The Arbour Media Blog

Because hiring a professional will get you online faster with lower costs in the long run and give you access to greater creative resources. But don’t take out word for it. ReelSEO provides an article with a nice overview of issues to consider when deciding between in-house and professional production.

Reel SEO’s bottom line:

There are really only three instances when choosing to self-produce is the best choice:

1. When you actually have some video production expertise or talent yourself (or on your staff), or…
2. When your budget simply leaves no room to hire a professional, or…
3. The goals of your video actually require it to appear self-produced.

Outside of those three reasons, I would advise almost anyone to look for a professional.  There are fewer risks, and the potential for huge upside.  And if you value your time, then self-producing can often end up costing you more than paying even high-dollar video production firms to handle the project.  But I know that reason number two above is going to put a ton of you in the self-production column, just by virtue of today’s economy.

The commercial use of images constantly raises legal issues. The other day we ran across Photoattorney.com and liked it right away, a blog by Carolyn E. Wright and friends. Ms. Wright is an attorney who often handles legal troubles of photographers and she’s also an active and accomplished wildlife photographer.

On the blog you’ll find artifices of interest to anyone who needs to think about the legal ramifications of image use.

Today Smashing Magazine (one of our favs here) has published an article that provides a nice overview of copyright and licensing issues related to websites and other online venues. It’s well worth the time to read if you’re not familiar with such issues, especially the newer Creative Commons licensing options that are more and more used ’round the Web.

An interesting article in today’s Guardian (London, England) muses of the rise of the smartphone and the implications of that fact for the future:

The change that smartphones bring is computing power in the palm of our hands or in our pockets. It is internet connectivity almost anywhere on earth. That’s going to have profound effects. Horace Dediu, another former Nokia executive who now runs the consultancy Asymco, says: “Besides being powerful, they’re going to be ubiquitous. Not only in the hands of nearly every person on the planet, but also with them, or by them, all day long. They will be more popular than TVs and more intimate than wallets.”

They’re going to do far more than wallets (although they can already serve that function: a system called NFC, for Near Field Communications, is being built into smartphones and will let you pay for small items with the press of a button). All the things you can now do with a smartphone would have seemed like science-fiction only a decade ago: translate signs, translate words, take voice input and search the web, recognise a face, add another layer to reality showing you the quickest way to a tube or restaurant or the history of your immediate surroundings, show you where your friends are in real time, tell you what your friends think of a restaurant you’re standing outside, show you where you are on a map, navigate you while you drive, contact the Starship Enterprise. Well, perhaps not the last one. Even so, “A smartphone today would have been the most powerful computer in the world in 1985,” observes Dediu. In fact, today’s phones have about the same raw processing power as a laptop from 10 years ago. And every year they close the gap.

The element of personalisation and intimacy takes smartphones beyond what we’ve had before. Our mobile phone used just to be a repository of our phone contacts, some photos and texts. Now it’s our emails as well, our photos, our Twitter and Facebook accounts (and, by proxy, friends), plus all those apps and games that we’ve downloaded to give it our own personal experience.

One of the reasons they will be more popular than TVs is that they’s have at least as broad access to motion picture content and will be, as in the case of the iPhone 4, generating video content, probably of pretty high quality.

Movie shot on iPhone 4 by Park Chan-wook to hit South Korean theaters.

In an interview published at ReelSeo, curation guru Steve Rosenbaum recounts advice he gave NewYork Magazine about the publication’s attempts to use online video

They were producing one awesome video a week; but that was all the video they were putting on their website each week, and they were getting relatively little traffic from it. They came to use and told us, “our ad sales guys want more videos, we want more traffic; but can’t afford to make any more [videos], what should we do?” And we said to them, “Well, let’s see – what are the things you care about? You care about food, fashion, social life, the environment, and urban New York.”

We said to them, “let’s take a gamble that there are probably lots of videos out there on YouTube, Metacafe, Daily Motion, etc., that fit your editorial trajectory, if you will.  And people aren’t going to YouTube and typing in ‘New York City jazz club,’ you know, ‘Lower East Side.’  But they are coming to New York Magazine and looking for a video and information about these things.”  So, we gave them the tools to search the web broadly, and then provide a curated collection to their users. So today if you go to New York Magazine, you’ll see literally hundreds of new videos every week – hundreds and hundreds – of which they make one or two.” [emphasis in original].

There’s an interesting idea here for organizations or businesses that are considering the use of online video in their marketing efforts: if publications like NewYork Magazine are going to be “curating” videos for their readers, then producing videos that will be curated is a potential path to exposure.

As we’ve noted, we think the curation idea is not really new, but as long as web publications are going to allow themselves to be talked into trying doing it, someone has to produce the videos that are going to get curated.

Might as well be your business or organization.

Think of the publications that cover your industry or activity and look to see if they are curating videos yet. Consider, perhaps, encouraging them to do so.

One of the oldest gimmicks in marketing and academe is to try and make an old idea seem new and different by dressing it up new words.

The point to the exercise is, of course, that if the marketeer/salesperson/huckster/PhD candidate can convince you something is new and different, then it’s easier to sell it to you—it and all the tools, accessories, and training that go with it.

One example: The Heath brothers added duct tape to Aristotle’s more than 2000-year-old Rhetoric and got Made to Stick. The old idea is that there are some tested ways to be persuasive and if you study and learn them you’ll be more persuasive. The Heath’s repackaging of rhetoric led to a best-seller (and, yes, they’ll sell you the Made-to-Stick training).

