Tag Archives: media

YouTube – everywhere?

Posted on May 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

Yesterday, YouTube turned seven.

I’ve recently become aware of just how pervasive YouTube has become. It’s available on a range of “computer” platforms – desktops and laptops, mobile phones and tablets. I’m able to access it via AppleTV, XBox, and a Sony Bluray player. Friends who recently updated their home media setup have it on their internet-enabled TV as well as via their Virgin Tivo box on the same “system”. Alongside BBC iPlayer, it’s actually more pervasive in the UK across the various devices many of us have in our living rooms, than the broadcast DTV/satellite/cable channels themselves. It’s also noticeably more present across a very broad range of devices, than alternatives like Vimeo which are arguably better at presenting more beautiful, longer HD content on the web itself.

This is both exciting, and also potentially problematic.

For those of us who have been seeing a multichannel, multimedia future ahead for some time, it’s a validation of the success of streaming web video in breaking the monopolies of the existing broadcasters and media companies. Over time, Google has added some tremendous value to YouTube – enabling creators to rapidly upload, perform simple edits, add soundtracks, and share content all within a rich HTML browser experience. It is also easy to reach a wide range of devices simply by ticking the “make this video available to mobile” box on the video management page – Google does all the heavy lifting of transcoding, resizing, and deciding on whether Flash or HTML5 is a better delivery mechanism, etc.

However, at the same time, it’s kind of… well, clunky. In order to consume content from YouTube on any of the platforms I mentioned before, you have to visit a dedicated YouTube widget, app or channel and then navigate around content within that box (oh, and each platform has a slightly different way of presenting that content). It’s not integrated with the viewing experience – I can’t just say to my TV or viewing device, “show me videos of kittens” and have it aggregate between different sources which include YouTube. Not only that, but we all know just how variable YouTube content can be, both in terms of production quality, duration, and the antisocial nature of comments and social interactions around videos. For some of the most popular videos I’ve posted on my channel, I can’t tell you how long I spend on moderating the most unbelievably asinine comments! Oh and, when we consider the increasing use of streaming video online – be it iPlayer, YouTube, Netflix or any other source – we constantly have to consider the impact on available bandwidth. Bandwidth and connectivity are not universal, no matter how much we may wish they were.

The other side of this is the group of voices who will point to the dominance of Google and their influence over brands and advertising. All very well, but I like to remind people that for all of the amazing “free” services we enjoy (Facebook, Twitter, Google and others), we do have to pay with an acceptance of advertising, and/or sharing of some personal data of our choice – or go back to paying cable and satellite providers for their services. It’s really a simple transaction.

I guess I don’t really have a message with this blog entry, other than to share my observation of the amazingly rapid rise of the new media titan(s). If I was going to offer any further thoughts or advice, it would be the following:

  • explore online video services more – you probably have access to them in more places than you think.
  • remember that video you produce may be viewed on any device from the smaller mobile handsets, to a nice HD television – so always try to produce your content at the highest quality setting possible, and let YouTube or the other video hosts do the rest.
  • richly tag and describe your content to make it easier to find. “Video1.mov” tells me nothing.
  • learn about the parameters which control how your content is displayed. I’ve previously written about this; the content is still useful but I should probably create an update.

This omnipresence across platforms is one of the reasons why I’ve started to primarily use my YouTube channel as the canonical source for all of my video content. Previously I’d used Viddler and Vimeo and occasionally posted a clip to Facebook, but now that I am able to post longer movies, I’ve also posted the full videos of various talks that I’d only previously been able to host at Vimeo. I’m not abandoning all other sources, but a focus on one channel makes a certain amount of sense.

 

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Photo post: IBM IMPACT 2011

Posted on April 17, 2011

I didn’t have a “proper” camera with me at IMPACT this year, but I did snap a bunch of images using my iPhone – they were either tweeted via yfrog, or through Instagram. Don’t expect the most awesome photography, but … Continue reading →

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Innovation and Social Media

Posted on March 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

“Telephone and email still remain important, just as face-to-face meetings and traditional mail retain their spaces,” he said. “Social media is just that: social. It’s part of the way in which humans have driven technology to enable them to communicate, create, share and collaborate. It reflects our own desire as a species to form communities and to connect with one another.”

Last week I was interviewed via email by Camille Tuutti for an article she was writing for GovCon Executive. You can read a few of the things I said about IBM’s use of social media (including the snippet above) in the piece, which is now posted online.

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Useful tools for homebrew media – my OS X workflow

Posted on February 25, 2009 | 4 Comments

As I’m sure regular readers are aware, I’m producing a wider range of media than ever before, now that I’m a regular podcaster and creating a range of video content as well. I thought it would be useful to talk a little about the range of tools that I’m using – far from professional level Final Cut or anything!

