Rick on the COW

You can hear an interview conducted by Franklin McMahon on the Creative Cow Podcast which should be on iTunes Friday December 23rd. We covered the origins of the festival and where it is now and where I want to take it in the future. I'll have to take a listen to it but I'd have to say it was an excellent interview! :)

Podcast Marketing 101

The best advice I could give to anyone promoting a podcast is TAG IT! Meta tags, descriptions... don't be shy. It's all on page one of the basic HTML manual. :)

In only two days Yahoo! picked us up and we're at the top of the list again. Not sure how this top of the list thing happens exactly, but the Help directory suggests there are human beings monitoring submissions and they reserve the right to not include material that doesn't fall in line with their standards or code.



TAG TAG TAG!!!

Now, what's up with that generic artwork?!?

The Top of our Class!!!

Congratulations to the team. Not only were just just listed on iTunes but they added our graphic, then rated us #1 on the list!

Now if you type "computer animation" we are NUMBER ONE. That's like having the first web site and being first on Google.

We did it! What a great team!

It's ALIVE!

One more step closer to iTunes, we found a Canadian podcast hosting company and they are in Toronto.

I'm not so sure about the files they tend to advertise as being "recently uploaded" on their home page (they may be using Creative Commons a little too loosely) but the fact is they seem to be on the straight and level offering podcast-friendly hosting with the proper tags. We'll give them a shot for few months.

Once I moved the XML pointers to these guys I tried for the hundredth time to submit my podcast to iTunes, and this time the artwork and description fields lit up and I got in farther, getting an acknowledgement from Apple that I was in the queue and I would be contacted. Sweet!

Then I tried to subscribe in iTunes as a regular guy and it started it's download as a "Podcast" as I hoped.

Lesson learned, unfortunately for all you starting up, is EVERYTHING has to be PERFECT, the first time. :(

Freeplaymusic Rocks

I've used these guys before on broadcast gigs and their music is incredible. Free if it's going to air in North America, but very reasonable if it's not.

Derek or editor needed some rockin techno cool music, and we needed it fast and we didn't want to get sucked into playing with Garageband too long, so we went freeplay. They have a no-nonsense term of use for podcasts: $25 for a year.

That's where we got our opening montage and some rockin' beats from. Thanks Freeplay!

The Morning After

Trying to keep it real, I've come across a few snags that have certainly taken a little bit of the euphoria out of video podcasting. Actualy, it's become quite a hangover!

Bandwidth and DRM.

Got an email from my service provider, saying they don't allow streaming media on my hosting account. Either that or a promise to keep my podcast to under 2M and only have 2 users at one time. Yeah, right. I explained the nature of RSS means that the media is not streaming, and can be dished out ONE at a time, although I see a bottleneck already happening. Methinks some rules will have to be changed fairly quickly. In the mean time I admit I'm exploring options like Bittorent or paid media hosting. Any ideas? If you've susbscribed to our show and got it to work on your iPod or PSP or even the new XBOX great! Please let me know. Feedburner says there are a few of you already!

One day old and there are 10 subscribers! OK, two of them are me.

On the issue of rights, I take this very seriously but I'm afraid there are others (lawyers) who take it even more seriously. The bulk of our show is original content, or animation I have asked for and recieved specific rights to package within our podcast. I've also licensed and paid for several tracks from Freeplaymusic.com so I think I'm on the right track. It's our news segment, which I feel is very important to our show, that may contain clips garnered off the web to promote a film or DVD release or game or whatever. If regular TV laws apply then we'll see how entertainment shows get away with showing trailer clips, or even some shows air the entire trailer. If it's "news" then you can get away with a lot! You can be assured I'm going to keep a very close eye on this.

Think Small

There will be two big events in 2006 in my industry: HDTV (yeah, since 1989 but this time it's for real) and portable media.

If you're not sure listen to this excellent podcast (link to the subscribe page, download episode 11 and check out the first 20 minutes at least)

HDTV, whatever.

Portable media. The bomb!

Today's generation won't tolerate sitting down at a fixed time to watch a show. They want only the show they are interested in, and they want it now. We've known that for a little while now, but RSS and iTunes makes that really possible. Content providers need to think small, really small, and deliver exactly what people want and nothing more. I'm so happy we did this now and not in, say, three weeks or so. I feel the explosion hasn't happened yet - it will happen on December 25th when all those PSP's and G5 iPods are opened and people start looking for content.

Very, very exciting!

Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema

I had breakfast with the curator of the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema Joseph Chen. We met to share war stories about programming Festivals, and discuss the animation community in general. Seems we have a lot in common!

It's interesting how our paths as Festival programmers crossed. TDIF in it's form was doomed to be folded sooner or later - the events of 9/11 sort of sped up the process. But think of it, the people I wanted to see were starting to download small animated shorts as broadband kicked up. They were likely less interested in coming out (and paying!) to see a Festival of short computer animation. They were computer guys like me more likely to tolerate downloading short video clips.

Joseph's show, however, hedged it's bet that people would be less interested in downloading entire feature films, thus this very unique Festival started up. It seems to be working, he's got some very exciting plans for his show and the animation community in general.

Show #02 of the podcast will be a feature on the Waterloo Festival and the work of Joseph and his crew. Stay subscribed!

You've got to be kidding

Friday I got the show from Derek and showed it to the team. Amazing! I could hardly wait to get home and download it to my iPod. Looked great, time to figure out XML.

I used a beta of Feedforall and it seemed to work sort of. I was able to generate a simple piece of XML but was not able to add the itunes tags for images and flags like 'explicit' (not that DIF is explicit!)

From there I found feedburner.com which, I guess, takes your plane-jane XML file and iTunes it up and cleans it too. For example, it flagged a URL's directory with a space in it as a problem which, by some definitions on the web is something to avoid.

Now I have a location http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalImageFest which seems to be iTunes friendly, I have a 300x300 graphic for iTunes, a smaller one for RSS feeds... I even have a little button on www.digitalimagefest.com with an RSS logo that does something I'm told.

But now the buzz is that iTunes is swamped (d'oh!) and you can wait 2 weeks or more to get listed. So, I'm going to have to go ghetto and offer a direct download from the DIF web site for now. Which really sucks, that the whole idea to get on iTunes. Well hopefully there are more saavy computer users out there that will take our RSS button and use it.

We'll see how long it takes "Digital Image Fest" to show up on iTunes... or do a search for "computer animation" and see if we show up.

Show's Done!

I nearly wept seeing the first show start to finish, with audio and everything. Tears of exhaustion but more tears of pride!

Only three weeks ago I got the idea of resurrecting the Digital Image Fest and now the team has a finished show, with two more already shot!