fabric of folly: video

Showing posts with label video. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Mark Kermode BBC video blog

Every so often you get to be involved with a project which is not only professionally satisfying, it also resonates with your own personal obsessions. Kermode Uncut - the newly launched BBC video blog - has been one such project, marrying my passion for blogging with my fan-boy enthusiasm for the film criticism of Mark Kermode. Long-standing readers of this blog will know that I listen religiously to his weekly Radio 5 Live film review podcast with Simon Mayo (see My media consumption diet) and that his wife was my one of my tutors at University (see 8 random facts about me). Suffice to say, I didn't have to think for long before taking Nick Cohen (Multiplatform Executive for BBC Knowledge) up on his offer to help shepherd the project through its initial development phase.

So, why a video blog (or, if we must, vlog)? Well, anyone's who seen or heard Mark's review of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End will understand how much of his reviewing is in the delivery and what a missed opportunity simply sitting him down at a keyboard would have been (excellent though his writing for Sight & Sound and The Observer is). It also felt like an opportunity to innovate with the BBC's blogging platform. With the possible exception of the Blue Peter blog (which Wikipedia credits as the BBC's first video blog), the BBC's blogs have been predominantly text-led to date, which was also starting to feel like a bit of a missed opportunity for an organisation which knows a thing or two about creating compelling video content.

Video blogging first started genrating buzz back in 2005 (aided and abetted by the launch of YouTube), but is still to go mainstream in the way that text blogging has, despite a few high-profile successes (e.g. Rocketboom, lonelygirl15). My hunch is that this may change in the coming 12 months as mobile video cameras continue to improve and sites like Seesmic, Qik and Kyte get users more comfortable with talking direct to camera (interestingly it was the Beeb that did much to pave the way for video blogging with Video Nation).

Certainly the typically more intimate, authored tone of a video blog is a good fit for Mark as this wonderful post on his past experience of the Cannes Film Festival demonstrates.

Props to: Nicholas Jones, Stevan Keane, Hedda Archbold, Nick Cohen, Claire Cook, Neil Bramah, Al Boley, Aaron Scullion and anyone else I've forgotten (as I invariably do).

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Video streaming and ISP traffic shaping

The above chart shows the data transfer usage for my broadband connection over the past month. The noteworthy change from the same usage chart for November? Over 2GB of peak-time streaming. The culprit? BBC iPlayer. Why significant? Because my ISP (PlusNet) uses traffic shaping to discourage/penalise peak-time usage, which I've been doing a whole lot of ever since my colleagues in BBC Future Media & Technology added a streaming component to the iPlayer in December. As a result, my "up to 8Mb" connection has been throttled to a painfully slow 125.87 Kbps (according to thinkbroadband's Speed Test) during peak hours, rendering web browsing tortuous and streamed video unwatchable (which is how it will remain until the end of this month's billing period).

PlusNet has a helpful page explaining traffic prioritisation (presumably so-called because it sounds slightly less sinister than traffic shaping), which contains the obligatory layman's metaphor:

"Think of it this way, the broadband network is like a motorway. When the traffic is light, all vehicles can move at the national speed-limit. Some lanes of the motorway have been reserved for important traffic, such as buses or emergency vehicles. During rush hour, most vehicles are forced to slow down. However, the traffic on the reserved lanes can continue to travel at their full speed."

The interesting word here is 'important' - an inherently subjective term (surely streaming video is important to me if that's what I happen to be doing? I don't want to be stuck in a bandwidth traffic jam if I'm trying to watch BBC THREE live or catch-up on the Six Nations). What ISPs are really interested in, unsurprisingly, is limiting bandwidth-intensive activities such as video streaming and P2P downloading which eat into their profit margins.

Until relatively recently, ISPs had a handy justification for traffic shaping: that the vast majority of video streaming and P2P downloading was illegal. This is becoming less true as more and more legitimate streaming and download offerings emerge (the BBC may have taken most of the heat on the bandwidth implications of iPlayer, but ITV, Channel 4, Five and Sky all offer similar services). Add new entrants Joost, Zattoo, Vuze, Babelgum, Jalipo, Veoh, Brightcove and Democracy (all reviewed here) into the mix and you're looking at a burgeoning market for legal downloads and streams.

