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A follow up on a followup - this time it's to add a link to the YouTube API blog about Flash and the HTML5 <video> tag.

A couple of good points in there - and a few things you can take away from it. Yes, Flash provides a convenient way to lets users record straight from their machine to ChatrouletteYouTube, and yes Flash has some rights management and streaming goo that let's YouTube control access/rights for commercial content ... in the US.

With the popularity and buzz surrounding the iPad (which has something like a daunting 3 million units sold across 80 days) as well as other mobile and tablet devices you could be forgiven for thinking that the hardware is singularly responsible for driving a technological shift. The hype and shininess are pretty compelling reasons for why so many consumers are choosing fork out a not inconsiderable sum for these devices, but the underlying changes and refinements in content provision and revenue generation, the marketplace, that makes them work is an arguably more interesting development.

Even with the popularity of the marketplace model, it is clear that there is no single strategy driving its evolution; the options available at the moment allow content to be bought, licensed, rented or borrowed with the different rules for different geographic regions. Whilst what the consumer is paying for and getting is not always particularly clear, going by the sheer number of items in Apple's marketplace it is a model that emphasises convenience and low-cost in a way that has proved very popular.

(Image copyright brendanlim from Flickr)

As far as marketplaces go, Amazon's Kindle platform is notable in that, as well as having its own tailored hardware, it also targets a range of devices providing access to the same broad collection of subscription based alongside the more well known eBook. Included in the devices that are supported is the practically ubiquitous iPhone. Whilst Apple's ‘App store' marketplace model is quite tightly controlled, applications are able to provide an additional store front to content, a marketplace within a marketplace, though there is generally some kind of competition. In the case of Kindle this comes from a number of other devices and applications, as well as from the original creators and publishers of the Newspaper and Magazine titles who provide both commercial and free routes to access their content.

If the benefit of access to numerous mobile devices and a pre-existing marketplace whilst only having to forego a percentage of the revenue generated from content sales isn't enough of a draw card, bundling in the tools to reformat display the content might make it one.  This is where the current offering around video looks a less convincing.

Access to video content online is still a space that is somewhat unsure of itself, with technology playing a far less transparent role that it arguably should, if our familiarity with the television is anything to go by. It seems that the view of success is still very much a kind of lonely experience based around a small rectangle sitting inside webpage, often failing to even match the quality and convenience of plain old analogue standard-definition television.

Google's foray into the online television space with some serious hardware partners could change this. Based around the Android operating system, GoogleTV is being sold as a platform that brings the findability of the web to the simplicity and tangibly social setting television enjoys. When viewed alongside Google's broader activities, including development of a music market place and acquisition the video technology company On2 for the VP8 video codec, it has a lot of promise.

Assuming that GoogleTV is not entirely ad-supported and just YouTube on your TV, it will be interesting to see how the marketplace element of this service compares to models like Seesaw, AppleTV, Microsoft's Zune and the subscription and pay-per-view scenarios common amongst cable and satellite broadcasters. Even more so will be seeing if it can provide a very compelling shortcut to an on-demand web based service to those who were a little bit late on the bandwagon. If this gambit delivers the right mix of ease of use and richness, it should set out an approach and a platform that many traditional linear broadcasters and even content producers will follow.

There is more choice in browser-based web video providers and implementation technologies than there has ever been before - YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Revver, MySpace, Facebook to name the popular fraction of what is available - and yet, delivering video via the web can still be time consuming and complex. If anything, this complexity is likely to worse before it gets better - however it is obvious that there is a huge potential to develop the richness around video delivered online.

I've worked on a number of rich media and video projects, each delivering something slightly different, and each having to work through the production of high-quality media and wrapping an experience around it. I'll admit that getting a single video up onto the web to share with friends, colleagues and fellow tweeps is pretty painless - Facebook will allows users upload an entire gigabyte of data in a single video clip, something I find quite astounding. Equally I'd admit that the tools out there to capture video are better and more commonplace than ever - with devices like the Flipcam, Nikon's D90 (my favourites) and the huge range of dedicated video cameras out there being capable of capturing video to a high standard.

The first challenge is blend of expectation and experience. Social media tools allow us to produce and distribute video live or pre-recorded video in a matter of minutes. The experience of YouTube is frequently cited by users as the norm, along with the expectation that a project can and will deliver a similarly powerful set of tools. Not a problem for brands making forays into video delivery in the social media space - just pick up the toolset and use it, produce discrete video elements and place them inside blog posts, against products, within campaign pages or the like.

But where are the tools that allow us to provide a much more immersive experience? One which is more than just embedded Flash, Silverlight or HTML5 <video> elements in a page, where video is the primary medium, the experience itself? They're in the hands of the designers and developers. Whilst standardisation around the very recognisable rectangular video player is happening, achieving the levels of richness above this still require some very specialised skills.

