When Richard Ludlow was struggling in a linear algebra class at Yale, he scoured the internet for answers and stumbled upon a full video course available online from one of MIT’s mathematics professors, Gilbert Strang. He realized that there was an opportunity to create an easily accessible online platform for academic video courses and guest lectures, much like Hulu does for television content. As he did more research, he found that academic resources were grossly underutilized, as they were scattered across different sites and offered in varying file formats, making them difficult to find and browse.

So Ludlow launched Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” The site also features a roster of famous guest lecturers on entrepreneurship and technology including Larry Page, Carol Bartz, Tim Draper, Elon Musk, and Guy Kawasaki.

This isn’t a radically new idea. Fora.TV and BigThink both offer intellectual video content online. iTunes U hosts a lot of university content as well. Unlike Big Think, Academic Earth isn’t creating original content, it’s just repurposing existing academic content. And Fora.TV seems to focus more on speeches and public lectures. But Academic Earth has the right plan around providing free course lectures. You can watch an entire semester’s worth of lectures in a few days (if your brain can handle it). My one complaint is that for an academic site, it doesn’t seem to engage the user via forums, comments, social networking features, or ads. Ludlow says that all of these features and applications will be introduced slowly.

The interface of Academic Earth is simple and no frills but Ludlow plans to roll out additional features, such as a YouTube-like commenting system for videos. Users will be encouraged to ask questions about the content of videos, with the hope that other users (or scholars) will answer them. Ludlow says that the site will try to make money by advertising for educational goods and services such as tutoring and continuing professional education, and will share revenue with content providers. Ludlow says universities will have the choice of opting in to commercials and advertisements. In addition to the current university sources, the site will be adding content from think tanks, conferences, and government agencies. Also, lectures can be dry and boring to watch. Academic Earth lets you download the videos, but sometimes all you want is an MP3 with the audio so you can listen in the car or on a run.

Published: February 23, 2009

WILLIAM A. ALLEN III has deplaned, returned the rental car and unpacked the suitcase he always kept ready to roll at home in Raleigh, N.C.

Mr. Allen, business traveler extraordinaire, is off the road. “I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m going to be 61 in April, and I’ve had it,” he said.

Mr. Allen is a consultant who often flew 200,000 miles in a year. He enjoys top-level elite status at airlines, hotels and rental car companies. I first met him four years ago at a Hilton Garden Inn across the road from Los Angeles International Airport.

Back then, I noticed that the hotel manager treated him like visiting royalty. Would you like a drink, Mr. Allen? How is your room? Is there anything we can do for you?

That was because Mr. Allen had earned some level of loyalty status that most of us never even heard of. But, he told me, he didn’t like to consider what he had done to earn it — including five nights a week on the road, 50 weeks a year for 31 years.

I spoke with him a few days ago by cellphone. He was with his two children, ages 5 and 10, at a playground. It was a Friday, which in the old days was when he would be stuck in some dreary airport, hoping to make a connection home for some time with the family before dragging himself back to the airport on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Allen is not retiring from his consulting job. He is merely retiring from the business travel grind. And I hope the travel industry is paying attention because a new era is dawning. Cheap technology is part of the reason, along with a profound weariness with the chronic indignities, inconveniences and expenses of air travel.

Last year, Mr. Allen and a small group of other road-weary consultants he knows from all over the country formed an informal network linked mostly by videoconferencing technology. They were enabled by the proliferation of cheap (and sometimes even free) social networking tools — wikis, podcasts, and computer video and teleconferencing systems like Skype and ooV00.

Now, I am someone who knows how to turn on the cable television only by stabbing randomly at buttons on three remote controls until I get picture and sound. But even I have embraced some technological advances. I’m currently in the Arizona desert working on a book, and my wife, at home near New York, set us up with Skype. Every night, we videoconference, and that includes input from our two parrots, both of whom talk to me while looking at the camera. Yes, I am videoconferencing with birds.

So I would say the revolution is here. For 10 years, videoconferencing was the next big thing that did not happen. But lately, it has finally been getting some traction. Big companies have made big investments in fancy videoconferencing systems. But at the same time, a technological initiative was being driven from the bottom up.

Right now, technology budgets are being slashed. Travel spending is down sharply. Hotels are struggling, and airlines cannot cut capacity fast enough to keep up with sagging demand.

The consulting business is in a slump, but the need for consulting assistance is still there as companies try to figure out how to dig out of this mess with fewer employees.

