If you've not seen it yet, CNN anchor Kyra Phillips got caught in a pretty embarassing position yesterday when she went to the bathroom during a live press conference featuring President Bush, and had her wireless microphone left on by an audio engineer. Her conversation with an unknown female, including some rather derogatory comments about her sister-in-law, went out live on air.

Presenters typically switch off their mics when they take a 'break', if only so crew members can't listen in to their conversations, but in this case clearly she forgot.

Video link here. Transcript here.

Posted by Alx Klive at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Philips has developed a system that can scan video files, comparing them to a database, in order to identify copyright infringing material, among other uses. This is similar to how music fingerprint service Shazam works.

Clearly there is interest among the more conscientious video sharing sites to automate this process, if only to stem the tide of work being generated by complaints from copyright holders. Just yesterday for instance, Microsoft acknowledged that it had asked YouTube to remove the Ricky Gervais Microsoft training video from its system, a video featured on the WorldTV charts. (At the time of writing it is still available on Google Video).

The challenge with these systems is being resilient to situations where the content is significantly altered, for instance adding a logo, re-encoding with a much lower quality compression scheme, cropping, etc. It's much easier to identify music, because music still has to sound the same to the end user, and there is less data to process, whereas video can be put into black and white, sytlized, have noise added, etc, without really affecting the user experience.

Philips claim the system can overcome these challenges and is pushing it as a solution to copyright infringement on video sharing sites and P2P networks. They also suggest that it can be used within broadcast environments for remote triggering of advertisement inserts etc. I can think of several other applications including media monitoring for businesses, video library organization, security applications and automated billing for stock footage usage.

No system like this is perfect, but it doesn't need to be. If it can flag content for manual review with just an 80 or 90% success rate, that makes a huge difference to labour costs. If it gains sufficient traction however, and is used on a wide range of sites, it will undoubtedly come under substantial attack from those wishing to subvert it.

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I finally got fed up with the way Google's Top 100 Video chart changes so little from week to week. I was finding when I used the charts myself, that if I saw the same videos in the charts as last week (e.g. Shakira Spoof etc), I wouldn't even bother with the rest of the video clips in that section.

So I've implemented a new filter that means Google's chart will always be fresh each week. No video can appear twice. This is better for viewers I think, and addresses the issues with Google's current chart algorithm.

The other charts do this phenomenon naturally, so this means the charts page will always be filled to the brim with new videos each week.

Posted by Alx Klive at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's now more than 100 video sharing websites, including the ubiquitous YouTube.

The popular format for presenting videos these days is Flash video. It's fast, it requires no installation for most people, and it allows site owners to build their own control interfaces (play, rewind etc) easily.

But a common complaint levelled at current video sites is one of poor picture quality. Although the video quality actually has nothing to do with Flash itself (if you don't believe me check out this demo), at least one company believes the answer to poor picture quality is... another video format.

Now normally this is about as far as I would get with this story, but the protagonist in this thriller is someone pretty special.

Enter DivX, the video compression format widely used for file sharing on Bittorrent. The eponymous San Diego based company is clearly feeling the heat a little bit with the success of browser-based video, and wants to do something about it.

They have decided quite astutely to launch their own video sharing site, making use of the DivX system. The proposition is an interesting one simply because of who they are. DivX is legendary, so much so, that more than 1250 consumer DVD players have the ability to play back DivX video.

Trying out the new service, which requires installing a free browser plug in, results in admittedly very high quality video, and there are a growing number of high quality clips available, including the infamous Dancing around the World video, brought up to date for 2006.

It will remain to be seen how successful this endeavour is, and I would certainly not dismiss their chances out of hand. DivX has a very good image among savvy Internet users, and the ability to download clips and play them on a DVD player is a definite plus. But I can't help but think that Jo Internet user does not want to install any more plugins, and will simply revert to YouTube as soon as they get that 'click here to download plugin' message.

Industry people have a tendency to overestimate people's strength of feelings about high technical quality - look at the continued abundance of AM radio for instance. But if DivX can attract enough exclusive content and traction, they may just pull it off.

Bear in mind that every video sharing site using Flash, including YouTube, can up the quality level at any time, if only they can sort out their bandwidth headaches...

While on the subject, and in the interest of completeness, two other sites going after the high quality video market are the just-now-launching Dovetail.tv, and the excellently named Instant Media.

