Marc Scarpa (born September 25, 1969, in New York City) is an American entrepreneur, producer and director specializing in live participatory media.TechCrunch: Participation-The Trend That is Bigger Than the Harlem Shake He is the 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.The Silicon Alley Reporter 100: 10 Years Later, Where Are They Now? Betabeat—News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0 Scarpa is the CEO and founder of DeFiance Media. Scarpa has received a Webby Award in 2010 for Best Event / Live Webcast for his work on the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, a Cannes Bronze Lion for Branded Content and Entertainment for the X Factor Pepsi Digital Preshow and Xtra Factor App and four Social TV Awards including Best of Show for X Factor Pepsi Digital Preshow and Xtra Factor App. Additionally, he has been a panelist for conferences such as NATPE,NATPE Speakers 2012 X-Summit ,X-Summit Speakers 2012 LTE North America,LET North America Speakers 2012 Digital HollywoodDigital Hollywood Speakers Spring 2012 and Canadian Music WeekCanadian Music Week Speakers 2013 among others.
1990s
Agrippa – The Transmission
With the media attention from Beyond 2000, Scarpa was given the opportunity to produce a project called Agrippa - The Transmission. This new project was an offshoot project of Agrippa (a book of the dead), the 1992 literary and technology collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr.The Agrippa Files » "The Transmission" For this project, the collaborators produced a book containing text that smudged when touched and photos of the genetic code of a fruitfly. An encrypted disc was included at the back of the book and automatically self-destructed after one reading. The participatory nature of the book ensured that no two readers would experience the book in the same way and the self-destructing disc would only be experienced by one person.
For Agrippa-The Transmission, the self-destructing disc's content was made available as a one-time transmission over the pre-web internet using 300 baud modems which dialed random and some select computers worldwide, and "transmitted" the file to those personal computers. Originally, 50 people received the transmission. Then over one-hundred thousand hacked the text once online. This 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.The Agrippa Files
CNET
In 1995, Scarpa got the attention of former CBS News supervising producer Win Baker through news stories he produced on Beyond 2000. Baker brought Scarpa on as a founding producer and the New York Bureau Chief for the start-up technology news network CNET TV. Scarpa would go on to produce the CNET programs "TV.COM", "The Web" and "C|NET Central" from 1995 to 1997. While at CNET, Scarpa co-developed the networks early video-on-demand deployment with Baker and produced CNET's first live webcast from the floor of the 1997 PC Expo (now called Interop). These were the precursors to CNET TV. In 2008, CNET was acquired by CBS Corporation for $1.8 billion.
Tibetan Freedom Concerts
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 15 and 16, 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 Smashing Pumpkins. Scarpa produced the live stream broadcast of the concert from its location in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for sonicnet.com. The broadcast was later acquired by MTV. The concert was attended by 100,000 people and had 36,000 online participants worldwide. It was the first large-scale webcast in history and proved the viability of the Internet as a two-way broadcast platform. Partners included RealNetworks, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's AudioNet, Digital Equipment Corporation and Pacific Bell.4 Ways Live and Digital Music Are Teaming Up to Rock Your World Epicenter Wired.com
Dozens of internet café locations around the world were utilized as gathering places for participants. They could hear high-quality audio and see real time still images pushed out in sync to create a flipbook video effect (JPEG push). They could also sign petitions, submit photos and chat online with each other and with the artists and fans on-site. Early Wi-Fi technology set up in action tents backstage and on the field at the event allowed for this connection. The unification of online and on-site communities has been a continued theme in Scarpa's work. In collaboration with the same event partners, Scarpa produced subsequent broadcasts for the 1997 and 1998 festivals respectively.World Peace, Economic, Trade, Democracy
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 was the first such facility in the nation and 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.Internet Evolution - Dialogue - Marc Scarpa, Producer & Director, MySpace Live!
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. 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.Inverge :: the interactive convergence conference :: Portland, OR » Marc Scarpa 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. 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.
Townhall with President 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. In 2005, this 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 received worldwide media attention and was simultaneously broadcast live on several television news networks throughout the United States.First Presidential Webcast, 'Online Town Hall With President William Jefferson Clinton,' Now Part of Clinton Presidential Library Politics Blogs
2000-2009
MySpace Live
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
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-renowned 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.
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.Inverge :: the interactive convergence conference :: Portland, OR » Marc Scarpa Presentation Topic
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."MySpace Live! T.I. vs TIP Video by marc - Myspace Video On Wednesday, June 20, 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.T.I. new album T.I. VS T.I.P. in stores - Hip Hop Galaxy
Projekt Revolution 2007
The Projekt Revolution tour was the brainchild of Linkin Park, and included a number of bands on two main stages over a 7-hour period. Myspace streamed the concert live on August 22 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 real time documentary shot from a first person perspective, which he weaved in and out of the artist performances during the HD streaming broadcast.
Oscar Night at Mr. Chow