In this summer's earning call, Facebook Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said, “If you go back ten years, most of how people communicated was through text. We’re entering into a period where that’s increasingly going to be video and we’re seeing huge growth there.”

The numbers show it:

• In November 2015, Facebook reported 8 billion daily video views (and in April 2015, the same stat was 4 billion daily video views).
• In January 2016, Facebook announced that 100 million hours of video are watched in Facebook daily.

So the arc of this is very clear.  We started with text and moved to images and now we're heading to video.

In the same earnings call last month, Facebook pointed out that, “people watch video differently in mobile newsfeed than on TV”.  As video dominates Twitter and Facebook, what are the new rules?

• Make sure you’re videos are uploaded natively: Linking to a YouTube video from Twitter or Facebook? It’s only going to get a fraction of the views and engagement that a native video will.  Post your videos natively to Facebook and Twitter so they autoplay and play with no lag time or extra clicks.

• Start out strong: Try to win the viewer’s attention within the first few seconds. Those first few seconds are your video’s email subject line or newspaper headline. Some examples from NowThisNews: 
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Add text overlays to your video: Since videos automatically play without sound, you can’t rely on sound to draw in the viewer. So... overlay text on top of your video.  The text needs to be short and crisp and choreographed with the video. My favorite example of this are the news videos made by NowThis. Or take a look at the cooking videos by Tip Hero. Here are a few examples:
  
  

  #ObamaAndKids is the most adorable thing in your feed https://t.co/QzxX9OA77Z

  — NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 22, 2016

  
  
  

  Some brilliant girl scouts are selling cookies outside weed dispensaries https://t.co/LswrdGFAGg

  — NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 23, 2016

• Upload closed captioning to your videos (Facebook videos only): An alternative to adding text overlays, Facebook allows you to upload close captioning with your videos. Closed captioning is displayed by default when a video autoplays so your video can be experienced without turning on the sound.  Here’s what this looks like: 
  
  
  
  How do you get the SubRip closed captioning file (.SRT) for your video?  A few choices:

• Use a third party video captioning / transcription service-- there are lots of them out there, a baseline cost estimate is $1 / minute of video.
• Caption your video yourself-- I’ve used a few different third party SRT creation tools. Aegisub is one of them that's free and open source. Aegisub let you type the text in as your video plays back. It takes a little bit of work, but it's not bad. Pay attention to the size of each block of text-- too short or too long and it'll be hard for the viewer to follow along.
• Use SnapStream (if you’re uploading TV clips)-- If the videos you’re uploading are TV clips (like the Daily Show or the Colbert Report), use SnapStream. We automatically pass-through closed captioning when you create a TV clip and post it to Facebook.

Update (February 11, 2016): If you doubted what I wrote below about how captions on native Facebook videos improved performance, see today's news that Facebook is now offering free automatic captioning of "brand" videos.

Did you know you can upload captions with your Facebook native video uploads?

This is a big deal and something you should always do... why? Well, apart from making your Facebook videos more accessible, it'll also increase the video views and engagement on your Facebook native video uploads.

How's that? Well, we live in a world of autoplay video. When someone scrolls through their Facebook news feed videos autoplay-- which is to say, it shows the moving picture but without any sound.  And if you upload a closed captioning file with your native video upload, Facebook autoplays the video with closed captioning display turned on.

This is a major key 🔑!!  With captioning display turned on, your autoplayed native video is more likely to draw in a viewer because the video can be experienced without audio. Here's an example of the Daily Show (a SnapStream customer) doing this on their Facebook native videos:

(separate question, but what was I doing up at 3:38am when I took this screenshot??)

So how can you upload closed captioning with your Facebook videos?

Facebook has this article on how to add captions to your uploaded videos (it involves uploading something called a SubRip file or an SRT file).

But if you're uploading TV clips to Facebook using SnapStream 7.0, you'll be happy to know we automatically passthrough the closed captioning.  So you don't have to do anything else-- it's just there.  Here's a screenshot of this in action:

If you want to learn more about how SnapStream makes it easy for social media managers to upload TV clips to Facebook (and Twitter), check out the SnapStream social TV features page.

Last week, Twitter announced support for native video uploads in their API.

