Tag Archives: Digital video

Guardian: Times website seeks Sky News link-up

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The Times website wants to carry more video content from Sky News.

Times Online editor-in-chief, Anne Spackman, told MediaGuardian.co.uk that negotiations to make this happen were at an early stage on the newspaper website carrying breaking news videos from Sky.

Any deal is likely to improve the online video offering from the Times.

Despite being one of the first national newspapers to adopt a TV service the Times offering has fallen behind other nationals – in terms of quality – and seems to be due an overhaul.

Guardian: Pluck picks up Hearst website deal

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Social media firm Pluck will supply technology to Hearst Digital’s uber-web portal Allaboutyou.com

It will provided blogs, discussion tools and media-sharing applications to the new community site for women, which combines content from six Natmag’s UK tiles.

The move is part of an ‘aggressive’ push of the business, says the Guardian.

For Hearst, it’s the second major partnership for its magazine websites after securing the services of Brightcove to supply its digital video hosting.

Innovations in Journalism – a plug in to ease sorting through web images and video from PicLens

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We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, it’s searching easily though web images and video with PicLens.

image of piclens plug in website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi, I’m Alec Jeong from Cooliris.

We’ve developed PicLens, a plug-in that transforms your browser into a 3D environment where you can search, drag, and zoom around thousands of images and videos across the web.

PicLens makes your online media come to life in a full-screen, cinematic presentation that goes beyond the confines of the traditional browser.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Journalist regularly search for photos and videos on the web, tediously clicking in and out of web pages and image search engines to find the perfect image or video.

PicLens changes all that, by allowing you to search and view 100s or even 1000s of online photos and videos in an instant.

Need to see the photo in detail? Just click a toggle button and the photo or video will go full screen. Jump to the corresponding page of the image or video? No problem.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
There is much more, much more to come. In the coming months, we will be adding features that will completely transform the way you use online media.

4) Why are you doing this?
We asked ourselves the question: What would the web be like if, rather than having to browse click by click, we were able find and share information quickly and directly through a single, rich media navigation layer that frees you from the confines of the traditional browser window and web pages?

We believe that you would discover that the web is richer than you’ve believed before, and that the added spatiality would enable you get much more from the rich online media and from your social connections.

5) What does it cost to use it?
PicLens is free to use and available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

The “3D Wall” interface is available now for Firefox and IE and is coming to Safari soon.

6) How will you make it pay?
Our goal has always been to focus on providing the ultimate user experience. With several million downloads of our product in just the past few months, we are on a fast trajectory to bring in the next generation online media experience.

Innovations in Journalism – live streaming video from mobiles developed by Qik

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We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, it’s live video streamed over the web from mobile phones from Qik.

image of qik website logo

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi. I’m Bhaskar Roy, co-founder of Qik.

Qik’s vision is to enable anyone with a camera-phone to stream live video from anywhere in the world to the web, TV, mobile phones, and gaming consoles.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
For news – immediacy of information is very important. Qik enables journalists to capture and report news live from wherever they are – without having to wait for the news truck to arrive.

It enables journalists to conduct better interviews by taking questions from anywhere in the world. It provides the ability for viewers on the web to send real-time chat messages to the person streaming the video straight to their phone enabling a high level of interactivity.

As a result journalists are able to conduct richer, better interviews. It also enables journalists to leverage anyone who may be at a particular event to capture the story for them.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are just getting started! 🙂

In our current invitation-only alpha release, users with Nokia smartphones can stream live video from their phones to anywhere on the web and playback their Qik videos from their phones.

We are working on addressing other smartphones and Java-enabled phones. We are also working on providing the ability to stream live from phone to phone.

4) Why are you doing this?
We truly believe that sharing and experiencing moments of your life with your friends, family and/or your world is invaluable.

5) What does it cost to use it?
We are currently in a free, invitation-only alpha stage.

6) How will you make it pay?
We are at a very early stage of bringing this innovation to market and focused on ensuring that we deliver high value to the billions of camera phone users globally.

