mint media is licencing all its work under a CC licence now.

Well, I’m really happy to announce that we’ve decided to licence all of our work, as far as possible, under a Creative Commons (CC) licence from 2009 on.
We have been inspired by a project determined to promote CC-licenced music. „Jamendo“ enabled us to pick great songs totally free and use it for our latest project „BVSA TV„, video-on-demand for the basketball association of Saxony-Anhalt.

When we covered the All-Star-Day it was clear that the videos had to go online. But what to do if you or your client don’t want to pay for the (enormous expansive) royalties? Hit the free way!
Jamendo provides thousands of tracks, some better than others, but all really professional. And the advantage of licencing under CC is on both sides: clearly we got inspiration out of impressive songs. Tough the muciancs gained more popularity and are one step closer to a label deal or something else. And even greater is the fact that German mediamakers worked together with songwriters and creatives from all over the world.

Of course we already knew what CC is, but couldn’t quite value the service until we realised how great such a small action can be. Setting up a Creative Commons licence doesn’t take a minute.
Now mint media intends to licence all of its videos under a Creative Commons licence from January 1st 2009 on. Non-commercial projects are aloud to copy, distribute, transmit and even adapt the work by attributing us as the original rightsowner and sharing the material alike.
We‘d like any of our customers to join us on that purpose. We noticed that this won’t be possible at all the time. That’s due to the fact that we’re not doing mint media only to be creative. We are working for our clients and it’s not in our interest to force them to something. We designed a concept paper, which will now be attached to any offer. If the customer is willing to go CC we won’t hestitate to publish the content.

This blog is by the way licenced under Creative Commons (BY) since its beginning. Join the movement, too!

Jugendmedientreffen 2008

I spent my weekend in Halle (Saale), the capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, consulting the youth of German media-makers at the „Jugendmedientreffen 2008“ (abbr.: JMT; english: Youth Media Meeting) at the Martin-Luther-University. It wasn’t that the organizers invited me to support them.
And I can honestly tell you I don’t regret the dicision – I expected it to be a little bit better in parts of the night program, but still it was a good weekend.

So what’s the JMT? Well, the Youth Press Germany wants to give students the opportunity to meet up with professionals from all across the country, so they can gain more experience and set up a network both with other youngsters and those who are (however) already professionals. This years slogan „Freedom of Press 2.0″.

JMT can be 3 days of fun creating creative products in 6 different workshops.
That’s were I come into play. „Thomas Wagenknecht, Consultant, Doc Workshop“ said my name badge. (Actually it was „Referent, Doku Workshop“.) I was responsible to teach a group of boys and girls, aged from 17 to 25, about Blogging.

I had a lot of fun working together with them. Even if we haven’t had a lot of time to blog about the whole JMT, we did our best to do anything the media has to offer: texts, images and of course video.
Next to the work with the youngsters there were panel discussions with several prominent German representatives of the journalism scene: From blogger Stefan Niggemeier to Reporters Without Borders CEO Dr. Michael Rediske. And then there was the ball night – unfortunately without any kind of long drinks.
Yeah, okay, I understand it was a YOUTH meeting, but if not everybody had already reached the drinking age (which is 18 in Germany), they could have provided something.

My Workshop Team

And by the way: I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, could get to buy some cheap things on black friday and enjoyed the 1st advent.
BTW No. 2: Saxony-Anhalt claims to be the state where the people get up the earliest. That’s probably the reason why I moved somewhere else. Anyway it’s a beautiful place to be.

(c) Images: fjp>media, Magdeburg

Some thousands of users received a really, really bad message last week: brightcove is closing down its free services which forces all (free) users to get themselves an offer for the new brightcove 3.

But actually you can save your breath, because – like me – you probably can’t effort to pay that much money or better to say you can save a lot of Euros, Dollars or whatever by choosing another partner for your video activities.

Why? Well, let’s start from the beginning.
brightcove is gernerally great. I started to use use it some 3 years ago when the Mitteldeutsche Basketballclub (MBC) became client of my company, mint media. Before using the brightcove service I was struggeling to provide our customers (in this case audience as well as the client) an adequate video solution. YouTube is popular, but the quality is awful. On the other hand you have some providers seeking for better resolutions like Sevenload, but you still don’t have the comfort of an complete area where you can do everything from creating thumbnails, previews, bumpers, pre-roll ads, customized players to detailed reports.

