As I recently mentioned, today is Blog Action Day. Ironically, because it’s Blog Action Day and I’m involved in the TckTckTck campaign, I don’t have a lot of free time to write a long, heart-rending blog post about the dangers of climate change.
Instead, I want to share this great video that the local video-meisters at Giant Ant Media created for TckTckTck. It speaks for itself:
I usually wouldn’t be a big fan of a video full of cute kids, but this one jibes with our philosophy and theory of change for TckTckTck. It’s reportedly brought the occasional person to tears, which is a pretty good result for 80 seconds.
As I mentioned, I’m revising the video chapter of our book, and so I was happy to discover this recent Slate article. For a month, Chris Wilson monitored the performance of 10, 000 newly uploaded videos. Here are the results:
After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views—that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.
An site called, uh, Rubber Republic ran a similar study (PDF), and found that 10% exceeded 1000 views, and 1% received 500,000 views.
I was doing some rewrites on the video chapter in our book, and discovered that this unremarkable clip was the first ever video posted to YouTube. It features YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim making a bad joke:
It’s interesting how much this video predicts the vast majority of YouTube videos: a young person speaking in direct address to the camera. He’s not in his bedroom, but otherwise it’s utterly typical.
I’m working on a new project that has some particular requirements. They’re not that unusual, though, and surely others have already solved this set of problems:
We need to sell online videos (of, say, 20 to 30 minutes in length). They’ll be viewable online, behind a some kind of password protection, or available for download as well (again, with password protection).
Users will choose from a menu of videos, add them to a cart, pay for them and then get access (through streamed videos, downloads or both) only to those videos.
Ideally this happens within our own site, or something we can tweak to look something like our own site.
No, we haven’t branched out into pornography.
I checked out some courseware systems, but they’re really about delivering structured multi-part classes. I’m also aware of E-Junkie, which is what Common Craft (among many others) use to distribute their videos. They’re a good option for downloadables, but don’t offer flash-based video for viewing only.
I’m happy to pay for a turn-key solution, assuming it doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount of money. That’s preferable, actually, to messing around with Drupal or whatever. All suggestions welcome.
Capulet needs a video camera, because we occasionally shoot video for client projects. It’s never anything fancy–typically just interview footage and the destination is always YouTube or a similar video sharing service. Here’s an example–a little video we shot for Nitobi. We don’t, as far as I can figure, need to shoot in HD. If need something more sophisticated, we’ll just hire some videographer-types who come with their own equipment.
I’ve never bought a video camera, as it happens, and know very little about what makes a good one. I’ve been told that the trickiest part of shooting video is actually capturing consistent audio, so I suppose that’s a consideration. Most of the video we shoot will be under controlled circumstances–in an office or boardroom.
So what do you suggest? I gather from reading Consumer Reports that I can get a MiniDV camcorder that uses tapes, or one that uses flash memory. The latter seems like a wiser choice. Would, for example, a Flip Video device be adequate for our needs? Or maybe it’s one of these ordinary-looking camcorders?
UPDATE: Thanks to everybody for the awesome suggestions. We ended up buying a Canon FS200, which is a SD (meaning non-HD) camera that has an audio-in jack and Flash-based memory. It cost $350, and is ridiculously small–about the size of a can of Red Bull. We also bought a lapel mic, which should be sufficient for our work.
I discovered the podcast for the CBC arts and culture radio program ‘Q’ while we lived in Malta, and listened to it quite regularly. When we returned to Canada and I had less free time, I grew a little weary of the format and host Jian Ghomeshi’s interview style, and unsubscribed.
Having just returned from watching the movie One Week (more on that later), I did a search for Liane Balaban, and discovered that there are a couple hundred video clips from Q on YouTube. As it turns out, the video version of Q also airs on the channel CBC bold (which apparently replaced the very poorly named CBC Country Canada). Never fear, it’s better than that insufferable radio-on-TV talk show on Sportsnet.
I particularly like the quiet “balls, balls” at the end, which is a little guest voice-acting action from Monique.
That video also stars Jay of Giant Ant Media fame. He sent me an email about some videos they created for Vancouver Adaptive Snow Sports. He tells me that it’s “a really wicked program dedicated to making the mountain available to those with disabilities”. Here’s one of them:
These are three clever videos I’ve come across in the last day and a half. Monique twittered about this Slate Vvideo, encouraging Americans to go northward in the event of another Republican president:
Professor Lessig is, as always, thoughtful and articulate in his critique of California’s Proposition 8, a referendum on banning gay marriage:
James sent me this well-crafted take on the Mad Men (a show I have difficulty getting excited about) opening credits from the Simpsons:
In passing, I note that none of these three videos are hosted on YouTube. It’s kind of a video hosting and sharing ghetto, when you get right down to it. You can’t ignore it, but discerning video creators seem to favour other solutions.
Oh, and yes, the imminent new site design is wider than this one, so that video frames won’t jut into the sidebars anymore.
