YouTube.com versus LiveVideo.com

The story of similar services vying for the same audience isn’t anything new. What makes this an interesting thread to watch is that as the contenders here are both social computing sites, part of the audience they are competing for are also their primary content creators. The result is a war not just of companies, but rather of self made “celebrities.”

I stumbled across this during my citizen journalist research on YouTube and it sucked me in. The breakdown goes something like this:

• 2006? - LiveVideo.com comes online
  For the life of me I can’t find a date for this. But I know it happens sometime before October.
• Oct 9, 2006 Google Acquires YouTube
  The google linkage is will come up numerous times in the arguments that follow.
• Oct 25, 2006 - Smosh launches a LiveVideo channel
  Smosh, a pair of 19 years olds, were one of the YouTube’s better known successes. The rational behind their move, and the re-branding of their videos as “Powered by LiveVideo.com” will eventually be called into question.
• Nov 2006 - ~Jan 1, 2007 - relative quietv
• ~Jan 1 - 20, 2007 - Flurry of activity - Investigation and Migration
  During this period a number of YouTube members post videos reviewing the LiveVideo service. Some announce, via YouTube, that they are setting up duel accounts. A number of prominent YouTube community members¹ migrate to LiveVideo entirely.
• Jan 20, 2007 -Renetto v-blogs “Traitors or Not.. Smosh, Geriatric1927, Boh3m3, DIGITILsOuL?“
  Paul Renetto, a well known YouTube v-blogger, attacks Smosh and others YouTube members who have established LiveVideo accounts. He alledges that a number of them were paid by LiveVideo to jump ship and refers to them as traitors.
• Jan 20 - 23, 2007 - Explosive Response
  Youtube an LiveVideo explode with feedback. On YouTube the video generates 170 response videos. At LiveVideo there are at least 77 responses posted.
• Jan 23, 2007 -Renetto follows up with “Are you all being duped by a “Corporate Marketing Scam”?“
  Renetto responds to the controversy his first post generated. By his account, the majority of feedback he got was negative. Three major points come out of this video:

  1. In October, he was approached by LiveVideo to migrate. He claims that LiveVideo offered to pay him to make the move.
  2. YouTube has paid Renetto, and other members, at least twice for videos. Once for the YouTube Christmas Video, and again for the New Years Eve video.
  3. He was appraochedby a talent agency who claimed that YouTube will be launching some form of revenue sharing program. This agency offered to represent him in artist negotiations with YouTube.

Since that time there has been a bit of back and forth postings. Renetto’s second post has generated at least 58 YouTube video responses so far. More responses are coming on LiveVideo. In the meantime, community members on both sites are posting videos rationalizing their decisions to stay, go, and in some cases remain neutral on these issues.

Ok, with all of that set up, tomorrow (or soon there after) I’m going to dive into the metapragmatics of this exchange as a there’s a lot of “culture” happening as I type.

¹ - The list of users will eventually make it up here.

In answer to the question “why all this musing on campaign videos?”, if all goes as planned, I start my PhD studies in the fall. Provided I go the anthro route, I’ll be looking at citizen journalism and American politics. Internet video broadly, and YouTube specifically, play an important role in that mix.

Honestly, the more I begin to explore YouTube, the more complicated things get. It’s a mish mash. And the threads that are emerging from it are so varied I’m not quite sure where to start. All of it complicates this question of what exactly a citizen journalist is. There’s a lot of citizen commentators and folks who post clips from news networks. And activists.

I’m just not quite sure about “journalists.”

On Saturday, Hillary Clinton became the latest democrat to use an Internet video to announce their presidential intentions. There are a couple interesting points about her video. One is how well timed to “news rhythms” it was. By releasing on a Saturday morning, her camp effectively ensured it would just make Sunday newspapers, many of which go to press early that afternoon. The net result there was that the video was the first thing discussed both in papers and on the Sunday news programs (trumping the Obama video released earlier in the week).

Another things to note is the cinematic quality of the video — by that I mean how it employs the tools and conventions of movie making. Where the Obama video was a stationary, single take, the Clinton video features at least three cuts and the camera is constantly moving (arguably to the point of distraction).

The Clinton camp also choose to host the video themselves, at HillaryClinton.com. Unlike the Edwards and Obama videos, Internet users cannot aggregate the Clinton video through embedded links. Instead, Clinton’s team’s choice to provide a high resolution Quicktime version of the video for download seems a bit of a strange choice.

