Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

This article will appear on the Channel4 Ideasfactory website later on in November.

In the wake of Google’s acquisition of web wunderkind YouTube, everyone’s looking for the next big Internet phenomenon to push things forward again. And once we have the technology to make it available to all, argues Antonio Gould, live webcasting could be a front-runner.

In a nutshell, webcasting is the process of sending audio and video live over the Internet. Key word: live. The difference between a webcast and a piece of archived video (on YouTube, for example) is similar to that between a live TV show and a recorded one broadcast a month later.

People watch as the content is produced – it’s linear broadcasting, online. But it can afford to cater to a far more niche audience than television can.

According to AOL, 2005’s Live8 concert was watched by 170,000 people over the web in addition to those who watched it on TV. But it’s not all about the big boys – the smaller scale projects are where things will get interesting.
So why watch a webcast? Surely it’s easier to wait till the recording of the show has been put online, so you can watch it whenever you want rather than sitting at your computer while it’s happening?

It’s all about interactivity. Viewers can effectively direct the content. Webcasts normally have a text-based chatroom attached, through which you can ask questions or make suggestions as the show unfolds. 

All the advantages of user generated media also apply to webcasting. Ideally, it can make live delivery of content possible for anyone. Until recently, the best way to do this with video was to get on to a cable or digital channel – which in this country is usually far too expensive for individuals to consider.

Webcasting means that content which is much more tailored to specific interests will start to be produced. If it’s much easier to do, then you need far fewer people watching to make it worthwhile.

C21Vox specialise in webcasting for the arts and education, and recently worked with the British Association of Youth Clubs to showcase a Europe-wide drama project. Many of the participants couldn’t make it to the UK, so the event was webcast live so that countries could see each other’s performances live. A chatroom was provided, and viewers pitched questions to be fielded by the audience at the event.

Videoconferencing was used to unite four of the participants from other countries on a big screen for a Q&A session. The event was a huge success, achieving a level of international communication that could never have been achieved without webcasting.

As you can imagine, the possibilities are huge – and as usual creatives can push the boundaries. Currently most webcasts are fairly straightforward, but we’re going to see a lot of interesting stuff happening over the next few years.

How do you go about doing it?

As things stand, unless you’re very technically minded with plenty of time and money, you‘ll need to hire in a company to do it – but it’s worth explaining a bit about how it works. There are a number of distinct parts to the setup. The first difficulty is generating the video and audio in the first place – this could be anything from one person sitting in front of a camera (like a simple video blog) to a full multi-camera and sound set up.

This requires video and audio mixers, monitoring and a number of people running the show all with the ability to communicate with each other. This is not easy or cheap at the moment – most of the kit designed for doing this is built for professional TV studios and as such costs a fortune. There is cheaper kit available, but you’ll need to know what you’re doing before you start buying anything.

Once you’re up and running, you need to put out that signal onto the web so people can watch it. You need an extremely high-powered internet connection (which as of writing is not available as standard in UK homes, although some providers should start offering it soon) and an account with a provider who can take your signal and ‘multicast’ it.

Multicasting effectively allows a large number of people to watch it at the same time. The more that are watching, the more you have to pay – and at the moment it’s not cheap. At the time of writing a one-hour show watched by five hundred users will cost you hundreds of pounds in bandwidth alone.

Audio webcasting is easier. You don’t need such a high-speed internet connection (good quality broadband will do) and obviously no cameras or video mixers. If you’re doing a music show, you just need some decks or CD players, a DJ mixer and a mic. But you’ll still have to stump up for the bandwidth.

The future

Of course, just a few years ago the process of putting archived video on the web seemed out of the reach of most. Now everyone from school kids to Tory leaders is doing it. At some point the world’s first free webcasting service will be born.

It’ll enable you to plug your camera into your computer, click a few buttons and start streaming out your own show. This will lead to an explosion of individuals and companies starting up their own webcasts, covering anything and everything.

Of course this won’t all be positive. As with other forms of user generated media, some of the first to take up the power of democratic webcasting will be those who can’t find an outlet through traditional media for very good reasons – because their material is illegal, immoral or distasteful.

