Uba Kontrovasie

Deconstructing Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry (Steve Forrest for The New York Times)

I’m really liking StephenFry.com, he has turned into a celebrity Social Media Evangelist.

The only thing that I question about his whole concept is the use of his own video content? Why is it not being hosted on a platform like Vimeo, Revver or Viddler? If people could embed his video content onto their own blogs and websites it would travel so much further, enabling him to gain more attention from the blogosphere and social video websites such as the ones that I have mentioned above.

I keep seeing various websites self hosting video content, personally think this is an expensive solution in comparison to all the free, community enabled, social video websites that are available.

In addition to cost the efficiencies of using social video websites, the marketing and distribution benefits exceed what can be achieved through self hosting.

Tags: social media, stephen fry, video communities, video distribution, video hosting, video syndication

BBC moves to embrace remix culture

I discovered today that the BBC are behind a project called Masher. Masher essentially enables people to splice and mash their own video’s with content from the BBC Motion gallery.

This is the second move the BBC have made to recognise how people want to view and use content.

The launch of the iPlayer was monumental because it enabled people to watch BBC content when and wherever they liked. The BBC recognised that they couldn’t beat pirate culture so instead they launched a service, which enabled people to watch their content on demand at their own pace.

The launch of masher I believe symbolises the BBC’s recognition of remix culture. There are so many people on youtube using illegally ripped video content to make their own remixed and mashed videos, like piracy, remixing is a movement that the BBC or any other broadcaster will not be able to stop. The BBC offering their archive for this project symbolises a degree of acceptance towards the remix movement.

I am sure this will be the first of many UK broadcaster’s stepping up to accept the movement and I hope in time they make the embed codes for the mashed videos available and allow users to download mashed videos and distribute them however they like.

Let’s watch, wait and see what happens next.

Tags: bbc masher, masher, pirate culture, remix culture, Video Content, VJ

The growing importance of video content

I have made various references to video content and video websites recently and I think video in it’s entirety is being under used as a social media communication method. This is primarily due to the restrictions of existing social video platforms as the majority of them only provide basic uploading and organisation functionally.

Up until now video has been perceived as a social media asset, which has been used as a catalyst for conversion and dialogue as opposed to a social communication tool itself such as twitter.

Websites like Utago and Seesmic are changing all of this as they are facilitating rapid video messaging and live video communities. Growing use of these platforms will make social media even more interactive as they facilitate conversations between people in online communities via video posting and video streaming.

Through observing websites such as Seesmic I have noted that video content appears to be stickier and by this I mean it appears to be engaged with more in comparison to text based content of a similar nature.

Video blogging also seems to be becoming more popular and famous vloggers such as Chris Pirillo and Gary Vaynerchuck to name a few are good examples of how it should be done. You only have to take look at the amount of comments Gary receives on each post in order to see how well received his content is.

Platforms like Viddler, which provide functionality such as in-video commenting and tagging make vlogging a lot more interactive and easier to set-up. In fact getting a good vlog up and running now only requires 4 things:

- A blogging platform
- A good video hosting platform
- A webcam
- A good idea, nobody likes to hear rubbish!

Other factors contributing to the rise of online video consumption and video publishing are; a fall in the prices of video recording equipment and maturity in the attitudes towards video content online.

Camcorders and webcams have never been so cheap and some mobile phones now come with good video recording capabilities, coupled with this people have been using video platforms such as Youtube, whilst simultaneously blogging for years now. We are now approaching a time where these early adopters are taking a step further by publishing their own thoughts and viewpoints on video and posting them onto the web.

Tags: online video, seesmic, social media, streaming, video, video community, vlog, vlogging, web2, webcam

BigStage - A virtual 3D you

Really liking BigStage, It lets you create a 3D version of yourself from photographs you upload. The virtual 3D avatar can then be then be dropped into anything from computer games to TV shows.

I am yet to fully experiment the service, however, if the avatars can be exported and imported into the likes of Second Life and Google Lively we might be onto a winner!

The project has been backed and funded by the US Government and CIA, all pretty scary stuff seeing as it has been in development for nine years. I guess this is the main reason as to why the avatars are so realistic.

Go on, have a play and tell me what you think.

Tags: 3D graphics, avatars, bigstage, google lively, second life, social media, virtual environments

Seesmic - Video Microblogging

I’m sure we’ll hear a TLA or an abbreviation for Video Microblogging at some point so I might as well have an attempt….V-Mlogging, sound good? :-/

Seesmic is just hours of entertainment to be quite frank, but there are some serious innovative marketing uses a facility like this can provide.

We’ve all seen how effectively businesses have used twitter, Seesmic provides much more sticky and engaging content through video. Video posts on average seem to receive more replies in comparison to text tweets on twitter (try saying that with a mouthful).

With me being a preacher of all things video at moment it goes without saying: Seesmic is definitely one to watch and one to get involved with too!

Tags: Micro Blogging, seesmic, social media, video, Video Content, video microblog