WordPress Theme For Video Blogging

Foxinni’s WordPress Videos Theme is designed to make creating a video blog a no-brainer.

The theme is makes it easy to embed your own videos and videos from YouTube, Meta Cafe, MySpace, Veoh and other video platforms.

Features:

• Multiple Color Schemes
• Dark or Light Layouts
• Built-in ‘Recent Videos’ Widget
• Embed personally hosted videos (.flv)
• Embed from supported videos sites:

YouTube

Meta Cafe

Daily Motion

Vimeo

Veoh

Break.com

Blip

MySpace

Live Leak

Hulu

• Video RSS Support
• Add multiple Videos from different sources to a post.

More information. Theme demo.

Live Streaming From The iPhone On The Way

Flixwagon has announced that it has an alpha version of a new iPhone live streaming applications available for testing on “jailbroken” iPhones.

Features:

• Express Sign-up on the fly: simply enter your phone number and you’ll be instantly logged-in. You’ll also receive a text message with your new user name and password (which you can change when you log in.
• Edit video details on the fly: change title and tags directly from the device before or during broadcast. This is useful in helping more users discover your broadcast while you’re still live, by adding relevant tags and titles based on events in the broadcast.
• Set sharing preferences directly from the device: set “flix” as private, public, or viewable only by certain groups like friends, family, co-workers, etc.
• Edit video details and sharing preferences on the fly: Choose video quality settings: select between higher resolution (sharper details within the frame) or higher frame rate per second (smoother video flow).

Note: the iPhone apps (1.1.4 and 2.0) are both in Alpha and are primarily for testing streaming from the iPhone platform. Flixwagon hopes to develop an app for the iTunes App Store once the iPhone SDK supports native video.

In other words - this is bleeding edge stuff. Let’s hope that Apple will support this type of development, and turn the iPhone into a multimedia content publishing platform.

Social Media: Strategies in Content and Commerce

I spent yesterday at NATPE’s LATV Festival enjoying some interesting discussions and presentations from the Digital Day. This report is a synopsis of one of those sessions. This session focused on social media and how digital media executives are using it to their advantage.

Ben Grossman, Editor in Chief, for Broadcasting & Cable led this panel discussion.

Danny Kastner is founder of Fan Rocket. Fan Rocket provides services to media companies that help promote media via viral videos.

Stephen Andrade is General Manager of NBC.com with a mission to promote TV shows, provide online advertising opportunities and create content for NBC.com. He shows a clip of what he calls creative social media that shows how The Office’s Dunder Mifflin Infinity website provides tools for fans to build content. The goal was to create a really deep community for fans of the show. The site presents creative tasks to “branches”( user groups) each week.

David Glover is CEO of Or Die Networks. The company is a online creative company that partners with celebrities to build new shows, such as Funny Or Die, and combines that with user generated content and social network tools to build community. He views it as a pyramid of content with the celebrity partner at the top, advanced users producing high quality content and then the mass user generated content.

EriK Flannigan, EVP of Digital Media at MTV Networks, runs Comedy Central and a few other sites. He says that consumers will form groups with or without you, so you need to decide if you want to participate. MTV is trying to embrace the social web using things like the Facebook activity feed.

How does an aspiring producer play in this? Stephen says that it’s important to understand the economics first. He says there are no barriers to entry so it doesn’t make a great area for investment. It doesn’t work to make things with TV type budgets. TV is a hit business where 1 hit can pay for 10 failures. On the web, there is a much lower cost of failure and therefore many more people trying.

Erik says that the industry has come a long way in the past few years understanding how users want to and will mash up content. The biggest stumbling block is letting go and letting users make their own choices. You don’t really have much choice because you can’t control what happens. He says you occasionally get into trouble with copyright issues, but you keep on going.

Dick says he met last week with one of the premier writer producers in comedy television. They were working on a concept and the writer said it would only work if there were no comments allowed. Dick says they walked away. You can’t fight reality.

Dick says they have less issue with copyright problems because their content is short and some what self contained.

Danny says this is really an area of opportunity as TV shows start hiring people dedicated to making extra content and making it viral. Stephen calls it a writer producer in training role, where when they go on to write/produce TV shows they will get the online side of this. Erik and Dick concur saying that new jobs are being created to re-purpose existing content for the digital space and new marketing jobs are requiring digital experience.

Does every new show need a social component as well as a digital component? Stephen says he’s not sure what “digital” means. He says it probably means both, but it really depends on the content.

Erik says that the social component depends upon the show. He describes the difference between The Daily Show and The Colbert Show. One is about presenting content, the other is really social.

The panel had some interesting advice to people in the audience who are interested in the space. In short, think beyond video. Erik pointed to an example on the Huffington Post that was an interactive view of how a conservative views the NY Times. Stephen concurred saying they want interactive ideas beyond video because they can really drive page views. Dick closes by saying think about what the technology can do, and video is just one of the things the technology can do.