But complete interactivity at every stage of a show that covers any conceivable topic is the next step for the YouTube generation. And not for the first time this century, conventional broadcasting might well get a good shake.

99% of everyone I’ve spoken to over the last year still doesn’t believe that anyone’s going to make any money out of peer to peer content sales over the internet. (i.e. I cheaply make some video, music, e-books or anything else and sell a copy to you directly and cheaply over the web without there being a megalithic company somewhere in the middle).

Here are some of the favourite objections to this idea in rough order of how often I hear them:

• “Won’t it all be rubbish content if it’s being made by individuals?”
• “How will you find anything good if there’s that much of it?”
• “People don’t like sitting in front of a computer to watch video” / “People like books, not reading on a screen” / “people don’t like listening to mp3’s”. (Actually suddenly people do quite like that last one!)  

I’ve written extensively on this blog about why all of the above are all red herrings. 

For me one of the genuinely hard questions to answer is about intellectual property protection. If you can make one sale of a piece of content, how do you know it’s not then being copied another 10 times?

This obviously is a real problem in the music industry at the moment (just ask anyone who’s trying to run a record label and finds their entire back catalogue freely available to download on a blog somewhere) and getting around it won’t be easy.

I think the most likely thing to happen is that as the distribution methods change, those annoyingly clever people who always seem to live in California will start to come up with inventive ideas about how to make sure people get paid for the stuff they create.

Today I found a great example in the video upload site Revver.com.

It’s extremely simple. You upload a piece of video and it becomes “Revverised” which means a small unobtrusive ad is placed onto the end of the content. Every time someone clicks it you get paid. The more it gets copied, the more you make.

Obviously this won’t work with music but for video it could be one solution. And it won’t be the only one. Certain content will sell best with certain models and we’ll see more and more inventive new models appearing over the next few years.

Maybe copying isn’t quite so bad after all!

This article will be published in the forthcoming edition of TEN4 magazine.

One of the Internet’s biggest success stories in recent years has been the rise and rise of online communities – sites that allow anyone, technically able or not, to communicate with each other and publish their own content.

Many of these websites centre on people expressing their creativity through photography, art, writing, or anything that can be represented in digital form. As well as helping people market their work, it’s also helping them improve their skills by giving them an opportunity to exhibit, showcase and discuss their work with a community of peers.

Online communities are becoming increasingly valuable across the creative spectrum. Stories of musicians achieving fame through MySpace have already become journalistic clichés – but in the last six months a similar phenomenon has begun in other disciplines.

Just over a year ago, Rebekka Guoleifsdottir was teaching herself how to use her first camera. She started posting on the photographic community site Flickr.com, and within a year her photostream had attracted 1.5 million visitors, making it the most viewed of all 4 million members.

Over in film and TV, the gigantic response to David Lehre’s web film MySpace: The Movie provoked a frenzy of Hollywood agents clamouring to represent the amateur filmmaker.

And slightly closer to home, writer Zoe Margolis was recently outed as the true identity of Abby Lee, who shot to fame after extracts from a blog detailing her true-life sexual adventures were published as a bestselling book.

We’re going to start hearing stories like this more and more often. However, you don’t have to become world famous to find success with online communities. They’re all about allowing people to publish content they’ve made, discuss and connect with other people.

Most communities are tailored to a particular type of content. For example, YouTube.com is currently the most popular video sharing site. At a basic level it allows members to upload their own videos, which are then accessible by anyone who visits the site. Videos can be discussed and rated, so that over time the best content floats to the top.

If the producer finds other people doing similar work, he or she can start a ‘group’ where fellow filmmakers can post related work and discuss style, content and inspiration. And ‘tags’ or keywords can be added to videos to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

Most other communities work in a similar way to YouTube, but use other types of content as their main focus. Flickr is the community of choice for photographers, and is one of the most developed creative communities around at the moment.

