The Working Title » Video

How to Hulu

Andrew — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:16:48 +0000

I’ve been talking about Hulu to a lot of people lately…after being initially critical, I have come to love it. It has allowed me to watch the entire season of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (may it rest in peace) and every episode of Arrested Development. So in my mind, Hulu is pretty kick-ass at the moment.

So check it out, below is the Hulu Walkthrough to give you an idea of what the site is like.

An Idea to Rally Around.

Andrew — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 02:36:04 +0000

Gary Vaynerchuk is, without a doubt, one of the most open, engaging, motivational and insightful guys I’ve ever encountered. He runs Wine Library TV as well as publishing a daily video blog post that usually revolves around some aspect of social media and the community it creates. Watch a couple of his videos. I guarantee that halfway through the first one, you will already have a new tab open so you can add his RSS feed to your reader. He rocks. That’s about the best way I could ever sum it up.

Anyway, Gary is one of those guys who defaults to seeing the good in everything and has a knack for seeing potential in things that others take for granted. So today, he was struck with inspiration during a conversation with Adam Hirsch , a writer over at Mashable.com and out sprung the video I’ve embedded below. Check it out and tell me with a straight face that you aren’t excited about it.

So, tomorrow reach out to someone; call an old friend; write a blog post thanking your readers for stopping by or thanking those people who have positively influenced you to get you where you are today; twitter a thank you to everyone you have following you, after all you invade their computer screen multiple times a day! Tell other people why the people you follow or the people who follow you are the best. Sell your friends to the world; if you scratch some one else’s back and boost their personal brand, I guarantee it will come back to you twice as strong one day!

This is Gary’s original post with the above video:

I want to try to get the WHOLE INTERNET COmmunity behind this mission I have to make sure that tomorrow people write and talk abd blog and twitter and just flat out SING about people that are AWESOME and GOOD. It is time that we take control of the fact that WE are the media and pump out a day tomorrow that will make NOISE across this WORLD! Please take the time tonight to gather your thoughts as you come up with ideas on how to spread the word about AWESOME people! I am looking for blog posts, twitters, powncers, facebooking, digging, flickring, stumpling on all things that are good about PEOPLE!
Please tag all work “GPD08?

So reach out and touch someone and help push the idea that social media can rally people around a positive message and help draw the world closer together. We walk around with our iPods in everyday and toon out the rest of the world because we are too busy jamming in our heads while we twitter about traffic… well tomorrow is the day to show that all this technology can build us up together rather than separate us across a digital divide.

Tomorrow I’ll post my thank you post for GPD08. (Good People Day 2008!)

My Site Now Supports Video Comments

Andrew — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:40:36 +0000

Well, I saw it on Mashable yesterday and thought it could be nifty and today I learned which Wordpress plugin makes it happen, so I figured I’d throw it up here and test it out for awhile.

So, now instead of just leaving a comment…you can record one! Try it out, let me know what you think and later on down the line, I’ll determine its future on my site! And for no real reason other than this update post has to do with video, I figured I would post these humorous time-lapse videos from last Christmas. Random? Absolutely. But everything is funny in time lapse!

Putting up the Christmas Tree (Part 1) from Andrew Cafourek on Vimeo .

Putting Up the Christmas Tree (Part 2) from Andrew Cafourek on Vimeo .

Woman Does 21 Different Accents

Andrew — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:46:34 +0000

This video is really pretty amazing: this woman does 21 different accents from around the world. She covers pretty much all of the UK, Europe, Australia, and the United States. It really is quite astounding.

from www.break.com posted with vodpod

Drag n’ Drop Your Acura

Andrew — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:43:47 +0000

I just saw this commercial and I think it is one of the best commercials I’ve seen in a long time! As a side note, though: this ad is on YouTube, which is cool, but the quality is lower than I would have liked. Companies should start putting their commercials up on their websites and make them portable (linkable, embeddable, etc.)…it would make the whole ‘viral’ thing a lot easier for you. So if anyone from Acura happens to encounter this, please feel free to send me a higher quality embed!

THX Meets Mother Nature

Andrew — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:55:59 +0000

This is just too creepy/hilarious not to share:

December 20th Web Picks

Andrew — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:31:16 +0000

Well the trend since the beginning of school is that my blogging has decreased in frequency…so it seems the my Web Picks is becoming more of a monthly occurrence…so for the future, I’m just going to plan on getting in the groove of irregularly timed Web Pick lists that happen to be about a month apart:

The Behance Network is an interesting online hub for the wide variety of designers and other artistic creators out there. It allows you to upload designs for your own portfolio and get feedback from the community and also has job listings and a collaborative tips section that encompasses everything from print to digital to web design. I am not a designer but I spend quite a bit of time around a few of them so I have started to appreciate design work a lot more than I used to and I think this site is really pretty cool for stumbling upon a variety of designs that are very well done. I cannot speak to the benefits of the job listings or the tips sections as I am not in the industry, but it seems to me that they are very well laid out and easy to navigate. if you are not in the industry, check out the site and just peruse the galleries for some really cool designs! Or if you are a designer, try out their portfolio features and let me know what you think!

