The flip side of the quarterlife flop

Articles have reported that quarterlife, the online episodic that NBC licensed for television broadcast, was deemed unsuccessful when it attracted something like three million viewers on Tuesday night. In terms of broadcast television economics, that’s considered a failure, but there are a number of factors here, not the least is that it was set it up for failure from the start. But failure in broadcast does not mean the show itself is a failure, which by internet standards is quite successful in terms of the vibrancy of its online community which is evolving nicely.
Read more

Viva La Difference: mixing media formats with Final Cut Pro 6

Having to render any media that does not match the format of the sequence is a problem that has plagued Final Cut Pro versions 1 through 5. With Version 6 (bundled with Final Cut Studio 2, no longer available as a stand-alone application) this problem has gone away. Version 6 of Final Cut Pro introduced the ability to mix video formats on the timeline, a long awaited feature that was the source of lots of teasing from the Avid snobs.
Read more

coBRANDiT at the North American International Auto Show

There’s a change in the wind and I was impressed how GM invited a variety of bloggers to attend the press days of the 2008 North American International Auto Show. I was there shooting video and conducting interviews for coBRANDiT. Owen Mack also shot video. Ryan Eichler of Weber Shandwick did a magnificent job helping me find bloggers and GM execs for the interviews. coBRANDit put together this widget of the videos they produced. Most of the videos were edited by Jessse Buckley and Owen Mack, I edited the “Intro” and “E85″ stories. The pieces are examples of minimalist run-and-gun production, but more importantly, they are examples how “tiny media” can cover an event from a different perspective. Photo of Brian Dooley (HummerGuy.net).

Kaltura: Wiki meets YouTube by way of Yochai Benkler

One of the most interesting presentations at the Web Video Summit today was Shay David, Chief Technology Officer of Kaltura, talking about their business, which they summarize in one phrase as “Wiki meets YouTube.”

Their site provide a set of tools that allows groups of users to collaborate online in the creation and remixing of rich media. They are capturing the synergy between two macro trends, peer production and video sharing. Kaltura offers an SDK and is engaging partners to build collaborative video authoring capabilities into their sites. Among their goals is to build the largest network of remixable materials. I think this would be of interest to video journalists, documentary filmmakers, and mission based organizations. I also find it very interesting that Shay is inspired by the ideas of shared cultural production which have been eloquently articulated by Yochai Benkler.