Design and Photography Highlights

An online content revolution is drastically changing the traditional media and distribution landscape. The market for online content, especially video and audio, is growing at an extraordinary pace. Fueled by open standards for digital media, the deployment and continually falling costs of broadband access, the explosion of user-generated content populating the Internet, the growth of broadband, mobile, set-top boxes and digital recording devices in addition to the advancements made in Digital Rights Management software, digital video and still-image content is becoming more widely available and easier to access.

The one obstacle these technological advancements have failed to properly address is how to efficiently monetize online content. In the past, aggregators and content providers worked only with traditional means of media distribution including through television, theater releases, DVD/VHS purchases and rentals. Moving content to the Internet has presented itself as a new, highly efficient medium to view and distribute digital media and ultimately is helping to build new ways to promote, build revenue streams and other non-traditional monetization mechanisms.

Indeed, we are witnessing the long-term trend away from the inefficiency of legacy delivery and the associated sub-par customer experience of the legacy model. New digital media start-ups and their emerging technology will gradually complement and possibly replace traditional television business models in the future. Now anyone with a camera and a desire to produce content can record, upload and distribute their work over the Internet. This type of access used to be just a fantasy for most content creators, but now it is fast becoming a reality.

Clearly, the emerging standard for video and information is on-demand, à la carte interactivity: consumers being able to find, download, store, recall and transfer content of their choice on virtually any platform or device. Digital interactivity will be the driving force to unlocking the bottomless content in this Pandora’s box. However, search and filtering is the means by which to find and manage the data, television program, movie, music or other content of choice. One cannot exist without the other in this brave, new media world.

Tomorrow will be our first day working out of our new offices down in Soho in the Big Apple. We will be joining our friends at Blip.tv and are ecstatic and blessed to be working in close proximity to such a great company.

Can’t wait to move in fully and if you need us now we will be at 187 Lafayette between Broome and Grand, 6th floor ….

Love it!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9cpOMYv0&rel=1]

It’s amazing some of the work that we have come across while scouring the globe for the best creators for our Cutcaster marketplace. It’s truly inspiring and unbelievable that people can create works like this on a shoe string budget and in only four days. Three graphic designers created this D-Day recreation for the time watch program “Bloody Omaha” and its simply awesome to see how they put it filmed it and then combined it with the special effects. Just goes to show you that technology and hardcore determination can create an amazing product. They really recreated the carnage and mayhem that was the Omaha Beach invasion of World War II and all with only three men in four days. Sorry I had to repeat that

Here is a link to the creator’s blog and look forward to seeing more creative and inspiring works like this.

Here are a few updates:

We have now hit over 1500 pieces of content and are in the process of releasing more to the marketplace.

We have over 500 registered users.

We have included some code to parse out IPTC metadata for photographers now during the upload process. All meta and IPTC data is now being transfered correctly into our backend from the upload 2 form. This will make it easier on photographers who are uploading a lot of images to the site. Let us know how you like it.

We have updated the media details view page to only show relevant media info.

We fixed some issues that people were having when logging in. The login is case sensitive so remember your username exactly.

What we are working on?

We are still working on our bulk upload which is almost finished.

Updating our pricing algorithm with more content pricing info.

We are working on the collection of metadata for video off a template we are creating for our video producers which they can use to autopopulate the metadata fields of their content.

We have almost completed the watermark for our images. We switched encoding engines and this caused a small issue which we are clearing up.

We are working on transaction history, a “my download” page and automated reciepts.

We are working on our release process to get your videos and photos into the marketplace sooner.

We just hired a new developer to help out with a lot of these features which we are excited to roll out in the next month. Definitely let us know what you would like as well and we will plan that out.