Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009 - (Page 50)

10 seconds watching a cat riding a donkey, I think low quality’s OK, but if you want to create a repeatable, episodic experience that people will come back to again and again, it has to be good quality,” he says. “Having something as good as TV is essential. The idea that quality doesn’t matter anymore is totally wrong for the sorts of things we’re doing.” Much of this has to do with consumer expectations and the demands of the content being produced. “If it’s a pretty girl walking down the street, people want to be able to see her clearly, but they don’t care about the overall production value,” says Kip “Kipkay” Kedersha, the highest earner in Metacafe’s Producer Rewards program. “But if you’re showing a close-up of a circuit board, and it’s out of focus and the camera’s shaking, then the production value has a direct impact on how that video is going to be accepted.” Also vital to consider is the cost of producing high-quality content relative to the use, longevity, and potential revenue that can be driven off of any particular piece of video, says Richard Glosser, executive director of emerging media for CondéNet. “We try to be very efficient in how we produce video so that the cost is reasonable while still trying to maintain high quality, because ultimately, people are coming to our brand for professionally produced content,” he says. “But you need to understand what type of video it is to appropriately invest in its production. For example, doing daily updates at a show like CES [Consumer Electronics Show] to put on Wired.com has much more perishability than something like a cooking video that has a much longer shelf life. You need to balance quality and cost.” Of course, sometimes the confluence of technological innovation and the trends toward social media present opportunities for providers to obtain video for next to nothing, according to Clayman. “This summer, the Jonas Brothers were coming to MTV. We had a whole bunch of mobile phone cameras that we gave to average people and the Jonas Brothers themselves to take video and send directly to our operations center. We got all this backstage footage and different angles, just a tremendous amount of video, and [we] streamed all of it to a website,” he says. “A lot of people were skeptical that you’d actually get good quality video from a mobile phone and that you’d be able to do anything significant with it. But when we put it on-air, we put a big box around it, and when the executive producers saw it, they liked it. And the views were just through the roof online—one of the biggest things that we’ve seen. And it was great because it was content you couldn’t see anywhere else.” This sentiment was shared by ESPN360.com and JumpTV. While both strive to deliver content of the highest possible quality, if people aren’t able to watch video from one sporting event, they’ll watch the video from another, even if it’s not the highest quality. Any video is better than no video. The audience will be willing to put up with lower-quality video if it’s content they can’t find elsewhere, according to the companies. In terms of what aspect of a video’s production is most important to delivering a high-quality experience, there are varying schools of thought. “I try to work on my production quality, but it’s not a high priority,” says Nalty. “I don’t give a crap about lighting, and I’ll put my camera on a tissue box to get a shot. Where I work hard is on the editing and timing because that’s what can harm videos. I probably spend zero time planning a video, 10 minutes shooting it, and an hour or so editing it. And I think that’s kind of right, though maybe I should spend less time planning. I’m not like Hitchcock, drawing up a storyboard. I’d never start if I did it that way.” Some argue that the quality of the video isn’t the most vital aspect. In fact, according to Louderback, the most vital aspect would be audio. “If the audio sounds like crap, no one’s going to watch it,” he says. “So the first thing you should do is get good microphones. And make sure whatever you do, do it in a good environment. We realized early on that our studio was really boomy and, oh, my God, did we hear it from our fans, to the point that we had to redo the studio and put soundproof insulation in. So, in my 50 STREAMING MEDIA December 2008/January 2009 http://www.Wired.com http://www.ESPN360.com http://www.netstairs.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009

Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009 Table of Contents User-Generated Politics Netflix Needs a Business Model Technology and Business Trends by the Numbers Improving Video Color Quality What Makes for Compelling Video? Game On: Bringing the NHL to IPTV Give! The New Era of Corporate Communications New Video Frontiers: Taking It Beyond the PC The HD Showdown: Codec Vendors Battle It Out for Supreme Quality The Ultimate Guide to Creating Online Video Content That Works, Part 2 Planning for Webcasting Success: Considerations for Deploying an Enterprise Video Communications Platform All Mobile Devices Are Not the Same Datmedia Datpresenter LSI Tarari Encoder Accelerator LCPX-6140 Gomez Active Streaming XF Transcoding for Global Reach Executive Visions 2009 The Revolution Is Being Televised

Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009

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