So, what's an online telly addict to do? One option would be to change ISPs, although as David Meyer points out in a comment on ZDNet, "Any ISP which says it doesn't use traffic shaping at all is lying, unless it simply doesn't have enough subscribers to fill up its pipes". Part of the problem is that in the race to offer cheaper and cheaper (and in some cases free) broadband, profit margins have been squeezed to the point where a high-bandwidth user is no longer an economically viable customer. Unfortunately, that category of high-bandwidth users looks sets to grow exponentially as streaming and P2P downloading become increasingly mainstream.

One possible scenario, suggested in a typically polemical piece on The Register, is a return to metered pricing. Whilst this may feel slightly counter-intuitive, it is consistent with the idea of broadband as utility. I'm happy to pay for my water, gas and electricity on the basis of how much I use - why not my broadband? Personally, I think this is pretty unlikely. Most people were so delighted to see the back of metered dial-up access that it feels implausible that they'd accept a return to a pay-as-you-go model. A more likely scenario is that slightly more expensive, higher-bandwidth packages will increase in popularity for heavy users who (like me) would happily pay a bit more not to have their streams endlessly buffer.

My short-term solution is to return to off-peak downloading using Azureus, with its handy Speed Scheduler plug-in ensuring that it only downloads between the hours of midnight and 4pm (hence no purple in the Peer-to-peer bar). Not my preferred solution, not least because it requires me to decide in advance what I want to watch rather than sampling on a whim (which I've been doing a lot more of since iPlayer introduced streaming). I'm now back to thinking 'do I want to watch this programme enough to download a 600MB file?' to which the answer's often no.

Longer term I think I could well be shopping around for a package with a more generous bandwidth allocation and/or less severe traffic shaping. Any recommendations welcome.

Disclaimer: I work for the BBC. The opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.

Related fabric of folly posts:
Broadband as utility
Interesting times for the BBC online
Round-up of Internet TV services

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Chat around TV?

Between May 2003 and March 2005 the BBC piloted an online chat service (called BBC Connector) which enabled visitors to certain parts of the BBC website to instant message other users viewing the same page as them. Referred to internally as 'chat around content', the concept was arguably ahead of its time / the available technology (the same could be said of MyBBC - a forerunner to the personalised startpage, live on bbc.co.uk between 2000 and 2003).

Fast forward a couple of years and the notion of chat around content seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance, although this time it's video rather than webpages (Gabbly, weblin et al. excepted) which is the content in question. Stickam got the ball rolling with the launch of its Media Chat service in August 2006, followed by Lycos Cinema in the November and ClipSync in the December. Also in December, YouTube started offering YouTube Streams via its ideas incubator, TestTube. February this year, Lycos added Lycos Mix and in August, Skype launched a new version which enabled users to download videos from Dailymotion and Metacafe and add them to their 'mood', inviting other users to chat around them. In November, Joost revealed Meebo was to provide its chat widget and then just last week Userplane announced tie-ups with Channel 4, The CW, Fuel TV and IFC (although it's not yet clear whether the company's popular IM and chat tools will be directly deployed around video assets or not).

Of course, not all users haven't been waiting around for media owners to join the dots and many have been hacking together their own chat around content experiences for years. One of my favourite BBC Radio Player anecdotes concerns multiple users communicating via Instant Messaging to coordinate a simultaneous press of the play button on listen again programmes, to ensure a synchronous (and therefore shared) listening experience. If its been done for radio, it's a safe bet that the same has been happening around live and on-demand television as well, at least in pockets.

What hasn't yet been established is to what extent users would make use of chat around television functionality were it to become more widely available. Microsoft demonstrated a TV chat interface as far back as 1999, which singularly failed to take the world by storm (although recently leaked screenshots suggest 'Chat whilst watching TV' may be appearing as an option on suitably IPTV-enabled Xbox 360s in the not too distant future).

