A Wider Net

We’re producing a live video webcast about online video techniques? Cosmo Kramer makes a coffee table book about coffee table books and Cramer makes an online video about online video… is it just me or is that, like, really weird? Normally I avoid talking about Cramer’s work here on A Wider Net, but since this blog is all about marketing ideas and technology I figured this was an event our readers would want to hear about.

Developing online video programs for marketing and communications has never been easier, faster, or more confusing. Questions commonly asked include: How do I produce the video? Can I do it myself? How do I get it online? How do my customers find it? How do I measure the success of my online video programs? How do I make it go viral? Should I stick my video up on my website, on YouTube, or on some other network? How do I make it look great for everyone? Should I allow people to use my content on their sites and blogs? How do I build interactivity into my video content?

Do I have to use 8 treadmills or can I get away with one?

To answer some of these questions, check out Best Practices in Online Video: A Platform Approach on June 19, the first in our latest series of live webcasts. But rather than repeat all the details here, let me share a short promo video with you:

For more information and to register, please head over here. If you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see discussed, please feel free to comment on this post.

This USA Today article predicts a tough year for air travel as astronomical oil prices drive up the cost of jet fuel and, of course, ticket prices. With higher tickets, fewer flights, and a total lack of reasonable customer service from most domestic airlines, we can expect a flood of requests for alternatives and augmentations to face-to-face meetings for a while.

We looked at this sort of thing 7 years ago after 9/11. We were able to quickly offer satellite, webcast, webconference, and distributed media solutions (among others) to those companies unable or unwilling to travel. The principal driver this time isn’t a terrorist event but oil prices. Considering how rare and limited a resource oil is, I’m shocked this hasn’t happened sooner. The good news is that we’re all better equipped to augment or replace face to face meetings than ever before. I will be writing about available solutions and techniques in the weeks to come. I welcome your input. Please send your ideas to awidernet at crameronline.com or comment here.

So far my favorite idea for ways to reduce travel is: Everyone walks or bikes to Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts, jacks into the web via wifi using their iPhone 3G (the one that doesn’t exist yet but supposedly has a second camera facing forward for video conferencing), and conducts a face-to-face meeting over Grande Iced Mochas. Whipped cream mustaches will be required for admission.

Steve Jobs’ 2008 Macworld keynote came and went the other day, as did my carefully written post about it. So upset was I, at accidentally overwriting half of it, that I shelved it until today. Ever been there?

Anyhow, I felt that having just written a retrospective comment about last year’s big Macworld revelation, the iPhone, it would seem logical to follow it up with something about this year’s keynote. This year’s keynote had it’s share of major announcements, although none of them quite as significant as the iPhone and none of them were strong enough to keep the stock market from plummeting that day on bad retail news.

Here were the major points from the keynote:

- iPhone and iTouch will get new software. The iPhone gets a free firmware update including a Google-driven mapping system that creates GPS-like functionality without actual GPS hardware in the phone. It works by triangulating the position of the phone from three nearby cell towers. Run out of nearby cell towers, and you run out of functionality for this service. Presumably you will also run out of roads to choose from anyway. The iTouch gets a suite of applications that should have been on the device to begin with including mail. The early adopters get to pay $20 for the update while new buyers get it for free. That’s two slaps in the face to early adopters in a year. Goodness, this brand is teflon.

- Apple TV Take 2 - A new, cheaper version of Apple’s set top movie and TV download-and-player is now able to operate without a Mac. So the price drop from $299 to $229 is actually a price drop from $2299 to $229 - if you count the previously necessary Mac. It also can download podcasts, designed for a 2″ screen, and feed them to your HDTV, maybe a 40-60″ screen. That will be a bit like looking at dust mites under an electron microscope - really nasty when magnified. Kudos to Apple, however - this service has a chance for success with every major studio already on board.