The benefit to her competitor’s distribution choices was that they allowed anyone to publish their videos through the use of the <embed> tag. There was no need to worry about the overhead of asking everyone to host a 55 mb or assuming that most bloggers have the technical skill to place that file on their website. More importantly, with the aggregation model, everyone is referring back to a single, master video. Which means that if Edwards or Obama chose to update the content, those changes would immediately be reflected across all sites.

The result of Clinton’s distribution choice can be seen in two ways on YouTube. First, The Hillary Clinton For President Committee, a grassroots organization supporting Clinton’s run, encouraged people to link their blogs to a YouTube video of CNN’s replay of Clinton’s video instead of the original artifact. The second is that people are already mashing-up the original high def source video the Clinton camp provided to make anti-Hillary videos.

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On a side note, I think my favorite YouTube Obama v. Clinton video is this one. It’s simple and goofy — a person called up both of the candidate’s websites and played the videos against each other.

Reference:

Bernius, M. (2007) a tale of two candidate???s video distribution strategies

Just a quickie… I tried out the Kodak Easyshare V705’s panorama tool. Man, my former employer really nailed this one. I’ve been very impressed with the camera - both in terms of lens technology and the user interface itself. It’s great to see Kodak continuing to live up to its boo-yah, non grab-ass vision outlined earlier this year:

[youtube]Sz6XjXu-oT8[/youtube]

That’s about it. I’m currently closing a karma circle and writing a letter of recommendation for an excellent student who is hoping to get a summer internship at the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By announcing of the formation of his Presidential Exploratory Committee yesterday, Senator Barack Obama (D-Il.) took the first official step towards a run for the presidency . I’m not going to address the politics of this. Instead, I will focus on his media distribution mechanism. The announcement was made through a video hosted on Obama’s website. Or, to be more exact, the video was hosted by web video company Brightcove and aggregated to barackObama.com.

Obama isn’t the first candidate of the ‘08 race to use the web as a video distribution medium. In December, John Edwards announced his candidacy in his YouTube Tomorrow Begins Today video. On the surface there are numerous similarities between the YouTube and Brightcove sites. Both stream video, allow direct linking to videos, and also enable the video content to be embeded in 3rd party web pages (though I can’t seem to get it to work with Wordpress). They allowed the candidates an easy method to distribute their message and ensure that the video can be aggregated to various sites.
But, as we look closer, the similarities quickly end. Brightcove primarily hosts professionally generated content, created by established media outlets like Dow Jones, Newsweek, and various TV networks. While the website invites content submitted by video bloggers, a quick scan didn’t find much “citizen” content.

YouTube is the opposite: user generated dwarfs profession content (not to mention that much of the professional content has been captured and, illegally, posted by members of the viewing audience). Community participation is at the core of YouTube model, and it creates a very different sharing space than Brightcove. YouTube allows viewers to leave public comments on videos. While Obama’s page only contains the video announcement, Edward’s annoucement is accompanied by a discussion of more than 88 postings, pro and con, from people who have watched the video. That is only the beginning.

Both sites feature links to related content from their pages. Obama’s announcement on Brightcove only references other videos that his campaign has posted. That is in stark contrast to the page which contains Edwards’ announcement. Following the YouTube model, a wide range of user generated content associated with John Edwards is linked on the page, including these three videos:

• RE: Tomorrow Begins Today - Brian Russell (yesh.com) and Ruby Sinreich (lotusmedia.org), two activist Bloggers speak in support of Edwards campaign. There are a number of other pro-Edwards postings.
• Response to John Edwards - A woman in New York State attacks the Universal Health Care proposal Edwards made as part of his Tomorrow Begins Today speech.
• John Edwards 2008? - A self identified Democrat from North Carolina (Edward’s Home State) who proclaims Edwards “unelectable.”

These examples highlight an interesting problem for candidates: while YouTube offers tools to manage posting comments, you cannot control what content your page links to. In going to “where the people are,” you leave yourself open to direct commentary from the people. Counter-commentary may be located directly beside your stumping. Contrast this to Brightcove’s promise of control, an interface that does not link directly to intertextual documents. Additionally, even when you find commentary on Brightcove, it is coming from established sources. While you might get criticized it is coming from the media, rather than the people you are trying to reach.

Note that these implications can be projected onto the videos themselves. Some have called attention to Edwards’ decision to speak extemporaneously, on location in New Orleans versus Obama’s use of a controlled backdrop and a prepared speech and teleprompter — organic contact with the people versus control over environment and message.

