Tag Archives: video

Cisco Renews Service Provider Focus at Partner Summit 2018 [Me/Light Reading]

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Executives from telcos and Cisco talk about the company’s new service provider strategy, including IoT, AI and 5G, and how those technologies are reshaping networking. Watch my video from Las Vegas – or, to be more precise, I was in front of the camera – my colleague Dan Allen did the bulk of the work putting it all together.

Mitch

October 5, 2016

Hell is a never-ending series of connecting 55 minute flights, each beginning with required viewing of the Virgin America safety video.

The problem with Twitter’s new marketing campaign

Twitter’s new video ad actually explains what Twitter is for – Kurt Wagner, Recode

Twitter unveiled a new video ad Monday morning, and it does something that its previous TV commercial never did: It explains why you might want to use Twitter.

Here’s a look at the new ad, which Twitter is running on its own properties for now and will soon pay to distribute on other digital platforms:

“What’s happening in the world?” the narrator asks over video of Donald Trump campaigning and clips from “Game of Thrones.”

“What’s everyone talking about? How did it start? See what’s happening in the world right now.”

This is, in essence, why anyone uses Twitter. To answer these exact questions. And now Twitter is explaining that, or at least highlighting it, in a way that might catch people’s attention.

Twitter’s problem is that most of the time there’s nothing going on in the world that you need to know about RIGHT NOW. Osama Bin Laden isn’t being killed somewhere every second of the day.

Sports and celebrity gossip might be the exception. People don’t need to know that stuff right away, but they enjoy it. Is that enough to sustain Twitter?

Also, if someone has never used Twitter before, can they find what’s happening right now FAST, like right this second?

Does watching video on 1.5+x speed make it better?

Apparently, watching video online at 1.5-2x is popular.

I’ve occasionally wondered whether that’s technically possible without requiring sophisticated software, but never gone further with it than wondering. After reading this article, I tried it with a short Mental Floss video and liked it.

I routinely listen to podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5x or so.

The ability to watch at high speed and scrub forward and backward is changing our relationship with TV, movies, and other video. Video becomes personal, like reading, says Jeff Guo at The Washington Post

Reading went through the same transition a thousand years ago, Guo says. Until then, reading was done with one person aloud to a group of a half-dozen others. People who could read to themselves silently were rare and remarkable. Monks who’d taken vows of silence were allowed to mumble while doing calligraphy, because mumbling was considered essential to reading.

I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything

 

Sideways

Vertical Video on the Small Screen? Not a Crime

Holding your phone “the wrong way” to shoot a video provokes surprisingly apoplectic reactions. Professional videographers tend to regard vertical videos as the mark of an amateur, and they react to these clips with the same sense of wounded outrage that snooty writers reserve for people who confuse its and it’s, or who type two spaces after a period when everyone knows there should only be one.

More and more, video is being viewed on phones rather than desktop web browsers or television, and on phones vertical video makes sense.

Also, vertical video makes sense when the subject is vertical. Like a person.

[Farhad Manjoo/The New York Times]

Link

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… what’s hot now in social are raw, unfiltered windows into the lives of others.

Wasn’t this a trend around 2000? People mounted webcams in the corners of their houses and we got to watch them eat, poop, and have sex all day. Anybody remember JenniCam?

I expect the Mitch Stares Slack-Jawed at Screens for 10 Hours a Day channel to be a MEGA-HIT.

Soon to be followed by a spinoff: Jesus, How Old Are You And You Still Haven’t Learned To Chew With Your Mouth Closed?

Why Facebook And Mark Zuckerberg Went All In On Live Video [Mat Honan – BuzzFeed]

Researchers extract audio from potato chip bag and other vibrating objects in video recordings

Salt and vinegar chipsResearchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal from minute vibrations of objects in a video recording, including recovering intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed 15 feet away through soundproof glass.

The researchers also successfully extracted audio from video of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and the leaves of a potted plant.

I wonder whether the technique might become sensitive enough to capture sound from old silent movies, newsreels, and home movies.

Extracting audio from visual information: Algorithm recovers speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass

Photo: Salt-and-Vinegar, by Gerolsteiner91. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons