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Tim Lorang

Is Google TV the Holy Grail?

Google’s announcement of Google TV achieves the Holy Grail of the digital-television conversion that has been going on the past two decades. The quality and streaming issues that had been prevalent on the web have been solved with higher bandwidth connections and faster computing processors. Televisions now come with internet inputs and the capability of connecting to the internet. What has been missing has been that piece that seamlessly connects the two.

I was very frustrated a few months ago when I bought a new flat screen TV with internet connections to find that the only internet access I had was to YouTube, Picasa and some pre-set weather information. I could not access Hulu or Netflex, fliker of Facebook. I couldn’t watch videos from iTunes-U or Vimeo. It looks as if Google TV is on the way to bridging that gap.

What does this mean for video producers and video content on the internet?

New Audiences: If people can easily access content from their TV more people are going to watch. I for one would rather watch old episodes of Bones from my couch then from my office chair.

Quality: I have always been a proponent of quality, even ten years ago when on-line video was a postage-stamp sized blur. Now with HD being streamed to the living room TV quality standards are again important.

Content: Content has always been king. But does seamless access to the web from your TV mean folks will be sitting on their couch watching “cats on treadmills” or will they choose to watch first run movies or college lectures. Maybe all the above.

Competition: For years the web has been leveling the playing field for independent producers and talented armatures. Will this tilt the field back toward big budget, high quality productions or open the door to entrepreneurial independents? Perhaps a bit of both.

Search: I am sure that Google has put some thought into the search engine for Google TV but content producers, especially independents will need to pay more attention to how they can be found and stand up amongst a crowded field.

Advertisers: I think this is just going to increase the practice of putting ads at the head of video content and move dollars away from traditional broadcasters to the web.

Death of Broadcast? I’ve been in television for over 30 years and predictions of broadcasting eminent demise have been frequent and premature. However there has been a trend toward the internet and this will surely accelerate it. In my career I’ve needed to move my focus from broadcast to the internet. I think NOW there is a place for big budget, high quality, serial programs on the internet.

The success of Google TV will depend up its openness and ease. It needs to work on a Sony, Toshiba and a Panasonic TV and my mother needs to figure out how to operate it. I have been talking to people for at least the past 11 years about the full convergence of TV and the internet and I’m excited to find out how it pans out.

Prezi versus PowerPoint

Last month I gave a talk at the CASE District 8 conference in Portland on 10 things you can do with video on the internet. Probably what generated more comments and questions than my topic was that I was not using PowerPoint slides. I think I was the only one at the conference NOT using PowerPoint as it has become the de facto professional presentation format. I’ve been using PowerPoint for more than a decade, what could possibly replace it?

There has been a gradual backlash against PowerPoint and I’ve recently seen speakers use online wiki’s, their web sites or nothing at all. I experimented with a new format called Prezi. Prezi is a radical departure from the traditional slide show paradigm in that it is not linear. Think of the presentation area as a big blackboard or giant sheet of paper where you have been scribbling your thoughts and ideas as if you were just jotting notes down on a sheet of paper at your kitchen table. Nothing is lined up while your thoughts and doodles are randomly scattered at odd angles across the page. Important thoughts are bold and underlined with arrows connecting related thoughts and circles around related ideas. Afterthoughts are scattered around in the margins and minor points are little tiny notes crammed between more important thoughts. Perhaps you drew a picture or a chart to illustrate your thoughts.

Now your Mom comes in the kitchen and wants to know what you are doing. You explain your ideas while twisting and turning the page to better read each point and directing her attention with your pencil. Well, that’s what a Prezi presentation is like. You have a giant work area where you can write topic headings and lists; insert graphics and pictures; roll videos and audio files while flying around and zooming in to important points and zooming out again for an overview.

Why did I use it? Well, it is so darn dynamic. The format, movement and novelty engaged the audience and kept them interested for an hour long presentation. I told them that an old axiom in television is that when you don’t have anything important to say use special effects. There may have been some of that but I was also interested in exploring a new format.

