Bencredible

My goal is to make SpaceVidcast the best space video site on the Internet.  I believe there are five things needed to make this happen, and these five things hold true for any video related site:
1 - Get a great community of evangelists
2 - Have best of class audio and video quality
3 - Make it easy to view, share and find content
4 - Have best of class content
5 - Be timely.  Don’t hold on to media forever.  If it is older than a week stale, you’re probably too late.

Alone it’s not possible to do all five things and have a full time job, but that’s why a core group of evangelists is so important.  By having people who not only are passionate about the topic you’re interested in but who are also willing to help spend time in making the videocast better you end up with a show immensely better than what otherwise could have been done.  And to this end we have *awesome* evangelists at SpaceVidcast.com.  My point is, I can only concentrate on one or two of the five items at a time.  Lately I have been working on #4 and #2.

Lets talk about improving the video quality of SpaceVidcast for a moment, shall we?

One of the things we do is record NASA TV 24×7.  This allows us to find interesting clips from NASA, edit them up and re-post them as even more interesting clips on the SpaceVidcast.com site.  For example if we want to have an archive of all the STS-126 footage we have, we’ll just grab that from NASA TV.  The problem is that the signal we get is digital from the satellite then converted to analog in the satellite receiver then back to digital to bring it in to the computer all before we can edit it.  So we’re stepping on the video a lot.  That’s bad.

To improve the quality of our NASA TV feed I recently purchased a FireDTV S2 which is a little set top box that the satellite plugs directly in to.  Rather than converting the video stream a bunch of times, this box takes the raw MPEG 2 sent to the satellite and puts that on the computer.  This box normally doesn’t work in the US, but it just so happens that the channels I need are not encrypted so in my specific case it will work fine.

FireDTV S2

Last night my FireDTV S2 came in the mail, and I was all excited.  I pulled it out of the box and immediately I was bummed.  I had forgotten that European power bricks use a different type of outlet.  So I went online, found a 12volt 2amp power brick at Best Buy, ran over and purchased it.  Brought it home only to realize that the FireDTV S2 actually can get its power from Firewire, no power brick required.  Heh, oops.

OK, got the unit powered up, running and operating.  Time to do a test record.  Got the media, perform an export and… on noes!  It looks like poo!!!  The satellite is capturing at 544×408 resolution rather than the 640×480 resolution I used to be capturing at.  In the old scenario I had hardware decoders that would convert the video to a slightly higher resolution and in hardware remove the interlacing.  Now I have none of that, I have the raw signal from the satellite, interlacing and all.

No need to panic.  Much.  I take the file and after playing for hours and hours in Episode Pro with different variations of frame size, GOP structure, de-interlace filters and such I think we finally have a file that is a touch better than the system we had before.  Will anyone notice the quality difference?  Probably not.  So why do it?

There are several reasons that I have spent the time, money and aggravation to make this work.  First and foremost is that rather than recording a 4Mbps MPEG 2 file now I’m recording a 2Mbps MPEG 2 file right from the satellite.  Smaller files mean fewer hard drives which saves me money.  That is good since I bankroll SpaceVidcast out of my own pocket.  This also opens the door for us to do HD when we’re able to get a C-Band dish.  The second reason is that this process will allow us to get videos out the door faster.  Rather than exporting to h.264, adding a bug, re-exporting to h.264 then uploading to YouTube now all we need to do is export to YouTube and the bug, deinterlace filter and cropping options will all be set at the same time.  So it is faster, we save money, we step on the video less and we look better than before.

Will this make a difference in the end?  Dunno.  I believe that every little bit helps.  Good enough is never good enough, so just the fact that we continue to find ways to improve the video quality and speed to market should be enough proof that we’re in this because we give a damn.  I think that shows to people watching the episodes, which in turn helps them become evangelists.  Evangelists in turn help produce and promote the show which helps us get better gear which helps us get more evangelists, so forth and so on.

I’m a huge fan of Red Digital Cinema.  These are the guys who are changing the video landscape forever by making insanely great cameras at a really low cost.  Right now they only have one offering which is the Red One and while that’s a nice camera, it’s not what I need.

At NAB 2008 Red announced Scarlet, a 3k resolution camera for $3,000.  Since I’ve been looking for a higher-resolution camera for SpaceVidcast, this seemed to be about perfect.  My goal was to buy a MacPro, fill it with BlackMagic Intensity boards then get a couple of these cameras for $3,000 and plug them in to the Mac via HDMI (I could probably use HD-SDI boards too if I wanted).

Problem is… Red scrapped the Scarlet.

Well, not really scrapped it, more like they are changing it.  November 13th is when we’re supposed to learn what the revised Scarlet will bring.  The thing with Red cameras is that they are not really designed to work in a live video scenario.  Each camera captures the RAW image which you then bring in to a computer and apply exact color specifications to the picture.  This is great for anyone looking to make hollywood grade movies, but at SpaceVidcast we’re just looking to make awesome quality live video with community interaction.  So here’s hoping that the additions to Scarlet make it a great live replacement to the DV camera we’re currently using (one of the reasons our show is not HD yet).

