What can stop this? Nothing. We will all watch everything in 3D — live & recorded; fiction & real-life action; professional content & user-generated; and on every screen whether it’s on a wall, in a pocket or connected to a keyboard & even by a variety of ubiquitous projectors that will turn any surface into a 3D display.
Great, with the head of steam we’ve got that should be soon, right? No. I have no idea when it will happen, but I can assure that we’ve got multiple years to go, maybe even decades, before our video being in 3D becomes more rule than exception.
Consider the following similar scenarios I recall from eight years working in the cable industry:
Perhaps most daunting of all, in the SEVENTIES, the Qube project for interactive television in which viewers could take electronic actions on content in their programming, and pundits are still wondering whether THIS YEAR might be the one one in which iTV finally takes off
When will mass adoption of 3D finally extend to all video, consumed anywhere, at any time, on any device? Don’t know, but I expect no sooner than:
The price ranges of 3D display devices recedes, with a low end starting in the hundreds of dollars
The 46% of US households with HDTV sets need some time before those move from the living room to the bedroom in order to make prime in-home real estate available for 3D to arrive
The CEO of my last company told me that despite the common claim, building a start-up’s not so much like running a marathon as it’s like running a short sprint and realizing that crossing the finish marks start of the next sprint. It’s very clever and I was compelled, but now that Market7 nears two-and-a-half years old, I’m back to embracing the established marathon metaphor.
It’s news to few that the 2009 business environment has been challenging. Market7 finishes the year stronger than it started, with additional, expanded, more integrated, faster & more reliable functionality across all of our modules; a larger customer base; entry into some new market spaces; and even a growing team with multiple valuable contractors who’ve joined our core team during the year. We’ve gotten a lot done and have done so, moving challenge-to-challenge, by distributing steady efforts among multiple initiatives and progressing incrementally in each. Our record of 2009 accomplishment, like the fact that you’re now reading our one-hundredth blog post of the year, would surely have been more volatile if we were constantly re-directing all resources and efforts towards whatever single opportunity promised most at any moment.
The photo above is me running, and under-pronating, in the year that will become 14-ago starting at midnight. It’s from the one literal marathon that I’ve run. Recalling that experience, the metaphor is very apt for building a start-up. Market7 goes into 2010 confident we’re pacing ourselves well and ready to gain some serious ground, and we look forward to sharing such a year with our community. HNY!
Thought it would be clever to pair the catch-phrase from Days Of Thunder at the start of this post with the catch-phrase from Talladega Nights at the end, but imdb reveals a different Tom Cruise vehicle as source of the line above: Top Gun, of course. My bad. Anyhow, that need, for speed: we’ve been feeling too, just like Maverick, and probably also Cole Trickle (name of lead character in Days Of Thunder — I had to look that up).
We love regularly adding modules and features which we know address real challenges and desires in production of media. The collection of all of these elements is an application suite on which people rely for vital activities of theirs. And delivering such an application suite, with its feature richness, over the internet, to browsers, presents performance challenges. The past couple of weeks have been one of our periodic times of assessing and implementing techniques for faster performance, and we are glad to already be hearing from users noticing the improvement. We come out of this release with a few more acceleration ideas that we’ll weave into our work going forward.
Besides being faster, one other significant initiative of this new release is that when people who already have video.Market7 log-in access, and are added to new projects, it’s automatic & instantaneous with no need for such new project members to accept invitations (although they do receive emails notifying them of being added). A few of our higher-project-volume customers have requested this, and we agree, so there it is & thanks for the correspondence.
Anyhow, like Ricky Bobby would say, do shake-n-bake some content in our faster video.Market7.
Caught Meet The Press over weekend about healthcare legislation and international climate discussions. Market7 factors into these top-of-news topics. Work is underway with our first health-oriented customer which publishes a broad library of video for people to be better educated about how to take care of ourselves, looking to video.Market7 for more organization and efficiency in their varying and ambitious production efforts. And overall we are enthusiastic about the environmental implications of helping spread use of video content to connect people and enrich communication without transportation, and for similar reasons about how we enable production teams to be dispersed but cohesive when making video. While we’re not appearing in this news, yet, we are grateful and excited to have beneficial implications for some of these important issues.
The annual list, which this year was pared down from over a few dozen nominations, recognizes the movers and shakers in the online video space. It also, in the words of editor Jim O’Neill, highlights those companies that “revolve around such cool technology” and “are driving online video forward by providing structure to build on or the muscle to move it.”
Head on over to Fierce Online Video to read the Market7 write-up and keep checking back as Market7’s industry value prop is further explored by Fierce in the new year.
People touting being online from airplanes is about as trite as people pointing out how we increasingly consume the video we want, when we want, where we want & on the device we want. I’m doing both here — is combining those observations even more trite, or kind of insightful? I’m not sure, so I’ll try to keep this brief.
I’ve been taking advantage of the free Dec-Jan WiFi to work online the whole flight (we’re over Utah now), including catching up on a couple of video podcasts.
Through the gap in the seats in front of me to my right a couple has swapped halfway through the flight so that each of them could watch The Hangover on the same in-flight VoD purchase in the seat’s screen.
Through the same gap on my left A guy is playing around with the Red interactive functionality on his screen while he’s got MTV up live in the screen’s corner by PiP.
Both of the guys next to me are using their iPhones to get online by WiFi. I haven’t seen them watch video on them, but they could.
& here I go making with the zeitgeist cliches (but it’s so true): wow we’re progressing from rapidly-extinguishing status quo of everyone being confined to whatever happens to be showing on the tube screens in the ceiling. In fact, my last NYC trip a couple months ago, on a different airline, the only electronic choices were to work on my laptop offline or tilt up my head to consume Mall Cop.
We have always used GetSatisfaction as a lifeline for our customers in need of support, and a channel for exchanges about ideas and questions. We use customer recommendations to decide what features and improvements to focus on. The large majority of what we’ve built directly responds to requests users share with us, and already our service integrates dozens of features initiated and enhanced through the feedback provided by GetSatisfaction in particular.
To make that easier, we have embeded the GetSatisfaction tab into our site. Better yet, we now share a single sign-on so customers who want to leave feedback don’t have to log on to their service separately or even have a GetSatisfaction account. You can now do everything right within the security of your Market7 project.
So try it out and let us know what you think (both good and bad) it’s the way we will get better.
Extensive recent interaction with users reveals that value from our service can improve with better performance from our site, largely faster responsiveness on page loads and other user activities. This has been our primary focus the last couple of releases, and will continue to be our emphasis through year end. Like always, we have tons & tons of ideas for new features and entirely new modules, and we can hardly wait to get back to constructing those, but for now we’re prioritizing infrastructural upgrades. Some of the recent enhancements include implementing a new approach to load balancing for consistent service availability and tuning our JavaScript to reduce (/eliminate?) “slow script” warnings especially in Internet Explorer — our engineers will be posting soon to elaborate on the steps we’re taking.
Of course, we do have several neat, new features implemented in this release (click any of the images to enlarge):
Shadow-text in draft mode of scripts to clarify where character-name & spoken dialog go:
Script Shadow Text
Ability to click into & manually overwrite comment placement time in annotative player for precise placement:
Comment Time Overwrite
Feedback tab prominently available on every page to interact with us on questions comments etc.:
Feedback Tab
That last one is part of a broader initiative of ours for better communication with our users about their use of video.Market7 integrated within the service itself, on which Shannon will expand in upcoming blog posts.