The significance of this product is amplified by the fact that Apple also announced a new laptop (See below) and neither the laptop nor the Apple TV box contain any support for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Apple has quietly yet profoundly declared the high definition optical disc format war, recently claimed over and won by the Blu-Ray camp, totally irrelevant. Downloads are the future. Microsoft was thinking the same thing, as their XBOX movie and TV download service had managed to grow to twice the size of their nearest competitor. This will certainly impact our video production and media authoring plans in the near future. I am very interested to know what the cable TV industry has to say about this product. I suspect they have something cooking.

I am also a little surprised that Apple TV has no user-rating functionality (at least, I don’t think it does). This is a big part of YouTube, and even Blockbuster and Netflix allow users to rate their content. The lack of community and peer recommendation within Apple TV and, for the most part, iTunes continues to disappoint. In fact, it doesn’t even appear to have preference-based recommendation engine like Blockbuster or Amazon. They seem to be completely blind to the process of media discovery by users.

- New Laptop. Easily the biggest news from Steve Jobs was the unveiling of the MacBook Air. An impossibly thin yet technically superior machine, the MacBook Air is as beautiful as it is respectable. It is a green machine (mostly biodegradable or biorenewable), and it is a pricey machine ($1,800-$3,200 ish). While the trend in notebooks has been toward the cheap, Apple and, to a certain extent Sony, have opted to maintain premium models to keep up their brand image.

You can check all this stuff out, and more, at Apple.

The keynote seemed to drain the life out of the whole internet. Everything ran slower. It worried me that all these new iTunes movie rentals are coming through Akamai, the same delivery network we were using to produce a live webcast at the same time as the keynote.

Footnote: The coverage of the keynote was extraordinary. Apple refuses to webcast the event, which is beyond belief. Instead, a legion of live bloggers, twitterers, and phonecam streamers delivered us the news guerilla-style. And it looked bad. Apple should really control the way it looks, and if they can’t keep a lid on it, they may as well broadcast it or allow it to be done right. This blog even listed all the top coverage and updated it in real time with the status, since many went down under pressure. QIK - a beta live phone webcasting system had a few brave souls trying to webcast it live, with very poor results. I still think they’re onto something BIG.

A post from Robert Scoble reminded me to share a vision of our webcasting future: Multisourcing. While his post wasn’t really on this topic, he did describe a moment where, in the middle of what appeared to be yet another boring online press conference with audio and slides, the principles in the company turned on a webcam and continued the conference live on camera. They showed their produce, live, and they took questions openly and without screening. The impact of going to live video was immediately apparent, since so much of the message is contained within the body language of the presenters. Also, their willingness to field questions openly indicates that this is not a press stunt - they have a real innovation to talk about and they’re proud of it.

Bravo to the Intel team, who gave the press conference. Was it necessary to use a handheld camera and an amateur operator? Probably not - you can mix production value and honest delivery and achieve even better results. But the fact that this was a video press conference isn’t what I’m here to talk about.

The fact that they “switched on” the video mid-broadcast, and the fact that it had a casual appearance is what made me think of multisourcing as a topic of discussion. Multisourcing, as it pertains to webcasting and events, refers to bringing in broadcast sources from multiple locations. For example - you could incorporate live video feeds from your CEO in Dallas, your CMO in Seattle, and your EMEA VP of Sales from London.

Traditionally we would have to use either satellite or terrestrial fiber (which you may have heard called Vyvx) to connect video feeds from multiple cities and switch them into a live broadcast. For broadcast television that is still the way it’s done 99% of the time. That’s very expensive. It’s reliable, but crazy costly. Especially when you bring in more than one source and when the distance is greater than 1,000 miles (satellites can only see so far so you may need multiple hops and fiber is billed per mile of transmission). The other option for remote feeds is video conferencing, but getting the right mix of gear on both ends and successfully penetrating firewalls with the connection is, at the very least, a juggling act.

The webcast world has some answers, mostly thanks to Flash video from Adobe (Macrodobedia).

