Marc Scarpa

Marc Scarpa
Born	September 25, 1969 New York City, U.S
Alma mater	School of Visual Arts
Occupation	Director, Producer, Entrepreneur
Years active	1985-present
Influenced by	Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog
Website
http://www.simplynew.com

Marc Scarpa (born September 25, 1969 in New York City) is an American entrepreneur, producer and director specializing in live participatory media.^[1] The success of his Web 1.0 company, JumpCut, enabled Scarpa to be at the forefront of participatory video, unifying web-based, mobile and televised broadcasting collectively to enable real time stories. He is an executive board member and the founding New York Chair of the Producers Guild of America New Media Council and a recipient of the Marc A. Levey distinguished service award.^[2] For his contributions in emerging media, he won a Webby Award in 2010 for Best Event / Live Webcast for his work on the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards.

His works are noted for their use of social media, streaming video, music-photo-video sharing, conversation, data visualization, tags and links whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people in real time in which the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible.

Scarpa is a firm advocate that the term “audience” is obsolete in the new world of participatory media and that “audience” or “viewer” should be re-named “participant”. As a Director, he views his role as enabling context to the flow of contributions by the participants and to creatively connect online with onsite groups together to stimulate conversation and engagement around a particular live event or program. Milestone projects include the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, Woodstock 99, Grammy Live! and politically driven programs such as Townhall with President Bill Clinton. Scarpa’s current venture Simplynew, incorporates his natural talent for producing participatory content with a focus on the creation of 24/7 real time (media) networks.^[3]

Personal life

TRS-80 Model II

Marc Scarpa has spent most of his adult life in New York City. His mother Deborah Mc Dermott general managed and partially owned several steak and seafood restaurants. His adoptive father Vincent Scarpa is a landscape designer. Scarpa was raised in a non-denominational household. As a boy, his parents would often take him to movie theatres; it was at this stage in his life that he developed a passion for cinema and storytelling. Enamored of science fiction epics in his adolescence, at least two films of the genre, Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, appear to have had a deep and lasting impact on his cinematic psyche. Scarpa also developed an admiration for improvisation and a realistic cinéma vérité style at this time through the works of John Cassavetes, Les Blank and comedian Albert Brooks portrayal of reality television program An American Family in his film "Real Life".

At around age 10, Scarpa became deeply interested in and an early adopter of the internet and computing technology. He spent countless hours online to hone his craft as a phone Phreaker. Major influences in this underground landscape included Legion of Doom member King Blotto of Blottoland, Phiber Optik, Bill from New York, Captain Crunch, Woz and broadcast video hacker Captain Midnight. His first computer exposure was to a TRS-80 Model II with a 300-baud modem at his elementary school in Bedford, New York. Sub sequentially his mother purchased him an Atari 400 then Atari 800 computer with modem, cassette drive and color printer for home use. He continued learning on the TRS-80 at school along with the IBM PC 5150 and Commodore 64 computers respectively learning to program in BASIC.

Roughly the same time, Scarpa received a VHS Camcorder for his birthday and ironically later purchased an inferior quality Pixelvision 2000 from the money he earned shooting football practices at his local school with the VHS Camcorder. This was his early foray into using mixed media to tell stories and shoot live events. He went on to receive his B.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts where he gravitated to the history, semiotics and sociology of cinema and learned to use super 8mm, 16mm Bolex, ARRI and emerging digital camera systems such as Sony Hi-8.

Early career

In the early 1990s, Scarpa produced a New York City art exhibition entitled “Beyond 2000,” in conjunction with San Francisco based cyber culture magazine Mondo 2000. The exhibition was more of a human be-in as it occurred at The Limelight at the height of its popularity and was designed to showcase participatory technologies of the 21st century. It is believed to be the first public debut of Virtual Reality to the general public in New York along with installations by IBVA, Synchro-Energizers, Aerotrims, wearable technology fashion designs. Performances included Timothy Leary’s How to Operate Your Brain, Dj Keoki, Dj Dmitry from Dee-Lite, transformative VJ’s along with virtual reality performance artist Vincent John Vincent, and the first show of popular techno-group The Prodigy in the United States. The event a few years later spawned “Overstimulation,” a 2-day multimedia arts festival highlighting the latest in technology art of the time. Pseudo Programs Inc, founded by Josh Harris, hosted this showcase and featured many emerging silicon alley artists including Emergency Broadcast Network, Judson Rosebush, G.H. Hovagimyan, Dj Spooky and featured expanded Virtual Reality exhibits from Virtuality and VPL Research.