Here is the presentation I gave at the conference. If you can’t see it follow this link.

10 worthwhile things to do with video on Prezi

Since then a lot of folks have been asking me what are the advantages, disadvantages and difference between the two formats. Here are my impressions:

Palette: The PowerPoint palette is almost endless. Any font or color that you can add to a Microsoft Windows product can be incorporated into PowerPoint in any combination.  Prezi has about eight pre-formatted templates and you cannot change the color, font or style. However you can upload any premade graphic and use that as your background. It is also possible to change PowerPoint slides into PDFs and upload them to a Prezi.

Video and Audio: PowerPoint supports a wide range of video and audio formats that can be embedded into the slide show and played automatically or in response to a click. Prezi will only support Flash files and embedded YouTube files. Of course if you use YouTube files you must be connected to the internet during the presentation. If you are not connected to the internet or if you want to use video from another site you must download the video, convert it to Flash and load that into the Prezi.

Special Effects: PowerPoint has a whole menagerie of flying fonts, whooshing sounds and dynamic transitions to emphasize, snazz up and generally draw attention to your presentation. Once you put in a font or graphic in a Prezi they are pretty static. The excitement comes from being able to fly around the screen, quickly zoom in, flip around then zoom out again during a presentation. In a Prezi the text does not fly in, you fly to the text. It is possible to insert interactive flash files and you can get more animation in that way.

Presentation: As I mentioned above, PowerPoint presentations, like most slide shows for the past 100 years, are linear. Slide one is followed by slide two and so on. If you are on slide 26 and you suddenly want to show something on slide 5 you need to back up through 21 slides or stop the show, scroll through the slides till you find slide 5. With a Prezi it is possible for the presenter to simply click the background with the mouse and the presentation zooms out to an overview then the presenter can zoom into the area they want. When they are ready to continue on they simply click the mouse and you are back to where you left off. The problem with this is that as a presenter you had better practice and know how to navigate because an inadvertent click can get you way off course and you may have a devil of a time finding your way back. The other thing is with Prezi you won’t be printing out the slides as a handout.

Other small things: The way Prezi defines a view is with frames which look like gray circles, brackets or boxes. When you set them up you are telling Prezi this is the area I want to see when I get to this frame. Prezi has done a good job of making these frames blend into the overall design but they can sometimes get in the way or interfere with an overall artistic look. For example if you are not careful it is easy for frames to overlap and you may be zoomed into one frame with the giant corner of another frame in your view.

Another thing you will need to deal with is the Prezi path. Even though a Prezi is not laid out in a linear fashion you still need to get from point A to point B and so on. So Prezi has you set up a path to tell it what comes next. If you are not careful you will soon end up with a rat’s nest of lines and numbers that can drive you to distraction and possibly back to PowerPoint. This “path” is not visible during the presentation.

Adding up the pros and cons may seem to tip in favor of PowerPoint but the movement and dynamics of my Prezi presentation kept folks at the conference talking about it for two days. Any artist knows it is possible to make great things within limits and just skimming the presentations at the Prezi site shows that you can do some pretty amazing things. Its best to take a look and judge for yourself.

For now I am going to keep experimenting with Prezi. It’s not hard to learn and it’s a lot of fun.  I just got a beta version of PowerPoint 2010 so I’ll need to put that through its paces and see what is new. Let me know what you think and if you prefer Prezi or PowerPoint.

Tales from putting on a video contest

As I mentioned before, I have been involved in a number of video contests over the past few decades. But the ability to harness the power of crowdsourcing and use a video contest to obtain User Generated Content (UGC) has only been viable for a few years.  Several years ago I worked with the EDUCAUSE/Internet 2 Cyber Security Task Force on a contest for college students to produce spots to promote cyber security awareness. Even at that late date we faced such issues as how are we going to get the videos? Uploading video would have dramatically reduced the quality. Did college students have access to the tools to produce a decent quality program? We did not want to exclude anyone. Now those issues are of little concern.