Now comes along the idea of video curation.

What’s video curation, you ask?

As near as we can tell it’s aggregation of of video at a website by someone with enough expertise about the subject matter of the videos to judge the accurate from inaccurate, the true from the false.

We need video curation, we are told, because we are confronted with so much information these days we just need help sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

Of course there is a book and website, Curation Nation, that explains how this idea is the solution to the “Data Deluge” (alliteration is important in Curation Nation) is now essential to business and how it will make you rich, or at least help you not succumb to the competition.

Of course the author of the book, Steven Rosenbaum (“a passionate advocate for the power of curation to return balance to our lives, a new ‘human powered’ focus to the web” we are told on the book’s website) will be happy to come speak to your organization or at your event.

Of course there are curation tools and services to buy. There are now even curation platforms.

“Curation” is a current business buzz word and a growing industry, it appears.

What’s the old idea here?

Editors and experts are useful people to have hanging about. They can sort out and organize information based on the credibility and authority of its sources. “Curation” is good because, other things being equal, it’s better to pay attention to information that’s true more than information that’s not.

Implicit in this old idea is another: if you want to attract attention in a way that will build long-term relationships and trust, take care that what you say is credible and can withstand editorial scrutiny.

Truth is multiplier.

An article in the New York Times today reports that some in Hollywood are a mite worried that 3D might not be everything they cracked it up to be. It appears that filmgoers may be balking at the higher prices charged for 3D movie tickets, but, the article notes

. . . there is also a deeper problem: 3-D has provided an enormous boost to the strongest films, including “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland,” but has actually undercut middling movies that are trying to milk the format for extra dollars.

“Audiences are very smart,” said Greg Foster, the president of Imax Filmed Entertainment. “When they smell something aspiring to be more than it is, they catch on very quickly.”

No kidding, of course they do. A pig in lipstick is still a pig.

There’s not  a substitute for a good story, and, however often Hollywood seems to forget it, story is the reason why people go to the movies.

In a commercial context, the message is there is no real substitute for substance. If you don’t have something of interest to say, as we advise our clients,  no amount of eye candy,—even 3D eye candy—is going to help much. On the other hand, if you have a compelling message, or story, your audience will forgive a multitude of sins.

We’d like to thank the Lancaster Firemen’s Association for giving us full access to their Fire Expo 2011 event in Harrisburg over the weekend. While there we shot some of the first sequences for The Pennsylvania Fire Show. We spent three days at the Expo learning about fire equipment and the vendors who sell it the fire-fighter and fire departments in Pennsylvania.

The first segment to get finished, an interview with Terryl Curler of Simulation Technologies LLC, is now online at YouTube.

For a slightly more skeptical view of the potential of online video to destroy the cable TV business, this article from the BBC is worth a look.

The US pay TV market had suffered its first ever drop in subscribers. In the end the economy was roundly found to blame, with cable packages being sacrificed as families were forced to tighten their belts.

But some commentators pointed to this as the inevitable result of the growth of on demand and over the top offerings available on the internet.

So is technology killing what we think of as traditional television – and taking pay TV operators with it?

It’s a confusing picture. Nielsen, who track US television viewing habits, have reported a drop in television ownership – albeit from 98.9% to 96.7%. DVD sales are falling, while Netflix recently overtook cable operator Comcast to become the biggest subscription video service in North America.

IMS Research however is predicting digital cable TV subscribers in the US will increase by 7.8m between 2010 and 2015.

We ran across a website previously unkown to us, www.killthecablebill.com, which according to a recent interview of the site’s founder Dave Kennedy, is

an informational resource that provides industry trend analysis, product / service reviews ( online video guide ), and simple but cost effective ways to make the transition from standard Cable to Online TV. This site is for people who want to decrease how much they spend on standard TV programing, while taking advantage of low cost Online TV.

Kennedy started the site after a recent financial setback led him to cancel his cable TV subscription and look for alternatives. He says he found himself overwhelemed by information on TV without cable, and so decided to pull together information on the topic and offer it via a website. “With cable costs going up,” he says,

and the economy getting worse, many people are finding that canceling cable is the only thing that make sense. With this growing demand for Online TV, vendors are popping out of the woodwork – all promising to fulfill this need. The problem is that most of the sites, services, and products out there only offer partial solutions, or no solution at all. Through my research I realized that there is a growing need for clarity in this space. And that people just like me, needed help making this complex transition from standard cable to Online TV.

In one post to the site, Kennedy gives his “Top Five Reasons to Cancel Cable”.  The first three:

1. TIME: Too much television is a waste of time. If you cancel cable and only watch those programs that are important, you can spend more time with the people we love.

2. MONEY: a cable or satellite subscription costs at least two times as much (on a monthly basis) as it does to utilize Hulu and Netflix. When times are tough the first thing that needs to go is entertainment. But if you can get the same entertainment at a fraction of the cost – then that is even better!

3. TECHNOLOGY: Streaming Video is the way of the future. Before long all video entertainment will be via an online connection. Might as well get on-board now, learn the tricks, and save money in the process.

Kennedy’s site is yet another indication that online video is likely to completely transform the way video content is consumed, and, ultimately, produced.

Doing a bit of searching on this topic led us to this interesting set of interviews with folks who “cut the cord” over at gigaom