Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley

This is a really neat way to display video. Instead editing all three camera angles into one video, they just let them play side-by-side-by-side. I can’t think of a lot of places where it would make sense to display online video this way. But a live performance is definitely one of them. Not only is the experience more immersive, but it mimics how we watch live shows, with our eyes darting around the stage, dwelling on the drummer for a bit, then the singer, then the guitarist.

I received an email from VideoEgg today telling me that they were closing my publisher account. Their FAQ says why:

As you know, resources at technology startups are limited and it is in our best interest to focus on the core of our business at this time….Once [your] video is removed from our servers, embedded video functionality will also be discontinued and a corresponding message will be displayed.

VideoEgg has shifted it business model to emphasize its ad network. None of this matters to me personally, as I never used VideoEgg for anything other than testing. But it’s an important reminder to those content creators who are currently relying on startups or other relatively new companies to host their content. The media landscape is constantly shifting. If the company you’ve partnered with or the service you’re using - Brightcove, Blip.tv, etc. - goes belly up, is sold or changes direction, are you prepared for the effect that will have on your hosted content?

When I moved over from reporter to online editor at the Merc, one of the first things I wanted to do was build a site focused on the local music scene. Alas, because of the many distractions at the Merc, lack of resources, competing demands, etc., it didn’t get done before I left. As the online focus evolved more into video, we began talking about producing a regular series of videos with local bands. The pessimist in me never thought it would happen.

So I’m thrilled to see that the Merc has launched Merc Sessions, video interviews with local bands and musicians. I’ll get the nitpicking out of the way first. I wish the video player was bigger. I wish the interviews and performances were mixed together into one video (the Sound Opinions guys do a great job of this with their audio podcast). And ultimately, this video should live on a much more interactive site where music fans can be part of the conversation with each other and the bands.

But Richard Koci Hernandez is producing the videos with his usual flair. And Shay Quillen is a knowledgeable interviewer. Kudos to them and the others involved. I know how much effort goes into producing shows like these. Here’s hoping my compadres there can keep it going.

There may yet be a smart business strategy behind Yahoo’s rumored purchase of web video company Maven Networks. I’m finding it hard to understand much of anything Yahoo is doing these days, even as I try to root for them. But the Maven deal depresses me a bit. We began using Maven as a video hosting tool in the months before I left the Mercury News (you can see one of the video players on the home page). Try as I might, I just couldn’t come around to liking the service. Having used Brightcove for many months, I kept feeling disappointed in the clunky Maven interface or with the smart little things I could do in Brightcove, but not Maven. Brightcove, for example, has a published API and a relatively robust developer community around it. Maven, to my knowledge, does not. To me, Brightcove, while not perfect, was (and is) a clear leader in this space. If these are the kinds of companies that Yahoo is buying to help swing itself in the other direction, that’s worrisome.

UPDATE:Clearly, I dashed off this post too quickly. The play here for Yahoo seems pretty obvious. Yahoo wants (needs) to extend its ad sales into video, and Maven offers an opportunity to do that, having partnered with several established media companies. But I’d still argue that Brightcove is the better platform and the better buy for Yahoo. Obviously, Yahoo didn’t see it that way.

We’ve been using Brightcove a lot more to publish video (1, 2) at the Merc, and there is so much to like about it. But fer cryin’ out loud, can we please do something about these annoying Flash behaviors. Brightcove’s editing control panel is written entirely in Flash, which means a) if you ever hit the browser’s back button while you’re in the middle of doing something, you go back to the previous web site you were on and lose all your work to that point, and b) you can’t cut and paste into or out of Brightcove when you’re adding descriptions or other meta data to videos. These are relatively minor things in the grand scheme of things, but they can add up to be real productivity killers. Argh.

UPDATE: Brightcove’s Bob Mason points out to me that cut-and-paste works fine in Safari and Firefox on the Mac. I was using Camino, where it does not work. So I stand (mostly) corrected. And kudos to Bob, the company’s CTO, for taking the time out of his busy days to trade emails with me about this.

Lots of people are doing lots of different things with video these days at the Merc, but one that I’m especially excited about is a new show we launched this week. It’s called Inside Silicon Valley, and it’s a weekly video podcast that will feature interviews with the people who make Silicon Valley what it is. (New video site coming soon.)

As the “Newspaper of Silicon Valley,” it’s something we should have done a long time ago, frankly. But it took a while for the resources, people, commitment and everything else to fall into place.

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There’s been a lot of chit-chat lately about the best camera to foist on reporters in this age of reporter video. Many newsrooms seem to like the Casio Exilim. I’ll throw in my vote for the Canon Powershot A570 IS. The “IS” stands for image stabilization, which should come in handy in the field. Plus, the model is very affordable (about $250), and it runs on AA batteries, which means you can do rechargeables or use store-bought batteries in a pinch. For Mac shops, the .avi movie format imports nicely into iMovie or Quicktime. And with Tiger, the videos will even download into iPhoto. I’m already envisioning a very reporter-friendly editing workflow.

Not that we really needed another video codec or anything, but Microsoft made news at the NAB conference this week by talking up its new web video player and video platform, now dubbed Silverlight. Flash, of course, has become the standard web video distribution platform (sorry Quicktime fans). Can Microsoft make any inroads against Flash? Here’s a quick overview, along with a video demo (in Flash, of course) that is worth watching. Sez a Microsoft exec: “Flash has “some video capabilities, and some success in that market.” But Silverlight offers “better video quality than Flash,” while the Expression tools will be “cheaper, faster and better” than Adobe’s offerings.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ideal length of Internet video. At the Gear Media Tech seminar last week in San Francisco, host Alex Lindsay said that he and his Pixelcorps team are aiming to produce shows in the three- to eight-minute range. Conventional wisdom holds that shorter is better because 320×240 web video can’t hold the attention of viewers in the same way as TV. Internally at the Mercury News, almost every discussion about video eventually comes around to length, and the mantra is “shorter is better.”

But I wonder if we aren’t going to quickly revisit this assumption. I believe we are on the cusp of a video revolution that is going to radically alter how we consume video content, and this will affect the type of video we create as well. Read David Pogue’s latest column, on the TiVo, to begin to see where we are headed. The TiVo can now pull in video and audio from a multitude of sources, including podcasts and the web. Says Pogue:

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Video auto reviews are certainly nothing new. Other newspapers, as well as Edmunds and other auotmotive sites, have been doing them for some time. Nonetheless, I like what we’ve started with our autos editor Matt Nauman. We grab Matt and his vehicle du jour, zip down to the local empty office park, and let Matt riff on what he likes and doesn’t like. We’ve done two so far.
We’ve purposely eschewed the B-roll video available from the auto manufacturers, and I think it makes our pieces more useful and authentic. Best of all, these are proving very easy to produce. It takes about an hour to shoot the video (with a $400 consumer camcorder) and another 30-45 minutes to edit in iMovie. We’ll improve the production quality as we go along (better audio and graphics, and maybe even a tripod(!)). And I’m looking for a better video player so we can present the video on our main site. But it’s a start, and further evidence that video doesn’t need to be hard.