YouTube New Features

Just checked out a video of McCain on Letterman. Noticed a couple of interesting features that YouTube is giving folks like CBS. First there was an ad before the video, second the video played in H.264 although it did have a link for the “normal quality” version and third there were a couple of nifty DHTML buttons up at the top.

Here is a screenshot:
YouTube CBS Letterman McCain Screenshot

Notice that everything but the video is grayed out. That is because I clicked the little film strip icon at the top left which stands for “theater mode”. You will also notice that the video is in the middle of the page with goofy graphical curtains surrounding it.

The icon directly to the right of that one, the little light bulb controls graying out the screen regardless of the theater mode selection.

Also notice that the ad at the top right (which reads CBS … and originally was a Schwab ad which matched the preroll video ad) is not grayed out.

In any case, none of this is new. (For reference do a Google/Yahoo search for “lightbox” to find a plethora of resources for accomplishing the same thing.) But is interesting to see what extra features and functionality YouTube is giving to folks like CBS.

Online Video Player Survey

For a project that I am working on, we are doing a quick survey to see what features and functionality people are interested in with regards to online video players. This doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive survey of the various players out there, rather it is something that we will be using to gauge what people like and dislike in the range of features.

If you have a moment, check it out:
Online Video Player Survey

C-SPAN online coverage of debate

C-SPAN has a really interesting site for showing the debate videos. It has a transcript search, a blog aggregation, a twitter message board and so on.

Here are some screen-shots:

Transcript along with video

Twitter and Blog Aggregation:

Transcript Keyword Visualization (wish you could drill down):

This might be even more interesting: Performance Group Blends Video Art, Public Service
“Three MIT grads have devised a way to “remix” the presidential debates — live. Friday night in Boston, they used custom computer software to analyze the candidates’ movements and speech patterns in real time, with a nightclub vibe.”

Internet Radio Royalty Rates

It seems that things have changed in the royalty rates for online music. I just read this report from DiMA: MAJOR MUSIC INDUSTRY GROUPS ANNOUNCE BREAKTHROUGH AGREEMENT.

I am a bit confused as to wether or not this is a change to the royalty rates that SoundExchange collects (performance royalties) or is this an agreement that standardizes royalty non-performance related royalty rates (such as those for songwriters)..

Anyone know?

ps. SoundExchange, your site sucks, I can’t link to a specific page if you load everything in an iFrame or whatever you are doing. I also can’t use my browser’s back/forward button the way I should be able to. Get with it.

Politics and the Internet and Participatory Media

This is just too good to pass up.. On WNYC 820 AM right now, the Brian Lehrer show is doing a segment which is audience driven. A wiki is open for suggestions and discussion among the audience and essentially being used to drive the broadcast.

This is part of Lehrer’s 30 issues in 30 days comparing the presidential candidates stance on various issues. One thing that I have learned is that McCain is against Network Neutrality and Obama is for legislation that protects the spirit of the internet. (I had no idea that this was an issue between them.)

Go Obama..!

McCain says this:
“Unless there is a clear-cut, unequivocal restraint of competition, the government should stay out of it,” McCain said. “These things will sort themselves out.”

Kind of like the banking industry.. Let it sort itself out.. Great.. Ha!

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Mobile, 5 Years in the future

I was just interviewed for an upcoming book and one of the questions was:
Fast forward 5 years into the future, can you paint me picture of the mobile world?

Here is what I said:
I am going to beg out of this one and instead paint a picture of my utopia.

My mobile utopia 5 years from now:

Carriers have accepted the fact that they are too large and slow to beat the current crop of DIY wireless systems that are being built. They have realized that the cost of maintaining service such as the little used voice platform is not worthwhile when all that anyone cares about is the openness and speed of their internet connection. Besides, they are sick of battling the hackers who continually figure out how to bypass their restrictions and really sick of spending their lobbying money to battle Googlezon and the like over whether or not they have to carry 3rd party data without charge.

They have finally realized and accepted their place in the world as “dumb pipes”, wireless ISPs.

They have given up on locking down phones. Nobody will sign a 2 year contract anymore for a free phone that they can’t install any of the open source software on.

On the other side of the coin, Googlezon, DIYers, hackers and hipsters are developing and deploying game changing hardware and applications at a phenomenal pace.

A prolific open source community has introduced a kit based mobile phone with every feature imaginable and battery life that puts devices from 5 years ago to shame. Tourists are carrying around monstrous looking home built teleconferencing systems with them as they gawk at the Naked Cowboy in Time Square and talk with their relatives and friends back home.

Hipsters in Bushwick no longer carry laptops and projectors to their VJ gigs but rather bring their mobile projector enabled high-speed wireless video mixing system and no longer have to be hunched over a keyboard and mouse. They simply mingle with the crowd or dance until they drop with every movement being tracked by sensors programmed to project and mix particular clips or dynamically generated visuals.

I can’t think of anyone who uses a laptop computer anymore. Everyone seems to have adopted the projected keyboard and gesture controlled interfaces that are common on mobile devices now.

Data flows pretty seamlessly and just by pointing to a contact in the sky a voice, data or text channel is opened to that person.

Wow.. Things are different now that the networks have been broken..

(Perhaps we can dream..)

Wow.. RIA’s are all the rage and things are definitely moving forward..

So.. I took a break from anything but PHP for a while. Didn’t really focus on learning any new browser based technology for the past 6 months or so. Today, I took a look around.. Am going to be using the the Flash Media Server in my class this semester and thought I would checkout the Flex SDK (which is pretty nice I must say, much much better than developing in Flash).

Looking through that got me to wonder what people were thinking of Silverlight, Google’s Chrome and finally JavaFX.

Talk about eye-opening.. I think RIA’s (rich internet applications) have arrived!

Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash competitor impressed me initially with their cross-platform push. It was a nice change and the streaming of the Olympics looked great.

Chrome with it’s revamped JavaScript interpreter seems as though it will be a pretty big game changer as well. (Wonder what that means for FireFox.) WebKit seems to have electrified the browser space (cross-platform and device (iPhone, S60, Safari, Chrome and so on)).

JavaFX looks like it *might* be something.. (This is my secret wish as Java is my first love but Sun has let me down so many times in the past with video support that I am not going to even bother until they support H.264 cross-platform)

Flash with it’s new H.264 support is what has me the most interested..

In any case, I don’t think I will be doing anything more than playing with most of the features of any of these. I will be using Flash for it’s video support and controlling it through JavaScript and using AJAX with PHP for the time being..

Ok.. Time to get back to FMS..