Channel 9 Forums - Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

MetaGunny — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:05:45 GMT

I don't know whose idea it was to break the videos up into pieces but if you want to ruin channel 9 keep posting the videos this way.

I'm sorry but it's absolutely idiotic. I used to watch videos every day while I work, now I barely watch any. I don't want to keep coming back and sorting through trying to find the next part. It's just a hassle and a pain in the butt and I'm not going to jump through hoops to support C9, no matter how much I like the content.

Also, I mean really, what is the point? To help people that don't watch the whole video in one go? Fine, then let them watch it on their own pace and in their own "parts", however they want to break it up. If they want to watch 15 mins here and there, let them, what is stopping them? They can watch however long they want, and later come back and skip ahead if they want right now.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Jeff Sandquist — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:09:27 GMT

We aren't doing this for all of our content, but we were trying it as an experiment.

Thoughts from others?

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

MetaGunny — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:13:50 GMT

I apologize if my post came across like a jerk. I did see some content wasn't posted in the broken out parts, but I saw the first one a week or so ago with Rory and see a bunch more on the front page right now so I thought this was the route from now on.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Minh — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:21:27 GMT

Chopped up long videos don't provide any added value I think. People who are interested in shorter videos want more concised ones. Cut out the boring parts (yes, it's subjective) and make a 15-minutes vid out of 45 min one.

Maybe put more production value by spending time to filter out the more interesting bits of a vid.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Charles — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 02:05:20 GMT

I've posted the entire CCR/MRS video as well. Watch it here.

We are trying new things. This doesn't mean we will stop doing what you've grown to expect.

C

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

eagle — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 02:09:52 GMT

I think 40 minutes is a good, you could still do a part 2 when it's needed.

I watched the Robotics videos and they were too short.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Charles — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 02:15:16 GMT

Thanks for the feedback. I'll post the long streaming MRS as well...
C

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

anand.t — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 02:33:08 GMT

jeffsand wrote:

We aren't doing this for all of our content, but we were trying it as an experiment.

Thoughts from others?

I agree with the OP. We better have longer videos instead of chopping it.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

JChung2006 — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 02:39:12 GMT

I want shorter videos.

I don't want a 45 minute video that's been chopped into 5 parts.

I want 15 minute videos.

What I really want more than shorter videos are transcripts.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Jorgie — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:38:42 GMT

The length should be decided by the topic. 15 Minute videos are fine. 90 Minute videos are fine. But no matter the length, please let me download it in one piece! Jorgie

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

MetaGunny — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 04:03:20 GMT

I definitely agree with trying new things and hope my post doesn't deter from that in the future.

Minh and the others hit it on the head. If the content warrants it, shorter videos. Although, I like the longer videos as well.

My situation is I work from my home office, have dual monitors, and passively listen while I program. I understand others may watch at night or off hours, so shorter content would be great for them, but not chopped up.

Charles, keep up the great work though. More and more in the videos you've grown on me and anytime I hear the long winded questions coming I smile. I think those are good things. It makes people think.

Also, it would be great to see more "inside" hard hitting detail videos about how Microsoft operates and so on. Sometimes I watch a video for an hour and come away thinking what did I just learn?

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Richard Anthony Hein — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:08:14 GMT

I agree, don't split the videos unless you have to.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Richard Anthony Hein — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:22:38 GMT

Another good reason NOT to split the videos is that the comments and discussions get split up, and that sucks.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

blowdart — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:40:10 GMT

Richard.Hein wrote:

"My situation is I work from my home office, have dual monitors, and passively listen while I program. I understand others may watch at night or off hours, so shorter content would be great for them, but not chopped up."

Totally agree with this - I HATE having to go find more content every 15 minutes because of this, because I am actually working, ok, I would like to not be interrupted by having to click to find the next piece.

So combine it; have individual videos, and a meta file that plays then one after the other.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Richard Anthony Hein — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:56:14 GMT

"My situation is I work from my home office, have dual monitors, and passively listen while I program. I understand others may watch at night or off hours, so shorter content would be great for them, but not chopped up."

