I created this blog to share ideas, conversations, tips and tricks with an emphasis on streaming media and online video publishing. It's one of my many channels for communication. Thanks for stopping by the Klessblog!
Streaming Media West is now just 3 weeks away and as I've previously mentioned, I'll be moderating two panel sessions on the subject of online video publishing strategies. As I've been organizing the two panel discussions I've spoke with several of the panelists and I'm learning more with each conversation. Each presenter at the conference shares their unique industry perspective and knowledge in hands-on workshops, keynotes or panel presentations focusing on a host of topics including new trends, best practices, content creation and distribution strategies and new media production.
We're definitely in a key moment in time with online video and live streaming where the new networks, distribution models, content producers and advertisers are starting to figure it out. We're hearing a lot about the video ecosystem and the importance of personal brand, and although we don't yet have a standard for online video, we do have a multitude of choices for video container formats, codecs and distribution channels. As for free video sharing sites, I hear the number is up around 13,000. But which ones will work best for you? What model best fits your business? How do we get meaningful statistics and viewer data? And the all important question, how do we monetize our assets?
These are few of the questions that will be covered in my two online video publishing panel sessions at Streaming Media West. While I'll be mainly focused on moderating these sessions, I will be walking the floor armed with video cameras, meeting people, asking questions, sharing ideas, recording interviews, possibly streaming live video and posting updates here.
In the coming weeks Dan Rayburn will be highlighting the sessions on his BusinessofVideo Blog. Dan will be asking for input on questions to ask each panel so look for more updates there. You can view the conference program here and if you can’t make it to the conference look for the live streams from TV Worldwide and the full archive of all the sessions on Streamingmedia.com.
Also, as part of the festivities is the 2nd Annual Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards. Join Streaming Media Magazine for drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and live entertainment as they celebrate the winners of the second annual Readers’ Choice Awards. Details are here.
The Uptake is on the scene at the Republican National Convention covering the political action in real-time using Qik. While Hurricane Gustav quelled the activities inside the xcel Energy Center in Minneapolis it didn't keep the protesters away as you can see in the videos below.
Qik also has an events page here for the RNC 08 which has 9 Qikkers participating .
Here's a video from CNN's coverage of the police taking on the protesters.
I wonder if we'll see any Qik videos from Congressman John Culberson?
Now as the Democratic ticket hits the campaign trail following their successful lovefest in Denver, the political stage is set for the next media event with the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. The big story today of course is John McCain's selection of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin. Traditional broadcast and new media outlets spread the news through the distributed channels. This Tweet caught my eye from Flixwagon that said,"flixwagon rare early interview with veep candidate Sarah Palin about the elections via MTV and Flixwagon: http://is.gd/236u"
I followed the link to thisFlixwagon interview with the Alaskan Governor conducted last February on Super Tuesday by MTV News Street Teamer Dani Carlson.
"With Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain's surprising announcement of picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, many media outlets are finding there aren't many videos quite yet showing the veep hopeful talking about the national elections. Not MTV: back in Super Tuesday in February 2008, MTV street reporter Dani Carlson made a live video interview with Palin using a mobile phone running the Flixwagon application."
"In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul “cool.” “He’s a good guy,” she added. “He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, ‘Right on, so am I." (more)
"She also spoke about Alaska’s natural resources, and urged the next president to look to her state for relief from the country’s reliance on foreign oil. “We have so much oil we are just sitting on,” she said. “We would be less reliant on foreign sources of energy [if we utilized that] — we need to have the ability to tap into it and produce for rest of the United States.”
Social media applications have changed the way we experience current events creating new distribution networks that circumvent the corporate owned media networks. The DNC 08 is a great example of how people are connecting, communicating, sharing, reporting and changing the world using real-time and instant video messaging. In 2004 blogging gained influence in the political process but now in 2008 it's completely different with Twitter, Qik,Flixwagon, Seesmic, ooVoo,UStream, Stickam and so many other live and on demand video services. These new communication tools are much more powerful and direct and enable us to broadcast our feeds across the globe instantaneously. Who knows what it will be like in 2012?Chris Albrecht posted The Ultimate Web Video Guide to the Democratic Convention on NewTeeVee and here are a few examples of the "New Media Press" that I saw today.
