UC Berkeley goes gaga over Google Video

Who needs textbooks when you can watch Professor Marian Diamond break it down? She teaches Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy and during the fall of 2005 she had her courses taped. As a Cal grad, I can only applaud the effort to make these treasures so widely available. I'm sure we'll soon see similar publications by other universities. Here is how they describe what they are doing: Integrative Biology 131 - Lecture 01: Organization of the Body The functional anatomy of the human body as revealed by gross and microscopic examination. The Department of Integrative Biology offers a program of instruction that focuses on the integration of structure and function in the evolution of diverse biological systems. It investigates integration at all levels of organization from molecules to the biosphere, and in all taxa of organisms from viruses to higher plants and animals. The department uses many traditional fields and levels of complexity in forging new research directions, asking new questions, and answering traditional questions in new ways. The various fields within the department cooperate across disciplinary boundaries, sharing information and knowledge. Experience in laboratory and/or field, technological and independent study will bring about an understanding of scientific logic based on both experimental and historical patterns and processes. The faculty has special strengths in the disciplines of morphology, organismal physiology, animal behavior, biomechanics, ecology, systematic biology, paleobiology, population genetics, and evolution.

Final Cut Pro through a browser... Yahoo buys Jumpcut

Now Web 2.0 is in full gear. Final Cut Pro is a huge application with tremendous horsepower requirements. The latest rumor has Apple offering it as an online service. This screen shot is all I have to support the rumor.

Not to be outdone, Yahoo is getting into the online editing game by buying startup Jumpcut.

“As part of Yahoo, we’ll be working on bringing video editing and remixing to everyone with an Internet connection,” Jumpcut said on its blog today.

Producing semi-professional videos, cont.

In the second part of a series, this article explains how to create good looking "stuff" without paying for lots of software. It does a good job explaining the basics of editing, using Windows Movie Maker.

DivX goes public

According to Paidcontent. org, DivX raised over $100 million by going public. They went out at between $12-16 per share (9.1 shares were offered for sale), and the price reached a high of $20 before settling to $18.70.

Not bad for a codec maker, which is now producing online services to help users to share their files.

Excellence: HD Expo videos

So much value from events can't easily be presented in press releases, white papers or brochures. This page from HD Expo illustrates how video can capture the value and communicate effectively in an "always on" environment.

The videos were shot last year. HD Expo opted to stream the video, which is nice but more expensive than podcasting or delivering via video blog "fast start" practices.

I expect other events to produce and distribute video highlights. The Stanford Professional Publishing Course did it this way, showing you don't have to be a huge show to deliver the experience through video.

Makes you want to sign up for their upcoming events, doesn't it?

Video U: MIT, Yale and UC Berkeley

Free video of courses have inherit value, it seems. PaidContent.org ran a nice story of Yale working with Yahoo, which elicited a very thoughtful response from Mara Hancock, of UC Berkeley's Educational Technology Services.

Her take:

"Our webcasts are meant to enhance the face-to-face course. Most of our students recognize that you don’t get the “UC Berkeley Experience” by sitting in front of your computer. That said, with webcast.berkeley, you certainly get a nice window in. In fact, MIT OCW found that many students who choose to attend MIT cite that OCW contributed to their positive image of the school.

"We have done some research into how our campus learners are using video at Berkeley, and it is primarily as a study tool. Partnering with web 2.0 companies and developing tools to help them scaffold their learning and engage around this content is the next frontier.

"It is also important to be looking for sustainable models to carry this work forward beyond grant funding and looking toward long-term preservation of this valuable content."

Video blogs gaining

Out of 54.2 million weblogs tracked by Technorati, videoblogging representation in the top 100 chart has gone from zero to four in the last two months. . .and it's climbing.

This is a very big indication that the reach for consistent, entertaining, informative, independent, short-form video is on the rise. [*note, mainstream media projects are no where to be seen on or near this chart].

- as reported by Dembot.com

True HD coming to your camcorder soon

This fall, Micron technologies will distribute a CMOS sensor to camcorder manufacturers that can capture 60fps video at 720p or 30 fps at 1080p. That promises to improve video quality way beyond what you now see on YouTube! Engadget has the story.

Tracking video embeds

The new paradigm, embedding videos through syndicated feeds, blogs, emails, etc, now is being tracked. The Viral Video Chart feed is updated daily. It crawls the internet, looking for embedded videos, and then tabulates what's being distributed. Right now, it's a bunch of humorous clips that people "just have to show" their friends.

