Business, television, & online media
Peter B. Kaufman (pbk@intelligenttv.com), a writer, teacher, and filmmaker, is the founder and executive producer of Intelligent Television and the Google-funded Intelligent Channel. He executive produces Intelligent Television’s media and directs the company’s research and strategic consulting work.
Mr. Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning. He previously served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning; as co-chair, with the BFI’s Paul Gerhardt, of the U.K. government’s JISC Film & Sound Think Tank; as an expert consultant on access strategies for the Library of Congress Division of Motion Pictures, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound; and as co-chair, with WGBH’s Karen Cariani, of the Copyright Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. He also has served as director of strategic initiatives for the digitization provider Innodata; president and publisher of TV Books, a publishing company he founded and sold to Lorne Michaels’s television and film company Broadway Video; founder and executive director of PUBWATCH, a nonprofit organization that supported the publishing and bookselling industries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the collapse of totalitarianism in Europe; and director of publications at the East-West Institute, a foreign policy think-tank in New York City. He has served as a consultant to numerous educational and cultural heritage institutions in the United States and abroad, including most recently Columbia University Press, the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision, the Library of America, and Wiki Education.
Educated at Cornell and Columbia, Mr. Kaufman writes and produces video about media, education, history, and society. His 2021 book, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, is out now from Seven Stories Press, and his current work, The Moving Image: A User’s Guide, will be published by the MIT Press in the spring of 2025. He has published work in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Publishers Weekly, Scholarly Publishing, Slavic Review, the Times Literary Supplement and also in a 1986 volume, Spacebridges: Television and U.S.-Soviet Dialogue.