Then there is the minefield that is quality. An idea of what might be an acceptable quality in the eyes viewers is one thing - but delivering that quality to the audience who have come to expect video that is constantly 'on' (think TV) is something which requires an exponential jump in the complexity of the production workflow. The notion of quality in video is closely tied to the context of the viewer; it's not enough to have the content and to deliver it at a preset size, bit-rate and format - the capabilities of the device (and there are lots of them) which is playing the video, in terms of both connection speed and computing power, means that quality in one instance (20mbit+ connection to the internet and a large 1080p widescreen TV) if very different to quality in another (a mobile device and 3G broadband). Production workflows that enable the progressive downloading and adaptive streaming of content go some way to alleviate the issues on the client side - but these scenarios require faster and more specialised hardware and software to achieve. Quality is something that must be measured constantly, and the challenge is to make this active readjustment seamless and transparent to all but the most hard core of users. The Open Video Player Smooth HD demo delivered using Microsoft Silverlight shows this off nicely and the Flash examples on these pages are similarly good.

It's clear that cable and satellite broadcasters, particularly in the US, are dealing with this quality problem in their digital broadcasts already. Though theirs seems fundamentally to be an issue of the bandwidth available being less than what may be required - to the point where the quality of material is drastically reduced in order fit within the constraints of the bandwidth they have.

Part of the quality problem is around access to content on a global scale. The use and evolution of content distribution networks (CDN) goes some way to addressing this system -  enabling content providers to offload the heavy lifting of content delivery and allowing the replication of content globally, pushing it out as close as possible to the users who will access it. The use of the CDN in delivering video is already very prevalent and will no doubt become more and more so, allowing a shift in video delivery to be more or less entirely on demand via the internet with commercial models that are regionally appropriate.

Earlier this year, in CNet's article "iPlayer uncovered", the BBCs iPlayer was stated as using 60+ encoding servers to create the video files that resulted in them pushing out content at an eye watering rate of around 60 gigabits per second during peak times - with content delivered from around the UK and even from Europe as required. That's just under a DVD going out over the wires every second, and illustrates quite succinctly just how important the delivery part of their service is, and hints at the cost involved in getting video to the web.

Cost is the elephant in the room when it comes to getting video online. I've implied that getting video online is quick and easy at the YouTube end of the scale - but that it may not be all that cheap once you start to move away from YouTube and the like. The cost comes about through the requirement for video production tools, dedicated encoding infrastructure and licensing, storage for encoded and raw video, publishing workflow systems, digital rights management and content licensing, CDN replication and bandwidth costs - and people to tie it all together; and this can all change depending on what output formats will be used. To put it into perspective, at the point where you are pushing video across the airwaves or through a network, apparently streaming video costs around 16,000 times what broadcast costs to deliver.

And then there is how to make money in the process, or at least not go broke, which is the subject of a huge number of articles, arguments and discussions.

All that said though, the success of online video hints to a shift to a CDN type model for content delivery that may overtakesome aspects of broadcasting. One of the key drivers for this change, and something I believe would be massively beneficial, may well be the audience's ability to have increasingly closer relationships with content producers, and for content producers to have more direct control over the access to the content they create and insight into how it performs commercially.

Perhaps the opportunity here lies in reconciling many this myriad of complex production choices into a set of on-demand services, a sort of reconfigurable version of YouTube, which could operate from public or private cloud type infrastructures.

Here's hoping complex parts of online video delivery can undergo the kind of shift that enables us to concentrate less on the hard parts delivering it, and more on creating it.

Following on from my waxing lyrical about the Tesco WPF app that was shown at PDC last week...

Ubiquitous computing

One of the interesting comments about the Tesco app during development was about how nicely this fits within the concept 'ubiquitous computing' - the app would definitely sit nicely on the front of a refrigerator door, though the Touchsmart's nice shiny screen is quite susceptible to greasy finger marks .
I find the idea of calm technology, unobtrusive multipurpose, multifunction and generally very useful but practically invisible computers to be... well... quite exciting. Particularly when I consider the types of experiences that we might deliver through the paradigms and devices developed out of the Wii, iPhone, Android based phones, the Surface, more recently the SecondLight demo and all of the various of  mash-ups between. It all points to some really interesting new ways of interacting with our stuff mobile phones, televisions, cars, fridges and vacuum cleaners as well as how they might interact with one another.

They're coming...

Perhaps not quite ubiquitous computing and more the ubiquity of computers; surely 2008 is the year of the little tiny computer? With HP, Samsung, Acer, MSI, Dell and a magnitude of others following in the footsteps of the Asus EEEpc and releasing netbooks or compact home friendly media type PCs. Wikipedia tells me there are no less than 20 models out there at the moment – even 3G mobile broadband operators are giving them away for free on contract! [There also also all the embedded systems that seemed to have been spawned from wireless networking (mine little Fonera runs Linux) but I'm going to ignore those for the meantime.]

Cheap, portable, connected AND useful? Throw in solar powered chargers and maybe it’s ubiquitous computing (in the reversed sense I noted above) that will really sell these Intel Atom, Via Nano and other low power CPU based machines and save the environment? Wait - netbooks don't cope with fullscreen video playback!? Then perhaps not until they're performant enough to offer the sort Supermarket meets Xbox Live meets the iPhone applications I'd like to imagine being the notice board on my fridge. Maybe someone out there can run Bubblemark across their Netbook collection and tell us what the scope of *richness* there is for tiny little computers at the moment?

And displays which are big enough to be seen at a distance might be a problem; at the moment even the big 10 inch netbook displays are a little on the small side to be noticed and interacted with - maybe the petite lovechild of the Touchsmart and the EEE pc fills that gap? I wonder what kind of glue you need to stick a computer to a fridge?