A live streaming video of a parking lot, where Britney Spears was expected, grabbed thousands of viewers for nearly two hours. A recent courthouse appearance by Hulk Hogan's son captivated many others. With just a simple video camera, laptop and mobile phone connection, producers and reporters from TMZ are bringing live stories to its online viewers.

**UPDATE 6/25/08** So here's how it works: You embed the widget above on your site and include a call to action separately: "Hey!! Upload your crazy dog videos here!!" When your readers upload a vid to their own personal YouTube channel you receive an email from VidyUp that includes the embed code. From there you just grab the code (if you like the vid) and drop it into your site (as seen below). Pretty basic...but exactly what I could have used 3 years ago when we launched the original coBRANDiT site.

coBRANDiT provides video production, distribution and consulting services to brand marketers, agencies, and organizations of all sizes. In the past year we've produced an award winning vlog for Flying Dog Ales, RSS-fed video widgets for General Motors, and an interview series for WOMMA, among others. We're looking for video projects that involve & engage enthusiast communities.

PRODUCTION:
Videoblog? Sales tool? Interview series? Event coverage? Man on the street research? From on-the-scene live video streams to HD presentations, we've done it...and we specialize in super fast turnarounds. Have a CGM initiative? Talk to us about platforms for video sharing in communities.

DISTRIBUTION:
It's not about people coming to your site anymore. It's about being where they are. We utilize platforms and tools that make video and related content easy to share...wherever your audience likes to go.

CONSULTING:
Want to get into online video but don't know how? Need help with strategy for an RFP? Wondering how social media can integrate with traditional methods? We can design a marketing program that ties together offline events with online publicity, social networking, and alternative media.

OUR NETWORK:
In partnership with guerrilla marketing agency Street Attack we offer a national network of event facilitators, street teams, video gatherers, and online community managers capable of running a full-scale alternative marketing program. Introducing a new product in 20 markets? Want to find the people who are into your brand and provide them insider access? Do you want to communicate in new channels and give people something to talk about? We’re your guys. And gals.

Monthly retainer for long term project management and consulting. Day rate and hourly fees for short term projects. Final prices depend on length and complexity of project, activation components, number of markets covered, and deliverables. Rush fees may apply.

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR A QUOTE, PLEASE CONTACT:

Owen Mack
Chief of Strategy & Development

owen@cobrandit.com
617.823.9286 direct

Download our capabilities .pdf
Download our capabilities PowerPoint deck (with video, 41 mb)
Download our capabilities Keynote deck (for mac, 41 mb)
Grab our widget (as seen above) & pass it along. Thanks!

Ok folks...a breakdown of the technologies we used to vlog from WOMM-U last week in Miami. We used two cameras: a Nokia N95 8gb and a Flip Video Ultra. The N95 is a multi-functional phone/computer often billed as competition for the iPhone. It's user interface blows by comparison but it shoots very nice video and has a few video apps. available that make it a great vlogging tool. You can shoot video to memory and then send the video (we use Shozu) to many social media video sites at once with one touch of a button. I typically send videos to a couple of youtube channels, a couple of blip.tv channels, and utterz.com though there are 20+ others i could set up. Shozu uploads are limited to a 10mb file size (though direct uploads to individual sites are not). That's why we didn't use Shozu in Miami. Instead, we live streamed via Qik.

We loaded Qik onto the N95 and set up our account online. When you open up Qik on the N95 it takes about 2 seconds to load, then you hit the button labeled "stream" and there you are, live streaming to the web with a few seconds of delay. Viewers can type in chat comments and they appear on the screen of the N95 in real time. This means if I'm talking to Joeseph Jaffe (as I did at the womma party in Miami, see photo above) viewers can ask questions which appear on my screen and I can ask Joe to respond. Joe sent out a tweet to alert his audience and we were off and running. As a side note: Qik videos can be viewed or embedded in two ways: you can embed a player which shows live video whenever you go live, or you can embed and view archived streams as individual clips (like you do on youtube). Here's the archived stream created while Joe was running my N95. I had gone to get beer...



