Archive for November, 2008

Rebuild a TV Station on the cheap

Posted by tom.altman on November 25th, 2008
My ooVoo Day With... John Wall

Image by klessblog via Flickr

I’ve been having some hallway discussions with our CEO Chuck Peters (or as I affectionalty refer to him as “Chucky P”).  I think it started after I was talking too much about how cheap I thought I could rebuild a TV station.  I was tossing around a number which was close to 10% of the cost the consultants were estimating.

So this morning, Chucky P called me to the table about the conversation.  He’s asys – OK, mr. 90% reduction in cost…HOW?  It was a much nicer was that he asked – but seriously, he said – “tell me more – how would you do it?”

The Methodology
You first have to agree – it’s not going to be the “TV Station” it is today.  It’s a digital distribution station, a DDS.  This DDS will do many of the things a traditional station does, but it must look and adopt some of the best practices of the web.

It will be hard – and I know I don’t understand some of the TV concepts and I can hear the old school media guys saying – this is all good, but what about…   the point is to try and think about what TV will be in 3,4 and 7 years.  I’m not sure TV as we know it will exist in 7 years, so why rebuild it now to currect specs.

Slashdot ran a post Oct 05, 2006 called “Could I Run a TV Station on Linux?”

  • I’m working with a low-power television station to update their playback system. Currently they’re using tape and I’ve been tasked to move them to computerized playback (MPEG-2, etc.) There are proprietary solutions (very expensive) and there are companies that bundle software with Windows and standard x86 hardware. Overall, they are generally unimpressive and won’t sell the software without bundling it with their own hardware. Tom’s Comment:  Wow does this sound familiar – this is exactly what I hear from my co-works at the tv station still today…but the interesting part is the other comments, I found some interesting one – but I’m sure I missed a couple of gems.
  • Actually, you can address a lot of those types of problems (like playlist management, etc.) with one of the many mplayer frontends on their related projects page [mplayerhq.hu]. All you need to do is choose whichever one you prefer and mplayer is your best friend for video playback.

  • The things you need are a scheduler (to determine which commercials air when), a program format spec file (to tell where in a program file the actual video begins and ends so you don’t end up unnecessarily airing several seconds of black as you might if you just paused the playback of a TV show), and a mechanism for crossfading the audio between spots to handle the case where people run it right up to the wire. You need a switcher for the video—the ability to quickly change from one foreground full-screen video window to another without any glitching. This is a lot harder than it sounds. Finally, you need a player that can start pretty much instantaneously and without glitch in the middle of a program. I haven’t found that to be true of VLC at all in my experience, but maybe it has improved a lot in the last few months….

  • For a possible controller UI, you might check out SongCue on SourceForge. I designed it for radio automation, but combine that UI with a preview pane above each controller and show a still frame from 5 seconds into a segment, and you have a UI that would work pretty well for what you’re doing, too. Maybe even show live video in the preview panes during playback. (I wouldn’t recommend the code from SongCue, though, as it’s pretty much raw Xlib, not for the faint of heart.)

  • If I were writing such a thing, I’d start with a Mac OS X (10.4 Server) box. Xsan provides a supported mechanism for handling your storage needs. QTKit can do your playback, and Quartz Composer should make switching the foreground full screen movie pretty easy. The only potential snag I can think of would be that if you aren’t careful, you could mouse over onto the live output signal, but all things considered, it’s probably the easiest way to build an app that does what you want, IMHO.

You see – this is a two year old post with ideas we have not seen people look at or try.  This is all good stuff.  I have not even begun to speak about user content – there are two projects like this going on – one for sure is based on Drupal…an open source contnet management system.  Don’t even get me started on my favorite CMS Wordpress – I’m SURE it could do it with one processor tied behind it’s back.

Here is also a pre-bult server from NetTVWorld (posted from CNet) which is calling it self a TV Station in a box and also – clains the idea of a reporter taking it with them to a story and broadcasting from there.  See link in comments to here.

Conclusion

So I’m not saying I can do it – but I think if you get a TV outsider who gets the web (someone like me) and a few TV people who really have a mindset to change the scene – it could be done…for 10% ok 20% of what they think!

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in innovation, video and tv Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments »

CEO's, API, live blogging and barcamps

Posted by tom.altman on November 21st, 2008
BarCamp Orlando

Image by hyku via Flickr

After our CEO Chuck decided to live blog the API Summit – it stirred up some interesting convo.  Some was positive, some not so much, but I think the end result will be very good.  He posted a very nice summary on his blog.

From the “non-CEO crowd”, there was my buddy Jason.  He’s also had some very good comments on his blog:

I don’t envision an environment where the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Steve Outing, Alan Mutter and those types get up and preach to the choir. They are fine and do a lot of good and I have no problem with any of them.

But the kinds of people I want in a room that can really end up making real change in our industry are those like Nick Bilton, Ryan Sholin, Pat Thornton, David Kohn, beat blogger Matt Neznanski, Tom Altman, and those on the Crunchberry team.

