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We've Moved

2010-10-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

I have moved this blog to our website: www.imgagemediapartner.com

If you have not been seeing the blog lately it is because we have moved and I am sorry about any inconvenience this has caused. You can see the blog here: http://www.imagemediapartners.com/blog/

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We are excited about moving the blog to our web site and we are posting a lot of new material. I hope that you join us there.

Tim Lorang

Is Google TV the Holy Grail?

2010-05-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-22T20:13:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-28T18:31:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

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

2009-08-09T15:48:00.001-07:00

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.

The Search for Intelligent Video

2009-08-06T20:28:00.001-07:00

Dealing with educational video on the internet is difficult because there is no order. For many this is one of the endearing traits of the internet unless say, you're a high school science teacher trying to find resources for her advanced students or someone who wants to find out about Mayan Culture but doesn't want to deal with the end of the world in 2012. Unlike a library where all the books are catalogued and a trained librarian can help you find what you want the internet can try the patience of even a skilled web surfer. Brad Wheeler, The VP of IT and CIO for Indiana University covered this whole question of verifiable content on the internet very well in an article last year for EDUCAUSE Review, "In Search of Certitude." This is an important issue and until it is addressed the internet will not be an important resource for educators, researchers or anyone trying to find factual content.

This is certainly not new. It has been one of the main criticisms of the internet. As Wheeler illustrates in the article, at one time, when you wanted information, you went to a certified source of knowledge, such as an encyclopedia or someone who knew where to look, such as librarian, to help you find what you were looking for. This was time consuming but there was a level of certitude that the information was correct. The internet replaced time and certitude with speed and abundance. You can now find a lot of information very fast but you really do not know if the information is correct.

The current situation for on-line educational video is very similar. As Marta Kagan states in her popular slide show: What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later,
thirteen hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute and 100 million videos are viewed every day. That's a lot of video and finding what you need is a challenging chore. Just a simple search through YouTube's Education Channel
for Mayan Culture brought back over 38 hundred results. I didn't even have time to scroll them all never mind conducting any type of through or rational search. In contrast when I searched the Seattle Public Library for books on Mayan Culture I got back 300 results and they were sub-categorized into subject areas such as art, languages, hieroglyphics, history and fiction. If I needed further help I could call the librarian. On the down side there were only 4 videos, one was with Dora the Explorer and another featured Dennis the Menace.

Back on YouTube the 38 hundred results are intimidating and it only gets worse as you delve into the titles. The top result presents Lost Civilization – Maya – 1 of 6. It looks to be a well produced documentary produced by Joel Westbrook and written by Jason Williams. It has a 5 star rating and has been viewed well over 56,500 times. It seems very well produced and informative. The length however is only about eight minutes and you quickly figure out that this is part of a larger documentary. Short videos have been, until recently, one of the drawbacks of YouTube. But there is really no other information about the video. When you follow the link you end up at a web site that asks the question: Is the world really going to end on December 12, 2012? It seems that Westbrook's and Williams' documentary has been high jacked by some quacks. Can we trust the video?

Another 5 star search result is Secrets of the Mayan Underworld: Ancient Traditions.This is
another short but well produced documentary that was well branded from BBC Worldwide. Following the link brought me to BBC Worldwide's YouTube Channel that immediately launched into a video about hurricanes. I couldn't find the Mayan documentary on the BBC site; or rather I couldn't find the place to look for the documentary. They did have 95 Doctor Who videos so I may be going back.

Back with my 3,800 Mayan Culture search results I found a number of documentary snippets with no information or citations. Many seemingly good programs are linked to sites about aliens and crop circles. I even found a segment of the 1973 pseudo documentary; In Search of Ancient Astronauts entitled Gods of 2012. Of course Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto has a number of appearances as does Chris Rock's new comedy Good Hair, apparently because Maya Angelou is in it. The point is that you have to go through a lot of work to find quality programs and even then you really don't know who made them, if the information is correct or if the content is there with the owner's permission.