I predict the site will be a "must see" within media companies. From their "blurb":

"How big are the biggest viral videos?

"Big. The most viewed video on YouTube is currently The Evolution of Dance, which was watched by 10 million people during April 2006 and has now been viewed over 30 million times. The guy doing the dance medley, Judson Laipply, is now not merely a motivational speaker from Cleveland, Ohio, but an internet superstar.

"This is why ad agencies wet their pants. Imagine reaching 30m people for the cost of a round of drinks in your favourite watering hole? Rarely happens, though. While some agency work is pretty good, most of it is staggeringly awful."

Pigs are starting to fly again...

The recent wave of success, introductions, and positioning around media has investors doing more than investing. The meltdown of 2000 came about primarily through circular relationships: ie, a consulting company would create a "workshop" to explore an idea, participants would include a VC, entrepreneur, etc. Several "fundable" ideas would be hatched. A company would be funded. And, of course, the consultancy would then be hired to build the site! Hmmm... Now this, from PaidContent.org:

Social Media Site Jacked Gets $0.5 Million Funding [by Rafat]

Stealth social media site and service Jacked, launched by former American Greeting Mobile head Bryan Biniak, has received $0.5 million in seed funding. The round was done by the new VC firm Provenance Ventures, also founded by Biniak.

Dell opens up with video

What will become of "corporate communications" when mid-level managers can produce their own videos? Even with rough productions like this, the commitment and expertise comes through. One piece by the same author steps you through the battery recall process, and has been viewed over 17,000 in a week!

MotionBox tags deeply

Getting to the "good stuff" is a great challenge for video. One of several tagging technologies comes from MotionBox, which provides illuminating examples on their blog. The "cool feature" is to provide a horizontally scrolling series of thumbnails (taken every 5 seconds) below the video window. It's quite easy to scroll to an interesting picture and then start the video at that point. They also provide direct jumps to previously-tagged segments.

I don't know what formats they use for uploaded videos. The end resolution is "acceptable" on a web page, but not downloadable and certainly not useful on a living room TV. Someone has got to tie the whole system together!

Apple, Disney pull the trigger

So now it's out of the bag: an end to end online media delivery system. CNET covered the announcement and provided more pictures.

This will be talked about ad nauseum. Basically, Apple has simplified online delivery for everyone. Now video podcasts can play on a big screen, in "acceptable" resolution. Podcasts that have been cramming things down to H.264 and 512x384 (maximum size possible), can now target 640x480. It's still SD, but now the same number of pixels as most sources (DV, DVCam, DVCPro, etc).

The device that enables this is tentatively called "iTV" and is tentatively scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 2007.

Producing semi-professional videos

Now that the distribution issues are solved by Google and the other video sharing services, semi-professional productions seem destined for huge growth. As an example of what organizations can do, this article says "How I did it myself". The case is a sales video to land a multi-million dollar deal. The value is the sales guy himself can do the work!

Maybe DVDs aren't so bad after all...

After reading one user's experience with Amazon's new UnBox movie download service, Walmart has nothing to fear (Walmart distributes close to half of all DVDs sold in the US). On Monday, we will learn about Apple's entry. Something's got to give.

And behind this curtain... Apple and Amazon to launch movie download services

Now the Wall Street Journal is speculating alongside every blogger known to man. What will Apple unveil next Tuesday? They've sent out invitations to an event at a performing arts theatre in San Francisco, with the headline "It's Showtime!". OK. And it's safe to say that Disney is on board.

But now it seems that Amazon has signed up the other film studios to a competing services to be unveiled "soon". These two pioneering companies are betting they can get a jump on everyone else to catalyze the market. Some don't agree.

Mark Cuban offered this view:

"I personally think that the optimal connection will be personally managed hard drives. In five years, a terabyte or more of storage on a hard drive will be less than $100. We should be able to fill that up with music and whatever content we want in HD format, connect it to the TV and, using our remote, choose whichever movies we want.

"Everyone thinks content delivery will come from the Internet. It won't. It's too expensive and far too slow to deliver HD content. You just bought your 50-plus-inch LCD that is hanging on the wall. Do you want standard definition over compressed HD or the best-possible picture quality from your content?

"Blu-ray Disc- or HD DVD-quality content or better will be possible, but you won't get that quality from a download. The reality is that it's cheaper and faster to send (hard drives with terabytes of) content overnight via UPS than it is to download it over the Net. Brown is faster than the Net."