Totally agree with this - I HATE having to go find more content every 15 minutes because of this, because I am actually working, ok, I would like to not be interrupted by having to click to find the next piece. To me this is the #1 problem with YouTube and other video sites as well. Break.com was ok, but you know what, I don't want to see videos of people dying, I want knowledge.

StumbleUpon.com is the best I have seen yet for selecting great content automatically, and I have to click only once to skip to the next thing. StumbleUpon will index Channel9, so that's useful.

I'd rather if Channel9 just knew what to show me next, and if I don't like the topic, just skip ahead to the next topic, but just make it a seamless conversation, one big long video, forever, that you can jump to, all conversations have a relationship here. You know you should KNOW what I am working on, and my interests are and try to match up topics to fields of software engineering where the content matters most, even index sections of video for the parts that apply so that when people search for information it's easier to locate applicable sections.

Hmmmm.... "Contextual Multimedia Indexing for On-Demand Learning". Over time, the mass of video (and audio) content will grow. The idea is a method and means for indexing video content over time, based on usage of information supplied by each user, collected from their system, including but not limited to what software is installed and frequency of use on their system, their browsing history, personal information and qualifications, and their immediate focus - what they are currently watching, browsing and reading on the web, the type of software they are writing and so on. A profile is built and analysed to provide a stream of video and/or audio content that is targeted towards providing the user with information that is related to their task at hand, and/or "work mode, creative mode, relax mode, bleeding edge mode, web development mode, bare metal mode, 50,000 foot mode", that sort of thing, or searches created by the user based on keywords that will find and stream in logical progression based on the user's history and experience, over time the video was recorded if nothing else is available, or using metadata that is. Keyword searches such as, "Learn Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1", or "System.Query demo". Over time the system will learn to present the next video in a series that will help a user IN ADVANCE OF THEIR NEED, eventually, REALTIME, On-Demand assistance for even the most basic of tasks. Everyone start making screencasts!

The easiest thing would be to start with Visual Studio 2005 dynamic help APIs and link them to all the Channel9 videos and screencasts.

You guys should hire me. I'm serious now.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Bas — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:27:56 GMT

Chopping up rarely works. Perhaps in a conversation where the first 30 minutes are conversation, and the second 30 minutes are an on-screen demo. That would work, because perhaps I'm only interested in seeing the technology demoed. I'd prefer it if both clips were posted simultaneously though. Perhaps even in a single post, and with a metafile so that both play consecutively if you want, like blowdart suggested.

Otherwise, chopping is a bad idea. If the conversation is 40 minutes, chopping it up into 4 10 minute videos is just going to be annoying. The call for shorter videos was for actual shorter conversations, not shorter clips.

Basically, what I'd find ideal would be a couple of short, 15 minute conversations/demos every week, and maybe a 40-60 minute video once or twice a week, so that you can get a quick update regularly and get into the deep stuff when you have the time.

If a video is very long, and it is clearly dividable into two or three clips, that would be okay. I imagine this, as described above, as for instance a 30 minute talk on technology and then a 20 minute demo of said technology. Or perhaps a 20 minute overview of a certain technology, and then a 20 minute in-depth look at a certain aspect of that technology.
Cutting that in two would be okay, if both clips are posted simultaneously and an easy way to play both one after the other is provided, so that I have the choice to only watch the tech demo, or perhaps watch the whole thing all at once.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

MetaGunny — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:37:48 GMT

Thanks for the comments everyone. At first I thought everyone was going to disagree.

Also, a GREAT feature would be to be able to hide the videos you've already seen. I was some what late to C9 until I setup the dual monitors, so I was going into the tags and trying to find all the videos I hadn't yet watched. I finally gave up trying to figure out which tags and which videos I didn't watch all of.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Boomport — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:43:32 GMT

Some content is good at 15 minutes (I know its subjective), other videos at a hour aren't long enough (like the going deep ones). So maybe if they go longer than 45 or an hour break them up.

The shows that always have a lot of views (Like going deep) keep full length and Rocken (Thanks Charles) and the ones that just have a few views liven up by being short and to the point. If people want more of those they will tell you:)

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

odujosh — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 01:48:26 GMT

Maybe providing a multiformat for this video layout. Hansleman has it right. You can't find one size fits all. When I on a high performant network the one click is great when I am on a low end broad band connection the chunks are great. Multiformat is good.

