The internet video distributor Brightcove just got an additional $59.5 million in funding from a group which includes the New York Times. They've got some heavy hitters behind them, including AOL, Hearst, and I think the Washington Post. See the story at Red Herring.
I hope the practice of putting a TV set (a separate video player) on a web page dies off quickly. I'm still waiting to see an automated content management system that will put video embeds on pages the way newspaper pictures sit on the printed page. The idea of captive pre-roll advertising is really strong, though, so expect to see lots of Brightcove players soon.
On the other hand, anything that increases revenue, I suppose, is a good thing....
One really cool thing about Brightcove is the reporting that tells how many people watched your video all the way through. Check out some of Brightcove's site and you'll see that almost nobody finishes one.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Internet TV from a newspaper company
If you haven't checked out http://www.hamptonroads.tv/ lately, they've gotten over their growing pains and their servers feed video smoothly now. It finally works the way it should and it's an interesting place to visit.
HamptonRoads.tv is a huge internet-only TV station created by Landmark Communications / Pilot Media Companies, whose Virginian-Pilot newspaper is the largest metro in Virginia. (They also own the Weather Channel and multimedia powerhouse Roanoke.com) Visual Journalists at the Virginian-Pilot contribute pieces to hamptonroads.tv, but the majority of local content comes from dedicated hamptonroads.tv shooters.
They have channels on their player and you can get world, national, and local content, as well as viewer-contributed.
Their ".com is so yesterday" intro is worth the price of admission.
HamptonRoads.tv is a huge internet-only TV station created by Landmark Communications / Pilot Media Companies, whose Virginian-Pilot newspaper is the largest metro in Virginia. (They also own the Weather Channel and multimedia powerhouse Roanoke.com) Visual Journalists at the Virginian-Pilot contribute pieces to hamptonroads.tv, but the majority of local content comes from dedicated hamptonroads.tv shooters.
They have channels on their player and you can get world, national, and local content, as well as viewer-contributed.
Their ".com is so yesterday" intro is worth the price of admission.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Ethernet Inventor Says Transformation to Internet Video is Here
This is a six minute interview from beet.tv with the guy who invented ethernet. While the perspective he brings to internet video is interesting, what's really cool is how this video got here on this blog. If you haven't experienced Google Video's "post to blog" button, it's really cool. One click and any Google Video is automagically here. If you haven't checked video.google.com lately, it has become a repository for lots of footage. Getty archival footage is available, as well as almost anything else you can imagine. -- Chuck
| The implications are profound says Internet Pioneer Robert Metcalfe. We are on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the annual Emerging Technology Conference organized by Technology Review. At the kick-off dinner at the MIT Museum, I had the good fortune to interview Robert Metcalfe, the pioneering computer scientist who invented Ethernet back in 1973 -- before that he was a principal researcher at MIT on ARAPNET - the early Internet. Bob tells Beet.TV he's long had a vision of the Internet as a delivery platform for video. Sure video takes more bandwidth, but it's still all about the Ethernet packets which carry the data, he notes. Among the most important implications is the prospect of energy savings by facilitating communications through video interaction. Thanks Bob for all you've done. Vlogging The World's Top New Innovators Gathered at the MIT conference are the the world's top 35 young innovators who are being recognized for their achievements. Technology Review has launched a cool vlog comprised of interviews with many of the winners, as well as speakers gathered here at the conference. Please stay tuned to Beet.TV this week for ongoing coverage of the Technology Review conference up here at MIT. -- Andy Plesser View this post on Beet.TV, http://www.beet.tv/2006/09/internet_pionee.html - Contact us at beettv@plesser.com Coming Clean: MIT's Technology Review, the organizer of the conference, is a client of Plesser Holland, publisher of Beet.TV | |
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Adobe Digital Editions: free ebook on Flash
Speaking of Flash, there's a free e-copy of a chapter in the Visual Quickpro Guide: Macromedia Flash 8 Advanced for Windows and MacIntosh on Adobe Labs' site: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/library/
This is interesting because the page uses Adobe Digital Editions - a new way of publishing using a pdf-style drm program. It is still in beta, but now runs on Mac OS X. It somehow hooks into Safari when it installs.
Check it out.
Update: this is one funky program. It only works when connected.... you can't download the content, apparently. It puts a 4kb ebx.etd file on your computer that manages the digital rights. If you click that file, it tells you you've already accessed it and you're out of luck. But if you go back to Adobe Labs page, you can still read the content.
