Courtesy of New Media Musings, a Hollywood Reporter item says that Michael Rosenblum’s M3 Media has teamed with the Travel Channel to air what in essence are video blog films produced by a team of four young filmmakers.
“The participants on ‘5 Takes Europe’ have been turned into viable citizen journalists, able to act as reporters, camera persons, sound engineers and editors simultaneously,” Rosenblum said. “A $5,000 edit room is now a $400 piece of software. TV production is as easy as word processing.”
TV viewers will be able to interact with the filmmakers on the web as they produce the series, called “5 Takes Europe,” on a scant budget of $50/day. M3 Media was founded by Rosenblum and TV veteran Marty Feinberg to create programming and teach others how to do it.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:36 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Courtesy of Cory Bergman at Lost Remote, Broadcasting and Cable magazine has an item on Time Warner Cable San Diego and its test of delivering basic service to PCs.
According to Ken Kerschbaumer’s report, Time Warner is shipping its expanded basic tier of service (which typically only includes basic cable channels and no off-air signals) via high-speed connections to 9,000 trial homes. Company execs say they are testing how consumers use the service and are positioning the TV-over-the-web option as a value-add to Time Warner’s Road Runner customers.
But in my ongoing conversations with cable operators, virtually every major cable company is hard at work trying to figure out how to move their entire range of video services to IP-based or web-based platforms. Top decision-makers at the leading cable companies say such a move would 1. cut costs in the long run and 2. enable a range of enhanced TV services, such as checking emails on the TV set, getting caller i.d. displays on the TV screen and more.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:16 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Telephony’s Carol Wilson reports that Cedar Rapids, Coralville and Iowa City, IA, “are using a free Wi-Fi service to help economic development in their downtown areas.”
The three cities, which are situated along the Interstate 380 corridor in eastern Iowa, are working with mesh-network provider Strix Systems on the project, which is called the Corridor Free Wireless Project, or cFree.
The service will be in place by Labor Day, according to Jamie Licko, executive director of the Cedar Rapids Downtown District and one of cFree’s organizers. As to its funding, Wilson reports that:
The service…is being sponsored in part by Iowa.com, a search engine designed to provide information specifically targeted to Iowa… In addition, the $70,000 cost of the network technology and the $15,000 budgeted for marketing and other expenses, is being paid for through city and county funding, and grants.
When customers register for free and log on, they will first be shown an Iowa.com page, [Licko] said…”This is a way for them to tap into that 18 to 40 demographic that doesn’t necessarily read newspapers and ads.”Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 12:36 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Matthew Koll, chairman and founder of Wondir, discusses his company’s “live question-and-answer” approach to online search in a MediaPost interview with marketing consultant Max Kalehoff.
We’d like people to think of Wondir as the service to use when you wonder, “Is there anyone out there that can help me with this question?”
What we’re trying to do is unite the world into a very fast question-and-answer capability. Our vision is that if we had millions of people connected by the various communications mechanisms we use, when a question comes into your head, there might be a person in the world who can help you. The idea of people interacting and exchanging knowledge has not benefited from the speed enhancements that searching has. But if you can take that dynamic and make it behave like search, then you can achieve the benefits of search: ease-of-use, immediate results, and a proven business model. We’re bridging the gap between search engines and the sort of slower community interaction that existed in the past.
Regarding the Wondir user experience:
You ask a question, and while looking at immediate results, someone may IM you with a live, new response. We capture the answers and build up a knowledge base that way. Over time, more and more people can be served by seeing the answers that other people got to similar questions. There are over 100,000 different people who have answered questions on Wondir, and about 40 percent of questions get a fresh response from another member within 10 minutes. We’re closing in on 2 million questions and answers, each.
We continue to get more answers than questions every day — the ratio is nine to seven…As the community grows we should see greater breadth, depth, and quality in the answers. More people connected should also mean even faster responses.
Kalehoff says that, after a few years in beta mode, Wondir “recently launched its service commercially as a destination as well as a licensable platform for other publishers.” He adds that the company’s market share of U.S. Internet visits in June was up 400% compared to year-ago levels.
Noting that the major search players are enhancing their services with “community-based sharing, tagging, personalization, and new algorithms” Kalehoff suggests that:
When relevance and results become more individualized and influenced by people, the protocol for marketing brands in the realm of search will change. The intersection of search, social networks, and user-generated content appears to be growing.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 12:23 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The German unit of voice giant Vodaphone has adopted a policy to block VoIP provider Skype’s calls on its cell phones, a plan designed to take effect in 2007.
While Vodaphone doesn’t offer an explanation for the new policy, the blocking tactic is similar to Madison River Communication’s decision to block Vonage’s calls, an action that resulted in the FCC levying a $15,000 fine against the telco.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:55 AM | Print | Comments (0)
John Borland has a piece in News.com today entitled “Open Source P2P Projects Keep Swapping.” The upshot: despite the Supreme Court’s Grokster ruling, the loose bands of open source P2P developers continue working unabated.
The legal threat facing many of the most popular file-swapping software companies may well radically change their operation and strategies. Yet open-source projects like Shareaza, which create software of similar function and popularity, are continuing unabated.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:11 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Brightcove founder Jeremy Allaire talks about a week in which he spent time “among two disparate crowds.”
…in San Francisco with Supernova’s new media digerati, content anarchists, and self-publishing blogging media visionaries, among others, and in Los Angeles with Hollywood’s “Masters of the Universe”, those responsible for producing the most mainstream of mainstream film and TV, and individuals who are architecting the strategies for media empires making their shift to the Internet.
First stop, Supernova:
Running deeply throughout all the conversations at Supernova was the theme of open media — anchored in the blogsphere, this posse is posturing for a world of open publishing and distribution of all forms of media…. The sense of optimism, ambition and pending change filled the conference with an energy I have not seen since the birth of the Web. It’s wonderful.
Then on to L.A.’s world of mainstream media:
What I found was a sense of needing to transform the very art of production and distribution, to find a new audience, and to involve the Internet community in that content in ways that were unconceivable for them years ago. The discussions evolved around consumer participation, affinity groups, self-publishing, and short-form content.
The ‘establishment media’ is a powerful force of creativity, it attracts many of the best and brightest around the world, and cannot be diminished as “1:many” junk, worthless in the realm of micro-markets and audiences. While it’s system of financing, production and distribution may be under seige (not yet, but soon enough), it’s creative minds will still be powerful forces in our culture.
In an ideal world (that is what we’re trying to build here after all…!), the new new media of the Internet will itself be a powerful remix of these worlds.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:52 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, points to a new section of the BBC’s website that lists “a variety of open source software projects” that together “provide building blocks that could help tech-savvy online video journalists develop more robust online video productions and distribution channels.”
The list of projects includes Dirac, “a state of the art video codec that provides general-purpose video compression and decompression tools” and Media Lounge, “a C++ application, based on the “Crystal Space 3D” game engine SDK [that] displays an interactive, shared virtual world, in which the content author can embed audio and video sequences.”
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:28 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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