Introduction
Outline what the essay is about and what is going to be discussed.
In this essay I am going to discuss how digital video technology is being used to enhance the user’s interactive experience.
YouTube is a video-sharing website that enables anyone to upload their own videos to be viewed and shared by other users and in just the last few years has had a tremendous impact on how we consume digital video and also a greater variety of content is now being produced and watched.
User-generated content is a rising media trend nowadays. With the technology and tools now available it is possible for almost anyone with just a basic knowledge of computers to be able to create their own video content and share it with a potential audience of millions. The existence of sites such as YouTube, are partly responsible for this now massive audience. As reported on http://mashable.com/2010/12/22/youtube-700-billion-video/ “YouTube has announced that its users have uploaded more than 13 million hours of video content to its servers in the last 12 months, resulting in more than 700 billion YouTube video views.”
This is especially apparent in terms of user-generated ‘Citizen journalism’, whereas before you were quite limited in how you could get your content out to a public audience (even not at all), being mostly the preserve of media outlets, corporations and companies, now it is possible for anyone to upload their own video, sometimes showing what is being censored from their own governments or that the mainstream media will not report. Sometimes it is simply a case of catching something on film that has been missed, the phrase ‘being in the right place at the right time’, comes to mind.
One example of this is in the case of Ian Tomlinson, who died at the London G20 protest. A member of the public had caught some footage of Ian Tomlinson prior to his death, which revealed that he had been pushed over by police. This video footage was picked up by The Guardian newspaper who publicised it and released it into the public domain. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/apr/07/g20-police-assault-video?INTCMP=SRCH. The footage remains on YouTube in various forms and is still today generating strong debate.
User-generated content is seen as one of the media and entertainment industries' biggest threats, according to a survey by Accenture http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4534, which goes on to state, “More than half (57 percent) of the respondents identified the rapid growth of user-generated content — which includes amateur digital videos, podcasts, mobile phone photography, wikis and social-media blogs — as one of the top three challenges they face today. In addition, more than two-thirds (70 percent) of respondents said they believe that social media, one of the largest segments of user-generated content, will continue to grow, compared with only 3 percent of respondents who said they view social media as a fad.”
If people are consuming more and more user-generated content, then this could have implications for commercial content providers, as the survey goes on to state “And while two-thirds are positive their organizations will find ways of making money out of user-generated content within three years, just under a quarter said they have no idea how this will be accomplished.”. In the same article, Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, is quoted as saying, "The winners will be those who can probe and analyze the changes, and manage and merge online and offline most successfully,"
http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4534
As well as individuals, many corporate companies and organisations use the site as a means of promotion, by releasing short video clips relevant to what they want to advertise or promote, potentially reaching a more targeted audience.
Coca-Cola used this video sharing and social media to great effect with their ‘Happiness Machine’ concept. They installed a rigged Coca-Cola vending machine into various locations which dispensed free Cokes, food and games. The machine was a novel award-winning advertising tool, with the students and workers surprise and excitement being captured on film. This was later posted onto social media sites such as YouTube where it gained popularity through sharing and social networking and are often referred to as ‘viral videos’.
http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/presscenter/nr_20100527_happiness_machine_clio.html
“The much-anticipated sequel to the global internet sensation -- the Coca-Cola Happiness Machine is now here, spreading happiness to the UK. With over one million views in the first week alone, the winner of CLIO's prestigious Gold Interactive Award and with a prime-time spot in the American Idol ad break, the film truly captured the world's imagination earlier this year and made people ask "Where will happiness strike next?"
With the use of social networking and Web 2.0 it is now possible to create your own targeted information that match your interests. http://social.dailyblogworld.com/2010/08/cascaad-tailored-social-streams-that.html, ‘Cascaad – Tailored Social Streams that Match Your Interest’
The ability to record digital video is now possible on such small devices as mobile phones and portable video recorders.
http://mobileactive.org/how-record-quality-video-your-mobile ‘Mobile Media: How To Record Quality Video on Your Mobile’
Usually this type of video can be quite highly compressed, resulting in a smaller file size at the expense of video quality. This would not be such an issue for applications such as news reporting as the essential use of this video technology is to broadcast the message, so the content of the video is important but it needn’t have to be the best quality.
On the technical side of things, YouTube stores its uploaded videos in a file format known as Flash Video (FLV) which contains the encoded video. These files are considerably smaller than some other file formats, making them ideal for live streaming and downloading over the internet.
Videos can be uploaded in a multitude of formats such as AVI, WMV, MOV, MP4, 3GP, and more. Once uploaded, they are converted into the FLV format before going live.
This makes uploading video content a fairly straightforward process that involves just a few clicks, during which you will be prompted to select a file from your computer, wait while it uploads and then after YouTube has processed the video it will be available to share as you see fit.
Digital video is a recording format that uses a digital signal to process the motion video captured by a digital video recorder. Most modern-day recording equipment such as professional broadcast cameras, hand-held camcorders, stills cameras, as well as the editing suite used in post-production is based on the digital format.
This digital format, in very simplistic terms, is based on a binary format of ones (1) and zeros (0), which are stored as a continuous stream of data. It is the way that this stream of data is processed which turns it from being just that, data, to a video picture that is displayed on screen, television.
When video is recorded it is ‘encoded’ to the storage medium, usually a hard-drive or solid-state disk. This encoding process converts the video as it’s captured and stores it in a digital format, and when it is played back it is ‘decoded’ in order to be output to screen. This video data can be copied, moved, re-arranged, cut, pasted and edited digitally with far more ease using software tools.
Digital video can also be subject to various types of compression. Compression is a method of data processing that aims to reduce the storage size required for a set of data (for example, a video file) by using mathematical algorithms to reorganise the data. Decompression is the opposite of this process, reverting the data to its original and uncompressed state.
Compression methods vary from the simple to the complex. As an example, a simple method could be that of reducing a section of duplicate frames in a video file (a lengthy still shot perhaps) to just one frame, and set the amount of time this frame should be shown for before moving on. A much more complex method could be that of analysing different frame sections and marking sections of the frame that do not change, deleting these duplicate sections whilst only keeping the actual changes between frames. This type of compression that removes data that is deemed unnecessary or redundant can be referred to as a ‘lossy’ compression technique, and ‘non-lossy’ compression being a technique that can shrink the data whilst not having to permanently remove any of it.
The distinction between encoding and compression is not always apparent. Compression is sometimes referred to as encoding and vice-versa, or it may be implied that compression is simply part of the encoding process, and although often true, they can be entirely separate processes performed independently of each-other.
great post thanks
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