How to get paid for Digital Content http://bit.ly/997Ci3 Compelling reasons to buy (something, if not the digital content), Easy payment and irresistable price points. Seems simple enough, and yet the mainstream players go the opposite way: provide no good reason to buy their content, make it hard to buy and expensive. Three strikes and you’re… a traditional media company.
The container is a problem wth Ogg as well ? http://bit.ly/dDayiG Forget the quality it’s open source (I’m going to be in trouble for saying that!)
While I understand the issues of Ogg (Theora and Vorbiss) vs MPEG 4 for HTML5’s <video> tag it’s usually because of quality and hardware support: H.264 is visually better than Theora at similar data rates and well supported by encoding tools and hardware-accelerated playback, I had not considered that the container format – Ogg – may also have issues.
But heck, if people still voluntarily use the AVI (Video for Windows aka “The Zombie format that will not die”) container that Microsoft officially killed in 1996 (that’s 14 years ago folks) then perhaps people just don’t care about containers the way geeks do?
Which kind of “openness” do you want? http://oreil.ly/bGQcZU Google’s or Apple’s?
Apple controls the iPhone, iTouch and iPad experience by allowing or disallowing applications in the store. Some call this a closed system (and it is) but it does lead to “computers you can’t break”, which is what most (non geeks) want. That’s what I want for my mother! (It’s want I want for my car too. Cars were once prone to breakdown and you needed to be a mechanic to operate one.)
Google controls the data “in the cloud” for most of its applications. That’s just another sort of control and in many ways less open that Apple.
Which type of control do you prefer?
Why TV can’t transition to the Internet – at least not smoothly. http://bit.ly/cKHBMo Some very smart thinking from Clay Sharkey. Must write more about it later.
This article has been a revelation to me and answers a question that’s been bugging me: if Television is to transition to the Internet, it won’t be a simple change of delivery strategy it needs to be remade. But how do we remake an industry where the dominant players are dominant. Sharey’s explanation of complexity in organizations and how it can’t become less complex, makes perfect sense.
“Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.—
He then makes it clear with In the Motherhood (originally a web program picked up by ABC where it flopped). Once it gets into the complex system, it plays by that system’s rules. And fails.
He finishes with:
“When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”
I need to think more about this, but I think it fits with my recent “What if there were no established TV production industry” piece. I need to think more about this and share my thoughts.
HTML5/Javascript/CSS for games? http://tcrn.ch/9mV8Tc Quake in browser – Flash isn’t the only game-in-town for games online.
In fact there are many examples of high level programming – equivalent to what Flash can do – using the standards-based modern approach using HTML5, Javascript and CSS. Javascript has become very, very much faster (more than 10x) in the last couple of years, at least in modern browsers like Chrome and Safari (and FireFox to a lesser degree).
Here’s how they did it:
“We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!”
AOL wants more “Content Object Creators” http://bit.ly/bnDXZ3 As if “Content Creators” wasn’t bad enough! More Demand Media style content!
“Unfortunately AOL makes the job sound like the person is essentially a content monkey, working on building “up to 40 content objects a day” by using “modules” and “programming supporting other high-value revenue sources.”
Apparently AOL think the Demand Media model of mass-produced content is the way to go. Except Demand expect video as well as rewritten articles. Â What a horrible direction for our industry to be going. Even so, we must learn the lessons of efficiency of fade into irrelevance.
Apple “winning the war on Flash” http://bit.ly/9rUGfo More important to be on the iPad than use Flash – who’d have thought?
In discussions with a friend after the iPad announcement, I predicted that the appeal of having a site on the iPad (and the iPhone/iPod Touch before it) would over-rule the “no flash” browsing. Turns out I was right as most major flash-based sites have created iPad friendly versions using HTML 5.
Flash isn’t going to disappear for a while but Apple is using the popularity of it’s portable computing devices to make it less appealing. If you’re going to make a Flash-free HTML5 site anyway to reach those devices, why stick with the Flash site?
A new HDCAM SR codec coming, supporting new media formats. http://bit.ly/bFMfaA Refresh for an old format.
Not only a new codec, which will improve quality, but also support for solid state media and other media formats. About time as HDCAM SR was getting a little old and no longer representative of the highest available quality.