Seesmic has a created Public Conventions account giving people access to post their messages from and to the conventions. From the Seesmic blog, "... Dan Patterson and the crew from TalkRadioNews are rocking the DNC.Also continue to participate in the video conversation at LinkTV powered by Seesmic.Below is the latest update from Dan in a long thread that has been the center of conversation. Please check it out, but also be warned, there is some harsh language. Re: Convention Coverage PUBLIC Accounthttp://talkradionews.com
Eileen Smith from the Texas Monthly, who I met earlier this month for the My ooVoo Day With.. Political Edition, is using ooVoo for exclusive videos and round table discussions. She and Paul Burka will be "Crashing the Conventions" and recording daily reports from both Denver and Minneapolis at the two major party conventions. Videos are available at Texas Monthly: Multimedia.
The Uptake is a small using Qik and captured the Ralph Nader News Conference. This may be one of the only venues you'll actually be able to hear from this staunch 3rd party candidate. At the end of the clip there's a fun exchange between Ralph and Citizen Kate.
Citizen Kate featured again in another The Uptake Qik video covering the political events the one hug at a time.
The Huffington Post created a branded player using Kyte to post its Media Shows.
Trevor F Martinis a Think MTV Street Team Reporter using Flixwagonand caught the Tent State Music Festival today. On his blog he says, "Today at the Tent State Music Festival, Rage Against the Machine headlined a star studded line-up including the Flobots, Wayne Kramer from the MC5s, the Coup and State Radio. Check out interviews with Wayne Kramer, Andy ROK and Johnny 5 of the Flobots and Boots from the Coup athttp://think.mtv.com/profile/trevorFmartin"
The two popular live mobile broadcasting services, Qik and Flixwagon, are covering the events at 2008 Democratic National Convention. These mobile reporters and citizen journalists use their cell phones (which replaces the large camera crews, bulky video equipment and satellite uplink trucks) to provide an unfiltered view that you won't see on the network television broadcasts.
Qik has an event page here with 16 Qikkers attending and while the convention is only televised for a few days the Qik event one week long. I've included a few videos below.
This video which already has over 33,000 views from TPMTV is a Qik report following Hillary Clinton's speech this evening. (UPDATE: The reporter is David Kurtz and his delivery is very much in the traditional news reporting style. His other videos of interviews and on the floor coverage are already some of the "Most Viewed" videos on Qik with A look from behind the podium as Michelle Obama finishes with close to 87,000 views)
This is one is from C-SPAN of protesters, vendors, delegates outside the Denver Convention Center. About a minute into the video you can some protesters getting arrested.
Another one from the Uptake is titled "Who's Wolf Blitzer?" and features a colorful protest through the streets of Denver.
I'm always interested in behind the scenes video and this one is "Inside C-SPAN's Production Truck."
Flixwagon is also on the scene partnering again with MTV and arming a number of street reporters with Flixwagon-equipped mobile phones to cover the action in Denver. They're also streaming live videos directly to their pages on the MTV Think website as part of MTV's Choose or Lose campaign .
Known as one of the world's most popular conventions for podcasters, online video creators and bloggers, the 4th annual New Media Expo, took place in Las Vegas last weekend. In years past, the Expo was was primarily focused on audio podcasting but this year saw a rise in videocasting. Founder Tim Bourquin said that now it's 50/50 audio and video.
Videocasters are big and with personalities like Gary Vaynerchuk leading off with the first keynote address it helped set the tone that you can be your own new media brand, and with 60,000 daily viewers of his Wine Library TV, you know Gary Vee definitely means business. He's a hero and celebrity in the videocasting and blogging community and is one the first to reach mainstream success crossing over to TV audiences with his appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Ellen Degeneres Show. His blog says, "Gary’s fame can be attributed to his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business building."
