I just got off the phone with an old friend Alex Mendoza, CEO and founder of Stylophane regarding his new product that tracks and reports Facebook users.
We both agreed that Facebook will probably rival Google in it’s size and popularity. We discussed the word to describe Facebook as a sliced “Gated Communities” . When you think of Google VS. Facebook, Google Open VS. Facebook Closed.
Anyway, he told me an amazing story about making this Facebook tool and when it was ready they launched a small grassroots social blogging push. Well obviously the right person reading, picking it up, and running with it, got his product to be the talk of the European Fashion community. Were talking major major fashion blogs. He has been getting calls all over the world from major designers and big player companies asking about his product. (companies not mentioned for obvious reasons..)
The takeaway is this, You can spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on Google ads and you may get a handful of customers in the end, but if you run a similar model in Facebook, you end up with a load of loyal fans that you can nurture.
I hope I have explained it well enough to understand, but if your not sure visit
Streaming has clearly been around for at least 10 years as we know it.
We are still and early stages of streaming for both Live and VOD (Video On Demand). So, you are a Church group, School, or you just have lots of videos to offer on the web and the question becomes, “Where do I store my media safely?”.
There are a great deal of people using Free or the cheapest places to host their media. Over time this becomes precious media. I have seen Churches especially gone down this path to save only to pay big later.
Some organizations have experienced painful downtime along with their own physical media file moves that have matured them into making more informed choices for Streaming solutions Providers and their support teams.
Why all the concern about storage?It is not today that you should be concerned with choosing where you can store them, it is when your web or media administrator moves on sometimes without clear instructions as to where and how the media is stored.
What are the the key things I have to watch out for?
Everyone has heard of the NFL or No Free Lunch. As an organization grows and your customers and viewers come to rely more on the media that you have stored and their unique links to those files. The unique URL or path to your media files are key to your impending or potential danger. Anytime you have Free or bare discount Anything, you run the risk of losing something valuable. How can you complain or request an explanation to a company that is not compensated for their services with Free?
Free things can be great for undetermined amounts of time, but when your Free service realizes they have to start charging you or go out of business, your views change and you become uncertain of the stability of your precious media. When it comes to your business or organization stability, you should not rely on the Free or almost free business model. Sometimes Free is not always free, yo have to pay by seeing ads you do not want to see. Afterall, the streaming business or organization you choose to work with cannot function without a clear path for compensation.
If you are in that position now, plan ahead today for the worst case scenario which can be extended downtimes, lost passwords, files, no backups. The key is to CYA (Cover Your bAckside).
If the worst happens, someone in your organization, maybe even you, will have to dig up any and all your media files you will have to reorganize, upload them to a new place, learn their URL path Structure, and get into each of your Flash files (which requires manually opening Flash swf or fla files) and rename the path and upload them.
Remember, if your streaming service is down, gone, or telling you they they have to move or close, YOUR STREAMING WILL NOT BE WORKING and potentially you lose your files. This can be a horrible position to be in. The blame can rest on YOUR development team that has to answer to the CEO or Organization head.
Selecting Streaming and Media Storage Services Summary -
Well Established system or representative of they systems
Tech support that clearly understands streaming and it’s challenges
Multiple POP, peer, server, network, and publishing points.
FTP Compatibilities
Statistics for Viewer identification and Usage
Administration tools would be a plus (automatic mount point generation)
Live Streaming for Flash, Windows media, and Progressive
Well, think again. I have been researching and speaking to some of the best minds and have concluded that creating a VOD or Video On Demand page that will stream on every type of smart phone will be a real challenge.
For example, as of the date of this post, the IPhone is one of the most popular phones with an ever increasing viewership, a close 2nd (depending on the demographics) to Blackberries .
The IPhone does not support flash, but will play a Quicktime video from it. Next you go to the Black Berry, on Verizon’s platform and they want 3gg video formats. Most broswers will support MP4 and the IPhone will play most but not all videos and plays best with Quicktime as a file using the Iphone’s player. As a layman, it is hard to parse out all these variables and frankly I am ok with looking at this from the clouds and it is messy on the ground. (so to speak)
I think that IPhone will have to come to the party by Summer when Flash Player 10x comes out. Steve Jobs cannot stand Adobes arrogance and their buggy Flash tool, but I do not see Apple coming up with a player of their own that will be adopted in the next year like Flash. Flash was a slow adoption, and still has people arguing over why use it and will HTML 5 take it’s place. HTML 5 does not have the adoption and you cannot monitize it like you can Flash. I just posted another article on Flash vs HTML 5.
Add to that, TMobil and other services that have different codecs and browser handling techniques…Nothing is standardized. Every phone needs some kind of player.
In a perfect phone PDA ITouch world, in theory, a company that wants to stream to all phone, one needs to to have files in many formats sitting on a server, and when that file is called, the server “sniffs or figures out what format” the phone needs and serves it up…. Most companies either straddling one side of the fence or straddling it to satisfy its viewers.
Maybe you have seen YouTube’s HTML5 demo which claiming good but is found to be be unsatisfactory and slow.
We are still in the Wild West when it comes to streaming and platform-player adoption. It is pretty messed up if you ask me.
3-5-2010 update -
I was talking with one of our partners at www.DigitalRapids.com about the IPhone and streaming challenges. The challenge is to try and serve up the video live or VOD stream and Digital Rapids has been working on this with Adobe, whom we all love.
None of the stream boxes out today will allow you to stream to an IPhone, and I use IPhone as an example because of its popularity and it’s Flash challenges. Even if the Apple opened it to Flash, there are streaming delivery challenges. Digital Rapids has come up with a box they call the “ABR” box, which uses the Adobe’s “Adaptive system” (just learned this word today) technique of streaming to the many different codecs and platforms on the market today. In one move, this streaming piece of hardware solves most of your cross-phone-platform viewing challenges.
RSS feeds are defined as (Rich Site Summery) and it is a way of delivering updated and changing web content.
Many news-related sites and publishers use RSS feeds to syndicate their content to anyone on the planet that has an interest.
I want to go into many different areas of blogging but let’s first see if we can get the RSS feed understood. What benefit is it to your reader? They save time as they are connected to your site updates without having to regularly visit your site just to see if you have added articles and or content that is appealing to them.
If you have not been to a page with the RSS feed symbol and want to experience it got to an example at the New York Times and click on the RSS feed you like.
At the time of this blog, it is clear that when picking a video platform, you should know your audience. Armed with this knowledge, you can determine what format or platform the majority of your users will be accessing. (platform meaning Windows or Mac, Flash vs. Windows media, Silverlight).
Windows is cheap and does not require the licensing Flash does, but on the other hand, flash provides the ability to wrap more controls and monetization. Alright, so what about the IPhone and why it will not play Flash……yet.
For you who are deep into it, there is HTML 5, which at the time of this post, is not as robust as Flash for pushing and controls, and monetization.
Must Listen – CNet HTML 5 VS. Flash > Discussion – Podcast
Our bet is on Flash for many reasons, which are -
powerful and available run-time,
ability to monetize, DRM (Digital Rights Management)