Animation sites are a little less developed (partly because so much is posted on YouTube) but NewGrounds.com and AlbinoBlacksheep.com are good places to start. A handful of visual art communities also exist – such as DeviantArt.com and GFXArtist.com – but style and quality can vary so it’s worth scouting the site before you join. 

Then of course there’s the ubiquitous MySpace.com which lets you do pretty much anything, but until now has been the most popular site for building communities around music. MySpace is probably worth joining just because of the sheer number of people signed up to it – but it’s a badly built system, and is beginning to slip out of fashion.

On a slightly different tack, the site LinkedIn.com is a great tool purely for connecting with new people, while the more business-oriented Ecademy.com is helpful for forging professional connections – although it does charge for membership.

It’s also worth ditching your browser’s bookmarking system and using the site deli.cio.us – that’s actually the web address – to store all your useful links. Whenever you bookmark an interesting page, it can tell you who else has added the same page, useful for finding new sites as well as meeting like-minded people.

A local case-study: Emily Quinton is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Birmingham. Her specialism is biodiversity and the illegal trade in wild flowers. But after tapping an unexpected reservoir of interest in her work through Flickr, she’s now also working as a photographer.

“Photography has been a hobby of mine for a few years, but I’d never taken photos in any serious capacity,” she admits. “A year ago I signed up to Flickr so I could upload some pictures of a friend’s wedding, and as an experiment added a few botanical photos I’d taken as part of my research.“

“The feedback was good, so I started to take more photos and upload them,” she goes on. “I couldn’t believe how quick the process was – I could have an idea, take the photo, process and exhibit it all within an hour or two. It got a bit addictive, and before long I was producing and uploading new work almost every day.”

Skip forward three months, and Emily’s photostream had become a success. It had been visited over 13,000 times, and she was getting a lot of good feedback. What’s more, people were starting to ask if they could buy her work.

Spurred on by the success of her Flickr stream, Emily set up a company which she now runs part-time alongside her academic work. As well as photographic commissions she makes products from her work which she sells both locally and internationally through her website. At least half of the website traffic comes through Flickr.

Emily is adamant that she would never have become a photographer if it wasn’t for Flickr. “What’s amazing about the system is that it gives anyone a permanent exhibition space, where they can perpetually showcase new work,” she enthuses. “The better your work, the more people visit that space. Then if you need advice on how to improve your technique there are always other members who are willing to help.”

Obviously allowing other people to comment on your work can have its downsides. Negative feedback can be hard to take, and it definitely pays to be thick skinned. Even worse is content which is plain offensive or the unwanted interest of murkier members of the community, especially for female members who’ve posted self portraits. Fortunately it’s easy to delete messages that are inappropriate. Most communities are also pretty strict about banning those who act out of line.

Another core feature of most online communities is the ability to assign other members as your friends or contacts – leading to invaluable smaller networks within the larger umbrella. “When you find someone you like and want to see more good work, you should be guaranteed to find it in that member’s contacts,” reasons Emily. “This very quickly creates a web of high quality content, which is great for getting inspired.”

It also partly addresses the problem of the sheer amount of content on any community. Flickr has over 4 million users – more than the population of Wales. Most of them aren’t great photographers, so it’s important to be able to sift through the amateurs and find the high quality work.

Going down the online route means a fundamental change in the way career development pans out. Until now, most disciplines have had at least roughly established entry routes – nowadays these rules are gradually being thrown out the window. A new set of rules will be undoubtedly be established over time, but at the moment everything’s in a state of flux.

In the past, getting into TV or film inevitably meant starting off making the tea and working your way up. In the future, if you make a film which generates a big enough buzz on the web, you’ll get picked up by someone who wants to harness that talent. If that many people are into what you do they’d be crazy not to.

Of course over time competition will increase too, and you’ll be rubbing shoulders with other talent worldwide. Things aren’t necessarily going to get easier. But online communities are guaranteed to level the playing field – both for those living in geographically isolated places and for those keen to stay small and independent, and not sell out to the media moguls.

