Netflix Posts Internet Milestone

Since the web came into being the majority of content has been free. Thanks to Netflix that's no longer true. The online video service has grown to 22.2% of all US broadband traffic, overtaking peer to peer file sharing for the first time. At peak times, Netflix hits 30% of all traffic. This news comes the same day that Forrester Research released a white paper suggesting that serious cord cutting pressure will arrive by year-end 2012. Cord cutting is the industry term for cancelling cable/satellite TV services. Cord shaving is the step before, describing the paring down of packages to remove pay-for movie channels as viewers become more comfortable with movie content from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus and Redbox, to name major players. While not all of these services are offered in Canada presently, Netflix alone has made great strides here, and deservedly so. Driving this shift is the ubiquity of game consoles, connected to the 'net for the purpose of playing against others all over the world. Once that connection is made, adding a Netflix account takes a few minutes and costs pennies a day. I use a Wii to connect my 42" flat screen to the web and to Netflix. I don't game online. My interest was in bringing the web to my TV and having seen it, I'm not impressed yet with that option. Netflix is a whole different matter. For those who haven't seen it, the interface is far more user friendly than my Rogers VOD for example, because it is web-like in its interactivity. I can page through movie choices by category, hover to read descriptions, cast and ratings and bring up a film with DVR-like control (FF, RV, Pause etc) and trash it for another one if it doesn't grab me quickly. I'm not paying by the movie or the minute. I'm paying by the month. It's where we're going and I'm happy to be on the bus.

Amateur Videographers Rejoice - YouTube now fixes shaky footage

The Gooderham & Worts building, Toronto

Among the mistakes made by amateur videographers, two are particularly annoying. YouTube has just come up with a free fix for one of them, the shaky clip that results from hand-holding the camera when it should be on a tripod or otherwise locked down. Last weekend I took my Kodak Zi8 to Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market. After carrying my groceries for a while I found that I couldn’t hold the pocket-sized camera steady with my overworked arm. Let’s take a look at what I got, then at what the YouTube stabilizer did with it.
Here is the original clip. And here is the stabilized version. You may notice that the processed clip has had some zoom-in applied to it. All the stabilizing software I've seen in the past ten years employs this approach. In the days of standard definition it often softened the image. With the detail inherent in high definition resolutions this is unlikely to occur unless the original clip is so shaky that only a high degree of zoom will fix it. If you want to give it a try, you'll find the editor here. You will of course need to have or upload at least one video in order to drag it into the editing window.
    And, for those of you who don't know what the other annoying mistake made by amateur shooters is, it's the fire hose approach. Swing the camera back and forth, never stop for long enough to actually capture a scene. Guaranteed to make viewers queasy.

Is this thing on?

    Forgive me. I'm fasting ahead of a routine procedure scheduled for tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'm feeling faint. And I'm experimenting with a new HD pocket cam acquired to more easily add quality imagery to the blog and elsewhere. Like the Flip cams one sees everywhere today, this Kodak Zi8 has few of the features of a consumer/prosumer video camera. No flip out screen, for instance, making it a challenge to shoot toward yourself. A table mirror placed behind the camera let me see where I was in frame, but to set up the camera and mirror quickly I had to choose a desk top, which meant getting low, as you'll see. I was also just off my ski machine, hair wet and workout "T" on, so I don't expect Hollywood to call soon. But for the price I can't say enough about the image clarity. See for yourself right here. If you have the bandwidth, be sure to check it out at full screen.
    The audio comes from the on-board mic, which is a bit noisy. Earlier clips with an external mic plugged in (great feature) offer clean audio. Normally I'd embed a video clip but the 720p resolution is too large for the blog's width. The camera will shoot lower resolution but usually that's not what I'm going to be looking for.
    I should mention that the unit ships with an HDMI cable so you can view clips on your flat screen TV, where they look surprisingly good. It also takes an SD card to expand the hours of material you can gather. I've got a 4GB card in mine for the moment, about $13 at Staples.
    I promise to shoot something, or somebody, more attractive in the near term.

Spring Newsletter Online Now

You’re invited to view our spring 2011 ONLINE VIDEO newsletter, four informative pages of advice, information, research results and product offerings focused on what video can do for you.  Did you know that Canadians are the most connected people on earth, spend the most time online and view the highest amount of video content? And what’s the significance of ever-larger numbers of us viewing web content on our TV sets? Find out how your business can deliver messages using multiple professional quality video segments for hundreds rather than thousands of dollars. On the back page we show you how, with three clicks of a mouse, you can reserve a convenient time for a one-on-one telephone meeting to get answers to any questions you may have about our video products, the results you can expect and the surprisingly affordable cost of entry. So please go ahead and read, bookmark or print the latest issue of “ONLINE VIDEO”.

