What the Proliferation of Video on News Sites is Telling Us

The quality of video streaming on the web is improving on a weekly basis.  Watching the election results last night was almost like watching live TV.   A few glitches and halts, but on the whole I turned the TV off, yet I felt like I was watching it on my computer.  I bounced around between various network newscasts and found that it was easy to watch the election highlights on the net.  This morning I watched highlights of Tim Russert's appearance on TODAY (they are getting better at the cross promotion stuff) and then listened to a series of stories about the flooding in Myamar/Burma.  The news business has been tinkering with their video models for years, but they are are finally getting it right as delivery becomes fast and seemless.  Also note the ads on the NBC site that run as pre-rolls to the actual news pieces.  The ad is actually a combination of a print ad (with a more info button) and a video commercial.  Quite a package for advertisers.

So what all of this tells us is that the newscast format is alive and well on the web, and that there is no reason that it cannot be applied to numerous storytelling applications for clients.    A newscast (or some version of it) doesn’t have to cost a lot, and it can stay on top of the changing communications and marketing needs of clients.   No pun intended, but this is a communications tsunami looming, and the sooner clients get on board, the more ahead of the curve they will find themselves.

TV Thoughts on the Masters

In the days of high production values, it's nice to see that the Masters golf tournament -- using simple, elegant , 'old school' production values -- is still of  one of the great golf tournaments in the game...  and a lot of fun to watch.    It's something you see a lot in this blog, the strength of story argument.   What CBS is doing in its Masters coverage is telling great stories of golf past and present.    Not unlike Olympics coverage, it's focusing on the people, the competitors.

In many situations, fancy production values, with high tech graphics and booming music tracks (the superbowl school) can overwhelm a commercial or marketing film and become almost larger than then the underlying messaging of the video.  The big production can also be a sign that a simple story had not or would not work (either for the client or for the marketing messaging).  That's not to say there are not good reasons to go the 'sensational' route -- trade show booths meant to attact customer traffic or spashy sexy ads meant to draw attention to a new product.

It's all part of same message we see in many businesses -- KISS - keep it simple stupid! 

the web show -- QuarterLife.com

This was taken from my former blog on blogger.com and was posted....

 

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

QuarterLife.com

watched this new web show brought to us by the boys from thirysomething yet?

looks like tv on the web, with a weak pretend blog tie-in that seems like artifice. the production values are good, story is not bad but the credits at the end... i counted almost 80 seconds of them in an eight minute piece.... seems like that part of tv, all those people working on a web show, is overkill.

that being said i'm watching more and i look forwad to seeing where they go.

is it creative? yes. will it work? maybe? will these web guys stay in the web game? doubt it, the money's still in tv, but we're all watching and hoping there might be some kind of business model here that works because there are a lot of eager young filmmakers from those weeks out of film school to those still waiting on tables in hollyweird at age 40.

the herskovitz zwick team liked this model because of minimal network interference allowing them to deliver their idea with few barriers, but how long will that last?

Posted by ProducerBoy at 7:02 PM 0 comments

Labels: 30 something, bad, creative process, creativity, film school, filmmakers, good, herskovitz, hollywood, network, quarterlife, questions, television, thirtysomething, tv, web

 

POSTLOG:  The show now runs on NBC.   This was a strange coincidence of timing... the writer strike this fall left the networks with a lack of programming.  Enter this new web program with all the production values of tv, and producers with a tv track record.  In Hollywood, that means you got a deal! 

the Story is King

This was excerpted from another blog I used to write on blogger, and was posted

 

Friday, October 26, 2007

the Story is King

Telling believable, real, relatable stories is the key to all great film and videomaking. This Blog centers on creativity and thought process that goes into making great moving pictures.
let's start with a video for MIT... simple, elegant, well designed with a crisp simple music track driving the stories.
http://thehumanfactor.mit.edu/indexFlash.html

what's not to like here. it's well lit, it doesn't try to do too much and it has students at MIT as the stars. it's hard to miss the final point here..... the students are smart and they are what it's all about.

too many stories got all caught up in the creative devices, yet they forget the story they are telling. In moving pictures the story and its development is KING. Let the king rule and don't let other things stand in its way.

 

Home Editing for the web

 The category of professional editing systems was once dominated by one player - Avid.  Today, it's a war between Avid and Apple's platform with new entrants nibbling away at the edges --  Sony and Adobe.  For those looking to do some basic editing for home videos or postings on the web Avid's VideoSpin is worth a look, it's free and it contains someof the features found in Avid's Pinnacle editing system.  iMovie and Blender also have offerings.  Here's a link to more info on editing software....

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/01/free-video-editing-software-for.html

 What's interesting about Apple's platform is that the company is making huge inroads in the edit space yet many experts say the real end game is about box (computer) sales not the software.