Posts tagged Video
New Media: Embracing Mediocrity or Unearthing Excellence?
12 years ago
by David van Sunder
in Business
Even diamonds are hidden amongst tons of rock.
So, is new media embracing mediocrity or unearthing excellence? This is a question that comes up whenever a form of media is opened up to the masses. It has been discussed with desktop publishing, blogging, audio podcasts and now with video. Every time, people weigh in with their opinions on the occurrence. I’m weighing in as well because I think this is an important topic now for several reasons.
The first reason is that many people feel like the media, (old media, the man, whatever you want to call it) is letting us down. The media is controlled by a small group of corporations, which are easily bought up and controlled by people or corporations that don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart.
The second reason is that the media usually shoots for the middle ground, the safe bet, for content that doesn’t offend too many people and isn’t too unique. Otherwise, people could potentially be discouraged from watching. That results in a lot of good content never being produced, some great content being cut short (like Firefly) and some content that people think is no longer up to its previous high quality, continuing long past its prime.
The third reason is that we will soon have a way to sift through the vast amounts of available content to find the content that we are looking to consume. This is important because it doesn’t matter if there are hundreds of amazing blogs, podcasts or videos that we would be overjoyed to consume, if we never find them. (more…)
You Have a Video Call, Sir
32 years ago
by David van Sunder
in Technology
I have my video calls, now where's that flying car? Photo by Vincent® via Flickr
As kids, my friend Jeff and I spent our weekend afternoons at Fry’s Electronics looking at gadgets. One of the few gadgets that still sticks in my mind after almost 20 years is a special telephone that could take a low resolution photo and send it over a phone line to someone else with the same phone. At the time, that seemed both pretty cool and fairly useless because we didn’t know anyone with one of those phones. And it wasn’t quite what we wanted, which was video calling like in The Jetsons.
During the first half of those 20 years, I didn’t see much progress towards that video calling dream. Eventually, I got a taste of my dream while doing video conferences at past employers, but those setups were much too expensive to buy for personal use. Finally though, video calling became possible a few years ago using a computer, a webcam and an application like Skype or iChat. I’ve used those applications over the years and while they have been fun to use, the resolution hasn’t always been great and you can’t call someone without a computer, like my grandparents.
Probably for people like my grandparents who don’t want a computer, Skype eventually teamed up with ASUS to make a stand alone video phone. Of course, a broadband connection will still be needed to make it work, but that’s to be expected. My hangup with the device is the 7 inch screen. That’s much too small for people with poor eyesight and much too small to compare with the large video screen calling I had dreamed of as a kid. (more…)