Time for a little recap of my posts about what to have in mind when you plan this new fantastic web service. This is what you should put on a yellow post-it note:
Content
Make it available and remember the long tail.
Conversation
Communication channel. Not only a distribution channel.
Context
Metadata, tags, RSS, widgets and descriptions.
Control
Give the users control.
But, this is old news. Because you already subscribe to my RSS feed or email update…
Digg this story here.
The Corporation is available in Democracy Player. It’s the winner of 24 international awards, 10 of them audience choice awards including the audience award for documentary in world cinema at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
The Corporation explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Footage from pop culture, advertising, TV news, and corporate propaganda, illuminates the corporation’s grip on our lives. Taking its legal status as a “person” to its logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist’s couch to ask “What kind of person is it?” Provoking, witty, sweepingly informative, The Corporation includes forty interviews with corporate insiders and critics – including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore – plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.
Install Democracy Player and subscribe to this feed. It’s a large file and will take hours to download, but what else should your computer do at night?
Traditional broadcasting has a huge advantage compared to internet streaming. The fact that you don’t have to care about how many people turn on their TV sets. When they start broadcasting the superbowl or popular content like the eurovision song contest in Europe more than 100 million people turn on and look at it. And still it’s no problem. That doesn’t overload the broadcasting systems.
With regular internet streaming that’s a problem. The load on your servers will increase with the amount of people tuning in to watch the stream. That system is completely useless if you want to serve 100 million people. That’s why the network operators are working on a system called multicast. A system that will allow more broadcast like streaming. Problem is that you need to replace a lot of hardware in the network to enable multicast. The transition to a multicast enabeled network takes time.
Acually, too much time. At least for the clever programmers out there that want high quality streaming now! They want a system that won’t break the server if it gets popular.
And it’s here already. It has been here for a while. Welcome peer-to-peer streaming. Simplified: Napster, Kazaa, BitTorrent and eMule, but for streaming instead of download. A system that gets stronger and gives you better quality as more and more people tune in. The more popular a stream is, the better it will be.
As mentioned, it has been here for a while. But it has only been available for quite advanced users. For the last couple of months I have been playing around with a solution that is pretty user friendly and straight forward. Time to write something about it. TVUPlayer is an application that will give you a long list of TV channels that you can watch on your computer, or media center. It’s not 100% remote control friendly yet, and I haven’t seen a Windows Media Center Edition plugin but I guess it’s just a question of time before you’ll see frontends for peer-to-peer streaming in the different media center solutions out there. Here you can read a full review of TVUPlayer: TVUPlayer Review | Get potentially any TV Channel over the internet for free
And because TVUPlayer works so well I decided to install it on my Media Center Box and have a look at it on my 37 inch LCD. It is not at all as good as a proper digital broadcast, but not too bad. Absolutely an alternative if I want to reach some channels that my cable provider lack or a specific event that I want to follow but don’t want to pay for months of some kind of package.
To illustrate I fired up my Canon S2 IS and shot a quick video. You can watch it here, or download the WMV version. As you can see in the video, changing channels is not like zapping. It’s like waiting for 15 – 30 seconds…
http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
Another software that also is pretty user friendly and completely free is TVAnts. Mostly sports and mostly chinese. In general, this scene is dominated by sports and that seems reasonable. Sports is content that is best when it is enjoyed live. Personally I don’t care about sports, so I find TVUPlayer more interesting.
And if you find this interesting you should check out PPLive, PPStream, Sopcast, PPMate, Feidan and TvKoo as well. Here is a great page with download links and descriptions: Streamingstar. Over at AsiaPlate they have some good tutorials for setting up PPLive, PPStream, TVant, Sopcast, PCast, MySee, TVU and TvKoo.
There are several companies that specialize in solutions to help content producers make peer-to-peer enhanced live streams. If you want to know more you can check out Octoshape, RawFlow and Abacast and Onion Networks.
