Thursday's Keynotes

Thursday morning begins with fulfilling and traditional english breakfast. It included eggs, beans and sausages. The queue for breakfast at 8 am was about 10 metres long. This wasn't the first line that we've been on this short trip to England.

Twitter seems to be regarded as the official communication channel and can be accessed via the hash tag #sme09. Particularly Twitter seems to be a very common communication channel in and from seminars and conferences.

The Online Video Experience
Keynote Speaker:
Dr. William Cooper, Founder and Chief Executive, InformITV

The first keynote, "The Online Video Experience" was presented by William Cooper from InformITV and focused on online video development generally.
Obviously, as broadband connections get ever wider adoption, online video has been able to form a serious extension or even alternative to traditional broadcast tv in spite of still mostly lower general quality and reliability. But the added technical possibilities around networking and interactivity have been able to make online video what Mr. Cooper calls a disruptive media, that though inferior in the beginning is finally able to take over a lot of traditional space.
Cooper predics that the development in the next 5 years will go towards online video fully spreading from the computer screen to the living room's TV-sets as well as the integration of traditional tv and online video in our entertainment units.

Cooper sees the protective behaviour of traditional broadcasters and the very nationally oriented rights model as the biggest slowing factors for online video growth. I agree entirely that we are at a point where many technical problems have been solved, now we have to tear down some limitations regarding the availability of content.

One thought especially regarding content production in Finland: Think about how many households you can access when producing for traditional 500 million homes

This presentation focused on online video development generally. Keynote speaker looked forward to the next developements in the delivery of digital media over the internet.




YouTube.com has 1 billion views a day, 40 million views an hour and 20 hours of content uploaded every minute, mainly professionally produced content. It has become
a really substitute for television. Global broadband video distribution is the main target for development at the moment. The question is whether internet distibuted video content should be used via desktop computers or television devices. New devices exist such as IPTV set top boxes and Apple TV device. Widgets will enrich the content of future television, will this finally lead into interactive television which supposed to come already in Digital Television tehnology (such as DVB-T/C/H). Quality of service (QoS) is required more and more; this requirement has created technologies such as adaptive streaming, which seems to be the hottest topic at the moment. This might be one of the emerging technologies for integrating On-line services & content to the living room TVs.

In a time of Digital era there are many opposite trends compared to the Analogue era. Many of us claims to be in the time of digital era but follows the analogue era trends. They´re just replaced some physical devices - not thoughts and methods...

Analogue era Digital era
===========================================
closed networks open networks
broadcast multicast, unicast
transmission routing
fixed frequences shared cloud
film, tape streams, files
signals packets
scheduled on-demand
push pull
channels programmes, clips
schedule search
sequence selection
mass media unique users
interruptive advertising addressable advertising

Hello teachers: Which terminology list you use in your daily job...?

Video Advertising: Setting Standards for Success
Keynote speaker:
Guy Phillipson, CEO, Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)
Jack Wallington, also from IAB

Guy Phillipson from the Internet Advertising Bureau continued the lookout on the state of the video industry today with focussing on the online video advertising market in his keynote "Video Advertising: Settings Standards for Success". Even thought the online video advertising only holds a tiny piece of the video advertising market, it is the most heavily growing segment. Phillipson cited numbers like 195% growth for preroll video ad spending volume year-to-year in 2009.



H1/2009 online is the only medium showing growth with +4% in UK. Majority of broadband services are now above 2M (compared to Finland where 1M will be 'proofed service level' in 2010...)
Online spend has overtaken TV in UK. There are currently 23,5 % On-line share and 21,9 % on TV share. UK is the first ever land where that has happened.

Mr. Phillipson had prepared for a video demo, which didn't work at all. How surprising here;)

Good places for online video advertising help, support and discussions:
-> iabuk.net/video
-> iabvideo.com

For Internet advertisement there exists already some Standard 'Formats' and more (technical) to come!
- Pre/mid/post-roll
- Interactive
- Interactive branded skins (depending on content used)
- In-stream overlay
- Branded content

Bad practice:
- lack of frequency capping
- not considering lenght
- not adapting for online (optimized for)
- allowing online to be pushed aside

Case Benjamin Button: VoD campaign contributed to significant rise for a Benjamin Button release which caused Warner Bros to choose VoD campaign for all coming movie launches.

(To be) online is the king of the consumer respond.

Summary:
- total online ad spend has overtaken TV
- pre-roll ads up 195% YOY
- IAB setting standards for video

Planning, Building, and Launching a Video Blog - Workshop

14:00-17:00 

Presenter: 
Jose Castillo, President, thinkjose, USA


This hands-on workshop on wednesday afternoon covered the basics of planning, building, and launching a video blog and answered to questions such as: how to make a video blog that can be used with different devices, such as laptop and mobile phone? Which is the right platform for multichannel video blogging?

A definition of vlog or video blog is easy unless we don't mess it up with 'show-ups'. A video blog shall include at least regular videos, syndication (i.e. RSS -feed), content metadata such as where the clip was recorded an when, as well as a platform where content is stored. A quick & dirty solution is i.e. YouTube.com unless it´s nature is, of course, also a platform for just 'show-ups' with no particular value added meta information. What becoms to the Google, the owner of YouTube, they love meta information thus it makes search processes run smooth and well.

During our workshop we attendees created a vlog posting which is available at thinkjose.com and maybe something will also be found from streamingmedia.com/europe. As every good production, this too (among the others) had a 'B-crew' producing the making-of document. We recorded the preparations situation with mobile phones camera and also published it on yotube.com. Our idea to do so was just to show that a vlog posting doesn't necessary require nothing else but a mobile phone with camera. Luckily we managed to make youtube.com upload by utilizing mobile web browser hence the 'camera man' had forgotten the USB cable to hotel room.

A very important question to all vloggers: Why are we doing this? The answer shan't be: 'Because we can' and we fully agree with this. What becomes to boost some biz-making to blogging one should identify a niche and have the end on mind while vlogging. In common, boosting vlogging into a business requires not only the (regular) postings but at least the mini biz-plan to be succeeded.

The power of a video blog is not in the production value. It's the speed of delivery, relevance of the story & value added to the conversation, key goal is to get your followers to start discussion. Keep it simple - video blog is not a studio production!

We really liked the way how Jose introduced the topic for the audience. The presentation was clear and simple so that there was no possibility for misunderstanding. It was also inspiring and got us thinking video blogging as a really useful tool for marketing or bringing any opinions into public.

Tip for video producers: check out livestream.com, it's a great publishing point for all kind of video stuff.

How do we do it? Plan - Build - Launch

Plan:
=====
why we are doing this?
- increase visibility, revenue, marketing etc.
- identify a niche
- how do you want them to respond?
- who is involved?
- what is the content length etc.
- how many episodes?
- where? who is our audience? how will they find us?
- how do we measure the win?
- agree to mini-bizplan
- set team-task-roles-responsibilities
- what equipment do we need?

Workflow
========
- write a script (or at least pretend on a napkin)

short-sweet
funny-interesting
weird-entertainment
shocking-scary

....be dramatically different and remember the audience: Why should they care?

edit
====
-slash & burn
-tell a concise story
-make others look good
-thruth is stranger than fiction
-bumpers (watched tv lately) = memoriable audio component

Format
======
- itunes
- youtube
- blip.tv
- seesmic.com
- viddler.com
- vimeo.com

!!! Do not forget syndication: http://feedburner.com

Market
======
-submit to itunes, podcast alley, yahoo etc.
-digital marketing tools (social media)
-show your best stuff! not everything
-chicklets, badges, user submitted content etc.
-ask content from your audience - be different