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New Mixables Contests: Win Concert Tickets, CDs, T-shirts, more :)

2008-04-28T17:43:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

We have more great music and videos for you to remix this month. And this time you can win free concert tickets and other cool stuff too. Check it out...

RED, Flyleaf, & Seether -- RED, Flyleaf and Seether are hittin' the road! Mash videos from RED, Flyleaf and Seether to make the "Official Tour Commercial" and win tickets to see the show in Chicago on May 20th! eyespot.com/mixables/REDFlyleafSeether

From First To Last -- From First To Last battle back with their self-titled Suretone Records debut! Mix up "World's Away" and get your video on their MySpace page and more! eyespot.com/mixables/FromFirstToLast

Five Finger Death Punch -- After a short winter break, Five Finger Death Punch is back with guns blazing. Create your own head bangin' masterpiece and win tickets to a Rockstar™ Metal Mayhem show! eyespot.com/mixables/FiveFingerDeathPunch

Harold & Kumar 2, Escape From Guantanamo Bay -- This marks the triumphant return of these two hiarious, slacker anti-heroes as they try to outrun authorities who suspect them of being terrorists. These guys can't seem to get a break! eyespot.com/mixables/HaroldKumar2EscapeFromGuantanamoBay

One last thing...Have you ever thought of building the next YouTube but don't know where to start? Or do you already have a website and want to add video to it? If so you need the Eyespot Personalization Suite, which makes it super easy for anyone to build a video sharing web site in practically no time. Get started here: eyespotnetwork.com

Keep Mixing!
The Eyespot Team

Build Your Own Site w/ Eyespot

2008-04-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd share this story with you...

I got an email from an Eyespot user a few weeks ago. He'd heard about the Eyespot Personalization Suite but didn't know where to start. I told him to signup at EyespotNetwork.com, read the QuickStart Guide, and let me know if he had any questions. Two hours later I received his response: he had signed up, read the guide, plugged a few embed codes into his web site, and his users were now uploading video to his site! All in two hours!

So the first thing I want to say this week is this: If you've ever thought of building the next YouTube but don't know where to start, or if you already have a website and want to add video to it but don't know how, look no further. The Eyespot Personalization Suite makes it super easy for anyone to build a video sharing web site. And best of all, it's FREE. :)

Get started here: eyespotnetwork.com

Now for some other news. By now you probably know that Eyespot Mixables are bundles of free music and video from your favorite artists, available for you to collect, mix, and remix. Well we've had a stampede of artists creating Mixables lately, so I just want to share a few with you...

Thievery Corporation: eyespot.com/mixables/ThieveryCorporation

Killswitch Engage: eyespot.com/mixables/KillswitchEngage

Tila Tequila: eyespot.com/promotion/tila_tequila

...and tons more here.

As always thanks for using Eyespot!

The Eyespot Personalization Suite

2008-03-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, Eyespot technology has always been available on other websites, not just eyespot.com. For example, Star Wars fans can use the Eyespot Mixer to remix Star Wars clips at http://mashup.starwars.com.

The big news today is that we're now making our technology available to ALL website owners, not just the big guys. The offering is called...

THE EYESPOT PERSONALIZATION SUITE -- The Personalization Suite (http://eyespotnetwork.com) is a set of hosted applications that you can easily add to your website so that your users can view, upload, and share videos online and via mobile. In true Eyespot style the Suite is extremely easy to use so you can turn your website into a video sharing site in a matter of hours. Some of the benefits include:

Personalization features that allow your users to easily mix professional and user-generated content

A library of more than 1 million rights-cleared videos, photos, and music tracks

Instant monetization with in-stream ads from leading networks such as Google AdSense For Video, Tremore Media, adap.tv, and others

The option to leverage the Eyespot network for content syndication and extended reach and visibility

Free (ad-supported) or low-cost monthly subscription offerings

You can signup or learn more at http://eyespotnetwork.com

And now for some other news...

THE NEW MIXER -- The new Mixer is here! Features include multiple-audio tracks, inline trimming, a whole new design, and lots more. Check it out: http://eyespot.com/mixer

CHICAGO 10 MIXABLES -- Summer, 1968. The United States is at war in Vietnam and with itself. Yippies, Hippies and thousands of America's youth converge on Chicago to make their voices heard during the Democratic National Convention. Combine that with an overzealous mayor, club wielding, tear-gas-toting Chicago police, the National Guard and what do you get? Pandemonium. Join this mixing contest and your entry could end up on the DVD. Check it out: http://eyespot.com/mixables/Chicago10

As always, thanks for using Eyespot!

