This isn't really about Videon on the internet - but it is about digital TV and the fact that here in Canada the government is dropping the ball in telling people, especially out in rural Canada, that their old "analog" TVs won't work come next August 31, 2011 unless they get a digital channel converter box.

If you get your TV signals from a cable company or satellite company you're fine. Their equipment is already digital and you don't have an antenna on your roof or rabbit-ears on your set top.

To those of you who have an antenna (and I see them all over, even here in Vancouver) you're in for a big surprise come September 1 next year. You won't be able to see TV at all because not only are the Canadian channels all switching, those in the US have already switched.

In the US, the government subsidized the purchase of the converter boxes - why shouldn't they, they stand to make billions from selling off the freed-up frequency spectrum to wireless phone and service carriers?

The Canadian government on the other hand has neither stepped up with a subsidy, nor even told you much about this change - they've been mute except for some pretty well stifled stuff from the CRTC chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein.

If you have an antenna on your roof you should be looking into getting a converter - and you should be giving your MP heck for the complete lack of preparation they've foisted on the unsuspecting public.

On the other hand, maybe this is about Video on the Internet - if you have to purchase a converter box anyway, why not go whole-hog and get one of the ones that gives you access to stuff from around the world? Just Google "internet TV set top box" and you'll see what I mean. Netflix is coming to Canada and their box is only $99 (US, but...)

Take a look at this site to see some of the various other boxes available too

Should be interesting - the local stations are going to scream - but then they should be selling you converters!

richard

Google I/O is on at the moment, and I'm just catching up after watching initial Keynote and wandering around looking at some of the new products and facilities announced today.

The major item is the absolutely fantastic announcement of Google's opening of their recently acquired VP8 video codec and the establishment of the WebM open media project.

The blow this will deal to H.264 will hopefully be fatal as this proprietary codec has the power to stifle the web every bit as much as it has empowered it to bring you the millions of videos of recent years. I mean - did you realize that with essentially no exceptions, every single use of H.264, whether through a paid license for your camera or application, or their "free" license for creating/viewing on the web, you, the end user of those cameras and video editing/creation suites cannot use the resulting images commercially without breaking the terms of the license and being open to law suit by MPG LA, the patent holder group. You can't sell your photos/videos! You can't advertise beside them! You certainly can't create advertisements with them!

Many of us are waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one. Will the (US) government step in and rule that this is restraint of trade? Or will MPEG LA start suing their "customers" like the RIAA and MPAA are doing?

Of course the fact that Adobe is going to put the VP8 inside Flash will help, but they really should simply concentrate on making HTML5 with WebM video their default standard for all new web creation software.

Shortly after installing my new version of Windows 7 Professional, I decided to take a look at the Zaplive.TV free publisher program. Hancock Wildlife Foundation has been using Zaplive's distribution via an agreement with WildEarth.TV for over a year now, but we've pretty much been doing straight Adobe media encoder live streams.

Now we're gearing up to do some live annotations by David Hancock of not only our regular streams, but of other streams as well, including some generated at the Hancock Ranch in South Surrey, near Vancouver.

We're likely to go with VidBlaster's offering since we're going to be using multiple cameras and sources, but I wanted to take a look to see how close the various offerings are to Vidblaster in terms of features and quality options. At this time I'm comparing free to free - since I'm using the Vidblaster demo which puts their logo in the upper right corner of the outbound stream.

The live streaming video industry is only just over a year old; at least the part that will monetize your stream (or at least mean you don't have to pay for bandwidth) for you is. I've been watching and participating in it for almost 6 years now, and can say that today there are facilities that will allow almost anyone to stream almost anything - and they do stream almost anything!

In this time we've seen a number of services rise, and the offerings from them morph. As one of the pioneers (you can count the arrows in my back and chest) of this new medium I'm going to work at some subjective and objective assessments of the various services available, starting with the two I know the best: Zaplive.TV and Ustream.TV

Bear with me while I put together the criteria, and by all means climb on and comment about what you experience and your thoughts on the subject. I've just opened up the forum module and added categories for providers, hardware, software and monetizing. So far there does not seem to be anywhere else really set up to provide this kind of venue for cross-provider discussion and general information and discussion, so I'm hoping you'll join me and bring your experiences and opinions to the rest of us.

Over the past few weeks I've been again dealing with the huge influx of visitors and new members to the Hancock Wildlife Foundation web site - especially since their two main eagle nest cameras now have chicks in the nest.

Along with this, I'm in the midst of writing an e-book on how to do wildlife live streaming video. The number of such sites is growing, and from what I've seen it is again a case of people getting things to work despite not knowing the first thing about what they're doing. I'm running across systems where security companies have done the install the way they normally would, then expecting things to "just work" when making the hook to the internet - and of course it doesn't.

