Newcast Blog

 

October 24, 2012

Office for Learning and Teaching and The Conversation breaks the record for most viewers of a live stream.

The Office for Learning and Teaching has broken Newcast’s record for the most amount of similtaneous viewers of a live stream. Over 4,200 viewers tuned in across the country and the globe via their devices to see Australia’s top Vice-Chancellors and the Minister for Higher Education deliver a lively symposium titled Future Higher Education: responding to the revolution of online learning.

The organiser of the symphosium, Siobhan Lenihan and her team, sent over 1000 emails to faculty staff, students  and Government bodies to promote live stream, which was hosted on The Conversation’s web site. You can watch it here.

The Office of Learning and Teaching had never live streamed an event before this. By connecting with their network of higher education institutions to publish articles on The Conversation weeks before the event, and by sending out emails to their many stakeholders in the lead up to the day, the symposium attracted a large number of online viewers. The viewer statistics included:

• Over 41,000 total viewer minutes
• 4293 Total streams served
• 4071 streams in Australia
• Over 2000 streams served from The Conversation website

October 17, 2012

Why use video marketing?

Here are some facts on why businesses are increasingly using video on their websistes to market goods and services. Having only one video on your website increases your SEO by 53 times!

• Online video production will account for more than one-third of all online advertising spending within the next five years. (Borrell Associates Annual Benchmarking Results, 2012)
• 76% of marketers plan to add video to their sites in 2012, making it a higher priority than Facebook, Twitter, and blog integration. (Social Media Examiner, April 2012)
• According to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 50% of manufacturers surveyed had established a YouTube presence for brand-building and connecting directly with consumers. (Industrial Marketing Today, 2011)
• The eTailing Group found that 73% of online retailers used video on product pages in 2010, up from 55% in 2009 and only 20% in 2005. 74% of the top 50 retailers used product videos, 40% used category videos, and 38% used other types of informational videos. (eMarketer, February 2011)
• Video and other multi-media product viewing options were rated more effective than any other site initiatives in an Adobe survey of almost 2,000 interactive marketers. (Adobe, May 2011)
• Leading online retailers added video to their sites in 2009 to increase online sales. PetsUnited, the owner of 10 eCommerce sites, saw a 50% jump in average sales when shoppers made a purchase after viewing a video. (eMarketer, January 2009)
• eCommerce video success can be clearly measured. Conversion rate, cart abandons, increased traffic and View Rate (VR) are key to demonstrating success. (Practical Ecommerce, March 2010)
• eMarketer senior analyst Jeffrey Grau characterizes the benefits of video as including “…a lower number of abandoned shopping carts, reduced return rates, and higher sales.” (eMarketer, January 2009)
• Search engine optimization (SEO) and online video were the two top priorities for online retailers in 2009. Online shoppers who viewed video had a larger shopping ticket than those who viewed traditional rich media such as flash animations. (Internet Retailer, January 2009)

source Invodo http://www.invodo.com/html/resources/video-statistics/

October 17 2012

TEDx Canberra

Newcast was very lucky to be asked to livestream this years TEDx Canberra. Titled ‘An Optimistic Challenge’ the conference featured talks on subjects ranging from memory training to new theories on the evolution of the dinosaurs. You can watch all the talks and see Newcast’s video stream in action by clicking right here

 

GovHack and GovCamp live streaming

June 6, 2012

The GovHack and GovCamp conferences were held over the the first weekend June. Using the #OpenGov #OpenData #Gov2Au hastags, the conferences were designed to bring designers, hackers, coders and public servants together to collaborate on ways to make the Government data more open.

 

Newcast in the Canberra Times

April 13, 2012

When Newcast launched in 2011, we were interviewed by the Canberra Times as an example of the recent surge of digital start-ups in the Capital. At the time, Newcast had secured the digital content contract for the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency’s Carbon Tax educational launch which was a headline in itself. Pictured: director Damien Maher and design consultant, Matteo Montebello.

 

March 26, 2012

3 ways to get the jump on accessibility, by Damien Maher

Its amazes us at team Newcast that it’s still widely unknown that the Australian government will soon be required by to publish all web content to accessible ‘single A’ compliance by December 2012, double A comes into force by 2014. Forward thinking departments such as the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy publish all their new content ‘double A’ as standard practice. This is good practice if youre a content producer and want to keep working for Government clients.

The new laws will have huge implications on the media production industry, most notably that it will come at an extra cost to the commissioning Department, eating into the already diminishing production budgets and potentially delay delivery for all concerned.

So what does this mean for content producers working in the online video space?

If you’re the type that likes to read through pages and pages of compliance ‘guidelines’ then be our guest, otherwise here’s a few factors to consider to think about when planning your post-production work-flow to cater for ‘accessible’ content.

Its all about managing expectations (mostly your own)

Forward planning can be of great assistance when it comes to adding accessibility compliance into the production mix. If clients expect you to deliver accessible content its important to factor in the time and costs associated with it. Take our advice, if you dont know what anything in the following list means then keep reading! Heres what you will need to factor in to your content to achieve for double A compliance:

• Word, PDF and RTF transcript
• Captions for all spoken word including music
• An AUSLAN signer window for those who cannot read (not a strict rule but good practice)
• Video codec conversion to play on any browser/device
• An accessible video platform
• Checks on font sizes, correct colour combinations and flash frames
• An audio descriptive file embedded and easily accessible for the sight impaired

Then:

• Should you master the final product and then add accessible content or vice versa?
• Will you transcribe and caption in house or externally and how long will this take?
• What sorts of files do you need to attach to the video and who will create these?
• How long will the video conversion take?
• Which video player/platform/device will you use?
• Do you have access to an ‘accessible’ content management system for multi-platform broadcast?
• What font/size should the captions be?
• What about the visuals in the video, do they need to be captioned?
• Will the video player be tab-able?
• How do you embed audio descriptive files?

This check list is only for on-demand content, live broadcast content comes with its own set of unique challenges (that we arent going to touch in this post). For more on recommended time management for production work flows please contact us.

Caption for the audience, not the client

Captioning video isnt as straight forward as keeping up with whats being said on screen. People with hearing or sight impairments commonly have literacy skills very different to those without impairments. This means that they may read at a much slower pace than the person speaking on the video or they may require the captions to be larger or smaller. Some even require audio descriptive files which is a double A requirement.

Think about the audience watching the video content and what your trying to achieve. If you are just checking the accessibility box then we doubt the target audience will understand the content, which is a shame as 1 in 4 have some form of hearing or sight impairment.

There are several video players and plug-ins that cater for interactive captioning, please contact us.

Be platform agnostic

Accessible video has to be ‘accessible’, which means it must work on any browser on any device. This can be challenging as most content producers know that certain tablets and phones dont play flash video and certian browser dont play anything at all.

When we say browsers we mean ALL browsers. Yes, this means Opera and Chrome, not to mention the more popular ones too.

Once you have mastered your content you should convert it. The following codecs should work on all platforms/devices:

• webM+
• OGV
• H.264
• HTML5

Once you’ve converted it you should test it on everything you can think of. A good idea is to write down combinations of codecs tested on browsers on certain devices. This way you wont have to test it all again next time. For more on video conversion please contact us.