the Crow Digital Media Blog

My basic contention is that most of the big media companies are either clueless or greedy to the point of self-destruction when it comes to online video.  Here’s a good example of why I feel that way…NBC and their site promoting the very popular show Heroes.

On the lefthand side of the Web page are multiple small banner graphics leading to various Heroes related content. As a fan of the show my eye was caught by a particular banner, this one promoting an online video clip of Conan O’Brien interviewing Masi Oka, one of the stars of the hit show. So far so good.

But instead of leading me directly to the clip what they really do is link to another Flash site (”NBC Video Rewind”) presenting Conan’s last ten shows…you have to read through each night’s show description just to find the correct episode to play.
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I’m a big proponent of two things, one is using social media technologies to greatly amplify the impact of your videos, another is the Wordpress blogging software that is great for constructing entire Web sites. This post is going to allow me to focus on both of those.

Let me bring to your attention a fantastic Wordpress plugin called Sociable from Yoast.com .

Simply put, this plugin allows you to automatically add a row of buttons beneath your blog post or page that users can click on to forward your content onto one or several of the social media sharing sites like Digg, Facebook and Twitter. There’s even an option making it simple for a site visitor to email your blog posting to a friend. The Sociable setup screen allows you to choose which social media sites you want your site visitors to be able to select from, it couldn’t be any easier.

I’ve just recently added this plugin to the Crow Digital Media blog

Certainly, from a purely design and look point of view, I think the Brightcove Player is one of the best ones out there and I was eagerly looking forward to telling you all about it.

But there’s been a big change at Brightcove TV, and unfortunately it’s not good. You can no longer upload your own videos to the site.

Now the only videos available are those from Brightcove’s customers who have bought the Brightcove system to publish videos on their site, I don’t have any numbers but I bet that’s not going to be cheap.

So for the person seeking a great free video player to use on their site, Brightcove is no longer an option. Moving on.

The history and culture of the Internet is all based around free content. Not many people charge you to visit their Web site for instance. Making money from a podcast is not as straightforward as it might sound, the fact is that most podcasts don’t make money for their hosts directly but they do however contribute to an organization’s bottom line in other ways, like the value of building a loyal audience, the PR and promotional value etc.

But many people are looking for more direct measurements, frankly they want cash not good PR. That’s what the rest of this post is all about.

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While many of us immediately think of sites like YouTube, the term “online video” is actually very broad particularly when one considers how content originally develop for online use can be re-purposed for anything from DVDs to Digital Signage.

This pdf describes 45 such uses and I assume there are still many more that I didn’t think of to include…can you help me improve my list?

If so, click on the headline to this post and enter in your comments.