There are a number of sites that are addressing this issue by vetting the programs in some way. Sites that are dedicated to presenting video programs from educational institutions such as
UCTV or UChannel are good examples. YouTube has addressed the issue by giving educational institutions their own space in YouTube called YouTube.EDU. A search there for Mayan Culture brings up one lecture from Villanova University called The Collapse of the Ancient Maya: Interpretations of the Past and Preserving the Future, by Richard M. Leventhal, Ph.D. a professor of anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. The hour long lecture with washed out slides is of very poor technical quality but at least you know Professor Leventhal will not start a discussion on alien space visitors. ITunesU
has been the center of Universities sharing video on-line and making them available for podcasting for some time. But searching for content there is a pain in the neck. Try looking up "Mayan."

There are a number of sites that do try to aggregate and vet educational and informational videos. In his blog Open Culture, Dan Colman provides a very good list of sites that feature what he calls "Intelligent Video." Here you will find academic web sites like ResearchChannel or sites dedicated to certain subjects like The Science Network. Colman even attempts to bring order to YouTube with his Intelligent YouTube Video Collections. There are blogs too, like Sandra Kiume's CHannelN that reviews and presents videos about the brain and behavioral sciences. At sites run by academic institutions or media aggregators with some type of controlled submission process from academic institutions, you can be fairly confident that the material at least represents the view of an academic employed at that institution and that it has reached some minimal level of scholarship. Otherwise the institution would not allow its name to be attached to the program. In the name of scholarship and freedom of speech Universities are loath to impose censorship or controls on their faculty but very few radicals with unsupported convictions become university professors. On the other hand, programs from non-university sites become harder to validate. And as we've seen in our brief YouTube excursion a lot of folks have no problem usurping other peoples work to promote their outlandish claims. Considering the poor quality of so much academic video it really would not be hard at all to fake an educational video.

In conclusion the enormous amount of video available on the internet has not made it easier to find content. Nor can it be certified once found. Brad Wheeler, in his article "In Search of Certitude," suggested a solution that combined the speed and abundance of the internet with the thorough vetting process of a librarian. Until then the potential for disseminating video content on the internet is seriously limited.

What is Educational Video?

2009-08-03T23:37:00.001-07:00

Dealing with educational video on the internet is difficult because there is no order. This is one of the endearing traits of the intent unless say, you're a high school science teacher trying to find resources for her advanced students or someone who wants to find out about Mayan Culture but doesn't want to deal with the end of the world in 2012. One problem is verifying the content. Another problem is finding content spread across many different content producers, distributors and aggregators. I'll address those issues in future blogs. What I would like to address today is just defining what we mean by educational video.

When I was in elementary school in the 1960's educational films told us how to brush our teeth, survive a nuclear attack and avoid girls who had VD. (I'm assuming the girls in the other class were watching a film telling them how to avoid boys with VD.) If Walter Cronkite narrated the film you could be sure it was important. With Public Television in the 1970's and 1980's educational television included everything from cooking shows to singing puppets, from political commentary to World War II documentaries. Easy internet distribution has now made available the entire spectrum of educational video to the world. But, in regards to what is available on the internet, what is educational video?

I would say that Educational Video is a program whose intention is to teach or impart knowledge for the sake of learning. This is a bit vague, but let me elaborate first by listing what I would not consider Educational Video.

How to Videos: Some may argue this point and I would concede that they teach but their intent is to teach a skill or use a product or perform a procedure. This would include how to put on make-up, how to install Windows on your computer or how to grill a chicken. All important things but not included in my definition. A sub genre of the how to videos are "get-rich-quick" programs that I don't even want to think about.

Corporate or Commercial Programs: These would be any program meant to promote a company or product. These usually include corporate image pieces or programs on how to use a product. Many corporations make and finance fine educational programs; in fact many educational programs would not be made without corporate support. But if the intent of the program is to persuade you to buy a product or support a for profit organization it is not educational.

Propaganda or persuasion programs: Any program with a political slant or that has an ax to grind is propaganda. A lot of programs labeled as documentaries would fall into this category. I personally would also include religious programs. Their goal is to persuade and not to teach. I am not saying it is bad to persuade, I'm just saying it is not the same as education.

