The convergence of physically expressed art forms and digital networks is appearing with ever greater momentum. Video content is moving to HD TV and images to large framed LCD display units. This inevitable convergence has opened huge opportunities for the arts as we bridge the gap and reach a wider potential audience.

Dancers, musicians, actors, painters, photographers, producers, schools, unions and every professional discipline that contribute to artistic expression and the business of art as we know it will find solutions in modeling the emerging business in well thought out databases and interrelated web applications, protecting content as much as possible and creating digital payment gateways to assure consumers receive great utility and value and art royalties are immediately paid consistent with global consumption.

Complementing our live performance activities with digital content requires a forward thinking and bold mind set and the willingness to embrace the possibilities, finding a way to satisfy all stakeholders. We have designed Artistes du Globe to be this bridge, enabling diverse artists and producers to become active in this inevitable convergence and be one of the first to capitalize on digital art, video and still images.

Dreams are meant to be realized and shared.

Artistes du Globe is first and foremost a community. Certainly phenomenon such as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter are impressive, but the age of communities is about like interests, focused conversations, relationships and learning around topics of keen and mutual interest. The arts needs the power of a full featured horizontal social network across art and business disciplines, as well as the vertical focus in the arts to keep it relevant and highly useful for members. A social network like FaceBook cannot hope to deliver the focused value and custom functions that the arts world badly needs.

In designing the Artistes du Globe system, we knew that great appeal and a critical mass of support is needed to reach new audiences and improve revenues for the arts, and what better way to bring the arts world together than a robust social network platform to complement and in fact support the development and growth of the on-demand Art-Serve content delivery system. We chose the Telligent Community Server Enterprise platform because of its well known leadership in useful functions and raw power to scale to a large global presence. It is the same core technology that powers MySpace.

Artistes du Globe community customizations include an event and calendar system with venue and ticket links, a tip-jar system, multi-directional e-commerce to buy/sell/rent props, costumes, instruments and supplies, group memberships with powerful mini-communities with or without a storefront, art oriented searchable public and private profiles, events, jobs and auditions, galleries, unlimited blogs, forums, Wikis, messaging, RSS feeds, mobile connections and links to other social networks, voting and rating systems for content destined for the Art-Serve on-demand revenue business, an integrated business intelligence data-mining system to understand your community and audiences and so much more.

Consumers will benefit greatly because now they will have access to the best performances and images, not low-res questionable legality content as appears on YouTube, but impeccable quality performing and visual art delivered as a digital art-service over the internet that pays the artists and legal stakeholders in real time. Because artists will be motivated to provide great high quality content to compete with others that do the same, consumers will receive a very wide variety of performances and images in an easy to use searchable web site and enjoyable at the best quality and lowest cost. They will have access to great visual and performing art, conveniently delivered and a very reasonable monthly or a-la-carte subscription.

To protect digital content from blatant piracy, all files are stored encrypted and can only be unlocked by one consumer system. To be viewed or played, the server must authorize it according to what the customer purchased and enable it to be unlocked and streamed. Files will be tagged or watermarked for that consumer, providing permanently traceable and which will discourage piracy by intercepting the streaming decrypted content. Therefore, consumers will be required to use their own computer to run the free downloadable Artists du Globe client software which manages server connections, downloading, decryption and communication with the server to assure permissions before content can be seen. As an alternative, and to take full advantage of the service, consumers can purchase an Artistes du Globe Art-Serve Gateway, essentially a very small computer costing as little as $300 and up to $700 with the largest drives, wireless and DVD player.

Example of an Art-Serve prototype, with dimensions of 6.5"(w) x 1.9"(h) x 6.2"(d). Wired and wireless models will serve one HDTV and many wireless visual display units. Internal hard drives will allow users to select "favorites" on the web which will be automatically downloaded and stored for immediate gratification and charged to their account when viewed. It will store and manage the viewing and rotation of still images on the wall displays. The device will serve as a web connection to the TV so that the consumer can surf the web regardless of Artistes du Globe use. It has the power to host additional controlled content networks, so that other companies outside the arts will likely approach us to utilize our end-to-end delivery technology for their content and providers. Paid or free virtual classrooms with teachers and students connected with USB web-cams with audio that students can view again will be provided in phase two.

When we all, as a global family of active providers and consumers of art can demonstrate a full end-to-end secure business together, delivered across the open internet instead of high cost provisioned networks, global media companies will see Artistes du Globe as an opportunity and a potential threat to the monopoly they have enjoyed in previous generations, and will seek to acquire us, and also an opportunity to run our superior content across their global syndicated networks.

Our core value is that Artistes du Globe should forever remain an independent community and business together and ride the coming wave of technologies and products that the Artistes du Globe platform can leverage to great advantage to all artists, producers, teachers and our consumers.