1990s

Agrippa – The Transmission

Main article: Agrippa (a book of the dead)

With the media attention from Beyond 2000, Scarpa was given the opportunity to produce a project called Agrippa - The Transmission an offshoot project from Agrippa (a book of the dead), which had appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr.^[4] The “book” was sealed in an ominous tome of genetic code, which smudged to the touch, and in the back there was a disc, which was encrypted and automatically self-destructed after one reading. The plan was to make this self-destructing disc available as a one-time transmission over the pre-web internet using 300 baud modems which dialed random & some select computers world-wide, and “transmitted” the file to those personal computers. Originally, 50 people received the transmission, then 100K + hacked the text once online, which now has translated into millions of viral viewers and numerous re-mix interpretations of the piece. Many support the notion that Agrippa - The Transmission is the first viral online Netcast in history.^[5]

SimTV 3 Flier

SimTV

In 1995 through an art school colleague, Scarpa began working with NHK for an Internet television project called SimTV.^[6] Broadcast live on television in Japan, the four-hour program used Xing Streamworks video compression technology to stream video from different locations around the world back to the studio in Japan instead of utilizing satellite feeds. It was also used for select viewers not located in Japan to participate in the program. It’s the first program in history to utilize streaming media as a content acquisition source within traditional broadcast in addition to video syndication over the web. The content of SimTV included mostly news and interviews with emerging technologists and web 1.0 companies, but was broadcast in a way that combined the Web and Television to tell these stories. The program was historically important for live multimedia participatory programming development. Millions of viewers participated via NHK television network, several hundred via online using XING stream works technology, which pre-dated Real Video by about a year.

CNET

Main article: CNET Networks

Scarpa got the attention of former CBS News supervising producer Win Baker through news stories he had produced on Beyond 2000 and brought Scarpa on as a founding producer and the New York Bureau Chief for start up technology news network CNET TV where he produced for CNET programs "TV.COM", "The Web" and "C|NET Central" from 1995 – 1997 and as a stipulation for joining the start up was given the freedom to work on outside projects. While there, Scarpa also co-developed with Baker CNET's early video on demand deployment and produced CNET's first live webcast from the floor of the 1997 PC Expo, now called Interop, which were the precursors to CNET TV. CNET was acquired by CBS Corporation in 2008 for US $1.8 billion.^[7]

Tibetan Freedom Concerts

Main article: Tibetan Freedom Concert

Organized by the Beastie Boys and the Milarepa Fund, the Tibetan Freedom Concerts were created to support the cause of Tibetan independence. The initial concert on June 15th & 16th 1996 featured the Beastie Boys, Beck, Sonic Youth, Björk, Foo Fighters, De La Soul, The Fugees, Yoko Ono, No doubt, Red Hot Chili Peppers and the The Smashing Pumpkins. Scarpa produced the live stream broadcast of the concert from its location in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for sonicnet.com that was later acquired by MTV. The concert was attended by 100,000 people and had 36,000 online participants worldwide. It’s the first large-scale Webcast in history, which proved the viability of the internet as a two way broadcast platform. Partners included Real Networks, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s AudioNet, Digital Equipment Corporation and Pacific Bell.^[8]

Dozens of internet café locations around the world were utilized for participants to hear high quality audio and see real time still images pushed out in sync with the audio to create a flipbook video effect (JPEG push), sign petitions, submit photos and chat with one another online along with the artists and fans on site via action tents set up backstage and on the field using early wi-fi technology. This unified the on site audience with the online audience and has been a continued theme in Scarpa’s work. In collaboration with the same events partners, Scarpa produced subsequent broadcasts for the 1997 & 1998 festivals respectively.^[9]

New York City Hall

New York City’s Blue Room

In November 1997 New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani became the first elected official in history to broadcast his inaugural speech online. Scarpa produced the Webcast and was sub sequentially asked by the Mayor’s office in conjunction with DoITT to re-build New York City Hall’s Blue Room as a multi-platform broadcast facility which enabled daily press conferences to be broadcast live over the Web, TV and radio simultaneously. It is the first such facility in the nation that enabled residents to have a real time relationship with their politicians. E-mail questions from residents were responded to during the daily broadcasts giving voters access to their elected officials as opposed to just the media. It is in use by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.^[10]

Woodstock ‘99

Main article: Woodstock 99

Following in the steps of its elder sister festival of 30 years prior, Woodstock 99 stood to modernize the musical entity that was Woodstock Festival (1969) with an implementation of new technology.^[11] Scarpa produced and directed the live stream of the festival on July 23-25, 1999 which featured musical performances by artists such as Metallica, Kid Rock, Red Hot Chili Peppers, James Brown, Sheryl Crow, Rage Against the Machine, and Limp Bizkit, to name a few.^[12] Approximately 200,000 people attended the festival, but over 2.4 million people participated online over the duration of the 64-hour live broadcast, which cemented it as the largest participatory media event of the 20th century and the first to overshadow its TV broadcast audience of a mere 140,000 viewers. It achieved this goal by syndicating live on hundreds of Websites, blogs and media partner sites throughout the world in addition to having a premium experience on Woodstock.com.

