Category Archives: Media

Reuters Paris on strike today

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If you’ve expected ANY bad news from Paris, you can relax for at least a day. The Paris bureau of Reuters voted yesterday in favor of a 24-hour strike.

The strike is in protest at a ‘deliberate policy’ of staff reductions (see also BBC staff reduction).

‘The decision (to strike) demonstrates the concern of the journalists that the deliberate policy of lowering staff numbers, besides the degradation of their working conditions it causes, will inevitably lead to a lowering of the standards of quality of the agency,’ Agence France-Presse cited unions as saying in a statement.

This comes several months after Thomson agreed an 8.8 bln takeover of Reuters.

Great video with Youtube

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Here’s a few tips from Cinetech on how to get better results from Youtube’s encoder.

1. Learn to shoot better quality videos for the Web.

2. Your source video needs to be ideally high resolution. For instance: MOV or AVI file, NTSC 720×480 or VGA 640×480.

3. You need to get a high quality video encoder. Keep in mind that most video editing programs such as Apple Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Adobe Premiere Pro, Windows Movie Maker or Sony Vegas, come with an encoding engine so you can export your videos directly from the timeline.

4. YouTube resizes your videos to 320×240 pixels, encodes them to Flash 7 at a data rate of approximately 250 kbps and compresses audio to mp3 (22.050 KHz, monophonic).

5. It’s very important that you keep an aspect ratio of 4:3, otherwise the quality of your video will be severely impaired.

6. YouTube recommended settings are:

* MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
* 320×240 resolution
* MP3 audio
* 30 frames per second

Youtube should probably improve their side of the “equation” as well. They do have director accounts so maybe they could test the water by providing more encoding options for them and see what happens

BBC lay offs delayed

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BBC lay offsWhen the BBC announced they’ll cut their 1,800 of their workforce, they probably expected the unions to strike back. They did – as Guardian reports – with a threat for a strike unless BBC talk to them first.

As a result, BBC will delay the lay offs with two weeks (i.e. till November 5) while they talk to the unions:

The unions welcomed the move, saying it was enough to halt the march towards strike action.

“We are pleased the BBC has stepped back from the brink and agreed to union calls for meaningful talks to take place at a national level,” the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, said.

This comes only a day after BBC director general Mark Thompson confirmed that there will be 1,800 redundancies. This move is part of a six-year cost-saving program aimed at plugging the estimated £2bn funding gap (approved by the BBC Trust).

If news is what you’re interested in (that’s where my exposure to BBC ends), you migh feel the difference pretty soon. The London-based news division will be one of the hardest hit with between 475 and 490 post closures, resulting in between 350 and 370 redundancies.

Politkovskaya killer “known”

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“The killer of dissident reporter Anna Politkovskaya is known to Russian authorities but has not yet been charged…”. That’s the statement of the chief investigator on the case that appeared in an interview on Monday. Here’s a bit more from Reuters:

“We have so far not charged the killer but we know who he is,” Garibyan told Novaya Gazeta in an interview. Gabriyan did not say if the person was in custody, or why he had not yet been charged.

His comments are likely to strengthen suspicions among Politkovskaya’s family and colleagues that the case is not as close to being solved as Chaika had suggested.

They have accused the Prosecutor-General of rushing to trumpet a breakthrough to score political points. Since Chaika announced arrests in the case in August, two suspects have released for lack of evidence.

I’ll file that in the folder “Russian SNAFU”.

Flash Media Server 3 announced

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Adobe announced a new version of the Flash Media Server (FMS) at IBC at Amsterdam. According to the press release some of the key features of the new version will be:

  • Improved performance and scalability
  • Streaming upport for H.264 and AAC (following Flash player’s support for H.264)
  • Secure streaming
  • Flash Lite 3 support (i.e mobile video delivery to your mobile)

Considering the competition, Adobe is facing from RED 5 (an open-source server) and Wowza (a commercial but significantly cheaper version), they’ll need to work on the price point too. $4,500 per 100 or so connections is very expensive.

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Next-gen Flash to support H.264 Video

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Stefan Richter at Flashcomgurus and a host of other Flash enthusiasts are excited by Adobe’s announcement that the next generation of Flash will support H.264 Video. This bit from Stefan:

The bottom line: a huge step forward for web video. The Flash Player will incorporate what is arguably the most versatile and most widely adopted video codec around (it’s used for much more than just web video), and it’s an open standard at that with a huge eco system of encoders and tools to boot. Let it sink in and expect some big waves from this. You will be able to test this out via progressive download (I know I will) once Flash Player Beta Update 3 hits the streets later today on labs. Both Flash Media Server and Flash Media Encoder will support the codec in upcoming versions.

I think Adobe’s moving in the right direction at least in part because of the competitive pressure from Microsoft’s Silverlight.

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Ira Glass on Storytelling

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Ira Glass is creator, host and executive producer of This American Life. Here’s a segment of his interview where he talks about the common pitfalls when doing a talk show for broadcast.

Update: You can view more videos on storytelling at current.tv

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YouTube advertising ignores UGC

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When Google introduced its ad model for YouTube, one could’ve expected that ads will show up in ALL cat-and-dog fighting videos (a.k.a. user-generated content or UGC). Instead, it appears that Google’s video ads will only show on videos supplied by the 3,000 professional content providers and 70 independent partner channels.

This quote from TVWeek:

Considering that giant Google spent $1.6 billion for YouTube primarily for its user-generated content, that might come as a bit of a shock. But given that even smaller sites such as ManiaTV have begun to eschew free-for-all user-generated video, it seems to add up to an admission that, while your cousin Joe’s video may draw a lot of eyeballs, it will never draw a lot of paying advertisers.

“There’s a huge audience built around user-generated content but no evidence that it is a profitable business,” said Peter Hoskins, who recently succeeded ManiaTV’s founder, Drew Massey, as CEO.

Hmm, I’ve seen plenty of advertising in shows like the “Funniest Animals” which rely SOLELY on user-generated content. So there HAS to be some money in cat-and-dog fighting videos…

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The “Anna” Conspiracy

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Russia and free speech have been one of the topics of this blog ever since Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow.

It looks like Russain prosectors have charged ten people with her murder.

Russian prosecutors have arrested 10 people in connection with the murder of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya and will soon charge them, the country’s chief prosecutor said on Monday.

Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika said the suspects were part of an organized crime group that might also be linked to the 2004 murder in Moscow of U.S. reporter Paul Klebnikov and central bank deputy chief Andrei Kozlov.

It looks like there’s just one crime group in the whole of Russia and any (all) murders in the 2004-2007 period will be “connected” to it. Needless to say, even Russian media are sceptic about this.

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