Now, this is an interesting twist - I wish I'd though of it!
The Talk Market, (in beta...) is in the process of creating a video-based marketplace, where you, as a seller, can upload and customize your own informercials. Shoot a video of what you’re selling, then use Talk Market's free tools make them look like the "real thing" from QVC, only better and funnier.
Graphics! Animation! Music!
You can preview and download free soundtracks, customized motion graphics, and animations to give your videos that extra cool vibe. If you create your own soundtrack or animation, you can also share it with The Talk Market community. Should they catch on, you might be able to make a nice little side business providing custom clips. Who knows?
The company is financed by no other than Amazon. Now this is my second posting in a row about them -- amazing! Are we witnessing a stealthy takeover of the internet by no other then Amazon???
Not surprisingly, they use Amazon's Flexible Payment service, providing you with a free (but mandatory) Amazon Payments Business accounts. The upside, of course, is the exposure you get to the 60+ million existing Amazon users, who can easily make purchases with the credit cards they already have on file.
Does this look like a win-win for you and Amazon? Or just Amazon? Let me know!
If you’re a filmmaker or screenwriter, now you can submit your work to festivals and competitions worldwide, quickly, easily, and economically. Only pay the entry fee. Everything else is free, like creating your Projects and Online Press Kits.
Order professional industry screeners
You can also order professional industry screeners to be shipped on-demand with your submission.
Build your audience
Withoutabox brings filmmakers, film festivals, and other industry players together in the ultimate business and social network. Participate and help grow it to build your reach.
Promote
Create and manage your complete Online Press Kit, with media-rich trailers, photos, bios, reviews, and more. Fully integrated with Filmsubmission and Audience. Also includes express syndication to Google Video.
Distribute
As a Rightsholder, you don't need to get permission from the big studios anymore. Withoutabox is opening channels to support direct distribution via Theatrical, Broadcast, DVD, VOD, Mobile, and more. The ultimate in Do-It-Yourself distribution? we'll see.
Pre-sell tickets!
Soon (how soon?) filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors will be able book theaters and guarantee a profit before their film releases. With the patent-pending Critical Mass Ticketing, the show goes on when the audience demands it. You can even use Critical Mass Ticketing to arrange travel to your favorite festivals. How COOL is this???
Expose your film to Film Finders
Access premium rights tracking and personalized consulting worldwide. Since 1988, Film Finders has helped studios, producers, distributors, international sales agents, governments, and film festival programmers to represent and acquire feature films.
Experiment
If that’s not enough -- and if have any time left -- experiment with the cutting edge of new world distribution. Withoutabox is seeking intrepid filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors who are eager to find new paths to profit through technology and innovation. Are you one of them?
Musion Eyeliner is a one-of-a-kind (at least for now) high-definition video holographic projection system enabling spectacular freeform 3D holographic effects to be projected within a live stage setting using “Peppers Ghost” technology. (Don’t you just love these names people come up for really geeky stuff, to grab and keep your attention?)
More to the point, “Peppers Ghost” produces images of such high resolution and quality that make them feel unmistakably real, which is what happened when Gorillaz & Madonna performed the opening number at the recent Grammy Awards.
Musion Eyeliner is an open system that uses a specially developed foil in reflecting images from high-definition video projectors, making it possible to show virtual images of variable sizes and distinct clarity created using a proprietary software.
Dimensional Studios has amazed both clients and audiences not only with the uniqueness of the Musion Eyeliner Holographic Projection system, but its simplicity, practicality, and set-up.
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.
I’m avidly following CoolIris’s progression of its PicLens technology, I first wrote about in this posting quite recently.
To recap, PicLens, installed in your browser, enables you to enjoy online media in full-screen, 3D. Without the plugin, you still get a filmstrip-style presentation, that mimics the full-screen mode. See for yourself:
Let Your Site Visitors Enjoy Rich Media
Courtesy of the free Web Publisher available for both the Mac and Windows, your website visitors can now all enjoy full-screen PicLens slideshows. You can create a full-screen, immersive slideshow gallery for your website in only two steps:
Step 1. Select the images you'd like to include in the PicLens slideshow.
Step 2. You're done! PicLens Publisher will take care of the rest. It will create a sample HTML gallery of your images and their thumbnails that's ready to publish to your website.
Get the "Wow" factor by:
1. Easily creating immersive slideshows for all visitors 2. Generating the Media RSS, HTML, and JavaScript you need 3. Editing the generated code to add audio, video, and even your logo. 4. By supporting Media RSS and Media Binding Format (MBF)
NOTE: Adobe Flash 9.0.28 or higher or the free PicLens plugin is required to enjoy the full immersive slideshow experience of PicLens Lite.
Want to Get Even More "Wow"?
Visit the Webmaster's Guide to learn how to add audio and video, and fully customize the power of PicLens and PicLens Lite for your website. Count on at least one more posting, where I plan to demo a new site using PicLens!
This the first product that allows subscribers to have movies and TV shows from the Netflix's Instant Viewing feature (aka "Watch-It-Now" I mentioned in my previous post) to be streamed directly to their TV screen. Previously, Instant Viewing was available only to PC users through the Internet Explorer browser.
You can access about 8,000 titles as of now.
I've been playing with the Netflix Player for about two weeks. For the most part there is a lot to like.
If you are looking for HD video quality and the polished interface of Apple TV or Vudu, you will be disappointed. This player is strictly barebones--you're not intended to do anything more than just dive in and watch the movies and TV shows you've already queued up via your online Netflix account.
That said, the Netflix Player has a major trump card in terms of price: it retails for $100, and delivers unlimited streaming to any Netflix subscriber on the $8.95 plan or above.
For the time being, Roku's affordable box is the only Netflix hardware on the market. However, Netflix has reaffirmed that three other hardware partners are scheduled to release competing products by year's end.
What do you think: is the Netflix Player a game-changing product that bests Apple TV?
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?
