Media Maze

The feature war with video service companies keeps on going.

Popular streaming video provider Mogulus has released a free desktop broadcasting app called Procaster, designed for use with its service. The feature set looks pretty amazing: it promises to broadcast anything from a web cam or from your screen — or both, side-by-side — with synced audio and no lag in frame rate. There’s also a game broadcasting mode that seems explicitly targeted at World of Warcraft players, and audience interaction features, like live chat, that work automatically with any broadcast.

One big advantage of Procaster is that it’s free, and so is the Mogulus service, so you the startup costs to create your own web show are extremely low. You can browse and play video clips for your audience in real time, as well, which helps if demo’s are part of your plan. If Mogulus’ service and bandwidth can keep up with the potential popularity of Procaster, I see this app becoming a standard tool of the social web trade. It’s only available for Windows right now, but the site says a Mac version is on the way.

OK just some of the options out there, will review others later

Vimeo

Ideal for: Interviews, documentary-style videosFile limits: Up to 500MB total per weekPaid options: Vimeo Plus for $59.95/year
Vimeo is a solid general-purpose host for video storytelling. Geared toward independent filmmakers and producers, its features are a cut above average video sharing sites. It has high-quality playback, HD video uploads and a gorgeous embedded video player that scales smoothly to any size.
The 500MB/week upload limit is unlikely to cause problems if you’re just starting out and only uploading a few videos a week. If your volume does grow beyond that, upgrading to Vimeo Plus is not too costly and comes with some extra perks, such as unlimited HD embedding and more player customization controls.

YouTube

Ideal for: Vlogs, short clipsFile limits: Up to 1GB or 10 minutes per video
YouTube has recently jumped on the HD bandwagon, but that feature is still under development and not guaranteed to work all the time. Instead, YouTube’s greatest strength still lies in hosting vlogs and short clips — the former because its ability to post video responses encourages conversation and the latter because of the potential for such videos to go viral with the site’s huge user base.

Blip.tv

Ideal for: Series, episodic videosFile limits: Up to 1GB per video, but 100MB or less recommendedPaid options: Pro account for $8/month
As the domain suffix suggests, Blip.tv is made for television producers interested in creating shows with online distribution. While it is possible to upload stand-alone videos on Blip.tv, the site really becomes useful when you have a series of episodes around a particular theme (e.g. a weekly movie review, an investigative series, etc.) that you want to publish on a regular basis.
Videos can be syndicated as well as played from an embeddable browser that lists all episodes on the side. A pro account lets you upload longer videos and set a publishing schedule ahead of time.

Seesmic

Ideal for: Interactive video discussions, MOTS/vox pop interviewsFile limits: Unspecified, but ideally under two minutes.
Take the asynchronous interactivity of YouTube’s video responses, combine it with the immediacy of Twitter, and you have Seesmic: the new kid on the block, but already making waves with its potential for innovative uses.
Seesmic comes with the Disqus commenting system, which enables readers to post video comments on your site by recording straight from webcam. You can also get creative and use Seesmic to host a Web 2.0 version of the classic man-on-the-street type of interview — just record your question as the conversation starter and upload your gathered clips as responses. Here’s an example of this in action.

Mogulus/UStream

Ideal for: Live webcasts, streaming eventsFile limits: 500kbps bit rate for streaming, 700MB for video uploads (Mogulus)
With broadband Internet access becoming more widespread, streaming live video over the Web at decent quality is now possible. Consider using live streams to host webcasts (with an expert panel, say) on your site, or to broadcast local events to an online audience.
At this point, two live streaming services are at the head of the pack: Mogulus and UStream. Robin Good at WebTVwire writes about which may be a better fit for you. The short version: Mogulus is good for professional-looking productions involving multiple cameras, titles and graphics, while UStream is the simpler option for rapid launches and impromptu events.

From this weekends edition of the New York Times, even in net savy US its going to be hard to draw paying advertisers, content is also difficult

Could start-up Web sites be an adequate replacement for local newspaper coverage?

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.
The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants.

Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web. But the notion of customized news has taken on greater urgency as some newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing.

The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments. “Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.”

Of course, like traditional media, the hyperlocal sites have to find a way to bring in sufficient revenue to support their business. And so far, they have had only limited success selling ads. Some have shouldered the cost of fielding a sales force to reach mom-and-pop businesses that may know nothing about online advertising.

One problem is that the number of readers for each neighborhood-focused news page is inherently small. “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who has followed the hyperlocal market for a decade. “Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.”

Still, said Peter Krasilovsky, a program director at the Kelsey Group, which studies local media, many small businesses have never advertised outside the local Yellow Pages and are an untapped online ad market whose worth his firm expects to double to $32 billion by 2013.

One of the most ambitious hyperlocal sites is EveryBlock, a six-person start-up in an office building in Chicago overlooking noisy El tracks, which is stitching together this hyperlocal future one city at a time. Backed by a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, it has created sites for 11 American cities, including New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.

It fills those sites with links to news articles and posts from local bloggers, along with data feeds from city governments, with crime reports, restaurant inspections, and notices of road construction and film shoots. (The New York Times has a partnership with EveryBlock to help New York City readers find news about their elected officials.)

