Bencredible

Oh the pains of living in Minnesota. Of course much of the US is blanketed in snow right now, but this is nothing unusual for us. Check out the video of our 8′ C-Band dish, which is what provides everyone with Spacevidcast HD, covered in snow.

Since we installed the dish in spring we had never needed to deal with snow before. With the dish as you see it in the video I had 51% signal, which I thought was pretty good for having the dish covered that much. Alas, 51% is not enough for an image and I ended up with 0% image quality. I spend around 15 minutes shoveling off the dish (and 45 minutes trying to get dry again) to get the signal back up to 95% with 100% image quality. w00t! Of course now NASA is switching satellites on January 16th, which means I’ll need to figure out how to rotate that dish with all the snow. I’ll probably need to give our great friend PSB Satellite a call to help and make sure that who area is clear of as much snow as possible before hand. That won’t be fun because that is super-compacted, super-wet snow.

Almost 15 years in broadcasting and I’m treated like I have no idea what I’m doing. I should just let this go, but I have been trying to get media passes for the last 3 NASA launch events now, and each time we’re denied.  This is a snippet of our latest denial letter:

“Requests from online orgs must be from a previously established, independent site that contains regularly updated original news content above & beyond links, forums, troubleshooting tips and reader contributors; a readership of more than 1,000 per month, and has covered the space industry before. Fan sites, Web logs and personal web sites do not qualify for media badges. Links to two bylined articles clearly displaying publication title published within the past six months AND EITHER a copy of your current masthead or business card with name, title and media outlet’s logo OR a copy of your online pubs home page and the masthead page with your name and title appearing in an editorial capacity OR an official letter of assignment from your media outlet. The web material must go through an independent editor before publication. In other words, you’re not media if you’re independently writing and editing your own material. That is what defines a blogger”

I won’t go in to how ***THIS*** is a blog and Spacevidcast isn’t.  Fine.  I won’t go into what defines a blog because clearly NASA has their mind made up there.  No, let me go in to where people get their news from now.

Traditional television is dying. People don’t go to CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, etc., etc. to get their information all that much anymore. They go online. If you want information on space you go to SpaceflightNow.com, NASASpaceFlight.com and yes Spacevidcast.com.  In fact over 3,000 people get their dose of Spacevidcast every… single… day…

It’s not that NASA isn’t trying, they really are. In fact STS-129 saw their first ever space shuttle TweetUp at KSC which looked to be an awesome event. We would have gone, but unlike media the Twitter users didn’t have access to the HD video feed, so I would have been SOL if I wanted to bring the world awesome coverage. NASA allowed 100 twitter users to come in and get a personal tour of the launch itself. Very awesome and I really do think they should get kudos for that.

However, it is just a start.

Maybe NASA thinks that all they need to do is allow 100 people in each time for a total of 500 more Twitter users until the end of the shuttle program. Maybe NASA wants to control the information flow and they are simply not used to the new media instant access. Or maybe NASA thinks that Spacevidcast getting a press pass would create a rip in the space time continuum to the peril of all humanity. No idea. I can say that 100 twitter users isn’t enough. Great start, but now lets start to take notice that sites like Spacevidcast don’t fit in to NASA’s nifty little categories. We are something new, something different but not something less valuable. We stream to tens of thousands of people during launch events. Don’t discount us because we are new, different or making change in this arena. The fact is that for STS-129 we had 73,814 people join us for the launch (based on the Ustream.tv viewer metrics). I don’t know what SFN or NASA.gov got but I would be willing to bet we held our own against both of them.

Anyhow, my rant is done. If NASA won’t allow us press passes, that’s fine.  I don’t need NASA to bring everyone amazing coverage of a shuttle launch. In fact I would say to this day we have the best launch coverage of any media outlet, online or offline. We’ll have people at Space View Park, we will have moles within NASA and we’ll have people at the STS-130 TweetUp if NASA decides to do that again. We don’t need NASA to bring you the coverage, we’re big enough now where we have people everywhere to make that happen. No, what gets me is that NASA doesn’t seem to care enough to look at not just Spacevidcast but all the other people out there who could be game changers in the space industry. Hey, we don’t fit in to the NASA “broadcaster” category, so what good could we ever accomplish?

Other than, you know, changing the world.

[Corrections: I have updated the time I have spent in the industry to reflect 15 years not 10 as originally posted. I just realized that I have spent nearly 15 years in broadcasting. In addition I made note that this was the for KSC TweetUp. NASA has actually had a few TweetUps before but the STS-129 TweetUp was the first at KSC and the first for a shuttle launch]

The BBC aired a story about Spacevidcast! Well, actually, no. They aired a story about UStream and how freakishly awesome it is. The funny thing is that when the Spacevidcast screen shots pop up they start talking about how you should protect your children. HA! They also mention how low quality it is, then go one to show our HIGH DEFINITION COVERAGE of STS-125. Oh well. Click the picture below to watch, the segment starts about 2:20 in to the clip.