Hardware

The hardware is pretty varied. The core of the whole “system” is the MacBook Pro, which I use for pretty much all of my editing. That also has the iSight camera, which is adequate for videos which need to include my face, although I’d like something higher quality (any recommendations?). I’ve mentioned iGlasses before, which is useful for adjusting the iSight input. From an audio perspective I use a USB headset and also a Blue Snowflake USB microphone, which is absolutely great – compact, convenient, and it captures excellent quality sound.

If I need to capture video away from the computer, my current camcorder of choice is the Kodak Zi6 which can take HD 720p footage, albeit at a quality limited by the rest of the hardware (lens, sensor etc). I’ve yet to do a proper review of this, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a step up from either the Flip Mino or the older disgo Video Plus which I’d tried. I also sometimes grab snippets of video on my compact Canon camera.

Screencasting

For screencasts I use ScreenFlow. This is just a wonderful piece of software which is capable of recording both the screen, and from the iSight simultaneously. This allows the video to be overlaid into the screencast if required, so you can personally narrate what is going on. Even better than that, ScreenFlow lets you zoom in on windows and desktop features, and is really a general purpose compositing application… if you look at this video I made when I talked to a friend recently, you’ll see there are no desktop elements at all, just the video stream from the camera, a picture of him, and the audio, with some nice image tilt and reflection effects applied. ScreenFlow has also recently added text annotation features, which are really useful.

I’ve yet to use it for any practical purpose, but I also just downloaded OmniDazzle, which is now free. OmniDazzle lets you highlight areas of the screen with visual effects using a single keystroke – I can see this being useful in combination with ScreenFlow in the future.

Video editing

A few weeks ago I blogged about iMovie 09. I know a lot of people really dislike both iMovie 08 and 09, but I’m totally comfortable with both versions now, and I have to say that 09 is just beautiful. I’ve had no issues with it – it’s great for rapidly mixing and editing video, still images and audio. Watch my introductory series on YouTube or the whole thing as one movie on Viddler. I wrote a bit more about my use of iMovie back in December, too.

Here’s a tip: have you ever wanted to create some animated titles of your own? I have one word for you – Keynote! When I created the Home Camp TV title sequence it was a simple matter of creating a slide with some animated elements in Keynote, and exporting it as a Quicktime movie (which I did without sound, allowing me to overlay a choice of audio on the title sequence in iMovie). It’s great for quickly creating JPEG stills with text for titles, too.

In terms of finding audio to accompany videos… I’ve used both the pre-canned loops that come with iMovie, and also used some audio from Podsafe Audio. I do find that site a bit cumbersome to search though, so I’d be interested to know of any other useful, royalty-free resources.

Audio editing

I’ve not done a great deal on the audio-only side of things, but my essential tools here are Audacity for editing and cleanup; and Levelator for post-processing. That’s a really important point, by the way: only levelate your audio once everything is mixed together, the whole point is that it’s going to analyze everything and modulate the volume equally… if you have a bunch of snippets of audio and levelate them separately, then edit them together, you may well still end up with volume variations.

Another quick tip at this stage: to avoid issues with VBR MP3s showing up as weird (and incorrect) lengths in some tools, I bring the audio file into iTunes and do the MP3 export in there.

Imaging

For “proper” RAW photo editing and management, regular readers will know that I’m a huge fan of Lightroom. I use Pixelmator for finer adjustments on exported images.

Beyond that, I find that iPhoto is useful for quickly grabbing snapshots from the digital compact camera for compositing into iMovie clips. Skitch and LittleSnapper are both very useful tools as well as they enable me to rapidly take, resize and annotate screenshots or clips of web pages. For diagrams and so forth, there’s nothing that can beat OmniGraffle.

Extras

Finally, a couple of other useful bits and pieces. Transcoding to different formats is through either VisualHub (now defunct) or ffmpegX. QuickTime Pro is an essential (and highly cost-effective) upgrade too, since it lets you make very quick edits to QuickTime movie files and control the output format more finely.

There. Now, I imagine this may attract a range of “have you heard of…?” “why aren’t you using…?” and other responses, but that’s how I’ve currently settled things. Hopefully some of the tips and thoughts here will be useful to other amateur content creators, too! :-)

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From the FT.com newsroom

Posted on September 26, 2008 | 1 Comment

This is not quite live from the FT.com newsroom – I’m writing this a day later, but I did upload some photos during the trip.

