So, we’ve reached the early bits of the 21st century, only to find TV companies (Sky) selling themselves using door-to-door salesmen.

To me, this says less about the viewer than about the ability of TV to market itself.

If you don’t want sports, most TV is available free in the UK (as long as you don’t live in a Welsh valley as I do – where you have to pay a TV licence despite being incapable of receiving digital or analogue TV or radio), so why do nigh on 9 million households pay Sky ? Well, because they’re willing to put people on the pavement. They sell their service like no one else.

The BBC doesn’t need to sell – it just needs to terrify the population into paying their licence fee through their obnoxious ads; ITV isn’t sure where it stands in all of this and is seeing its audience disappear to more savvy operators. But as the recession bites, why spend that £20 – £50 a month when you can get it for free ?

Sky’s pounding of the pavements is a smart move, but may not be enough in the face of ‘free’ competitors.

View post:
Pounding The Streets

The old 80:20 rule really applies to software development (the last 20% takes 80% of the overall timescale of the project). The last leg seems to be the longest, and this is proving to be the case for Project V. As ever this is a combination of developers under-estimating and clients (that’s me) over-specifying (oh, and changing their minds. I really should know better..).

The trouble with software development is that the metalanguage around it suggests that it is a science. In reality, it is an art. An iterative process where craft is at a premium. At the same time, producing code is an industrial process involving different roles and responsibilities. An industry where an idea takes ten seconds and realising it takes ten months. And also an industry where your product is never complete, there are always revisions to make.

So, during our long, hot summer, things are moving slowly to their conclusion. I am sanguine about the prospects for the Project since the actual product is becoming better and smoother every day, ideas are being refined and it will not only be the most cost effective, but also potentially the best, product on the market when it is fully released.

Excerpted from:
Project V – The Last Leg

The disparity between the regulations that broadcasters in the UK, such as ITV, and Google trade under are truly ludicrous. You either regulate video content or you don’t. YouTube’s self regulation is laughable, but that’s the nature of unmoderated content. Now it seems that the legislators are waking up to this.

This is a long standing issue – are ISPs responsible for the websites on their service, or are publishers responsible for what their authors write?

Personally, I believe that there’s a simple measure for this. Any party benefiting commercially from the provision of content (not services) should be regulated. YouTube should be brought under Television Without Frontiers regulations.

And this isn’t an issue isolated to the UK; there is an increasingly long list of countries where YouTube has been banned. But there is a dark side to this. I reckon that the only reason more countries haven’t blocked YouTube is that its influence is not yet significant, but this may change and there is a danger of political censorship overtaking moral censorship.

Excerpted from:
Unlevel Playing Field

Following on from my last post a former colleague has pointed out Ply Media who seems to have some neat overlay tools which work cross platform (thanks, Pete).

Excerpted from:
Plying

The video tools market is an interesting one. I have long expected some clever online editing tools or overlay-based technologies to appear which, in particular, make a link between the temporal feature of videos and related online content (e.g. click to put the bike in your shopping basket’, ’see the best off for this product’, etc…

The reality is that tools like Microsoft Producer have long allowed you to sync, for example, powerpoint presentations with video, but the potential to add hotspots to videos to enable shopping has still not been realised. Of course, Jumpcut is also a veteran of this market and I’ve blogged previously about MovieMasher. But a new generation of clever, commercial tools

As the Internet TV market matures and services like iPlayer continue to grow in popularity surely the next generation of internet video companies will focus on this area. The one stumbling block is that people have traditional seen TV as a lean back medium and are reluctant to interact – red button services have hardly changed the industry (although services such as QVC and Teletext show what can be done with the right approach). The good news is that all the experience I’ve had shows that viewers are more likely to inter-react with Internet video than they are with traditional TV.

See more here:
Opening The Tool Box