Cybersky-IPTV is a product that was stopped, but are now back again. I haven’t had success when trying it, but it is under development and especially interesting because they cooperate with a media center solution called TVOON Media center. And, if you want to start broadcasting a peer-to-peer stream yourself Cybersky could be a good place to start. More on Cybersky: Peer-to-Peer Internet Television: Cybersky-TV
And of course I have to mention the venice project. The guys behind KaaZaa and Skype are working on a peer-to-peer streaming solution…
And because 25% of my readers are Norwegian you might be interested in TvNoo. It only supports Internet Explorer and you might need to download a small file and upgrade your windows media player.
Paid and Subscription based services:
TV for us
Live online soccer
Free football
Footy live
Subscribing and downloading of content is also evolving. Still better quality and no dropped frames because of network trouble. And for high definition content download is still the way to go. Check out Democracy Player and Videora. And of course the traditional BitTorrent clients. Azureus and BitComet are two good ones.
Thanks to Lars Frelsøy for valuable advice and huge amounts of info for this article!
Content, conversation, context and:
Yes. It is important that you have control. NOT! It is important that your users have control. Let them paste your video player on to their own pages. Let them link directly to what you publish. Give them RSS feeds. Let them add your content to their pesonalized start pages. Let them mash up. Let them remix. Give your users an API so they can have fun with your content. People will do that anyway. Through hacks and technologies like greasemonkey.
Use creative commons. Of course you should not allow other commercial companies to simply take your content and use it for whatever they want, but through creative commons you can put restrictions without locking out all kinds of positive and traffic driving use on peoples blogs and pages.
But, never underestimate the power you’ll give your audience:
Link to article in Wired: Commercial Break
In a risky experiment, Chevrolet asked Web users to make their own video spots for the Tahoe. A case study in customer generated advertising.
…sorry. Now we’re all just confused. Yes, give away control, but not too much!
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…
We’ve been through content and conversation. Today I have a short note about:
In this world of infinite content you need context. In the form of metadata describing your content. In the form of tags. RSS feeds, widgets. All possible tools you can think of so that people find you and understand what you are up to.
On YouTube you are not even allowed to choose the file to upload before you give it a title, description, tags and a category. A video on YouTube with no metadata is wasted space on their hard drives.
Context makes it easier for people to find your content. On your site. And through Google.
And context is extremely important when you want people to find you down the long tail. Remember, “90 percent of everything is crud“.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you why you should loose control.
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…
I am currently working on an article about peer to peer streaming. During my research I found this: Your Free Satellite. Seems like this stuff is related as well. Looks extremely dodgy. Anyone out there that have tried it? Or know anything about it?
As promised. Part two in my series of posts on why content, conversation, context and control is important issues on the net. Today, it’s all about…
I have mentioned Cory Doctorow and how he question that old saying that content is king. It seems like the people that combine content and conversation is on to something.
Have that in mind. MySpace and YouTube is about the combination of content and conversation. They use the internet as a communication channel. MTV is still mostly about content. And they still think about the internet as a distribution channel. If your bosses talk about this new distribution channel and the information society you should tell them about this new communication channel and the conversation society.
People still want professionally produced content and huge hits, but it must be made available and it must be possible to discuss it.
Yes, I know. 90% of the pages on MySpace are crap and 90% of the comments on YouTube are crap. Still it is important. It makes people feel in control. We feel like we own a part of it. We feel important. And we are. Even if 90% of the stuff we create and discuss is crap.
And the conversation gives you google juice. You know. That magic that makes your stuff hit on page one in Google. Because the discussion is not only taking place on your page. It is all over the internet. And people are linking. My readers have discussed my pretty detailed list of media center alternatives on their blogs. Currently it is among the first ten hits of 70 million if you search for “free media center software” in Google. The conversation got it up there.
Other stuff:
How did I make that ugly illustration? Like this.
eirikso 