One argument is that even in this age of continuous partial attention, online chat is too intrusive an activity for most television viewers (although I'm not sure how much water that holds when you consider that talking over the TV is practically a national pastime). Whether viewers will use chat applications to discuss the on-screen programming or not is perhaps a more pertinent question. I also can't help feeling it won't be long before advertisers are asking for IPTV chat apps to be disabled during ad breaks because viewers are ignoring their ads in favour of chatting to their mates (solution: makes your ads interesting enough that people want to talk about them).

Regardless of the absence of demonstrable user-demand, chat functionality is likely to feature on the roadmap of many IPTV companies, looking to use the potential of a network to gain a competitive advantage over terrestrial broadcasters without an integrated back-channel. Only time will tell whether its a mass-market proposition or not.

Friday, September 28, 2007

User-inputted text populates online promo videos

Not sure it constitutes a trend, but I've seen a couple of nice examples of dynamic text insertion of user-inputted material into promotional videos recently.

The first was Icetruck.tv (created by digital ad agency Ralph), which Jo showed me a few weeks back. The site (promoting the UK premiere of Dexter on FX) invites you to "give your friend the Dexter treatment". This involves keying in some personal details (name, age, gender, profession) and a message which then get rendered in a faux video news report and emailed to your 'victim' as a link with the subject heading 'This is really weird..." If you really want to freak them out you can also supply their mobile number which will send them a text message reading "Hello Dan. I'm heading to the UK sooner than you might think. Dexter". You can watch the video I received here.

The second was techlightenment's Bob Dylan Facebook app, promoting the release of his latest Best Of album, which allows users to type in ten short phrases which then appear on the cards Dylan rifles through in the legendary video for Subterranean Homesick Blues (which incidentally, just squeezed into my Top 20 best music videos ever). I have to admit I'm both surprised and impressed that Sony BMG is happy for punters to put words in Dylan's hands, opening the door to some potentially undesirable brand associations (I can confirm that the app doesn't have a profanity filter!)

Whilst neither implementation is perfect (both suffer from problems with word wrapping), they're both impressive and an interesting indicator of a likely future direction for promotional videos, which will no doubt soon incorporate user-submitted photos and videos, as well as text, to further personalise the marketing message.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

US TV networks wake up to distributed distribution

It's been interesting to chart the major US TV networks' evolving approach to online video distribution over the last couple of years. Below is a rough timeline of activity from 'the big four' (ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox) which shows the shift from paid-for iTunes downloads and broadcaster-hosted streaming services in 2005/06 to increasingly distributed models in 2007. This change is also reflected in recent proclamations by some of the networks' big cheeses (pasted below the timeline) who seem to have finally woken up to the fact that the internet is a network and that big audiences in this space come from allowing wide distribution of your content, not forcing users to come to you (although as Jeff Jarvis points out on the excellent BuzzMachine, these noble sentiments don't always translate to actions).

12th Oct 2005 - ABC shows made available for download (for $1.99) via iTunes
5th Dec 2005 - NBC shows made available for download via iTunes
1st May 2006 - ABC launches free (ad-supported) video streaming service
4th May 2006 - CBS launches 'innertube', free (ad-supported) video streaming service
9th May 2006 - Fox shows made available for download via iTunes
8th Jun 2006 - CBS shows made available for download via iTunes
1st Oct 2006 - NBC launches 'NBS Rewind', free (ad-supported) video streaming service
22nd Mar 2007 - NBC and News Corp announce what will later become Hulu.com
18th Apr 2007 - NBC creates the National Broadband Company to distribute video
12 Apr 2007 - CBS announces its 'Interactive Audience Network', distributing shows through numerous partners
18 Jun 2007 - Fox partners with Brightcove to offer streamed, embeddable video
31 Aug 2007 - NBC ends contract with iTunes
4th Sep 2007 - NBC shows to be made available via Amazon Unbox
19 Sep 2007 - NBC launches 'NBC direct', free (ad-supported) download service
20 Sep 2007 - ABC begins free (ad-supported) streaming via AOL
21st Sep 2007 - Fox gives away free seasons premieres via iTunes

“If we really want to compete with big aggregators like Yahoo and Google, we need our video in as many places as possible,” (Randy Falco, president of NBC, quoted in the New York Times, September 2006)