Red Scarlet Teaser

I have a few more behind-the-scenes SpaceVidcast updates I’ll be posting here in the coming days.  I would give you a great excuse for not posting recently, but well, I don’t have one.  My November resolution is to post more to Bencredible about the happenings at SVC.

Wow, big press week!  First Cariann and I were in the StarTribune on July 1st for SpaceVidcast.  Then today I was back on TwinCitiesLive talking about how to secure your computer (video below).  And finally tomorrow I’m scheduled to go on the air with Jay Kolls at 6:05am on KSTP AM-1500.  Yes, you read that right… 6:05 in the AM!  I have no idea what I’m going to do!  I didn’t even know there WAS a 6 in the morning!!!

Anyhow, enjoy the TCL clip from earlier, and I believe we have other local press outlets looking to do SpaceVidcast interviews as well! Watch for those in the near future.

SpaceVidcast.com is officially one of the most popular videocasts I have created. Over the course of 16 days we averaged over 3,750 viewers per day to get us 60,000 viewers in a little over 2 weeks time with *no* advertising. Amazing. To put this in perspective, if I exclude the iPhone launch video and take all other TechnologyEvangelist.com video views combined I still don’t reach 60,000 views. So I have outdone TE in just a little over 2 weeks time! Think of what will happen to SpaceVidcast.com when I unleash the ad hounds!

I have started the weekly videocast. Next we’ll finish up the site, move the studio to my basement and get this thing rolling. I think we can easily hit 1,000 concurrent viewers with 100,000 downloads of each episode easily.

This is a very exciting time for me. I am passionate about space travel and I’m glad that other are getting excited with me. The show still needs a little love, but we’re very close to something that I can truly be proud of and point at when people say “what do you do?”

SpaceVidcast.com started with around 250 live viewers, skyrocketed to 450 and held there for a while. Then the stream crashed and we were back down to 200 viewers. From there the viewership has been steadily declining until at the writing of this post we’re under 100 live viewers (83 to be exact).

I was expecting about 20 to 40 live viewers of the launch and about 5 live viewers during the down times, so 100 viewers is still well above my expectations. I had a feeling, and apparently a correct one, that people would get bored after the launch and start to bail. While space flight is the future of humanity it oddly has a very inhuman face. This creates a problem for viewership as people want a human connection and NASA TV simply does not offer that.

The solution is painfully simple yet quite complex. I have 1/2 of it online now by burning a chat room directly in to the video stream. The other half comes in the form of actually getting on camera and talking with people live, interacting with them. The trick here is timing. I have a full time time (well over 40 hours a week) and that makes it hard to squeeze in time to broadcast and get people excited about this stuff.

There are other ways to draw an audience as well. This show has zero marketing right now. I’m streaming simply to see if it can be done and to learn for my weekly show. I’ll be advertising for the weekly show so I expect/hope viewership will be higher for that. I’ll also try and get more compelling content over each show to keep people interested and excited. I think with all of these things we’ll have a winning combination.

So why do I care about viewership of a re-broadcast of NASA TV? I’m not even producing the show! I’m hoping to get NASA and space flight in front of people who have never really been interested in it before or are a little interested but simply never vested the time. These people don’t go to NASA.gov and look for the live steam. These people don’t go out of their way to learn this stuff, they stumble across it and if it interests them they stay. That means that the more viewers I have the more interested people we were able to bring in. The more that drop off, the more bored they get. Viewers are finicky and won’t come back if they get too bored too often. Thus, I need to be careful here. I went a little twitter happy these last few days, so I think it is time to scale it all back a touch before the huge events like landing occur and we do our first weekly show.

All in all this has been a great experiment. I’m happy with how it turned out and while I’m sad the viewership is declining I’m a little happy that my theories on how viewership would start to decline rapidly were correct. I’m ecstatic that the viewership scale was so much higher than anticipated. For a show that I figured would be a fun side hobby, this may turn in to a venture worth something. That’s great news as advertising can get spend-y.

For now the really high viewership has come to an end. I expect it to climb back around 200 to 250 during the days and under 100 at night. 450+ was fun while it lasted, but I’ll need to put a human face on NASA before I’ll be able to get back to 450 let alone the 1,000+ that I really want. So far we have had over 25,000 views of the stream, so not too shabby for something I was not quite prepared to do.

Watching the space shuttle launch is always a great moment of joy for me. Hosting a space shuttle launch show on UStream.tv was the highlight of the year! Hosting the show with several hundred enthusiastic viewers and having dozens of people tweet excitedly about the show… Best moment I can remember having in a very long time. The interaction with everyone watching was amazing!

The SpaceVidcast.com live coverage of STS-123 is up to 15,000 views and growing. At any moment in time we have *hundreds* of live viewers. These are not staggering TV viewership numbers, but these are interested people who are actively interacting and asking questions about space travel. As the mission goes on the numbers seem to be GROWING which is the opposite of what I thought would happen. I assumed that as we get in to the mission with hours and hours of downtime people would log out and stop watching. Apparently a lot of people love to see space travel as much or more than I do.

