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Posts tagged: brightcove

Qik and Brightcove May Soon Present “Live From…Anywhere.”

Student taking a photo with a camera phone
Image via Wikipedia

Sure, the terrible violence and politcal unrest in Iran is a tragic and disheartening story, but the “real” story continues to be how social media sites like Twitter and YouTube have been bringing the sad story to the world.

While it remains to be seen what will happen to Mahmoud and company, the writing is clearly on the wall for traditonal journalism.  The “citizen” journalists are rising up and taking reporting of the news into their own hands.  Is it neat and tidy and fact-checked? Not really.  Is it instantly more compelling, engrossing and informative than any half-hour with Tom Brokaw could ever promise to deliver?  You bet.

Of course, what’s been largely missing in this journalistic uprising is live video reports from down in the trenches.

Qik has been providing a service that allows certain cell phone users to live stream to the internet.  While they are expanding the number of devices offering this service, they are combining forces with Brightcove, a very large internet video distribution company, resulting in, eventually, the ability for ordinary folks with cell phones to “broadcast” live over a potentially massive network of sites reaching, theoretically, millions of viewers.  All of this without any satellite trucks or multi-million dollar news-vans.  No FCC, no corporate overseers and no commercial sponsors to placate.

As technology like this becomes more widespread it is going to become harder than ever for anyone to hide.  Imagine the power of not just, say, audiotaping an encounter with a NYC police officer detaining you unlawfully.  Now imagine live streaming that same encounter.

It will be very interesting to see how various goverments react to these innovations.  As Lancaster, PA has proven, the government loves the idea of cameras watching our every move but what happens when the cameras are turned back onto them?

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categories Uncategorized | admin | datetime June 23, 2009 11:05 am | comments Comments (0)

Brightcove (and others) End “Sell” Option

Yesterday, I had a lovely meeting with a programmer from Veoh.  Among other things she was telling me that they were phasing out the option for users to “sell” downloads of their videos.  She told me that upper management thought that users would be upset by this but, as she suspected, nobody cared at all.

Now comes news (via NewTeeVee) that Brightcove is taking a similar approach:

“On July 31, 2008, we plan to discontinue the Pay Media (Beta) functionality within Brightcove.

The Pay Media functionality allows publishers to rent or sell their content directly to consumers. Since its beta release in January 2007, less than 1% of our customers have tried the feature and an even smaller percentage of our customers use it routinely. Given the minimal adoption of Pay Media and the feedback we have received from the market, we are going to discontinue this beta functionality.”

Looks like most folks have realized that there is less to be gained trying to sell video to the end-user than there is to be gained in exposure giving the video away for free (or a rev share from ads).

Users are just not interested in paying a per-download fee to check out the latest kickintheballs video.

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categories Uncategorized | admin | datetime April 17, 2008 2:24 pm | comments Comments (0)

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