Okay, the competition for the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang contest is better than I expected. Which means I need to blog a desperate plea for votes. If you have a second, please give the following three short videos "5 stars." You don't even have to suffer through them or click the ads. And if I win, I'll let you borrow the iPod whenever you want…
My kids do Apology scene (mostly bloopers)
Thanks!
It would appear that the Howard Stern & XM Radio deal has scared the hell out of cell-phone providers. Cingular has partnered with HBO, and Sprint and Verizon are hunting for "short films suitable for the size-challenged cell-hone screen," according to Newsweek. Nokia is setting up a tent at the Los Angeles Film Festival to show off its mobile-video phones and technology, Newsweek reports.
Is there anyone else that finds this a bit ridiculous? Naturally we'll be using cell phones as a primary media-consumption device in years ahead. Finland and Japan have proven this. But I find it weird that some phone providers are going directly to film festivals for two reasons:
Note: The writer of this blog is friends with EvilFist (even though the feeling isn't mutual). Since this blog produces zero revenue, it's not above self promotion.
Here's my video version of the AOL Cancellation (click to see it on YouTube).
A guy tries to call and cancel his AOL account and runs into an aggressive call-center employee who wants to talk him out of it. And it's all caught on audio for everyone to enjoy! Here's the blog entry about this event. Here's the recording of Vincent Ferrari trying to cancel his AOL subscription. We can all appreciate this because it's happened to all of us.
"Cancel the account. I don't know how to make it more clear… you're annoying the shit out of me."
"And that goes both ways," responds the call center employee. "If you want me to cancel this account… you're going to listen to me."
Apparently the call center employee has been fired from AOL. This just goes to show- see what happens when you outsource your call center (see video)?
Right now you may channel surf between 100 to 500 channels, according to this article from The Mercury News. But Internet protocol television (IPTV) — television broadcast over the Internet — could change that. An estimated 49 million Americans already have the gear and broadband connections needed to receive IPTV, and this will allow for a huge varitey of "small audience" programming that can include local athletic events, personalized business news and low-budget independent films or clips.
"We're on the eve of a television revolution that proponents say could change how you watch your favorite shows – and who produces them," says writer Ely Portillo of Knight Ridder Newspapers.
Tuesdays suck. Why? It's the worst day to check videos. For reasons I can't quite explain, people do more on e-mail and the web on Tuesdays. It's been a long-standing "secret" that promotional e-mails get the best "open rates" on Tuesdays. My CubeBreak traffic spikes on Tuesdays. Even this blog spikes on Tuesdays.
But all of this means I'm competing with my co-workers for bandwidth. Tuesday lunchtime is the single worst time to surf videos. So my videos aren't loading, and it's pissing me off. Could everyone just get off the Internet for a few minutes?
We're all getting used to crappy video online. It may stream quickly, but it's a pixelated as Atari's original Space Invaders.
Will this improve soon? Not for the most part. Sure some of us will upgrade to higher end pro-sumer video cameras ($3000-$10,000). And broadband will allow for higher file-size uplpoads than the typical 100 meg cap. But the vast majority of us will start using our video-enabled cell phones to capture a lot of spontanious, viral videos. So in aggregate, the videos of 2007 will be even uglier than 2006.
Bandwidth isn't yet an issue online, but keep in mind that Japan's wireless broadband is signficantly faster than what you're using now to connect at home. There won't be an incentive for cell providers in the U.S. to bring us high definition video cameras because nobody will want to spend 5-10 minutes sending their video clips to their buddy. So until cell phone pipes expand in the U.S., we're going to be stuck with grainy footage for a while.
The high-end sites will boast broadcast-like quality video, but the vast majority of consumer-generated video will look worst next year. Let's hope that I'm wrong or that someone's creating a software to enhance videos.
… Like in the movies when they turn a 10-pixel image of some guy at his desk into a "Kodak clear" image, in which you can read the legal print on the memo on his desk. Does that bother anyone else, or am I just a geek (don't feel obliged to answer that)?
My friend Jack wrote this rant about online videos, and he said I could steal it. Click "more" below for the entire piece. Here are some highlights.
The revolution will be televised; but its just seems we needed to wait untill the television is really a large flat-panel LCD monitor with a PC hooked into the Internet.
The Consumer Generated Content Internet “Video Revolution” needs four things to hit tipping point: 1. eyeballs, 2. adoption, 3. famous and/or popular mavericks, and; 4. easy-to-use payment systems supporting artists.
Want to predict the future of the Video Revolution? Look at the Audio Revolution. Common independent music artists are still eating Ramen Noodles just like the 80’s and 90’s. Thanks to software like Garage Band, we have lots of tools to make the stuff…. However, no one really showed up with a system that paid artists directly and easily.
Really the Audio Revolution focused on pirated music of famous artists, not original content. More than six years past the commercial birth of the Internet we tune in to FOX and American Idol (on TV) to find our new music stars and not the Internet…all on a show made famous by a maverick record label guy from the UK who stole the idea for the show in the first place. We use our phones to vote; we can’t even e-mail it in.
This Audio Revolution was followed quickly followed by the Lawsuit Era.
Continue reading Will the “Video Revolution” Be As Muted as the “Audio Revolution”?
This quote from a Cnet article on the topic of smut and online video:
A weeklong review of some of the top user-generated video sites by CNET News.com unearthed scenes of beheadings, masturbation, bloody car accidents, bondage and sadomasochism. It's important to note that no child pornography was discovered.
Meanwhile, imagine if YouTube needed to monitor all posts. They'd have to hire hiring people to eyeball each frame of the more than 50,000 videos that get posted daily. Although most flicks are under 2-3 minutes, YouTube allows videos to last up to 10 minutes. So YouTube would be monitoring up to 2,500 hours worth of video a day.
Let's make one thing clear. This blog isn't for movie reviews, and I don't review movies. But last night I went to see one of those old "feature length" films in a cinema. In case you don't recall them, let me give you some reminder cues:
Since it was Father's Day, I decided to see Nacho Libre. Jack Black did a fantastic SNL appearance when Kong came out so I thought I might enjoy it. I was't let down- not only did I stay awake (which is not true for the past dozen movies I've seen) but I laughed outloud. In fact, I can't recall a movie where I heard the audience laugh so frequently and so loud. It was really fun.
Go check it out yourself. But don't try to "right click" and save it, because I think they're going to try to sell it on DVD.
P.S. I deliberately squashed the photo above because I think Jack looks funnier that way.
Who would have thought that a few hundred dollars worth of Diet Coke and Mentos could turn into $30,000? According to this Wall Street Journal article, viral videos — which featuring explosive shots of Mentos mixed with Diet Coke — http://www.eepybird.com/ have generated several million of views. This is not uncommon for YouTube, but it's a record for Revver.com, a video-serving company that splits ad revenue 50/50 with its creators.
The result?
Typically it's hard to make a mint on Revver (which has limited traffic), but impossible to make money on YouTube (which doesn't share ad revenue with content creators). So how do I move from my GoogleHead, Crackberry and Burger King Outsources videos (which are somewhat popular but nothing like Eeepy) into something with wicked viral appeal?
I wonder if I lit my fart on fire with a Bic if I could get the lighter-maker to do a promotion with me. Ya think?