Online video pioneer Ze Frank is “replaying” his much imitated daily video series The Show exactly five years after its original broadcast in 2006. Follow along as episodes are released on a new blog complete with reflective commentary. It’s an exploration of a brand new medium, an examination of spontaneous creativity, and a study of viewer engagement. It’s funny too. Watch the replay every day here.
Dear Chairman Genachowski and Commissioners Copps, McDowell, Clyburn, and Baker:
My name is Eric Susch. I have been producing an internet video show called Let’s Knit2gether for over four years now.
I’m the little guy, the small business person who always gets mentioned in the abstract but who rarely gets a chance to speak for himself directly. I, and many others like me, are trying to pioneer a new form of video entertainment and information exchange, outside the traditional forms of movies and television that are dominated by large conglomerates. This new cottage industry needs Net Neutrality desperately to survive. We’re in direct competition with large companies like Comcast Cable and Time-Warner just as blogs were in competition with newspapers and magazines six or seven years ago. Because the net was “neutral” back then, blogs (for good or bad) were able to broaden the scope of the marketplace and bring information and opinion to the public at large that the big media news organizations weren’t. That’s what we are doing in the video space. We are creating video content that big companies don’t want to take a risk on and we’re delivering that content to millions of viewers who thank us every day for providing something new and different. Please don’t shut down this new innovative marketplace by giving those who control the wires of the internet the power to discriminate against certain data. The consumer’s and the producers should decide what content is readily available, not the middle-men who control the wires.
I share the concerns that Union Square Ventures has outlined on its blog:
http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/12/an-applications-agnostic-approach.php
I urge you to work together in the coming weeks to improve this proposal along the lines described in their post. I support your effort to create an application-agnostic regulatory framework for the Internet.
Sincerely,
Eric Susch
Here’s the letter CAT wrote to Leo:
Hi Leo!
Two years ago, (almost exactly) I had the idea to make you a Jayne Hat so that you would have something to wear during your new venture on TWITlive. When you received the hat, I was so excited to see that you really appreciated it.
Over the years, fans of both TWIT and LetsKnit2gether would send me pictures of you, your daughter and others wearing your hat as part of a “Jayne Hat sightings” picture collection.
Recently, someone sent me a picture and pointed me to a video of Colleen happily wearing the Jayne Hat as she was leaving the TWIT cottage for her new adventure at Google. Now, although I am thrilled that amongst all the hats that you have in your collection, she chose the Jayne Hat to grace the halls of Google, I couldn’t leave you without one.
So, here is Jayne Hat #2. Wear it well and remember, “A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he’s not afraid of anything”.
Thanks for all your support,
VoloMedia announced today that it has been awarded what it calls the “patent for podcasting.” OK, whatever. Podcasting is so last Tuesday but the government takes a long, long time to approve these things so, what’s this all about. Turns out it was an application from 2003 that doesn’t even mention the word “podcasting” (because the word hadn’t been invented yet.) I think then it’s a bit disingenuous for the company to say it’s the patent for podcasting in the title of their announcement about it. It looks to me like they might be trying to make claims after the fact.
And who is this VoloMedia? I’ve been podcasting for three years. I speak at technology conferences about it. I’ve never heard of VoloMedia until today.
OK so what does the patent claim actually say? Here are the details from VoloMedia’s website. (See you on the other side of this quote. Don’t get lost on the way 😉
For reference, below are the claims issued under U.S. patent 7,568,213:
1. A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising: providing a user with access to a channel dedicated to episodic media, wherein the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes by a remote publisher of the episodic media; receiving a subscription request to the channel dedicated to the episodic media from the user; automatically downloading updated episodic media associated with the channel dedicated to the episodic media to a computing device associated with the user in accordance with the subscription request upon availability of the updated episodic media, the automatic download occurring without further user interaction; and providing the user with: an indication of a maximum available channel depth, the channel depth indicating a size of episodic media yet to be downloaded from the channel and size of episodic media already downloaded from the channel, the channel depth being specified in playtime or storage resources, and the ability to modify the channel depth by deleting selected episodic media content, thereby overriding the previously configured channel depth.
2. The method of claim 1, further comprising automatically providing the user with an indication of the availability of updated episodic media via the channel dedicated to the episodic media in accordance with the subscription request.
3. The method of claim 1, further comprising synchronizing the updated episodic media automatically downloaded to the computing device associated with the user with a portable computing device communicatively coupled to the computing device associated with the user.
4. The method of claim 3, wherein synchronization of the updated episodic media automatically occurs in response to a predetermined user setting.
5. The method of claim 3, wherein synchronization of the updated episodic media occurs in response to a request received from the user.
6. The method of claim 1, wherein the updated episodic media is made available to users not associated with the computing device over a local area network.
7. The method of claim 1, wherein the automatic download is further based on a priority assigned to the channel.
8. The method of claim 3, wherein the channel dedicated to the episodic media is reduced in size during synchronization in order to fit available cache storage within the portable device.
9. The method of claim 1, wherein the channel dedicated to the episodic media is modified in size by removing one or more episodes of episodic media.
What a bunch of vague gobbly-gook. This patent claim could apply to iTunes, my DVR… heck it could even apply to Twitter and Facebook. There’s no mention of an RSS feed at all which is essential for a podcast. I don’t think this patent is enforceable but they could certainly cause trouble for a lot of people.
What’s happening here reminds me of what happened a hundred years ago to the emerging motion picture industry. Several companies got together and formed the “Edison Trust” and tried to control the industry with their patents. The “independents” as they were called (the ones shut out of the trust) moved to the west coast to get as far away from the trust as they could. They concentrated on story and longer feature length films that were easier to market. In the end “content” beat out the control of the technology.
So, what does it all mean? Tom Webster over at Edison research has some good thoughts. Leesa Barnes over at Marketing Fit weighs in as well. But all in all, Alex Lindsay from Pixel Corps may have said it best on twitter:
OK… whoever approved this at the Patent Office… I want my tax dollars back for your salary… youre an idiot.
Yep.
CAT won a contest on the revision3 website and we were able to attend the recording of diggnation episode #207 at the MSNBC.com digital cafe in Rockefeller Center. Rachel Maddow was a guest on the show and she made us cocktails!
We had a great time! Check out all the pix I uploaded to flickr.
“Podcasting” is one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s new words for December 2008. It looks like this is relatively soon for a new word to be entered since one of the other words for December is Rashomon, which has been around since 1951.
The first reference to the word podcast is possibly this post to the Yahoo group ipodder-dev from September 2004. That’s just a bit over four years from made-up-word to “near-ubiquity in 2008.” The power of the internet is on display.
The only thing that disappoints me is that the new podcasting entry only mentions audio. Can a video podcaster get a little love? I guess the video podcasters will just have to wait for a future dictionary update to go main-stream.
I came across this information on Twitter from @GrammarGirl and @MWGblog. Ain’t Twitter great? It seems these days that everything you hear, you hear first on Twitter. Maybe Twitter will be in the dictionary some day. I just hope they don’t call an individual message a “tweet.”
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…
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.