Does the future of film lie in a screen the size of your palm? This is the brave new world of wireless networks, and its coming faster than you might think. Donald Clarke previews this year's Darklight Symposium
NEXT Thursday the Darklight Festival in Dublin will consider the opportunities, challenges and dangers presented by the arrival of snazzy new 3G mobile phones to the market. The symposium's official task is to "identify, profile and respond to the current transformations in the distribution of cultural production enabled by the proliferation of digital and wireless networks." To that end various boffins will pontificate on bandwidth, compression ratios and other intricacies of the new media.
But the great question hanging in the air is whether the ability to view and record high-quality moving images will become as important to us as the phones' capacity to let us hear train-bound friends tell us they are about to go into a tunnel. After all, a recent survey found that, after talking and texting, the most popular use for mobiles is still as an alarm clock.
In the weeks after the London tube bombs, much was made of the growth of so-called citizen-generated media. While it is true that the volume of footage members of the public relayed to television stations was staggering, it is debateable whether this constitutes - to use the sort of language media symposia tend to enjoy - a significant paradigm shift. Abraham Zapruder, the man who recorded the assassination of John Kennedy, was doing much the same thing as the commuters who covered the aftermath of 7/7. There are just an awful lot more cameras around than there were in 1963, and they are a great deal smaller.
More convincing evidence that citizen-generated media can create its own space came earlier this year with the overblown happy-slapping craze. According to Britain's Chicken Licken tabloids, youths were battering their friends to within an inch of their lives while recording the assaults on their camera phones. As it happened, serious attacks were rare, but the phenomenon of a body of amateur video milling about the network, forming itself into a mass worthy of media analysis, is an intriguing one.
Stephen McCormack, founder of Wildwave, an international mobile digital media company and a speaker at Darklight, believes the happy-slapping story contains lessons for the industry.
"The whole thing was blown out of proportion," he says. "But the point was that what citizens generate can, perhaps, attract more attention than what professionals produce. When there is a quality camera on every phone it opens up the possibility of videocasting as well as pod-casting. We are working on producing a blog-based video channel for mobile phones. We think that people might be about to take more control of what they watch on the new phones."
Wildwave is at the forefront of a nascent enterprise which might, depending on whether or not punters really want video on the go, create a million millionaires or end up in the same grim histories of commercial hubris as Guinness Light and the Sinclair C5. Wildwave offers visual media to users of the new 3G telephones. One of its clients is Michael Walsh, managing director of Old Hat Productions, which makes TV3's movie show, Popcorn.
"To use a phrase from football: it's early doors," Walsh says. "We are happy enough to be in the game. It isn't part of some great masterplan. We weren't sure of the technology at first. But we looked at it and it was a lot better than we thought it was going to be."
To adapt Popcorn for the smaller screens, Old Hat replaces the large amounts of text that usually run across the image with a spoken voice-over. The viewer can buy individual snippets of the show at 50 cent or the whole programme for €2.
One can see how Popcorn's digestible chunks of information might work well for the traveller, but can there really be a market for full-length drama on the very small screen?
Apple certainly thinks so. Last week the company's scary tech-evangelist, Steve Jobs, stood before the usual crowd of slavering acolytes to announce the arrival of the video iPod. Opening up hopes for a rapprochement between Jobs's Pixar and the Mouse House, the polo-necked guru further explained that he had reached a deal with Disney, owners of ABC television, to provide product, such as specially edited episodes of Lost.
But this has been tried before, hasn't it? Remember the portable televisions that were launched 20 years ago? They now lie rotting with Betamax videos and, well, Guinness Light clocks.
McCormack is keen to point out that devices such as the iPod and the Sony Playstation Portable offer images of previously unimaginable clarity, and he has already made contact with his man at Apple. But he admits that the needs of the peripatetic viewer are different to those of the couch potato.
"Attention spans are still quite low," he says. "It's what I call the waiting-for-the-Luas market. The material will have to be constructed so there is a burst of activity every two or three minutes. I think what will happen is that your phone will be like your snacking medium: videos, short films, a little arts programme for a few moments."
Next year the experiment in mobile TV begins in earnest. ITV has announced the launch of a mobile service featuring special episodes of shows such as Coronation Street, This Morning and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. It has even been suggested that individual parallel plotlines of Corrie might be commissioned for phone viewers alone. The BBC is also planning to issue classic shows via phone.
Success depends on the reliability of the service. Many futurologists believe that their ultimate ambition - quality mobile access to all channels, all the time - will require the adoption of a dedicated network, separate to that providing the phone service.
DVB-H, as the favoured system is called, will, McCormack suggests, not be available in Ireland for some time. Until then, unfortunate punters may be forced to while away their time reading The Ticket. Oh, come on. The hours just race by.
The Darklight Symposium runs October 27th and 28th at the Digital Hub, Dublin. For information: www.darklight-filmfestival.com, 01-6709017