What it boils down to is we’ve got to stop talking and do SOMETHING.  Yes, let’s get it on.  And the best way “we” know is to treat this like any other “new”, “new media”, “web 2.0″ problem…we must BarCamp.

Now presenting BarCamp:newsinnovation (not me – Jason set it up and a bunch of people have already said “yes”).  I like the verbiabe he uses:

The idea is to get energetic, tech-savvy, open-minded individuals who embrace the chaos in the media industry because the ability to do really cool things still exist. We also need find those people outside of our industry who love to consume news and information and are great thinkers and innovators.

So we’ll see how it goes…please join in and help out.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in community, innovation, new media Tags: , , , , Comments Off

My first WordPress plugin – awwwww.

Posted by tom.altman on November 20th, 2008
Windows, GNOME and KDE keys for cut and pastin...

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been slowly turning into a WordPress fanboy – and now I think I have finally turn the corner to full-flegde-dom.  I built my first plugin.  OK, I made a couple little ones first, but this is the first REAL one.

It allows the WordPress admin to add a flash mini-document from a site called Issuu.  (Issuu is very cool if you have not heard of it before…create very nice looking flash presentations from many different document formats.)

You install the plugin and then just copy and paste the embed code from the site to your WordPress sidebar.  Boo-ya, you get a mini-Issuu viewer for your site.

I leveraged a very well done How to located over at guffszub.net – called My Widget example.

So bop over to my WordPress plugin page and check it out.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in wordpress plugin Tags: , , , Comments Off

Free DAM – Digital Asset Management with Wordpress for free!

Posted by tom.altman on November 12th, 2008
Matrix Code

Image by David Asch via Flickr

Over the past year to year-and-a-half I’ve been working with an “old media” company and a new start-up, then back to the same “old media” company.  The big buzz is DAM or Digital Asset Management.  Everyone is trying to get all their content into a repository.

The other thing you have to know to make this all make sense is my latest “fanboy” idol app – Wordpress.  Yea, I admit it – I think WordPress is flipin’ awesome.  I pretty much say it can do everything including wash the windows.  Now granted – a lot of this is through rose colored glasses, I’ve implemented a handful of sites and used a bunch of different plug ins…its not wholesale, mega-leverage action; but this is smokin’ hot-hot-hot.

People are spending big bucks to find the holy grail in the DAM world, I know of a few that are north of $250,00 and they go up from there – and that is a base package.  Then the other day I stumble on this WordPress plugin, yea a plugin that is free.  It’s called WP-O-Matic.

This is a killer little plugin.  I think it was designed to kind of leverage the SEO world by converting RSS to WordPress posts…yea – RSS to WP posts.  By dumping RSS news feeds into a website, it will draw search engine traffic and bring more eyeballs.

Check out these options, I have added comments…mostly for humor, but seriously, this is good stuff – this is classic DAM bullet points:

  • Campaigs Feeds and all settings and options are now organized into campaigns for the perfect organization and comfort.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “You contorl “campains” for organizational purposes – great for our DAM.”

  • Multiple feeds / categories: it’s possible to add as many feeds as you want, and add them to as many categories as you want. It’s not obstrusive, so you can also write your own posts to any of those categories.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “all the feeds and categories you want, plus we can add hand entered posts.  cool and cool.”

  • Every form of XML syndication supported. This includes RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 formats, the popular RSS 2.0 format, and the emerging Atom.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  • Feed autodiscovery, which lets you add feeds without even knowing the exact URL. (Thanks Simplepie!)

    TOM’S COMMENT: “I’m not sure what this means – but I can tell you this.  IT IS COOL!”

  • Unix cron and Wordpress cron jobs For maximum performance, you can make the RSS fetching process be called by a Unix cron job, or simply let Wordpress handle it.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “looks like it is flexiable as far as how the automation happens…can be an external bot – or part of WordPress”

  • Comfortable interface. The admin is powered by a state of the art ajaxy interface that lets you handle your feeds with ease. Updated!

    TOM’S COMMENT: “Me loves the AJAX.  Got ot have some buzz words – yes?”

  • Images caching for extreme performance and hotlinking bypassing.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “Um, thank you – I’ll take it.”

  • Words Rewriting. Want to replace the word “Poker” with “Texas Holdem”? We have it covered. Want to use regular expressions? We have it covered.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “I’m sorry – are you telling me I can replace some of the words…OK, if it must be included – I can only think of 1,000,000 ways this will be helpful.”

  • Words Relinking. Define custom links for words you specify.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “Nice.”

  • Post templating. Define a global header and footer for the posts, or even for a specific feed. Add ads

    TOM’S COMMENT: “So after this gets pulled in I can reformat it?  Wow – what of a guy could use hidden fields and ‘hide” meta data int he post.  Ummm, sure.”

  • Campaigns import/export using OPML files. Easily import hundreds of feeds into new or existing campaigns!