Ultimately, the candidates may find that hopes for controlling their distribution is a pipe dream. In less than 24 hours, more than 17 “bootlegged” versions of the Obama video have surfaced on You Tube. Almost all of them have, individually, received more viewings than the original video at Brightcove. And, a search for “Barack Obama Announcement” also includes a link to a Right Wing radio show host offering counter commentary.

For the first time in quite a while, I’m not being deluged with spam comments. Up until this point, on an average day, this blog received upwards of 20 cybersex/weight-loss/gambling/loan offers masquerading as user comments. Since the move yesterday to the new URL (http://www.waking-dream.com/blog”) nothing new has come through. I wonder how long it will take for spammers to update their databases.

It also just occurred to me that all of my RSS feeds are now broken. Though, actually, I’m not sure if they ever worked correctly. One of the great things about this reskinning project is that I’ve finally taken the time to really pull the Wordpress engine apart.hI have a much better understanding of how it works and how it can be tweaked. And that provides me with new insight into finally getting a number of Wordpress plugins to work.

In other news, its the first day back here at RIT after the mid-quarter, winter break. And sadly, I’m still grading.

In terms of the PhD hunt, I’ve received confirmation now from NYU that they have all of my components. Now the waiting officially begins.

Quickie — I’m currently blitzed with classes and applications to PhD programs (Cornell, NYU, and Columbia). I have a redesign for this site in the works, but that’s going to happen over my Christmas break.

I will say that its interesting to see the reaction to “social computing” as Time’s person of the year. I personally think it’s a bit of a ridiculous choice — I don’t think it’s had an effect that is yet socially significant enough. That said, let me present to you what will hopefully be the next viral YouTube video. Here’s the Assistant Dean of my College and a laser pointer:

[youtube]DGNPcF11pFg[/youtube]

Things are slowing here. Some of our creators have given in to sleep (I think our collection is going to have a number of Eastman Variations). We attribute it to this hunk of kryptonite we discovered in Vicky’s soda.

BTW, make sure to check out the offical blog/archive of 24 Hour Comic Day located here.

We’re almost 10 hours in and going strong. The group has decreased to 14 artists, but the work is amazing! And the fun everyone is having is even better!

Here’s a breakdown of the work that’s going on:

The newly formed "Team Awesome" is cranking on the following:

• Michael – Applesauce.
• James – The chronicle of how drum major Dan became the drum major for Satan’s marching band.
• Lindsey – Whether true love exists and the things that draw people together.
• Alfie – BANG (the end of KILL)

Our other team, Vicky & Laela, are working on "A story that has nothing to do with anything but is really funny — Four characters meet their creators."

As for everyone else, we have:

• Dan – Nightclaw: the beginning
• Benjamin – Man on a Mission: One man’s quest to repair to the ozone layer aka hold on you 2 your layers aka deeper still, Ben’s not crazy.
• Eric – A fantasy action story in search of a title.
• Kurt – Deaf Buddha: the meaning of life.
• Dorothy – An autobiographical comic.
• Chuanshi – X-painters

Here are some random shots from the event. You can see the Flickr page for the event here.:

One of the committees that I’m currently serving on has been charged with coming up with an end of year event display event for School of Print Students. This type of event, in theme, if not form, is pretty common across the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences. For example, each year all the students and faculty members in the film department gather together and watch every student’s final project. Likewise most of the other arts have gallery exhibitions or studio walk throughs.

All of the above focus on an end product. But what is the end product of print? It’s easy to focus on the created artifact. But that often is reduced to concerns about the item’s graphic design. That focus is completely inappropriate for printing students – if for no other reasons that they are not training to be graphic designers. Arguably, the final products could be evaluated on choice of media and production aspects, but many of these factors are controlled by the assignments.

Frank Cost noted these problems with judging print production at the beginning of the chapter “The value of print” in his book The New Medium of Print (Cost, The New Medium of Print, 2005: pp95-7).  Cost reminds us that most printing industry awards are based on the quality of the final project rather than intangibles such as “was the job delivered on time? Was the customer please with the service? Did the product deliver the anticipated value to the customer?” (Cost: p95).

Cost goes on to suggest that while print quality is important, it’s also assumed. Thus, companies differentiate themselves on those other vectors. Likewise, our students are judged on far more vectors than simply “did the job print” and “is it pretty?” The challenge that we face is choosing a method of display that brings those intangibles to light.

The benefit, pedagogically, is that finding a method to display the intangibles serves to make the students more aware of their existence – that, as Martha says, “is a good thing.” The question is, what method is best?