“We can’t expect consumers to come to us. It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.” (Quincy Smith, president of CBS, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, May 2007)

“It is critical that we embrace the Internet as a distributed medium that promotes engagement with users, wherever they are on the Web” (William Bradford, senior vice president, content strategy at Fox, August 2007)

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Joost, Babelgum & Apple TV in your browser

Want to get a taste of Joost/Babelgum/AppleTV (they do all sound quite edible) but don't have a beta invite/can't be bothered with the download/don't want to shell out £200? Well, you're in luck. Independent developer, Paul Yanez, has created browser-based Flash mashups of all three products and they're pretty damn slick (see below screengrabs). Whilst they don't feature the same video content as their parent apps, they do give a very good feel of the interfaces and the content they suck in from assorted video sharing sites is arguably more compelling than much of the official offers. Nice job, Mr Yanez.

Joost Flash Mashup

Babelgum Flash Mashup

Apple TV Mashup

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Round-up of DIY live video streaming services

The lowly webcam has been enjoying something of a renaissance of late, aided by increased broadband penetration, improved streaming codecs, more kit being bundled with webcam functionality (e.g. mobile phones, laptops) and a mushrooming start-up economy, hungry for the next big web thing.

Justin Kan, founder and 'star' of Justin.tv, must also take a share of the blame/credit. Launched in March of this year, the 24/7 'lifecast' streams continuous video from a mobile camera attached to Justin's cap and has attracted a significant amount of media attention. Whilst the concept isn't new (anyone remember JenniCam?) the services which have sprung up enabling you to easily do it yourself are. Below is a round-up of a few of the main players.

Stickam
http://www.stickam.com
Launched: February 2006

First out of the blocks (and actually predating Justin.tv by over a year) was Stickam, which bills itself as 'The Live Community' and offers a suite of tools including live video streaming via an embeddable player. Stickam recently hit the headlines over allegations that its parent company, Advanced Video Communications, also runs a substantial online porn operation, which hasn't been viewed by everyone as a particularly good fit with Stickam's predominantly teen user base. The teen user base also helps explain the site's scrappy, MySpace aesthetic and general incomprehensibility to an old geezer like me. Definitely one for the kids.

Ratings: N
Tags: N
Comments: N
Live chat: Y
Viewer count: N
Embedding: Y
Recorded shows: N

Design: 2 stars
Navigation: 2 stars
Features: 2 stars
Overall: 2 stars

Ustream.tv
http://ustream.tv
Launched: March 2007

Ustream.tv was the first of the new generation lifecast sites to appear post-Justin.tv, reportedly bringing its launch date forward to capitalise on the surrounding publicity. The interface is pretty slick with a decent chat client and some nice extras such as a 'shout meter' and live polls, set by the broadcaster. It's also possible to pause the stream, which is cached until you resume playing.

Ratings: Y
Tags: Y
Comments: Y
Live chat: Y
Viewer count: Y
Embedding: Y
Recorded shows: Y

Design: 4 stars
Navigation: 4 stars
Features: 5 stars
Overall: 4 stars

kyte
http://www.kyte.tv
Launched: April 2007

Like Stickam, kyte is something of a hybrid service of which live video streaming is just a part. Also in the mix are photos, music and polls which can all be packaged up within your embeddable 'channel.' However, kyte's key market differentiator is its mobile component which, assuming you've got a compatible handset and a sufficiently meaty data allowance, enables you to broadcast direct from your handset.

Ratings: N
Tags: N
Comments: N
Live chat: Y
Viewer count: Y
Embedding: Y
Recorded shows: Y

Design: 4 stars
Navigation: 3 stars
Features: 3 stars
Overall: 3 stars

Operator11
http://operator11.com
Launched: April 2007

Operator11's USP is letting more than one person into 'the studio' allowing the operator/director/net jockey controlling the video stream to cut back and forth between various contributor feeds. It's an interesting development of the single camera model which potentially moves the medium nearer to broadcast TV, although it also serves as a reminder that successfully editing video on the fly is a great deal harder than it looks.

