For the internet television final project, the assignment was tocreate a website and make a pitch for an internet television property taking the following points into consideration:

a. What is the genre? (comedy, news show, talk, sports, reality show, etc.)
b. What is the “concept” behind the show – what makes it different from the other shows in your genre? Why will people watch?
c. Who is it targeting? who do you expect your audience to be?
d. What is the length and frequency? Is this a weekly series or more like an internet television equivalent of a “movie of the week”
e. What internet television platforms are you targeting and why? Could it be made available on more than one or is it unique to one platform?
f. How are you using interactivity, connectivity or other aspects of internet television beyond delivery of basic video?
g. What funding/revenue model do you think would work best for your concept? Are advertising or other revenue generation elements incorporated?
h. How will you produce this show? Using what tools? What processes? If someone were to give you a “green light,” what would you need to do to actually get it done?

Given my obsession with mobile phones and my recent infatuation with location-based stuff, I decided to develop a prototype for a series/platform that I called "locationSTORY". Basically, the idea is a user-generated set of mobile TV channels that makes the most of the advantages and limitations of the mobile platform. Visit the website to find out more.

Posted by Cat at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I chose to focus on creating and delivering content to mobile phones.

Here is my Presentation

View links here and here..

Continue reading for the actual research. Or download the word document.

Continue reading "Internet Television Deep Dive Assignment" »

Posted by Cat at 03:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Although talk of this initially started out as rumor, it appears as though it might actually be true. Several sources, including TechCrunch, Informitv and the WallStreet Journal are saying that, while neither YouTube nor Google will comment, there have been talks between the two companies involving a $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube. Many speculate that this, in fact, makes sense, that YouTube is losing money even though it is growing much faster then Google Video and that Google already sends a large amount o traffic to YouTube, more traffic then almost anywhere, except myspace.

On the surface, this seems like a good deal for both parties, and it certainly is a great deal for Google. But, as Mark Cuban points out, "Youtube now becomes a deep pocketed target. Sure, they can try to work out deals with the biggest media companies, but those deals are going to be ultra expensive...........Its not the big companies they would have to worry about the most. Its the little guy. Youtube would get sued by the thousands of rights holders who will seek the maximum amount per download from Youtube for their content." I'm not sure that this is necessarily true, because if it was why haven't we seen these kind of lawsuits yet? I think the real problem is that, despite its impossible structure and bad interface design, YouTube still provides a space for user-generated content. Forgetting for a moment that this could be the beginning of the end of copyrighted content on the site (cause thats not why anyone goes to YouTube right?), it seems that this is just one step in the direction of creating another space for network television.

In fact its already happening. Also today, it was reported on Federal News Radio, that YouTube struck deals with CBS, Vivendi's Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which comes less than a month after YouTube reached a deal with Warner Music Group Corp. As a result of this deal, YouTube will supposedly allow CBS to test out new technology that will help the network find copyrighted content on YouTube and remove it. All three companies will receive advertising revenue from ads that play alongside copyrighted content.

Not really sure exactly how I feel about all this, as I am not particularily fond of YouTube, although I do enjoy a funny cat video every once in a while. I have always believed that there is a better model for distributing and generating shared user content. I have a feeling the deal with Google will go through and, in some ways, it is the direction that YouTube has been going in all along.

***Update. The deal is done. Let the lawsuits begin....maybe.

Posted by Cat at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can someone lend me $699 so I can buy this crazy phone? I don't why, its one of those things, like the Nikon D200, that I look at and just WANT, for no apparent reason. I hadn't visited Nokia's site in a while until a received a link from my favorite link-pimp Alex, concerning a rumor that Nokia may be launching a living room video streaming device which will be based on the Nokia’s Audio Gateway and will use WiFi to stream video stored on your cell phone. Very interesting.

Apperently, the N95 has a 5 megapixel camera, but I like the look of the N93 better. Either way, the price tag is waaaay to high for now. A sign of things to come......

Posted by Cat at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"If they dont incorporate ads, then thats even worse. Again, that means they are hosting the video of the net for free. Thats an ugly, no win business." This is a quote from a post on Blog Maverick about YouTube, the same blog where I recently read the article The Coming Dramatic Decline of YouTube where the author makes the point that YouTube is only successful because they host videos for free and because they have copyrighted content, the author effectively equates YouTube to Napster.

Anyone who reads my blog or knows me knows that I am not a huge fan of YouTube because of their impossibily to navigate structure, but I feel that this comment on YouTube's success is far off base and to insinuate that hosting videos for free is an 'ugly no-win business' is scary to me. This week in the Internet Television class we had a speaker who worked for ESPN for a significant amount of time exploring New Media approaches to broadcast. While I appreciated the perspective on the 'business' of online media, and was significantly shocked at what some of the traditional media giants consider to be actual profit for media distributed in an online forum, I think it is dangerous to assume that making money should be the ultimate purpose of media online and that anything else is 'ugly'. More on this as I think about it more.

Posted by Cat at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cat TV

This weeks assignment in Internet Television was to create an online television channel using the brightcove.com architecture. Brightcove allows you to create your own customizable video players, where you can upload high quality video content, titles, graphic images, video thumbnails etc. and create playlists, tag content for searchability, syndicate content and get reports on how frequently your content is being viewed. More interesting then that however, is the built in ability to charge users to view or download content, allowing creators to use the brightcove pay system to make money off original work. In addition, you can link to brightcove to view your player or embed it (either through html ,actionscript or javascript) in any website. From the player, viewers can subscribe to the player's rss feed, email the video to a friend or link to the video from their own website/blog.

There were some downsides to brightcove, the largest one being that you can only use it through Internet Explorer on Windows, no good for MAC users or those of us who use a real browser like firefox. Unfortunately, the video uploader only works in this environment. Other then that annoyance, the video console was very easy to use, although there were a couple of times when it completely froze up while uploading (not sure if this was my internet connection of the console itself). It was also really easy to customize the look of the player with the automatic CSS editor. However, I found that I really wanted to extend the functionality of the player so that viewers could leave comments on media. I could not figure out how to do it in any kind of real way through the brightcove console so I used the section reserved for an external link to a website to send media id values to a perl script that would then display comments and allow viewers to leave comments for that particular video.

It would be nice if brightcove made the player more interactive. I would also love to see brightcove make a similar player for mobile phone video. The current equivalent in the mobile world, abazab, does not allow the creator of the player to customize it at all and the individual videos are not searchable though tags, titles and descriptions as they are on Brightcove. Not sure that they would ever do mobile video since the site seems to be directed towards displaying high-quality content.

Posted by Cat at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The assignment was the following:

"check the following sites and review 2-3 content examples from each.
also review the techniques each site uses to help you find the content
you are interested in:

-amazon's fishbowl
-youtube
-cnn pipeline
-mtvu
-rocketboom
-turbonick

write a 1-2 page summary of your experiences. what are the
similarities? what are the differences between the media experience on
tv, online and (optionally) on a portable device? dig past the
obvious."

My thoughts:

Continue reading "Internet Television- First Assignment" »

Posted by Cat at 03:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)