video

Future unFriendly

Louis CK is right:  The world is amazing and no one is happy.

This weekend I saw two game-changing videos. One was the Tipp Ex advertisement with the Hunter and the Bear, the other was the Arcade Fire video “The Wilderness Downtown.” One word sums up both of these experiences: Wow.

The Tipp Ex video advertisement is exhaustively interactive. A bear comes upon a hunter – and you, the viewer, decides what happens next. Does the hunter shoot the bear? Dance with the bear? Kiss the bear? You name it. The hunter and the bear do it.

Of course there are limits. And of course, *that* is what people talk about. Forget the fact that there are at least 50 possible outcomes. Forget the fact that this video continues to shoot around the internet at lightning speed and has garnered over 6.5-million views on YouTube in less than 2 weeks. Forget the fact that this is another inspiring example of interactive media, a la Old Spice. Nope. Let’s talk instead about how the words “sew” or “knit” don’t trigger results.

Taking the concept of what a video can be, to another new level is Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown”. (You must launch this video on Google Chrome for the full effect.) This interactive video sucks you into the experience in a most intimate way. By incorporating imagery from Google Maps, the street you grew up on becomes part of the video. Not only that, but halfway through this experience, you are prompted to write a note to your younger self, who lived on that street. There are multiple windows opening – with content transferring between them. It is truly remarkable.

Yet when you read people’s reactions online, many complain about their address not working. Or, having seen this done before… it’s nothing new. And therefore..? That takes away from the overall awesomeness? People. Dial back the negative. I think this ambitious interactive experience takes an entire industry of video production to new heights. The potential blows my mind.

In my opinion, these two examples give us a taste of what’s to come. And I, for one, will be greeting that future with a jaw on the floor and an abundance of praise for the very effort.

Tags: Arcade Fire, interactivity, Louis CK, TippEx, video, youtube

Why H.264 has won (for now)

H.264 is a video codec that is used in a number of different containers, for example, .MP4, .FLV, .MOV.

As of May 2010, the H.264 format has claimed a stake in 66 percent of all videos online, making it the current leader for internet video compression.

One reason is, well, H.264 is an athletic encoder – it looks great and weighs less! Technically, it offers nearly three times greater compression than MPEG-2, at half the file size, and still looks clean and sharp, I like to think of it as the star wrestler of video encoders, the way it squashes data flat.

Another reason for H.264′s dominance, is it’s flexibility. H.264 was created to allow content from your home computer to be delivered to other devices without the time consuming hassle of converting. So, if you happen to have the latest technology in your hands, you can share your H.264 videos from your computer to your iPhone to your iPod to your DVD player, to your TV set-top box with no sweat, no cursing, no mangled, stretched or pixelated video.

And finally, I would guess that YouTube – the Ruling King of Video – has been one of the major forces in pushing H.264 to the top.

In the beginning, YouTube’s favored codec was H.263 Sorenson Spark in an FLV container. And people were astounded at the speed of playback and the ability of H.263 to crunch a fat movie down to an edible size. We were finally watching video in real time, on our home computers, without fits and starts, and the world was forever changed.

Since then, YouTube, whose very existence requires the staff stay on top of evolving video compression standards, started using H.264 in 2007 and three years later, YouTube uses and promotes H.264 FLV. In a recent blog post, YouTube explained that they chose H.264 because they need a format that will work with as many browsers as possible. And for efficiency’s sake, YouTube needs to minimize the number of formats they accept to keep up with their manic upload rate of 24 hours of video every minute (makes me sweat just thinking about it!).

While YouTube gives a nodd to the people-friendly open video format VP8, YouTube says they’re sticking with the Flash Player and H.264 for now, noting Flash’s security features and it’s technical capabilities such as recording from a webcam straight on to YouTube for live chat and broadcasting.

Tags: codec, H.264, video, youtube

YouTube: 24 Hours of Video Uploaded Per Minute

YouTube just announced that 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Don’t know what’s more astounding, YouTube’s ability to process that much content or people’s ability to generate that much content?

Tags: upload, video, what's cool, youtube

The Social Media Revolution

This video has been floating around for a bit, but, a friend sent it to me again this weekend and I’m reminded what a great presentation it is.  Enjoy!

[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8]

- Moyra

Tags: revolution, Social Media, video, youtube