Entertainment: This would include the vast majority of programs from Harry Potter
to Cats on a treadmill
and every music video, reality program and cell phone captured catastrophe. I would also include so called infotainment and reality programs.

Current Affairs Programs: Current affairs programs can be very enlightening and impart important information, but I would not consider them educational programs.

Ok, now what is left? Educational videos tend to fall into several broad categories that represent how they are presented rather than subject matter. These would include instructional programs, documentaries and by far the largest group represented on the internet, lectures and panel discussions.

Instructional Programs: At some risk of contradicting myself, instructional programs are a close cousin to how-to-videos. They essentially show or explain to the viewer how to do something. This program on measuring squares and rectangles from Teacher Tube is a good example.

Documentaries: When meant to instruct or inform they are a popular educational video format. They can be very effective if they are well produced but they can be very expensive to produce. Many documentaries are produced by professional or commercial producers such as Nature
found on PBS Video. But there are many great programs available that are not such grandly produced affairs. An example of a more modestly produced but still very informative and effective documentary was produced by the University of Kentucky's
Center for Visualization and can be found on the ResearchChannels' YouTube Channel the program Flying on Air: The Science of Inflatable Wings.

Interview or talk shows: A common format that dates back from the early days of radio is the interview program and talk show. I would include in this panel discussions. Educators have been using this format to interview academic and thought leaders and to engage in intellectual debate and discussions. Many of these programs are series with a regular host but the format is familiar to anyone who watches television. A good example is "Conversations with History" hosted by Harry Kreisler, produced by UC Berkley and distributed by UCTV.

Lecture: By far the largest numbers of educational videos are lectures. These can run anywhere from 5 minutes in length to two hours although I would say the majority are around 50 minutes, about the length of your average University class. The cheapest to produce and perhaps the least satisfying is the camera stuck in the back of the classroom. Here is an example from Stanford University, a Computer Science Programming Methodology class by Professor Mehran Sahami.

A lot easier to watch are those lectures recorded with multiple cameras, or just look that way. (See my instructional slide show on shooting a lecture with a single camera.) A good example of this format is the University of Washington's series African American West, 1528-2000 by Quintard Taylor.

TED has some very nicely produced lectures and seems to be concerned about the visual presentation as much as by the content. Just because we are watching an hour long lecture the presentation doesn't have to be ugly. They also seem to be shorter programs which make them easier to watch on the internet. I kind of like this lecture by Alain de Botton entitled: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success.

I also think that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute does a great job of staging and presenting a lecture series so that it is more interesting to watch on the internet. Below is a lecture by Bruce D. Walker, M.D. on
AIDS and the HIV Life Cycle.

Finding these programs is another problem altogether and the subject of a future blog. For now a very handy list of almost 50 sites that feature educational videos, or as they are referred on the site, "intelligent videos", can be found at the Open Culture web site.

Enjoy the programs and let me know what you think.

Timothy Lorang

Broadband for the People

2009-07-22T18:29:00.001-07:00

Last week I attended the Alliance for Community Media (ACM) annual conference in Portland, Oregon. These are the folks who run PEG TV channels or Public, Education and Government channels. A lot of people refer to this as public access TV which covers only a small part of it. Probably the popular parody of public access TV is the old Saturday Night Live skit "Wayne's World." There are two things that should be noted about this group. First, long before YouTube and the internet these folks were giving average citizens access to the airways. They provided an inexpensive platform where people, not governments, not corporations and not special interest groups, could express themselves. The second thing is these people are passionate about community television.

The price for freedom of speech is you let everyone have a voice. Then you get shows on public access that inspired "Wayne's World" and you get silly cats on YouTube. This I believe is an acceptable price. The PEG channels have not only given average people a platform but they have made education and their local governments more accessible to more people. From my conversations at the conference it seems that these resources are better utilized in smaller towns and tight knit communities and have less of an impact in suburbia and large cities. There are exceptions of course, especially in cities where the neighborhoods have access to the PEG channels.

