Posts tagged ‘video’
The last step in copying your movie to an iPhone
There’s lots of good info out in intarwebland about how to go about encoding video for the iPod or iPhone, but amazingly I couldn’t find anything about the last step - moving the damn finished file to the device. Turns out I really haven’t learned how iTunes works even after a few years of use.
It’s really pretty simple:
- Save your encoded video to any convenient directory.
- In Itunes, go to “File” and select “Add File to Library”. Find your file and click.
- When you attach your device you can go into it’s video settings in iTunes and select the title you wish to sync.
Much easier than I was thinking - sometimes the solution isn’t as hard as you think it should be.
How do you get your video seen the way you want it to be seen?
I was reading Mark Cuban’s post about how the Oscars should deal with YouTube and was inspired to jot down some of my own ideas about video hosting. Mark argues that the best way for content owners to deal with the video hosting sites on the internet is not to bust out the lawyers to remove your content, but to flood the sites with clips that look like your video, but are really just billboards pointing back to your site, where presumably you can collect advertising revenue.
OK, this is a pretty good idea. Most of these video hosting sites will allow you to post just about anything (besides porn and hate material). If you want you could post hours of video of paint drying. There are no restrictions on posting video for commercial purposes. Posting an ad on YouTube in order to draw viewers away from YouTube may seem a little skeezy, but from a business standpoint, it just seems to make perfect sense.
So what’s wrong with this?
Flooding YouTube with ads for your site creates a value differential. Now when someone goes to YouTube and searches for your show, most of the time they are likely to only find your ad for it, while they can be assured of finding what they want on your own site. You’ve decreased the value of YouTube to the point where your site is more attractive. But YouTube still has some aces up its sleeves.
There are social solutions to the problem of flooding a site. All YouTube needs is a method for rating contributors. Voting on submissions. Heck, YouTube users could create systems that blacklist members that have links that point back to the old school media companies that do this. This tactic for decreasing YouTube’s value could very quickly be overcome.
Back to value differentials. If you decide not to try to reduce your competitors’ value, you must raise your own. I think a good example of how to do this is how NBC has dealt with “Heroes”. I don’t watch traditional TV anymore. The old saying, “There’s never anything good on”. I’ll buy DVDs, and I watch live events like sports at a bar. But I caught an episode of this show at my brother’s house one day, and decided that I’d like to see more, and I was excited enough about it I didn’t want to wait for the DVD. There’s plenty of video hosting sites out there that have the episodes within a day or two of broadcast. The quality is good and there are no ads.
So why do I watch it on NBC.com? Because of my high moral values? Pfft! I ain’t that nice a guy. NBC inserts a short ad in several times during the play of an episode, and has a still ad continuously on the side. But the quality of the video is just as good as what I’ll find on a hosting site, and I know exactly where and when I’ll find a new episode. There’s a bunch of bonus features on the NBC site as well, like a comic, a wiki, interviews, etc. So add together the pluses, subtract the minuses of the ads, and overall NBC has provided more value to me than the hosting sites. They’ve won my eyeballs for this show, and maybe I’ll check out some of their others on the site.