Ratings: Y
Tags: Y
Comments: Y
Live chat: Y
Viewer count: Y
Embedding: Y
Recorded shows: Y

Design: 4 stars
Navigation: 4 stars
Features: 4 stars
Overall: 4 stars

blogTV
http://www.blogtv.com
Launched: May 2007

blogTV isn't short on functionality but suffers from a somewhat cluttered interface when viewed alongside the cleaner designs of Ustream and Mogulus. It's 7,500 channels are grouped into nine categories with 'My Life' predictably being the most populated. One nice feature for producers is the ability to pick a co-host whose video stream appears alongside your own with viewers able to interchange the two using a slider.

Ratings: Y
Tags: Y
Comments: Y
Live chat: Y
Viewer count: Y
Embedding: Y
Recorded shows: Y

Design: 3 stars
Navigation: 3 stars
Features: 5 stars
Overall: 4 stars

Mogulus
http://www.mogulus.com
Launched: June 2007

Currently in closed beta, Mogulus focuses more on the production side of live video, offering a fully featured browser-based 'studio' (requires Flash 9) to finesse your broadcast. In contrast, the viewing experience is pretty basic, eschewing chat, comments, ratings and the like in favour of a more classically televisual interface (on/off, mute, volume and, er, that's it). It even goes so far as to mimic static as the channel 'tunes in'. It's certainly the least cluttered of the sites discussed here and should provide a good platform for them to gradually introduce more functionality. I've got five beta invites to giveaway - mail me if you want one.

Ratings: N
Tags: N
Comments: N
Live chat: N
Viewer count: Y
Embedding: Y
Recorded shows: N

Design: 5 stars
Navigation: 4 stars
Features: 2 stars
Overall: 4 stars

Veodia
http://www.veodia.com
Launched: April 2007

Veodia is a distributed live streaming product for embedding in blogs and corporate sites and doesn't aggregate any content on its site beyond a couple of sample videos. Unlike most of the alternatives (which use Flash) it streams using MPEG-4/H.264. As a consequence the embedded video lacks any social media features such as comments or chat.

Ratings: N
Tags: N
Comments: N
Live chat: N
Viewer count: N
Embedding: Y
Recorded shows: Y

Design: 2 stars
Navigation: 2 stars
Features: 1 star
Overall: 2 stars

YouCams
http://www.youcams.com
Launched: Unknown

Like Veodia, YouCams' focus is on distributed live video (via an embeddable widget) rather than aggregation, although it positions itself as a facilitator of social networking chat rather than as a provider of streaming technology.

Ratings: N
Tags: N
Comments: N
Live chat: Y
Viewer count: Y
Embedding: Y
Recorded shows: N

Design: 2 stars
Navigation: 2 stars
Features: 2 stars
Overall: 2 stars

mystreams.tv
http://mystreams.tv
Launched: Unknown

The ugly sister of the live video streaming family, mystreams.tv is a UX disaster, plastered in large banner ads and forever opening new windows. Avoid.

Ratings: N
Tags: N
Comments: N
Live chat: Y
Viewer count: N
Embedding: N
Recorded shows: N

Design: 1 star
Navigation: 1 star
Features: 1 star
Overall: 1 star

Whilst it's ultimately a matter of horses for courses when it comes to choosing a live video streaming service, my personal vote would be with Ustream.tv with Mogulus the one to watch.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Online video reaches TV via Wii

Getting online video content off the small screens in people's bedrooms and studies and onto the big screens in their lounges is a nut that a whole bunch of big media companies have been spending a lot of time and money trying to crack.

Microsoft was one of the first out of the blocks with Windows XP Media Center, launched way back in October 2004. More than two years on and Bill Gates' dream of a Media Center PC under every TV is still just that, a dream. Put simply, not enough people were willing to shell out for a dedicated media hub to sit in their front room. Whilst the integration of Windows Media Center into Vista (Premium and Ultimate editions) will massively increase the number of Media Center PCs in the market, most of them will be sat on a desk rather than beneath a TV screen.

Apple took a different approach, bundling Front Row with all Macs from October 2005 onwards but waiting until January 2007 to finally bridge the PC/TV gap by launching a set top box (cunningly named Apple TV) capable of wirelessly streaming video (and audio) from your computer to your television. The obvious shortcoming of Apple TV (apart from the fact that it's still not shipping) is that it only works with iTunes.

