A Day In the Life of a VCC User

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Free HD – How to create HD videos to post on your blog

HD video on your blog is not as easy as you might think but it can be done if you get some pointers here and play around with it a little.  As you can tell, I use the free, hosted WordPress for my Web Video Journal blog. Being a video guy (my handle is webvideodaily) in both a personal and professional capacity allows me the time and energy to figure these out.

YouTube provides a link to a funny video about widescreen. You want to watch this.

HD Video in your blog

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To see it on YouTube where you can actually display the video in full res go here.

So what you need to do is read everything that I read on uploading your HD videos to YouTube. When you try to ‘Upload’ a video it points to this. Read the ‘Best Video Formats‘

Here is an eager video geek that has worked out some of the crazy suffixes (I had a pronunciation issue in my video today) which can be used to alter the appearance of your video embed.

Jan Ozer blogged on his site – ‘Streaming Learning Center’ about YouTube HD. This goes into some detail.

New Comscore video usage report out

Yes. Video use is way up even during the recession.  Why?

See for yourself.  This article says it all.

Also, Phil Leigh of ‘Inside Digital Media’ is interviewing Will Richmond, editor of VideoNuze about the Comscore results.

Phil Leigh of ‘Inside Digital Media’

The Impact of Web Video

By Steve Levine

What is Web Video?  The Use of the Internet to deliver on-demand and live video in either a business or personal context that is relevant and often timely. It can also be thought of as a new vehicle to promote products and services by placing ads around popular ‘viral’ videos.

More specifically, a range of corporate and social information from commercials and product pitches, software demos, how-to, vacation and home-cooking demonstrations.  That’s a huge range. Hence, the need for clever social video aggregation communities that allow users to upload their own video creations.

Some of those:

YouTube Google Video Yahoo Video AOL (Uncut) Video MySpace DailyMotion PhotoBucket MetaCafe Multiply Imeem Break Esnips BuzzNet LiveVideo Heavy Brightcove SPIKE Blip.tv Revver GoFish PutFile Lulu Vimeo Veoh Crackle StupidVideos Flixya JumpCut VidiLife ZippyVideos GodTube Vsocial Phanfare DropShots Dotv MotionBox Sharkle ClipShack OurMedia.org VideoWebTown VMIX EyeSpot

View the TechCrunch Video Sharing Websites Comparison Chart. (2007 but good)

There are two real impacts taking shape here.

Non-Commercial Impact – Pull

Although many are purely social, the more serious personal videos seen on the web deal with Citizen-Journalism.  A CJ with Camcorder in hand – just happened to be     somewhere when breaking news is happening and in 20 minutes it is on YouTube.  Yes this has been happening for a while but now it can be anyone doing it.

A lot of new mobile phones have video cameras and there are new sites popping up to capture these and share them with a community of other mobile CJ’s.  This can be a teenager at a rock-concert or a person driving to work who witnesses a bad accident.  Although not intended, we are all starting to be under surveillance at some point.

AT&T Video Share is another step towards mobile phone video.  This product is designed to have one of two people beam video to the other’s mobile device.  It doesn’t allow full-duplex video conferencing, just remote video to one of the two ends from the other.  This can be used for on-the-scene news reporting or video witnessing of crimes or infractions.  Even Apple   is planning to incorporate video chat in a new version of the i Phone sometime in the future.

Many of the sharing sites are filled with individuals recording songs they composed or covering other bands.  They are looking to be ‘discovered’ or get a job in a band.  A lot of this comes from MySpace where many Indy bands get their start.  It appears to be an alternative to signing a deal with a record company now that many young people feel that these companies are toxic to a budding musical career.  Above&Beyond has a typical MySpace music page that is easily found from searching.  There are always videos on these pages as well, many linked to YouTube sites.

After this, it starts becoming commercial. The music pages on MySpace often translate to a subtle marketing effort by the band to use viral marketing to attract fans.  Eventually these fans buy CD’s or iTunes tracks and go to concerts.  I call this free-marketing which allows a user to pull this content freely.  This is not pushed out or made as mandatory attachments to view another video.

Commercial Impact – Push

Here is where advertisers take advantage of the proliferation of web video as candy.  Even serious business people and knowledge-workers can be tempted with video sweets. A search on Google results in some ranked pages to go to and eventually, sometimes immediately, you find yourself on a web page with a video right under your mouse pointer.  You got to see this video because you searched for something related to a product that just happened to have an contract with this video.  While you are watching the video, pertinent ads are rolled before, after and during in some cases.  These have contextual relationships to the original search terms you made on Google.  This is soft-push.