Via GigaOM

Posted by Alx Klive at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

High resolution film footage of the original Apollo 11 moon landing, never before seen by the public, has surfaced in an Australian's personal film collection. The collection belongs to Peter Clifton, a rock video director who made films and videos for Pink Floyd.

It turns out the footage we all know was recorded off a TV screen by a video camera. In other words, the quality is way below what was on the original recording.

NASA has lost the original recordings in a maze of government archives. The footage found by Peter Clifton is expected to lead to the discovery of the originals.

More info here.

Posted by Alx Klive at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new development over at YouTube sees Paris Hilton with her own custom branded channel. This is the first of what is expected to be many deals with artists and other commercial entities wishing to exploit the YouTube phenomenon.

What does Paris get? Well she gets her own page that is a lot snazzier than other YouTube users, and advertisers like Fox get the knowledge that they are supporting a page guaranteed not to have any 'dodgy' material on it. How the advertising is split between YouTube and her record company, we'll probably never know.

The page itself smacks squarely of MySpace, clearly no one is wishing to reinvent the wheel here. This should be an interesting development to watch...

Posted by Alx Klive at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fellow London blogger Asi Sharabi has put together an analysis of the types of videos most watched on YouTube. He breaks them down into categories like music videos, commercial promos, user generated content.

His focus is on user generated content, and he calculates that 86% of the most watched videos on YouTube in July are UGC. But I have to completely disagree with his definition of what is user generated content.

He defines it as follows...

As I see it, everything that has been uploaded without commercial / marketing / promotional purpose in mind is UGC. That includes clips that were on TV, movies etc and for some reason been uploaded to YouTube, like sports great moments, or a bit from Paris Hilton TV Show.

Now as someone who has been championing user generated content since the 90's, I must take issue with this definition. How can clips that have been ripped directly from TV or a movie, and uploaded without any changes be considered user generated content?

Over on vcritic, he explains his thinking further...

Isn’t organising, recommending, rating or linking etc., in essence creating content? So we have user generated content and user organised content and user distributed content….people are content!

Well... yes, in a way. Recommending, rating or linking to content is in itself content, but it's not the actual video content itself. A person who finds a good bit of video, and uploads it to YouTube is categorically not the creator of that content. If it were anything else, anybody who ever used Napster or Limewire or Kazaa to share an MP3 with others, could claim they were the creator of that Eminiem, Green Day or Metallica track. On the contrary, that person is simply the uploader, the researcher, the critic if you like.

Asi does go on to concede...

So, surely there are different levels of UGC and there is a big difference between uploading a 30sec clip from your favourite show to producing/directing/acting/editing/mash-uping a 5min video, but the way i see it, they are just the different end of the same UGC line.

He goes on to say however...

If someone bothered to cut and upload a beautiful goal, 9/11 dreadful moments, spoiled Paris, a classic scene from a movie etc. with the inttention of sharing it with the world then this is user generated content for me - as long as there is an individual (or peers) user/s on the other side that has uploaded the content without any marketing/profit intentions.

The issue of marketing or profit intentions is interesting, but I would suggest that User Generated Content CAN have profit or marketing intentions. Why the %$#! not? Isn't that the whole plan?? Aren't we all heading (and perhaps hoping?) for a place where talented user's can create content, make money out of it, and stick it to the man???

Phew!

I like Asi's blog, and I like his intentions, but I can't help but feel his definitions need some tweaking. It is misleading to suggest that 86% of the most watched videos on YouTube last month were user generated content, when many of those were simply direct copies off TV shows, movies etc.

I would be remiss not to finish this piece without of course my own definition of UGC... Anything else would be uncivilized.

In my opinion, user generated content is anything produced or remixed substantially by a user. It can contain content from other sources, just like music producers sample segments from records, it can even have all its content come from other places, just like TV show producers source material from stock libraries. But it must be sufficiently mashed up, edited, remixed, changed, or had significant value added to truly be called user generated content.

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

With all the hype about the current movie "Snakes on a Plane", I thought I'd pass on this real life story.

On August 25th 2003, passengers on a British Airways flight travelling from Heathrow to Cairo, were terrified to see a real live snake slitthering around in their cabin. There was a mild panic as crew members tried to capture the snake and calm down worried passengers. The snake was ultimately captured and its owners - a group of passengers travelling under diplomatic immunity - fessed up that the snake was theirs. The plane carried on towards Cairo, and the snake and its owners were ultimately re-united.