First, flash video servers make it easy to incorporate multiple video streams into your broadcast. You can have a dozen participants anywhere on the internet turn on a standard webcam and become available as sources to your webcast. You can switch them one at a time or, in some cases, show several at once as part of an ongoing conversation - useful for a panel discussion. The quality will not be the same as if you had them all together in a studio with professional equipment. To a certain degree, that’s totally acceptable - especially if there is a high-quality “anchor” broadcast and you are only using the remote feeds to bring in people unable to make it to the central studio. There are a number of companies already doing this including Operator11 and Avacast. Most of the larger webcast platform companies are also working on their flash solutions and this capability is certainly on their roadmap.

Next, there is a relatively new mobile video product from ComVu that allows you to switch between multiple live video streams, some or all of which can be originated from mobile phones, and rebroadcast them to desktops and (you guessed it) mobile phones. This is the ultimate in anytime, anywhere broadcasting, and is especially exciting for the future of remote news gathering. The quality is, well, what you would expect from cameras attached to phones that have been rattling around in people’s pockets along with lint, breath mints, and dirty sexy money. But it’s acceptable for certain circumstances and it will only get better. They’re already where internet video was six years ago - give it time.

There are, I’m sure, other solutions available. I can’t even count the number of times we’ve needed to “bring in” someone in a far away place to webcast or live meeting. And we’re getting increasing numbers of requests for virtual meeting solutions where multiple people, in multiple locations, need to talk to a large group of people all over the place. The future of webcasting will certainly include multisourcing as a standard capability.

I have been working on, in, and around webcasts for seven or eight years now, and I can say with some certainty that webcasts are boring. That’s really saying something, since I actively suggest webcasts as one potential part of a marketing or communications strategy. But to be fair, they’re usually boring. They’re not all boring, and they don’t have to be boring - they just usually are.

The sad thing is, webcasts have long been sold as the answer to boring conference calls. And there are still millions of meetings carried out huddled around a Polycom starfish or some other conference phone. I’ve even conducted conference calls with five people huddled around my cell phone with the speaker turned on. Now THAT’S engaging.

WHY ARE WEBCASTS BORING?

1. PowerPoint. The focal point of most webcasts, webinars, and webconferences is a slide window built in, most likely, PowerPoint. And the vast majority of those presentations suffer from the same ills I discussed in this post. Where PowerPoint can dull the fun in a live meeting, it’s absolutely lethal in a webcast.
2. The Presenter(s). A webcast is a public speaking event. Just because your audience isn’t in the room with you doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you wouldn’t put your presenters in front of a large crowd at a face-to-face event, then don’t put them in a webcast.
3. Looooongggggg. Look to YouTube for the answer to your question about how long your webcast should be. YouTube has stated that the optimal length for their videos is 2 minutes. I’ve seen webcasts range from 5 minutes to 5 hours and without question, the most well-received were under 30 minutes. These days shorter is better. Going back to watch a long webcast using chapters seems to be giving way to shorter presentations and more of them.
4. The Experience. Your audience is at their desk. Your webcast is competing for attention against piles of unfinished work, the phone, coworker interruptions, incoming email and rss feeds, and widget alerts. Asking them to focus on their computer screens can be asking quite a lot. I’ve always thought it would be fun to email the attendees a PDF of a sign that says “Don’t Bother Me- I’m Watching a Webcast!” to hang on the back of their chair or office door, if they are so equipped.
5. Bad Video or Audio. YouTube has lowered the bar for video production standards, but serious webcasts still benefit from real production values - clear, intelligible audio and video that uses multiple cameras, decent lighting, etc.
6. Interactivity. One of the coolest aspects of webcasts and webconferences is interactivity - yet very few webcasts use the interactivity at their disposal. Q&A is only one part - you can push polls and surveys, provide content to explore, and allow users to network with each other. Frankly, it’s amazing that so few webcasts offer any kind of audience networking, discussions, or group opinions.
7. Fun(less). Webcasts are a natural platform for using games to reinforce content and create engaging fun, but they almost never incorporate them. You can push trivia games, bingo, and all kinds of simple flash games - and they can be competitive with the rest of the audience, with a prize reward. Add a game, make it fun - make it memorable.

WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?

