So a few weeks ago I upgraded WordPress on this blog and got locked out of the dashboard! It just wouldn’t let me log in. Then CAT upgraded another WordPress blog we use as a test site and the same thing happened. BOGUS! Anyway, CAT did some research and was able to find a fix today, so now I’m able to post again. YEA! New posts with great wit and insight soon to come…
For those that don’t know Tom Green has been doing a talk show called Tom Green’s House Tonight from his living room for about two years. New Tee Vee went to his house for a behind the scenes video tour.
Here’s another tour of Tom Green’s house where we get to see all his plants and what’s on the roof:
The test of any vendor is not the quality of their products or the price. The true test is how well they handle problems. I’ve dealt with a lot of professional video vendors over my 25 year career and most are mediocre, some are really bad, but occasionally one really stands out. Bodelin Technologies who make the ProPrompter II LCD teleprompter has shown me that they are definitely one of those rare vendors who deliver excellence.
We’ve been using the ProPrompter II LCD on our show Let’s Knit2gether for over a year now. (We first used it on episode 7 – Felting part 1.) I’ve been on the set with and known several different companies that make teleprompters. (I actually used to scotch tape script pages into long runs and load it under a small black and white video camera back in my live news days… but I guess that dates me so we won’t talk about that.) In any case when we started Let’s Knit2gether we needed something simple and easy since this was New Media and it was just the two of us doing everything.
I’ve been a fan of GeekBrief.tv from the beginning and they mentioned on their site that they were using a ProPrompter II LCD and liked it. I’d never heard of Bodelin Technologies but I checked out the prompter and eventually bought one.
The prompter is light and easy. No counter weights. No complicated rail system. It just clamps onto the end of your lens. Setup time is minimal. We were even able to get a foot switch so CAT could control the software all by herself and I could concentrate on what I was doing while we were shooting. It made a significant improvement to our show.
Near the end of last year the small LCD monitor on the prompter just died for no reason. A quick e-mail to Bodelin support with a picture and description of the problem got a response back with within hours. The e-mail even included a return authorization number. I packed up the defective monitor and got a brand new replacement within a few days, no questions asked. I was actually quite surprised. No hassle, no searching for receipts to check warranty status, no extended turnaround times, only one simple e-mail to support. Problem solved, now get back to shooting. This kind of service is very rare and deserves the highest kudos.
Looks like podshow is re-organizing and changing their name. I was never really sure if Podshow was going to succede. Here’s why:
In 2005 I was heavily invested in my broadcast television career. I saw the writing on the wall however and I was fond of saying, “It’s 1955 and we’re still making radio drama. Pretty soon somebody up in corporate is going to figure out that it’s cheaper to hire one guy to spin records all day and we’ll all be out of a job.” I decided to jump off the old media ship, take a risk, and try something new. But what?
I eventually decided that podcasting was the way to go in part because of what I was hearing from Adam Curry on the Daily Source Code. I followed the launch of Podshow in 2006 mainly by listening to the DSC and Podcast411. I was also studying video shows like, Rocketboom, Tiki Bar, diggnation, Rumor Girls, and GeekBrief.tv. The later two shows were with Podshow.
In the summer of 2006 CAT and I started working on Let’s Knit2gether as a new media test case. We wrote some episodes, started shooting, finished a pilot episode, learned about RSS, and put up a WordPress blog. We stayed up all night for about a week and finally posted our first episode literally hours before getting on a plane to Ontario, California for our first Podcast Expo. We were determined to be podcasters when we arrived and we were. We had one episode!
At the expo we soaked up everything. We were still new to the game and we needed to learn as much as we could from everybody else. When we were leaving to go back home I remember turning to CAT and saying, “Where was Podshow? It was supposed to be this big deal and they didn’t even have a presence here.”
After we got home I found out that all of “Podshow was there in full force!” They were riding around in limos and having a grand old time. What? We were all over that place, actively searching out as much information as we could find, and we didn’t even notice them. Podshow was obviously in a serious bubble. I wrote them off right then and there. Any company that gets into a brand new industry and thinks they are the center of the universe separate from everyone else, is doomed to failure.
So now they have a new name, Mevio. OK, setting aside the fact that companies typically re-organize and change their branding right before they go out of business, maybe this will work for them. Hopefully this is actually a new direction and not the same old thing with a new name. They seem to be trying to do something more like Revision3 who, in my mind, are doing things right. We’ll see…
Yesterday at Roosevelt High School in Fresno California, a police officer shot and killed a student after being attacked with a baseball bat. I believe the person who took this video of the press conference that followed is a newspaper reporter for the Fresno Bee.
This is a response to a post on Michael Geoghegan’s blog called Podcasting – It’s a Community Not an Industry.
Podcasters, it is time you face the facts. If you are waiting for a podcast advertising service to ride in on a white horse and rescue you from your monetary woes, let me help you: start looking elsewhere.
Over the past year we’ve basically come to the same conclusion as Michael. The various new online ad “networks” aren’t going to do much for you as a podcaster.