This scan is the telex (telex??) sent between airline staff discussing the incident. It's quite amusing.

It reads...

ATTENTION ALL / (NAME WITHELD) CUSTOMER SERVICE SUPERVISORS CAIRO
RE SNAKE INCIDENT FOR BA155 / 25AUG KINDLY FIND THE FOLLOWING:

CABIN SERVICES DIRECTOR INFORMS ME THAT THERE IS 6 PASSENGERS IN BUSINESS CLASS AFFECTED BY THE SIGHT OF SNAKE BUT THEY ARE OK NOW.

PASSENGERS NAME AND ADDRESS AS FOLLOWS: (WITHELD)

ALL AFFECTED PASSENGERS MET AND ASSISTED AT AIRCRAFT AND PASSENGER RECEIVED HIS SNAKE FROM THE CABIN SERVICES DIRECTOR AT THE END OF THE FLIGHT.

CAPTAIN ISSUED AIR SAFETY REPORT WITH WHOLE INCIDENT.

THANKS AND BEST REGARDS.

Posted by Alx Klive at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On 30 September, 1929, the world's first television broadcast took place. It was an experimental transmission by the BBC, and it lasted for only two minutes. There was no sound, which was broadcast later, but John Logie Baird, the inventor, was very pleased to know that at last, a real television transmission had taken place - even though only 29 television receivers were in existence. A crude, 30-line experimental system was used for tests three years later, but in 1936, television broadcasting began in earnest. The BBC, using a 405-line system, had begun regular transmissions. But there were still only about 400 receivers, and even they had to be used within 30 miles of the transmitter.

Today, television has become part of the lives of people the world over. In Britain alone, the average television set is turned on for more than five hours each day.

It is a miracle of electronic engineering, invented by a series of men over a period of almost a hundred years. A century ago, there was no television, no radio. Although the art of photography was in its early stages, there was no cinema, although the telephone and the talking machine had just appeared on the scene. The transformation of that scene in one hundred years has been truly miraculous. And what of the future? How will television develop? It seems likely that the television of the future will probably be piped by cable into our homes. It will probably have a very large screen, and we shall almost certainly posess our own video-tape machine for showing programmes at will.

These words come from the introduction to a book called 'See Inside a Television Studio' by George Beal and R. J. Unstead. Written in 1977, this book, more than any other, was the inspiration for me to work in television.

I just received an old copy of it, after my original was regretfully destroyed in a flood a few years back. Flipping through it again was a step back in time for me, and filled me with the same hopes, dreams and aspirations, as it did 30 years ago.

This book is long since out of print, but hopefully the authors will somehow find this, and consider getting in touch. I would love to post more content from the book, and perhaps even scan in some of the superb illustrations, sketched by artists John Berry and John Marshall. So transformative for me was this book, I believe it could have the same effect, even now, on current broadcasting students, and historians of TV.

I would like to add the book to the archives of the WorldTV University, a free and open repository of educational content and self-study courses, for anyone wishing to learn more about the process of creating television.

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Been delayed with this, but am still getting jiggy with blogosphere memes.

Basically a big thank you to all the above mentioned blogs for linking and/or reviewing the Internet TV Charts. I'm still a relative newbie to the blogging scene, and it's refreshing and rewarding to find such well respected blogs, willing to provide some link love.

Thanks guys!

Lifehacker - Recommending stuff to save you time
MicroPersuasion - How social media is transforming media, marketing and public relations
ResearchBuzz - News about search engines, databases, and other information collections
Paul Katcher - Interesting finds on the web, from the Upper West Side

Posted by Alx Klive at 5:21 PM | Permalink

In response to user feedback, the Internet TV Charts will soon feature a daily chart as well as a weekly chart. It seems people just can't get enough of the most popular video clips on the net.

I'm just putting the finishing touches to the code, and a link to the beta version will appear on the main charts page soon. I'm also considering adding charts for other popular video sites including Grouper, Metacafe and Revver, and I welcome your suggestions for which sites you'd like to see appear.

Thanks for all your comments.

Posted by Alx Klive at 2:25 PM | Permalink

Gravity's best friend - very amusing.

