Upload your 3-5 minute film portraying a carefully crafted protagonist facing a moral dilemma that leads to good or bad consequences. The protagonist might make a difficult, but ultimately good decision, or the story may be a cautionary tale.
The Top 10 Finalists will receive an all-inclusive weekend in Virginia Beach, VA for the Live/Webcast Final Event on May 31, 2008, and have their films viewed and judged by respected industry professionals.
The Grand Prize winner will receive a full tuition-paid scholarship to Regent University’s Film School, housed in a $35 million state-of-the-art Communication and Performing Arts Center.
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!
“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."
Google's popular video sharing site is now giving away tools that let you tap its underlying database functions, in effect allowing you to build your own YouTube. They call it "YouTube Everywhere."
You now have full access to YouTube's extensive video library, global audience, and the underlying video hosting and streaming network that powers YouTube. The move goes significantly beyond the current access to videos in which any Web user can copy and embed selected videos onto their own Web pages.
YouTube says the new offerings allow anyone building a Web site or application to upload videos straight to YouTube. Also, you can fetch video feeds, comments, responses or playlists from YouTube.
What YouTube is offering parallels an earlier move by Yahoo to open up the ability of its Flickr photo-sharing site to provide deep access to Web developers in order to embed underlying features of Flickr in other sites.
Developers can build in functions to let users rate videos or add them to a favorites list embedded within their own sites. They can customize and control the Adobe Flash video player through which videos are viewed. The APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces) let you build a so-called "chromeless" Flash player -- a video-viewing window that is stripped of formatting such as title bar, browser buttons or status bars, meaning that you can create your own player.
These free customization features can be used in conjunction with the existing APIs which launched last year and which provide the ability to view videos on other sites and to search for videos on YouTube.
COOL! Upload videos directly from mobile phone devices:
One of these features and functions enables you and your site users to publish videos directly from their mobile phone devices or encourage new users to share videos to the Web site, as if they were on YouTube itself.
The number of possible new applications is endless. Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly to YouTube. Here are a few scenes from the highly anticipated game:
The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube. Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube. Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.
Zipidee, an online marketplace for specialty videos and other content, has purchased competing rare video company TotalVid.com. This move continues Zipidee’s strategy of carving out a niche for itself, as a marketplace for rare content. TotalVid’s 5,500 or so videos — typically older video, first offered as VHS videocassettes — include how-to, action sports, travel, anime, martial arts and some 50 other categories. You can rent videos for $1.99 and up, and view them for a seven day rental period.
Combined with Zipidee’s 5,000 or so largely instructional titles, Zipidee now claims more than 10,000 video titles in more than 100 categories, mostly through exclusive licensing arrangements. You won’t find most titles on iTunes or Amazon. The company licenses content from more than 600 content sellers, from independent producers to large media companies.
You can upload your own videos to Zipidee, for sale, but beware -- the videos are higher quality than on your typical user-generated site.
Sellers on Zipidee can set their own prices and distribution models via download, subscription, or rental. Zipidee offers DRM software so a seller could, for example, choose to let a buyer rent a video for a specified amount of time.
Zipidee says it gets more than 300,000 visitors per month.
No odd spellings or lengthy domain names??? Comedy.com is yet another new portal for amusing content, launched February 22 this year by the former chief executive of the defunct UPN television network.
The competition in this space is becoming fierce, with 60Frames, FunnyOrDie (see my previous post), ICN MyDamnChannel, and a number of other startups all trying to popularize professionally-produced comedic content.
Here is one from one of our lesser known comedian, Mike Huckabee, the flag bearer of conservative America in this election season. His comments are hilarious in this context!
For my money, FunnyOrDie is still the best. MyDamnChannel is catching up quickly, though. Comedy.com? Not there yet....
Akimbo, a Silicon Valley company that was first in Internet video delivery is back, this time with a complete Internet Video On Demand (VOD) solution for content providers’ own websites.
Akimbo supports multiple business models including ad-supported, transactional, subscription, download-to-own, download-to-burn, pay-per-minute, gift cards, account credits and more.
According to Thomas Frank its president, “One of the most important pieces missing in the stampede to the Internet video market has been an easy solution for content owners to control the marketing and sale of their own video assets, Until now, content owners have been forced to use incomplete solutions or rely entirely on distribution deals to publish professional content. We have engineered a solution that allows content owners to take control of their own destiny without incurring costly infrastructure expenses or unreasonable revenue splits with third parties.”
The first company to utilize Akimbo's solution is MavTV, a multi-platform programming venture targeting male viewers. Check it out and tell me what you think. Or upload your own video. They are always looking for video clips filled with humor and craziness, or even those that are just plain hard-core. (Their definition.)
Submitting your video (or videos) is super easy and fast. Simply follow the step-by-step instructions you'll be rolling like a video superstar. Keep in mind, they only accept the following file formats: .wmv, .asf, .asx, .mpg, .mpeg, .mov, .divx, and don’t send files larger than 5 MB.
Slingbox is a gadget which lets you mirror what's showing on a home TV on a PC or handheld computer. Sling Catcher, announced at CES, works the other way around.
Like the Apple TV or Xbox 360, it lets you play PC-based video on your TV. But it also hooks into Slingboxes, letting you control one TV with another. Sling Catcher will be release “sometimes between” April and June 2008 and sell for $249.
The new "clip and sling" feature in Sling Player 2.0, due by March, could be a copyright nightmare. It lets Slingbox owners grab a chunk of TV programming and publish it to a Web page, operated by Sling Media, where other folks can view it as streaming Flash video.
Sling is hoping to prevent enraging TV networks by offering them chances to make money from the content. If a viewer shares a Jay Leno clip, "imagine presenting to a friend a custom Web page that had branding around it that was NBC and Jay Leno-related, with advertising sold by NBC," said Rich Buchanan, Sling's VP of marketing. Sling won't tack commercials onto the beginnings of clips, he added. “Clip and sling functionality” will start as a beta. Rights holders will be allowed to impose their own restrictions on sharing content, or make content un-shareable, Buchanan said.
Sling Player 2.0 has two other improvements. The software will come with its own electronic program guide, so you won't have to rely on streaming the program guide from your home DVR. It will also have a buffer, much like home DVRs – the buffer size is still being worked out, but for now it's 20 minutes. Sling Player 2.0 will initially be available for Windows XP and Vista, with a Mac version coming later in the year. How much later, Sling Media?