Hulu’s advertising income “barely” covers its bandwidth bill? http://bit.ly/aUzB7V Doesn’t auger well for advertising supported video.
For the longest time I’ve been saying that advertising is not going to be the way media is supported in the future. It will be part of the picture but branded media – where the advertiser has cut-through and clear branding (also called Hyperdistribution by some) – and direct payment will be much more likely. Remember the only truly successful distribution model online is Apple’s iTunes store, even though the media there is seriously overpriced.
“It’s an important issue, because any debate about Hulu is a debate about the future of purely ad-supported TV, which is increasingly becoming an endangered species. Hulu is the No. 2 video site on sheer volume of video views behind YouTube, yet no one is yet making much money from its model: not its network backers, other content partners and least of all Hulu itself, which has a hard time paying for its bandwidth bills.”
Having just got back from an North East trip – New York, Boston and Meriden/North Haven CT – I’ve had a good opportunity to think and observe trends outside my own environment. I see four major trends happening across production and, despite the publicity and inevitable NAB push, I don’t think 3D stereoscopy is among them (at least not yet).
Stereoscopy is indeed a trend in feature film production with an impressive percentage of last year’s box office attributable to 3D movies, but it will be a long time before it’s more than a niche for non-feature production. In fact the supply of 3D content vs the number of theaters equipped to display, is probably going to limit 3D distribution to the major studios and their tentpole releases.
That said, this year’s NAB is likely to be full of 3D capable rigs, cameras and workflows. For what display? Â Until the viewing end is more established production in 3D won’t be that important.
Right now the trends I’m observing are: more multicamera production; extensive use of green screen even for “normal” shots; 3D sets, objects and even characters; and a definite trend toward larger sensor cameras (both DSLR and RED).
The appeal is simple: acquire two angles on any “good” take. Of course reality television takes this to almost-ridiculous levels with up to 68+ hours recorded for every day of the show’s shoot. On more reasonable shows, Friday Night Lights shoots multicamera in real world locations for a very efficient production schedule.
While it no doubt saves production time, and therefore cost, it can limit shot availability (as one camera ‘sees’ another) or more bland lighting (to make sure each camera angle is well lit). Multicamera studio shoots – the staple of the sitcom – tend to be lit very flat, but Friday Night Lights doesn’t suffer for the multicamera acquisition.
All major editing software packages support multicamera editing. We’ve also seen an increase in requests for multicamera support in our double-system synchronizing tool Sync-N-Link.
Part of the reason that multicamera acquisition is becoming more practical is that the cost of buying or renting camera equipment has dropped dramatically, so that three cameras on a shoot are not necessarily a budget buster.
If you haven’t already seen Stargate Studio’s Virtual Back Lot reel, do it now. Before seeing it I had the sense that there was a lot more green screen used out there, but I had no idea that shows I’d watched and enjoyed employed green screen. The Times Square shot from Hereos, for example, did not feel at all composited. When simple street scenes are being shot green screen – things that could easily be shot in the real world – then you know it has to be for budgetary reasons.
Green screen (and blue screen for film) technologies are well proven. There are good and inexpensive tools that fit within common workflows to build the green screen composite. In other words, the barriers to entry are simply the skill of the Director of Photography on the shoot, and that of the editors/compositors in post.
When 70% of a show, like Sanctuary uses virtual sets, the necessity for anything beyond a good screen screen studio, with a good lighting kit and some smarts seems less important.
The third major trend goes hand-in-hand with the use of Virtual Sets: sets that are created in the mind of a designer and rendered “real” with 3D software. There are literally hundreds of thousands of object models available for sale (or free) online. You can hardly read a production story now that does’t feature 3D set or character extensions.
I should probably add motion tracking as another technology coming into its own, because it’s an essential part of the incorporation of actors into 3D sets, or the enhancement of character with 3D character extensions.
Fairly obvious to all, I would think, but the trend toward larger sensors includes the DSLR trend as well as RED Digital Cinema and the new Arri Alexxa. Wherever you look the trend is toward larger sensors with their sensitivity improvements, greater control of depth of field and drop-dead gorgeous pictures. Among other uses they make perfect plates for backgrounds in green screen work!
All four (plus motion tracking) trends contribute to reducing production cost, making more shows viable with ever fragmenting audiences.