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IPTV Evangelist pre-published a Video Age Magazine-interview with Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”. Anderson updates his theories of a diversified, yet profitable marketplace for digital goods in regards to the online-video revolution that brought us countless social video-websites & the breakthrough of video-blogs in 2006. “leveraging lower distribution [and production] costs to reach a specific niche and audience” (Anderson) is what drives video-blogs, or ‘Sliver-Casts’ as another pregnant term of Anderson puts it.

one of the most popular ‘Sliver-Casters’ (and a personal favorite) is Kent Nichols, with his highly successful guerilla-comedy Ask a Ninja, a semi-regular vlog featuring Q&A-sessions with the typical “ninja-next-door”. with 20mio downloads in 2006 and a DVD-release pending, the no-budget show is the living prove to Anderson’s long-tail concept. NewTeeVee (a online tv/video-focused blog recently launched by GigaOM) featured a short interview with Kent on the business-side on sliver-casting earlier this week.

wow, this looks like some awesome patchwork of technology! News At Seven is a video news-show, 100% automatically generated from content-bits all over the net. claimed to work totally autonomous, the engine fetches news-stories from various blogs and websites, runs the text through speech-synthesis, mixes it with matching still-images and video-clips and add’s a Halflife-character as virtual news-presenter - voila, instant virtual news! from the creators:

In this, our first deployment of the system, the show produced is a three-minute daily news update, featuring national, international, and human-interest stories, with commentary from blogs on the national story. After the material has been assembled, the system is ready to present the news using preset scripts. The engine, and our extensions to it, allows us to present believable human-like newscasters as well as more imaginative scenes and sets that are only possible because the show is virtual. We also use techniques to make the generated vocal audio more interesting and believable.

though the quality of speech-synthesis could be better and some of the clips look out of place, this feels like an impressive glimpse of how news/TV could be produced in the not-too-distant future… (and it reminded me of the short news-casts featured in Starship Troopers ;)…)

(Screenshot courtesy of Boing Boing)

ex-Rocketboom vlogging-celebrity Amanda Congdon launched her new video-project AmandaAcrossAmerica today. during the next five weeks, AAA will cover Amanda’s roadtrip in a hybrid car from NY to LA. sponsered by the National Resources Defense Counsil and Environmental Countdown, the show will take advantage of all the web2.0-tech we get to love: besides the obvious video-feed there is a flickr-feed, a map-feed and a wiki asking for audience-involvement & -meetups. bon voyage!

in a recent post, Robert Scoble pointed to Stage6, a new video-portal by DivX.com. unlike its well known competitors YouTube, Google Video or Grouper (which was recently aquired by Sony for a unbelievable 65mio USD), Stage6 isn’t built on flash streaming-technology but requires a custom browser-plugin to utilize the DivX6-codec. around 1998, DivX was the first video-codec allowing the transfer of feature-length movies on the net (see Wikipedia). today, DivX and its opensource-cousin XviD are still the dominating codecs in movie-downloads. comparing Stage6 to YouTube & co., I found that:

• Stage6-videos generally are of much better audio- & video-quality - check out these widescreen-features from the sundance film-festival - it’s stunning! most videos are fine enough for fullscreen-replay, naturally at the expense of increased bandwidth
• switching between fulllscreen and embedded playback works seemless
• pre-buffering & connection-time are recognizably longer than with flash-based portals (about 20-30 seconds)
• all videos can be downloaded by a single-click - unfortunately, many portable video-players like the iPod can’t playback DivX-movies, which means additional transcoding-time coming along with some quality loss
• being just launched recently, Stage6′ is currently hosting only ~1.000 clips. featured shows like treehugger.tv, G4TV or CommandN are very geek-oriented & well-produced, but lack mass-appeal
• viral spread will be hampered severly by the lack of embedding clips into myspace or other websites. on the other hand: most people won’t embed content which requires visitors to install a third-party browse-plugin anyway

the plugin is available for most windows- and mac-browsers (manual install worked fine, autoinstall on Flock didn’t work for me). I’m afraid the requirement for an additional install will obscure Stage6, despite it’s superior video-quality. it remains to be seen when YouTube is going to increase encoding-quality (which should be easily possible, since flash itself is definitely capable of better encoding as to what we are used to right now).

two days later than expected, rocketboom 2.0 reboots with its first episode featuring interim-host and ex-MTV-vj Joanne Colan. former rocketboom-host and neo-vlogger-celebrity Amanda Congdon announced her split from producer Andrew Baron just one week ago. since then both sides‘ accustations (of course videotaped) were only drowned by the blogospheres echoes.

Joanne does a pretty good job in her first episode. good to see that the predictable allusions to Amandas style are carried out in a respectful manner. it’s also good to see at least one half of rocketboom-talent back to work. I’m excited how, when and where Amanda will follow up…meanwhile I keep subscribed…

without a doubt, todays hottest topic on the blogosphere was Amanda Congdon leaving rocketboom. rocketboom is (or was) probably the biggest success-story in the young history of video-podcasting. the geeky news-cast with mainstream-appeal founded by Amanda and her partner Andrew Baron attracted enough viewers to sell a week worth of advertisment for no less than 40.000 US$ on ebay. watching Amanda’s and reading Andrew’s statement I assume it’s safe to say the split happened in disagreement. without its anchor-woman, rocketboom will surely have a hard time…meanwhile Amanda is already wooed by Robert Scoble (ex-Microsoft, soon-to-be Podtech) and Jason Calacanis (AOL/Netscape)…

update: now scoble muses on hiring calacanis as well… don’t think so