Our engineering team jumped on it and today we’re happy to announce that we’ve added support for native Twitter videos into SnapStream. Check it out:

Who's got two thumbs & just added support for native Twitter videos? SnapStream! http://t.co/61jguM76Ou pic.twitter.com/FDP3JN3iTL

— SnapStream (@SnapStream) June 2, 2015

With native Twitter video as a part of SnapStream's social TV features, our users can capture TV moments and upload them quickly and easily to Twitter. And their Twitter audience will get the best video experience Twitter has to offer (most views, most engagement). Publishers can also monetize video tweets in a Twitter Amplify campaign.

(And to other developers out there: since we’re early adopters of this new Twitter API, we also wrote-up our experiences and published some sample C# source code to github. Hope it helps.)

We just added Twitter native video into SnapStream (more on this here). For posterity, we documented our experiences and suggestions for improvement (feedback from Jason Baumeister):

The documentation is spread out.

https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/media/upload-chunked

The link above contains very little in the way of actual details (note it doesn't even say what the JSON returned by INIT or FINALIZE is or even mention what the calls return/do in error cases), because they want you to go here:

https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/uploading-media

but while that has more details in some areas it has less details in others (and still no error case documentation).

The examples are all given using the twurl tool, which has shortcuts like '--file-field "media"' so then you get to work backwards from the examples through the documentation to try and figure out what they actually want. If the examples were the raw multipart requests, the spec would be much easier to directly implement. Having to get their tool running and trace the headers that way is extremely roundabout for a simple example for someone to build off of.

The error messages during this process are vague. A poorly crafted multipart request gets things like a "media not found" error.

If twitter doesn't like the video you upload, the upload itself looks to work fine, but you get a "The validation of media ids failed." error when you try to actually post a tweet with the media id linked. If the FINALIZE command could actually validate the file and return an error message (and that error message actually indicated what the problem was) things would be a lot cleaner.

I believe they require MOOV before MDAT (aka MP4 FastStart) files, but the listed video specs don't indicate this (or I have had a file be flagged as invalid for another reason I can't track down).

Documentation for the multipart uploads says the Content-Type header is required on the multipart boundary with the file data, but in practice it seems to be completely optional?

Here's some simple C# code on GitHub that uses the Twitter REST API to upload a native video:

https://github.com/SnapStreamJason/TinyTwitter
https://github.com/SnapStreamJason/TinyTwitter/commit/858d226100dc855b6911de1417f7eebfd0b5d002

(There are probably a few more things noted in comments in the github commit)

As frequent readers of our blog know, we've written several posts about how to build your own digital cable headend (aka a QAM headend). And we've reviewed most of the products in the market, including our favorite the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM.

But I just recently learned about some new products in this area from Drake and they appear to have GREAT price points:

• Drake's HDE24 High Definition MPEG Encoder Module product (which also requires the Drake MEQ-1000): Again, each module handles one channel and with 2 modules per encoder host, the cost per channel works out to something like $1900 / channel. These modules DO have closed captioning support.

• Drake's DSE24 High Definition Signage Encoder product: One box handles one channel and appears to cost about $1,200 per channel (compare this to the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM which will run you about $3,000 / channel). Problem is that these units do NOT support closed captioning right now.

The only problem is we haven't tested either of these units yet in-house so we can't comment on video quality, stability, or other features. We're working on getting eval units in-house and once we do, we'll post more detailed reviews. Meanwhile, at least the HDE24/EH24 products appear to be VERY strong with all the necessary features and about 50% less than the Blonder Tongue product.

The American Journalism Review writes about one of my favorite SnapStream customers: "What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart"

Brooks Jackson, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania: "I am in awe of the ability of Stewart and however many people he has working for him to cull through the vast wasteland of cable TV and pick out the political actors at their most absurd..."

A few weeks ago, I started noticing billboards around town (here in Houston) for a SnapStream customer, the Kidd Kraddick morning talk radio show:

After exchanging a few emails with their operations director, I got this update from them:

Over the past 2 years, SnapStream has become an invaluable resource to Kidd Kraddick in the Morning. Every single day we use SnapStream in several ways. With this program we are able to locate content that is specifically targeted at our demographic and use this content to entertain and inform our audience. On the video version of Kidd Kraddick in the Morning, KiddTV, commercial breaks are not full of boring infomercials or the same 4 songs your radio station plays, it is loaded with pop culture content from Entertainment Tonight, ENews and the late night talk shows to name a few. Without SnapStream the entertainment value of KiddTV and Kidd Kraddick in the Morning would not be at the high level it is today.