“No Video” Video – for fun and profit

If the word “video” brings to mind images of video cameras, lighting and microphones on boom poles that’s only natural. But in the digital era myriad examples exist of videos which include not a second of video camera content. Whether you edit family vacations or contract for online video content for your business this is useful to know. Let me give you an example from the work of legendary documentary-maker Ken Burns, who pioneered the animation of still images, a process widely known as the “Ken Burns' effect. Early in my experience of his work I realized that a part of his technique, and one that in a real sense does breath life into a still image, is the tasteful use of sound effects. Birds sing, horses whinny, boots echo on wooden steps. As you view this clip, listen too. Mr. Burns takes a single photograph, an image that without the motion he creates would be irritating after ten static seconds, and stretches it over multiple sentences of narration. A video budget that producers would have ignored 10 years ago can create highly effective online content today. And if you’re an amateur editor,"no-video" video can easily and instantly up the quality of your work and the size of your audience.

PC2TV Video Viewers – Latest Research Results

    I posted recently about my experience of connecting with Netflix.ca through a Nintendo Wii game console. For less than a movie ticket I can view any number of films and tv shows each month with great picture quality and not a stutter in delivery on a high speed wireless connection. Today I carved out some time to return to the web surfing side of the offering. My Wii sees the ‘net via a version of the Opera web browser. I haven’t found any way to change that out or update it and I’ve looked, because it is absent support for the majority of Flash video content on today’s web. The result of this is that content I looked forward to viewing from the comfort of my sofa won’t display. I’m talking Allan Gregg interviews from TVO.org and the wonderful stuff available at Ted.com to name a couple. There are exceptions of course. YouTube’s “XL” site serves up decent looking content, including the videos I’ve uploaded to the “dhurdon” channel.

    You might be forgiven for asking “who cares?”, although not by me. Granted it remains early days, but one third of adult broadband users in America connect the PC to the TV at least once a year to view local or web-hosted video content. Within this segment users are further broken out as follows:

• Frequent Users - the 16.8% that use a PC2TV connection to watch video on their TV at least once per day;
• Regular Users - the 21.4% that use a PC2TV connection to watch video on their TV a few times per week;
• Moderate Users - the 35.6% that use a PC2TV connection to watch video on their TV between once and few times per month, and
• Light Users - the 26.2% of PC2TV Video Viewers that use a PC2TV connection to watch video on their TV between once and a few times per year.

If you’re into addition you may have noticed that more than 38% of this group connects at least a few times per week. It is a virtual certainty that most of this activity involves services like Netflix, which has grown so big so fast that companies including Amazon are looking at offering streaming movies soon. My experience of surfing the ‘net on the flat panel remains underwhelming, even taking the absence of Flash video out of the equation. Were I to add a USB keyboard to the Wii, navigating would be much easier than it is using the controller and a virtual keyboard. But images and text lack crispness and the zoom function adds to those problems. The Wii’s best connection is component. It doesn’t support HDMI and I have no experience yet with surfing via a game console that does.  So my conclusion at this point in 2011 is that streaming movies via the Internet are a great value and a remarkable convenience. Surfing on the TV has a way to go. As always I’d appreciate feedback on your own experience – and if you don’t have any yet, get on it!
Source: www.tdgresearch.com

E-retailer Video - real (big) results

Home Shopping Network creates a great deal of video content, being a TV property. Today they are capitalizing on that via their website, hsn.com, where some 14,000 video segments are now available. Emery Skolfield, HSN.com’s director of digital content spoke recently at an Internet Retailer conference. (Read the article.) Here's what he said about the impact of video on the TV shopper:

... a consumer who watches TV and then visits HSN.com to complete the transaction spends $1294 a year; a consumer who watches TV and then calls to complete a transaction is worth $855, and someone who only visits HSN.com spends on average $625. “If we can give them something that supplements their shopping experience, that’s what we want to do,” he says. “They can watch it on TV and then jump to the dot-com and explore something new and interesting immediately.”

Beyond advising all e-retailers to get started with video he had this advice:

“Get some video on your site, play with what works and drop what doesn’t. Let that mold your video strategy.”

Not all e-retailers have their own TV channel of course, but all today have an equal opportunity to introduce video to their visitor's web experience.