Posted by Alx Klive at 3:27 PM | Permalink

In just the few short weeks that the Internet TV Charts have been live, I've begun seeing some clear trends in online video.

1. YouTube and Google Video's most watched videos are not neccessarily the best, or highest rated.

2. Google's chart in particular doesn't change a great deal from week to week.

3. Homemade karaoke-style versions of well known music videos are very popular.

4. Corporate types are beginning to seed videos on YouTube, particularly music and film promos.

5. The Digg and Videosift charts are generally more 'high brow' than YouTube and Google Video, and clips featuring Stephen Colbert or the Daily Show are extremely popular.

(contd.)...

Highly rated is not the same as popular. While I personally prefer a chart based on popularity, and this is what the Internet TV Charts are based around, it is annoying to see low rated, poor quality videos creeping into the top 10. This is something I'm taking steps to address, but the reasons behind this phenomenom are pretty interesting.

The reasons are threefold...

a) Videos are sometimes titled in misleading ways, and a poor quality video with a provocative name like Girl Pwn, can easily make it into the charts, even if it's not really a very interesting video.

b) I suspect there is some network voting going on, or at least swarm voting in the case of certain corporate videos like music promos.

c) A foreign language video can make it into the chart, simply for lack of any great similar content. Those speaking foreign languages are, in all likelihood, voting to encourage more similar uploads.

On the subject of Google's staleness, the chart is definitely suffering from a bit of a positive feedback loop. Lots of people are going to their Top 100 chart and watching the most popular videos, meaning those videos are staying the most popular. YouTube's social network effects are probably helping them avoid this problem, and they also don't feature their chart nearly as prominently.

As an example the Shakira - Hips Don't Lie spoof has been in the top 10 videos for several weeks now on Google, as have have two or three others like it. There's no reason why Google can't fix this, they simply need to deprecate links originating from their Top 100 page more (assuming they are already doing this).

I really like the trend in karaoke music videos, here's a great example. They embody the current spirit of Internet TV more than anything else in my opinion.

The appearance of commercial music and film promos in the Google and YouTube charts is a little depressing, although probably inevitable. I hope the charts don't get riddled with them, and if they do, I may begin filtering them out.

While I like Stephen Colbert and the Daily Show in general, this week, 5 out of 14 videos on Digg and Videosift were from that show, which is a little much. I notice some have been removed by YouTube for copyright violations, and I kind of hope that hinders too much more of the same.

More on what's popular in Internet TV in a month or so...

Posted by Alx Klive at 11:50 PM | Permalink

A grassroots campaign has emerged in China to subtitle popular American TV shows into Chinese for download by Bittorrent.

(New York Times article)

Posted by Alx Klive at 9:35 PM | Permalink

One of the most Dugg stories of the day (and if you don't know Digg, you should make it part of your daily routine immediately), is a link to a website for a company called DV labs, who have a very impressive flash video sample on their homepage.

The video sparked a lot of debate on Digg about what technologies might be behind it, and I wanted to delve deeper to find out if there was indeed any magic.

(contd...)

The homepage of DV labs embeds a straightforward SWF file, containing a single FLV video file and a single MP3 audio file. The video file weighs in at 5,537,802 bytes (or 5.5mb), and the MP3 file weighs in at 723,801 bytes (0.7mb). Combined they are 6.2mb.

The video is exactly 60 seconds long and has exactly 900 frames of video. It runs at a speed of 15 frames per second.

The video is impressive because it seems to load instantly and play back very impressive quality video. But using a streaming FLV file, and some clever timing actionscript, it does not have to buffer the whole movie beforehand, it has the entire 60 second length of the clip to stream the 6.2mb file.

It is thus easy to calculate the bandwidth requirements for the movie.

Each frame of video is 6kb, and each second of sound & audio requires 102kb, which is comfortably less than the 128Kb per second of a 1 meg DSL connection.

The company who makes the codec, On2, clearly have a very fine compression scheme, (here's one frame of the same video, at medium JPEG compression, weighing in at 18kb), but in terms of delivering it over the pipes to your computer, a DSL connection is more than enough to handle it.

So called IPTV companies are now making full use of these newer compression schemes to offer very high quality, cable TV like services in a number of markets worldwide. This British company has been doing DSL based television in London since 1998!

Posted by Alx Klive at 7:49 PM | Permalink