Beet.TV Transcripts

Brightcove Says Quality Comes from Locally Encoded Flash: New ABC Video Player is Awesome

Sanjay Desai, On2 Technologies

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Sanjay, tell us about The Publish Pod and why you guys did it and some of the utility there.

Sanjay Desai: Sure. The Publish Pod is a desktop application that we released about three months ago and it allows you to do a couple of things. One is to take a Flash video file and upload it into Bright Cove and you can actually batch several files, one after another and have them upload consecutively. The second, which is an interesting and new capability is to take files, video files that are not in a Flash format and have those both encoded and then uploaded directly into Bright Cove, all with The Publish Pod.

One of the ways that we trade off quality versus performance is to look at novel and innovative ways to actually deliver the technology that provided that quality. So one of the approaches we’re thinking hard about now is to actually look at the load of the video and to limit the amount of – the amount of images that are actually loaded in that initial set, such that the entire process actually becomes quicker and a better experience for the viewer.

Andy Plesser: You know, we’ve been talking about Flash 8 and of course that’s what you guys use and it looks so good. How come it looks so good?

Sanjay Desai: That’s right. Well, that’s again where On2 provides a lot of value. The video compression technology that’s inside the Publish Pod actually allows the encoding to be done at a high quality. And that’s the video that you see that comes out at the other side. We think is one that stands out from the competition in terms of the quality of the video.

On2 actually provides a couple of unique elements. One is on the encoding side of the business, as we’ve talked about, the video compression technology is part of our Publish Pod and allows folks to take files from any format and convert them into Flash video. The second piece where On2 provides value is through their Flicks Pro editing tool which allows a lot of our larger publishers to be able to edit their video and then directly upload that content into the Bright Cove service.

We have a very close relationship with Adobe and have continued to migrate as they have from Flash 7 to Flash 8 and now Flash 9 you’ll see become stronger and stronger in the marketplace.

I think we’re moving towards a world where again the picture quality will continue to improve and the interactivity between the video and the consumer will continue to improve as well.

We’ve focused on providing the highest quality experience that you can find and you’ll see our video, as compared to other sites, tends to rank very highly on that end of the spectrum. What we’re looking to do is also optimize performance. So find that nice balance between providing high quality, but also doing it in a way that allows the consumer to have a really good experience and for the video to load quickly and to play well.

My name is Sanjay Desai. I’m a director of product marketing here at Bright Cove.

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On2 Technologies, Brightcove, Flash Video

WashPost Online Exec Editor: Journalists Have No Choice but to Change and to Promote Their Work

Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

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[Start of Audio]

Jim Brady: We saw back in the late 90’s that or suspected that video, once connection speeds really improved and people had high speed at home and at work and that the art form was a little better forum that people would watch a video on the Web. And so we started throwing resources at this back in ’99. I think we hired our first video journalist.

And we just kept refining the craft over time. It got enough traffic that we felt like we could continue on. It wasn’t getting huge amounts of traffic, but again, we felt like this was something we were preparing for that day in which suddenly people were willing to watch a video.

And I think over the last three years, a combination of YouTube, a combination of video iPod and just better connection speeds – suddenly one day, people will seem to be willing to watch a lot of video. And it was odd for a lot of us who have been doing this for a while that it seemed to happen so quickly that it went from some people watch video to everybody’s willing to watch some video.

Andy Plesser: Tell us about the scope of the video that you’re producing.

Jim Brady: We do some that’s purely news video. A Bush press conference, just something we think enhances a news story and gives somebody some depth. We obviously do some documentary video where we send one of the six or seven video journalists we have somewhere in the city, somewhere in the country, somewhere in the world to chase a story on our own; sometimes with a post reporter.

Reporter video is kind of a third category where we give the reporters themselves cameras and ask them to shoot video that helps to kind of enhance a story or add another dimension.

Andy Plesser: We’ve heard a lot about the changes in the world of journalism and newspapers and the imperative for journalists to change, to learn new multimedia skills. What are your thoughts on that?

Jim Brady: To answer the question about journalists and transitioning into the world, there are two answers. One, it’s hard. And two, they have to figure out how to do it; that the world is changing, how people consume media is changing by the day and we can’t, as journalists, sit back and say this is how we’ve done it. This is how we’ve done it for the last 10, 20, 30 years and that’s the way we’re going to keep doing it because our consumers are completely changing how they get to what we produce. And getting yourself out there in as many places as you can and making sure people understand what you’re doing is important. So if you’re out covering a story and you go on MSNBC for two or three minutes; you do a spot on Washington Post Radio, come on here and answer questions from readers for an hour. That does all cut into your schedule in figuring out how to juggle that is complicated.