One day last week, the EveryBlock page for Adrian Holovaty, the company’s founder, showed that the police had answered a domestic battery call two blocks from his home and that a gourmet sandwich shop four blocks away had failed a city health inspection.
“We have a very liberal definition of what is news. We think it’s something that happens in your neighborhood,” said Mr. Holovaty, 28, who worked at The Washington Post before creating EveryBlock two years ago.

In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups. In the last several years, neighborhood blogs have sprouted across the country, providing the sites with free, ready-made content they can link to. And new tools, like advanced search techniques and cellphones with GPS capability, help the sites figure out which articles to show to which readers in which neighborhoods.

Unlike most hyperlocal start-ups, Patch, based in New York, hires reporters. It was conceived of and bankrolled by Tim Armstrong, the new chief of AOL, after he found a dearth of information online about Riverside, Conn., where he lives. Patch has created sites for three towns in New Jersey and plans to be in dozens by the end of the year.
One journalist in each town travels to school board meetings and coffee shops with a laptop and camera. Patch also solicits content from readers, pulls in articles from other sites and augments it all with event listings, volunteer opportunities, business directories and lists of local information like recycling laws.
“We believe there’s currently a void in the amount, quality and access to information at the community level, a function, unfortunately, of all the major metros suffering and pulling back daily coverage of a lot of communities,” said Jon Brod, co-founder and chief executive of Patch. This month, the home page of The Star-Ledger’s Web site, based in Newark, twice referred to articles first reported by Patch.

Outside.in publishes no original content. The company gathers articles and blog posts and scans them for geographical cues like the name of a restaurant or indicative words like “at” or “near.” An iPhone application lets users read articles about events within a thousand of feet of where they are standing. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, licenses feeds of links to big news sites that want to deepen their local coverage, like that of NBC’s Chicago affiliate.
Venture capital firms have invested $7.5 million in the company, partly on the bet that it can cut deals with newspapers to have their sales forces sell neighborhood-focused ads for print and the Web.
One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts.

That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online.

But many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.
“In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.

(Via .http://www.nytimes.com)

Thought I would post this item from First Ascent Everest showing the flexibility for reporting from regions that was impossible a few years ago, technolgy is off shelf and your probably looking at roughly 25K for setuo with 1 camera. BGAN is starting in NZ this year, if it hasnt already, satellites were limited to Northern Hemipshere hence easy of Everest.

Enjoy

(Via . http://www.firstascentvideo.com/)

An Interview with Spot.us about the changing nature of journalism.
These days, everywhere you look it seems that some newspaper is closing its doors, stopping its presses, or maybe just going online-only. This sea of change is being heralded by some as the "death of journalism," a transformation that has been brought about thanks to the web. But is the web really killing journalism? Or, is it allowing an entirely new type of journalism to emerge?
David Cohn would probably argue it's the latter. For five months now, his crowd-funded journalism project at Spot.us has been providing the means for local reporters to get paid while researching the stories the community wants to read.
At last week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, we had an opportunity to sit down with David and ask him about the project, what's been happening with it, and where he sees it going.
The "Death of Journalism?" Not so fast. We would say that the internet is leading us to the future instead.
About Spot.us
Spot.us is a non-profit startup which distributes the cost of hiring a journalist across a community of people. Based in the San Francisco Bay area, Spot.us has already funded stories where journalists have investigated things like the local police department, poverty issues, and city budgetary issues.
After a story is funded and the final copy is turned in, Spot.us will try to sell the first publishing rights. If that happens, then any money they make goes back to the original donors so they can reinvest in another story. If Spot.us is not able to sell the first publishing rights, they will then release the story under Creative Commons so anyone can publish it.
Spot.us is currently funded through a grant, but they also ask the community to donate an additional $2 when funding a particular story. This money goes to the organization itself and will hopefully allow it to expand to other cities. But, if you don't want to wait for Spot.us to come to your town, you can start your own version instead. The Spot.us code is open source, so you could launch a site like this for your own community.
In the end, what David Cohn hopes to prove is that, indeed, "journalism will survive the death of its institutions." With Spot.us, he shows us that there is another way to keep the industry alive, even after the papers fail.

Events at the G20 summit show that everyone can be a torch-bearer for truth.
The recent G20 riots in London provided further evidence, if any was needed, that a combination of the web, portable technology and citizen journalism is better able to feed us real time news of events as they unfold than even the most professional news teams on the ground. That’s simply because everyone with a mobile has the potential to instantly send texts, twitter messages, photos or even video a matter of moments after newsworthy events unfold. What better statement of its significance than the fact that a number of newspapers are now resorting to the use of services such as Twitterfall, to track for key events occurring in real-time. But perhaps most interesting (and most challenging for governments keen to manage the media message) is that almost everyone can be a witness to these events. Take the tragic death of an innocent bystander at an alleged riot in the city of London, photoed by this growing digital army of amateur newshounds.
This isn't to suggest that this is somehow better than considered journalism and professional prose, but it highlights how the true facts are increasingly hard to hide from public gaze. Whatever the merits of citizen-led news-gathering, this has to be a good thing if it ensures that a true record of events is captured.