A hard push is when you have been targeted by web marketing either by opt-in or being on somebody’s list.  Your inbox has a nice HTML email with links to videos in it, sometimes you see the thumbnail of the video and other times not.  This has a good chance of hitting the trashcan but in many cases you (and I) will be curious enough to click on the video link.  I know this was pushed to me but I am betting that the advertisers have made an effort to entertain me or keep my interest.  Usually, these are kept short <2 minutes so I don’t lose interest.  If I watch the whole thing, and they can tell, I am offered the opportunity to go deeper.  I can then watch a 5 or 10 minute video that sucks me in even farther and at some point I might buy something.

What is the real value of this?

On the pull side there is the potential to use relevant user-generated personal videos to get eyeballs onto pre and post-roll ads.  Google Adsense makes this possible for citizen authors and bloggers have ads placed on their pieces.  A search of the video by a prospect brings the user-generated video up and the ‘tiny commercial’ is seen either before or after.  Yes, a nuisance to prospects but video is not entirely free today and this is really not so bad.

For the individual video content creator, this could mean a nice little revenue stream from the ads when they make a video that becomes popular – read ‘viral’.  With a bunch of like-minded people watching these videos, there is a good chance that a handful (or more) of the viewers will become customers of the company that snagged ad-space on this TV.

At the push end, companies are hard-pressed to ignore the impact of Web video.  It turns out that for a fraction of traditional marketing costs, web video can be used to inform prospects about a product without harassing them on the phone or showing up in the lobby of their place of business until they ‘see a salesman’.

Individuals who actually have resources to spend and are looking for a solution can save a lot of time by surveying focused video introductions to a set of products. This way, they can essentially perform a pre-bake-off of the products just on the company’s ability to best communicate their value.  In most cases, I have purchased software after seeing the demo flash tour.  This told me a lot about the company and how they were able to communicate their product value proposition in a short time.

Take this poll, ok?

Loic Le Meur Talks To Scoble about the ‘Instant Web’

This interview really uncovers significant trends towards the concept of the ‘Instant Web’ as Loic Le Meur (Founder,  Seesmic) illustrates in this great interview.  (“Twitter is still geeky” according to Loic)

Pay attention to his mention of video being freely available and ubiquitous next year.

Loic also produces the LeWeb conference which many of us would kill to attend.  Our favs over at Scobleizer.tv and TechCrunch did attend.

Is video on the web the new candy?

Tivo changed things forever.  We now have control :  Somewhat.  When Satellite and Cable failed to give us ultimate control, we went to the web.  So, now anyone can search from a number of video sharing and blog sites, YouTube and its ilk and perhaps get that video rush for free and NOW!

The important thing is the now.  Without waiting or putting in your credit card, you can pretty much find any kind of video out there and watch it immediately.  Or can you?

Well, the commercials have not left.  They only have been shortened and made less frequent in many cases.  These pre and post-roll ads much of which are 15 seconds long, now may be found on many news clips posted on Yahoo, CNN and ABC news websites which you cannot fast-forward .  Once you watch the ad, then and only then do you get your little news item.

Have you noticed that occasionally, these news items are ad-free?  It is a little lick of the lolly to keep you coming back thinking that maybe there will suddenly be an amnesty of ad inclusions so that maybe for a whole day, you will be able to view your news clips all by themselves.

Then there is of course Google Ad-Sense.  This is quite a cool concept if you analyze what is happening with video on the web.

Everyone goes and gets a camcorder, shoots some ‘cool’ video and puts it on one of the sharing sites on the web.  Now, they are informed that they can allow their video to be used to entertain ad viewers before or after they see an ad from the 3rd-party or company subscribing to your video.  This way, the company goes out and acquires a bunch of prospects for their products and directs them (via banner ads, tracking links and calls-to-action) to a video they select from a pool of authors or bloggers who have agreed to make their clips available for this purpose.  You, the person who shot that ‘cool’ video of your cousin playing the guitar or shooting hoops now becomes the destination for the prospect who clicked on some banner ad somewhere else on the web.  The ad probably said:  “interested in sharpening up your pickup game?” – Click Here.  Once they get there, an overlay ad for Nike sneakers appears on the hoops video you shot.  Voila!  You get a check sent to you for real money.