But we, like every other major media company in the world now are fighting for the attention of every reader. And how are we going to make sure that they know what we’re doing and in some cases, getting on and talking about what you’re doing is more important now that it’s ever been; especially as we try to attract a national and international audience. So I think the challenge is definitely there but I don’t think we have any choice but to figure out how to juggle our schedules and help them produce better journalism.

[End of Audio]

Washington Post, Public Relations

WashingtonPost.com Exec Editor Mulls YouTube for Video Distribution: The New York Times Grabs Smart Dartmouth Grad for New Blog

Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Some newspapers are beginning to solicit video from their readers, actually, or users or whatever you want to call them. What are your thoughts about soliciting and using video from your readers?

Jim Brady: Well, I don’t think there’s any question we will get into that and pick our spots in doing it. It may be around the cherry blossoms, it may be around the Redskins. It may be around, protests downtown. I don’t know what it will be about but we definitely want to get citizen video or citizen submissions in certain areas. We’ll probably be getting into that in the next couple of months.

But I think it’s a part of every site. I don’t think – it’s never going to be the dominant thing that WashingtonPost.com is but what we really focused on a lot of the reader engagement; providing all sorts of forums for readers to talk to us whether it’s through comments on articles or live discussions or making it easy to send email to reporters. Actually providing access on our own pages to ____ blogs that are writing about our articles. We feel like that’s something we’ve done really well, which is give people an opportunity to go deeper than just what we wrote. Write about it yourself. See what other people are writing about it. Contact the reports.

Andy Plesser: So the Washington Post has had video for a long time. You guys have sort of retweaked the home page by bringing video onto the home page in a very prominent way. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts behind that development.

Jim Brady: We brought video to the new homepage primarily because we needed to really signal the people that this was the central part of the site, that over the past couple of years, we’ve continually heard in focus groups and in other places ‘I didn’t realize you guys did video’. So a lot of the reason we’re doing this is we really need people to see that we do it. We need to get them into video and we need to get them to watch more video which is obviously good for us from a business perspective.

But when we tested this homepage out on people over the last couple of months, the one thing everybody noticed because we had that big multimedia strip on the home page, and some people said, ‘oh, I probably wouldn’t click on things in there’ but they all saw it. And I think that was a key for us because it really – this homepage signals better than anyone we’ve had what we’re about if we’re focusing on a couple of core items and making sure people can find them on the home page.

And with the Braco player on top of that, it’s now an opportunity to drive people into vide and then once they’re in video, we’ve presented them with a much better experience and a much better chance to go to more videos. So we think there will be a pretty significant impact on traffic.

Andy Plesser: Jim, let me ask you, most people experience the videos – well, let me just ask you about how the video is watched and where it’s watched. I assume it’s pretty much watched on the WashingtonPost.com. Will you have that content syndicated? Will it be downloadable? Tell us a little bit about how folks experience now or might experience these video clips beyond the confines of the WashingtonPost.com.

Jim Brady: If you look at kind of the phases we go through with video right now, and Travis comes back with this piece from Chad, we blow it out for like three days on the site.

But after a week, 10 days, that story still resonates and is still as powerful as it was the day we launched it but it’s been pushed out of the way by all these new things we’ve put up on the site since then, whether it’s the 100 stories we get from the newspaper every day or more multimedia projects we do.

So at some point, promoting a piece like that on the site aggressively becomes a lot more complicated so why not, when that second phase hits, not turn it around and say, let’s put this up on YouTube or let’s make ____ embeddable somewhere. Let’s figure out how to get this on as many platforms as we can now to give it a second life, for lack of a better term.

In terms of video podcasting, we do a ton of video podcasting. We literally bought the video iPod the day it came out and had our first video podcast out 24 hours later. So we embraced it quickly. And we actually have more people downloading video now via video podcast than we have watching video on the site. And so it’s been huge uptick for us.

Now, that’s apples to oranges because all we know is they’ve downloaded it. We don’t know that they watched it. We know people on the site watch the video. So I’m not saying more people watch video on iPod than on the site but the fact that that many people are downloading it is great for us. And so we’re going to continue to explore any avenue we can to get our video content out there, whether it’s an Apple Set-Top Box or whether it’s working with broadcast organizations to try to get stuff on network TV. We’ve done some stuff with Frontline in the past and some stuff with local TV.

So there’s no platform that we would not be willing to put our video.

[End of Audio]

Washington Post, YouTube, Online Video, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,