A mate recently sent a short message where he suggested we should create Spotify for television shows if it does not exist yet. I kind of agree that something like that would be great. The thing is I’m afraid the big boys already got their act together and have exactly what everyone wants in the works. Meanwhile it makes sense to analyze what are the reasons freemium business model  has been so succesful.

The single biggest thing that has made Spotify successful is that several recording companies have invested in it. Consequently Spotify has three virtuous cycles working for it.

1. Access to a huge library of content
2. No need for costly advertisement sales
3. Embraces existing social media services

These hugely advantageous things are pretty hard to replicate in video entertainment business. On the other hand following the same model would make the opportunity little less entizing for an entrepreneur. Basically the start-up would need to take all the development risk  and then find a buyer for the finished platform. Understandably the negotiation position would be pretty poor at that stage. Considering all this I think we need to figure out something else.

I have already been on the market for a good solid DSLR for couple of years now. We are in a happy position to have an additional member to the family. Interest to record such life changes gives a good push to re-evaluate camera gear. Right now it is the dark time of the year so low light performance counts, but improved video features are the key selling factor in many new cameras.

Even though shooting still photos would be my number one use scenario one of the key requirements in my hunt has been the ability to shoot HD video. Previously I have liked handling of Nikon’s products, but while the video still far away from 4k of the new JVC or RED products Canon’s new EOS 7D seems to have lot of the things I have been looking for:

• external microphone
• H.264 encoding
• 8 fps continous shooting
• AI Focus AF

I’m also keen to find out more about the remote HTTP controls and whether the feature would also  support video shooting through live preview.

All in all I’m really tempted, but there are some down sides to splurging at this moment. The kit is little bit expensive compared to what is available for a third of the price. The sensor is small so I might need to upgrade the glass later. I’m also bit worried how H.264 in .mov wrapper would  work together with H.264 in .avi containers from my AVCHD video cam.

Considering all this buying something in the mid-range and waiting a couple years might still be worth it. I’m still going to wait where the price stabilizes and whether Nikon can come back with an update to their line soon. Also let’s see when the new Samsung 8500 line comes out. I’ve been on the market for a new telly also.

What a wonderful idea. I doubt we will see open camera platforms anytime soon unless the camera wars really start heating up. The thing is that with so much proprietary lens technology around there is still very little reason for the incumbents to open up their platforms for third party apps.

I have been dreaming up different video-related services and tools. I haven’t gotten to building anything, but I thought I would already share these ideas with you.

• TV-guide app for Facebook  (challenge: no event creation API, no “participated” response to events)

• Automated video publishing for Facebook groups (challenge: content?)
• iPhone tap-to-compose camera app  (challenge: no access to Apple’s propriatory real-time image recognition API)

If there was somebody who would be interested working on the above topics it would be interesting to explore possibilities of starting a venture or just building something new for the sake of it.

In general to consider any system intelligent there are a few basic preconditions that need to be met. First and most importantly the intelligent entity should be able to adapt to new situations based on a certain predefined criteria. Additionally the system needs to be able to learn new responses and optimize its behaviour over time. To do this the rule base needs to be adapted according to the feedback. It is evident that building  a video conferencing system that could be considered truly intelligent is a daunting task.

The situation today is that video conferencing hardware has been built for one purpose only. A frequent phenomenon is that a company winds up retrofitting existing meeting rooms with new devices. The most common corporate communication needs, internal company meetings and virtual team collaboration will be for the most part be well fulfilled. Everybody is happy partly because face-to-face meetings add value, partly because they don’t know of anything better.

The fact is that a normal office environment has not been designed to be an optimal communications environment. Open office concepts have born out of compromise and do not take into account the growing number of distributed teams. The problem is that often the meeting room setup constrains the use of video conferencing to a very limited template. Doing anything outside of the basic scope would be very impractical.

The current solutions are not very versatile and customizing require a full groundup redesign. The constraints presented above are nothing new of course. Telepresence technology has born out the frustrations of customers had with earlier video conferencing generations. The fundamental design guideline has been to strip the environment to its bare essence. This approach has worked well and undoubtedly improved effectiveness of communication. Unfortunately it is not impossible to make cuts without losing something essential in the process. We are still far away from situation where we don’t need to set the stage for communication.

The challenge is to build video communications systems that can not just handle a static environment, but also be able to react correctly in easy to predict situations. All such adaptive actions should be easy to understand and non-intrusive to the communication. The most basic active building block is feed switching. As complexity grows (number of sites, views feeds, events etc.) software-based tools for intelligent information flow management become essential. In the beginning it may still be necessary to let the user implicitly give clues or select their explicit communication needs. Later on content-aware solutions with dynamic event response should become the norm.

I thought this video from Adobe research was pretty nifty. Nothing really ground braking maybe, but cool none the less. Unfortunately I can’t embed a Vimeo player directly on this free blogging platform. That is really unfortunate, because what I have noticed is the Vimeo seems to be winning in the video portal game. They have attracted the best content, have the best quality and a smooth player. I know it is way too early to call a winner, but Vimeo seems to have cemented itself as a video delivery platform of choice for many quality content makers. I think native support for Vimeo in wordpress.com would be nice. I still keep on using this free tool, but maybe it would be time to move on?