So, if Windows Media Center and Apple TV aren't yet delivering online video to people's television sets in serious numbers, what is? The answer is the latest generation of game consoles, which are increasingly looking like the trojan horse of the digital home, delivering so much more than small Italian plumbers and hyperactive blue hedgehogs.

One such trojan horse is Nintendo's Wii, which, having sold 4.5 million units in its first three months of launch, is now the fastest-selling console in history. The launch of a (free) Wii-specific beta version of the Opera web browser (a.k.a. Internet Channel) last December turned those 4.5 million Wii's into potential conduits for online video. Whilst the browser can successfully render most webpages, it wasn't long before sites specially designed for the Wii began appearing. Below is a quick compendium of some of the best Wii-specific sites for accessing online video and music.

What's noticeable about these sites is how well designed many of the interfaces are. The limitations of the Wii controller and the likely distance of the user from the screen have forced the designers to come up with bold, simple interfaces which in many cases outshine their web-based cousins (compare the FineTune Wii Player with the regular FineTune site).

Wii video sites

MiiTube
http://www.miitube.co.uk

As the name suggests, MiiTube is specially designed for watching YouTube videos on your Wii. The homepage pulls in YouTube's 'featured videos' and there are separate pages for 'recently added', 'top favourites' and a selection of 'most viewed' charts (i.e. daily, weekly, all time) plus a 'viral chart'. For a site whose USP is accessibility on the Wii, some of the text could do with being a bit larger and there's no option to increase the video size (which you can do on the regular YouTube site).

Rating:

WiiToob
http://wiitoob.com/

Another Wii-friendly window on YouTube, with an infinitely swisher interface, WiiToob's homepage is dominated by a dynamically updating list of recently viewed videos, an alarming proportion of which are not suitable for the office. You're better off heading straight to the 'most viewed' or 'most discussed' lists. Giant font sizes and a visual style which successfully apes Nintendo make WiiToob a joy to navigate.

Rating:

SofaTube
http://www.redkawa.com/sofatube/

RedKawa certainly thought outside the box when developing the interface for SofaTube, using search rather than lists as the main mechanism for finding videos and deciding to present the featured videos as a jumble of Polaroid-style tiles which can be dragged, dropped and bought to the front. It's a neat idea which almost works but ultimately feels a bit gimmicky.

SofaTube's key differentiator from MiiTube and WiiToob is that it indexes videos from Revver as well as YouTube (although you can't search the two together and I wasn't actually able to get the Revver videos to play). Another niggle is that the search results don't fit on the screen (horizontally or vertically) which feels frustrating when the site has just accurately detected what browser I'm using.

An innovative approach let down by poor implementation.

Rating:

Wii music sites

FineTune Wii Player
http://www.finetune.com/wii

The FineTune Wii Player is a big-button version of the Pandora-esque online music service, FineTune (reviewed on this blog a few weeks back), offering streamed playlists/radio stations themed around artist or tag. It boasts a gorgeous interface and enables you to log on to your online profile to access your saved playlists, artists and tags.

Rating:

WiiHear
http://www.wiihear.com

Besides a pun-tastic name, WiiHear offers genre-based streaming radio stations (85 stations across 15 different genres at the time of writing) and supports the three 'R's of Web 2.0 sites (reviews, ratings and recommendations). The interface isn't a polished as FineTune's with too much small text, although there are a few nice touches, such as the 'past tracks played' lists which accompany every station.

Rating:

The number of Wii-specific video and music sites is sure to mushroom over the coming weeks and months (keep an eye on Wiidesigned.com) and will no doubt soon be joined by an array of sites tailored specially for Sony's PS3 (which launches in the UK on March 23rd and features a built-in browser). Opera has also indicated that Wii web widgets are on the cards, which could be very interesting.

As suggested in my earlier post on key technology trends for 2007, the converged digital media hub is arriving by stealth. The next trojan horse looks likely to be the set-top box, which are getting smarter and more connected by the day.