Smart Choices
blip.tv
If you’re looking to emulate Oprah or Dr. Phil, but lack the network connections, blip.tv has got a deal for you. They’ll post your videos, help you find sponsors (for a 50% split), and assist with your promotional efforts. Sound too good to be true? Perhaps, but CEO Mike Hudack reports that some shows are grossing more than $10,000 a month.
Though blip.tv looks a lot like YouTube to the untrained eye, the goal of the site is different—rather than accepting any and all user-uploaded videos, it’s seeking independent, highly branded serial shows from sources like TreeHuggerTV, which teaches viewers how to be more environmentally conscious. Thanks to a recent distribution deal with Akimbo, you can now watch blip.tv in your living room with an Akimbo set-top box.
While producers can upload video to blip.tv in almost any format, with QuickTime MOV and Windows Media Video preferred (and MPEG-2 and DV discouraged), blip.tv automatically encodes all videos to Flash format, at a resolution of 320x240 and a bit rate of 512Kbps, including 96Kbps audio. Uniquely, blip.tv also lets publishers make their originally uploaded video available to their viewers. Hudack reports that many of their publishers upload in iPod-compatible QuickTime format so viewers can download the file to their desktops or watch it on their iPods.
According to Hudack, blip.tv chose Flash because the video quality was very good, the player was ubiquitous, and they could customize the player and viewing environment to their liking. One downside of the current version of Flash, however, is the lack of a Linux player. Interestingly, blip.tv does not distribute Flash with a Flash Media Server, due to the high per-unit cost. Instead, blip.tv distributes their video via HTTP using Apache servers running on Linux computers.
The drawback of this approach is that the files lack the progressive-download interactivity provided by the Flash Media Server, which allows viewers to drag their sliders through the file. With blip.tv, your only option is to play the video file straight through from start to finish. Also missing are higher-end features like closed captions.
Hudack reports that QuickTime was the second favorite format among blip.tv’s user community, and that blip.tv may start automatically transcoding uploaded video files to QuickTime as they do to Flash now.
The company rejected Windows Media because it doesn’t work well on Macs—which obviously didn’t sit well with blip.tv’s largely Mac-based creative community. Hudack commented that Real was "not even on the radar screen in any way, shape, or form." Reasons included high licensing costs, Real’s negative reputation for bundling software with the player, and lack of support among aggregators or video distribution sites like iTunes or Akimbo.
Hudack said that blip.tv might consider using H.264 as the primary distribution format in the future, citing excellent video quality and better QuickTime player distribution via iTunes. Today, however, it can be hard for lower-powered computers to play back H.264 video in real time.
Another codec on the horizon is Ogg Theora, an open-source video codec based on On2’s VP3. Hudack bemoaned the lack of an "MP3 codec for video," commenting that the absence of a standard confuses viewers and slows market acceptance. Though admitting that Ogg Theora wasn’t quite ready for primetime, he felt that it held great promise as a royalty-free codec that could work across systems and platforms without the need for a supporting business model.
ESPN
With more than 350 million page views in August 2006, ESPN.com is by far the most popular sports site in the United States. Sports fanatics come for scores, they come for news, they come for commentary, and they come for streaming video.According to Paul Gavalis, ESPN’s director of video technology and operations, the site posts videos shot by the broadcast arm as well as original video shot by a production team dedicated specifically to the website. Video is integrated into the site’s overall editorial presentation, allowing contextual viewing, and also presented within a video-only Flash-based interface containing all videos available on the site. There are multiple video packages, including the basic ESPN Motion, which is advertiser-supported and available free to all visitors; ESPN 360, an expanded service; and pay-per-view sporting events.
Three factors made Flash the easy choice for Gavalis. First, ESPN’s primary goal was to provide video that was easy to access and play, and Flash was able to deliver on this point. Second, they wanted to serve the widest possible audience, and felt they could leverage Flash’s near-ubiquity.
Finally, ESPN wanted to give its product managers as much flexibility as possible regarding the user interface for their products—another Flash strength. Since the site was already Flash-intensive, Gavalis had multiple Flash designers on staff, so ramping up to support Flash video wasn’t a major undertaking.
All new video content is captured with digital camcorders and edited on Windows workstations, with some animation and other content created on Macs. Though ESPN has developed its own proprietary encoding systems, it licensed technology from On2 for Flash encoding.
ESPN publishes most video at between 400 and 600Kbps, depending upon subject matter, usually at 440x330 resolution. Gavalis reported the ESPN used single-pass, constant-bit rate encoding for time-sensitive video, or video with low-motion content, but produced most high-action video using two-pass variable-bit rate encoding.