Crowdsourcing: The Killer Development Tool

I spent yesterday at NATPE’s LATV Festival enjoying some interesting discussions and presentations from the Digital Day.  This report is a synopsis of one of those sessions.  This session focused on how audiences and content are interacting like never before.

Moderator: Wayne Karfalt - Editor, Cynopsis: Digital

Panelists:
Eyal Hertzog Founder and Chief Creative Officer for Metacafe
Melanie Hall - COO Quarterlife
Kevin Chou - CEO Watercooler
Justin Cooper - Chief Innovation officer for Passenger

Crowdsourcing has it origins in things like WikiPedia where people can collaborate and develop content together.  How can crowdsourcing sourcing techniques be applied to entertainment?

Melanie discussed the social networking site for creative people and online show.  She says they have many opportunities for crowdsourcing at Quarterlife.  They use the audience to discuss characters and story lines.  The principles of the show were used to build out a social network so that the show and the site can play off each other.  They launched the show on Myspace, Youtube, Bebo and other sites which then referred people to the site resulting in a fast growing online community.

Eyal described how Metacafe now serves up over 300 million videos each month to over 35 million people.  He says the internet is introducing a new low cost of failure which means many more experiments and allowed many more people to participate in the creative process.  They have recently allowed people to edit the metadata about the videos. The members can edit the tags, titles, descriptions etc connected with the videos.

Kevin introduced Watercooler, a company that makes widgets for social networking sites.  Watercooler’s mission is to bring fans together online.  People have allows gone online to discuss entertainment.  They started online forums to discuss TV shows.  They launched in 2007, growing to 25 million registered users in 12 months.

Kevin says that their users are using the site to find out what others are thinking about when they watch a show. The communities can be very different.  Lost, for example has a community of 600,000 with very different involvement, while the online community for Jericho is 10,000, but very passionate about the show.

Justin described Passenger, a company that provides a crowdsourcing application for large corporations and media companies.  Major networks like ABC and Fox use the application for collaborate with their most passionate users.  These super fans can drive storylines and changes in shows using Passenger.  These audiences are built from either web sign ups or email lists that the clients have built up over the years.  Filtering tools are really important to allow people find the content they want and for the clients to sift through all the information provided by the users.  Justin says that Lost has been an active user of crowdsourcing to steer the show and for what content should be submitted for Emmys consideration.

The panel discussed the future of pilots.  Eyal says that the whole model for pilots is changing.  It used to be that because of distribution constraints there was a filter, then publish model for testing new content. The change of the distribution method has changed the model. We are moving from filter, then publish model to a publish, then filter model.

Eyal says that about 50% of videos are found via search for the first video you watch.  The second video is more likely to be the exploration of the related video.

In another example of crowdsourcing, Wayne described how Digg is building a recommendation engine based up your Diggs.  This will makes for more active recommendations based upon the collective input from the crowd.

A question from the audience - how to use input from the community when it conflicts with the creative direction of the show?  Melanie says that in any successful relationship there is compromise.  Justin describes how the creative commons process where other can build upon existing content and generate fresh content.

SEC Opens Up To Social Media

 Yesterday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved new guidance for publicly-listed companies in using traditional websites and social media channels like blogs to meet the SEC’s public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD.

read more

Association for Downloadable Media Releases Standards for Consumer Downloaded Content

The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) has announced the release of its first ad unit standards and audience measurement guidelines for industry compliance, The Download Measurement Guidelines and Advertising Unit Standards.

The goal of the standards is to make it easier for media buyers to run advertisements across hundreds of podcasts. The guidelines have been accepted by the ADM Ad Council, a fourteen-member interactive advertising agency liaison group, which acts as a sounding board for the ADM committees.

The Advertising Unit Standards include three kinds of formats:

• Insertions
• Content Participation
• Collateral

The units outlined in the document (pdf) are the most common set of existing formats in use today by sponsors and content producers.

The ADM has, in essence, documented current practices. The challenge the organization faces now is to turn this from a document into a recognized and accepted standard.

Details on the announcement below:

INSERTIONS

Definition: A separate ad file that is attached, inserted, or edited into an audio or video podcast.

Time: Up to :10, :15, 30 or :60 seconds
Location: Pre-roll; mid-roll; post-roll

CONTENT PARTICIPATION

Definition: When an advertiser’s message is included as part of the audio or video podcast content.

Examples:

1. Underwritten Sponsorship
2. Scripted Live Read
3. Talking Points
4. Host Endorsements
5. Product Placement / Product Discussion
6. Sponsored Interstitials
7. Special Episodes
8. Advertorials / Interviews
9. Infomercials

COLLATERALS

Definition: All the other real estate that a podcaster has that may be included as part of an advertising or sponsorship package, or as separate items a lá carte.

