Tag: Video


Help Us Help You…

March 22nd, 2011 at 06:17 by Rob DeMillo in Viewer Polls, Website

…with all due respect to Jerry Maguire, of course.

Over the last year, we noticed a pattern in our support emails: people who have been getting choppy, incomplete videos – or, worse, no video at all – seem to be coming from areas that are slightly out of reach of our video delivery network. Whether the user is in Revision3′s home country, or in Europe, Australia, or the UAE, it’s possible to be just a wee bit too far out of Revision3′s reach.  We have great programming, and great viewers who want to see what’s happening next on Dan3.0, pick up a few pointers from Tekzilla, or weird out a friend with Scam School antics… so, its up to those of us in the engine room to fix the problem.

We can tinker and tweak all we want – but we can’t very easily get on planes with laptops and fly to all points of the globe to test out our video delivery system. (Although, I think it might be worth it for the free peanuts, actually.) So, that’s where you come in…

We’ve set up two new video delivery technologies that we think will significantly improve the delivery of programming to you, no matter where you are. Taking a page from old commercials and mixing it with a sprinkling of modern crowd sourcing, we’ve created a blind “taste” test on revision3.com. Just point your browser to our Revision3 Video Vote page and help us out.

The test will only take 7-8 minutes of your time, tops. Just play the three videos (it’s Tom’s Top 5, which everyone wants to see at least three times), and answer the response questions below each. Please note, the only reason we ask you for your location is so that we can chart how we’re doing in different regions. We do not maintain or use this information for soliciting, sharing, telling your mother where you are, or any other nefarious purpose. We promise.

Thanks for the help – and please spread the word. Blog, Facebook, or Tweet out the link to our video vote page: http://www.revision3.com/videovote We’re going to leave the page up for the next few weeks and see which technology serves you better.

Thanks again!


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Why HD Matters

November 25th, 2007 at 08:17 by Jim Louderback in Polemics

My friend Kevin Maney, over at Portfolio.com, finally got my company right (Herb Scannel must have been so surprised!). But that’s not why I’m posting.

In his latest blog post, he predicts a bifurcated future of video, where traditional TV video keeps getting better, while internet delivered video on the PC stays standard definition or worse.

But I think he’s wrong. Kevin is making the mistake of equating internet delivered video with the PC. The PC is just one of many devices that will be used to view video delivered via FTP, HTTP, RTTP or other internet protocols. The audience for Revision3′s episodic, personality-driven shows, along with others in our space, watch on everything from an iPhone to home-theater PCs, portable media players, AppleTV and other web-connected devices.

And even if you do restrict yourself to the PC, the history of that device has been a constant flight to quality.

There was a time – back when I was running PC Week’s Lab - when I thought it folly for a notebook to have a color screen. In fact, monochrome monitors looked far better than the first CGA models. But EGA, VGA, SVGA, etc kept on advancing the state of display quality — and what we looked at got progressively better too.

That’s only going to continue. Today’s HDTVs are no different from the computer monitor sitting on your desk or in your laptop. Some are connected to locally deployed computers (TiVo, Motorola DCTs, etc), and others get their bits from computers a bit futher afield, either at a cable head-end or at the other side of an ATSC transmittion signal.

Quality matters. And the story of the PC and computing devices is an inexorable march towards higher-fidelity (with a short detour as the internet become the dominant transmission medium). And unless we all end up going back to dialup, that’s not going to change. Even if you’re just watching dry how-to videos, or yet another LOLCAT, the better it looks, the better the payoff. And better payoffs translate into more traffic, more ad support and more sharing. The alternative, from where I sit, is dial-up AOL. And not even Time Warner believes in that anymore.

– Jim Louderback, CEO


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