Catalyzing Creativity With Creative Commons

2006-12-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

Imagine the following scenario. You go to a New Years Eve celebration. Your plan is to shoot lots of great video of all the festivities, your drunken friends, and the huge fireworks display at midnight. Monday morning you'll edit the video and send a highlight mix to all your friends to commemorate the great night you had together.

Unfortunately, the battery in your camera dies the moment the fireworks display begins.

Come Monday morning when you fire up your desktop video editing software, your commemorative New Years Eve mix will be lacking fireworks -- literally. This is one example of why we started Eyespot and, more specifically, why we chose to make Eyespot a Creative Commons site. With desktop video editing software you're limited to the media on your hard drive. You have no stock footage archive to pull from. But on Eyespot, you can search the commons for fireworks and instantly access all the footage contributed by the community.

Early in 2006 a prominent member of the Creative Commons community intimated to me: "we've really opened up a can of worms". What he meant was that all the different licenses and the various restrictions associated with each had created a real challenge, i.e. how to track and enforce it all. So we decided to use technology to help alleviate some of the burden involved with the adoption of this new licensing scheme.

On Eyespot we support the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. This essentially says that you can (for example) use the fireworks footage you find but you have to give attribution to the community members that provided the footage. To honor this requirement we built our encoding engine to automatically generate and append post-roll credits to every video created on Eyespot.

Here's a great example of the automatic attribution technology in action: this video was created by one of our users to pay tribute to the wives and girlfriends of active duty Marines. To create the video she used clips from another community member as well as a song from a popular band. The credits at the end inform us of the contributors.

This represents the transformative power of Creative Commons licensing in conjunction with innovative technology. The instantaneous and collaborative nature of the internet is fueling a rapid evolution of our relationship with media.The era of strictly passive media consumption is gone. We are now members of a culture of participation. Traditional licensing schemes worked well when the number of licensees and licensors was relatively small. But today, with an entire globe full of creators, content owners and rights lawyers are faced with A Brand New Reality.

-David

Take The Technology To The Eyeballs

2006-12-13T15:38:00.000-08:00

When we started Eyespot we decided against creating a destination site. Competing for customers in an increasingly commoditized business (video hosting, social networking) was not something that appealed to us. It was clear at the time that there would be hundreds of video sharing sites competing for eyesballs, and sure enough that is exactly the environment we find ourselves in today.

We were conflicted, however, because we knew our differentiators (editing, mobile) would really set us apart from the competition. But that did not change the fact that we would still have to rise above the noise in this very crowded space. So we decided the best way to leverage our differentiators would be to take the technology to the eyeballs, rather than trying to bring the eyeballs to the technology.

The Eyespot business model is that of an ASP technology platform provider. All of the applications and features available on eyespot.com are also available as part of a hosted private label offering. As you can imagine, all players in the online video space are looking for differentiators. Our platform was designed to quickly and easily integrate into any online property and, within a matter of weeks, add innovative and engaging applications that enable mashups, remix contests, mobile video sharing, and more.

Today's digital media environment is vastly different than years past. Whereas discussions of digital media in past years were almost always focused on DRM issues, today's discussions gravitate around viewer participation and mashups. The savvy new media execs of today understand that the era of passive media consumption is over. Our media culture has evolved into one of participation. The new conventional wisdom among media companies is: fans are going to use our digital assets for mashups whether we want them to or not, so let's facilitate the phenomenon and create new revenue streams in the process. This way of thinking is permeating record labels, film studios, broadcast media companies, professional sports leagues, video game publishers, and others. In 2007 you will see branded mashup communites powered by Eyespot in all of these sectors.

Content Creation and Distribution in the 21st Century

2006-12-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

Ever heard of Miles Beckett and Mesh Flinders? How about Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz?

Maybe not. But you are most certainly familiar with their work: Lonelygirl15 and The Coke and Mentos Experiment, respectively.

A year ago these guys would have been thrown out of any film studio, television studio, or artist agency they dared wander into. And who knows, maybe they would be today as well. But it doesn’t matter. As Becket points out in Wired this month: “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theatre. You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet.”

At Eyespot we’re working on making content creation easier for the millions of hobbyist story tellers who want to experiment with this phenomenal new medium. It’s easy to shoot video, but it has always been ridiculously complicated and time-consuming to edit video. So we built a video hosting and sharing platform that has easy-to-use video editing built right in. At Eyespot you just upload your video and then use our simple interface to sequence your clips, add special effects like slow motion or black and white, add transitions like fade in or fade out, and add a music soundtrack to complete the mix. This can all be done in a few minutes with an intuitive drag and drop UI.

