Make: Television Debutes on public TV

A new TV show based on one of my favorite magazines, MAKE, debuted online and on public television (broadcast / cable tv) just a few weeks ago. Being from the old school, I prefer reading, but hey, this blog is for the print copy challenged. OK, just kidding….

Each half-hour episode hopes to inspire you to think create, and, well, make. Also, each episode can be viewed or downloaded DRM-free (that is without any digital right management wrapper), in HD from makezine.tv. The show is also available on Vimeo, YouTube, Blip.tv and iTunes.

See if you get inspired:





And here are links to newer episodes too:

1. ttp://www.makezine.tv/
2. http://www.vimeo.com/make
3. http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=makemagazine
4. http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=74069835 &s=143441

Making it to the show is now easy. Making time for it is hard.

Cybercast credit: Blip.tv

YouTube Now Has a Screening Room For All of You Indie Filmmakers

Now you can use YouTube's new Screening Room to bring your SERIOUS film work to a global audience.

As a filmmaker you most likely use YouTube to kick-start your viral marketing campaigns already. This new feature gives you a VERY easy-to-find home — and makes you a partner in drawing new ad revenue. Watch this - that's what Google gets out of its investment.

Sara Pollack, YouTube’s film and animation manager puts it this way: “Hopefully as they see thousands of people watching their films, it’s going to be a very eye-opening experience.”]

The Screening Room will feature four new films a week, chosen by YouTube's editorial panel. Here is a truly amazing animated piece, Last Time in Clerkenwell from Igli Migli Productions. Even their name is funny!





The panel also will scour film festivals and work with partners such as the Sundance Channel to identify talents.

Among the first eight titles showcased are “Love and War,” a stop-motion puppet movie by a Swedish director; the Oscar-nominated short “I Met The Walrus,” about an interview with John Lennon; and “Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?” by performance artist Miranda July.

As a filmmaker, you will also have a “Buy Now” button attached to your work to sell DVDs or digital copies. They will also collect a majority share of ad revenue generated from views of their work. SWEET!

YouTube says people whose clips regularly attract a million viewers can make several thousand dollars a month. However, an even bigger bigger prize can be exposure.

When YouTube featured the nine-minute short “Spider” by Nash Edgerton in February, it became the fifth-best selling short on iTunes, Pollack said.

The creators of the full-length feature “Four Eyed Monsters,” Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, got their break when more than a million YouTube views helped land them a TV and DVD distribution deal.

Cybercast credit: YouTube

Smilebox - Extend What YOU Can Do with iTunes

For Macsters, here is creative photo and video sharing service I've come across very recently, that extends what you can do with iPhoto, iTunes, and Photo Booth: mix your photos, videos, and music with animated designs you can email, post to a website or blog, or print.

Smilebox is a free service with premium upgrades for print, more music choices, and ad-free playbacks.





Here is a quick rundown on the features:

- Photos, videos, and music: Combine your photos, videos and music, and share them inside animated, interactive designs.

- iPhoto and iTunes integration: Easily drag and drop your photos and videos from iPhoto and Photo Booth directly into Smilebox. You can also easily add your music from iTunes. No plug-ins and no lengthy uploads required.

- Professionally designed content for every occasion: Smilebox's catalog has more than 700 digital scrapbooks, slideshows and greeting, with new designs released each week. Smilebox has partnered with the leaders in digital design including Hallmark, Making Memories, K and Company, DigiChick, Sweet Shoppe and more. Cool!

- Interactivity: Your recipients can click on photos to enlarge them, turn pages, control the speed and flow of their playback.

- Many ways to share: Share your interactive creations via email, post them to a blog, social network or personal website or print pages at home or at a local retail store.

Cybercast credit: YouTube

HBO Shows for Your iPod or iPhone

Summer is here. Enjoy.

The Wire





HBO's Season 2 of this gritty drama series focuses on the vagaries of crime and law enforcement in Baltimore, MD. Setting up in the wake of the first season's joint homicide/narcotics detail that exposed a major drug operation - the second season expands to include not only the familiar drug dealers, but a group of longshoremen and organized crime members.

Sounds like they're muscling in on Soprano territory... a HOT summer in the making?

Weeds

...Be gone??? I guess not.





In Season 3, popping up just next to Agrestic is a new, sprawling mega-church neighborhood called Magestic. This takes a heavy toll on the Agrestic residents, including our heroine Nancy, who begins to embrace her chosen occupation and, can also, finally, stop hiding.

Lycos as a VOD player? Who Knew?

Remember Lycos? Of course you do. Remember when you last used the site? Of course you don't. Perhaps that's exactly why the company's taking the site in a new direction: video on demand (VOD) rentals.

