#dynamicvideo

Google Vogon Awesomeness

Careers are rarely a straight line. The good ones, like any quality art, come through a struggle that takes years. I'm finally on a path that feels like the right one, so let me take a few minutes and navel gaze. You might find something interesting in here, or you might think I'm grandstanding. Either way, I'm taking a few minutes to look back on my struggle.

Let's start in 2008. Ugh. That year.

I had left a really comfy job with little oversight to helped launch a tech news / reviews / database site. I was picked to be the leader of the site, and as the leader I was responsible for building the editorial parts from the ground up.

Where is that site today? Wiped from the face of the internet.

So let's just say I was really bad at that venture. Like really bad. Like it imploded likely singularly thanks to my lack of skill / personal awareness of my weaknesses.

To put it how I'd have said it at the time: That sucked.

I thought the 2008 venture was going to be it. I had worked my way out of TV news, where I discovered even though I was obsessed with producing video content, however I loathed covering local news. It was impossible to care less about the content of the newscast. But, I knew I cared a lot about technology content, and I was lucky enough to escape TV and work with some great technology publications in CNET and Engadget... mostly doing video production.

Somewhere along the line, I had the hubris that I could recreate one of the most respected technology brands, just by hard work and sweat, basically copying their structure. I didn't really have an original bent to what I was trying to do, nor had I done a lot of writing nor leading a group of writers, but I was excited about the topic area, and thought I could do anything.

Yeah. I was wrong.

I had a theory about our differentator. I thought comparison charts would be it. I thought everyone wanted to shop for gadgets that way. I probably should have realized that wasn't the case, since I had never looked at a comparison chart, but hey, retrospect.1 In the years since the lean startup movement has evolved, it's clear that had I come up with a simplistic chart comparing major phones, and not done it by coding lots of software, we could have come to that conclusion faster and less painfully.

Anyway, bad direction, bad leadership, bad at following up on tasks, that venture basically was destined to die with me at the helm. Oh, and remind me what the hell that had to do with video again? My strength?

So basically I was fired. I quit, but realistically the venture was doomed so had I not quit, I would have been fired, and everyone else was laid off eventually.

After what seemed like the biggest professional failure I'd ever had, I basically had a month or two of mourning. My wife tells me I was pretty depressed.

I started watching a lot of TV. Specifically ESPN. I'm not particularly a sports fan, but I thought, and still think, they're some of the most innovative video producers in the world. I only mildly like sports, but I love ESPN2.

Lightning bolt.

Would it be possible for me to create an ESPN quality show out of my living room? Maybe an Around the Horn style show for technology?

I started experimenting. I had some of my NYC media friends3 do a test, where I rigged three extra computers to share a screen. I connected each of them into an audio mixer, and I routed their audio so that none of them could hear themselves, but they could hear each other.

That evolved in to TechVi. TechVi was a daily show that I produced solo for the first year or so, where I'd have different technology journalist guests come on the show, and talk about one topic of the day. I kept it under 10 minutes, because YouTube had a strict upload limit of 10 minutes back then.

Eventually, I met Iyaz Akhtar, and convinced him to do TechVi with me as my cofounder. We didn't know what we were doing, but it was fun. (Iyaz has since moved onto amazing things at twit.)

The show was ahead of its time for sure, and production quality that was pretty good, but still not exactly a source people turned to for technology news. Also I didn't spend enough time on the content. I found myself messing more around with coding the site than preparing the show, so I wasn't extremely happy with how the content of the show came out.

By coding on TechVi, I learned that coding is something anyone could do. I created a hacked-together site that would poll the video player for its timecode. When the player would hit a certain timecode, the player would shrink, and the background would change out for an iframe of a website, effectively allowing me to dynamically insert b-roll into the video. Also, since I made it so the site was a big single-page app, the video player would continue to play even when you clicked around on links.

Using websites / iframes as b-roll was pretty unique. It meant that the video, while crucial to the experience, didn't have to be the entire experience on its own.

I realized: Shouldn't video be like that? Video right now is this static thing that cobbles together clips and stuff, and then once it's rendered, it's one thing. Stuck that way. Forever. Shouldn't it just stay clips forever? Shouldn't you be able to update a video the same way you update a blog post? Shouldn't you be able to edit out a word, or swap a video clip, after the video has been published? What if video wan't just this static thing, what would be possible?

That's where the path I'm on now starts.4

Vidpresso is an expression of the answer of those questions. It's a way for TV producers to start wading in the waters of dynamic video.5

For what it's worth, John Falcone of CNET actually gave me a great idea that I should have done. He said people don't really want to compare items, they just want to know the best. He said a page that just did extensive research and listed the best would win. So all the scores and rubricks aren't really the tool people use. People just want to know what the best thing is. That, incidentally, is what (The Wirecutter)[http://thewirecutter.com] is, and they're killing it. I should haven listened. ↩︎

I used to work for ESPN earlier in my career as a freelancer. It was heaven, working in a fast-paced, innovative video production truck. ↩︎

Kyle Monson, who was at PC Mag at the time, Maggie Reardon of CNET, and Nicholas Carlson of Business Insider. You guys helped me out hugely. Thanks! ↩︎

For some reason, it doesn't feel like I can contextualize what happened after that yet. Justin.TV and my experiences with Y Combinator are hugely formative for my company, but I don't think I can effectively know what impact they've had yet, so those will have to wait. ↩︎