Canned Content is the concept I developed together with Jussi Myllyniemi in 2001. Jussi ran a Digital Film Festival at the time and I was a little bit involved. Jussi is the guy who knows the digital editing business, I only know opportunities and can imagine the "what is next". So here we were, two guys full of enthusiasm trying to put a product onto the market.
What we tried to solve was a few things. First of all we thought people would add more and more video to the internet. Their own clips and that of others.
Then we assumed that other people would like to find these videos. Tagging was one option but what if this tagging could be done also during the script writing phase?
Then we entered the realm of professional film and documentary making. More our cup of tea so to speak. We said, if scripts are written on a computer, we have the content already in digital format. A script has much more than "text to be spoke". It includes locations, props, people, time and what not. This can be used!
So we set out to construct a method to distill the right content from the script and include this in the XML layer of an MPEG file. Canned Content was born and suddenly a world of opportunities opened up to us.
But, money was needed and the VCs we went to said one by one:
There is no money in online video, putting videos online, watching movies...
Ok, they were right of course. Youtube, iTunes and the bunch did not generate any money...
The full presentation is available. A bit dated as it was made in 2002. Below is a link to one of the pages.