So finally I got to use brightcove. I don’t even remember anymore who’s recommendation it was, but it was really satisfying anyway.
Over several years we were able to upload tons of Gigabytes of video material, brightcove would store anything and present it in no time with a great quality. When we came to the point to offer advertising solutions we had great integration models on the one hand side and could provide detailed information to our advertisers on the other which brought some Euros into the mint media cash box.

But anyway we asked ourselves all the time how brightcove could effort to provide such a service? And now we got the answer: they can’t. Why should they close it down now if for another reason?

Well, actually it’s not like brightcove would just say „Guys, pay for it or leave it“. What they did is more like pretending to do some renewals, calling it „brightcove 3″. I think that are just some slight changes, such as the integration of Google AdSense, – the main modernization is the design.
However this isn’t worth an increase of 4800 Euros! Yep, that’s what brightcove wants to charge for one year. (Tech specs in this case are something around 10.000 viewers, medium resolution and not more than 1GB per month.)

Way too much money after my opinion. For that amount I’d rather employ a web designer to build up a similar flash-based interface.
Or switch to Vimeo. Dan Frommer (Silicon Alley Insider) gave me that idea. I wasn’t quite sure if that’s an appropriate solution, so I wrote the following comment:

I’m afraid you can’t really compare Brightcove to something like Vimeo, because the NYT-supported company gives you some great browser-applications to analyse and present your videos, whereas Vimeo is just a (way) better YouTube.
Did I miss something or is there another option to keep a brightcove-like video service?

As it turns out there are really some other services. (I collected them for you at the bottom of this article.) But there are either as expansive as brightcove is now or they’re not as good as Vimeo can be.

Vimeo seems to be a proper solution if you want to save a lot of money and still want to get a good result. They got some great features and a good-looking player whereas you have 2GB storage a week and (real) HD Videos. You can customize your player in almost every detail you want – you can even put text or graphic at the end of your video (which is good for ads, too).
At a price of 59,99 $ (~ 49 €) a year that seems pretty fair. Consider also that you can test Vimeo at first totally free as long as you want to (but with banner ads and slow uploads and all that shit).

But even so you should always think a lot about the targeted usage of the project. Viral campaigns are almost only good on YouTube (because they got the name and a huge community) and detailed reports or special functions like costumized navigation or ad network integration are available with brightcove – not Vimeo.

Oh boy, Microsoft really did something to improve their service „Windows Live“ (Live.com), which has been on the web for a couple of years – so far without any big success, because the guys didn’t try hard enough. What they basically did was to repeat old web tactics, which means search engine in this particular case linked with some other features (there was this funny function that you could really ask a question like „How old can a crocodile get?“), and were hoping for Google to get down. And of course that didn’t happen at all.

In stead Google went on being the No. 1 in business, Apple got more and more buyers and Yahoo! rejected the best offer they could possibly receive.

But now finally Microsoft is moving on with an improvement worth to be mentioned.

Live.com gets a new face and great functions, that combine the best of the web, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, flickr and so on. (Facebook doesn’t seem to be in which is odd because Microsoft invested some 250 million dollars into the social network.) Their goal is to bring all your activities on the WWW together in one place, where your friends and family can see what you’re doing. You just have to tell Live.com where your profiles are and it will create a cool landing page, on which you can also add favorite blogs, websites and more and it even conjuncts Microsoft desktop applications and online services.

Further on your friends will be able to see new changes immediately when they are done. And everytime they are writing you an e-mail via Hotmail or are chatting with you with the Live Messenger those people can see your latest updates, so for instants thumbnails of some pictures you’ve just uploaded or reviews of recently bought products.

Have a look at this nifty video to get the impression: http://blip.tv/file/1462663/ (I can’t embed it, but WordPress.com doesn’t aloud me to do so… )

Of course Microsoft will still try to force you on the dark side, because one approach obviously is to get you to upload your videos, photos and other files onto the Windows Live storage or encourage your friends to join Live.com.

But all in all it seems to be a great service. One indication is that reliable Blogs such as TechCrunch and RWW are talking about it in the most significant spades.

I still won’t use it. Why? Because I got a MacBook Pro at home and I’d never trust Steve Balmer.
Anyway it’s the right way to go for Microsoft and I wish them all the best.

Mediainflux
mint media
Postfach 1606
06667 Weißenfels

E-Mail: th.wagenknecht [at] mint-media.eu

Inhaber der Firma und inhaltlich Verantwortlicher gemäß § 10 Absatz 3 MDStV: Thomas Wagenknecht, Paul-Lincke-Weg 3, 06667 Weißenfels