Images Form a New Language - New Challenges, Too.

Photos, once slices of a moment in the past ... are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue - Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online - NYTimes.com

Yep. And I've said for years that what's possible for text is increasingly possible for images and, eventually audio and video. Cutting, pasting, sharing, even searching, measuring and mashing up. It's all data, and the ability to parse it improves, to detect it increases, to process it becomes more powerful with less overhead. Meaning:

As we can now mark, cut and paste a piece of text to a page, and link back to it (sometimes a forced "include" via the browser through a little piece of .js, as with Tynt), so too, for images, perhaps video. Cut, paste, in whole or in part.

As we can search for sections of text buried within reams of information, so, too, can machines increasingly detect the meaning and inferences behind both still and moving images (and audio). We will move beyond the need for transcripts and tagging to enable search.

As semantic analysis can parse, organize and process text (in part to aid with search), so too, will an analog to NLP come to be common parlance for images and video, and automated mashups, creation and more of content be able to include those media as well.

As we can measure views, A/B and multivariate test, and more, so too for the different aspects of images and videos.

As copy protection and detecting violations of same become both harder and, respectively, easier, so, too, for video and audio.

HP: 9 Terrbytes of Video Per Month

If anyone doubts that corporate video can get an audience: Hewlett Packard monthly serves nine terrabytes, equal to millions and millions of views, according to Daniel Webster of The Feedroom, which serves the video. "You have to have lots of content and refresh it constantly," he notes. And, for HP, it's a marketing cost, covered in part by the money they save using the Internet to distribute video that used to cost many millions more to send around by satellite. Much of this is internal video. He was speaking at the Web 2.0 conference.

Money From Web Video: Costs Low, Marketing Smarts

UPDATE: 51% of TubeMogul users are making videos to make money from ad revenue shares. (Though, as Silicon Alley Insider notes (in linked story) the data is suspect.)

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Keys to making money in Web video:

1. keeping your production costs low
2. marketing marketing and marketing -- and thinking of marketing in a very traditional test, rinse, repeat kind of way
3. having something else to sell besides the video. IE, your services as a live performer

These from Jennie Bourne, author, Taking Your Video to the Web, at the Web 2.0 conference at Pace University. She gave a few examples. She talked about the success of the Coke/Mentos video (currently at more than 7 million views on YouTube, and more on other platforms). “What’s behind that is some very careful thinking about marketing, and the audience they were trying to reach. They studied everything that’s successful on the Web to come up with and create a successful viral video .They looked at what the content was, whether it had physical action. Whether it was elaborately produced. Whether it had more than one camera. And step by step they put it together ... They did it hundreds of times to get it right.”

To make money from it they put it on Revver, which shares revenues with producers, and also used it as a way to promote their live act, which ultimately is paying them more than the video ever did, she says. Added moderator Dave Burstein of DSL Prime: “They went from semi-employed circus performers to more work than they could handle, at Vegas and elsewhere.”

A counter example Bourne gave is from the producers of “The All for Nots.” They had a show called “The Burg,” which got sponsorship. They then raised their production values, increasing the cost of the show, but when they lost sponsorship were unable to continue it, because it cost them too much. The current site site is begging for more viewers to try to get sponsorship.

The Problem With Video ...

... is that it's linear ... there's no real way to skim ... I can't be told easily what paragraph to look at (though I suppose I can be told to access a video at X minute or Y). Just finished the Naked Media show, first one, with Jay Rosen, and it will be available On Demand soon on Scribe Media (thanks to those of you who watched live and participated).

This will be solved by technology, I believe -- searching, scanning and parsing will come. Everything do-able for "print" will be do-able for video. But not now. I don't, thus, quite understand the fascination with video ... there's a lot of great stuff. For example, a lot of information (in the usual Calacanis bloviation method) in this conversation Jason had with Loic Lemeur. But, it ranges back and forth, and even though it's a great conversation, it's hard to know where to access.

He talks about Nick Denton as a liar. Wikipedia as a closed loop. Mahalo, his search engine, as a place where human intelligence is added to search ... really, we need a transcript of all this, with BOLD text or some other signifier to tell where the entry points are.

The Coming Shakeout in Video Distribution

One big impression from the Streaming Media East show I got today: There are going to be shakeouts:

 - in content distribution networks, CDNs. There are too many to be supported by the market, even if the market IS growing 30% per year. How many do you need. There's Akamai. And there's Limelight. And then there are more than two-dozen others, about half of them with venture funding (too much  VC $$$, according to one person -- see Twitters in right column ), all claiming one niche or another. But those niches can't support it all.

- in standards. H.264. Adobe. Silverlight. These are all schemes for making videos and then getting them to the Web and into a browser or some other player that you can watch on your computer. But it's difficult to create in one and post in another. There's a rumor Microsoft will have Silverlight be agnostic, adopt H.264, and allow posting from all kinds of media into it, which could -- in the words of one observer -- revolutionize the industry. (Wouldn't that be something? Microsoft being the open ones.) for now, though, creators of the content are locked into different not terribly overlapping universes and the skills are not really transferable. 

- In video advertising. A bazillion schemes. Only some will survive.

- In video intake and display through the competitors to YouTube -- everyone from Revver to Veoh to Brightcove to Daily Motion. Fewer than exist today will survive.

Talked a bit, too, to show chief Dan Rayburn, who said part of the reason there might be less of a representation of revenue, and more of technology, than previous years at the show, is because he's got his ear to the ground -- and no one is really making money in video, while there's been the explosion of CDNs.

Coverage:

- Getting Nerdy (Online Minute)

- TV Worldwide 

My buddies at Scribe Media (who are doing the Naked Media show with my company and me as host) produced Streaming Media's video and will have it live in a couple days. 

WNYC Radio on “TV”

I’m a big fan of NPR -- not just because I’m in the 40-something, socially liberal, reasonably monied, Manhattanite, intelektual, granola-eating demographic -- but also because in addition to giving quality information and occasional good laughs on humor shows, it’s also been pretty good at making sure its material is available via the Web and podcast, and giving lots of other material to delve deeper. Some of the shows are also quite good at encouraging audience interaction and feedback, via not only phone but also blog or email or comment board.

My local station, WNYC, is great at all the above, and also available on YouTube. Or, rather, pieces of many of the high-quality talk show interviews are. Seeing them this way has a couple of plusses: It’s oddly compelling to watch Alice Walker or Daniel Schorr or Arianna Huffington or one of the other myriad high-quality guests at the the mic, and see how they looked while they were talking, even though it’s a static grainy picture.

It’s also a way to quickly survey who was on the channel organized in a way that’s not available on the WNYC site -- not by show and topic, but rather by guest in either chronological or “favorited” order. Plus the thumbnail photos make the scan easier. Sometimes the eye recognizes John Edwards’ face more quickly than his written name. Wonderful how the cross-referencing and digitization of information leads to new ways of looking at it.

New Primetime(s) - Program for Noon

Magazine Publishers of America writes that the new prime time for Web video is noon. Jim Louderbeck of Revision3 says, via PaidContent, "there are now three primetimes beer-drinking relaxers at 8pm-11pm; bored office workers at 12pm-2pm and now young male geeks at home12am-4am on a Saturday night:"I’ll leave it to you to figure out what they’re looking for."

Noon, we've known about for years. And it moves across the country along with the timezones. Lunchtime, people log on from their fast at-work connections. We've also sometimes seen the uptick in the evening. Saturday late night is a new one.