Examples:

1. Show notes on podcast website
2. ID3 tags in podcast episode file
3. Album Art Cards
4. Link and banner in enhanced audio podcasts
5. Overlays, underlays in video podcasts
6. Web banners, buttons, text links, hyperlinks (using IAB standards)
7. Email sponsorships
8. Press Releases
9. Product sales (CDs, DVDs, merchandise)
10. Signage/Outdoor (for retail)
11. Brochures, flyers

The ADM recognizes two types of effective measurement techniques, Native Server Measurement and Third Party Measurement:

Native Server Measurement (NSM)

The Native Server is the actual end point where the media is hosted. Native Server Measurement refers to the log files derived from the Native Server. It may include the amount of data that was transferred in each log entry, and therefore may provide information to derive more than simple download statistics.

Third Party Measurement (TPM)

A Third Party server is the intermediary between the Native Server and another Third Party Server. Third Party Measurement refers to the files measuring the initial download requests as received by a third party server to be delivered to the requester. Because the Third Party server is a constant, it may uniformly measure download statistics across multiple hosting services.

YouTube’s Legal Troubles Grow By $779 Million

Google’s YouTube troubles just got kicked up a notch.

Italian media company Mediaset SpA is suing YouTube and its owner, Google, for at least 500 million euros ($779 million).

Mediaset claims that Google and YouTube carried out the “illegal distribution and commercial use of audio and video files,” according to a Bloomberg report:

According to a sample analysis run by Mediaset on June 10, at least 4,643 videos belonging to the company were found on YouTube. That equals more than 325 hours of broadcasting without corresponding rights, the company said.

Mediaset claims that, based on the number of its clips available on YouTube and the hits generated, the broadcaster lost the equivalent of 315,672 broadcasting days.

The claim of 500 million euros corresponds to “immediate damages,” Mediaset said in the statement.

Google already has a billion-dollar Viacom lawsuit on its plate.

Given YouTube’s size and popularity, its massive library of user-submitted videos, and Google’s deep pockets, the YouTube legal battles are probably just getting started.

PodPress Disaster Highlights WordPress Problems

WordPress 2.6 has been a disaster for a lot of podcasters.

The update, which WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg said “should be pretty painless,” has broken a lot of podcasts, leading to a lot of kludgie workarounds.

Some, like Dan McKeown, think the WordPress/PodPress fiasco highlights broader problems with the way WordPress is handling releases:

This episode is a good illustration of a few problems with Wordpress and the relationship between the CMS and its plugins. First, Automattic, the company that manages Wordpress development, is extremely overzealous in pushing new versions on users at the expense of previous features working. Second, the lack of professionalism of plugin developers is a serious danger to the continued functioning of blogs for a wide range of Wordpress users, from casual podcasters to large enterprises.

The problem with pushing new versions and features on users is a fairly nuanced one. Let me explain: I do not mean to say that new versions and new features, even at the pace at which they come out, is a problem. Rather, the problem is the assumption by Automattic that all users are ready for major upgrades every three months and have the time to install new versions and find updated plugins. Because the last few new major releases (Wordpress 2.5 and 2.6) have included some fairly major changes, they broke the functionality of many plugins that were designed for older versions. That really is okay–I don’t want to stand in the way of progress here–but what I don’t understand is why they can’t maintain the older versions for a little longer while people scramble for new plugins.

WordPress has gotten a free ride from many analysts, despite a history of security problems and new releases that break existing features and plug-in compatibility. In fact, WordPress has had many more security problems over the last four years than other content management systems, like Joomla and Drupal.

I still think that WordPress is the best blogging platform, but the PodPress problems and the history of security problems with WordPress show that Automattic’s constant push to get user to upgrade to a new version is dangerous.

WordPress is a mature content management system with hundreds of thousands of installs, which makes it a nice target for hackers and means that features changes are more likely to break things.

Automattic needs to maintain two versions of WordPress because of this:

• the bleeding-edge version that it’s been releasing every three months or so, and
• a “stable” version that for users more interested in security and compatibility

Let me know what you think - is it time for WordPress to slow down and get more conscious of security and compatibility?

Free App CellSpin Brings Podcasting, Photo Blogging To iPhone

CellSpin Soft has announced it has added support for Apple’s iPhone to its mobile blogging software platform.

CellSpin is designed to let you capture audio, photos and text on the iPhone and publish it to your blog or favorite social media sites. Supported sites include

• MySpace
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pownce,
• Blogger
• Picasa
• Flickr
• Live Journal
• Live Spaces
• TypePad
• eBay

CellSpin’s free iPhone application supports:

• Voice blogging
• Photo blogging
• Text blogging
• Posting pre-existing media from iPhone
• Posting audio, photos and text to live eBay auctions
• Podcasting
• Recording and posting live events

CellSpin’s app is free via the Apple App Store under Social Networking. In addition to the iPhone, CellSpin supports the Symbian, Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.0, Palm OS and Blackberry operating systems.

Watch Dr Horrible On Hulu

We had fun watching Josh Whedon’s musical Internet video experiment as he released it. If you missed it the first time around, though, it’s available now on Hulu.

The musical follows aspiring super-villain Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris), who wants to join the Evil League of Evil and win the girl of his dreams.

Dr. Horrible is notable because it’s a glorified mom and pop production, because of the way Whedon is using free distribution to generate interest for later DVD releases and because Neil Patrick Harris is awesome.

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