Monday, April 27, 2009

My First Gig as a Reporter (pt4)

100 Days Coverage

Bill Hennessy and GatewayPundit are organizing a Tea Party near the site of Obama's teleprompter reading to commemorate his first hundred days in office, Fox High School in Arnold. I'm planning to be there. With luck, I'll get a picture of the voice talent... maybe even TOTUS himself. The crumb crunchers will be with me. I'll be the guy with the video camera wearing a four month old accompanied by the babe's Gadsden flag wielding sister (assuming the girls do not thwart my efforts).

If you went to one of the outlying Tax Day Tea Parties (Cape Girardeau, Sikeston, Lee’s Summit, etc.), I want to talk with you. If you helped lead one of those tea parties, I *really* want to talk with you. I know it's hard to have your voice heard and I want to help as much as I can. Email me: dsm012 -at- gmail -d0t- com

If you're with a broadcaster and would like to use my footage, please email me (dsm012 -at- gmail -d0t- com). You will need to 1) create an account with Motionbox.com and 2) add me as a contact. I will need to add you as a Motionbox.com contact, so I will need your email address—presumably the one you used to contact me. Here's a rough sketch of my plans for Wednesday. Please make suggestions in the comments!
  1. Conduct interviews and gather other footage (9AM to noon-ish Central Time)
  2. RIP the tape (hopefully done by 2PM)
  3. Create low-res version for logging and upload to YouTube (3-ish)
  4. Email broadcasters (4PM)
  5. Create hi-res version of what I think is the best material and upload to Motionbox.com (my goal is to keep this under 500M... probably not available until Thursday morning... bandwidth is still a problem)
  6. Go out to dinner to celebrate nine years of marital bliss
  7. Email broadcasters (TBD)
If there are specific cuts from the low-res version you want, then email me and I'll do what I can to get them on Motionbox.com for you. Recognize that until I have a real bandwidth solution, fast turn around will be hard. Oh, and I've got two girls to look after as part of my stay-at-home dad duties.

Business Opportunities

For part four of this series, I was planning to review some business opportunities I thought of during my adventures. It's getting late, so I'm just going to cover one of them: moving hi-res video.

I found a new enthusiasm for video after getting involved in the Tea Party movement, so I ripped all of my 1080i tapes to disk (including an air show with about fifteen minutes of the Blue Angels). Each is about an hour long and occupies from 10 to 14 gigabytes. It took me about 15 hours to upload 2G over my DSL connection, so that's a non-starter.

What I would really like is a Motionbox.com kiosk: I give them an HD tape or an external hard drive and they put the goods in my account. This model is very similar to one that already exists. If you want to get a print of one of your digital pictures, you can go to a CVS or Target or where ever, put your flash drive in one of their kiosks, and walk out of the store with your prints fifteen minutes later.

Retail stores do not have the kind of bandwidth I need, so they're not (yet) an option and probably never will be. I thought FedEx/Kinkos might be, so I asked at my local one and they told me that they didn't have great bandwidth. This seems like an obvious growth opportunity for them, but they will probably want to continue to sneaker-net my content to PJTV.

I want the kind of bandwidth computer datacenters have. I haven't contacted any yet. I doubt that they would sell bandwidth like that, but who knows. If you can think of other solutions to this problem, please mention them in the comments!

I could upgrade my DSL. While Charter's Ultra60 looks awesome, they're in bankruptcy proceedings. An incremental improvement to my DSL would help, but it wont be enough.

I have no idea when my posts about being a reporter will end... there will be several more as time permits.

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