Handle more questions: Many long webcasts get long because they handle questions one at a time. With an audience of 500 people asking 1000 questions, a typical webcast gets to 10-20 of them. Instead, you may consider having a team of people answering questions via text that the audience can browse right within the webcast player, at their leisure. That way more people get their questions answered faster.

Get a Moderator: A good moderator can spruce up a webcast better than a coat of paint on an old house. By setting the pace, keeping things moving, and using their talents to keep the energy level up, a professional moderator can make or break a webcast.

“You”: The man of the year, “you”, wants to be involved. Let the audience drive. Q&A and user-driven chapters and interactivity is just part of it. Support Social Media. Companies like Operator11 are building webcast platforms using Adobe Flash that allow any audience member to insert their own videos, live or pre-recorded, into the overall broadcast (under the control of the webcast producer, of course.) Support Social Networking. A webcast audience usually has a lot in common. Let them meet each other and communicate about the topic at hand. Before the webcast, let them tell you what they want to discuss.

Any other ideas on how to improve webcasts are most welcome - especially if anyone has a way to broadcast chocolate.

no… that picture is not of me.

Continuing the topic of extending live events across the web, I thought it may help to list some of the essential elements of live face-to-face meetings and some technology solutions that can be deployed to allow remote audiences to experience those elements. To be clear, I include attendees as remote audiences, because they are only on site for a short while. Before and after the event they are part of the remote audience with everybody else. This is an important distinction because I find that many people assume that online components of an event, such as video archives, are directed exclusively at non-attendees.

Pre-Event

Networking: Social Networking. Examples: BD Metrics, Leverage Software, Ning, Intronetworks

Audience Alignment: Blogging. Examples: Lotusphere

Making a list of things to see: Social Networking and User Rankings. Example: Ning

During the Event

Conference and General Sessions: Webcasts. Examples: InAAU, Demo

Product Demonstrations: Video On Demand. Example: YouTube, Engadget

Team Building: Gaming (online and through kiosks) - couldn’t find an example…

Swag: e-Swag. Examples: Widgets, Desktop Wallpapers, Screensavers, E-certificates

Buying your client drinks: Buy Your Friend a Drink.com

Asking Questions: Webcasts, Webinars, Chat Sessions, Blogging

Post-Event

Measurement: Online polling. Example: Survey Monkey, Zoomerang

Course Credits: Webcasts with CE credits

Memories: Photo Sharing, Video Sharing. Examples: DragonCon on Flickr, DragonCon on YouTube

DEMO, the mighty showcase of startup companies and products, places videos of the product demonstrations on their website. The fact that they do this, fearless of the possibility that it may somehow cannibalize the size or quality of their onsite audience, tells me that they “get it”. These videos make their event even more appealing. You can see firsthand, through the well-produced videos, that the Googles of tomorrow will be first seen by most people at Demo today.

Capturing video of your event used to be a daunting task. Now, it should be as second-nature as booking the hotel. Delivering the video has never been easier, either. DEMO chose to work with Brightcove, the video delivery platform from former Macromedia mastermind Jeremy Allaire. Not only is the Brightcove player a well-engineered feature-rich video player, but they make it easy to syndicate the content and repurpose the content across multiple websites. Like this:

I will admit, however, that it seems a shame that a show that is clearly dedicated to showcasing the cutting edge in technology, has not adopted a more progressive social media approach to their video assets. Specifically, why can’t we rate the videos, or comment on the demos? I would think the stream of comments would be extremely valuable to the companies that worked so hard to produce the demos. Also, I’m very surprised to see that they still make us look through every demo to see what we’re watching - there is no description on the page of what the company makes. So if you’re interested in new social networking pieces, you have to watch ALL of them to find what you’re looking for.

Regardless, there are a TON of exciting demos to see. I’ll try to highlight a few for you, although you can get complete textual descriptions be skimming the headlines over at Mashable - they managed to write about each company just before their product demos went live on the site.