Started as a Carnegie Mellon University research project in 1994, Lycos was one of the first web search engines. By 1999 it was one of the most visited sites in the world. Then Yahoo and Google happened. While it still maintains respectable traffic worldwide, Lycos, now owned by Daum Communications, the second largest portal in Korea, is hardly more than an after-thought in the "Web 2.0" world.

In 2005 the company decided to shift its strategy away from search to online communities and broadband entertainment. This transition is continuing with the launch of Lycos Cinema.

An online video on demand service, Lycos offers both free and premium content. The free content is ad-supported, while the premium content takes a new approach: fees based on the number of "seats," that is how many people you want to watch the film with. Here is a sample clip from the "Little Shop of Horrors..."





That's the key component Lycos Cinema feels will set itself apart from the competition: social interaction. When you load up a movie, a chat room appears on the left hand side. Here, you can invite and interact with friends about the content you're all watching. It's a cute idea, at least in theory.

In reality there are problems:

First, the content is awful. It's not that I haven't heard of all of the films (only most of them), it's that there's no way I would pay to watch most of them.

Second, Lycos Cinema faces some stiff competition. In the growing field of VOD you have Apple's iTunes movie rentals, Amazon's Unbox rentals and Netflix's Watch-It-Now, among others. All of them offer much better content at similar prices with a much better experience. Even the free stuff on Lycos can't begin to compare with what the NBC and Fox-backed online video site Hulu offers.

The third problem, unfortunately, is that the site throws errors left and right. About half of the time most pages didn't load at all and instead spat out error code. Even if you wanted to rent a movie, you might not be able to -- it's a total crap shoot.

If you are able to get to the featured rentals promo page, you'll notice a top section that looks quite a bit like iTunes movie rentals' CoverFlow view. It's really kind of pathetic.

Lycos sold to Spain's Terra Networks in 2000 for $5.4 billion. It was resold in 2004 to the aforementioned Daum Communications Corp. for $95.4 million. At that rate it's due for another sale this year, priced down even more. Webcast anyone?

Cybercast credit: Lycos Video

LonelyGirl Jessica Rose Returns

It was Jessica Rose who had the first Internet only video show hit, way back in 2006.

Lonelygirl15, if you'll recall, was the headline-grabbing video diary of a pretty teenager, later exposed by net detectives as a brilliant, CAA-backed fiction. The lonely girl was by no means alone -- she had a team of writers and producers behind her, and though the door was closed on lonelygirl15, the frontier of "webisodic" video was wide open.

The situation with open frontiers is that the people seeking to colonize them, to borrow a quote from Ms. South Carolina, simply "don't have maps." Which is why, almost two years after lonelygirl15, no Web series has established a viable, let alone profitable homestead. However, more wagons are now arriving. Sony Pictures Television just launched C-Spot:

From Crackle: Roadents: Episode 3

an online comedy channel featuring six sharply produced programs with enough short episodes to fill a 13-week season.

And Jessica Rose is planning a comeback too. The almost-21-year-old actress from New Zealand will soon return to the online world as the star of Blood Cell, a new horror-thriller from Web TV studio 60Frames Entertainment, directed by Eduardo Rodriguez. The show, whose trailer is now up on deadcelldeadfriend.com, follows Rose's character, Julia, as she contends with an unseen murderer who will talk to her only via her fancy photo- and video-enabled cellphone. Which hopefully gets good reception because, as the name of the website suggests, if Julia's signal goes dead, a blond somewhere gets dispatched for good. To build their online audience, C-Spot and 60Frames will "syndicate" their shows on Sony's Crackle (see this and my other previous posts), Hulu, and AOL Video; while 60Frames can be seen on Bebo, Blip.tv, iTunes, MySpace and others. And everyone's on YouTube.

Revenue-sharing deals allow the creators to get a piece of the advertising pie no matter where their shows get watched. 60Frames and Sony Pictures hope to find the answer to the overriding question posed by Web-only tv: In an entertainment world dominated by multi-hour, multi-night programs like American Idol, how do you win repeat viewers with three minute webisode.

Even though more of the big name studios are tempted onto the web, the question still hangs in the air: what will it take for large numbers of us (14-year-olds included) to feel like the computer screen with its blinking and ringing distractions is a good place to watch TV?