-Nick Adams
Director of KiddTV

Long-time TV clipping and monitoring service, VMS (video monitoring service) announced on Friday that they've shutdown their service as they file for bankruptcy (chapter 7, evidently). While their website is no longer working, the note on their site yesterday (Sunday Aug 28, 2011) read as follows:

The VMS Board with the input of qualified professionals have elected to close VMS.

Unfortunately almost all VMS personnel have been terminated effective today.

The decision has been made after exhaustively evaluating many different options and with sadness for our loyal staff and customers.

At some point in the very near future a Trustee will be appointed to liquidate VMS. We anticipate the trustee will make future communications with customers.

VMS thanks all customers for their loyal support.

My perspective, as the CEO and founder of SnapStream (a company that makes TV recording and search software used by many of the media monitoring companies out there today): As a member of the International Association of Broadcast Monitors, IABM, I had met a lot of execs from VMS over the years-- but none that still worked there this past Friday. Based on conversations I had with former VMS folks this morning, Friday's conclusion started with a big round of layoffs over a year ago. And since then, VMS had been trying to both cut costs and become profitable and they had been simultaneously trying to sell the company. VMS was one of the oldest companies in the TV monitoring and clipping business and as such, their cost structure was a lot higher than some of the companies that entered the market after them like Critical Mention and TV Eyes. I don't think VMS ever adapted to this new market reality-- for example, they still had 200 people in Kentucky that were manually reviewing lots of daily TV recordings and creating improved transcripts for them. Meanwhile, I think the market had moved on to "good enough" and cheaper services. Also, there were new options for recording and searching television (ie our product, SnapStream) that also ate into their customer base.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that SnapStream provides an alternative for folks who want to put their finger on the pulse of television... so if your organization gets mentioned on television a lot, SnapStream might be the right fit for you. Contact us if you think we might be a fit.

More information on VMS's shutdown here on the O'Dwyer's blog. I'll continue to post updates as I hear about them.

Also, here's a search on twitter for mentions of "VMS" (warning, a lot of "false positives" in the search results... While it probably wasn't their biggest problem, VMS also had a search engine optimization (SEO) problem that went straight back to their name. 'VMS' or even 'video monitoring service' is about as non-unique of a name as they come!)

Since our TV search technology is used by a lot of comedy TV shows (like Daily Show, Colbert Report, the Soup, Best Week Ever) to expose the follies of government and media, this news caught my eye:

Graham Linehan, an Irish TV writer, was puzzled by a missing episode of the Daily Show and so he looked further into it and discovered it was blocked from being aired for "compliance" reasons. After some back and forth with the broadcaster Channel 4, they got this answer:

Wow, so the UK Parliament blocks people from using video of their proceedings in comedy!

More coverage and discussion of this at Graham Linehan's blog, Boing Boing and the The New Statesman.

The funny and ironic thing is that The Daily Show segment in question (the one that breaks UK's "no parliamentary videos used for satire" rule) is actually very positive towards the UK! You can watch it here.

Evidently, the same is true in Australia as well!

As we begin to sell SnapStream internationally, in the UK and Australia in particular (we'll be demo'ing a DVB-T version of SnapStream at IBC in Amsterdam in about a month from now!), I wonder if we'll bump up against this law!

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It's been a while since I wrote about how to build your own digital cable (aka QAM) headend.

Shortly after I wrote that article, Blonder Tongue released a new HD encoder product that's become our QAM modulation product of choice: the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM.

Inputs/Outputs: The Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM, like the Adtec HDMI-2-QAM, takes two HD inputs and modulates them both to a single QAM output. The inputs can be passed in via

• HDMI (unencrypted) or
• Component HD (ie YPbPr) + Analog Audio or Digital Audio

Closed-Captioning Support: In addition to the above inputs, the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM has analog inputs for closed-captioning which it converts and inserts into the final QAM output.

Pricing: The street price for this HD encoder comes in around $6,000 (link: SolidSignal), making it a $3,000 / channel solution. Not bad, considering that about 2 years ago, the least expensive solution for building your own QAM headend was about $10,000 / channel!

Stability: Unlike our experiences with it's Adtec competitor (the Adtec HDMI-2-QAM) the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM is really stable and reliable. It doesn't lock-up and runs for long periods of time uninterrupted.

Bottom line: The Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM is the QAM modulation / HD encoder that we recommend over all the others. It's robust and stable. It's can be purchased at about $3,000 / channel. And it supports passing closed captioning in the QAM output (which our previous recommendation, the Contemporary Research QMOD-HD, does not support). So if you're trying to build your own digital cable headend, the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM is the way to go!