Online communities are not a fad: the principles that are slowly being developed now will form the basis of how creative people will work for years to come. As well as commissioners using the web to find new talent, we’ll also see more local, national and international collaboration. And without big companies guessing what we’re going to like next, niche, inventive and experimental work looks set to become more popular the world over.

This is the rough draft of an article I’ve written for the next issue of TEN4 magazine. I’d like to know what people think about this subject and of the article. All comments appreciated as usual!

Thanks to Dan O’Connell for the interesting title.

—

Plyometrics through Paypal

Digitalization has profoundly altered the creative industries.

For the price of an hour in Abbey Road Studios it’s now possible for anyone to make a film, an animation or an album in their living room.

However, getting that “digital content” distributed to people can still very difficult. If you make recorded music you generally need to be signed to a record label before anyone will hear it. If you make films you generally need the backing of much larger companies to get them distributed through the cinemas and onto DVDs.

Digital Ebay

But times are changing, new technology is starting to allow creative people to sell their digital content to the people who want it, directly through the internet.

We’ve already seen a huge growth in small independent retailers making their living selling physical goods through systems like Ebay. The doors are also now being opened for individuals and small companies to start selling non-physical content.

Whether we’re talking about films, animations, music, podcasts, e-books, live webcasts or anything that’s digital, if you can produce it then you can sell it. Many people are now saying that we are on the verge of a revolution which will see a new breed of creative people making a living from doing just this.

The Numbers

I’m not suggesting that the big record labels, the cinemas or the television networks are going to be brought to their knees by individuals selling their content. The market is big enough for everyone.

If it costs very little to produce and distribute a piece of content over the internet, the producer doesn’t need to make anywhere near as much money to make a good profit. Even if a tiny slice of a multi-billion dollar market swings towards the individuals, a huge number of people will begin to make their money in a profoundly different way.

A Theoretical Example

In her spare time an ex-teacher and animator creates fifty short pieces of simple, high value educational animation. Each animation lasts three minutes and she charges a pound each time one is downloaded.

The content becomes extremely successful and she starts to sell a hundred of each of the animations a month generating an ongoing income of sixty thousand pounds per year.

If this sounds like pie in the sky, a real world example of this is Ricky Gervais’ podcast which receives hundreds of thousands of listeners a week. Recently he started to charge people to listen to it. At $2 a play the potential income is staggering. And the best thing is, a podcast costs very little to produce.

Getting it out there

Obviously Ricky Gervais’ reputation and a big marketing drive was a major factor in the success of his podcast. However, the internet is changing very quickly at the moment and techniques like viral marketing and the use of new online communities mean that if your content is good, it’s not difficult to become well known to a high number of people worldwide.

A good example of this was our game Mansion Impossible which without any marketing whatsoever was played by over a million and a half people, through a simple process of players sending to their friends.

So if your content is good enough, it will market itself.

The next step on from this will be a whole new breed of internet technology which will intelligently decide what kind of content a viewer is likely to enjoy. Similar to E-commerce sites like Amazon which present you with books and CDs it thinks you will like, these systems will look at previous viewing habits, what your friends have enjoyed and so on.

Quality and Relevance

The first objection most people have to the idea of people selling their own content is about “quality”. If anyone can produce and sell their own material, won’t that lead to a sea of mediocre rubbish?

The answer is inevitably yes. But it doesn’t really matter. When we’re talking about such a high volume of production only a tiny proportion actually needs to be of high quality – as long as a potential buyer knows how to find it.

The internet as a whole is largely comprised of pointless, uninteresting content but people still use it. The reason it works is because we now have:
1. Intelligent search engines to help you find what you want
2. Friends and links pages to recommend content to you.

Now here it’s also important to look at what “high quality” actually means. Obviously it depends who you are. If you are not interested in trains then a podcast about steam locomotives might not particularly interest you. However, if you interested in trains then you may find that this is the only podcast that exists in the whole world that deals with a subject you’re interested in. In fact you’ll probably be pretty excited about it!

And here’s where things start to get very different from the traditional distribution model. As the amount of content being produced increases dramatically, more and more niche content will be created. A radio station specifically about steam locomotives could never have been started in the past because not enough listeners would have been interested to have justified the cost associated with getting it broadcast.