Scarpa employed roughly 140 creative and technical professionals, a staggering amount for a project such as this at the time, from photographers, writers (bloggers), videographers, video editors, dozens of field producers, technical staff and hosts including then unknown comedian Patton Oswalt with the goal of creating a comprehensive and participatory real time documentary of the 30th anniversary event. The results were staggering, the work all encompassing and daunting for Scarpa who took a two-week hiatus to recover from exhaustion following the broadcast.

Seen as a milestone participatory media event, WoodStock 99 created tens of thousands of photographs from both onsite photographers and those participating and submitting online for use in the video broadcast itself, crowd sourcing was employed whereby dozens of chat rooms were set up for participants to suggest story ideas to which onsite writers and producers would respond with corresponding content. Chat moderators worked 24/7 to maintain the dialogue throughout the event and feed information back and forth between the groups. Onsite attendees were utilized to tell their personal stories and experiences at the event both on camera and in chat environments as well, which was similar to the technique Scarpa used during the Tibetan Freedom Festival years earlier.

Townhall with President Clinton

President Bill Clinton

On November 8, 1999, Scarpa produced and directed the first presidential Webcast with President Bill Clinton for the Excite@Home Network in partnership with the Democratic Leadership Council. DLC chairman, Al From, moderated the town hall and included streaming video remote feeds which connected New Democrat leaders (some of them just recently-elected), including Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then Lt. Governor of Maryland; Donald T. Cunningham, Jr., then mayor of Bethlehem, PA; Wisconsin State Rep. Antonio Riley; Ron Gonzales, then mayor of San Jose, and Jeanne Shaheen, then governor of New Hampshire along with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, all using IP-enabled technologies.

The Clinton Town Hall chat enabled viewers to send in questions and watch the proceedings simultaneously. Billed as a 21st-century version of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats, the Clinton Town Hall event has stood the test of time, as a model for real-time political communication with voters and political constituents. Featuring the lofty title “Third Way Politics in the Information Age,” participants “engaged in an online discussion on the common values and priorities of progressive Third Way politics in the Information Age.”

In 2005, this historical participatory media event was inducted into the permanent collection of the Clinton Presidential Library, in Little Rock, Arkansas and is the first Internet-age broadcast in a Presidential library. The project was a critical success for Scarpa and is widely seen as a catalyst for his work. It received worldwide media attention and was simultaneously broadcast live on several television news networks throughout the United States.^[13]

2000s

MySpace Live

Main article: MySpace

MySpace Logo

At the turn of the century, Scarpa began producing under his new business moniker, Simply New. One of his first projects, which he co-created and directed, was a series for the popular social networking site Myspace. Entitled Myspace Live, it was a part of their newly formed MySpaceTV initiative to combat Youtube’s video dominance on their site. The series featured Linkin Park, T.I., Paul Oakenfold among many others musical artists and was their first foray into live participatory media that celebrated community through individual expression. It is widely accepted that the series was the first for a social media platform which utilized the vast content creation resources by the Myspace community.

Paul Oakenfold

Paul Oakenfold

The first in the series and the first live broadcast on MySpace took place on November 18, 2006 at Club Space in Miami, Florida. Additional artists included Jonathan Peters, Sandra Collins and world-re-known visual artist Vello Virkhaus, immersive media artist V Owen Bush and live visual performance artist Benton C Bainbridge. Members of the MySpace community were invited to submit videos during the six-hour experience which were then re-mixed on site by the visual artists, displayed live in the venue and incorporated the modified videos back into the broadcast to the online participants.^[14]

Hosted by Renee Intlekofer and Shaina Fewell of Project MyWorld, user questions were answered by the dj’s, performing artists and attendees live on camera using mobile phones provide by T-Mobile. Over 1 million participants worldwide experienced the first show and cemented Scarpa’s participatory video aesthetic and use of social media.^[15]

T.I. VS T.I.P.

