TechnoCloud

YouTube’s latest experiment at live broadcasting, the decidedly A-list U2 concert from the Rose Bowl attracted a broadcast size audience of 10m. Given its premium content, it’s too early to say whether this is a tipping point for internet video or indeed YouTube’s live broadcasting ambitions, but nonetheless it’s an impressive figure.

The concert was made available to 187 countries, including China, North Korea and Iran, with a third of the 10m viewers based in the US.

An old post noting the BBC’s trialing of video embeds remains one of the most popular on this site, even though the story is out of date.

Thankfully I can update the story after a post on the BBC blog announcing that the trial is going to be rolled out using the embedded media player, starting on the News Technology section.

You can see it in action below (or not if it doesn’t work!).

It works fine for me and was easy to add to a post. The first impression was that the player feels too big, certainly compared to the initial trial size. The description panel below the video content is a large part of this, especially when the metadata could be displayed in the player itself, although I suspect the additional links (Terms; What’s This) were an important requirement of this getting released.

However, since my original post YouTube has increased the size of its embedded players with the change to widescreen format (and even allows HD), so it is not out of keeping with the dominant player in general video.

Equally a blog post is just one of the locations that the video could be embedded and it may look a better fit outside of a blog’s column width.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary edition, Esquire magazine wanted a truly standout cover.

As you’ll see from the embedded video below, they certainly achieved that despite the limitations of the animation, which resembles one of the earliest animated gif banners.

The limited edition cover came at a cost. Although the official figures have not been released, the cover price was $2 more and it was co-funded by Ford who released animated magazine ad inside the front cover. The work involved to reduce the batteries to a suitable size is rumoured to have cost a six figure sum. Good job they last for a minimum of three months and a projected average of six months to help the purchasers display some serious table top eye-candy for their extra investment.

Despite the cost, Esquire have created a memorable cover to celebrate their anniversary, which has generated a great deal of buzz from people uploading a video of their copy to YouTube to the inevitable technologists taking the e-Ink technology apart and posting the results online.

What’s interesting about this beyond the first-mover ‘gimmick’ is the potential convergence between print and digital. E-Ink also provide the screen reader technology for the Kindle and once the technology advances, it is not unreasonable to expect video and wi-fi to provide the a/v content and real-time updates that makes the web so competitive to print.

Buried in a post on search quality on the Google blog was an interesting titbit:

we now offer an early form of face recognition on advanced search

Frustratingly that was all there was - it would be interesting to hear if this is technology they had developed themselves or if they are using a third party such as Viewdle, Like.com or even Blinkx, each of whom are innovating in this area.

Visual search is one of the great challenges in unlocking the potential metadata hidden in images and video. Alt text, image name and descriptions only take you so far in understanding a video or image’s content. They may do a good job of describing the overall content, e.g. visit to Paris, but struggle to explain either specific components of the static image (Eiffel Tower in background) or content variations within a longer piece of video (Notre Dame 30 seconds in).

Facial recognition technologies are nothing new in themselves and have been in use in airports for years, but getting them right in visual search is and remains an elusive, yet valuable prize.

Like Elvis, Bob Dylan seems to have no limit to the number of Greatest Hits variations he can release. I can remember as a child listening to my parent’s Dylan compilation in the car some 20+ years ago and the old master is at it again with a single CD or ‘deluxe’ version with 3 CD Digipack no less.

Passing over the fact that most of the old favourites are there yet again, a piece of viral marketing for the album caught my eye.

The viral, also available as a Facebook application, allows you to create your own version of the famous ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video where Dylan nonchalantly holds up lyric cards. In a neat piece of creative you can add your own lyrics to the cards and watch Dylan flick through them followed by a plug for the album.

You can share it via Facebook, email the website version to a friend (with the classic subject line ‘Bob Dylan has a message for you’ or embed it on your blog or social network after the slightly annoying step of having to provide a url and email address.

Great reminder of some of the video gems to be found in user generated content, starring a highly creative street performer in Germany using a combination of skis and bottles filled to various levels…

Interesting to see that BBC News is trialing the use of a Flash player which will allow users to embed video clips into their web pages (T&Cs plus code for the video below here). So, in the spirit of a trial, let’s give it a go using a report on the current UK alternatives to the ‘i-Hype-Phone’.

Easy to do for anyone familiar with embedding code and works fine for me in Wordpress and on MySpace. Work OK for you?

Another oh-so-handy reference list from the recently list obsessed Mashable, profiling the increasing ‘How to’ video niche.

While YouTube and its many clones try to be all things to all people, these How To sites are proving that there is a market for niche video communities. The best of these sites are more focused, easier to navigate and are proving themselves able to co-exist alongside the traffic phenomenon that is YouTube.

This trend carries over to the series of niche social networks that cater to every topic from the environment, to pets, to writing and everything in between, some more successfully than others, alongside the traffic giants of MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

Let me be (ahem, among) the first to categorise this sector: social nicheworking. Let’s see how well that phrase catches on…

Every now and then you stumble upon (literally) a piece of content on YouTube whereby the term ‘user-generated content’ just doesn’t cut it.

Step forward OneManSho, who manages to cram an incredible 200 impressions into just over a quarter of an hour. What’s even more impressive, is that most of them are actualy pretty good.

It reminded me of the crammer’s favourite the Reduced Shakespeare Company which squeezes all of Shakespeare’s 37 plays into just over an hour and a half.

All-in-all, an enjoyable global audition which will surely lead to him moving to other platforms - the other video sharing sites will no doubt be on the poach and he would be a surefire hit a the Edinburgh Fringe (although he may have to pad it out a half hour!).

We keep reading about the ‘MySpace-made-us’ musicians (cue Lily Allen, Artic Monkeys), how long until we see the YouTube etc. comedians as a fixture on our big screens?

MTV parent Viacom is allowing web users to embed videos from a number of MTV sites, including Pimp My Ride, into their web spaces. This comes at a time when Viacom requested the removal of 100k+ clips from YouTube.

While this move shows Viacom’s desire to control the source of their content on the web, they are prepared to let users consume it at least partly on their own terms, whether embedded on a blog or in their social networking space. With the content contained in their player, they can potentially place advertising around the player or within the content to monetise their content in this space.

Check out our example below to see it in action.