The moral is that video is the most effective way to sell something on the web or on TV.  The shift of buyers are towards the web.  The Web allows ads and ad-pulls to be changed every day, several times a day if necessary.  Think of how effective this can be for an advertiser who wants to leverage viral videos by sticking an ad in with a very popular video on YouTube or Vimeo?

Next, we will look at the pros and cons of allowing your videos to have ads attached to them.

Series: Video Sharing Sites

YouTube Goes HD

If you are like me and need to embed video into your blogs you will be very interested in what YouTube recently released.

A couple of weeks ago, YouTube added high quality and definition to their capabilities. Now, all those vloggers, trainers, world-travelers etc. can use their new HD camcorders, Flip’s and whatever they have to publish in HD on YouTube.  That is a breakthrough by anyone’s standards.  Even though other sites like Vimeo have HD as well, YouTube has the largest global footprint in the universe and their Adsense monitizer helps you pay for gear.

I really like this example of how a widescreen video looks on YouTube before you press the ‘Watch in HD’ button.  See for yourself.

Video: A good YouTube HD Example

I will say that you have to go to their site to see the button to toggle between normal and HD.  I have not figured out yet how to get the same experience on this blog as you do on the YouTube site itself.  I think that is by design.

It might be a good idea to check out some of the recent threads resolving how to upload high definition videos to YouTube.  I found these pretty accurate.  Pay close attention to the issue of resolution.  Here is a great discussion about the ‘fmt=xx’ append to the end of the url.  One person stresses that you have to upload high-resolution video for the ‘fmt’ suffix to work.

It turns out to be fairly tricky to get your video (in the YouTube player) to look correct on the blog page.  WordPress pulls out ‘object’ tags so you cant take the full embed code. You have to use the URL that you copy/paste from YT and go through a dialog with WP that asks for the URL.  You bang it in there and it puts it inline in the text of the blog with ‘[ ]‘ around the link.  But, you can edit the link, add ‘&thing=xx’ suffixes to adjust the player size, quality etc.  The two videos in this blog have had these suffixes added.  It took some experimentation but I figured out that’ &w=xx’ and &h=xx’ allowed me to size the player precisely.  Note that both videos fill the player as they should.  I added ‘&fmt=18′ to allow HD high-quality playback as well.

‘Since I do a lot of Camtasia work and the new version supports HD, I have been uploading some stuff to YT in HD high quality.

Video: Made with the new HD version of Camtasia

Here is a great tutorial on Squidoo about ‘how to make YouTube videos look great’.

Also, there is a good tutorial on YouTube HD here.

My opinion of the whole effort is – Ok, where are there video sharing sites offering free (zero dollars) video storage and distribution of HD?  Obviously, G has some kind of huge monitization scheme somewhere in here but for now, we are beta-testers for YouTube HD.  The reason it is so difficult to get it just exactly right is that there is no tools developed yet that support this new mode and make it idiot-proof.  A lot of bloggers and internet user/hackers have figured stuff out but right now there needs to be plug-ins and other support built into the authoring applications such as Premiere, Final Cut, Camtasia etc.  Fortunately, Camtasia’s new 6.0 software supports HD and allows H.264/MP4/Mov to be custom encoding to your exacting specifications.  I am pretty sure that Adobe will follow suit at some point because a lot of video is being authored for YT right now and probably in the future.

In a later post, I will address the use of commercial video distribution platforms like Twistage, Akamai and Limelight.

I thought a poll would help.

The Premiere of ‘Web Video Journal’

Welcome from WebVideoDaily

This is my pilot video blog.  Expect to see and read about web video technology with a rich perspective.  Having been involved in digital video since the early days provides a high vantage point from which to determine value, test-drive products and present findings.  We will open up the onion, so to speak in order to show how we are gleaning the cool factors, user-experience and effectiveness to the task of these new and rapidly emerging online video tools.

First up is our introductory series on ‘Video Sharing Sites’.  This will be a multi-part series starting with:

1. YouTube
2. Vimeo
3. Seesmic
4. Blip.tv
5. Mefeedia
6. Sharing Wrap-up

These posts will include written comments, comparison charts & stats on the service as well as embedded video web tours, deep-dives and tutorial-like screen caps.  They can be re-embedded on your site or blog, shared with colleagues or just socially bookmarked, RSS-Feed etc.

We welcome your feedback and if appropriate, corrections, updates or reports of your own experiences.  Potentially, our crowd of online video folks can learn something as a group and increase our network of like-minded users.

Thanks,

WebVideoDaily Guy