Ok, understand so far? Good. Now it's gonna get more complex...we were also using Mogulus. Mogulus allows you to produce a 24/7 video channel that's always playing a rotation of selected video. Whenever you go live (which you can do via an N95 and qik, or via a web cam like the one built into you laptop) the live stream automatically bumps the rotation and there you are. Live. Mogulus lets you overlay branding and tickers and titles and crawls, so you can apply text and images to your live feeds (and the vids in rotation for that matter). We set up a Mogulus channel for WOMM-U at mogulus.com/womma. Mogulus is set up so that multiple producers can login from remote locations. You could run a live or near live channel from different places around the world. This just in from our team in Dakar! Pretty cool. Mogulus allows chat in the same way Qik does, and offers customized embeddable players. I'm not embedding one here because they're a pain in a blog post. They're always on! They need to be on a standalone page like this one: the coB homepage.

So far so good. But it turns out that live video is hard to produce (surprise!). Easy technically, but in terms of compelling content you've got to have your interviews and situations lined up pretty well. And to get the chat going you've got to do a little pre-publicity and then run the camera for awhile to give people a chance to respond. People aren't used to live web video. The first comments we get are usually something like "Are you really live? Say hello to me if you are." To make live video work well you've got to have pre-determined go live times and you've got to stream for 15-20 minutes minimum. AND you've got to have some good content lined up. A hot interview, a sweet scenario, a crazy event, a compelling demo. Want the easy mobility of an N95 but don't need or want to go live? Want to produce video you can actually edit? Ahhhh....Flip Video Ultra.

These $140 cameras hold an hour of flash video content and produce amazingly crisp 600x480 video with good sound. The file formats can be a little wonky (.avi) but there are easy workarounds available. The converter I use is streamclip, available from apple. Here's the Flip workflow: Put it in your pocket. When you want to shoot, pull it out, turn it on and in 3 seconds you're ready to shoot. Hit the red button and you're recording, hit it again and you stop. There's a basic digital zoom that helps in some situations, but it degrades the video quality. When you've got an hour of content, flip out the built in USB and load it on to your computer. You can load on files directly (the camera functions just like an accessory hard drive) or you can edit and compress videos right on the Flip--all the software is on the camera's drive in a nifty little program that opens up on your computer screen. The way we work is to bring the files into iMovie or Final Cut Pro and edit them down a bit and add titles and music. Then we do our own compression and throw it up on YouTube or Viddler or load it into our Mogulus stream or whatever. Here's a mix we produced this way at WOMM-U. It's not live, but pretty close if you work fast and the content can better because it's edited...but you lose the live chat functionality. Though you can chat about non-live video through Mogulus if you want to.

Part of the question here is quality vs. quantity, and is live really valuable? Depends on the situation. I can certainly think of a lot of applications for live video, but you really need to do the advanced set-up, PR, and pre-production to get it to engage people and work properly. Near live like we did with the Flip worked pretty darn well, though at an event you need to set aside time for editing or be prepared to stay up late. Need more quality? That's why we aren't throwing out our nice Sony HD camera and our wireless mics...yet.

We are taking the opportunity to make a PR announcement: coBRANDiT is teaming up with guerrilla marketing agency Street Attack to offer a full suite of alternative marketing services. We've built out the widget below to help spread the word. Check it out and let me know what you think! (That goes for the live vlogging too...)

In February 2008, a group of 20 bloggers and podcasters hosted "My ooVoo Day". The participating bloggers chatted with fans via ooVoo. To thank all the bloggers hosting the chats, ooVoo donated $30,000 to the Frozen Pea Fund, a fund established to support the American Cancer Society's Making Strides Against Breast Cancer campaign, in honor of blogger and cancer patient Susan Reynolds. Go to http://www.oovoo.com/ to download ooVoo...

I've since found squared5's mpeg streamclip, which is a converter that solved all the probs, 'cept the audio is still really soft. Shame on Flip for not being up front about the problem on their site.