Anyone who knows me, knows that I’ve been preaching the value of metadata for longer than I’ve been writing this blog. Usually to a very quiet house! Â Certainly when I started there was very little recognition of the value to postproduction of production metadata. In fact I’ve coined the term “pre-post” to describe how metadata from the set can be used to save time in post.Â
According to Techcrunch Canceled Soaps “All My Children†And “One Life To Live†Coming Back From The Dead On Hulu, iTunes with a new business model.
Over the weekend Dylan Reeve published a blog post IN DEFENSE OF GOOD ENOUGH. We are so attuned to always wanting/having/striving for “the best” that we can get bogged down and miss appropriateness. He completely nails it at the end:
Don’t think of “good enough” as settling for something inferior or imperfect, think of it as striking a perfect balance.
In a post titled Old EMI Email Shows They Knew That Giving Away Songs For Free Leads To More Sales Mike Masnick focuses on an email between EMI employees from 2009:
 We are being told that historically the track which is offered for free like this is usually still the top selling track in digital retail.
I have a strong interest – personally and professionally – to want to automate the boring parts of post-production away from humans to computers, extending to some of the basic string-outs. This seems to infringe on the “human” role in postproduction, at least according to some of my associates. Well, lately I’ve come across a whole series of stories on how traditionally human roles, like doctors (and assistant editors), can or will be automated out of existence. That’s led me to think about what is the essential role of the human that can’t be automated? It’s not a simple question.
Pixels – those little dots that make up all our video images – are hard to encode and push down pipelines, even with ever-increasing encoding efficiency. On the other hand, vectors are small and very efficient, but so far have proved difficult to apply to video content.
Dan Rayburn, has written a provocative post titled: Streaming Video Can’t Scale At Cable TV Quality, Will Never Replace Traditional TV Distribution. Essentially he argues that there isn’t enough bandwidth for the large scale events. He’s only partly right.
One of the more interesting press releases coming  this week out of CES, was from RAMP, a company I’d not heard of before, but with some interesting technology if the press release is to be believed for automatically generated metadata. (I say let’s give them the benefit of the doubt!)
Traditionally a broadcast network would be a world of transmitters or cable infrastructure, but revenues and views might make YouTube a broadcast network. At least that’s Broadcast Engineering’s question although there it’s framed as a competitor.
Video Insider is a good read, and I recommend following them. Like many sites, they take a pass at Online Video Predictions for 2013. They vary from the cute:
1. The term “This is the year of online video†will be written and stated about 35% more often in 2013 than it was in 2012.
to the sly and accurate, slipping in at the end:
6. Branded content (Branded Video) production will be on the rise, but not enough to grab headlines or the kind of attention this trend will deserve.