A few weeks ago, I was cruising the internet and I stumbled upon an ABC News site called i-Caught that is a place for everyday people to upload their own media for possible inclusion in ABC stories. It is essentially the same model as every other video sharing site out there except this is targeted specifically towards developing news and relevant information. I have not been able to figure out yet what level of censorship they have, but I’m sure that the site is moderated to some extent. There is a page called TalkBack that allows users to submit questions and content to specific ABC programs for contribution or comment. I think this site is a pretty good idea from the MSM as it tries to adapt to the YouTube era. However, I do wish they had spent a bit more time of designing the site…it is very nice that the ads are limited and all focus is on the video content but check out the i-Caught logo. It looks exactly like what you see on sites that make fun of Web 2.0 logos, like this logo generator or this page of hilarious mock logos. Other than that, this site is a pretty cool idea…there are others out there too, l ike this one from MSNBC, but I think ABC has the best handle on how to harness the community. In fact, if you look at the actual URL for their site, it is http://ugv.abcnews.go.com/ I’m guessing the “ugv” at the beginning means User-Generated Video…kudos to ABC on slowly starting to figure out the world of social media.

I am a big fan of the band The Spill Canvas and a few weeks ago I went to their website to buy their latest album (see RIAA, just because I download albums I would never buy anyway doesn’t mean that I don’t ever send my wallet over to the band I like!). Anyhow, I was poking around the site and found a really cool page promoting their album which happens to be called “No Really, I’m Fine.” Well on this page, there is a a bar that asks “How are You?” and when you enter in your response, it will display it to other site visitors as “No Really, I’m yourresponse”. (see screenshot to understand a bit better) While this does not really have off-site impact, I think it is an awesome way to get fans engaged in the site. It is a page out of the twitter playbook that asks “What are you doing?” but it tailors perfectly with the band’s site.

AbbyMe is an awesome site that allows you to send audio messages to people’s phones by typing in whatever text you would like them to hear. The computer voice is actually pretty good and you can enter in more than one number at a time so if you need to send a quick message to lots of people it makes it very easy to do. Of course, I’m sure the most common application is for prank calls (4 of my coworkers and I just finished up a 30 minutes funny phone call round of sending each other very inappropriate messages…all in good fun, of course!) but it could have some really good real-world uses as it gets fine tuned. If they develop a mobile version of it, it could be used to send audio text messages, etc. Definitely a fun site to play around with that someday might develop into something super useful!

The Artful Writer: The Studios’ Stances on Digital

Andrew — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:54:13 +0000

Another awesome video about the writer’s strike and the studios’ ridiculous stances on digital content.

from www.artfulwriter.com

Why We Fight: Writers’ Strike 2007

Andrew — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 04:24:07 +0000

A cool intro video that explains why the Writers’ Guild is on strike! support the strike: www.unitedhollywood.com

from www.youtube.com

NBC Falls Waaaay Off the Bandwagon

Andrew — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:42:31 +0000

Over the last couple of months, NBC’s CEO Jeff Zucker has had a rather public spat with Apple as his company has pulled out of iTunes because apparently Steve wouldn’t let NBC price gouge its consumers for episodes of shows like Heroes and Biggest Loser…so Jeff decided to take the ball and go home. Apparently, NBC thinks that it can do a better job of distributing its own shows by not selling them on its own site: (enter Hulu, stage left) Interestingly enough, if you Google ‘Hulu’, the text clip that follows the site link is “The system is down for maintenance as of 12:18 Pacific Daylight Time. It’ll be back shortly” Normally, you might expect something lame like that from a site that is still in private beta, but NBC could surely do better. Why would they pull their content from iTunes before their replacement was ready?

Then, in late October, NBC also decided to cancel its YouTube channel which was created back in June 2006 for its short clips…but all anyone ever watched was SNL shorts/skits. With that channel, NBC had made YouTube legit in the marketplace and helped lock up the Google acquisition, not to mention it gave NBC street-cred (web-cred?) with online content users (aka everyone under 35). In lieu of it’s YouTube channel, NBC revamped its websites for content: the streaming full episodes are awesome quality (though I wish I didn’t have to switch back to full screen after every commercial break) but if you want a case study for disaster, check out the SNL video page.

