New Media
CONTENT
It’s our mission to use media to stimulate people to think about the moral, ethical and spiritual issues in everyday life. In addition to linear broadcast television and radio, we produce and commission content specially created for on-line distribution, including web-drama Being Victor which will be hosted by MTV UK this Autumn. In 2011, we are planning an increased slate of purpose-made short-form Web content, for distribution in partnership with web-based publishers, as well as our own sites and YouTube channels.
Digital Communities
In 2008, we received funding from ‘V’ to run film-training workshops and support for more than 1000 young people across the UK, using Facebook and Twitter to connect the communities of young film-makers we worked with. In 2010, we built on this with the launch of Boldface Productions. In addition to in-house and location based training, Boldface supports and connects a rapidly growing online community of film-makers, connected via YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Using these platforms, it provides industry advice, technical know-how and tips designed to build the confidence and skills of new talent.
more about Boldface
TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT
In May 2010, CTVC, successfully secured its biggest ever New Media and technology grant, receiving €500k over 3 years from the EU to participate in two hi-tech consortium research projects, Saracen and Pursuit. The projects are in collaboration with 5 EU-based companies, including Ericsson (Finland) and Atos Origin (Spain), and 10 European universities, including Cambridge and Queen Mary’s, London. The funding allows us to use our TrueTube site to help develop and test a state-of-the-art, scalable HD media streaming platform, and to support research for the semantic web (a new architecture for the internet based on interconnecting information rather than interconnecting machines).
SARACEN
The SARACEN Project (Socially Aware, collaboRative, scalable, Coding, mEdia distributioN) is designed to research and develop a stable peer-to-peer platform to support the streaming of standardised, network-aware and scalable HD video content via all levels of media devices to mobile phones, laptops, HDTVs and even cinema screens. Such a platform will also enable users to embed complex data in media, so they can stream it onwards to friends across the world while at the same time tracking its whereabouts on the web.
PURSUIT
The PUrSUIT Project (PUblish SUbscribe Internet Technology) will explore a semantic proposition for network-aware data transfer online, which has the potential to increase speed as well as security for internet users. Internet speed for streaming media, content sharing and uploading/downloading etc is of critical importance to stakeholders like CTVC’s TrueTube, whose main user base – schools and teachers – have a tradition of notoriously unreliable, contended connections to the web.