“We know how to implement strategies, and now we’re figuring out a way to use these Web 2.0 tools work for us,” Mr. Allen said of the business plan that he and his colleagues were trying to develop. Once they get rolling, they plan to evangelize clients to transform hierarchal technology cultures.

“We’re talking mostly about the productivity benefits of using Web 2.0 tools,” Mr. Allen said. “The ancillary benefit is the ability to cut down on business travel. People will still need to travel, but not at the levels we did.”

He, for one, harbors no illusions about life on the road. “Years ago, it was always amusing to me to hire a new consultant just out of grad school, and they were all gung-ho, like ‘Hey, I’m going to make 1K on United!’ ” he said, referring to United Airlines’ top-level elite status, earned by flying 100,000 miles in a year.

“And then after a few years they all start to sound like me. Like, ‘Oh, man, I’m sitting in O’Hare for 12 hours and they won’t put me on another flight till tomorrow,’ ” he said.

Why do certain videos on YouTube become mass phenomena while the vast majority of videos just get a handful of views, if any?

Riley Crane, an American post doctoral fellow currently researching at the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH university in Zurich/Switzerland, says he has the answer: According to him, the success of online videos can be explained with physics.

Crane claims every time a YouTube video turns into a hit, the development takes the form of an “attention spiral”, a geometric pattern that partly follows physical laws. He discovered that a decrease of popularity with certain videos, for example, can be explained through methods usually utilized in modeling the aftershocks of earthquakes. He believes social systems on the web follow the rules of physics and can therefore be analyzed mathematically.

The popularity of YouTube videos can be characterized through curves visualizing increases and decreases in the number of viewers and the amount of attention they pay to each video. For example, the following graph shows two different attention spirals (top left: level of search activity following the Tsunami that hit part of Asia in December 2004; top right: the volume of search queries for Harry Potter between April and October 2007, bottom left:views of Harry Potter videos on YouTube; bottom right: views of tsunami videos on Youtube):

After researching the usage of about 5 million YouTube videos over 8 months, Crane found out that only 10 percent are viewed more than 100 times a day. According to Crane, the popularity of these videos can be measured through distinguishing whether a burst of activity was observed after a large-scale “exogenous” (external) shock or whether it’s the result of a number of smaller “endogeneous” (internal) factors that had a cumulative effect. Also, it seems to be important to take into account the extent to which web users can influence others to take action (what he calls “critical” vs. “subcritical,” where the latter term means exerting influence is impossible).

Crane categorizes especially popular videos into three different classes:

• “junk” (exogenous subcritical type, videos that quickly pick up and lose viewers / see the green diagram at the bottom left in the picture below)
• “viral” (endogenous critical type, videos spreading through the site through word of mouth / see the red diagram at the top right in the picture below)
• “quality” (exogenous critical type, videos that attract attention quickly and only slowly lose their appeal over time because of their high quality / see the blue diagram at the bottom right in the picture below)

Junk videos are characterized by a significant peak that contains the vast majority of views and fail to spread through the site. In contrast to quality videos, viral videos show precursory growth before peaking out and decaying slowly (see the Harry Potter example above, diagram A): It takes time for the endogenous phenomenon to build up and spread within the network. Quality videos, however, reach the peak much faster as a reaction to an external “shock” but also decay slowly (see the Tsunami video example above, diagram B).

Crane claims that viral and quality videos show very characteristic patterns over a specific period of time, supposedly making it possible (through the analysis of tendencies) to predict if a video has the potential to become a super hit.

The final goal is the development of an encompassing and science-based online trend monitoring system. The university newsletter writes (German only) Amazon is currently in negotiations with Crane to integrate his model into its site, hoping to predict the potential of newly listed products at an early stage.

The critical factor here (and one of the long-term objectives) is to correctly determine the tipping point, the point in time at which the viral effect kicks in and sales or (in the case of YouTube) views of videos take off. Details of the Crane model (presented with fellow researcher Didier Sornette) can be found in the October issue of PNAS magazine (available online here).

Filed at 9:05 a.m. ET

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – YouTube will venture into webcasting later this month, in an effort to take the video sharing Web site’s popularity to a new level by showcasing the talent behind its most viewed videos.

The site, owned by search giant Google Inc., has matured from Web start-up and video fad to a site with loyal fans. But as any good TV industry executive will say, it needs to begin producing new and fresh content to keep its audience.

So, on November 22 in San Francisco, it is launching “YouTube Live,” a show featuring well-known stars such as rapper Will.i.Am and singer Katy Perry and YouTube sensations like 20-year-old Esmee Denters, who posted video of herself covering popular songs and became a star on the World Wide Web.

