The studio will not be in full-time use until February, but Schwarzenegger helped open the studio on Tuesday (22 January).
The 30 minute webchat used the Showcaster platform to provide live video from their new studio, alongside a chatbox in which users could post questions. The questions were moderated and put to Schwarzenegger by showbiz editor Gordon Smart.
A video of the interview was then posted on the Sun’s online ‘showbiz’ section, accompanied by a write-up of the interview focusing on the show-business related aspects of his answers.
Here is an idea for all journalists: use Bambuser to broadcast a livestream video from your phone.
The app and mobile site allows you to stream video from no less than 360 mobile phone models.
Sky News North of England correspondent Nick Martin yesterday used his iPhone to livestream a report on queues at fuel stations.
It wasn’t broadcast live or aired later on Sky news on this occasion but enabled Martin to share live footage with his Twitter followers. A total of 45 watched it live, with current viewer stats standing at 443.
He told Journalism.co.uk:
We’ve been covering the fuel problems at forecourts across the country.
It was just a case of going past a forecourt and seeing pretty lengthy queues of 50 or 60 cars and not having a cameraman with me.
It’s a way of getting pictures in real time to Twitter followers or to a news desk.
The quality sometimes isn’t great but a way of people being able to plug into what you’re doing as a reporter.
Martin said he saw real value in the possibilities during a breaking news story, such as the riots, of the channel broadcasting the phone footage live.
Martin explained that Sky News has its own technology to allow reporters to sent high quality phone video footage to the newsdesk.
Hans Eriksson from Bambuser told Journalism.co.uk:
Bambuser has been used by several smaller local media outlets in the UK over the last year but this is the first time it’s been used this way by a nationwide media.
What is it? Spool is like Instapaper or Read it Later for video. It allows you to to save videos to watch later.
How is it of use to journalists? How many times have you come across a video on a news site or YouTube when you don’t have the time to watch it?
Spool allows you to save videos you’ve found during the day for viewing later. And what is great about it is that it records the video, allowing you to watch it offline, perhaps on the train home from work.
It saves it in HTML5 so videos or documents that started as Flash can be viewed on an Apple device.
Spool is not just for video – it allows you to save any webpage – but it is video that sets it apart from similar platforms for saving news articles.
You can also add the option of saving the videos, articles and documents to Dropbox or Evernote.
After the second day of sessions focused on business at the Global Editors Network news summit, including paywalls and paid-for app, it was fitting that during the third and final day of presentations we heard about projects offering content and platforms for free.
One such project came from Russia Today which outlined its FreeVideo platform, described as an “English language video agency”. The website, which should be of interest to journalists worldwide, provides free video footage that journalists can download, edit and reuse for their own projects and output.
Answering a question from the floor about the business model, Alexei Nikolov, managing director of Russia Today, said it was to “promote the channel” on a global scale.
The site includes “stock footage” as well as video covering specific news events. Xenia Fedorova, head of the department of promotion and development of media projects for the broadcaster, explained that all the footage comes with multilingual scripts and shotlists.
She added that the website has more than 9,000 news channels already registered and using footage “on a daily basis”.
I spoke to her more at the end of the session about the decision to go down the free distribution route, their attribution methods and to find out whether there are plans in the pipeline to monetise the platform.
In this video interview on Beet.TV Matthew Cavnar, head of product at Vook, a company which creates video books, talks about its collaboration with ABC News to produce a ‘vook’ which combines its text and video reporting of significant events.
Recent publications produced by Vook and ABC News, which Cavner claims offers the “360 degree experience of a news story”, includes the capture of Osama Bin Laden and the royal wedding in London.
Cavner added that while the company is looking at extending the platform out to partners, for now it is concentrating on its uses in-house.
Right now we’re really focused on going to a media company, going to a publisher, and saying we’ve got the platform … come work with us and create 50, 100, 1,000 titles because we’ve got the ability to do it.
… We think we’re basically cornering that market of scalable quality.
Today the BBC announced the launch of a new product for connected TVs which, according to a release will see BBC News video news clips brought to television via the internet.
The BBC News product for connected TV combines existing video and text content from BBC News Online and will initially be made available on Samsung’s range of Smart TVs. It will subsequently be made available on a range of connected devices over time.
This is part of a “value for money” strategy to re-purpose BBC Online products for a wide range of devices. Editorial teams in the BBC’s newsrooms will work to curate clips to complement the 24 news channel and to run alongside text-based news from BBC News Online. And the control of what content the user views will be in their hands, with navigation via the remote.
BBC Worldwide is also said to be launching an international version which will be supported by advertising. In a blog post BBC Online editor Steve Herrmann said in time the product will also be rolled out to other devices in the UK.
To remove the YouTube logo from the player when displaying a video on your site just add the code ?modestbranding=1 to the end of the URL. For example:
A small YouTube text label will still show up in the upper-right corner of a paused video when you hover over the player.
The video-sharing site has also introduced ‘As Seen On’ YouTube pages. These pages bring together videos from news sites which regularly display YouTube videos, such as the Guardian, which now has its own As Seen On page.
By crawling web feeds of sites that have embedded videos, we’ve built dedicated pages that highlight your embedded videos. This means that there is now a place on YouTube to find videos mentioned on your favorite blogs & sites. We think these pages provide a way to find new and interesting content while helping you dive deeper into the conversation around a video.
A third recent development is HD preview, the option to add a high-quality placeholder image to a YouTube video in the hope of encouraging more viewers to be tempted to click play.
It is being widely reported that YouTube has now launched the ability for users to choose how they licence their content through its video editor platform.
The new Creative Commons option will give other people permission to use footage, including for commercial purposes, with attribution, according to TechCrunch.
It is also reported that initially YouTube is working with content partners including C-SPAN and Al Jazeera to offer a starting batch of 10,000 videos under the creative commons license. Al Jazeera already makes some of its content available under a creative commons licence, shown in this repository. TechCrunch reports that it will not take long for YouTube’s 10,000 video store to grow.
That library will rapidly increase as more people switch their content over to Creative Commons, and there’s even a tool that will let you swap the license for a bunch of videos at once.
A request for more information from YouTube has not yet been answered, but details of YouTube’s creative commons policy can be found here.
International news wire Agence France-Presse (AFP) has launched a YouTube channel which will be dedicated to covering next year’s French presidential elections, the Editorsweblog reports.
The new channel has been launched in conjunction with Twitter and the CFJ journalism school (Centre de Formation des Journalistes), the report adds.
The channel hosts videos posted by political parties and tracks candidate popularity, but its main feature is an interface in which viewers can submit questions to candidates. The questions are then posed in interviews held by journalism students from CFJ.
The New York Times Gadgetwise blog is reporting that Flip users have 30 days to save any videos uploaded to FlipShare, the video-sharing site for the Flip video camera. Last month Flip owner Cisco announced it was discontinuing the Flip, a favourite of multimedia journalists.
FlipShare will exist until 31 December 2013 and Cisco will continue to provide technical support for Flip users until that date.
Here is the nearer deadline: Cisco has put a 30-day expiration date on videos and photos stored on FlipShare’s Web service. Starting May 12, videos will expire 30 days after being loaded. Cisco doesn’t say explicitly what happens after 30 days, but presumably they will be erased. This also applies to videos that have been posted before May 12, so you have about a month to rescue all of those videos you have archived on FlipShare.
There is a step-by-step explanation of how to move your videos from the web to your computer here, on the Flip Web site.
Flip videos that you share to Facebook and YouTube aren’t subject to expiration.