We also enable our users to easily export the video they create on Eyespot. Our users can download their videos in DivX, Quicktime, Windows Media, iPod, and PSP formats. We support instant publishing to other video hosting sites such as Veoh and Blip.tv and blogs such as Blogger and Live Journal. There are many many video distribution channels online and we want to make it easy for our users to leverage all of them.
Our most interesting export option allows users to send videos to mobile phones. Click the “send” link under any video on Eyespot, type in a mobile phone number, and we will instantly transcode the video and send it to the mobile phone via MMS. One thing we learned after we launched this feature in April 2006 is that MMS is inherently limited by the carriers, so we subsequently built Eyespot Mobile Share, the world’s first mobile video sharing application. Once the app is installed on your phone you can receive video feeds, search the web for videos, post video to your blog, all from your mobile phone. If you’re interested in getting a beta version of the app you can sign up here.

In summary, our goal at Eyespot is to provide a powerful but easy-to-use editing and distribution platform for a new generation of content creators. In my next post I will tell you about our business model and answer any questions you may have.

-David

Vloggercon

2006-06-11T22:35:00.000-07:00

I'm headed back to San Diego after a fun day in SF at Vloggercon. Lots of good discussion today, lots of energy, passion, and idealism. Discussion around politics, journalism, human rights, intellectual property, net neutrality, technology, etc. But the common thread running through all of it was: we are the media.

Vloggercon was held in a cool old town hall. As I sat inside and listened to members of the community debate, it reminded me that once, in our gloried past, policy decisions were made at this level. Representatives took the collective decisions of the community and rode with them to seats of government, where those decisions were written into law. Government by the people, for the people. Democracy.

Ah the good old days.

Unfortunately, topics of discourse are no longer determined at the local level. The issues that we hear about on a day-to-day basis, and the policy debates that pervade our culture, are distributed to each of us by a centralized mass media. We are no longer participants, we
are consumers and viewers. Spectators. Centralized media, as it turns out, is the enemy of democracy. Or, more accurately, centralized media is the enemy of democracy when controlled by those who are unwilling or unable to hold leaders accountable for their actions and
inactions.

Of course this is all changing. Mass media is becoming decentralized. Media creation is now occurring at the edge of the network, not the center. We are the journalists, the entertainers, the advertisers. My argument today at Vloggercon was that technology must be an enabler,
not an impediment. If devices and software are too complicated for the average person to use...the average person won't use them. However, if the average person CAN easily figure out how to use these powerful tools, i.e. shoot some video, perform some basic editing and
mixing, and then distribute to the world, then we will be one step closer to returning politics, discourse, debate, and government to the people.

a glimpse to the imminent future

2006-05-27T18:11:00.000-07:00

Communication Convergence

We have entered a new era of disruptive innovation in which human communication is being radically and irrevocably transformed: the paradigms for mass media and interpersonal communication are converging into a single, global, and ubiquitous communication ecosystem.

Historically, mass media communication has been used for advertising, advocacy, education, entertainment, journalism, marketing, and more on a one-to-many basis. In contrast, interpersonal communication has been used to build and maintain relationships on a one-to-one or one-to-few basis. These attributes have been mutually exclusive: mass media communication has never been viable for building personal relationships, and interpersonal communication has rarely been used for the spectrum of endeavors suggested above.

Advancements in technology have recently led to a convergence in which each form of communication is adopting the traits of the other. Entities that leverage mass media communication are increasingly using technology to build “personal” relationships with their target audiences and individuals are employing instantaneous decentralized communication techniques to engage in advocacy, education, entertainment, self-promotion and journalism. Individuals are becoming media machines in their own right and mass media is attempting to become personalized.

A Perfect Storm

The convergence of communication paradigms - in conjunction with ubiquitous mobile devices and inexpensive hardware and bandwidth - has created fertile ground for the emergence of a rich new medium: digital video.

Early success stories, like YouTube, have proven that the entertainment value offered by digital video is non-trivial. In the very near future we will see the medium move well beyond what has become known as user generated content. Mass media forces have already begun to embrace the form by building advertising and marketing models, citizen journalism outlets, and Internet based advocacy resources. Digital video will not be strictly limited to the entertainment domain. Instead it will become the medium of choice for all forms of mass media communication, interpersonal communication, and self-expression.