The second installment Scarpa produced and directed in the Myspace Live series was T.I. and friends performing hits from his album “T.I. VS T.I.P.”^[16] On Wednesday, June 20th, T.I. starred in an exclusive concert event for a crowd of 1800 people which was streamed to more than 1.5 million participants in two hours, making it another successful live broadcast for MySpace. The event was transmitted from Chicago’s Riviera Theatre, T.I. was joined by special onstage guests: Twista, Lupe Fiasco, and DJ Drama, with hosts Nick Cannon and Aubrey O'Day from Danity Kane. Scarpa again employed similar participatory media techniques specifically utilizing crowd-sourced photography from the Myspace community. The images were then displayed as a slide show within the venue and projected on stage by inflatable artist Anakin Koenig with the images themselves being remixed by visual artist Holly Dagger and again incorporated the modified images back into the broadcast to the online participants.^[17]

Chester of Linkin Park

Projekt Revolution 2007

Main article: Projekt Revolution

The Projekt Revolution tour was the brainchild of multi-platinum recording artists Linkin Park, and included a number of bands on two main stages over a 7-hour period. Myspace streamed the concert live on August 22nd to over 2.5 million participants, which was hosted by Matt Pinfield. For this installment of the series, Scarpa utilized Nokia N95 mobile phones as live broadcasting cameras that he provided to six select fans that had been provided all-access to the concert to share their stories and experiences. This is the first known broadcast to mix both HD captured content with media provided by mobile phones in real time. The ensuing result for Scarpa was a true real time documentary shot from a first person perspective, which he weaved in and out of the artist performances during the HD streaming broadcast.^[14]

Oscar Night at Mr. Chow

The Leeza Gibbons Memory Foundation and Extra TV sought to create a charity event that would incorporate a viewing of the Oscars with live interactive media.^[18] Scarpa was asked to produce and direct the first-annual charity gala, which featured hosts Leeza Gibbons, Olivia Newton-John and entertainment director, David Foster.^[19] The live stream was broadcasted directly from Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills, and was accessible via several partner websites including ExtraTV.com, Glam.com, Variety.com and Jessica Biel’s Make a Difference Network. Viewers of the program were not only able to get an exclusive glimpse into the event, but they were also encouraged to donate directly to the charity of their choice and participate through commentary and questions. With 1500 hundred persons in attendance, the benefit reached to date over 2 million participants in 32 countries through its combined live and VOD syndication strategy making it an overwhelming success in raising awareness for over 25 charities and foundations.

Special guests included: Laila Ali, Mel B, Michael Bublé, Wilson Cruz, Hilary Duff, Tony Hawk, Paris Hilton, Mario Lopez, Suzanne Somers, Slash, Charice Pempengco and many others.^[20]

GRAMMY Live

Main article: GRAMMY Awards

A GRAMMY Award

Scarpa developed, produced and directed the Webby Award winning first Grammy Live as a participatory online experience for the 52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards. It contained 72 hours of continuous live streaming video coverage on GRAMMY.com, 6 hours of streaming on Myspace (Jan. 30-31), and 6 hours of streaming on www.cbs.com (January 31). There were 3.8 million unique visitors to the website who consumed more than 140,000 hours of video during a 3-day period. More than 3 million live streams and 1.5 million video-on-demand plays were tallied during this time with more than 50,000 registered new users signed up at the GRAMMY website in the month leading up to the show. One segment of the program, the GRAMMY Pre-Telecast, generated itself more than 200,000 unique viewers collectively across GRAMMY.com and The Recording Academy syndication partner’s websites. Subsequently, the video on-demand assets of the program have garnered over 10 million viewers to date in over 150 countries and are partially credited with driving a record increase in viewership of the CBS broadcast to 25 million homes for the three hour telecast.^[21]

The online event festivities kicked off on January 29 2010, two days prior to the awards night TV telecast, with The Recording Academy's Social Media Rock Star Summit hosted by CNN at the GRAMMY Museum. It was a participatory panel discussion among social media trailblazers including Pete Cashmore, Nikhil Chandhok, David Karp, Kevin Rose, and Jared Leto along with an online and studio audience that spotlighted the intersection of music and the digital space. The program went on to feature behind the velvet rope coverage of never before seen GRAMMY pre-telecast events such as MusiCares Person of the Year Tribute honoring Neil Young; Special Merit Awards Ceremony & Nominees Reception; Pre-GRAMMY Gala featuring the 2011 Grammy Salute To Industry Icons and Pre-telecast ceremony in addition to the post telecast GRAMMY celebration.^[22]