    TOM’S COMMENT: “ok – this might be helpful!!!!”

You can see why I’m excited.  This is truly a valid option, I know I’m being a bit cheeky – but this is a real, super inexpensive option.  Plus the database is MySQL and open source.  This means we can add some more magic after we get things into the database.

That is when something like Zemanta steps in – after you have the content data in, you hit it with a dose of Zemanta.  Systematically charaterizes the content for quicker use later.

So, as my buddy Nick says – there are a million ideas out on the intranets; its solutions that are hard to come by.  I really want to work on this myself, but I’m too excited – so I want to put it out to see if someone else has the time and energy…if you do – let me know, I’d like to help – or at least watch.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in innovation, new media, web concepts, wordpress, wordpress plugin Tags: , , 7 Comments »

Media – use the megaphone before its too late

Posted by tom.altman on November 11th, 2008
Members of Austrian jazz band Riverside Stompe...

Image via Wikipedia

One of my favorite ideas of our CEO Chuck Peters is the idea that “old-media” is like a megaphone.   We  broadcast a message in a one-way fashion rain the news down to all within earshot.  I like that analogy.

But I guess I’m thinking that we better starting using the thing to engage some people really soon – or we’ll have nobody left, or a lot of deaf ears, to talk to.

I think sometimes people are trying to make this all too complicated, I see three main points.

  1. Focus on the community – for me this is more about fostering relationships and just being real.  Let’s not get hung up on who own’s it, what the rules are or that…but the conversation, is it meaningful?
  2. Use the megaphone – not in the obnoxious, “see how loud I can holla”, Ty Pennington way – but people are listening and they want to know what to do.  Let ask them what they think.
  3. “Don’t over think the room” – this a quote from the great philosopher Colin Cowherd.  I guess it speaks to me – let’s see what the people will use, not analyze to death the exact mentality of each person and their “true” motives.  Damn – put something up, try it, see how it works, revise, put something else up, see how it works, revise.

OK – enough rambling from me – let’s crack the switch and see if anyone wants to talk.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in community, innovation, new media Tags: , , 1 Comment »

HTC PPC 6800 from US Cellular

Posted by tom.altman on November 10th, 2008
Sprint Mogul

Image by nino63004 via Flickr

I live in the middle of what they call “fly-over” country, Eastern Iowa.  We have a whole bunch of choices for cellular providers – but, if you want it to work more than 60% of the time…you pick US Cellular.  I used to complain quite a bit about US Cellular – they have good coverage – but pretty much everything else about them stunk.

I will have to admin, over the past year or so they have been fairly committed to customer service, so now they have good coverage, OK customer service – but still have stinky phones, stinky plans and super stinky data plans…all I have to say is Easy Edge.

About 4 months ago I took my quarterly parusal through their selection of phones and to my amazement, they had a windows mobile phone.  Now US Cellular has had some Blackberry’s for a year or so – but this is the first Windows phone to date.

I’m opposed to their “lock-you-in-plans” so I set off on eBay to find me a used one and after a month or so quest…I located one, bought it and finally, it was delivered.  I headed to the store – and with little trouble – within 20 minutes or so I was walking out with phone and data plan.

The HTC PPC 6800 is a pretty good phone.  It has a solid feel.  A bit heavy – and looks pretty good (for a windows mobile phone).  I really enjoyed the phone, it would lock up about 1 every day or two causing me to rest/soft re-boot it.  The more apps I used, the sooner I had to log off.

The slide out keyboard is good – not as fast as a Blackberry, but OK.

Overall – it was a pretty good phone, quite heavy…but nice.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in reviews Comments Off

Yammer adds groups

Posted by tom.altman on November 6th, 2008
Yammer t-shirt and more...

Image by inju via Flickr

I posted about a week or so ago at how I really thing a tool like Yammeris a good replacement for email.  And no Yammer has added groups.  These can be private or public groups – but allows people to further whittle down the amount of people who recieve a message.

This is really good – now people can “opt-in” to certain relms of communication.  It allows some channels to form, yet not boxing people in like email tends to do.  Yammer is reall getting some attention – I really like it.

A couple more Yammer feature request:

  1. Direct Messages – I think Yammer may be holding off here.  I think DM would be good, but only as my personal mission of replacing email.  I can see why they might not have it on their radar.
  2. Multiple Domain Aggregation – woah, I didn’t know what else to call it.  But we have 3 companies within our parent company.  Some people don’t have the same domain/email address.  I’d like to be able to combine more than one “company” or “email domain” into one account.  This way – we could all colab together.
  3. Attachments – this is a BIG request…we can still use links in the mean time – but it would be cool to allow companies to setup a file server which could be registered with Yammer to post to.  This way the Yammer doesn’t have to worry about storage and security of the files and the company feels comfortable the Yammer  doesn’t have have confidential documents on Yammer’s servers.
Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in new media, web concepts Tags: , , 1 Comment »
Twitter Delicious Facebook Stumbleupon