Cybercast credit: Crackle

EyeTV Tuner - The Third Generation

If you're tuned into Macs more than Windows and have been using Elgato's EyeTVhardware and/or software, the new 3.0 version expands your options in a big way, enabling you to:

1. Watch, pause, fast-forward and rewind live television on your Mac, at your desk or in the comfort of your living room.
2. Search the Program Guide using any criteria.
3. Record hours of television.
4. Create subscriptions to TV series and topics of your choice.
5. Manage saved episodes, and organize them in Smart Playlists.
6. Edit unwanted content from your recordings
7. Put them into iTunes in one easy step.
8. Export for current media types and playback devices or burn to DVD.
9. Share EyeTV recordings with other Macs on a local network
10. Play back using Wi-Fi Access on an iPhone and iPod touch and selected smartphones.

Here is what Jeremy Horwitz, Editor-in-Chief of iLounge says:

"What's great about EyeTV is the incredible scope and generally smart, intuitive functionality of the software: what you get here is now officially leagues beyond what TiVo and its many lesser competitors offer in today's digital video recorders.

Open Television Network at Your Service

Is brought to you courtesy of Philip Hodgett, an Aussie émigré of DigitalProductionBuzz.com fame. These days, however, he concentrates on his new ventures, which, in addition to OTN, include his software company Intelligent Assistance and consulting outfit Big Brains for Rent. Here is one busy man!



In his word, quoted from David Williams’s interview with him in Digital Video magazine:

“It’s another entry into digital distribution. Some would say we are late getting into that game, but I have problems with most of the existing offerings out there. What we are trying to do is create an unmediated marketplace between content owners and those who want that content. Pretty much every other system has somebody sitting there as a gatekeeper between the content and the consumer. They decide what gets on the system, and if you have just a few pieces of content you can’t get any traction with them. We want to democratize distribution the same way that production has been democratized over the past decade.”

So OTN is available to you FREE, to sell your show to viewers and for viewers who want the option of controlling their own programming. It is built on a new technology called klickTab.

You can use klickTab to sell audio and PDF content too through a standard RSS feed (a podcast feed) that can be loaded into iTunes, Miro or compatible RSS aggregators. Is that cool or what?

With your channel feed loaded, your viewers can preview, get, download, manage and view your programs in one piece of software. Viewers have options like iPods, AppleTV, and other applications to deliver their content to a big screen TV for the traditional television experience.

Does “Open” mean that my videos can be pirated away?

Both OTN and I believe that the way to combat piracy is to offer a simple, convenient and fair way to buy the content people want to watch. There will always be some piracy, a fact of life that we all must live with. It's also not clear that a "pirated" copy is really a lost sale (most often it is not), and whether or not the promotional value of the piracy is worth more than the potential sale. There are certainly some in "big media" who believe that, and evidence suggests that independents and new media also benefit from "piracy."

The Apple of NBC's Eye

NBC has launched NBC Direct where most shows can be watched online and some shows are available for full episode downloads. This comes after NBC decided to pull out of iTunes. For now it's Windows only, XP or Vista, IE 6 or 7. No love lost here...!

Hulu, the anti-YouTube, launches

Hulu, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture designed to compete with video site YouTube, has launched a test version of its site. But it is more of an anti-YouTube than a competitor, because it focuses less on user-generated content.





It comes after months of delay. NBC withdrew its video channel from YouTube last week, and also ditched Apple's iTunes in favor of Amazon's music service. (See my post about Amazon here.)

Hulu will be the exclusive online provider of videos from NBC and News Corp, and it will then syndicate the material to other sites, including AOL, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo, but apparently not YouTube.

Hulu got $100 million in backing from Providence Equity Partners, and arose because of animosity from NBC and News Corp toward YouTube, in part because that site kept hosting vidoes containing copyrighted videos.

NBC had warmed up to YouTube last year, working with the popular video site to promote its vidoes, until Jeff Zucker took over NBC in February. The company then changed its tune, and filed a lawsuit against YouTube.

UnBox TiVo and Find CreateSpace on Amazon

... continued from my post of Sept. 21:

Can you see the small TiVo logo below?



Yes, Amazon Unbox is now offering downloads to your TiVo box, in addition to your PC and Xbox 360 console. That obviously leaves out Mac and Linux users. We don't count anyway, so that's OK, till Microsoft eats Amazon's lunch....

Equally cool, for those of us cursed with some creativity and production skills is that Amazon UnBox has partnered with
CreateSpace to sell your masterpiece. The quickest and easiest way to submit your content to them is on your authored DVD. They can also use your tape to archive a master-quality file, then encode and author your DVD master.

Now all you have to do is ...

1. Create your blockbuster
2. Market the living daylight out of it
3. Sell it through Amazon UnBox, iTunes, CinemaNow, Netflix, Blockbuster,

etc. Easy ... except maybe the marketing part ....

Tuned Into iTunes

With full seasons of "Lost," "CSI," "Battlestar Galactica," and now "The Closer" and "Days of our Lives," you will never miss your favorite shows again. And with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees even "CSI" or "The Closer" is a cool experience...





