Sundance Film Festival

I met Satjiv Chahil (pictured at right with Sundance’s Ian Calderon), when he was at Apple (he founded the New Media division). At that time, he and his colleagues were talking about things that seemed a long way off–digital networks that allowed you to use desktop computers to make and move content, whether around a facility or to remote collaborators. At that time people could only just begin to envision that network extending to audiences–this was before digital cinema and before video sharing on the web. But the “what if,” was there even then. Now Chahil is SVP, Global Marketing, Personal Systems Group at HP. Now he and other Apple/HP colleagues like HP CTO Shane Robison are in the thick of that vision coming true.

“For people in technology it seems these things take much longer than we expect,” he says wryly, as we talk at New Frontier on Main, . Yet at the same time Chahil marvels that HP is now at the center of what gets called an ecosystem by many people these days. The word is awkward but evocative. It seems the only way to conjur the interaction of content creator, collaborator, audience and device in an increasingly seamless and interactive loop. Certainly HP asserts that interconnection through their multi-faceted presence at Sundance–they sponsor everything from New Frontier to the photo-driven venues and experiences like the Snapshop Chalet, HP Photography Promotion, the Brilliantly Simple Tour, the Photo Patrol, and the Adobe/HP Photography Studio. They have an interactive Sundance website and blog (hp.com/go/sundance), and a Graphics Arts Showcase. They sponsor the Sundance Channel‘s Snapshot Diaries and a the “Meet the Artists” section of sundance.org–part of their larger involvement with the Sundance Institute. HP technology–from content creation to presentation–is in venues throughout the festival.

With that, Chahil‘s mind returns to technology–he singles out one of HP‘s latest innovations–you can play DVDs from your laptop without first booting up. This small detail reminds me of HP‘s move to put Firewire in on the front of the workstation. These are not big things from a technology standpoint but they are big things from a getting it standpoint. And they stand for something bigger. Firewire up front said that yes, people would be using their workstations as ingest devices, they would be going straight from the camera or a portable harddrive or whatever–it envisioned a way of working that was dignified when people didn‘t have to crawl around in the dust bunnies behind their machine to hook up a camera. Now HP has removed another indignity that is a sign of the times. When you want to show your content to a producer, when everyone is in a hurry and you might lose their attention, you won‘t have to spin up your harddrive before you can spin your reel. In real life, this will matter and it acknowledges one element of a larger reality: “people want to share from platform to platform, person to person across many devices and, many audiences.

“There are things in our labs that are an absolute fascination,” Chahil says as he talks about the next future. It‘s going to be all HD. “MP3 took music down, it was convenient but lesser. We‘ve just announced that across the board all HP devices will be HD capable. We have to make the media richer and ore enjoyable for the beholder. That idea then touches every aspect of this industry. We look at the convergence of computers and consumer electronic devices through the viewfinder of the digital entertainment experience. That effects how we create everything from faster workstations for content creation, to our new 30-inch flatscreens which are of a visual quality that‘s 20-30 percent better than anything out there, to our consumer devices that are designed to give a rich experience.”

We talk about people‘s ultimate desire to be their own programmers to search for and choose content that they program to static and portable digital devices, rather than relying on an established network–whether broadcast or otherwise to make all the decisions.

Later in the day Adobe‘s Jim Guerard will say “55,000 videos”–how do you find what you want (the answer was interesting…more later).

(Pictured: Todd Bradley, EVP, Personal Systems Group, HP (center) and Satjiv Chahil, SVP, Global Marketing, Personal Systems Group (right) with HP’s DCC marketing team at New Frontier on Main.)

“First photos went into the computer,” Chahil is saying, “then music, then video; next your television will interact with the computer and distribution will expand accordingly.”

Ian Calderon, director of Sundance digital initiatives, overhears us talking and joins. Calderon has been Sundance‘s big advocate or the indie-friendly potential of digital technology. He has worked hard to illustrate and advocate for digital technology‘s role in supporting diversity, global access, and opportunity for filmmakers who want to get access to high level tools on a budget and reach audiences outside the more traditional–and sometimes inaccessible–paths of distribution. He takes the long view on this mission, but has already significantly raised the profile of digital opportunity at Sundance.

Todd Bradley, EVP, Personal Systems Group at HP, joins the conversation to remind us that at the top level HP sees the mission as matter of digital lifestyle, one that will be driven by quality (read: HD) and open access to content. It’s good to see that the things Chahil had started talking about decades before resonates up from our world of workstations up to the larger HP picture. That’s reassuring in an industry where we must all work together to build the freeways and paradigms for the next content marketplace.