When you right-click on an ebook, you get a settings dialog that can allow Adobe access to your web cam and mic....!!!
And as noted in the comments below, it's not the whole visual qp guide book, just 24 pages.
This is interesting because the page uses Adobe Digital Editions - a new way of publishing using a pdf-style drm program. It is still in beta, but now runs on Mac OS X. It somehow hooks into Safari when it installs.
Check it out.
Update: this is one funky program. It only works when connected.... you can't download the content, apparently. It puts a 4kb ebx.etd file on your computer that manages the digital rights. If you click that file, it tells you you've already accessed it and you're out of luck. But if you go back to Adobe Labs page, you can still read the content.
When you right-click on an ebook, you get a settings dialog that can allow Adobe access to your web cam and mic....!!!
And as noted in the comments below, it's not the whole visual qp guide book, just 24 pages.
FLASH VIDEO HOW-TO by Chuck Fadely
FLASH VIDEO HOW-TO by Chuck Fadely
Adobe (Macromedia) Flash is the best way to put video on a web page. Nearly every computer hooked to the internet has a Flash player installed. A Flash .flv-encoded video streams itself, so you don't need a streaming server.
There are a number of different versions of Flash. Flash 8 is the current and highest quality. But many office computers have the FlashMX players, an older version, and are locked down so the user can't upgrade. If most of your traffic comes from the 9-5 weekday crowd, you should encode using FlashMX (which uses Sorenson Spark encoding). If your audience is hooked up, use Flash 8 (which uses the On2 VP6 codec)- it's better quality.
You can encode video into Flash in a number of ways. There is, of course, Flash 8 , if you've got it. You can also use Sorenson Squeeze , a great compression software that has many uses beyond flash. VP6 encoding software from the company that wrote the encoder for Flash is On2 Flix. On2.com makes stand-alone encoders and a Quicktime plug-in so you can export Flash from a Quicktime app. And if you're on Windows, there's a free encoder from Riva.
Compression settings are a whole 'nother encyclopedia. In general, though, you should compress your video using two-pass settings, at a 400kbps max data rate, at half the frame rate of the original video (15fps for normal ntsc 29.97 fps video), at 320x240 for sd video and at 400x224 for 16:9 widescreen video. Sound can be 56k at 22khz sample. This will give you a video with rather mediocre quality but will be able to play on the $24-a-month slow dsl lines. Compression settings are an art, though, and vary with content, size, and motion in your video.
Once you've encoded your video into flash, you'll need a player for it. A .flv video won't play by itself. It has to be played in a flash player. To run it in a flash player, it has to be put on a page with a chunk of html that calls the player.
VideoSpark.com has a bunch of (commercial) info about flash players.
There is a player at http://www.jeroenwijering.com as well as a tutorial on how to embed it on a page.
The html code to put Flash in a page looks something like this:
HTML embed code:
This coding will play a widescreen flv video from my site named "video.flv" It uses a player named "flvplayer.swf" to play it. Cut, paste, and figure it out. (Watch out for dropped brackets and quotes. Getting html code to display on an html page is a bitch.)
And here's what that code produces:
TUTORIALS:
Here's the sermon on the mount, straight from the source: Adobe - Developer Center : Flash Video Learning Guide
Here's WebMonkey on embedding the video.
Here's University of Florida instructor Mindy McAdams' instructions: Flash and Video . (pdf)
Here's how to do it with Windows Movie Maker and Riva: Boutell.com's "WWW FAQs: How do I add video to my web site?"
Another good one is at VideoHelp.com's forums.
Here's a WordPress page with links to a lot of plugins to get the video on your WordPress blog -- but many work with other types of pages.
The Wimpy Player is a nice one. This has ways to play in both html and javascript.
For an overview of Flash video, including streaming vs progressive, see the Flash Video 101 articles on this page from Peachpit.
Good luck.
Adobe (Macromedia) Flash is the best way to put video on a web page. Nearly every computer hooked to the internet has a Flash player installed. A Flash .flv-encoded video streams itself, so you don't need a streaming server.
There are a number of different versions of Flash. Flash 8 is the current and highest quality. But many office computers have the FlashMX players, an older version, and are locked down so the user can't upgrade. If most of your traffic comes from the 9-5 weekday crowd, you should encode using FlashMX (which uses Sorenson Spark encoding). If your audience is hooked up, use Flash 8 (which uses the On2 VP6 codec)- it's better quality.