The promise of joining an online “network” and automatically getting ads (and payment) as you focus only on making your content has always seemed a dubious promise to me. I do a video podcast about knitting which I think is a strong niche with lots of potential. In the various meetings we’ve had with these online “networks” it’s always been about raw numbers with very little consideration of the strength or subject of your content. There seems to be a blind focus on grabbing eyeballs, and advertising as the only way to monetize those eyeballs. Last year pre-roll ads were the answer. This year it’s overlays. The online mainstream media and all the VC money seems to be focused on developing advertising technology ONLY. No other options are being explored with such vigor. However, this is a new industry. Everything is changing very fast. There are a LOT of things that aren’t going to work. We really need to be exploring many new, different, out of the box models to find a FEW that are really going to be successful and repeatable.
The focus today seems to be to try to give the traditional ad buyers exactly what they want. The problem is, all they want is what they know. And all they know is what works for them now on TV and radio. I don’t think a traditional broadcast model is going to work for podcasting. We’re seeing a paradigm shift in the media industry. The Digital revolution is separating content from delivery technology. Shows go everywhere and aren’t confined to the specific distribution technology they were created for. At the same time the content producer is moving closer to the consumer. In the TV broadcast world there are lots of middle men. There’s the producer of the show, the cable channel corporation that pays for the show, the cable TV systems that delivers the show, etc. etc. before you can see it in your living room. With podcasting it’s, producer –> internet –> viewer. Any monetization model is going to have to leverage this greater simplicity. The mass media models from the past aren’t the answer and that’s all anybody seems interested in trying to develop.
So, I called podcasting an “industry” above and I guess I should probably respond to what Paul Colligan posted on his blog about podcasting NOT being an industry. These days I use “podcasting” as more of a synonym to New Media. The whole landscape is changing and constantly morphing into something else. It’s harder and harder to be strict about the definitions of specific technologies. For example: Our show Let’s Knit2gether is technically a podcast because it’s downloadable with an RSS feed but on the new AppleTV you can just click on it and play it. Does that make our show NOT a podcast? We also sell DVDs. Is our show a podcast when it’s on DVD? I don’t know anymore. In any case the media industry is changing rapidly. What it is becoming may be unknown (and un-nameable) but I still think it’s an industry.
A final thought. There’s so much more in Michael’s post to address. CAT and I have been talking about it all day. I think I’m going to cut it off here though and save the rest for future posts. When I made the decision a few years ago to shift my broadcast TV career into New Media I expected it to be a wild ride with plenty of excitement and change. I have not been disappointed in that respect and I’m sure there will always be plenty to comment on next time.
Check out these interviews Zadi and Steve got at the Spirit Awards.
“You can’t see paintings on the internet.”That really struck me. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t make much sense to me. I went over to the epic-fu community site and left the comment:
…you can’t slice a tomato with a karate chop either.
It’s interesting how some filmmakers in the video totally get it and some don’t. I guess we all move into the future at different rates.
I just finished watching the first two episodes of Quarterlife.
There’s an article over at NewTeeVee that examines the shows audience numbers, specifically that the numbers were going down. Andrew Baron commented about it on his blog too. Quarterlife seems to be losing their audience. The question is why.
I had no idea who made this show until the end credits and I nearly fell out of my chair. How could Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick be responsible for a show that I thought was so terrible? I usually like their work!
I’m reminded of a conversation I had a few days ago.We were discussing the difficulty in doing drama in short segments.Comedy and spectacle are easier and more satisfying in short clips but drama takes time to build.I think maybe the 8 minute length is part of the problem.It’s dragging the show down.There’s just not enough time to get into it.
OK maybe that’s part of it but there are other problems too.
So the main character calls her roommate an alcoholic on her blog and then she’s surprised that it becomes a problem? How clueless are these characters? How can I care about someone who basically creates their own problems this way?
Oh, and having TWO product placements in the first 90 seconds was really off putting. Product placement needs to be much more subtle to work. Corporate logos invading the frame constantly hovering in front of and behind the actors just kills the authenticity of the drama. It really pulls you out of the story and makes you think you’re just watching a contrived advertisement. The main character rolling around on her bed with her computer just screams product shot! product shot!
The product placement right up front set a really bad tone right at that critical point where you should be concentrating on winning over the audience. Hmmm… Maybe I was just put off right from the start and didn’t give the show a chance after that…
OK, so I just watched the third episode. I’m trying. Maybe it’s getting better. I’m not sure. I’m thinking that there are too many characters. With so many character arcs to cover in 8 minutes the plot moves forward way too slowly. Maybe this show is over-reaching and would be more successful concentrating only on one character.
And where is the RSS feed? Why isn’t this show on iTunes? I want to subscribe and watch this on AppleTV in my living room. That’s a much better place to watch something like this. Maybe it would help me get into the show more.
I’m going to watch a few more episodes but only because I respect the producers’ past work. I really want to like this show, but it’s hard.
(Whoops! I wrote this entry a few weeks ago and I guess I never posted it. Still getting the hang of this blogging thing…)
On the last day of the Podcast and New Media Expo, CAT and I sat down for a quick sandwich just before having to leave to catch our plane back to NY. We happened to sit next to one of the Internet’s first video bloggers, Steve Garfield. He had seen our latest show, liked it, and wanted to interview us for his video blog. We only had a few minutes but that’s all it took. We went out into the hall and he recorded us on a tiny digital camera. Check out the interview.
It was a pleasure to meet you Steve!