After thirteen years it’s become an established medium for branding, art and entertainment. Web Video is now following in it’s footsteps.

Video on the web has only recently become popular. Beginning around 1995 with streaming media players such as RealPlayer. In 1997 Shareyourworld.com was one of the first video sharing sites but failed mainly due to limited bandwidth.

With the birth of Adobe’s Flash Video codec in 2004 and the increase of bandwidth video sharing sites like YouTube emerged in 2005 popularizing web video.

There’s a shift from many TV and Film professionals to the web feeding the demand for web video advertising and entertainment.

Sites like YouTube catered to the users desire to connect and share. The user community varies from vloggers to independent filmmakers. Other video sites cater to a specific community or host certain content such as Funny Or Die, iKlipz and Expert Village.

For Advertising video communities can be difficult because of over saturation of content. YouTube being a good example. There are too many videos being uploaded too quickly for yours to stand out.

This video summarizes the most common techniques. Keep in mind these days everyone and their chimpanzee uses them.

Under three minute, hilarious content will always stick to web audiences. The trick is not just cheating the system by uploading tricky thumbnails or changing the title to “boobs”. Recently high quality content in both entertainment and advertising for the web has become a demand.

You can only watch this so many times. Professional talent and original ideas shouldn’t be excluded from the budget.

To make an effective web advertising campaign Viral Marketing is used like Batman: The Dark Knight and I Love Bees advertisements.
Combining their techniques with web video will insure you stand out and reach your audience.

For independent filmmakers to make a profit from their work many sites have partner programs were ad revenue is shared. To make more profit many use services like iTunes or Amazon.

Also through merchandising and hosting advertisements on the series/films official webpages. Brightcove is often used instead of YouTube or such sites because it allows for high quality video to be streamed.

A good example of this is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog which was created by Joss Whedon starring Neil Patrick Harris. It streamed free online and earned it’s revenue from iTunes sales, merchandise, and DVD and Soundtrack.

Thanks to technology video has become an effective medium that can be incorporated into anything. From games to web sites.

AKQA’s work on the microsite for Unilever’s Peperami Noodles Army and the Philips Bodygroom site are examples of incorporating interactive video into a sites design.

YouTube’s annotations, Video Clix are an examples of easily attaching interactive information to a video.

Web games can incorporate video just like the classic FMV games used to. A simple yet hilarious example being Aliens from Planet Dave.

Like Web Design, Web Video is a new industry emerging from the internet. It is still in it’s infancy but with the rate today’s technologies evolve it is quickly reaching it’s prime.

Now that you’ve watched that, you might be inspired to join in the comments.

Tips n’ Tricks

Mobile phones are like Swiss army knives. Take the Nokia Nseries for example. Newer mobile devices are among other things capable of playing mp3s and movies like the PSP.

So, what’s this got to do with filmmaking? Mobile devices are another way of distributing your film. Microsoft has a video downloading service for mobile devices and there are a few mobile film festivals already like the Nokia Shorts. Also there’s mobile broadcasting.

So, how does it all work? You make a mobile compatible version of your film. Then post your film on the web. People download the film to their PC, then upload it to their mobile device.

How do you make a mobile version of your film? Makayama’s software Mobile Media Maker will convert your DVDs and any other video content to various mobile formats. There’s a free program PSP Video 9 that converts to Sony’s PSP.

If you don’t want to spend the money on software you can try to do it yourself with the software you have. All you need to find out is what sound and video format the mobile device you want to distribute to, uses. At times the video frame rate has to be configured as well. So it’s a bit complex depending on what device you choose. Pocket Movies has a FAQ on getting your movie to an MPEG-1 file that can be played on Pocket PCs.

Is it really worth it? There’s no question weather there’s a market. Fox adapted their TV series for mobile devices. It’s a lot cheaper then trying to get your film played in theatres and it might just end up with the wider audience.

Filmmaker’s Journal

You could consider this part two of my last post were I basically stated that filmmakers should use the web for distribution of their films. Google Video a search engine/archive for video lets you upload your video and will also let you charge for viewing it. Currently it’s in the beta stage. Yahoo also has a video search engine.

From Vlogs to web banners, video is everywhere. It’s up to the filmmaker now to take advantage of the technology and realize were the market is.

I’m still waiting for many of the commercial services that offer the latest in Hollywood films to come to my side of the globe. I guess they don’t realize that the web is a global market making it possible for anyone anywhere any time to get whatever they want in information and entertainment. If they can’t grasp that vision then it just leaves more room for independent filmmakers to give the new kind of “moviegoer” their dose of entertainment.

My Bookmarks
Doom9 is a great source for making backups of your DVDs. Their information saved me a lot of headache when I first had to author a DVD.