video

Why Twitter is right not to launch a video service

October 12, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Reports by the Telegraph of an official Twitter video service have since been denied – and it’s definitely the right decision.

Video services have seen tremendous growth – but very few have made any money. Look at the example of Youtube, and the huge risks in terms of the costs of providing a video service, versus the potential ability to profit from it without a lot of hard work.

And how many video companies have either disappeared, or, in the most appropriate example, changed direction significantly – Seesmic was purely a video service before moving into the Twitter client arena.

And when Biz Stone replied to Mashable’s enquiries, it made it clear:

‘Haven’t read the piece but no video hosting. 140 characters of text including spaces. You know the drill!’

Start the week with a great guide to multimedia journalism

September 7, 2009 By Dan Thornton

There are increasing numbers of journalists and bloggers utilising every channel in multimedia to convey their stories and information, but whether you’re contemplating starting to embrace digital multimedia, or you’ve engaged in mixing text, audio, video etc for a while, you’re bound to pick up at least a couple of new tools and ideas from Mindy McAdam’s Reporters Guide to Multimedia Profiency.

It’s the single PDF compilation of her 15 excellent blog posts on the subject.

And worth reading if you’re publishing anything online, whether or not you’d define yourself as a journalist or editorial staff.

Former colleague (although we never met in person), Adam Westbrook has also been doing some brilliant guides to using multimedia and video.

And for interesting inspiration, I tend to look at Christian Payne, and spend some spare time trying to persuade friend and former colleague Angus Farquhar to spend more time doing crazy stuff and blogging about it.

BBC reminds me of two elements of consumer satisfaction

August 17, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’m a big fan of much of the work the BBC does online, and in general it does a very good job of providing a massive amount of content in a fairly logical manner.

But using the site as a consumer with a couple of urgent needs highlighted a couple of things which I think are good lessons for any website:

Multi-channel delivery:

I’m a huge fan of the BBC iPlayer, and the fact it allows me to watch good quality online and on-demand television. So on Sunday morning, I rushed to watch Match of the Day, having missed it on Saturday night (and with the Absolute Radio Fantasy Football game meaning I need to pay extra attention to every team this year!).

But the listing was greyed out – and with no reason given, I had to presume it was down to the licensing rights for the Premier League.

So it was a bit weird to be looking for something else a bit later, and stumble across it in the sport section! (Flaw here was attempting to browse my way to it, rather than using the site or Google search.)

The lesson: If you’re putting out content through two difference channels for whatever reason, then link between them! And always try to explain why someone can’t access something if they might logically think they should.

Reassurance:

The BBC carries a lot of event coverage, particularly in areas such as music, and especially sport. For example, it’s great to be able to watch the MotoGP series via the BBC, and also great to be able to see the full list of races (125 and 250cc) online, as my TV set-up seems to struggle with the Red Button Freeview channels.

But although it’s nice to see everything go live at the same time, as if a single switch somewhere brings everything to life, unless you’ve got Freeview and the website running at the same time, it isn’t that impressive. And the fact the online feed wasn’t listed from the MotoGP page of the Sport section until the video went live two minutes after the listed time meant that I probably wasn’t the only one frantically refreshing the page to see if it would appear or if there was a problem.

The lesson: If you’re covering an event that starts at a specific time, why not have a page and link ready and live in advance, which can provide a bit of reassurance for internet users? That way, we can relax knowing that everything will go live at noon, for example, rather than worrying that there’s a technical fault with 1 minute to go. Whatever happens afterwards, we’re already stressed and less likely to enjoy and appreciate your hard work!

I’m still a huge fan of the BBC, and there are hundreds of sites which could have been used for the same points – the reason it stood out for me was that I was a completely powerless consumer. Reinforcing the final lesson – always look at your website as a consumer trying to achieve something.

Twitter is the best source for users to engage with video

August 4, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Twitter seems to be the best source of traffic for online videos, according to a new report from online video service Tubemogul (Found via Mike Arauz).

The average time spent viewing a number of 6,763,690 video streams linked from Digg, Facebook and Twitter, from six top video sites, showed Twitter users spending 1:58 minutes watching, compared to 1:14 from Facebook and 0:58 for Digg.

As Tubemogul point out, Twitter allows one-sided (asynchronous) following, and therefore you can filter your incoming noise more effectively than Facebook or Digg.

But as Mike adds:

‘a network of relationships built primarily on information shared, and only secondarily on personal relationships to the other people, is a more potent information sharing network’

And I think he has a very strong point – I’m connected to family and friends on Facebook that I might have a lot of love and affection for, but it’s balanced by a constant stream of invitations to install apps I’d never touch etc.

But in general the Twitter users I follow are people whose interests are of a relevant interest to mine, and are far more likely to post things I’d like. (Speaking of things I like, Mike’s got a very effective visual way of posting which I definitely recommend).

Share videos on Twitter with twitvid

July 15, 2009 By Dan Thornton

If you want to go beyond sharing text, pictures or audio on Twitter, you can not only share videos with Twitvid, but even upload from your iPhone 3GS with their new mobile application.

That’s in addition to their earlier integration into popular iPhone Twitter app Twitterfon.

Alternatively the site itself allow you to upload a video file or capture your webcam, tag people, tweet it, and also send to Youtube at the same time.

There’s also an API available.