Scarpa utilized various new technologies to ensure yet another real time media and “dual screen” experience thereby complementing the CBS GRAMMY telecast with red-carpet coverage, backstage interviews, exclusive photo sessions with winners (with renowned photographer Danny Clinch), press room question-and-answer sessions, and past GRAMMY Moments working in conjunction with the telecast. He also cast TV/Web personality Shira Lazar to host the event along with various music industry video bloggers. With the Recording Academy he led the effort to partner with Ooyala, Akamai, Live U, Livecast and MySpace to deliver compelling features such as social media tools, streaming video, photo sharing, live remote 3G enabled cameras and mobile phones to collect intimate first person coverage by the video bloggers. By far his most ambitious creative work to date, Scarpa was invited back for a second installment, which mirrored the first participatory video experience for the 53rd GRAMMY Awards show as an executive producer which would be syndicated to Youtube.^[22]

Earth Day Logo

Earthday Live

Scarpa teamed up with the Earth Day Network to produce Earthday Live!, a seven-hour live online participatory broadcast that bridged the in-person attendance of 250,000 on the National Mall in Washington, DC, with the online world of several million in 18 countries. Three events were held from 2008 until 2010 for the 40th anniversary of Earthday. Overall, the stream included over 20 hours of real-time video programming featuring world renowned musical artists, illuminating speakers, backstage access and pre-taped content in 10 cities across America celebrating related Earth Day activities. Participants were able to watch live, sign up for the billion acts of green campaign, submit petitions to the senate, engage in green trivia and have a real-time dialogue with concert goers and artists on site via two 40 x 40 JumboTrons positioned as bookends on the stage itself. This visual display was further used to encourage all participants to submit photo's of their personal Earthday experience which were then displayed and incorporated into the broadcast.^[23]

To create the stream, Scarpa worked with Arqiva, which provided satellite news-gathering trucks, transponder time, teleport services, and live encoding. Highwinds delivered the live stream to network users in 48 states and 17 countries outside the US.

The events featured musical artists Sting, The Roots, OAR, John Legend, Flaming Lips, Los Lobos, Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, Booker T. Jones, Mavis Staples, The Roots, Passion Pit, Patrick Stump and Q-Tip, and environmentalist supporters such as Chevy Chase, Edward Norton, 'Avatar' director James Cameron, Jesse Jackson and author Margaret Atwood.^[24][25]

References

1. ^ PAPERMAG: WORD UP! - Meet 'n' Greet: Marc Scarpa
2. ^ The Silicon Alley Reporter 100: 10 Years Later, Where Are They Now? | Betabeat—News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0
3. ^ http://www.simplynew.com/
4. ^ The Agrippa Files » ”The Transmission”
5. ^ The Agrippa Files
6. ^ YouTube - ‪c|net simTV‬‏
7. ^ Digital Video Pioneer: Marc Scarpa
8. ^ 4 Ways Live and Digital Music Are Teaming Up to Rock Your World | Epicenter | Wired.com
9. ^ World Peace, Economic, Trade, Democracy
10. ^ Internet Evolution - Dialogue - Marc Scarpa, Producer & Director, MySpace Live!
11. ^ Welcome to Woodstock 1999! On the road to the show!
12. ^ Inverge :: the interactive convergence conference :: Portland, OR » Marc Scarpa
13. ^ First Presidential Webcast, ‘Online Town Hall With President William Jefferson Clinton,’ Now Part of Clinton Presidential Library | Politics Blogs
14. ^ ^{a b} Two new MySpace programs.("MySpace Live!" and "Hey, Play This ...," )(online information services) - The Online Reporter | HighBeam Research
15. ^ Inverge :: the interactive convergence conference :: Portland, OR » Marc Scarpa Presentation Topic
16. ^ Myspace Live! T.I. vs TIP Video by marc - Myspace Video
17. ^ T.I. new album T.I. VS T.I.P. in stores - Hip Hop Galaxy
18. ^ Dare2Care 2011
19. ^ Oscar Night at Mr. Chow Feturing Charice | Charice
20. ^ http://www.leezagibbonsoscarnight.com/press.html^{[dead link]}
21. ^ 3.8 Million Grammy Live Fans Can’t be Wrong: Case Study - Streaming Media Magazine
22. ^ ^{a b} 52nd GRAMMY Pre-Telecast To Stream Live | GRAMMY.com
23. ^ Highwinds Streams Live Coverage of Earth Day On The National Mall | Highwinds
24. ^ Ooyala Offers Live Video On Earth Day
25. ^ Sting and John Legend Headlining Earth Day Concert in Washington, D.C. - Spinner

Persondata
Name	Scarpa, Marc
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 25, 1969
Place of birth	New York City, U.S
Date of death
Place of death