New York Film Academy teams up with NBC to train digital journalists of the future

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image of new york film school website

The New York Film Academy has teamed up with NBC News to offer a year-long training course in ’21st Century broadcast journalism’.

The course aims to train the next generation of journalists to ‘be prepared to navigate the evolving landscape of digital journalism.’

Students will have the chance to attend ‘master classes’ conducted by NBC news staff and can go backstage on NBC news programmes to learn about production.

Each student produces pre-recorded news projects, using both single and multicamera, which they edit using Final-Cut Pro.

Comprehensive coverage doesn’t come cheap, though. At around £8,500 per semester, there may still be something to be said for learning on the job.

Wired: Interview with war zone video blogger Kevin Sites

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Sites has used his own blog to break new ground in war reporting – the platform has freed him from the limitations placed on him as a freelance or correspondent.

The investigative journalist is a pioneer of multimedia reporting in the field, having led his own online video news show on Yahoo armed with only a laptop, satellite phone and video camera.

Innovations in Journalism – live geo-tagged video broadcast from Seero

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We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, live video streamed over the web with extra geographical information mapped in real-time from Seero.

image of seero’s website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hello, I’m Justin Cutillo, co-founder of Seero. It’s a geo-broadcasting platform that fuses live and on-demand video with GPS mapping.

Our technology is a response to the convergence and proliferation of video and GPS features in the flourishing mobile device market.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Seero was built to reflect the core needs of video bloggers and online journalist. The platform incorporates tools for live mobile broadcasting with additional real-time GPS tracking and static location marking.

We also have a geo-information/advertising server. This system allows us to geo-tag specific information to enhance any broadcasts near that location.

For example, if an online journalist was covering a fire in London, we have the ability to upload facts specific to the building and geo-tag them to the exact location. The information is served based on its proximity to the location of the broadcast.

All you need for mobile broadcasting is a laptop and a mobile broadband card. You can add on an inexpensive GPS receiver for the real-time tracking feature or use an Ultra Mobile PC is you don’t want to carry around a full laptop.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are currently working on some major build items. We should be releasing an embeddable flash player that includes the live video player and the full map functionality within a month. We are also working on a module to add course tracking to previously recorded videos.

Our largest project is to build a mobile broadcasting application for Symbian mobile phones to enable journalist to broadcast live video and GPS right from their Nokia phones.

Beyond that we have a secretive project that could really redefine how people interact with live video on the internet.

4) Why are you doing this?
When it comes down to it we are technology buffs. We came up with the idea on a vacation to San Francisco more than two years ago while thinking of ways to virtually tour a city.

Combining live video and location info opens up new, exciting uses for online video.  Needless to say we are very enthusiastic about the prospects.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Besides the hardware cost, which may be very little if you already have a laptop, the service is completely free to all users.

6) How will you make it pay?
We currently envision three main channels of revenue. The first channel involves white label sites built on the Seero infrastructure for promotional as well as professional and government services.

The second channel is geo-advertising. We have a proprietary geo-advertising system that provides a simple and powerful solution for correlating advertising to site content.

Beyond those revenue streams we also see potential for our geo-advertising system as a stand-alone service.

Nashua Telegraph video of Clinton aide arrest is in public interest, says online editor

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The Nashua Telegraph‘s decision to publish a 15-minute video of Sidney Blumenthal, aide to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, while he was in police custody has been criticised by media commentator Roy Greenslade.

Writing on his blog, the former editor of The Daily Mirror said the video was ’embarrassing, humiliating and overly intrusive’.

“To show the footage of a person undergoing ritual humiliation while in police custody is a disgraceful act. It serves no public interest whatsoever,” he wrote.

Damon Kiesow, managing editor and online editor of the Telegraph, told Journalism.co.uk that the decision to publish the video was ‘typical practice’:

“During the course of our coverage we have published booking photos, police records and court documents related to the case. This is typical practice for us. In fact the story with the video also included a PDF containing nine pages of records including the sentencing document.”

