Web Video | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Fast Flip Video Uploads

Here’s a video I took this evening while dining with my bride at her favorite local Chinese buffet restaurant, in celebration of the anniversary of her birth:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX23tLwjYoo]

I uploaded it directly from the Flip video camera to YouTube. It isn’t particularly long, but within 10 minutes of upload it was processed and ready for viewing.

This is just to illustrate how quick and easy it is to upload video to the web using the Flip. Instead of having to digitize from a tape, which takes at least the length of time required to connect the camera to your computer and play the tape segment, the file can be almost instantly uploaded. And if you don’t want to edit, you can just upload the raw video.

Not that you generally should. It’s really easy to edit the video files, so you can trim extraneous seconds to improve the presentation. But if you catch some extraordinary event, you can show it to the world within a few minutes.

I’ll be doing some exploration of the balance between time to worldwide video availability and quality of the product. Let’s just say that what you see above minimizes both, and that I spent twice as long writing this blog post as YouTube and I together spent producing and processing the video.

Blogging 131: How NOT to Shoot Web Video

The Flip video camera, which I reviewed and demonstrated in Blogging 130, enables you to easily shoot and quickly edit video to be uploaded to YouTube and embedded on a blog.

But as my friend Jane likes to say, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”

Or, at least you should get training and follow some basic principles so you can produce better-looking content.

Here’s an example of the wrong way to shoot web video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnwR_h2Sd1E]

The main problem (aside from needing a better spokesmodel), is the brightly lit window behind me at the Seattle airport. It makes me all shadowy. Even so, you can still distinguish some of my features and it’s not completely intolerable (although you can weigh in on that in the comments), but it’s definitely not high quality shooting.

Here’s a better example, which comes from just turning the camera the other way:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmMeMJDWYHk]

The subject matter isn’t any better looking, but at least you get a more accurate map of the creases created by four-and-a-half decades of smiling and laughing (and squinting in the sun).

I’m also temporarily password-protecting this post, and making the videos on YouTube only visible to me, to see how that works. I’ll remove the password protection later.

Updated: Here’s what I learned. By setting the videos as “Private” in YouTube, that overrides the other setting I had done to allow embedding within this blog post. So if you have video you only want to share through a password-protected post, you can’t use YouTube embedding to display it. It has to be public on YouTube to be embedded in a post. I’ve now removed both the password protection on this post and the privacy on the YouTube videos so you can learn from these stellar examples.

Netflix Digital Transition Requires Browser Agnosticism

Netflix washington post
The Washington Post has a good article today about Netflix (free subscription may be required) and the transition it needs to make from DVDs by mail to online digital delivery.

“It’s like a three-act play, and we’re in the opening minutes of the second act,” says Steve Swasey, vice president of corporate communications at movie-rental Web site Netflix, as he gives a tour of the company’s Rockville processing center.

Act 1, as far as the company is concerned, was getting people used to renting DVDs over the Internet. Act 3 is “no more DVDs and everything is online.”

Does joining when there are 8 million Netflix customers make me a late adopter? We finally signed up for the two-week free trial yesterday; I love the idea of no late fees and unlimited rentals, and that it offers a Long Tail of selections. For example, in our local video store it’s easy to find the Reloaded and Revolutions sequels to The Matrix, but the original is hard to find. And my wife, Lisa, is looking forward to watching lots of documentaries. We’re looking forward to having access to this huge back catalog.

One initial complaint: the new online viewing feature is for Windows only, and only for Internet Explorer 6 and newer. It’s one thing for corporate IT departments to mandate Windows-only, but a company that wants to sell to the home market (like Netflix) will be missing market share with such an approach. In the last quarter, the Mac’s market share grew to 8.1 percent of the U.S. market. Given the Windows dominance of the corporate IT world, that means the Apple share is even stronger among home users.

Second complaint: I tried to view videos on my daughter’s Windows XP machine in IE 7, so I downloaded and installed the Netflix client software (after downloading IE 7 because it wasn’t compatible with Firefox). Then when I tried to watch season 1 of The Office, it just prompted me again to install the software. Never got to watch it.

I’m sure the DVDs will be great when they arrive Tuesday. Obviously, as Mike Musgrove’s article describes, Netflix has the system for delivering DVDs well orchestrated. But support for Macintosh and browsers other than Internet Explorer will be a key to Netflix successfully making the transition to digital delivery.

Apple’s iTunes obviously serves both Macintosh and Windows. The TV networks, in their ad-supported streaming of their primetime shows, support both platforms and don’t limit to one particular browser. Netflix doesn’t seem to have a true competitor in the DVD-delivery business, but it will have serious competitors in digital delivery.

Microsoft now has less than 65 percent of the browser market. If Netflix continues to ignore more than a third of the potential users of its movie streaming service, it will not be successful in its DVD-to-Digital transition.

Technorati: Netflix, iTunes, Washington Post, Mike Musgrove, Windows, Internet Explorer, IE 7, Microsoft, Macintosh, The Office

YouTube Copyright Law Video

If you don’t understand Copyright law, one way to learn about it is on Wikipedia. But a better way to have the concept “stick” is through this excellent YouTube video (thanks for pointing it out, Dennis)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo]

Disney is one of the most aggessive defenders of copyright; in this video Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University shows that copyright isn’t a blanket protection, but that there is a space for fair use.