Over the past 30 minutes or so, I have browsed the user comments on the site and have seen two positive ones that were about a clip being funny. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of negative comments ranging from the mundane opinions to extreme rants which reminds me of the Wal-Mart vs. Target facebook model discussion Jeremiah had going some weeks ago on his site (and facebook group): Wal-Mart had thousands of negative comments on their facebook group and the hits just kept coming. This is exactly what is happening to NBC on its own site. Some of my favorite comments:

“This site is worthless….now if the clips we want to see aren’t available on this site we cannot see them anywhere. You guys suck.”

“I just want to watch the Lazy Sunday video. It’s fine if you don’t want it on Youtube, but then at least make it accessible somewhere else!”

“IM GOING TO YOUTUBEEEE”

“This site is a joke. Guess what? It’s 2007…YouTube is your friend…viral marketing is good.You think that by controlling the content and then bombarding people with advertising that nobody wants to see is the answer…bad move. $100 bucks says your back on YouTube in a month after this fails miserably.Hire a 4th grader to run your online marketing.”

“your website is a good reflection of where your sho is going.”

“My hatred is palpable for this failure of a website.”

“Even the time is wrong.”

“you know things are f’d up when the ads don’t even work.”

“The fact that every clip starts with an ad proves that you guys suck!”

These are a pretty good cross-section of the comments on the site as of this morning. Let me tell you, I am no web developer, but I think I could build a better video distribution site on my own site (via Wordpress). There is no catalog of clips of guide to finding your favorite videos, no way to embed videos on other sites, and when the player does work, they have included front-end advertisements! Didn’t YouTube find the perfect solution to front-end ads, since no one watches them anyway? Oh wait…NBC left YouTube…bummer. NBC has built a widget that you can embed in your website which will display content that NBC will change and update each week. Wait…NBC controls the content? On my site? Hmmm…yeah that’s not going to work for me. Although even if you could control it, good luck finding anything worth displaying: the new site doesn’t have the most recent ‘Digital Shorts’ that have been hugely popular: Lazy Sunday, Iran so Far, and Dick in a Box. The only reason those have been so popular is because they went viral while hosted on YouTube! But good luck finding them anywhere now.

The only good thing I can say about this site is that NBC isn’t moderating the comments. At least they are leaving it open to criticism, which I’m sure is causing quite a few bruised egos around their offices. NBC is completely missing the point on viral marketing and social media: companies no longer control information. Users control everything from what gets watched to how it gets watched. They are really going to have to step up the game on this new site if they want any kind of sizable online presence…and Hulu had better rock…and open up for business sometime very soon.

Tips for NBC:

1) Go back to YouTube…or if our ego is damaged, just rebuild your webiste into a YouTube clone so we can browse, embed, and view whatever content we want.
2) Fire Jeff Zucker…old people only look at immediate, tangible ROI…they don’t understand online community development
3) Scrap Hulu. The name means everything from ‘butt’, ‘cease’, or ‘desist’, depending on what language you are using.
4) Stop whining about iTunes prices. They haven’t nailed down market dominance in the video world yet, but it is only a matter of time and you are going to want to be on board for that. Ever heard of Steve Jobs? He takes no prisoners and once he controls the market, good luck getting into it ever again. Don’t be the Zune of the video market.
5) Heroes is a winner. So is 30 Rock..and I hear some people like Scrubs, too. Run with the good ones, leave the riffraff like Bionic Woman for CBS.

UPDATE: (9:30 pm 11/4/07) TechCrunch just posted a clip of an hilarious iPhone commercial spoof done on Saturday Night Live, but the clip is embedded from YouTube…I wonder how long that will survive before it gets yanked from YouTube only to disappear into the realm of “clips-you-will-never-see-again-because-we-are-afraid-of-the-internets”…

As one insightful TechCrunch reader posted: NBC hates Apple. NBC hates YouTube.

Brad Jashinsky

November 4th, 2007 at 8:16 pm

This post is so great in so many ways. As others have mentioned, you have an obviously hacked iPhone clearly displayed on NBC (Apple’s enemy). At the same time, I just watched the clip not on TV, but on YouTube (NBC’s enemy). Probably the most surprising is that this was actually funny, and yet was allowed on Saturday Night Live.

(via TechCrunch 11/4/07)

UPDATE: (11:50 pm 11/4/07) Now you see it, now you don’t! The SNL clip is now down from YouTube, and thus TechCrunch as well…judging by user comments, it came down sometime between 8:15 and 9:30 pm (CST). So now anyone who will read that article over the next few days or weeks will wonder what exactly it was about since they can’t see the clip. I wonder how many thousands of potential viewers NBC is missing out on just from this one post…