I am a terrible blogger. How long has it been since my last update? Wow! Well a lot has happened in the last 2 months, some of which I probably should not blog about.

On the Spacevidcast front a lot of really great stuff has been happening.  First we have live High Definition coverage of STS-125.  As far a I know we are the only Internet stream that is doing shuttle launches in HD.  Even NASA does not do that!  During the launch coverage we have some pretty stiff competition from SpaceFlight Now’s live web stream as well as from traditional TV.  For the first time we were able to crush most of our “competition” which was pretty cool.  Of course I don’t really view anyone as competition because I believe all ships rise with the tide and I’m excited to see more and more people trying to show off human space flight!  It was also nice to have the largest number of concurrent viewers though.  Made it feel like all of the work, pains and effort was worth it.

At the end of this month I’ll be leaving for Orlando!  The first part of the vacation has nothing to do with Spacevidcast and will be the first time I have had a real vacation in… years!  The second half will be for ISDC 2009.  We will have live coverage of ISDC 2009 streaming on Spacevidcast (as far as I know the only ones) and we will also be hosting a New Media panel.  To say I’m excited is an understatement.  I hope we’ll find some good sources there to help relieve some of the financial burden that is Spacevidcast.  Monetize or die. I would hate to see Spacevidcast die, I truly believe it is vitally important that we get humans psyched up about human space flight again, and fast!

This is basically the full 7 hour install of the two FTA satellite dishes we put in for SpaceVidcast.com.  There was a bit of a connection issue so it got broken in to two sections.  Might be best to skip through them a bit to see the progress. Enjoy!

Earlier I posted that I was using Bluefox to design my live show graphics for SpaceVidcast.com (which was earlier called NASASpaceCast.com and may change names again before we launch.) The problem with using a talented graphic designer is that they are super busy all day and night designing, so it can be hard to get extremely fast yet pretty graphics out of them.

Yesterday I decided I should probably have a plan B and designed my own live streaming graphics. This is what I came up with:

Not bad but really nothing different than what anyone else has done. Later in the evening around 2:00am or so I was able to meet up with Bluefox and a couple hours later he was able to crank this out:

That’s pretty freaking cool but doesn’t quite work with the graphics. So a few minutes later this came my way:

That’s even better. Logo is a bit smaller to allow for more text and there is more usable area for objects at the bottom while still remaining very sleek and web 2.0 looking. Finally Bluefox thought that there may be a way to reduce the footprint even more and still allow for text, or possibly use both the last image and the following image in two different scenarios:

Even smaller logo but it still comes across in the stream beautifully and an even smaller footprint but you’ll see we were still able to fit all of the text on there in the same font size.

Bluefox isn’t done but it got to be around 4:00am CST and we were both tired and called it a night. The graphic at the top that I did doesn’t even begin to compare to a couple hours work for Bluefox. This is why I use a pro graphic designer, and you should too. My next task for Bluefox: fix my blog theme!

I am working on a new personal project which right now is known as NASASpaceCast.com (no domain there yet so no actual link). This will be a weekly live video podcast on all things space flight as well as live coverage of NASA space missions including the upcoming STS-123 flight to the International Space Station.

So far I have many pieces of the puzzle in place. I already own all the audio gear myself (I have some pretty kick butt gear), I have the computer but what was missing was the video side and the show image. The video portion of the show is near completion with a new revision of CamTwist from Steve Green (it is going to be uber cool). The show image (branding) is being worked on by BlueFox AKA Sean Blake (one of my favorite designers) and below is the first draft of what you’re going to start to see.

This of course is just the logo and will be the basis for what all of the show graphic, advertising banners and templates look like. I also need to make a final decision on domain name. The options I have are: NASASpaceCast.com, SpaceVideocast.com, SpaceVidcast.com and SpaceFlightCast.com. If you have a preference please leave it in the comments below. Personally I go between NASASpaceCast.com and SpaceVidcast.com. What I really want is Spacecast.com but that’s not going to happen as it is already taken by a TV network (curses!)

The final steps will be to create a theme song, which I’ll start working on soon and finish up the show outline. I’m really close to release, about 80% there. Then again I was 75% of the way there about 2 months ago. I’m in the stages where one element can hold up the whole thing. Unlike other live videocasts and podcasts I want to ensure that I have fantastic production values and make a show that is fun and interesting to watch week after week. Content is king but it needs to be fun too!

Keep watching Bencredible.com for more interesting announcements and behind-the-scenes info on NASASpaceFlight, the Compass Networks (more on that soon), and the resurrection of the old TechnologyEvangelist.com podcasts under a new brand. Very exciting stuff is headed your way soon! I’ll keep updating everyone on the progress of these projects here.