Mar 22
Posted: under Uncategorized.
…and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men … Welp. Here I had been recommending VideoEgg as a possible solution to all my students/trainees, because it offered a dead-bang easy way to upload and host your videos, the EULA wasn’t as onerous as YouTube, and they were actually trying to incorporate a shared-revenue [...] [...more]
…and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men …
Welp. Here I had been recommending VideoEgg as a possible solution to all my students/trainees, because it offered a dead-bang easy way to upload and host your videos, the EULA wasn’t as onerous as YouTube, and they were actually trying to incorporate a shared-revenue video ad model to their services.
Looks like that was a little bit more than they could chew.
Imagine my surprise and delight when I read this:
Why and when is my.videoegg.com being decommissioned?
As you know, resources at technology startups are limited and it is in
our best interest to focus on the core of our business at this time.
With a wide range of video destination sites available on the market,
we feel that we
are leaving you in good hands.
The last day for my.videoegg.com is May 31, 2008
Thanks a pantload, guys. I have a couple dozen videos that I’ve embedded on this blog and on other sites around the web, that I laboriously uploaded, tagged and verified with VideoEgg. And in less than two weeks, they all go bye-bye? They give some real dingbat directions as to how to get your videos off their site – “Just click the “Download This Video” link. Again, thanks. No batch processing? I get to do this one after the other? Happy happy joy joy.
What I can salvage from this dog’s breakfast is the lesson that internet companies come and go … mostly go … especially in the online video space … and that you have to really keep an eye on your content. You can use the sharing sites for non-mission-critical clips, but the very nature of web startups means that one day, as in the instant case here, all your content could go “poof!” Which is a Bad Thing for a newspaper site. I had been hoping to offer the fledgling web operations in places like Kiev, Colombia, Russia, heck, smalltown America, with a good solution to the revenue vs. bandwidth cost problem of hosting news video clips, aka the “Be Careful What You Wish For” case study of what having a viral video hit can do to the bill from your ISP at the end of the month.
They do recommend Vimeo (which looks a little cheesy), Blip.tv (which violates Rule #1 of a multimedia site by blaring obnoxious sound the second the page is loaded), and of course, good ol’ drinking-from-the-firehose, All-Your-Base-Belong-To-Us YouTube. Guess I’m going to have to start pushing the revenue model offered by Revver… even if by the time you get to #18 of their top 20 most-viewed of all time, you’re dropping below a million views. Hey, what can I say? I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog.
Mar 22
Posted: under Uncategorized.
A teenager without a Hi-5 page? The Bar Channel, a venture in the Great White North, broadcastsprogramming via closed-circuit internet to subscriber bars that itprovides TV-style monitors. After launching in April, the network grewto 88 Ontario bars and about $600,000 in first-year revenue, and itexpects to add 50 establishments in Calgary and 50 in Ontario [...] [...more]
A teenager without a Hi-5 page?
The Bar Channel, a venture in the Great White North, broadcasts
programming via closed-circuit internet to subscriber bars that it
provides TV-style monitors. After launching in April, the network grew
to 88 Ontario bars and about $600,000 in first-year revenue, and it
expects to add 50 establishments in Calgary and 50 in Ontario during
the coming year.
Mar 14
Posted: under Ukraine.
I’m on my last day of training here in Ukraine (I was informed that they prefer that we gringoes say "Ukraine" rather than "The Ukraine" … not sure what their objection to the article is, but OK…) The reporter teams have done some stunning work in only a week. We assigned them to go out [...] [...more]
I’m on my last day of training here in Ukraine (I was informed that they prefer that we gringoes say "Ukraine" rather than "The Ukraine" … not sure what their objection to the article is, but OK…)
The reporter teams have done some stunning work in only a week. We assigned them to go out and shoot and edit together video reports for the web; yesterday, we went over their (mostly) finished results, and gave them some pointers on camerawork, editing and sound.
I hope to be able to post some of their efforts here – the reports range from the funny (a piece on how Ukrainian women are so much more demanding now than they used to be – the poor guys here used to be heroes if they brought a woman a piece of smoked fish – now they have to get diamonds and perfume) – to the tragic (a piece on how the out-of-control development here is displacing old widows who are struggling to survive in a world they no longer understand).
And then there’s the interviews with the victims of the sex slave trade.
My only regret so far is that I have not been able to do any real sightseeing here, but this task (teaching print journalists how to handle a videocamera, how to edit in Edius and Avid Liquid, what sort of stories are appropriate for multimedia, etc.) has been so demanding, I really haven’t had the energy to get out and see this ancient, beautiful city.
Heh. I did go out last night for Tex-Mex food. It was my inner daredevil taking ascendancy again … I wanted to know how Ukrainians could possibly process the South Texas cuisine … but I have to say, it wasn’t bad. Beats Taco Hell, that’s for sure. And it goes good with the strong local beers…
Photos and (I hope, I hope) video to come…
Mar 04
Posted: under Web/Tech.
The posts here have been pretty sporadic – it’s my hope that the imminent arrival of a Nokia N95 cellphone (the new & slightly improved N96 is pictured to the right) will inspire me to put the thing thru its paces to see how useful a tool it is to multimedia journalists looking for an [...] [...more]
The posts here have been pretty sporadic – it’s my hope that the imminent 
arrival of a Nokia N95 cellphone (the new & slightly improved N96 is pictured to the right) will inspire me to put the thing thru its paces to see how useful a tool it is to multimedia journalists looking for an all-in-one gadget to cover the news.
There has been a mad rush to the streaming video space this year – there must be much love in Vulture Capitalist circles for streaming vid sites right now. Can’t rightly tell you why – I guess someone out there is still clinging to the old biz model of there being some kind of value in live broadcasting.
Well, when everyone is toting one of these devices around at all times, in all places, the media landscape is going to look at lot more like the world envision in such books as Farewell Horizontal, where everyone is a freelancer, broadcasting live at all times, and when they manage to stumble across an interesting live event, they immediately package it, upload it to an aggregator, and get credits for the number of people who pick it out of the flow and pay attention…