I have a bit of an issue with the SpaceVidcast.com web site. I am recording things like the launch, mission briefings and some EVAs but every time I post to the site it pushes the live stream further down the page. This is bad as I want the live stream at the top with everything else below it. I may have to make a modified template for live launches that puts the UStream.tv window at the top and log posts under it. Not very elegant, but it may work. Anyone know of a good Wordpress plugin to pin a specific entry to the top until I unpin it?

Outside of minor quirks like that the whole process has been very smooth. CamTwist Studio 1.7 worked like magic. The whole look and feel of the show that BlueFox created was amazing. Everything turned out better than I expected for a ‘beta’ show with no advertising. I wonder what will happen when I start the AdWords, Google Radio and Google TV advertising campaigns? This thing could turn out to be truly interesting!

For your enjoyment, the launch of STS-123 as hosted by me on SpaceVidcast.com from t-9 minutes and holding (about one minute before they went to T-9 minutes and counting) to MECO:

First an update on SpaceVidcast.com. Site is coming along nicely. The live stream is up and counting down to the STS-123 launch.

The UStream.tv banner is complete and I think it looks really nice:

While the Spacevidcast thing is wrapping up I’m starting two other projects. One is a lifecast of sorts. This is my replacement to the Technology Evangelist podcasts, but a wee bit different. I have set up my office with audio and video and I am setting up my home office with similar equipment. I’ll be doing off-the-cuff technology shows live and recording them and doing a little TubeMogul distribution of sorts. Unlike the TE shows where you had to tune in at a specific time, this you will be able to watch 24×7. Unlike lifecasting where 95% of it is boring in this scenario we’ll be switching between streams and people to keep the conversation going. Should be a lot of fun. Look for more info here later.

The next project I’m working on is part of the TechCompass.com network. This is still in formation so I can’t say too much. Not because it is confidential but because I simply don’t know yet. More deets on this project as I bring the lifecasting project online and Spacevidcast becomes a well oiled machine.

All of this AND I have a full time job. Early in the week I will be deploying new anti-virus software to replace an aging Trend Micro system, deploying a new backup solution, fixing the date/time problem on a few really old servers, and just generally keeping the system running.

My time will be stretched pretty thin, but in the end I believe the new media projects are well worth it. My past is in media, my future will be in media. Media is what I love to do, it is what I was born for. I’m good at Information Technology (IT), I’m *great* at live TV and I love the new Internet live streaming. Monetization here I come!

I took some of the work Bluefox did and modified it to be actual advertising banners for the upcoming STS-123 mission. There are currently some issues with Endeavour’s UHF radio which may delay launch, but if not then you may start to see something along these lines on UStream.tv:

Bluefox has not yet approved these designs, so he may come back and say “they look awful, what are you thinking?????” Personally, I like the one with the shuttle taking off (secret: the orbiter in all the pictures is Atlantis and not Endeavour. Shhhhhhhh).

I have brought Spacevidcast.com online in a rough form. Only the very basic functions are there right now and I have yet to get simple things like navigation in place, but it is still neat to see.

Even if the site is not fully online should Endeavour launch on March 11th as scheduled I will be covering it live. The site is not required for live coverage, but it sure would be nice.

There are two really neat things on the site:
1 - The search box is an AJAX search that will show results in real-time as you type.
2 - The code is all W3C compliant. COOL!

Bluefox is super picky about his designs (as any good designer is) and wants to change the stars in the upper left. When I spliced the image apart to turn it in to HTML I had to create a repeating element for the stars. He doesn’t like this, and I tend to agree. It’s very subtle but once you see it the repeating pattern will annoy the heck out of anyone.

I like how clean the site ended up being. I also like that with the 750 pixel wide white area (710 usable) I can add a 640×360 video that I shot in HD and not have to pop up another window. The problem is, like I mentioned earlier, I have no navigation on the page yet. If I want to keep the ability to have 640×360 videos I’ll need to figure something out with navigation that is horizontal.

Next steps are to fix that repeating star element, add navigation back in, clean up the footer, test with a UStream.tv video window and chat box side by side (it will be tight), get some cacheing installed, SEO/SEM optimize the site and finally find a way to distribute the vidcasts in their own RSS feed. Sounds like a lot but once the nav is in place the rest should come quickly.

The launch of STS-123 is coming up (hopefully) on March 11th in the wee hours of the morning. I wanted to get at least one on-demand show out the door for SpaceVidcast.com as well as prep for live coverage of STS-123. A couple things were missing though, namely a web site design. Sure we have the logos for the live show and whatnot, but no web site. Bluefox to the rescue!

Web Design version 1 (click for larger version)

Large Banner

Standard Ad Banner

Small Ad Banner

Vertical Ad Banner

Some of the text needs to change before I start using the banners. I would like to partner up with sites like NASASpaceFlight.com and Spaceflightnow.com. To do that I don’t want to compete with their core audience who will be reading breaking news. My goal is to bring awareness to the masses on why space flight is important for humanity, why it is worth the billions and billions of dollars it takes and frankly to get people excited about space travel again.