Movies, movies, movies: "No Direction Home" (Bob Dylan) and "Finding Nemo" were just added to the repertoire.





Stay inside and enjoy!

FYI - we are an iTunes store affiliate.

WallStrip Does It ... In 6 Months

WallStrip, the daily web show devoted to irreverent stock news
see my previous post about it here, announced yesterday morning:






CBS is buying us and we WON'T tell you for how much!

The six-month-old program has been on YouTube, Veoh, Blip.tv, iTunes, Yahoo! Podcasts, Google Finance, TheStreet.com, AOL Uncut, vSocial and Revver. And from now on CBS....

Much of its success is credited to host Lindsay Campbell. She is often compared to former Rocketboom host Amanda Congdon, who was picked up last year by ABC News. Lindsay will stay on as host. WallStrip's producers Adam Elend and Jeff Marks will produce original web video for CBS. Creator Howard Lindzon will become a consultant for the network. When the shooting gets hot, the hot go corporate ... or something like that. Never mind the sour grapes from me - congratulations WallStrip!

Broadcast credit: vSocial

Total Recall, Now on the Small Screen Near You

That is, on your iPod, courtesy of iTunes, and all other legal (and we are LEGAL, aren't we all!?) movie download sites, I'm sure.




In case you forgot (I did), the movie is set in the year 2084. Douglas Quaid (aka Guv of CA these days) is a construction worker who has been having dreams about being on the planet Mars with a sexy brunette. (What else???) After seeing an ad from Rekall, a company that sells imaginary adventures by implanting memories, he decides to get a 'vacation' in Mars from them, one in which he will take a vacation from himself as a spy: the ego trip called "Blue Skies on Mars."

All right, that's enough. I don't get a commission to sell the movie the Nth+1 time. Enjoy, if you're into Hollywoodian Sci-fi.

Net Symphony on Eyephedrine

Haven't had so much fun with e-music ever! Courtesy of Mike Calore's Monkey Bytes blog on wired.com, I downloaded Sound Of Traffic, a nifty Java code, created by none other than John Weir of smokinggun.com fame. His Java Synthesizer converts the IP/TCP message headers of the data packets traversing the net into music notes that you can individually manipulate. Cool!

This, enhanced with Apple's Garageband and combined with the Eyephedrine (by GioFX) visualizer on the iTunes client can produce some deeply resonating, addictive audiovisual experiences...for me, at least! If you're into mashups, send me a comment and I'll point you to the FTP directory where you can download the sound and/or the video file, under the Creative Commons Attribution license.



Sound of Traffic is available , totally free, for Mac, Windows, and *nix at:

http://www.smokinggun.com/projects/soundoftraffic/. Thanks, John!

P.S. Net symphony music is here for all to mash-up, play with, or contribute to. It will, eventually, find a home on my website to be, netsymphonix.com.

P.P.S. And yes, this video is streamed from UnCut Video, aka AOL. We try them all!

iTunes Announces Swimsuit 2007 Videos

"Sports Illustrated and iTunes have come together to bring you a more-in-depth showcase of this year's swimsuit issue. Here you'll find a variety of videos featuring models like Anne V and Marisa Miller on location. Watch the behind-the-scenes-antics via candid footage with the models and photographers. In order to help conjure up these changes in latitude (an attitude), we've also got an exclusive video from Jimmy Buffett, who had an enviable position of being on location during the photo shoot."





I'd be sold if I weren't happily married...but you can tune in, if you're not. Comments are encouraged!

Pop-up Video Is So Yesterday

Confession - no, not about pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-anything. I have another blog, exactly like this, at MakeiTV.com. I use it to learn the capabilities of blogs and blogging software to create video blogs. (vlogs for you, acronymistas).

MakeiTV.com is built with WordPress, a very innovative, beautifully designed, and modular blogging software from, you guessed, WordPress.org. I installed an inline Flash video plugin to see if it can consistently deliver flash videos. Why Flash? Because it is the de facto video format on the web. If it works, we'll be well on our way to producing a real video blog. Obviously, I have not been able to make this work on Blogger as yet.

The song video you should see there was written and sung by our favorite author-artist, June Marshall. It's part of her album, "Booby Trapped: Men Beware the Dirty Seven Sisters!" Being an equal opportunity gender-basher, she also made another album, "The Dirty Seven: Ladies Beware!" about the kind of men women should avoid. We'll feature a song video from that album too, hopefully soon. Ouch!!!

P.S. You can get the best deal on her albums, books, and ebooks from Newmedia Publishing. Or download her songs from iTunes, AOL Music, MSN Music, Yahoo Music and a host of other sites.