Far from seeking to ‘humiliate’ Blumenthal, Kiesow said the paper – and other US media – had previously been accused of covering up his arrest by not reporting it immediately to protect Clinton’s election campaign.

“The Telegraph has been publishing video on the Web for almost three years. During that time we have published numerous court-related segments including police interviews and court hearings.

“Some have been very graphic and painful in detail but were published due to a significant local interest in the stories.

“The Nashua Police Department only recently implemented the technology that makes it possible for us to gain access to booking videos. Blumenthal is the second booking video we have requested, the first was not published due to technical difficulties on our end.”

Publishing the video was not an attempt to cast aspersions on Blumenthal, but was intended to give readers the opportunity to make up their own minds – with all the information provided.

“I think Roy Greenslade frames the question ‘why publish’ in exactly the wrong way, and by doing so pre-supposes both the answer and the potential public reaction to the video.  In fact, this was the first story in our coverage that garnered any positive reader comments for Blumenthal.

“Obviously those predisposed to support or oppose Blumenthal will interpret it as they want. But it is not our place to try and guess what those interpretations are. We felt in this case, and in general, that supplementing our reporting with source documents is the best way to let readers make up their own minds.”

Is there an issue here about the medium: is multimedia content such as this more intrusive, as Greenslade suggests, and therefore arguably less in the public interest? Or does it better serve the readers by giving them all the information available?

YouTube videos now available in Google Maps

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youtube videos on google maps

The team of developers responsible for Google Earth and Maps have launched a new feature to show Embedded YouTube videos in Google Maps.

Geotagged YouTube videos have been available in Google Earth since last year – the service has now been extended to Maps.

Newspapers in the UK have been increasingly drawn to the use of interactive maps on their websites as a new way of displaying news to their users.

In the US, where the availability of public data has made mapping a common part of online news reporting, several new innovative news-mapping experiments have recently launched.

In particular, new service Everyblock has been charting a vast range of public information across city maps for Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

The Google Maps developers have pointed out examples of how this new function might work for business – but the application being used for news videos looks like it could be just a step away.

Innovations in Journalism – Gnooze.com

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We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, don;t take your journalism too seriously – it’s the daily internet comedic news program Gnooze.
gnooze.jpg

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Marta Costello, host, writer and executive producer of the daily internet comedic news program, Gnooze. Myself and Brain Bartelt make up make up Amazing Cosbars Productions, a two-person team, jack-of-all-trades TV/film/internet circus act. Gnooze is our latest brainchild.

Gnooze is a three-ish minute, news of the day improv/scripted update told from all sides of the story.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
As you know, the news model is changing. Seven years ago, I was part of an effort to “converge” a newsroom, to make the internet a third prong of dissemination for the media outfit. Now less than a decade later, the idea that one would have to actively converge a newsroom is completely defunct.

The internet is no longer an addendum to an established television or newspaper giant: it is a primary source of global information. We’re hopeful that Gnooze and other internet shows like it can be part of a return to the early days of journalism, reporting designed to share information, not just to get ratings. But do not forget that the success of this project was achieved thanks to the new technologies developed by the company Friv2Online in this case, advanced technology was used from the case of innovative projects of this company for the development of online games.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
With any luck, there are many more to come.

4) Why are you doing this?
When we began in August 2007, the goal was mainly to get in the habit of daily production and build an audience that would hopefully carry over to future endeavors.

However, as our base has grown and our focus refined, it became apparent to me that perhaps we could be a force in changing the face of journalism today. Tiktoknitro.com is an advanced tiktok services marketplace for successfull and fast promotion. We offer to buy tiktok likes and buy tiktok followers of highest quality instant and secure. The mechanisms behind our work are unique and tailored to your goals. I refuse to get caught up in the hype, the breathless reporting of non-news just because everyone else is leading with it.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Free!

6) How will you make it pay?
We’ve already had some interest from investors. However, we’d prefer to generate revenue from advertisers and sponsors.