Recently I worked with Arizona State University’s College of Public Programs and Zooppa.com to hold a contest to generate content to promote the College’s Spirit of Service Scholars Program.  Working with Zooppa greatly reduced the logistical issues and the day to day management of the contest, but there are a few things I learned that can make a difference in the outcome of the contest.

The content creators tend to form communities around different organizations such as Zooppa who regularly sponsor contests. This group is on the lookout for contests and will hear about it from the press releases and posting to their community. This group is motivated by the contest. They are creators and the topic is less important than getting an opportunity to produce and to win. From the perspective of a sponsor these creative producers will not be your core group or fans. They will be very creative and give you great content but if you want to engage your natural fan base you will need to target those people with your own message.

Will your fans take part in the contest? That depends upon their demographic. As easy as it is to produce a video these days it still takes talent and work to produce a good one. Your fans may not have many video creators and you may not get anything from them. Does this mean you should not hold the contest? You should still hold the contest because the process of promoting the contest not only gives you an opportunity to talk to your fan base about the contest and the publicity about the contest will reach new groups. If you are working with an organization that is putting on and promoting the contest be sure they know you want to reach out to specific groups, even if it is unlikely you will get many contest participants.

Because those who may ultimately be making videos for the contest will not be from your core group you will need to be very explicit about any instructions or requirements. This is a bit of a balancing act because you do not want to get in the way of their creativity but they must understand your requirements. For example we wrote a brief that was posted on the contest site explaining the goals of the contest with links to our web site for more information. We wanted a spot that challenged young people to consider a career in the public sector. The public sector covers a lot of ground so we gave some examples that included mayors and city managers but also police and firefighters. I was surprised at how many entries pretty much said if you want to be a firefighter or police officer go to ASU. Don’t assume people will actually do any research, they may just parrot what you wrote.

The same caution goes for graphics and tag lines. You should provide the graphics that you want included in the video, such as a logo, but don’t assume that the contestant won’t put a black logo on a black background. If you like the video otherwise you should be able to ask them to change it. You should also consider URLs and tag lines. It’s amazing how long and cumbersome a URL can get on video. Provide a short one or better yet, give yourself options in the future and tag the video yourself after the contest.

This is an opportunity to get some good content but because it is an open contest you will get a few duds. Expect it. Also, if you have a vision of what you want and are hoping that someone in the contest will give you that it would be better to save your money and hire someone who can produce a video to your specifications.

Using crowdsourcing as a means of creating content can be very powerful. It does take planning, and even with the new tools of the internet, a lot of work. Partner with someone who has the experience and tools to do an effective campaign.

The Changing Role of Video Contests Part 2

In the past video competitions were generally held to reward and encourage excellence in video production. I always thought that those of us working away in small television stations or corporate video departments were a bit jealous of our compatriots winning Oscars and Emmys and started organizing contests through our local ITVA chapter and entering or videos in the Tellys. Now I believe that video contests fall into roughly three different areas.

Promote and Reward Professional Accomplishments: This would include many of the long standing and well known competitions such as the Emmys and the Tellys. This would also include organizations promoting excellence in their profession that include a video or broadcast section such as the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition awarded by the Society of American Travel Writers.

Promote Student development in broadcast and video: Many local National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences regional Emmy competitions have student categories as do the Tellys. Professional organizations such as The Association of Higher Education Campus Television Administrators (AHECTA) started having Student Production Award competitions. These are mainly to encourage students to pursue a career in television production or broadcast. The content is less important than the artistic and technical accomplishments of the students.

User Generated Content: These contests are using the vast resources of amateur and professional producers to make content specific to a particular cause or product. A vast number of the new contests we see fall into this category. The competitions can be about anything from the Department of Education’s I Am What I Learn, Reel Insights What’s Unique About Being Black?, to Nabisco’s Diet Like A Diva contest.

The purpose of the contest can be anything from encouraging students to learn about science; educating the public about a social cause or promoting your client. It is a great way of engaging the creators in your community by getting them to produce a video with your message. They create content that you can share with your larger community. They help you create a message that you can use to help spread your message.

