Owning the process - Concept, Production and Delivery
Whilst the empowering nature of digital media technologies has long been lauded the trickle down effect of what was once the domain of expensive and cumbersome hardware to the uber-efficiency, flexibility and affordability of the laptop or desktop the celebration of this empowerment has for the most part been confined to production; the making of media.
The element always several steps behind however has been the final phase of the media creation triumvirate; Delivery. Independent, accessible, efficient, flexible and affordable delivery to mass audience (or at least the potential mass audience). The internet as an entity is not enough on its own, it's just the road not the vehicle; the airwaves but not the transmitter. Sure there's the much discussed YouTube delivery; open slather to all and sundry, but this lacks delivery sophistication or focus. It lacks respectability.
But the new generation of delivery models and mechanisms are quickly descending. Models that embrace the roadway of the internet but set upon it a highly functional vehicle for distribution that is wearing the hallmarks of sophisticated and polished content delivery for the digital age open and accessible to all who've got content to show.
I've been trialling some of these delivery mechanisms and two have stuck out as being of particular merit on a range of levels. The two that have caught my eye most readily are
Blip.TV and
Brightcove. Both present a very similar ideal and delivery methodology but the implementation is quite different.
A Datsun and a Ferrari are both cars but the difference is huge, likewise Blip.TV shares a great deal in common with YouTube but the compare the two is very much Datsun to Ferrari. Blip.TV is a website that provides free web hosting, syndication, format conversion and distribution of content. It functions on a 'Channel' model whereby the user sets up there own channel to deliver a body of work. Episodic programs are very at home on Blip.TV. If you're looking to host a sngle work, a signle movie then you're not really going to be embracing what Blip.TV is really designed to do. But if you have a cannon of work and, in particular, if you plan on on-going additions to that work new programs, new episodes then Blip.TV is very well placed to be a slick delivery vehicle.
The Blip.TV interface is clean and uncluttered, the players work tremendously well and its generally a very pleasant viewing expeirence. The two big things Blip.TV has going for it are multiple format hosting you're viewer will never complain of the format not working if you provide multiple formats. And comments/discussion sections for each program to allow for viewer feedback that can build a very compelling proactive experience and a viral exchange aspect between channels. The other thing that is very much in blip's favour is the URL. When you create a blip-TV channel you simply give it a name and .blip.tv is added to the end of it. Its slick, clean and very professional. No clumsy alpha-numeric URL's, just a direct and easy to promote, publicise and remember channel link.
The other system that I've found has enormous merit is Brightcove. Functioning on a somewhat different paradigm, Brightcove is still a video hosting system that allows for channels to be developed to deliver a body of content, much like Blip.TV, but its focus is less on attracting visitors to the specific Brightcove site and more about building more transferable and syndicated 'Players' for content. In simple terms this will mean for many content developers using Brightcove to build a visually attractive Player for their content one that allows for selecting programs, blurbs and browsing and then hosting that Player on their own website and server space or more simply still linking from their own page to the Player hosted on Brightcove's server.
With Blip.TV your channel is directly and always associated with the Blip.TV site but with Brightcove the Player itself can be almost entirely divorced from Brightcove and embedded into any site you wish. Moreover the entire player, the entire channel if you will, can be syndicated out for others to embed it to thier site. Management of the content is done form a central on-line back-end CMS and changing the content there, adding new programs and changing the look of the Player itself, will directly update your Player wherever it is on the web.
The big advantages for Brightcove are an aesthetically gorgeous player with a fair degree of customization coupled with the fact that it can embedded into your own site rather than directly attached to the Brightcove site.
Both these systems are technically still in Beta development but the future is very promising for this kind of delivery of content, the audiences wishing to watch such content is growing all the time and I would encourage all independent movie makers to consider embracing that final stage in the content triumvirate, Delivery, to partake of an end-to-end ownership over their creation. Most certainly No student coming out of a film school of any type should be allowed to graduate until they have established a Blip.TV or Brightcove channel and populated it with a body of work. As a media creator in the new media age you must take control of the entire process conception, production and delivery.
T
his page form the new defunct DVGuru gives an overview of a much wider range of video hosting sites and services but does so from a different perspective than I have looked at above. More about getting individual movies online rather than a more comprehensive approach of building a 'broadcast' channel for a body of work and ongoing episodic works.
You can see my own
Blip.TV and
Brightcove video site experiments.
Posted at 01:00AM May 21, 2007
by Mike Jones in video |
