Vbrick: A Foundation for Your Video Ecosystem

Vbrick Systems is a relatively "old player" in the online video scene, providing technology to websites for video hosting. It's about to launch new hardware and software for streaming and pay-per-view video.




It also hopes to bring in more money by embedding advertisements in some of the videos it serves, on top of the $30 million in revenue last year and reports that 2008 will be even more profitable. They've been helped along the way by a partnership with Akamai Technologies, a company that will improve its network resources, and by a total of $62 million in VC backing to date.

VBrick's complete product line is designed to create a foundation for your entire network video ecosystem, and is made up of:

EtherneTV
Is their enterprise-wide solution composed of a set of scalable, industrial strength, network-aware appliances that allow organizations to build a video infrastructure on top of any existing IP network. Each component plays a significant role in capturing, recording, managing, distributing, and viewing your video assets.

VBrick Appliances
Industrial strength, portable VBrick Appliances deliver video on local area networks, wide area networks, and the Internet through its customers' VPN IP network.

VBCast
Travel to a location, connect your camera and microphone and begin broadcasting. The package contains everything you need to go live in an instant.

VBrick’s software and video appliances enable you to distribute a live webcast, complete with timed PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint slides???

You can also view and record a live feed from remote appliances. Now, that's more like it for me.

Do You Root For Grassroots Media?

That's where the action is going. You must get familiar with Ourmedia if that's where you are headed too.

What do they offer? A lot, like:

* Publishing and storing video, audio, manuscripts, and other media that you create
* Sharing your own and discovering others' independent media.
* Learning how to create citizens' media - that is, yours
* Sharing: RSS feeds, email to a friend, direct link to files from your own site or blog
* FREE storage, sharing & bandwidth forever
* NO ADS!

Downside (as it is):

* Requires an Internet Archive account too
* Slow to upload and view during most of the day
* Keeps your content in its native format. Both good and bad. It doesn't recompress your video - good, but requires viewers to have several different media players installed (not so good)

The Learning Center

My favorite is the Learning Center, which has everything you'd ever want to know about user-created citizens' media. With all the hoopla about copyrights, illegal downloading, Viacom vs. YouTube (see previous post), you DO want to know about your options. One of the best is the Creative Commons license, at work all over the site itself, making it very easy to grasp the concept as well as its execution. Nearly all contributions are shared that way, so other sites can republish bits and pieces from this open-source learning project.

So what can we learn about copyright and the law?

How about:

* Fair use in the digital age
* Online libel and defamation
* What is Creative Commons?
* Filmmakers' best practices in fair use
* Documentary filmmakers, fair use and 'free use'
* Legal issues in creating your podcast
* Release waivers - there is a link to forms
* Terms of Service comparison for video hosting sites
* Publishing public performances

Listen to Lauren Gelman, associate director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, as she discusses copyright, fair use, and grassroots media. (You need a media player that works with industry standard MPEG-4 video, to watch.)

Lauren Gelman on copyright and personal media