Content Creation and Distribution in the 21st Century
Have you ever heard of Miles Beckett and Mesh Flinders? How about Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz?
Maybe not. But you are most certainly familiar with their work: Lonelygirl15 and The Coke and Mentos Experiment, respectively.
A year ago these guys would have been thrown out of any film studio, television studio, or artist agency they dared wander into. And who knows, maybe they would be today as well. But it doesn’t matter. As Becket points out in Wired this month: “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theatre. You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet.”
At Eyespot we’re working on making content creation easier for the millions of hobbyist story tellers who want to experiment with this phenomenal new medium. It’s easy to shoot video, but it has always been ridiculously complicated and time-consuming to edit video. So we built a video hosting and sharing platform that has easy-to-use video editing built right in. At Eyespot you just upload your video and then use our simple interface to sequence your clips, add special effects like slow motion or black and white, add transitions like fade in or fade out, and add a music soundtrack to complete the mix. This can all be done in a few minutes with an intuitive drag and drop UI.
We also enable our users to easily export the video they create on Eyespot. Our users can download their videos in DivX, Quicktime, Windows Media, iPod, and PSP formats. We support instant publishing to other video hosting sites such as Veoh and Blip.tv and blogs such as Blogger and Live Journal. There are many many video distribution channels online and we want to make it easy for our users to leverage all of them.
Our most interesting export option allows users to send videos to mobile phones. Click the “send” link under any video on Eyespot, type in a mobile phone number, and we will instantly transcode the video and send it to the mobile phone via MMS. One thing we learned after we launched this feature in April 2006 is that MMS is inherently limited by the carriers, so we subsequently built Eyespot Mobile Share, the world’s first mobile video sharing application. Once the app is installed on your phone you can receive video feeds, search the web for videos, post video to your blog, all from your mobile phone. If you’re interested in getting a beta version of the app you can sign up here.
In summary, our goal at Eyespot is to provide a powerful but easy-to-use editing and distribution platform for a new generation of content creators. In my next post I will tell you about our business model and answer any questions you may have.
-David
[note: this post is also available on the Eyespot Blog]
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5 Responses to “Content Creation and Distribution in the 21st Century”
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Hi David. I am co-founder & organiser of an open source film project called http://www.straycinema.com. One of the main objectives of our own project is to allow as many people as possible to tell their story with our film footage, using the all powerful medium of film. It allows the editor to function as the main storyteller in film, and in turn puts them at the heart of the filmmaking process.
When we were developing Stray Cinema, we considered using your website as an alternative for people who didn’t have editing software, to edit their film submissions for our competition. For various reasons we decided not to this year (mainly because we provide our finalists with high res footage so they need an editing programme with a time code to drop this in at a later date). However we think you have a great idea, not only have you created a video sharing community, but you provide people with the opportunity to change and manipulate the films on your site using your accessible editing tools. This is a huge point of difference to other video sharing websites.
Oh, and your idea of sharing vids on cell phones is cool too, I actually read about that elsewhere recently. An interesting alternative for people to experience and capture media. Nice. To sum up – we like the way you think!
see ya
michelle
“Our users can download their videos in DivX, Quicktime, Windows Media, iPod, and PSP formats.”
May I request that you add ogg theora capabilities?
http://www.theora.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora
http://xiph.org/
If you are interested in Free and Open, it might be a wise move.
all the best,
drew
Thanks for the suggestion Drew.
What level of adoption is Ogg Theora seeing among the general population?
Hi Michelle. Thanks for the post.
I really like what you’re doing. Very innovative. Let me know if you’d like to do a promotion on Eyespot to help drive awareness of your project. Check out our promotions page for examples:
http://eyespot.com/promotion/partners
Best,
David
David,
“What level of adoption is Ogg Theora seeing among the general population?”
I am sure it is must still be minor, but it is somewhat a chicken and egg problem. Also, like I said, if you are not concerned with Free and Open systems and works, then popularity might be the most important metric, if you are… it might make sense to support Free and Open protocols.
all the best,
drew