A while ago I posted a story about how a video from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation was flagged by the YouTube community. The talented people behind the show has been kind enough to make a US friendly version of the video.
http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/376819422
A while ago the NRK released a video on YouTube featuring an animated german trance artist. It’s a part of an animated TV talkshow that will air in Norway this autumn. A part of the humor is that all the characters are dressed like Donald Duck. Meaning that they have no trousers…
Link to video.
The video was featured on the front page of YouTube and got more than 33 000 views. But the american audience found it utterly disturbing, creepy and inappropriate. So, after a while enough users flagged it and it’s now behind the login wall. Very interesting that the good old Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation is more controversial than the general YouTube audience. This stuff will be aired on national television.
So, some people agree that this is kind of silly. Neodorian has a very valid video answer to the discussion:
Link to video.
Then, the fantastic people here at the NRK making the original video got Mr. Stammler back into the studio where he recorded a YouTube response himself:
Link to video.
I think this is an excellent example of how to utilize these new distribution methods and handling the fact that this is a world where you don’t have full control.
Tomorrow there will be an article in the Norwegian newspaper “Dagens Næringsliv”. Written by… me, actually. One of the issues I bring up is the question of how the internet and the fact that advertisers now have their own distribution channel change some business models.
I’ll try to put up an English version of the article here tomorrow. Until then you should all read “You Tube vs. Boob Tube” over at Wired.com:
TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs. Which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup.
Some peoples problems, other peoples possibilities.
Link to video on YouTube.
I’ve been busy lately, so for what I know this is old news. Anyway, it’s a good excuse for me to paste a U2 video into my blog. According to the YouTube profile a user called U2Official registered less than a day ago and have posted two videos. One have been removed again and the other one is the one you see here. U2 Live in Milan “With or without you”.
Interesting times…
Atle b has a comment on my article about the conversation society that deserves to be read:
Well, you’ve upped the ante – the Google count now stood at 54 – with three of the top five referring back here. How is that for instant visibility?
If you change the viewpoint slightly, there is already a term and a discussion – namely “conversational media” clocking over 56 000 hits. I view it partially as a spin-off from “participatory journalism” and other ways of saying user-generated content.
Which brings it back to your current topic of content – is it “content” when I say to my co-worker “Gee, it’s raining outside. Again.”? Does it become content if I post it to a MySpace page? Then how about if I type it in MSN? It is saved, it is visible and there are ads making it a commercial “channel”
The main problem I have with YouTube and MySpace is that they take ‘traffic’ from everyday actions, and make it into “The Next Big Thing”:
zapping the channels on the tv you can scan the 20 channels twice in five minutes – does that mean you have just had “40 video views”?
talking nonsense to a friend to pass time – is that debate and commitment?
Like Bruce Springsteen said – 57 channels and nothing on – so why not spend time mindlessly looking for that one great video on YouTube? While posting the best links to your friends MySpace page?
Having a blog and a couple of very intelligent readers is a nice thing…
NBC have been distributing trailers on YouTube for a while. Mostly trailers that they also run on traditional TV. Then, they get some negative comments about being commercial in a medium like YouTube.
It’s of course possible to simply put traditional videos on YouTube, and even have great success doing so. If the content is good you have the possibility to reach huge amounts of viewers.
However, the interesting stuff happens when you really use this new medium. Lonelygirl15 is an example of something that we’ll see more of. Using traditional story telling, but in a typical YouTube wrapping and form.
It’s the same old story. “Oh, we invented TV. Let’s take some radio presenters and put them in front of a camera”… And 20 years later this new medium of television has evolved.
Maybe we don’t need 20 years this time. NBC gets the message and produce this excelent promo, only for YouTube.
Link to video.
The trailers from NBC on YouTube have resulted in more than 6 million views in total so far. The most popular is the exclusives, previews and of course this one.
(Thanks, Linn)
Paul Neave is a complete genius that have made amazing stuff like the wonderful flash based frontend for Google Maps and Windows Live Local.
He has also made a very nice frontend for YouTube, blip.tv and Google Video. It’s called neave.tv and it’s close to a service that you would want on your media center. Slightly better keyboard control and it would have been perfect.
As far as I understand the content is selected by Mr. Neave himself. It’s a very nice collection of good stuff from the three video sites mentioned. Including a video that I put out there a while ago…
Most media centers is capable of starting internet explorer in kiosk mode. Meaning full screen without any toolbars. Simply make a shortcut in your media center of choice that starts internet explorer at neave.tv and you have yet another television channel to play around with. The command you need looks like this:
iexplore -k http://neave.tv
Neave.tv lets you play the videos in full screen as well. I wouldn’t recommend that if you have a big LCD. Image quality isn’t exactly what YouTube and the others are known for. And, neave.tv had problems scaling correct on a 16/9 monitor:
Anyway, yet another interesting experiment from Mr. Neave.