YouTube executives said the show will feature performers who are popular with the site’s users, a community that has already held unofficial events and whom the company wants to reach by streaming a live show for the first time.

“The value of YouTube is we’ve created this platform that’s been driven by the community, so this is in reaction to that,” said YouTube spokesman Chris Di Cesare “Having a community event that the community values benefits all involved.”

Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has been a repository for all kinds of Internet videos, from snippets of TV shows to off-beat demonstrations of skills such as cup-stacking to serious campaign ads in the recent U.S. presidential election.

But as other sites have found, Web surfers can be a fickle bunch of fans and keeping them on your site — which is what advertisers pay for — is a daunting task.

LIVE ON THE WEB

Taking their cues from the TV industry, Internet giants AOL, MySpace and Yahoo! have webcast original programing in recent years. What seems to work best, so far, has been live concerts by the likes of Madonna and The Pretenders.

Yahoo! Music landed car company Nissan as a sponsor of its tape-delayed concert series, called Nissan Live Sets, with the average concert receiving 2 million streams, the company said. The concerts are also broadcast on MTV cable channel Palladia.

For its part, YouTube said videos posted by the roughly 50 entertainers and other talents on the bill for “YouTube Live” have been viewed online more than 2.5 billion times, which the company said accounts for a big part of the site’s hits.

“These are the personalities that people at home have tuned in to watch,” Di Cesare said.

Those personalities include Discovery television show “Mythbusters,” Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who will attend the “YouTube Live” event.

They will demonstrate a feat that has become a sensation on YouTube, the workings of a giant robot they designed to shoot paint at a canvas and create a version of the Mona Lisa, by Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci.

Singer Katy Perry, whose hit song “I Kissed a Girl” became an international chart-topper over the summer, will open the show. Perry, whose label is Capitol Music Group, posts videos at her own “channel” on YouTube.

Denters, the Dutch singer, is a budding star who rose to fame on the video Web site. More than 111 million times users have clicked on videos of her singing into a webcam, a homemade success story that eventually had pop star Justin Timberlake signing Denters to his Tennman Records label.

“It’s been a crazy story, and I have all that to thank from YouTube,” she said.

YouTube said it intends to hold follow-up events to “YouTube Live,” but it gave no details on those plans.

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

A concept in video advertising has been bubbling up amongst the professionals I’ve been listening to over the last six months, one that makes a lot of sense and is already in use by several successful podcasters, but one that is rarely described explicitly and definitely lacks a cute buzzword-y name, at least as far as I’ve seen.

Most advertising in video and audio media is treated separately from any other content, text or otherwise. Most blogs and news organizations that regularly (or irregularly) produce and feature video and audio content don’t monetize it at all. Those that do monetize it either rely on remnant advertising methods or sell by CPM, and are often discouraged when production costs outpace the sales returns for the content being created.

I’ve spoken here before many times about the value of sponsorship models for all forms of online content, and their inherent superiority over metrics-based advertising for publishers. The topic has come up a few times when we’ve discussed different ways to monetize Twitter, particularly in the context of making money from a personal brand, rather than trying to look at the content as monetizable inventory:

Folks like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble have been able to launch entire Web 2.0 niches just by describing a problem, and then subsequently promoting a company or set of developers that work to solve those issues. Those are just two names I’m intimately familiar with within the hundreds of Twitter users that have several thousand or more subscribers. Twitter should be striking deals with these users and splitting the cash with them.

And I spoke even more recently about the idea of sponsorship in the context of online video when I explored some of the hidden reasons behind Revision3’s recent cuts:

For a real world example, why is it, do you think, that Cisco signed on to sponsor the Mashable Conversations video podcast (one with zero subscribers at the time when they signed the deal) before we’d ever put out an episode?  Why do you think Seagate continues to sponsor Robert Scoble’s endeavors, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the distribution of larger blogs like us?  The answer is the same in both cases – those advertisers want to have their name associated with the brands they’re buying into.

When you compare the budgets spent on brand sponsorship to metrics based ads on the very same show, the value to the publisher is clear – sponsorship is the way to go, as it can swing the money dial upwards easily by between a factor of 10 and 100.

With a Difference Like That, Doesn’t Advertiser Value Suffer?

Advertiser value, in theory, should go up. The reality of sponsorship situations is that they’re chosen much more carefully, and with much more manual interference. A company simply isn’t going to drop what can easily be a six figure sum on a well known publisher’s brand without some human interaction taking place. Conversely, buys that take place on remnant video inventory or CPC text and image inventory can easily exceed that value, and most of the time it’s handled primarily by automated systems.