With over 2000 attendees, Tim Bourquin calls the Expo "a fantastic weekend of education and networking!" and the conference program describes it as "a hands-on, exciting, "how-to" event with practical conference sessions about how to produce high-quality online audio and video content, grow a loyal audience, and even make a few bucks with your content in creative ways." Steven Hodson of Mashable wrote about this last month in his post, Video Blogging Is Not The Frontier You Might Expect, where he made the point thatvideo blogging is not the same as traditional text blogging and that it's evolving into the next new territory of social media communication.
So who attends the NME? Audience demographics can be viewed here, and the graph below charts the main reasons why they attend.
While I didn't attend the Expo myself I managed to view a few videos around the topic of the video blogging boon. Along with Gary Vee's keynote another favorite was an amazing live demonstration by Will it Blend.
Gary Vee was also later joined by iJustine and Walt Ribeiro for panel session on what's the direction of online video. Ben Parr moderated the live session which was streamed live on Ustream and covered topics like mobile, live mobile streaming, Nokia N95 and Qik are the catalysts, life streaming and privacy vs. meeting everyone is the world.
Gary Vee said that in the mainstream world nobody knows the Internet celebs but give it time, we are the early adopters, live video, Twitter, Friendfeed, lifestreaming - people who have content will rule! You can read Ben Parr's post hereor click on the photo to link to view the video below.
Live streaming video by Ustream Also, David Tamés of Kino-Eye.com sat down with Steve Woolf (Epic Fu), Zadi Diaz (Epic Fu), Steve Garfield (SteveGarfield.com), and Walt Ribeiro (Ustream.TV), for a conversation which was planned to be an audio podcast as he says below but turned out as video. Recorded on Saturday, August 16, 2008 topics discussed included "what was best about the show, issues as the big-players enter the space, and Net Neutrality."
The video is 19 minutes and David Tamés shared this about producing the video,
"I had originally planned this to be an audio interview, but when Steve Garfield gave me the video he shot video with his N95, it became a video. When I combined his video and my audio, I was impressed that the audio sync drifted less that a frame from start to end. The N95 is an impressive little camera, suitable for minimalist double-system sound with a digital audio recorder as we used it here."
This video features Tim Bourquin talking about how the NME evolved and where it's going. Watch more videos here.
I read some mixed reviews from some of the attendees which I've listed below and Bourquin himself went on record saying that he may quit the Trade show business altogether. But it doesn't change the fact that many attendees and presenters alike saw video becoming more of niche player in the blogosphere.
These two Adobe resources surfaced a few weeks ago were recently highlighted on Fresh DV and other sources. ReelSEO Creator and publisher Mark Robertson, who wrote, "For those of you that are unaware, there is an excellent FLV bitrate calculator tool from Adobe that does an excellent job of helping you determine the optimal bitrate at which to encode your Flash video files."
FreshDV.com published a table of the optimal frame sizes to use when converting to FLV (Link via Andy Dickinson.) FreshDV's Matthew Jeppsen wrote, "Encoding gurus have long known that to get optimal results from a codec it is best to choose a frame size that divisible by at least 4 or 8. This is because codecs often use use 4×4, 8×8 and sometimes 16×16 “blocks” to form an image. If your image dimensions are evenly divisible, no extra blocks are wasted and the codec can be most efficient with respect to image quality. In the case of On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark codecs, both use 16×16 blocks."
Optimal Frame Dimensions for Flash Video Encoding Regarding the table below Reel SEO's Robetson added, "For the best image quality and playback, you should always use width and height dimensions that use a multiple of 4 (good), 8 (better), or 16 (best). The following table from Adobe provides guidance as to the best frame dimensions (both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios) for FLV encoded files."
Flash expert Robert Reinhardt who created both the Bit rate caculator and table emphasized, "In fact, I would recommend that you refrain from using 4 or 8 multiples unless absolutely necessary, unless you can verify with cross-platform tests that quality or playback haven't been compromised."
I'm a visual artist, interactive technology consultant, video communications professional and videoconferencing production manager in a corporate multimedia department by day and a technology blogger by night. My focus is in the converging technologies of streaming media, videoconferencing, collaboration and social media. I continue to expand the feeds I track and create and having a lot of fun at it.
