There's this open question about real people and their interest in exploring content in a less filtered way. Mainstream media's pushback is always that the large majority of people want their media packaged, polished, and organized.

Well - seven days ago we began a quiet experiment to test that, and see just want kind of different relationship we could have with viewers.

This is the story of Google Video. Back when I Directed "7 Days In September" we began to gather a large collection of video. Now the 9/11 Archive is substantial, and it's sitting on drives. We know that people want to see the images of 9/11, so i wondered if there was a secure way to share them without risking piracy. I found the Google Video interface to be simple, understandable, and with a number of filmmaker friendly features.

Among them - you can allow viewers to see the clips without downloading them. This provided a great deal of comfort in thwarting piracy. At the same time, you can control sharing and even a Pay Per View solution.

So how did it work? Well, the clips have been up for just 7 days. There's been no advertising or promotion. Just word of mouth, search results, and a small mention on the google blog. The results are kind of staggering. More than 79,000 views in a week. Who are these people? What are they looking for? Would they choose finished films rather than clips if they had that option? We won't know for a while.

But it's got me thinking about how filmmaking is changing - and how 500 pieces of a theme can act as points of entry, introductions if you will, into a piece of finished content.

I'm directing the click throughs to our film "7 Days" right now, but maybe there are other kinds of media that people would like. Collections of footage? Single Subject docs? We've got a lot to learn about how people want to explore ideas in video... it's pretty remarkable.

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I should tell you a bit more about the mechanics of the whole thing. The folks at Google are very engaged in learning about video, and the whole media landscape. I found them to be smart, responsive, and honest about what the current software does - and doesn't - do.

That said - it's early days. And for example metadata is hard to modify. That means that once you've loaded your clips on their server there's a rather time consuming process of going in and hand coding each clip with appropriate info about producer, rights, etc. Now there is a way to do a 'bulk' upload to them via a spreadsheet, but it is a manual process. I would expect that future releases will include global search and replace and a more robust solution for transcription and meta tags. But for a 1.0 product it's actually pretty remarkable.