Perhaps in a coming age, these sponsorship transactions will also take place by sophisticated automated means (and when that day comes, a lot of folks in the sales and marketing business will be fearful of their jobs), but I rather doubt it.

These types of sponsorships are generally made because careful consideration has been made by both the savvy publisher and the savvy marketer to identify where the audience for the product or service and the content being monetized coincide closely.

For a real example of what I’m talking about, simply look no further than our daily sponsored feature at Mashable, the Sun Startup Review. The content and the sponsorship is strictly textual in nature, but the concept here is the same. Sun decided that a key target for their future business lay in the startup sector, and Mashable’s brand is inextricably tied to the startup business, so thus a sponsor-publisher relationship made sense.

Sun could have simply bid on a text ad on the side bar, or even purchased one of the more expensive graphic ads we sell, but they were looking to shape their image to our audience beyond what may or may not be glimpsed when a reader scrolls through our pages looking for content.

In terms of online video, these concepts are no different, it’s just that the added value of the sponsorship becomes much more stark and visible.

New Media Beats Heritage Media Moguls at Their Own Game

Although I’ve vocally disagreed with Brightcove’s media distribution strategies from time to time, their Vice President Adam Berrey very succinctly made this point about publishers with respect to how they work to monetize their video efforts at a recent roundtable discussion hosted by Beet.TV.

The point that he’s driving at there is that it’s the audience you’re selling, and not the content. This is true for any media organization, and it’s an important distinction for those who are trying to sell any New Media inventory to learn and learn well.

Put another way, New Media publishers hold in their grasp the holy grail that moguls of the olden days spent millions, if not billions, to acquire – the ability to sell against multiple media types. Congress won’t ever pass legislation to break up a media monopoly by an online website in an effort to prevent them from utilizing video, audio, images and text on their website. On the other hand, congressional hearings are routinely held whenever mergers and acquisitions take place that consolidate too much media in the hands of too few publishers.

Just In Case You Need a Refresher on the Value of Video

Case study after case study shows how video and audio are more valuable than simple text content. The old standby study I like to cite was published two years ago by Ken Rutkowski, and it documented the simply amazing response rates to online video advertisements.

It found that of those that watched a video advertisement online, 45% had some sort of measurable response from the ad, and 31% followed through on the advertisement enough to go to the company website. Of those that watched the advertisement, 16% ended up making a purchase, and separate 13% either signed up for a free trial or ordered a subscription.

Plainly, if under half watch the advertisement, and then 45% of those folks respond, you’ve got around a 25% viewer to response ratio, a not insignificant number. Likewise, of all the folks that will view a video, 12.9% will end up buying the product, requesting a free trial, or ordering a subscription.

At this point, evangelism for online video response rates is almost preaching to the choir, no matter who it is you’re talking to. The reasons behind it, particularly for the web savvy, are almost common sense.

• A video advertisement defeats most common forms of web ad-blindness.
• Standard video and audio CPM base rates for even remnant ads are far higher than that of text.
• Video and audio are more memorable and often easier venues for conveying complex ideas, and thus …
• … better at creating a lasting impression of advertiser brands, offers, products and services.

The formulas for CPMs and CPCs are great starting points, but shouldn’t be set in stone. When a publisher is looking to solidify the sponsorship relationship, they should treat all inventory (be it audio, video or text) as ala carte.  The key is, for both advertisers and those who sell ads, to wrap your head around the concept of what a video or audio ad is worth, what your brand and audience is worth, and how to convey that to those who want to partner with you to reach your audience.

The Army’s Web site for potential enlistees, goarmy.com, will feature a series of webcasts about soldiers deployed in Iraq.

By STUART ELLIOTT

FOR the last two years, the Army has presented itself to potential recruits as the way to become “Army strong.” Beginning on Tuesday, Veterans Day, the Army will seek to make its pitch stronger by making the campaign more relevant to the desired audience of Americans ages 17 to 24.

One new feature on a redesigned version of the Army Web site (goarmy.com) called “Straight From Iraq” states, “Now you can find out what it’s really like to be deployed in the Middle East from the men and women stationed there.”

“Soldiers are ready to take your questions,” says a section of the site devoted to a webcast series. The feature represents the first time that visitors can ask questions of soldiers deployed overseas as well as the first time the Iraq war has been referred to so directly and prominently on the Web site.