While attending the conference I was thinking about the future of television and the PEG channels. PEG channels are under assault across the country by the large cable franchises who give up channel space and a small percentage of their profits to support community television. The Comcast's of the world would just as soon see PEG channels disappear. In addition many have been predicting the demise of broadcast and cable television and its replacement by the internet. The attraction of community television is the community and the connection between neighbors. On-line communities are not the same. How does the Founder's Day Parade streamed on YouTube build community or the City Council Meeting podcasts encourage citizen involvement?

I am not sure what is going to happen but I did make it to one panel discussion that got me very excited. Sean McLaughlin, the Executive Director of Access Humboldt chaired a panel discussion with Christopher Mitchell, the Director of Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the Institute for Local Self Reliance and the New Rules Project, and John Bloch, Board President for ORCA Media in Montpelier, Vermont. Turns out a lot of people have been thinking about and doing something about this for a while now. According to Mitchell 60 communities have already built full fiber-to-the-home networks and many more are working on it. Now I live in Seattle, according to some, one of the most wired cities in the US. I get Comcast's highest internet connection that approaches 3MBps for download speeds and .1MBps for upload speeds. Burlington Telecom, the community run broadband internet services in Burlington, Vermont, provides 8MBps upload and download speeds and bundles that with cable and unlimited US phone service for less than Comcast charges me for internet and cable service.

As a community they are solving the "last mile" problem and providing the gold standard of broadband connectivity, fiber to the home, for less than a private company. In fact private companies don't even want to touch it. Not only do they have broadband, the fiber provides cable television AND telephone service. The comparison of service and costs between private companies and public utilities is pretty striking. Lafayette, Louisiana's public utility's network offers 10Mbps symmetrical connections for less than $30 a month. In Burlington you can get your own television channel for $65 a month. They have plenty of room because they have fiber to the home. The future is here and it's in small towns across America. Of course this is only true in area where it's not illegal. Apparently some states have laws against the public competing against the telecoms. Even Seattle has a group working on it: the Seattle Digital Justice Campaign. Of course Mitchell from Minneapolis had to tell me about it. I'm not too optimistic for Seattle but I'm excited about Burlington, VT, Lafayette, LA, Ashland, OR and the Loma Linda's of the nation.

You can find out more about municipal and community broadband networks at Muninetworks.org and for more information about broadband policy go to Baller.com.

YouTube vs. Professional Video

2009-07-11T13:22:00.001-07:00

Recently an associate of mine and a fellow member of the Communications Media Management Association, Cynthia Hotvedt of Medtronic, Inc started a conversation about creating "YouTube/home video" style programs in the corporate setting. There were a lot of contributions and opinions on this subject. The members of CMMA are managers of corporate, educational and government internal media departments. Many of them are responsible for internal communications and many more are responsible for external communications and hence the "look" and "message" of their organizations.

It seems that there are three reasons given to engage in "YouTube/home video" style productions.

YouTube is getting a lot of buzz so shouldn't we be doing that too?
We should engage our employees and customers in generating our message.
This is cheap; we don't need to pay for video production.

The reaction ranged from enthusiastic acceptance to beating the evil amateurs away with a stick. Some saw this as a threat on quality and professionalism. Others saw this as the latest in a long line of fads like camcorders and super-8 film (for those of us who were around when these were fads). They contend that the amateurs would soon fade away when it became evident that skill was needed to craft a coherent message. Still others reacted to the continual onslaught of those who wanted something for nothing and devised strategies for coping with the cheapskates. Others thought it was great and have already started distributing flip cameras.

Well, I'm taking a firm stand on the side of, well… it just depends. Meaning that the message and the media just depend upon what you are trying to accomplish. But first let's step back and look at what we mean by professional, YouTube, User Generated Content and all this other stuff.

YouTube is the newest incarnation of the democratization of media distribution. My "25 cent words" for saying that every few years there is a decrease in the cost of the tools to produce film and video and a group previously prevented from producing content now can. When 16mm cameras became available in the 1960s there was an upsurge in independent documentary film producers. When public access television became widespread every suburban teenager had a talk show, aka the "Wayne's World Affect." When camcorders became available in the 1980s everyone started making their own videos. Now YouTube has made it possible for anyone to distribute video for nothing and that's pretty cheap.

Now just because someone can make and distribute a video doesn't make it good and that is the point made by my professional friends. There are millions of examples of bad video on the internet. But it does give talented people an outlet they never had before and those few individuals are the ones creating the buzz.

So, does professional video have a place? Yes of course. Whenever the message is important, the story is critical and the audience needs to be engaged I would pay and depend upon a professional. The video should be distributed where it will engage the audience. If that is on YouTube, NBC or the corporate web site then that is where the video should be distributed.

How about amateur video? If the purpose is to save costs then it is a Pyrrhic savings. It is like the old production saying: I can make the video cheap, fast and good: please pick two. You can save money but you may not achieve your goals. The idea of getting someone to produce your content for free is ultimately bad. You cannot control the message, you have no control on quality and you cannot control the distribution. If you want control you need to pay for it. But what about User Generated Content (UGC) you ask. Coke and Mentos got a huge amount of publicity from YouTube videos. That is true but Coke and Mentos do not let amateurs control their corporate image and message. A business can work with their fans and customers in promoting their goals if they don't abdicate that role to the amateurs. The dark side of course is exemplified by The Sons of Maxwell's "United Breaks Guitars."

A couple of places are doing some cool things with User Generated Content. Robert Halper, the Director of Video Communications at Johnson & Johnson is in charge of their YouTube Channel. One of their cool projects and a great example of effectively harnessing UGC without it being exploitive is the Real Mom Series. This is one of my favorites:

An example from a university is the University of Washington's
Pocket Media contest. The idea was staff, faculty, students and alumni could compete if the shot their video on a camera that fit into their pocket. They got some very good results.

Neither the University of Washington nor Johnson & Johnson are using UGC in place of professionally produced content or to save money on production costs. They are using it to engage their customers, build community and enhance their message. Let me know what you think about user generated content and YouTube quality videos.

Free! The Price of Educational Television: Part 2

2009-07-07T20:59:00.001-07:00

In my last blog the debate sparked by Chris Anderson's new book,
"Free: The Future of a Radical Price"
(Hyperion; $26.99) and the responses by Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Cuban, Seth Godin and Chris Bogan inspired me to reflect on the model of distributing educational video. For years I worked at the University of Washington's UWTV and at the ResearchChannel. Besides producing programs and managing the production department, one of my jobs was to get people to produce and air their programs on the channel and the internet. It was not always an easy job. A typical conversation often went like this:

Me: "You should let us record your lecture so we can put it on television."
Professor: "How much will you pay me?
Me: "Nothing."
Professor: "How many people will see it?"
Me: "I don't know."
Professor: "Can you prevent anyone from stealing the content?"
Me: "That will be hard."
Professor: "How much will it cost?"
Me: "Oh, between 2 and 5 thousand dollars."
Professor: "Are you an insane idiot?"
Me: "Um…."

So we now know "Free" is the new future and as many say, the future is here.

As Andrea Ford's article in Time Magazine, Logging On to the Ivy League,
makes clear there are a lot of advantages for those schools who have embraced distributing their video content on television and the internet. Among other things the videos promote the school's presence, their faculty, programs, research, as well as connect with their alumni and reach out to prospective students. Some content providers have told me that the videos are in many ways better than traditional advertising. For example a medical school will record a medical ground round that features a particular operation or procedure. This program will then be seen by a doctor across the country who will then recommend his patient seek treatment at the university's medical center. Other schools feel that the programs are a good way to showcase their research and will impress potential funders and granting agencies. When I asked one researcher who his audience was he told me the state's legislature. Many non-Ivy League schools use this platform to gain attention. It is one thing to have a paper published in a peer reviewed journal and quite another to have 25,000 views on YouTube.

The question now returns to who pays for this "free" content"?

The term "free content" already established that the consumer is not paying and most on-line distributors are providing the service for no cost and are not going to pay for the content. This leaves the schools to pay for production and distribution. Production can cost anywhere from a couple of thousand dollars to the low six figures depending upon the subject and how it is shot. Who generally pays these costs and why?