Enterprise video publishing solutions have traditionally relied on television broadcast technology. More modern video technological solutions have generally been ruled out as viable option. Now as technological evolution progresses a more flexible, but still dependable solutions based on video conferencing technologies may bring changes to the status quo. A converged solution could mix the best of both worlds and be first adopted in corporate communications.

For any new solution to fly new added-value needs to be created. The problem is that the suppliers and customers who have been involved with creating webcasts and other types of corporate video communication have been trussed to old ways of working. They have too much to loose and risk in sense of time and money spent on previous generation solutions. To succeed it is obvious that the new value proposition needs to be presented to a new group of users.

Corporate communications departments have two clients. The executives have a need to communicate and the employees or other stakeholders have a need to understand and respond. It seems that there has been a real awakening in both customer groups. The awareness about the importance of non-verbal communication has been identified by top management in many companies. On the other hand the recipients are progressively more and more used to visual communications methods. Now this is very promising, but does still not imply genuine progress.

For the market to grow there would need to be a clear customer demand for a specific solution. It would take quite a while for the customers to grasp their need and understand how to fulfill them on company-wide level using existing video conferencing components. As is for most end-users video conferencing is still not an application, but a physical mesh of single vendors’ devices. Few-to-many information sharing use case has not been high on the list of users’ priorities. Consequently there is only very basic support available at the moment.

Obviously for any market segment to launch off the enabling technology will need to be in place. One important fact already helping in the transition is that the devices are starting to be built based on well-known standards (SIP/h.323, h.264). For a more adaptable future this is the single most important enabler, but more trustworthy network connections and active network elements would start creating real added-value. The services need to be totally fault tolerant.

Networks have been and still remain the weak spot of video conferencing technology. There have been successful efforts to dedicate either virtual or physical network infrastructure for video conferencing needs. However such measures really miss the point and session management protocols just end up generating unnecessary overhead. Essentially they are really just copying the old model from broadcasting. Instead an ideal situation the needed network resources would be reserved dynamically based on content-aware session management.

When pitching a technical solution to non-technical people there is nothing more important than the ease of use. No other issue seems to be more intimidating and worse turn off than visible technical complexity. To hide some of the inherent complexity the communicative needs of the users demands to be identified. Again the simple solution would be to dedicate facilities to one kind of need (telepresence for collaboration). The more audacious goal would be to build content-awareness into the systems.

The very first basic building blocks for content-aware systems would let the user give clues or select the communication needs. As complexity grows (number of sites, feeds, events etc.) software-based tools for intelligent information flow management would become important. These could actually identify communication needs automatically from usage patterns and other available information. To be able to do this dynamic communications event response mamapping would be a relevant topic for study.

To make true enterprise video convergence reality few things would need to happen. Quality of service (QoS) mechanism would be required in corporate networks. The true needs would need to be mapped to solutions. Finally the whole thing would need to packaged to a simple practical package. Despite progress on the technical arena the classic communication truths remain. Until we get to the age of true machine intelligence the real meaning of the messages still count. Garbage in-garbage out.

Backend for Autoviewer (BfA) is a nifty little multi-gallery management script for Autoviewer image slideshow widget. Since often times hosting providers don’t offer the latest in PHP and MySQL I have downconverted the original object-oriented implementation to a fully procedural one that should work with most hosts. I’m also in the progress of re-writing the whole script, but I wanted to offer 2.03 interim solution to those of you who would like to try the latest iteration.

I’ve been very glad to hear that people have found actual commercial use for BfA . There is at least couple of sites already in production. People have also extended the script with some pretty cool features by themselves. I haven’t included the extensions to the distribution, but if you like I can get you in contact with some talented developers.  I was also happy to find that  using the backend does not interfere with artistic choices. Embedding Autoviewer script to web pages has not gotten more complicated. Updating the site is now just easier with a simple publishing tool.

For installation instructions check out the original post.

I’ve been getting feedback from people that they are having trouble installing my Autoviewer backend script onto their web hosting servers. With Leff’s help we were able to find the pesty bug in the install script and can now release the 2.02 version of the script. Basically the new release is just like the earlier versions except the install script now comes with the “it works” feature and should thus be a breeze to install.

There were couple of reasons why the installer did not work right out of the box. Finding the bugs wasn’t an easy straight forward task since the descriptions of symptoms were somewhat vague and I didn’t have a reference environment available.

The first thing that came to my mind was that I had done the development on WAMP platform and moving from WAMP to LAMP often times requires some tinkering with things like making sure the ASCII files use the right encoding. This time my hunch failed me and problem was elsewhere.

In the end the crucial bit was that in a hurry to get this thing out there I had overwritten the install script with something from an older codebase. Consequently instead of the new SQL create statements the ones from old install script were there. Also the path to config file was wrong.

Anyways Leff came to rescue and did bit of detective work to find the root of the problem. Curing a diagnosed disease was pretty easy. Big thanks!

I have always been a fan of innovative user interface work so I wanted to post this clip I saw on the NewTeeVee blog. The cool thing is they say the gesture-based controls could be in mass market devices by 2010.

It may seems little cumbersome to keep reaching and poking with your hands, but you can’t under estimate the hatred people feel against remotes. At least it would be a one new way to get some movement into the couch potatoes.