The goal is to provide those considering the Army — along with parents and others who influence their decisions — with “verifiable information about what being a soldier is really like, what combat is really like,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, commanding general of the Army Accessions Command in Fort Monroe, Va., which is overseeing recruitment.

The changes in the “Army strong” campaign place more emphasis on the Internet, event marketing and other methods that connect with young Americans on a closer, more personal level.

To help pay for the new media features, cutbacks are being made in areas like the Army’s sponsorships of professional rodeos.

The changes include an additional theme for the campaign, “Strength like no other,” which will appear along with “Army strong”; a focus on the skills that recruits can learn in the Army, to make a stronger case about how serving can bring personal and career success later in life; and new information about becoming an officer.

“The campaign has been successful conveying the benefits of ‘Army strong,’ the physical, emotional and mental benefits,” said Ed Walters, chief marketing officer for the Army at the Pentagon.

“We wanted to more clearly articulate that,” he added, through efforts like sharing with civilians the video clips of “real soldiers’ stories.”

•

The “Army strong” campaign is produced by nine agencies, eight of them part of the McCann Worldgroup division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The Army ad budget from 2006 through 2011 is estimated at $1.35 billion.

The Army has met its recruiting goals for the first two fiscal years during which the “Army strong” campaign has appeared. Critics of the military’s practices contend that bonuses being awarded to recruits as well as less stringent entry standards have also helped meet the goals.

“We love the ‘Army strong’ campaign because it resonates with youth,” General Freakley said, and it “says in a nutshell who our soldiers are, that it is a strength they get by serving.”

“This is a progression, an evolution,” he added, referring to the new phase of the campaign.

In addition to the new content on goarmy.com, there will be new TV commercials, meant to help drive traffic to the Web site. The first ones compare the Army to a company, a team and a school by showing young men and women in settings like an office building, a gym and a campus. The scenes shift into scenes of soldiers performing military tasks like marching and saluting the flag.

In the gym commercial, young athletes are seen working out, then stacking sandbags. “There is a team like no other team in the world,” says the narrator, the actor Gary Sinise, who took over the narration work for the campaign last year from the actor Josh Charles.

“When they raise their flag in victory, you will know what these men and women are fighting for,” Mr. Sinise says, “and you will feel fortunate to be counted among them.”

In the office commercial, young workers in business attire suddenly start climbing walls. “This company is filled with dreamers,” Mr. Sinise says, “but they also have courage, strength and honor, and when they leave this company it will be with a thousand opportunities and the respect of millions.”

The intent is “to show the Army in a way you haven’t thought about it,” said Craig Markus, executive creative director at McCann Erickson Worldwide in New York, one of the McCann Worldgroup agencies working on the campaign.

“Obviously, the buzzword right now is ‘relevance,’ ” he added, “and we’re trying to talk to people in a way that’s relevant to them at the moment.”

Coincidentally, it turns out the campaign was developed months before the start of the steep economic downturn. The growing unemployment rate could benefit the Army because young men and women may enlist rather than search fruitlessly for work.

“History will tell you that’s true,” Mr. Markus said, “but I’m not going to predict what may happen.”

The other McCann Worldgroup agencies working on the campaign are: Casanova Pendrill, for ads aimed at Hispanics; the IW Group, for ads aimed at Asian-Americans; Momentum, for event marketing and sponsorships; MRM Worldwide, for the Web site, digital marketing and direct marketing; NAS Recruitment, for medical recruiting; Universal McCann, for media planning and buying; and Weber Shandwick, for public relations.

Another agency, Carol H. Williams Advertising, is creating ads aimed at African-American recruits.

•

Other changes the Army is making include reworking the content of the Virtual Army Experience, a traveling interactive exhibit with games and other displays that is intended for an audience as young as 13. There have been complaints that the exhibit is inappropriate because it makes combat seem to be fun.

“If we show the Army fighting, people say it’s violent,” General Freakley said. “If we don’t, people say it’s not truthful.”

The new content for the exhibit will concentrate on the peaceful purposes the Army can serve, he added, like providing humanitarian aid.

The new elements of the “Army strong” campaign aimed at so-called influencers like parents are scheduled to start in January. Such ads have been part of the campaign since it began in 2006.

By David Chartier | Published: November 11, 2008 – 04:05PM CT

I don’t know whether to think recent calculations for mobile video consumption (or lack thereof) via the four top wireless carriers in America are just a little bit Halloween spooky, a big point of concern, or perhaps a good omen.