Those readers who work in academia are already aware that universities and colleges are not monolithic organizations with clearly stated goals and obvious objectives. The English Department, Athletics and the Medical School will not only have different funding models and goals but different constituents and measures of success. Many schools embrace this laissez-faire approach for content creation and if the medical school finds it in their best interest to produce and distribute videos and the English Department can't buy ink for their copier that is fine. Fewer schools look at free content distribution in a holistic way to promote the school or achieve some public outreach goals.

There are many who believe that the entire content production and distribution model should support itself. The reports of millions of dollars being made by photos of silly cats on-line have convinced many academics that the nation's top physicist should be able to do the same. But even if YouTube.EDU shared revenue with content providers like MIT's academic rock star Walter Lewin, Dr. Lewin would be hard pressed to cover the cost of production. His all time most popular video with over 234,000 views is just a third of the traffic make up guru Michelle Pham generates in just one week.

Of course Michelle Pham doesn't make money showing videos on YouTube she makes money selling make-up to people who watch her videos on YouTube. What is MIT's goal, or rather what is Walter Lewin's goal? What is the measure of success? What does it mean if a professor who normally speaks before an annual audience of a couple of hundred students now has an audience of a couple of thousand people worldwide? Does that have a value? Is there a return on the schools investment? Should academic knowledge be reduced to an ROI?

The cost of production including the work of digitizing and posting the video is borne by the school or the department. Let me know what you think. Are there other funding models? Is it worth the effort? I'll be exploring these questions in more depth over the next few months.

Free! The price of Educational Television: Part 1

2009-07-05T17:30:00.001-07:00

I have not read Chris Anderson's new book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" (Hyperion; $26.99) but last night I read Malcolm Gladwell's review in The New Yorker, "Priced to Sell." Then this morning I read comments in Chris Brogan's blog: I Believe Mark Cuban is Right
which lead me naturally enough to Mark Cuban's blog: Free vs Freely Distributed and of course to Seth Godin's disagreement with Gladwell's review on his blog: Malcolm is wrong. I'm not going to weigh in on the future of newspapers or whether "Free" is the new price point but I do have some thoughts about distributing educational video, its value and who pays for it.

Several points in the "Free Debate" seem to be clear even if not everyone agrees on what they mean.

Consumers are increasingly expecting information for free.
The cost of distribution is so low that when you "round down" it is free.
Someone is still going to make money somewhere.

Some of the areas of contention are:

Who controls the distribution of information?
Who gets paid for what?
What will the marketplace do?

What does this have to do with educational content, especially with video content where I have more experience? Through my previous roles at the University of Washington's UWTV and the ResearchChannel I spent a lot of my time trying to get professors and schools to record their talks, lectures and presentations, their "intellectual property," and distribute it first on television then on the internet for free. Of course it was not free to produce and distribute the programs but the programs are free for anyone with access to the internet. For the most part the content providers were not paid. However, there are countervailing opinions within the educational community that will both help and hinder the distribution of educational content.

Briefly let's take a quick look back on some of the dominant attitudes of academia on distributing educational video in particular. In our culture colleges and universities, for over a thousand years, have been at the center of disseminating information and knowledge. Even though higher education thrives on a meritocracy access has traditionally been available only to the elite and widespread access has only been available in the United States since the end of World War II. For some the promise of television meant a way to educate the masses and to freely disseminate knowledge. Pioneers such as Johns Hopkins University began broadcasting "The Johns Hopkins Science Review" on WAAM as early as 1948. Many Public Television stations began as educational TV stations in the 1950s and 1960s. For example KCTC in Seattle first aired in 1955 from the campus of the University of Washington. Because of the strong believe that knowledge should be free many of these efforts, from children's educational programs to satellite distribution across Alaska, were supported by local, state and federal subsidies which have been steadily eroding since the 1980s.

While some promoted the free distribution of academic content over television others were vehemently guarding their "intellectual property." They often felt that at certain levels information could be shared amongst their peers but mass distribution, especially on television, was a waste of time and a bit unseemly. Others thought that knowledge needed to be distributed face to face, in a brick and mortar building, that giving people free access to knowledge would somehow decrease enrolment. Others felt that, for example, if they wrote a book they should be paid for it, if they gave a televised lecture they should be paid for it. The basic stance was that giving away information for free was counterproductive.