Content on the Cheap

With the internet two things happen. Firstly the market becomes worldwide – anyone, anywhere can access your content. Secondly the costs can be reduced so dramatically that creating a sustainable business around content that is relevant to thousands of people rather than millions becomes possible.

Although this will lead to a huge explosion in high quality, niche content it will also mean that producers have to start thinking about what they do in a completely different way. There’s a romance and kudos associated with getting a record deal or a book publishing deal and producers may have to let this idea go to be able to fully embrace this new way of working. However the ones who do it first are probably going to be the ones who do well.

Plyometrics through Paypal

Simon Hunt is a high jumper with over 12 years’ athletics training experience. He’s also learning to be a film maker and has started to produce a large bank of video all on the subject of “plyometric” or jump training, invaluable to thousands of budding athletes around the world. Although the training is far more effective when delivered through video rather than text diagrams, nothing of its kind currently exists on the internet.

Using the Google Video system, Simon will sell these short, two minute videos through a simple, free to set up website. Viewers will pay around a pound to download each clip, which they can watch on their computer, or download to a video iPod or PSP (useful for taking to training sessions).

Simon believes that by selling short videos at a low cost, there will be enough people willing to buy them that at the very least, the business will become self sustaining. His costs are extremely low. The videos are produced in a simple way so up to six pieces can be scripted, filmed, edited and uploaded ready for sale within one day. The blog site was set up for free using the Wordpress system, as was the Google Video account.

As with any kind of niche content, the marketing will be mainly done through forums and links with other specialist websites. The potential market is huge.

Cost Blindness

Simon’s example illustrates another point about the economics of buying content in this way.

Currently his only competitors distribute their training information through DVDs, each costing around $25 and containing roughly 20 minutes worth of footage. Minute for minute, simon’s content costs roughly the same amount to watch. However when buying on the internet, viewers only have to buy the particular parts they want to see.

£1 is a figure that to most people is low enough to spend without having to think about it too much. This is one of the reasons for the gigantic success of iTunes. When each piece of music costs less than a pound, the listeners don’t even really feel like they’re spending money.

Cash Cows
Many creative people lead a hugely unstable existence, living from one job to the next. It can be very tiring and demoralizing not knowing where your next job is coming from or when you’ll next get paid.

Larger businesses often avoid this problem by developing a “cash cow” product, so called because once you created it, you can go on milking it without having to put too much more effort in. Many creative people would hugely benefit from having a product like this.

Coming back to our theme, once a piece of content is produced, marketed and is selling well, if the producer is lucky he or she should be able to sit back and watch the money roll in month after month. Imagine how much easier life would be if every month the rent and bills were paid without having to do anything.

How does this apply to me?

This article probably raises more questions than it does provide answers. It’s too early at this stage to write a practical guide on how to make money from selling content as so few people are doing it yet. It’s also impossible to say at this stage how soon and to what extent these changes will happen. No-one knows.

What I’m trying to do is to provide a vision for how things could be, and encourage the producers in this region to start thinking about how they can take advantage of these new opportunities. Whilst the others are spending all of their time trying to get their big break by constantly changing their ideas to fit into what someone else thinks will sell, we can be quietly getting on with doing what we love doing and simply finding enough people that will pay for it.

So it isn’t just a financial reward that’s at stake. There’s a creative reward too. When you rely on a middleman, not only does he take most of your money, he also tells you what you can and can’t do.

So ditch the middleman, Do it yourself.

Links

http://www.e-junkie.com/, http://payloadz.com/
Sell software, eBooks, music, podcasts, movies, digital art or anything digital through PayPal

Video.google.com
Soon to be offering sale of video to the general public

wordpress.com / myspace.com
Set up your own website in ten minutes

emusu.com
Get an affordable website and sell your music directly through it

Lulu.com
Publish your own books, CDs and DVDs. When an order is made, Lulu print the copy and send it to the customer, giving you 80% of the profits.