Now we know: the Secret

What a way to launch a movie! The Secret starts from nowhere in March, as a web site, with an option to watch the 90 minute feature for $4.95 in high definition, over your broadband connection, or to buy the DVD for $29.95. An Australian production, it will be fascinating to see how much of an audience this film reaches.

We will know if others follow suit. We're months after the launch, and the buzz is still happening.

YouTube gets the center stage

Forbes recently estimated that YouTube is paying over $1 million/month for bandwidth from Akamai and other content delivery networks. Given that they acquired $9 million in funding, and rumors have them quietly getting maybe $25 million more in May, is it a matter of months before this great experiment hits the wall?

Click on the picture and see CNET's "Ten tech-related YouTube clips you shouldn't miss".

Movie distribution through "video sharing" starts in earnest

Local Web video firms team with Hollywood was featured in today's SJ Mercury News. Essentially, it's a move by filmakers and studios to choose amongst many potential distribution partners. This looks like a game where many will play (no "Blockbuster" or "NetFlix" with a clear lead), and there are many more questions than answers.

New video code generator

For playing multiple (a multitude?) of videos on a web page without clogging things, there is a new bit of free code for vloggers and web publishers. Here are some example QuickTime sequences.

Play video from a UK-based television station. The experience of living with a family in Henley must have made a lasting impression on the Freshman team from the University of California. Play to see the final portion of the Cal race against Oxford Brookes B. Cal won "easily", understroking their opponent throughout the race, and received a warm reception at the finish. The second race was against Glasgow, and again Cal won "easily". Full race coverage of the race between the Cal Freshman and the Varsity lightweight boat from Cornell. What a smooth launch ride! It's pretty clear which boat moves more efficiently, as Cornell never gives an inch.

The tool is called "videos Playing in Place". It will allow me to embed videos into this blog without taking away from the overall presentation. CAVEAT: It doesn't work correctly with Macs yet!

Publishing lessons migrating to internet video

Online Video -- Moving Forward..? points out that TV networks are getting publishing lessons. Whether they pay attention or not doesn't matter, someone will. Among the lessons pointed at in this post about a NY Times article about a sitcom called "Nobody's Watching" that got posted on uTube and now has 300,000 views:

"Publish first, ask questions later". What good is market research if, for the cost of a full survey, you can publish a project and get real feedback?

"Small is beautiful". A publication might have an audience of a few thousand, but that audience might become so vested in the production as to actually transcribe episodes so others can more easily find it via search engines. (Corellary: some books you can't kill, the audience won't let you).

So, "let Frank think so you don't have to". Check the comments under the video, and note that he inserts an ad/buy page at the end of each viewing. I wonder what kind of yield he's getting so far?

Comments within video clips

ITP Research has produced Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin. It's the first stage towards making video searchable. True, it's not automatic. It requires the efforts of users to "tag" video at certain timecodes. However, it's done in a blog interface, which promotes natural language descriptions of the video.

Whether this "brute force" method of identifying segments within videos will be more useful than automated audio track translation will remain to be seen. It's just nice to see both methods surfacing.

Pando: A BitTorrent app for sharing large files

Try this on when you have to send or receive raw footage to/from someone who doesn't really understand ftp servers. Up to 1 gig transfers are free, from one email address to another. I recently had to get materials from the UK into a video podcast and I can say it was not straightforward.

"Little" media friendly apps like this actually hide some powerful functionality under the surface. CEO Robert Levitan hints at becoming a huge distribution partner with media companies.