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Posts Tagged ‘Video Uploads’

Drobo is having a "Spirit of Macworld 2010" video contest

Filed under: Macworld, Peripherals

If you’re an amateur or professional videographer and you’ll be attending Macworld Expo 2010 in San Francisco this week, Data Robotics has a contest just for you.

Come up with an original video (less than 60 seconds in length) that best captures the spirit of Macworld 2010, submit it to a special Drobo Flickr group by February 19, and you’ll have an opportunity to win one of two Drobo S five-drive storage devices (note that non-Pro Flickr users are limited to 2 video uploads per month). The Drobo S connects to your Mac via USB 2.0, Firewire 800, or eSATA, and can be populated with up to five drives for tons of storage. TUAW has reported on the new Drobo S and Drobo Elite devices in the past, and they’re a popular storage tool for anyone who needs vast amounts of expandable storage but doesn’t want to hassle with administering a RAID array.

To find out if you’ve won the contest after your entry has been made, just follow Data Robotics on Twitter at http://twitter.com/drobo. Full contest rules and instructions can be found here.

TUAWDrobo is having a “Spirit of Macworld 2010″ video contest originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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YouTube Direct Gives News Orgs A Way To Accept User-Submitted Videos

Love it or hate it, there’s no doubt that “citizen journalism” — the trend where ‘regular people’ record video, snap photos, and tweet live from breaking news events —  is quickly gaining steam. One of the biggest catalysts for the trend has been YouTube, which gives people an easy way to upload and share the video footage they shoot from the heat of the action. And while we’ve seen some media sites, like CNN’s iReport, attempt to take advantage of this user submitted content, many news sites haven’t found a good way to integrate it. Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage.

The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites. Of course, news organizations will still be responsible for actually curating the content to ensure that it’s accurate, which is a task that will require additional manpower for the more popular news sites. All video content uploaded through these tools will be available on YouTube proper as well.

My biggest concern with this kind of reporting is always credibility — oftentimes you’ll come across videos on YouTube that seem like they’re relevant to breaking news, but are unable to determine who uploaded the clip. Fortunately, as an open source tool YouTube Direct allows organizations to customize their submission process. Hopefully the more credible ones will require (or at least encourage) uploaders to leave their contact information, so that fact checkers can follow up on their video reports to ensure their validity.

News organizations aren’t the only sites looking to accept user generated videos, either — YouTube Direct will work that any site that wants to upload video content, so we should probably expect to see some more creative uses in the future.

The feature is not live quite yet, but should be up by tomorrow morning.

Image by quinn.anya

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Five Video Apps That Play Nicely With Twitter

Video apps that cater to Twitter users are all the rage at the moment, but this particular bandwagon is filled to overflowing with apps that rock jostling for mindshare with apps that barely function.

We’ve spent the past couple of days testing and retesting a slew of these sites, and we are ready to present our top five picks for sharing video content on Twitter. Read on to find out which app comes out on top and which ones didn’t make the cut.

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5. TweeTube is currently available only for Mac OS X and requires a download, but it allows users to share webcam videos, images, YouTube videos, and links via Twitter. The video component reminded us a bit of 12seconds.tv or Seesmic’s video offering from back in the day, i.e., last month. It wasn’t our favorite app to play with, and the limitations seem to outstrip the benefits.

Type: Twenty-five second webcam uploads that are embeddable and linkable with Twitter-enabled comments.

Test Video

4. BubbleTweet is a service we’ve been trying and testing for several months with mixed results. However, the premise is great for Twitter. The site lets users upload a simple, 30-second webcam recording, which then shows up on Twitter as a small, unobtrusive “bubble” of video over the web interface. BubbleTweet also lets users upload prerecorded video content.

Type: Thirty-second webcam recordings or video uploads that appear in a video bubble over the Twitter web interface.

Test Video

3. TwitVid.io is the Twitter-friendly video recording and uploading tool from video website-creating service Fliggo. It allows users to record up to ten minutes of video from a webcam or upload videos they’ve already created and tweet a URL. Co-founder Chrys Bader also tells us they’re getting ready to launch an iPhone app soon.

Type: Single-user webcam recordings of up to 10 minutes or video uploads from a drive.

Test Video

2. Twitcam is a pared-down offering of parent company LiveStream. It runs a Twitter-based chat program alongside the video itself, and videos are archived for linking and embedding after the fact. Unfortunately, the tweet/chat module only allows users to send out one tweet every 30 seconds, which minimizes the real-time fun to be had. Still, it’s been one of the easier, more fun apps we’ve tried today.

Type: Single-webcam live-streamed video with Twitter-based chat module and post-stream archive of video and chat.

Test Video

1. TwitVid is a great little app we wrote about recently that allows users to record and upload video from a webcam or any video-enabled mobile device or to upload prerecorded video. They also have a nifty iPhone app that works like a charm. The site also lets users auto-post their TwitVids to other sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Best of all, each video has its own “like” and “retweet” buttons as well as Meebo-powered chat, all of which feed back into the Twitter stream. As far as Twitter integration with video, we tend to think TwitVid does it best.

Type: Single-user webcam/mobile recordings with retweet, chat, “buzz,” and other Twitter options.

Test Video

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