It’s come to be a common refrain that most of the country’s residents are mobile phone users. But what they do with their devices is, particularly in media consumption, very unlike the advanced markets of Asia and places elsewhere. Less than 3% of American subscribers bother to consume on-demand video in any form. “Woe is US?”

That number, released by Comscore yesterday, is certainly not an attractive one for any carrier to next to its name, especially given the activities made possible by new(ish) strides in mobile broadband penetration across the country by various networks. Whether it is a 4.4% usership that AT&T managed to serve circa June-August 2008, the 4.2% tallied for Sprint, or the the 2.4% figures each given to T-Mobile and Verizon, none shine very brightly.

To get specific for a moment, so-called amateur video clips (a la YouTube) ranked #1 among those who did use the carrier’s video services, followed by music videos, comedy clips, and film trailers. Each segment managed to net over 1 million users. (Alternatively, Web browsing, email transfers, and photo and video sharing are all working double-digit percentiles themselves, totaling over 100,000,000 users.)

As anyone with a good perception on data rates demanded of video downloads knows, the “packaged” experience delivered by carriers is 1) nowhere near like using a desktop-sized Web browser, and 2) costly. These factors, compounded with unavailability of many media options and television channels and whatnot, do much to make media services somewhat unappealing to many people. New software breaches that barrier, no doubt, but such developments are young and far from a common convenience.

What’s more, present platforms used to deliver streaming and on-demand video to handsets (only few of which manage to interface with online services really well) should really be taken for what they are: mobile broadband and Internet use. It’s entirely reasonable to think, then, that consumers wish to consider mobile broadband and Internet use very much the same way they do their land-based residential and at-work broadband connections. Which is to say, “give me access for a fee and let me do what I want to do and see what I want to see.”

Wireless carriers of course don’t appreciate this sensibility very much, since it essentially designates their task as a dumb ISP, so to speak. No value added. Just build the towers, sell the handsets and monthly connections and allow the user to do what the user wants to do from there on out. (How very libertarian and Ron Paul-like of the user. And we all know how wigs in the major parties regard independent thinkers.)

All said, I would think that an average of 2.8% penetration for the on-demand mobile video market is just a notch or two above crumb-sized. So I can only imagine that the figure is directly attributable to the age-old law of supply and demand. If the product isn’t adequate, nor will demand be. Time for carriers to be a little more free-thinking (philosophically, if not financially) with their mobile media delivery models, it seems.

Critical Media CEO Sean Morgan has some advice for TV broadcasters who are still using $50,000 workstations and a team of professional video editors to upload TV clips to their Websites:

Fire your editor, and here is your username and password.

The password he wants to give them is for Syndicaster, his online video editing and syndication platform. Launched in beta in January, he has now just released Syndicaster 2.0, which lets TV stations edit and publish video clips from their regular broadcast to their own sites and across the Web within a minute after the video airs.

Currently, it can take TV stations hours to process video for their sites. With Syndicaster, everything is done through a browser. So no special hardware or software is needed. And the video doesn’t even need to be uploaded because Critical Media captures and digitizes live video from more than 700 local TV stations.

I was given a demo of the product, and while the UI is a little Windows 98, the underlying capabilities are pretty impressive when you consider that the system is taking raw video feeds from TV and making it Web-ready in a matter of minutes. Search results come up as thumbnails, along with transcripts. Click on a word, and it takes you to that point in the video. The clip can be bumped to the point the editor wants it, and then it lets you pick a thumbnails, add a title, descriptions, and categorize the video with automatically suggested keywords that make it easier to target ads to each video. Says Morgan:

We want to own the ad taxonomy on professionally produced video.

Once the video is ready to go, a drop-down menu lets a video editor post it to his TV station’s Website, as well as to YouTube, AOL, and ClipSyndicate (Critical Media’s Web video syndication platform). Already, 80 TV broadcasters are using Syndicaster.

Morgan’s pitch to them: Instead of 10 video editors at 10 TV stations dedicated to uploading stuff to the Web at a cost of $30,000 to $50,000 per wokstation, Syndicaster can replace that with one editor at a cost of $3,000 to $5,000 a year in Syndicaster subscription costs. That one editor could see all the video from all ten stations and prepare clips for the Web. And he could do it all in his pajamas from home.

And while Syndicaster is only for TV video professionals at this point, many of the same capabilities will be available to everyone in a product called ConsumerCaster that should launch some time in the first quarter of next year.

October 3, 2008 – 4:43 pm PDT – by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins