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Today is a benchmark day for us at Rocketboom as we release the merits of a great new effort with blip.tv. Together we’ve integrated our systems to demonstrate a flexible model for distribution, sponsorship and advertising.
At Rocketboom, earlier this year, we designed a sponsorship model so far culminating in a week-long sponsorship by Real Player and a rev-share deal with YouTube.
I personally love our sponsorship model and consider it to be hardly invasive (you can expect to see more of these from us throughout 2008). It’s also a great system because we burn the sponsorship message into our master file and thus distribute it across all platforms. Not just one flash file, but all of our files, everywhere (e.g. the sponsorship message travels through our own site, iTunes, Facebook, YouTube, TiVo, etc.).
Now blip takes us further with the additional ability to serve interactive, post-roll ads and collapsable overlays in flash AND Quicktime files. After talking with Apple, we believe this is the first time anyone has used Quicktime to serve overlay ads. Our daily publishing method now incorporates this dynamic serving in perfect sync with our hard burning.
Blip brokered the sponsorship (many more to come) and has integrated their run-of-site framework into our site for extra coverage between sponsor runs. This gives us the ultimate flexibility to manage multiple sales of various types at the same time.
The blip folks are some of the brightest and smartest people in this space so its been a real pleasure to finally come together. Thanks especially to Mike and Dina for maintaining such strong passion and good will. On our side, I want to give a big thanks to the Rocketboom team, especially Mark Mathewson and Jamie Wilkinson whose persistence saw this project through.
Check out Mike’s post here.
To see in action, visit Rocketboom.
Want to get involved? Contact us!
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Have you ever wondered how the various video sites determine a view count?
TubeMogul conducted a study of the various video hosting sites by uploading videos, monitoring the conditions and recording the counts.
| Site |
Full View |
<1/2 View |
>1/2 View |
Refresh |
Embed |
| AOL Uncut |
Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
| Dailymotion |
Count |
Count |
Count |
No Count |
No Count |
| Google |
Count |
No Count |
Count |
No Count |
No Count |
| Metacafe |
One/IP addr. |
One/IP addr. |
One/IP addr. |
One/IP addr. |
One/IP addr. |
| Myspace |
Count |
No Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
| Revver |
Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
| Yahoo! Video |
One/IP addr. |
No Count |
No Count |
One/IP addr. |
No Count |
| YouTube |
Count |
No Count |
No Count |
No Count |
One/IP addr. |
As you can see, YouTube only ads one count per i.p. address, per fully watched video. No partial views get counted. When a video is embedded, it only gets counted once per i.p. no matter how many times the video is viewed. Yahoo Video and Metacafe are even more stringent.
Compare this to Revver which gives a count to a full view, a 1/2 view, less than 1/2 a view, refreshes and embeds. Big difference. Why would Revver be so slack on a count? The only reason I can think of is hyperbole.
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Several weeks ago we started to use TubeMogul and have been really impressed. It’s now a part of our daily workflow.
Each morningnnnwe upload our 3ivx 270×480 Quicktime file to Tube Moguel, enter 3 fields of metadata (title, descriptions, tags), select a category and then TubeMogul quickly uploads the video to 9 different sites all within a few minutes:
YouTube, Brightcove, Blip, Dailymotion, Revver, Google Video, Metacafe, Myspace and Yahoo.
We have never distributed through any of these sites before mostly because we just haven’t had the time to go around uploading all day on top of the 9 different files we serve ourselves.
TubeMogul has been really fast. They also keep track of stats across all the sites so it’s very easy to keep tabs on how things are going.
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Josh Kinberg, founder and creator of FireAnt is one person who has always been on the about page of Rocketboom. We met at school and connected over building the first blog at Parsons School of Design and always discussed online patterns and activity throughout the 2004 elections.
In particular we talked alot about the development of Rocketboom and Ant.
During that time, Josh found out about Adam Curry who was working on the same kinds of problems with audio. I remember when Josh first told me about this, we snickered in kinda of a nostalgic way, the same way you would if you just found out that Martha Quinn was building robots and programing micro-controllers.
When Josh, Kenyatta and I were building out the backend and strategy for Rocketboom, especially from August through October, 2004, Josh had come up with an elegant proof of concept for an aggregator that focused on pulling video files with an Apple Script. Nothing that Curry and Winer had missed but nonetheless, they along with almost everyone else were tunnel visioned on audio (and pdf files!?).
Perhaps one reason for the disconnect occurred because of the difference in application. Podcasters were ultimately enamored with transferring mp3 files to the shiny shiny (i.e. the ipod) automatically.
With Rocketboom however, there was no shiny shiny (i.e. the video ipod) at the time but we saw the aggregator as the killer app for bandwidth limits and thick compression settings on the delivery of large video files. Pretty files sent to computers over night while people sleep to be available in full local playback glory, scrollable, jumpable, and without delay when ready for viewing was where it would be at.
In October 2004 knowing that video enclosures would catch on very soon, when Rocketboom did launch, I made sure we had them working for the few people who used Josh’s player. I also of course noticed that there was no way to offer multiple file types in the enclosure fields and decided the only solution would be to offer multiple feeds (we launched with several).
Right around that time, Podcasting was starting to gain momentum and I always noticed how almost no one else was talking about using RSS for video. It was kinda like the Twilight Zone actually in that regard. Even through most of 2005, while podcasting was totally exploding, very few people took interest in the use of RSS with video enclosures. Perhaps it was because the news angle was mostly generated from a radio show fanatic slash tech geek-angle and the disruption they were casing to the radio industry.
There were two main public brain trusts through 2005 that existed separately on the web where on-the-pulse information about development in the nascent industry made its way in: [1] the podcasting group on Yahoo vs. [2] the Videoblogging group on Yahoo.
As for #1, my bafflement with podcasters and music fans who still deal with mp3 crap compression remains. A great beauty of the audio aggregator is that you can deliver very high quality audio files (not a problem to offer the mp3 versions too for the losers), but whatever, people used to take playback quality much more seriously in the good ‘ol days of wax and lasers.
As for #2, the excitement fueled by foresight into the implications behind a world shift in media, would soon drove user testing, adoption and good will to Ant (later served with a no-no letter on the name, btw), so FireAnt, with “the” surrounding directory of videobloggers was where the first party started.
Perhaps we will never know but I feel very strongly that Josh’s development of the initial player gave Apple their best look at what I always hoped they would acquire, but instead, built themselves. In a single moment in October of 2005 with the release of the video iPod and video podcasting in iTunes, Apple opened up the concept of video online to the masses (er, you know what I mean) and essentially took a great deal of FireAnt’s steam. Coincidentally, the prior release of Apple’s audio podcasting client in iTunes stole the same kind of steam from Odeo so it makes since that these two companies would come together for a return match. The space may be ready for more alternatives.
Apple’s strategy for growth was and continues to remain stealth and secretive, closed and proprietary. They probably get away with it because their products are so good. But Apple’s aggregating features have never been as good as FireAnt’s which strated off as open sourse and remained open on the frontend.
I consider Josh to be a major pioneer in the space for being one of the first, if not the first to create a video specific aggregator, going on to win the support of the videoblogging community, growing a business from an early 2.0-like application, sustaining the onslaught of a changing industry, managing a difficult set of personalities, dealing with alot of legal nonsense and then orchestrating a very delicate acquisition. Way to go Josh. Cant wait to see what’s next!
Many others have written about this story too.
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An extremely moving memorial. Also consider the tecnique and use of medium:
Retracing my steps
By Jeff Jarvis on 911
I took out my camera today and quickly retraced and recorded my steps on 9/11 six years ago. (A longer version of the story is here, recorded in audio shortly after 9/11.)
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Joanne is hosting a new live streaming show called Hollywood Now. Tonight she is interviewing some of the cast from Heroes, one of the most popular TV shows out there.
For her debut on Monday, Joanne interviewed R&B artist, JoJo and over 5000 people were watching live. I have not heard of another case where this many people were on all at once. Surely there must be some?
I was in one room that had a full 500 people in it and the chat was insane. As soon as I typed in the word “Hi everybody” it scrolled off the page before I could even read it.
There was an incredible moment where JoJo was singing a chorus “Yea, Yeah, Yeah” and then sang: “Everybody sing with me, Yeah, Yeah, Yea.. . .”
Everyone was entering in “yeah yeah yeah” in the chat – it was a hyper crazy collaborative experience that actually worked. Thousand of yeah’s scrolling to the live music. Pretty cool.
First time? You should give yourself a good 15 or 20 minutes to get the PalTalk player installed and find the room. Not an easy task, but well worth it in this case.
Next week she’ll be interviewing cast from Entourage.
Tonight and every Wednesday at 8pm ET – Link.
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“Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times.” – Link.
I like to keep checking back on ‘China’s effect on the internet’ and ‘internet’s effect on China’. Both of these terms in Google have nothing but posts from me and David Weinberger.
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Google has implemented their jumping feature into YouTube videos and it’s really nice. As you know, with most flash videos, you can’t scroll ahead until the video completely loads out beyond the point you want. With a YouTube video, now you can jump ahead and the video will start to load out from the new point foward, wasting no more time or energy loading any of the prior sections of the video.
Above, you can see I clicked the scoller to the middle of the video. It then began to play from the new point and started to load out ahead (and then behind next).
This is a very elegant feature that saves bandwidth and gives the audience way more flexibility for consuming information quickly.
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It seem as though Om Malik’s NewTeeVee weblog has emerged as one of the top authorites on online video news. It seems to be in a league of its own right now and there are surprisingly few other blogs that cover this kind of information. The staff of writers are just conservative enough, very insightful and in the know. Their coverage of MSM as well as independent media is comprehensive. News, reviews. I’ve met a few of the writers and think they are all very nice too.
Tilzy.tv is another new site which seems to be pretty good too (creative, insightful and on the pulse). LostRemote is another one – speaks more to people who have been in the media business for a long time and need some online nudging.
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Net Neutrality takes a serious blow.
“The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.”
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