Be a Webcaster Without Becoming a Webmaster
Camcorders are everywhere as a result of their point-and-shoot simplicity, but sharing video over the Internet is anything but simple, preventing most consumers and small businesses from maximizing the use of this powerful medium. Digital Spielberg wanna-bes take heart: Two Web sites, POPcast.com and SpotLife.com, make broadcasting video on the Internet easy. POPcast offers support for a range of digital video formats, though it currently lacks support for live broadcasts. Using the free, download- able P0Pcaster applet, you can encode AVI, MPEG-i, QuickTime, and WAV files with simple controls to adjust resolution and bandwidth for your target audience. After you encode the files, the program logs onto the P0Pcast site and uploads your file.
Alternatively, you can use third-party tools to encode into Windows Media Technologies ASF format and upload files directly to the site. Once your videos are uploaded, you can keep them private or add them to one of nine public channels. You can easily link videos to a separate Web site, e-mail links to target viewers, or consolidate multiple videos into albums for sequenced viewing, which requires Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. A free account includes 10MB of storage, which POPcast funds with short advertising videos shown at the beginning and end of your clips. POPcast offers fee-based options if you want advertisement-free videos at higher bandwidths.
In contrast with POPcast’s broad compatibility, you need a Logitech QuickCam to publish files to SpotLife. The benefit is seamless integration with the polished, user-friendly Quick- Cam software, enabling virtually any user to broadcast live audio or video and create multimedia albums. In use, SpotLife is an alternative publishing mechanism within the QuickCam software, with all log-ons, uploading, and page creation handled transparently. Once the files are uploaded to the site, you can password-protect your content or make it freely available on any of 14 SpotLife channels for viewing by anyone with the Real G2 Player. SpotLife’s free service includes 15MB of storage and 240 live streaming minutes per month, with a maximum audience of 25 simultaneous viewers.
As a destination site, we preferred SpotLife, where the real-time, unedited nature of the QuickCam broadcasts spawned “Candid Camera-like spontaneity. Both sites get the job done for casual publishing, though POPcast has a polished, professional feel and fee-based programs that will appeal to many small businesses.
Freeze Frames
Roughly 200 feet beneath the earth’s surface in a former Pennsylvania limestone mine, it’s as cool as ever: -4 degrees Fahrenheit, with 35 percent relative humidity. The perfect climate for preserving photographic prints and negatives, according to Ken Johnston, and it’s his business to know. Johnston is manager of historical collections for Corbis, the Bill Gates- owned photo stock agency that in 1995 bought the world-renowned Bettmann Archive, which includes the United Press International collections and many of this century’s most enduring images— Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out, John Kennedy Jr. saluting his dead father. With the help of several experts, Corbis determined that the best way to preserve the 7.5 million originals was to move them out of Manhattan and into Iron Mountain National Underground Storage, a sort of underworld backup server for fragile analog content. The facility will be fully operational in April. “A few have suggested -4 is a little extreme,” Johnston says, “but film is organic, and it lasts longer frozen.”
Though photo researchers will still be able to visit the archives, the distance from New York has some worried that access may be sacrificed in the name of preservation. Corbis communications manager Marc Osborn insists that this concern is unfounded. Thanks to digital technologies, he says, prints from the archives will be more accessible than ever. Corbis has already scanned 225,000 of the 1.3 million most requested images in the collection (the remaining millions can be “scanned on demand”) and uploaded them so they’re available via the Web. It is also digitizing six card catalogs that were never before cross-referenced. True, for a more obscure image, you might have to wait a day for a glass plate to defrost. Still, Johnston says, ‘that’s a small price to pay so we can ensure there’s an image left to scan.”