An article in Time Magazine written by Andrea Ford this past April, Logging On to the Ivy League, pointed out what my colleagues at the ResearchChannel and UWTV had been saying for over 10 years. That giving away the content, the exposure, was worth the costs. In the article Ford talked with MIT's Steve Carson, "who serves as president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, says it's worth the expense, since the online content attracts prospective students, keeps alumni connected and encourages innovation. Schools have decided that these benefits outweigh the concerns about cost, intellectual property and devaluation of élite degrees. After all, the free material does not add up to a diploma, and viewers can't interact with the faculty."

One major thing has changed between the time Johns Hopkins' educational programs first aired in 1948 and MITs YouTube adventure. Traditional broadcast bandwidth, including the license, transmission towers and related infrastructure, was very expensive and distribution limited to a few hundred miles. When distribution subsidies dried up in the 1980s educational television all but disappeared. Now, as we have learned from Anderson et al, distribution via the internet is so cheap it might as well be free. Now that the walls to distribution have been torn down knowledge is free to roam the verdant fields of an eager public, yet rubble and barbed wire still mar the landscape impeding the free flow of knowledge.

In Caldwell's review he criticizes Anderson's example of Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, "who famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties that "our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."' Caldwell points out that even without the problems later faced by nuclear power, electricity would never be "too cheap to meter" because no matter how cheap it became to generate electricity there would always be costs associated with the infrastructure and delivery of electricity. Likewise, no matter how cheap it is to distribute content on YouTube.EDU, assuming that YouTube can maintain or survive their business model, it still costs thousands of dollars to produce and publish the simplest video lecture. Someone has to pay for that.

This is where the current debate in educational video lies and the subject of my next blog. Who should pay for the distribution of educational content and who should benefit? What pricing models make sense and what business models are sustainable?

First Entry

2009-06-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

This is my inaugural entry in a new series I am publishing for Image Media Partners. My partner Nate and I started Image Media Partners to help people deal with producing and distributing media. I am from the video production side of the house and Nate is the technical, streaming, coding type of guy.

One of the things we’ve noticed is there is a lot of bad video on the internet and it’s hard to find the good stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against bad video. The internet is the great democratizing agent that lets everyone have a voice. Silly cats and goofy teenagers are fine and more power to them if they can get an audience for their videos.

But why do those that have an important message insist on producing such bad video? Even those without an important message, just a halfway decent message, can do a better job, should do a better job. And I am not talking about hiring expensive production crews or buying top-of-line HD gear. I am talking about using the tools you have and doing a good job.

It is amazing to me that people who otherwise pride themselves in their professionalism do such a poor job when they represent themselves or their company on video. For example the other day I saw a video on a web site about building web sites and blogging spaces. This person really knew a lot about building web sites and blogging. Their work was professional looking and she clearly approached her business seriously. But the video was atrocious. It was a talking head shot. But if the head was focused, in the center of the screen and lit it would have been a lot easier to watch. Besides she just rambled on and on. This was extemporaneous exposition without structure or point.

It is clear that the majority of on-line media doesn’t even reach decent levels of mediocrity. There is good content out there but the percentage is small. Again, I’m not talking about over produced Hollywood video with animated graphics, make-up and boom shots. I’m talking about straight ahead, clean, decent video. We believe that it is possible to produce and distribute good content that effectively delivers its message without breaking the bank.

We are not only concerned with producing media but with the entire spectrum of content development, work flow management, publishing media, managing files, archiving and retrieving data, broadcast and on-line delivery.

We intend to use this space to:

Provide practical tips and guidelines to help improve the quality of on-line media.
Give examples of effective media.
Highlight best practices in production and delivery.
Review and recommend tools to help you deliver your message.
Comment and review trends in the industry.
Lay out recommendations for improvement and development.
Connect our readers with the resources to succeed.
Encourage discussion and debate.

We hope you find this information useful and we encourage you to comment and let us know what you think.

Tim Lorang