You can encode video into Flash in a number of ways. There is, of course, Flash 8 , if you've got it. You can also use Sorenson Squeeze , a great compression software that has many uses beyond flash. VP6 encoding software from the company that wrote the encoder for Flash is On2 Flix. On2.com makes stand-alone encoders and a Quicktime plug-in so you can export Flash from a Quicktime app. And if you're on Windows, there's a free encoder from Riva.
Compression settings are a whole 'nother encyclopedia. In general, though, you should compress your video using two-pass settings, at a 400kbps max data rate, at half the frame rate of the original video (15fps for normal ntsc 29.97 fps video), at 320x240 for sd video and at 400x224 for 16:9 widescreen video. Sound can be 56k at 22khz sample. This will give you a video with rather mediocre quality but will be able to play on the $24-a-month slow dsl lines. Compression settings are an art, though, and vary with content, size, and motion in your video.
Once you've encoded your video into flash, you'll need a player for it. A .flv video won't play by itself. It has to be played in a flash player. To run it in a flash player, it has to be put on a page with a chunk of html that calls the player.
VideoSpark.com has a bunch of (commercial) info about flash players.
There is a player at http://www.jeroenwijering.com as well as a tutorial on how to embed it on a page.
The html code to put Flash in a page looks something like this:
HTML embed code:
<object width="400" height="224" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0">
<param name="salign" value="lt">
<param name="quality" value="high">
<param name="scale" value="noscale">
<param name="wmode" value="transparent">
<param name="movie" value="http://chuckfadely.com/content/flv_web_vids/video.flv">
<param name="FlashVars" value="&streamName=FLV_Video_URL&skinName=http://chuckfadely.com/content/flv_web_vids/flvplayer&autoPlay=true&autoRewind=false">
<embed width="400" height="224" flashvars=&streamName=FLV_Video_URL&autoPlay=false&autoRewind=true&quality="high" scale="noscale" salign="LT" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://chuckfadely.com/content/flv_web_vids/flvplayer.swf" wmode="transparent">
</embed>
</object>
This coding will play a widescreen flv video from my site named "video.flv" It uses a player named "flvplayer.swf" to play it. Cut, paste, and figure it out. (Watch out for dropped brackets and quotes. Getting html code to display on an html page is a bitch.)
And here's what that code produces:
TUTORIALS:
Here's the sermon on the mount, straight from the source: Adobe - Developer Center : Flash Video Learning Guide
Here's WebMonkey on embedding the video.
Here's University of Florida instructor Mindy McAdams' instructions: Flash and Video . (pdf)
Here's how to do it with Windows Movie Maker and Riva: Boutell.com's "WWW FAQs: How do I add video to my web site?"
Another good one is at VideoHelp.com's forums.
Here's a WordPress page with links to a lot of plugins to get the video on your WordPress blog -- but many work with other types of pages.
The Wimpy Player is a nice one. This has ways to play in both html and javascript.
For an overview of Flash video, including streaming vs progressive, see the Flash Video 101 articles on this page from Peachpit.
Good luck.
Video killed the TV Star
Newspapers and TV Stations are circling around each other like dogs looking for a fight. In this Washington Post story, Newspaper-TV Marriage Shows Signs of Strain , Frank Ahrens explains the trend.
"At the Washington bureau of the Belo newspaper chain, two veteran television reporters whose stories appeared on Belo's 19 broadcast stations were laid off and are to be replaced by videographers who will shoot digital video for the Web sites of Belo's 11 newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News."
"At the Washington bureau of the Belo newspaper chain, two veteran television reporters whose stories appeared on Belo's 19 broadcast stations were laid off and are to be replaced by videographers who will shoot digital video for the Web sites of Belo's 11 newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News."
Friday, January 12, 2007
Handycams: tape is dying
A bunch of new camcorders were introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show. New hard drive and digital camcorders with proprietary codecs that you won't be able to edit in your NLE. See http://www.camcorderinfo.com/
The Panasonic GS300 is apparently discontinued and replaced by a model that doesn't have external microphone input.
Treat your Optura 50's and GS 400's with care -- they were apparently the last of their breed: cheap 'corders with manual controls and inputs.
The Panasonic GS300 is apparently discontinued and replaced by a model that doesn't have external microphone input.
Treat your Optura 50's and GS 400's with care -- they were apparently the last of their breed: cheap 'corders with manual controls and inputs.
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