Archive for March 2008
Today’s Fringe Fridays brings us to a dark and dusty room through the medium of stop-motion animation. The animator definitely owes a debt to such stalwarts as Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay, but he brings something new to genre through his use of television clips. It’s a painstaking process, one that instills the movie with an unsettling atmosphere.
-Kent, Yahoo! Video Team
First of all, everyone should have received an email from us regarding the delivery of your prizes. If not, let us know.
With the Yahoo! Video Awards wrapped up (and our elves busy hammering together the prizes), I thought I’d take a moment to show off some cool odds and ends from the people who were nominated. I didn’t want to publish this while the wards were on, lest it should appear as favoritism.
First, I put together a playlist showing some of the downright entertaining ‘vote for me’ videos that our creators put together:
Finally, we received this photo showing the stars from Cooties during a reunion party held by the video’s creator, James Murray. And they really do look like stars, sporting their Yahoo! hats.
-Kent, Yahoo! Video Team
Today, I’m happy to announce an improvement that will make uploading a lot nicer. In fact, if you’ve uploaded anything new in the past few days you should have noticed a difference. No, we’re not automatically replacing the people in your videos with the cast of Gray’s Anatomy. That’s too expensive.
Instead we’ve given our transcoders a major kick: we’re now transcoding user uploads to 700kpbs! That’s up from 300 kpbs in the past. Transcoders are those robots that diligently turn your video file into flash format. We also boosted the capacity of our uploader. This means better and faster uploads from start to finish. Of course, this doesn’t re-encode anything you’ve already uploaded; this is for new uploads only. As always, the final quality depends on the original video file. So keep your bitrate high, we’re ready for it.
So, here’s Yahoo! Video by the numbers: a 16:9 aspect ratio, 150 mb uploads, and 700 kpbs transcoding. We’re closing in on 100% awesome.
-Kent, Yahoo! Video Team
Hey Everybody,
It’s that time! Unlike those big awards ceremonies, there’s no envelope to tear open. But the final votes have been cast and it’s time to acknowledge and honor not just our winners, but everyone who’s participated. Anyone who was nominated made it there because of their skill, passion, and dedication. And there are many amazing creators who weren’t nominated this year, but who can be seen daily on Yahoo! Video. I hope you’ll continue to check us out both here on the blog, and at video.yahoo.com.
Without further ado, here are the winners, as of 9:56 am, when I rolled into work:
Best Indie Music Video: Terrene: Unwelcome
Best Animated Video: Weird Al’s Childhood
Best Non-Fiction Video: Good: Business of Death
Best New Uploader: DadLabs: Bike Rap
Best Series: The Guild
Best Internet Personality: Brigitte Dale: TVSquad Daily
Best Comedy: The PitNYC: Cooties
Everyone, both winners and nominees, should expect to hear from us soon, ’cause there are prizes to go around. Thanks again to everyone who voted and commented. And of course, thanks again to our creators! We take it as a sincere compliment that you have chosen to upload your videos to us. While there will always be some controversy about voting and results, I rather like what one of our commentors had to say:
“Thanks for creating so much exposure for all of these video makers, especially those from the indie community, where exposure for all these new incoming artists is so difficult to create. It’s been fun! which is what it’s all about in the end.”
-Kent, Yahoo! Video Team
It has been estimated that $1.7 billion will be lost in productivity during the two weeks of March Madness. I guess that would make sense based on the number of bracket print-outs I have seen taped to people’s desks. In hopes of moving that number to an even 2 billion, here is a link to live streaming video of every NCAA Basketball tournament game.
And if you can’t break away in the day to watch the games live, you can always come to the Yahoo! Sports network at Yahoo! Video for sports highlight videos and recaps.
-Randall, Yahoo! Video Team
Hello voters, nominees, journalists, academy members, and innocent bystanders,
I’m really happy that the The Yahoo! Video Awards have taken off. There are heated contests in many categories, with some folks even making their own videos to drum up support. We like that.
We’re witnessing Democracy in action here (it’s really true, we’re using a polling plugin called Democracy). There are some allegations of vote-tampering robots surfacing in the comments. I honestly don’t suspect any such polling tomfoolery, but let’s keep the commenting and the voting fun and fair. With all the challenges to the polls, it’s almost like Florida in 2000.
Keep keeping it awesome.
-Kent, Yahoo! Video Team
