GRAPHICS AND BEER
Colorado Fires - Red Cross
Every day, your local American Red Cross chapter is working for your community–keeping people safe and connecting those in need with essential resources in the face of emergencies. Thank you for your gift that makes this possible.
Whether it is responding to a home fire in the middle of the night that affects a single family or opening a shelter after a disaster that displaces an entire community, your local chapter is prepared twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to bring comfort and care. They also empower friends and neighbors to save lives through a variety of training courses including first aid, childcare, CPR and AED. Volunteers stand ready to assist military families who need to connect with loved ones overseas or a soldier who requires medical care to transition back to active duty.
Your gift is an investment in your community and helps to support our lifesaving mission down the street, across the country and around the world. Thank you for reaching out to others through the American Red Cross. Please visit us at redcross.org to see the current disaster updates, stories from those who needed us, and how you are making a difference.
Sincerely,
Giovanni Greco
Interim Regional CEO
American Red Cross Colorado Chapters
2 Billion views, VP8, Google TV = @Google grandslam!
2 Billion Views
Google this week has made some major announcements to shake up the online video community. Seven months ago YouTube reached 1 Billion views a day, this week they are announcing TWO BILLION views a day. If you had any questions about where online video is going, this is your answer.
VP8
Also google bought VP8 (a video codec) a little while back for $150 million, they have released as open source. This comes in the wake of Apple and Adobe trading punches over the future of online video formats. I think it will take a while to see where the market lands but I will tell you one thing; anytime there are multiple paths on the web the designers suffer having to design for both such as the dreaded IE6 which most JUST laid to rest.
Google TV
During Google’s IO conference they announced Google TV. Basically you will be able to watch Internet video on your TV using Google’s powerful search with a set-top box. In the past few years I think people have started to want a smart TV where they can surf the web, check their email, social media site, and watch TV all in one neat device. Like when BlueRay and HD-DVD were introduced we are about to see clashes over how we view entertainment, but unlike BlueRay and HD-DVD this might spell the beginning of end to physical media. This is possible as Netflix has shown us.
YouTube also turned 5!
64Bit upgrade & HTML 5 fight
This week has had a lot of ups and downs for Adobe the makers of Flash as well as other essential programs for designers such as Photoshop and After Effects.
To start with the good news, Adobe released Creative Suite 5 or CS5. This is by far one of the biggest updates I have seen in 10 years of video postproduction. For me the nicest update is After Effects becoming completely 64-Bit. No more 8 or 16-bit effects that have been around for 10 years, what an amazing transformation! It is like putting a Mustang engine in a Ford Fiesta = Lightning Fast.
The bad news is Apple stated they will not support Flash on their mobile devices, ever. Then Microsoft said it would not ship IE9 with Flash. Each is gearing their new products to HTML5 for video playback, which is good and bad. The good is with HTML5 content distributors can easily embed video into their webpage with simple HTML tags. The bad news is not all browsers use HTML5 like IE6 and IE7.
In the long run HTML5 video embedding will be a big deal, right now Flash is on 99%+ off all computers. The safest thing to do (if you get Lots of traffic from iPhones and iPads) is make a mobile site devoid of Flash interaction.
1080p HD Is Coming to YouTube
Read YouTube's official blog post.
This is awesome news for people shooting 1080p. They will no longer have to convert to 720p and any advancement forwarding web video is great news. It is funny to think about how just a few years ago online video was mostly AVI or WMV files that looked horrible, with small frame sizes, and a gigantic file size. We have come a long way!
On the flip side- I have a cable connection that steadily has 14MBs down and 4MB up running to a dual quad core Apple Pro with a great video card and I still get stuttering video from YouTube in HD. So will it really matter if the picture is bigger is their bandwidth is lagging? Yeah, I'll take it!
August 2009 Online Video Numbers
All totaled in August people watched 25 billion videos, 10 billion coming from Google.
Other August 2009 stats:
* 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* The average online video viewer watched 582 minutes of video, or 9.7 hours.
* 120.5 million viewers watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com.
* 44.9 million viewers watched 340 million videos on MySpace.com.
* The average Hulu viewer watched 12.7 videos.
* The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.
I think this online video thing is catching on! ;)