I'm also running across things like "nanny cams" being used on a bear den, in Winter. Stuff that just shouldn't work, at least not for long - and that present a hazard to both those installing it and to the critters they're watching.

The field is so new, there simply isn't any place that has all the basic information for those who luck into having an interesting critter nearby. The book will be released by Hancock Wildlife Foundation and proceeds will go to the foundation. Watch for it.

People with headphones and boom mics dominate the new internet talk show circuit. Lots of them are just your every-day garden variety people with a passion for some particular topic, but some have generated excellent followings in their particular vertical market.

From the web to tech, sports, religion and politics, there are people talking and trying to get noticed using the tools of sites like Ustream.TV and Justin.TV and others. Some, like Chris Pirillo (the locker gnome), have been doing this kind of thing for literally a decade or more. Chris, by the way, was the other half of one of the original Around the World shows done by David in the late 1990's out of the studios at Insinc, headed up by my friend Hugh Dobbie.

On the other hand, I've searched high and low for a show in any way similar to what David Ingram's Around the World has been in the past and will again be in the future - a general interest show with high-quality guests and in-depth interviews on subjects ranging from politics to politicians' hobbies (Bill VanDer Zalm and his flowers) and authors on all manner of topics, musicians and artists, and even other show hosts. Yes, there are web versions of the traditional TV offerings - but nothing that takes advantage of the interactivity of the web and yet provides solid and generally interesting interviews and opinions.

But we're going to change that. Over the next few weeks and months we're going to experiment with and get comfortable with the new technologies available from one or more of the live streaming video sites. We'll start with Ustream.TV this week and, depending on how things go, may move to something different at some point in the future. You'll always find us at www.david-ingram.com and here on www.digital-rag.com but the underlying service may change. Of course the archives and stories will be on our sites too.

Come on along and interact and support us - we're counting on you. Wednesday Evenings from 6PM to 9PM Pacific time.

richard (and David Ingram)

In 2005, when we created the live video sensation of the year with the Hornby Island Eagle Nest Camera, there simply were no live video services capable of helping us make money from what turned out to be 40,000 live streams on for over 4 months solid. The technology and techniques simply didn't exist.

All such streaming video shows at that time were limited to "pre" and "post" roll advertising insertions - aimed at episodic (relatively short shows done daily/weekly etc.) or file archives. That model didn't work for our camera because, although there could be, and was, a pre-roll when someone joined the stream, there was never any post-roll because the stream never stopped - and the length of time someone could watch was measured in days and months, not hours and minutes so the potential cost per viewer was measured in tens and hundreds of dollars rather than pennies and dimes.

Flash forward to today - and there are several companies whose business model is exactly what we needed - live insertion of overlay advertising onto non-stop video streams. Four short years and a new industry has exploded onto the market.

Today I'm shopping around for a hosting service for David Ingram and my new weekly show. Yes, it's episodic, but many of the services I've found will let you broadcast 24x7 streams of your hummingbird feeder or your puppies playing and sleeping - and yes, your news and views program. They (the service providers) don't care what it is your stream consists of - as long as you attract people who don't mind ads showing up on the bottom of the screen every so often.

But what is the economic trade-off with such services? Should we host our own? We've been doing this for the first year as we have done the financial shows - mostly because many of these shows were paid advertising - so our costs were covered. Going to a strictly ad and donation based revenue model means we would have to somehow cover our bandwidth use ourselves even if we got no donations/ads.

The internet revolution is making its mark again - this time in the cost and practicality of the paid personal interview.

In the past the typical self-serving interview, paid programming or info-mercial scenario was the realm of either those with very high marketing budgets or very low standards. It just was not a reasonable vehicle for the typical small business with one or two locations and either a typical service or hard-goods product line. Maybe this kind of business could afford to do a 30 second commercial with the owner as the lead, but more likely they were limited to trying to get a bit article in the local paper or a brief interview on radio when their company sponsors a baseball team or the owner puts in 50 years or some such.

Today this is no longer the case. The cost of presenting self-serving video content has plumetted to the point where everyone should be doing it. Of course there are good and bad ways of doing it, and sometimes it's still a good thing to leave it to the professionals, both for production, and for the interviewer.

That's certainly the reason that P-Zip Marketing and David Ingram have teamed up to create a wonderful vehicle for self-promotional video/internet interviews. David's "Around the World" weekly video-cast on his www.david-ingram.com web site provides an excellent background to the business or businessman interested in getting the word out about who they are and why people should deal with them.

EE Times has a story today about the BBC's showing their DIRAC codec that they've been working on for years (Slashdot 2004)

"What does this have to do with the general public?" you might ask. It has to do with how efficiently and cost effectively internet TV can move into the realm of cable TV or over-the-air broadcast.