In the next few blogs I will cover some of the issues involved with launching a video contest such as the Spirit of Service Scholars video contest the College of Public Programs at Arizona State University conducted with Zooppa.com.

The Changing Role of Video Contests

I’ve been working with Arizona State University’s College of Public Programs on a scholarship called the Spirit of Service Scholars Program. One of the strategies we decided to use was to generate video content with a video competition. We teamed up with ZOOPPA.COM and you can see the results on the Spirit of Service Scholars Competition Page.

I’ve been involved in video competitions as both a participant and administrator since my ITVA days in the mid 1980s. There have been a lot of changes.

Logistically managing a video contest has drastically changed because of digital video and the internet. As an administrator I no longer have to deal with stacks of U-Matic, VHS and Beta tapes mailed to my office. Although I miss the pizza fueled judging parties we had to organize where a dozen video professionals watched 3 minutes of 30 tapes then filled out paper scoring sheets.

Videos are now uploaded online and the judges can view all the entries from their own computer.
In the past only “video professionals” could enter contests. This was mainly because you had to work someplace that had the equipment to make the videos. Consequently most video contests concerned themselves with professional themes such as “Best Corporate Informational video under 30 minutes” and “Best editing for a filed news report.”

Now that your typical High School Student video producer has better equipment then I had access to for the first half of my professional career the pool of talent has proliferated to everyone with the interest to participate. Because of that the types of contests have changed.

There are still professional competitions such as the Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences or the Telly Awards. But even the Telly Awards has greatly increased its categories and this year they are introducing the People’s Telly Award Presented by YouTube. If you go to video contest aggregation sites like Online Video Contests, Videomaker, Vidoop, and the YouTube Contest page you’ll see video contests for causes, commercial products and just for fun. These are the biggest change in the nature video of contests, who participates and why the contests are held.

In the next blog we’ll talk more about how contest can be used.

Academic Video has No Authority

I just read a short, free guide about on-line marketing available from Copyblogger called Authority Rules. It has some very useful information about how to build trust and authority on the web and sets up the piece by using some well know studies to show that people usually defer to authority figures. The guide then demonstrates how all of that has been turned upside down on the web. Authority tends to flow to those web sites that turn up highly ranked on search engines. High search engine rankings then tend to reinforce the authority perception because those are the sites people tend to go to, read, link to, and quote which again increases their rankings on search engines. This happens even if someone with more expertise has a web page but does a bad job of marketing.

In my last blog I talked about how difficult it is to find relevant video content on the internet, especially if you rely on sites such as YouTube. Just because content is highly rated or turns up on the first page of your search does not mean that it is vetted, relevant or even true. But it is worse than that. If I search for "used cars" I'll find more relevant and useful used car sites than I would find sites dealing with academic lectures if I searched for academic, educational or university lecture videos. You certainly do not come up with a list that approaches the authority or usefulness that you find at the Open Culture site.

I think the reason for this failure is a combination of several things.

First, most content providers don't understand how the video lectures are part of their brand. Academics hate thinking this way. Marketing and branding is cheap and vulgar. But if Professor Johanna Smith from Upstate U. is the expert on Green Widgets she does herself, Upstate U. and those who need to know about Green Widgets a disservice by avoiding this approach.

Second, for most academics, making material available to the general public on the internet is not a priority. Many feel that providing information and knowledge to the public via the internet or television is beneath them. My unofficial estimate is that over half of the speakers barely know their talks are on the internet. They had to give a talk, someone recorded it and they signed a release form and that is the end of it. Likewise, if you asked the University Relations director or a dean at most colleges and universities they will have no idea about what videos from their faculty are available on-line.

Finally, most in academia don't see how giving away knowledge or information is going to help them. They feel they get paid to teach and they should be paid if their lecture is on TV or the internet. Why would anyone come to their class if they could watch them on-line for free?

These feelings are not universal and many in academia do get it but many more do not. And because it is not a priority they will not spend the time or the resources to improve their products, promote their videos or make them easy to find or use.