[IMC-Video] update on visionontv - undercurrents project

[Mick Fuzz]

hi all

After a train journey from swansea to london today
with hamish and paul from undercurrents.org here's a
bit of an update on what they are up to with their
projects including 
http://visionontv.com/ 

Paul has been putting out series on 
a) you tube
b) blip.tv and then feeding the feed into itunes
directory. (which is getting loads of hits, 20,000
average per video)

And doing this is getting an average of 10 to 25,000
viewers per video he's putting up. In total that's
adding them up. 
http://youtube.com/user/undercurrentspaulo

Anyway - 
the idea is to promote the http://visionontv.com
project, as a more sound project technically ir more
open source less corporate -
It is using bittorrent - via the azureus /vuze upload
(because it's dead easy to use) and then creating
Media RSS channels - and promoting Miro to play these
channels.

I think I've convinced them to use drupal to create
these Media RSS feeds rather than Broadcast machine.
Which is what they are using at the moment. 

The idea is to theme these channels, by series, like
the A-Z of Bushcraft and create a flashy front page
for that page. One thing on that page which  blip.tv
does is to allow you to create a series and queue up
all videos in that series / on a theme in a embedded
flash player -
http://www.undercurrents.org/visionon/bushcraft.htm

Have a look around as see what you think. There is a
lot of stuff there which is really interesting as far
as use-ability for non-techy people is concerned. 

The other idea is to customise Miro player to make it
easier to use. The idea is to remove the channel bar
on the left and package it for download with a pre-set
of channels installed. All users would have to do
would be to press play. 

They are looking to get programmers to make these
changes so that any producers who want to do this
could make available a custom install of Miro with
their channels enabled. 

They are looking for programmers to be able to do
that. 

So there are some varying approaches here, but i'll
try to keep you up to date on what it happening. But
what I really like about this lot is that they are
really getting people checking out their content and
being pragmatic, but working towards taking the users
in a more opensource direction. 

ps - i've done a drupal website for them so they can
get used to using it here 
http://beyondtvfestival.info

do log in and create a profile if you feel a desire to
network yo selves

ok cya
mick

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email : mick at mutantmedia.org.uk