Blog Relations

A “new” type of political tv channel launched today here in the UK, 18 Doughty Street named after the same London street where the Spectator used to live, and where I once worked on the far less prestigious Money Week, now defunct (there’s another publication of the same name now).
I hate to gripe, but video people often forget that there’s not much point in seeing somebody, if you can’t hear what they are saying.  The audio track on the  programme I tried to watch starts with a hooter, and goes on to sound like a man in a bath.  I didn’t stay with it for more than a few seconds.

As Matthew Lynn was saying to me the other day, video is actually better on the TV.   It’s so much more comfortable to sit back and watch a good picture.  TV isn’t dead yet.

Here is a brief pitch for our video services. It plays for just over a minute.

The video steaming is courtesy of Google. The big advantage of hosting a video on Google is that it is free. It gives you some easy code to paste onto your own website, which produces the little “TV screen” containing your movie. But the large default size produces a rather blurred picture, which is why I scaled it down in size to make the picture smaller but sharper. Google also takes a couple of days to approve the video, presumably to check that it isn’t either pornography or a mountain production by Osama bin Laden.

As regular visitors know, we are very much into audio podcasts. Of course video blogging is a promising line too. I’ve just been chatting to Steve Beer, a camera operator whom we know well. He tells me that his latest piece of commercial work is a short film of a hydraulic lift, which sounds just fascinating…. We’ll be shooting a short a video pitch for our services tomorrow. When it come to visually appealing subjects, I think I’m on a par with the lift. So instead, I’ve decided to test the video blogging technology with a very different example of Steve’s work. It seems rather more enjoyable than either me or the lift.

The video pitch of me follows in the next day or so… The style will be somewhat different.

By the way, this is streaming off “>Google video, entirely for free.