As of late, concern has risen about the H.264 codec.  If you read the fine print on any video camera encodes natively to the format, it states that the footage may not be used for commercial purposes.  The consortium that owns patents that make H.264, which includes heavy-weights such us Apple, Microsoft and Toshiba amongst about 30 others.

The Biz Media crew would much rather see an “open” standard, allowing anyone to use a codec without royalties.  Google recently bought the VP8 Codec from ON2, this could be the open codec required to get around licensing fees.

This small article is certainly not doing justice to this issue. A Recent Engadget posting – Know Your Rights: H.264 and You does an absolutely fantastic job in explaining the issue in plan English.  The Engadget article was in response to a very strongly worded piece called Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA.

“The video above demonstrates the comparative visual difference between VP8  and H.264 at the same datarate. The source videos were 1080p and encoded to H.264 (using build r915 of the x264 encoder, set to HQ 2 pass) and VP8 at a bitrate of 2mbps.”

To sum things up, the patents attached to H.264 are keeping Firefox from embracing HTML5 in full,  which is to be the new web coding standard. Until 2015, MPEG-LA who owns the codec, will not be requiring payment for it’s use en-masse…  what happens when 2015 rolls around is very unclear.

Watchout Netflix and Apple, YouTube is “unofficially” in the online video rental space. With a quiet debute today, YouTube  opened YouTube.com/store, which if accessed from outside the U.S will bring you to someone’s vacant channel.

The biggest advantage Youtube will have in the rental space is its access to more independent/ non-movie content.  Sure you can rent the latest blockbuster  or even art films from Netflix but you can’t rent a semi-pro tutorial on how to use After Effects CS5.   This monetization of amateurish content is part of the evolution of online video.

It will be a while before Youtube allows for non-movie or TV show content to be sold.  It’s not hard to see its inevitability.

We posted a blog a few weeks back showing one of our clients videos. In hindsight we don’t feel it was the best example of how to have fun with your video content. The same client recently did a similar video but for a drastically different demographic – so once again, meet LITTLE ALAN SMITHSON. This time Alan shows his true colours for the Star Productions DJ website. Alan is always looking for fun and unique ways to incorporate video content into his marketing – you can learn a lot from him!

Star Productions DJ website

You ever been to a website where a little person pops up to greet you and help you navigate your way around the pages? This is clearly becoming a very popular way to deliver information quickly and effectively. We get asked about making these pop up video spokespeople all the time so thought we would share a sample of one we have done recently with our client Alan Smithson and his website memoryplus.com.

Go to memoryplus.com to meet tiny Alan Smithson!

Hi there,

Thanks for stopping by. If you’re an avid blogger you may be wondering what
this blog has to offer – or in other words what you can learn from us. Well,
I don’t really know. We once tried blogging about effective business
strategies with a focus on young entrepreneurs but we folded that idea
pretty quickly. What we learned from that experience though was that
blogging was easily searchable and by blogging, random people found their
way into our website.

That’s why were blogging again!

We like random people here! We’re a business! And we’re proud to do
business!

So if you randomly popped in, once again WELCOME! We are happy to have you
drop in because we feel strongly about what we do and being able to work
with new people is one of the reasons we got into business in the first
place. So here is the declaration! THIS is what our new blog will be about:

WELCOME to The Biz Media’s blog about THE BIZ MEDIA! For all you people who
have no idea who we are, this is where we will post the video’s we have
made, client testimonials about us, fun things we are up to, and sometimes
just things that we have found online that we love and feel you will love
too. You found your way to us and right here is where you can learn a whole
ton about who we are, what we like and what we do.

Please feel free to leave a comment – we would love to hear from you!

Cheers,

Dan Demsky