Slidecasting, an elegantly simple method of synchronizing a slide show to an audio file using tools from Slideshare, is the latest in an overabundant array of online slide presentation tools. Now you have more flavors of online PowerPoint presentations than there are flavors of toothpaste at the local supermarket. You’ve got your plain paste, minty gel, tartar control, tartar control gel, tartar control whitening, tartar control whitening gel, tartar control whitening breath-freshening enamel-strengthening paste, tartar control whitening baking soda gingivitis breath-freshing sensitivity spicy cinnamon sparkle pearl, and all natural organic sand mixed with milkweed ooze. Multiply that times the number of brands and you have a full aisle of tubes that all say “do not swallow.”

Oh, wait - this is about PowerPoint presentations. So, like toothpaste, there are loads of options. You have your slide shows, your animated slide shows, and your animated flash embeddable slide shows. You have your slide shows with audio, your slide shows with video, and your slide shows with video, flash animations, Q&A, polling, downloadable white papers, quizzes, interactive games, and audience sleepiness sensors that alert the speaker to be less boring. And then you have degrees of slide show psychosis - presenters who try to use slides as book pages and ask us to read while they talk - a truly annoying form of multitasking.

So, if it isn’t obvious, I’m a little skeptical at yet another me-too slide show tool. In fact, I’m VERY skeptical at another tool coming from Slideshare - a site I never understood. People upload PowerPoint presentations - WITHOUT the audio. I suppose you could design a slide show that stands alone, but most of the presentations I saw on Slideshare were slide stacks from presentations that needed the audio from the presentation to make sense.

But Slidecasting from Slideshare isn’t bad at all. They have created an elegant tool, and a nice embeddable slide show player to go with it. Plus, the community at Slideshare makes it easy for anyone to store and share presentations. This is actually what Podcasting on the iPod should have been. Surprisingly, they do not have a way to export a Slidecast to a video iPod for a Splodcast.

If you have a need for a little multimedia on your blog or if you have some simple presentations you want to archive and distribute, you may give this tool a try. As a sample, see below. I would say this tool is roughly the slide show equivalent of Crest Whitening Expressions Tartar Control Lemon Ice.

Thanks to Gogi for tipping me off to Slideshare

Widget Mania points us to dotSUB - a service that allows you to upload a video, add closed-caption text, then allow other users to translate the original text into any other language. The video becomes available to the masses in the language of their choice. This could also be considered a solution for the hearing impaired.

They certainly aren’t the first company to provide tools that allow us to add captioning, synchronized text, or even language translations, but they are the first solution I’ve seen that allows these translations to be produced by other users - similar to the way the Wikipedia grew. It does, of course, have the same pitfalls as Wikis - the users can place whatever text they want. Most of would never know if they translated “O, Say can you see” into “George Bush is an idiot” in Swahili. But the benefits revealed in this sample video greatly outweigh the risks:

I have not had an opportunity to explore this for corporate use. There would have to be controls over who was allowed to translate and who was allowed to view the content, but if there were, I bet there would be a long line of corporate communications and marketing people happy to meet their localization requirements using a tool like this.

Hooray for Widgets! You just have to love these cute tinkertoys of usefulness.

Yahoo has released Yahoo Widgets 4.0 (you may recall when Yahoo bought the widget system called Konfabulator). New improvements include superior performance and a Vista-like docking system that works on XP computers.

Widgets, a staple of the Macintosh OS and the new Windows Vista, are little applications that can users can select and sprinkle around their desktop or join together into a little tool conglomerate. They perform all kinds of functions ranging from the silly (cartoons-of-the-day, vote for best buns) to the useful (news feeds, alerts, information displays, calculators, sharing tools). Why am I getting this feeling of Deja Vu?
Recently we’ve seen a surge in branded widgets made to promote a service, like Priceline, or a product, like an upcoming movie or album. They provide useful functionality in return for a consistent place on your desktop. These are the electronic equivalents of a stapler branded “Remember to drink Coke at lunch” sitting your real world desk.

Some branded applications go beyond the mere “widget” and are called BDA’s or Branded Desktop Applications - but that’s another post for another day.

Yahoo Widgets - who says OS X and Vista should have all the fun?

Thanks again to Techcrunch for highlighting this release for us.