On Brightcove I chose to look at two music channels: the "Country Music Channel of Australia" and the "Realvibez" channel, both of which gave me a fascinating view of American culture overseas in streaming media.
The Australian channel led me to http://aussiemedia.com, the website of an Australian web design company that specializes in Flash websites and online videos. One of the Flash sites in their portfolio is a sexy surfing site that offers products including "Holly: a surf wax totally for girls." Now, I know absolutely nothing about surfing, so I'd love it if someone could explain to me why girls need a special kind of wax for their surfboards.
The major feature of the company's portfolio, however, is their complete coverage of all TEN DAYS (yikes!) of the 2003 Australian Country Music Festival, held in a town called Tamworth that is so devoted to country music that it has erected a giant golden guitar sculpture in its town center.
I was curious to hear what Australian country music sounded like, and found out that it sounds exactly like American country music! In the twelve videos here, which range from two to eight minutes, it was amusing to watch an announcer in a big cowboy hat speaking in a thick Australian accent, introducing various acts and features of the festival. The Australian accent ended there, however. As soon as the singing started, it was all pure Texas twang. The garb of the artists was also straight from the American South and Southwest, ranging from Nashville glitter to Appalachian Hillbilly chic. Not only the artists were attired this way, but also the thousands of country music fans who were shown flocking to the festival and camping out in trailers all over Tamworth.
The Aussiemedia portfolio also led to a website they designed for the Ashby Motor Inn, which includes 360 degree virtual reality photos of the motor inn's pool and two guest rooms. This website grabbed my attention because the motor inn is located in Tamworth, home of the Australian Country Music Festival, as well as the Australian Equine and Livestock Centre with its 500-seat indoor arena. I spun myself around and around as fast as I could in the VR photos, which gave me a real good sensation of what it would be like to spend nine or ten days in greater downtown Tamworth listening the lots and lots of country music.
The other music channel I selected is called the "Realvibez" channel and led me to http://www.realvibez.com . This website is totally devoted to music videos from the Caribbean, with categories including Reggae, Dancehall and Soca. I liked the player here, which has a bright red frame, but what really tickled me were the videos. Obviously a bunch of Caribbean musicians were sitting around one day watching imported MTV and VH1 videos and turned to each other and said, "Bumboclot! I and I can mek our OWN MTV, mon!" And so they grabbed camcorders and started shooting.
The results, of course, are fantastically amateurish and highly derivative of American music videos. Most of them seem to include the featured musicians driving a car or engaged in a car chase. Unlike the Australian Country Music Channel, however, the music and the cultural ambience here is strictly Caribbean. Many of the videos are shot in real hard core ghettos and feature dialogue in thick Caribbean patios (one of the videos I watched kindly provided English subtitles for its Jamaican actors). There is a cultural authenticity here that is really refreshing compared to the Australian Country Music videos. This is no surprise; African and Caribbean people have been taking some of the best features of American culture and re-shaping it into unique forms for many generations. By contrast the Australians seem to me to have taken some of the worst aspects of American culture and imitated them with slavish perfection.
Articles about the business aspects of the Internet make my head heart almost as much as technical articles. One of my big problems being in the MCDM program is that mixing scholarship and business leaves a bad taste in my mouth. For some perverse reason I still expect scholars and scientists to be above and beyond the commercial world.
"Devising Video Distribution Strategies Via The Internet" by Chang, Lee & Lee struck me as yet another social science paper in service of the Mighty Dollar that employs many words to say very little. I must differ with one statement of the authors: that people will not pay to watch TV shows that were initially shown for free. Don't video stores do brisk business renting TV shows that are no longer on the air? Don't cable channels like Nickelodeon collect monthly fees for endlessly recycling shows that were broadcast for free many years ago?
A couple of things struck me in Ann Becker's article "Digital Impasse." She referred to Sony Pictures Television as an "independent" producer of TV shows. Perhaps it's my ignorance of the industry, but I don't see how an organization can be considered "independent" in any way when it has the word "Sony" in its name.
Becker also talked about the growing importance of "branding": the networks desire to make sure people know the source of the programs they are watching. Aha! So this is why those incredibly annoying network logos started popping up in the bottom of TV screens about ten years ago. To me, seeing "American Movie Channel" superimposed on a classic movie is as disruptive and offensive as, say, colorizing "Citizen Kane." This type of branding simply makes me hate the brand, and is part of the reason why I no longer watch TV.
Claire Atkinson's article "Bewkes: Future of Digital is Cable TV" was sort of interesting because of Jeff Bewkes' seemingly perverse prediction that cable TV, and not the Internet, will be the future leader in digital entertainment. With so much cable TV being stored on hard drives (as in TIVO) and with so much Internet service being delivered via cable, and so on, I find the distinction between TV and computers to be getting blurry. Atkinson mentions an interesting crossover service called EBay TV, in which a message pops up on subscribers' TV screens, alerting them if they have been outbid on EBay, so they can put their TIVOs on pause and jump over to their computers to make another bid.
It seems pretty obvious that there will be more and more of these crossovers and that various technologies will eventually merge. I doubt, however, that we will simply end up with a single device. This is mainly due to our need for devices of various sizes for various purposes. Perhaps we end up with a single, octopus-like information/entertainment system in our homes, with tentacles reaching out to various dedicated devices with different screen sizes and degrees of mobility.
I found an interesting-looking U.W. site at http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/interviews.htm about the history of the civil rights movement in Seattle. It offers lots of streaming video interviews but unfortunately I could not get the movies to play on my computer. There are little camera icons underneath the player window, one for each topic in each interview, but when I clicked on them, the player simply disappeared. There are no other control buttons, no instructions and no indication of what kind of player is being used. I suppose I could scour the site looking for instructions or else email the webmaster, but I decided it wasn’t worth it and moved on to another site.
Watching streaming movies like this makes me feel like we have returned to the days of the Kinetescope, peering through a magnifying glass at blurry image inside of a dark box, and getting excited that we can see anything at all!
The Red Hot Jazz site has quite a few other movies, but they take a while to find. The site is poorly organized, with no site map and just a few broad topics in its navigation bar. Moving through the site is a matter of drifting from link to link, squinting at tiny text, clicking on things experimentally and often being surprised by where links lead. It feels like wandering through a dark, dusty old museum and having displays suddenly come to life when you bump into them. It’s a little confusing, but it’s fun!
There is a message in the Film section of the website that reads “Films require the Vivoactive plug-in available free of charge at www.vivo.com." I went to this address and it brought me to an ad for Real Networks, offering a 14 day free trial to their “Superpass” (as well as their Playboy TV Club!). As it happens, I already have a Real Networks Superpass (I think) because I subscribe to Rhapsody. This message confused me because all of the movie clips I found on this site are offered in Windows Media and/or Quicktime. Would I not be able to view these clips if I were not a Real Media subscriber?
Please take a look at my very first video weblog posting, which contains my comments on this week's readings. It runs just over four minutes.
I had some interesting adventures compressing this video. I basically fumbled around with various compression codecs and settings available in Final Cut Pro. At first this resulted in huge files that looked terrible. Finally I stumbled on an MPEG-4 compression that gave me pretty good looking results and a file that was a quarter the size of all the others. Unfortunately, a lot of the quality got lost once I uploaded the clip to Vox. Also, I can't really remember the compression settings I used, having tried so many. This means that the next time I go to compress something, I'll have to start experimenting all over again.