TVedia is a media center frontend with some extremely interesting networking functionallity and a very nice interface for YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, LastFM and other media related web sites.
I recently gave it a run on my Windows Media Center Edition box. The installation was very easy. The MCE remote worked at once with no configuration.
You let the software scan your drives for media files and it builds a database that lets you browse your images, videos and music. So far so good. A full screen media browser like all the others out there. And, after my quick test I must say that it is a very good one. The animated user interface is fast and user firendly, but not as smooth and slick as Windows Media Center Edition (MCE). The advantage is the fact that TVedia has modest hardware requirements compared to MCE.
But what’s so special about TVedia compared to all the other available options? The network integration. During installation it asked if I wanted access to the media that TVedia found on the other computers on my network. I said Yes, and when installing TVedia on another box on the same network all my media showed up there as well. No questions asked, no configuration. It just worked.
TVedia is a universal plug and play (UPnP) client and server. Meaning that it will communicate with your UPnP enabeled phone or media server. I haven’t tried this yet, so I’ll have to come back to how this works. You can read more here.
But the functionallity that impressed me the most is TVedia’s nice integration with sites like YouTube, GoogleVideo and Flickr.
With TVedia these sites are suddenly available from your remote on the big screen in the living room. The experience works very well. You can search for video clips and browse categories. Compared to the YouTube and GoogleVideo plugin for Windows Media Center Edition this experience is way better. Of course, the quality of the videos on these sites doesn’t look very good on your 42 inch LCD, but the playback is done through ffdshow and gives you an experience as good as possible. When trying to predict the future of technology a couple of things are pretty certain. The quality will be better! This is a preview of some of the functionallity that the future of big screen entertainment will give you.
Such a nice interface for these sites can turn out to be very interesting and really emphasize the possibilities of Long Tail Content in your living room. (If you want to know more about the long tail Chris Anderson explains it in The Media Center Show here. Or, of course Wikipedia comes you your rescue with a great article.)
For Flickr you can even upload pictures to your account directly from TVedia. You can browse your own sets, your friend’s pictures, search and browse tags.
When running a slide show of photos from Flickr TVedia downloads the largest version available and present them with nice transitions on your TV.
If you add the fact that TVedia plays protected music from both iTunes and MSN Music and has an open interface for plug in development you are close to the perfect media center. And you can’t complain about the price of $35,- either.
Unfortunately, there’s a big one. No TV functionallity yet. You need to run it in cooperation with SnapStream Beyond TV or another proper PVR software. I have years of experience with such solutions. Running one PVR software and another media library software. That is not at all something that I would recommend. The fact that Windows Media Center Edition provides me with both a media library and a proper PVR with an EPG was my main reason to switch to this platform.
The usability, navigation and stability always suffer when running several programs. TVedia version 3.5 had PVR capabilities, so I really hope that 8Dimensions will add a proper PVR with EPG to TVedia version 4 as soon as possible.
But, if you’re in for a tiny bit of tweaking and maintenance, the combination of TVedia and the already mentioned SnapStream Beyond TV will give you a media box with far more functionallity than a plain MCE 2005 box from Microsoft.
So far this is one of the most interesting products I have seen in this space for a long time! The music library, networking and online features are way better than what I am used to in MCE. Please guys, add a proper PVR and you have a winner on your hands.
First, an apology to my RSS subscribers. Unfortunately, articles from this blog get published again if I change them. Recently I have done some experiments where I change the hosting of some of my videos to Google Video from YouTube. All the articles that have been modified will then show up as new in many RSS-readers. Sorry for the inconvenience.
So for my little experiment. I have posted a couple of videos lately, and have been using YouTube to host them. I have also been playing around with Google Video, and here is a quick round-up:
YouTube
– Low quality on videos
– Big community and lots of possible viewers even without links from a blog or web page
– Very nice with trackbacks so you can see who is linking to your videos
– Counter that shows how many times the video has been played
– Web based uploader with good feedback on progress
GoogleVideo
– Better quality than YouTube
– In general less traffic and smaller chances for people discovering your video unless you link to it from your blog
– Possibilities for selling videos
– Possible to let people download your video as well
– Web based uploader with limited feedback on progress
– Desktop based uploader available
If you have any comments on what you prefer please contact me or comment directly here.
Here is an example of the same video, hosted on GoogleVideo and on YouTube:
Human Drums, on GoogleVideo
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-3876415520174236092&hl=en
Human Drums, on YouTube
Update:
And here is the same video on Revver:
http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
eirikso 