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- Best documentaries of 2008December 31 2008
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Third Place - Man on Wire. In 1974 Philippe Petit defies police, gravity and all concerns of self-preservation to spend 45 minutes dancing on a wire suspended between the twin towers of the WTC. All accomplished with the unstinting support of his childhood sweetheart and a coterie of devoted friends. Task accomplished Philippe promptly abandons the amis who have supported him through the years and years of preparations. Rather than celebrating with his collaborateurs Phillippe slinks off to party in the boudoir of a NY socialte/groupie. “It was bee-yoo-ti-ful” he explains.
Standout character was the NY City insurance commissioner who provided the team with fake IDs to enter the WTC. A truly strange character, who calls to mind an image of what Frank Zappa might have looked like if he’d chosen to be a pimp rather than a musician. (more…)
- Who let the big dogs out?December 31 2008
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While US newspaper industry continues it’s foolish game of footsie matching 4th rate video content with the “people previously known as the audience”, the people previously known as the newsmakers are joining the people previously known as the advertisers in taking matters into their own hands.
Corporate marketers now spend over 2 thirds of their online ad budgets on their own websites. 2008 will go down as the year that everyone from high school sports teams, ski areas, police departments, airports learned that they could distribute content without middlemen.
Now the Israeli Defence force has jumped on the bandwagon, they have launched a channel on YouTube to show their side of the attacks on the Gaza strip, no middleman needed.
2009 is going top be a landmark year for savvy video producers and in house media mavens. If current trends continue over 90% of corporations will be producing video by the end of the year.
[UPDATE] Media consultant Terry Heaton picks
- Ideal length for web videoDecember 13 2008
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“For a two-week period, we measured viewed-seconds for a sample of 188,055 videos, totaling 22,724,606 streams, on six top video sites (due to partnership limitations, we cannot disclose which sites). Limitations of this approach include the fact that we are only studying short-form content….YouTube was not included (although many of the videos in the sample mirror identical videos on YouTube).“tubemogul
Nothing too surprising about the numbers. They seem to support the notion that “shorter videos work better on the web”. But that conclusion depends on us using a metric that is based upon “complete views”. If we count only viewers who watch the entire video then a shorter video will always have “more viewers”. To retain even half the viewers the video has to be under a minute - 30 seconds would be even better.
But supposing we add another metric - say “minutes watched”.
Going from the chart:
1000 people
- Passionate productions - video that worksDecember 12 2008
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A few month’s back I mentioned that a low budget documentary from Passionate Productions seemed set to transform the world of dog-breeding.Today the cause received a major boost: The BBC announced it will not be showing the Crufts dog show next year, for the first time in 40 years. Despite regularly drawing 12 million viewers, the Kennel Club has so far been unable to interest any other major UK network. (more…)
- Bad week for user-generated videoNovember 18 2008
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AOL, current.tv. Brightcove and Youtube jump ship.
[UPDATE 12/2] Expect the stampede away from user-generated video to accelerate: According to he IAB’s Randall Rothenberg in this week’s Economist user-generated content is a major obstacle to monetization:
The lesson appears to be that the problem was not the format but the fact that so much of the footage online, especially on YouTube, is “user-generated”. Brands are wary of putting their ads next to amateur clips because they may be boring or offensive.” via onlinevideowatch (more…)