Conference roomYesterday I attended a “bloggers event” at the The Financial Times, arranged by Ben and Drew from Hotwire PR. My friend and (now former) colleague Roo Reynolds had been to the previous one of these, so I was curious to find out what the FT would have to say to a second group of bloggers. Others in attendance were Alan Patrick, Adam Tinworth, Joanna Geary, Patrick Smith and Dominique Jackson; the FT.com team included James Montgomery (editor), Stacy-Marie Ishmael (Alphaville), Kate Mackenzie (Interactive Web Editor), Tim Bradshaw (Digital Media Editor) and Tom Glover (Deputy Director of Communications).

James MontgomeryIt does seem as though we covered similar ground to the last set of visitors. I say that without wanting to be unkind to our hosts… in all honesty I’ve not been an FT reader, so it was obviously worthwhile learning about the basics of the FT.com business model; and clearly we hadn’t heard the information before, so it was all useful background. James Montgomery kicked things off by talking a bit about the model that the FT.com is driving – trying to find a balance between subscription and free content. After that, the discussion widened out to cover a variety of topics, from their expansion into video, the reader and commenter demographics, the FT Alphaville site, microblogging and other social media, and some of the future technology plans.

The business model itself is a little different. Rather than an all-or-nothing free vs. subscription approach, anyone can read 5 articles on the FT.com site without any need to sign up. This makes the site search engine and blog link-friendly, and enables casual viewers a degree of access. After that you have to register, and can read up to 30 articles per month; beyond that, you should be subscribing, as the likelihood is that you are more seriously interested in the content. James sees the key plays here as the content, brand, expertise and accuracy of The Financial Times, and also pointed out that this model produced a certain quality of audience too. It would appear to be working – I note that the previous bloggers who visited were given a number of c. 450,000 registrations since October, and yesterday the number quoted was in the region of 600,000, so clearly there is some growth happening.

Newsroom

I’d never visited a newsroom before, so it was interesting to observe the setup. It’s big, and the team is obviously also distributed around the world, which resonated with me given that my employer is also a global organisation with people needing to collaborate across timezones.

Back to the social media stuff. The underlying technology is WordPress, although they are currently using two separate platforms for the main site and for Alphaville. Right now that means that the core search indexes are separate, but this will change in the future.

We talked a little about the expansion into video content, with around 150 items now being generated per month “we don’t want the website to be just an online newspaper”. This has produced some new challenges editorially as new skills are needed. I noted that the video production team in the newsroom somewhat unsurprisingly appeared to be using Macs :-)

The discussion and feedback aspects of the site were covered at some length. I’ve observed that many journalists tend to view blogs as a means to post, but not to converse (the BBC blogs being a frequent example where a journo will post an entry, but not respond to reader comments). The FT are keen to find ways to engage “the wisdom of smart crowds” but there are challenges in their market where readers often have the inside scoop on a story and are therefore unable to comment. It was interesting and pleasing to hear that the journalists are generally aware of the need to respond. It was a surprise that it is not necessary to register to comment on the main FT.com site (although Alphaville does require registration) and the community is generally self-policing, with only very lightweight moderation required.

I’ve been taking a particular interest in microblogging lately. It’s surely a sign of the times that the first thing that we bloggers did was to exchange Twitter IDs… Joanna proceeded to Twitter from the event far more quickly and in more detail than I managed (this is probably a comment on the iPhone too… I just couldn’t type as fast or accurately enough to keep up). A couple of interesting angles came out. Firstly, the FT.com lists a set of Twitter feeds on their website, and I’m not aware of other newspapers doing this – quite progressive, but at the same time somewhat dependent on the success / stability of Twitter itself. We also talked about whether people reply to the feeds or whether anyone monitors the interwebs for references to the FT – obviously this would be a major undertaking, and the view was that people tend to view media feeds on Twitter as a way to consume the news, rather than to communicate with the newspaper. I also wondered whether the team had found microblogging to be a useful way of communicating internally… given the privacy constraints that they might be expected to operate under… several of us opined that a solution like Yammer was “never going to work” for internal communications, and the FT team currently exchange a lot of email and use Skype rather than having an internal social software platform.

Tools of the trade I had my iPhone with me but the lack of free wireless meant that I was mostly taking notes with pen and paper… (tenuous photo tie-in!). I’m curious as to the mobile strategy. On visiting the main FT.com site before going for the event yesterday, I couldn’t see a way of getting a view optimised for my iPhone, although I’m told that there is a mobile version. Alphaville does have some automatic optimisation for mobile, and I’m told that there is a (Java?) mobile application for some phones too… I guess as platforms like Android emerge, there may be more interest in developing this side of things (I note that Bloomberg makes an iPhone app available for free… but would the FT do the same?).  I guess the choice of video technology will become interesting here, too, since not all mobile devices can show Flash, WMV or whatever.

An interesting afternoon, and it was lovely to be invited. Delighted to meet the other bloggers, too. I’ll be following the evolution of FT.com to see where it all goes next.

Coverage from others:

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