What bugs me is we gone from 1 video a day to sometimes spreading one video across several days in parts instead of all you care to watch of the next Anders interview being there when it first premeres. I prefer the all or nothing approach. If you are going to have a 2 day dry spell spackling a video over that span of time really seems to make it unwatchable and less enjoyable. Give us the whole video, it in parts, then give us the two day dry spell.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Charles — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:10:56 GMT

Just say no to dry spells!

I am not going to cut up any more of my videos. If you want 'em segmented, then use Clipster. That's why we built it for you. Nobody can slice and dice a video exactly to your specifications in an a priori manner...

Keep on clipping,

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Richard Anthony Hein — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:24:24 GMT

Yeah ... does Clipster have an RSS feed ... is it tagged? Well, I just checked and it has tags for the name of the clip. No RSS feed. If there was a direct feed, I'd try hooking it up to Dynamic Help and then start indexing the videos too, to build up keywords in the metadata.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

anand.t — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:41:43 GMT

Richard.Hein wrote:

Yeah ... does Clipster have an RSS feed ... is it tagged? Well, I just checked and it has tags for the name of the clip. No RSS feed. If there was a direct feed, I'd try hooking it up to Dynamic Help and then start indexing the videos too, to build up keywords in the metadata.

you cant satisfy everyone

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

tsilb — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:54:33 GMT

anand.t wrote:

you cant satisfy everyone

Why not?

Download: [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | FULL ]

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

An_Angel — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:57:14 GMT

You should use SoapBox and get the SoapBox team to look into something like the viddler style tagging and comments system. That way you wouldn't need to split the video's up, just tag the time points and have it as a long video, unless the issue is upload time and such. Also even better than that when people are watching the video they can comment at the time point so that there is a context to the comment

(OK so I'm a Viddler.com fan!)

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Herbie Smith — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 10:10:27 GMT

An_Angel wrote:

You should use SoapBox and get the SoapBox team to look into something like the viddler style tagging and comments system. That way you wouldn't need to split the video's up, just tag the time points and have it as a long video, unless the issue is upload time and such. Also even better than that when people are watching the video they can comment at the time point so that there is a context to the comment

(OK so I'm a Viddler.com fan!)

Oh, so someone's already done it? I had thought about this before, the ability to jump to a tag for the bits you're interested in, like 'Demo starts here' or 'Talking about feature XXX', etc.

Nice.

Herbie

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

Massif — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 10:32:44 GMT

SlackmasterK wrote:

anand.t wrote: you cant satisfy everyone

Why not?

Download: [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | FULL ]

There's always going to be someone awkward:

"But I was only interested in the last minute of 1, the first two minutes of 2 and the middle 4 minutes of 3! [6]"

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

webmonkey — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:58:55 GMT

Dr Herbie wrote:

An_Angel wrote: You should use SoapBox and get the SoapBox team to look into something like the viddler style tagging and comments system. That way you wouldn't need to split the video's up, just tag the time points and have it as a long video, unless the issue is upload time and such. Also even better than that when people are watching the video they can comment at the time point so that there is a context to the comment

(OK so I'm a Viddler.com fan!)

Oh, so someone's already done it? I had thought about this before, the ability to jump to a tag for the bits you're interested in, like 'Demo starts here' or 'Talking about feature XXX', etc.

Nice.

Herbie

If I remember correctly the UK vista/office dev launch videos had this feature.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

AndyC — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:26:13 GMT

webmonkey wrote:

If I remember correctly the UK vista/office dev launch videos had this feature.

All the Channel 9 videos can be tagged like this, it just requires someone to do it with the Clipster feature.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

raymond — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:44:49 GMT

Let the subject matter determine the length of the video.

If the subject matter is only worth ten minutes, do a ten minute video.

If the subject takes an hour, do an hour video.

Please do not split up a video just to have three ten minutes video, where one thirty minute video would do just fine.

Coffeehouse - Whose Bright Idea Was This?

MetaGunny — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:09:56 GMT

raymond wrote:

Let the subject matter determine the length of the video.

If the subject matter is only worth ten minutes, do a ten minute video.

If the subject takes an hour, do an hour video.

Please do not split up a video just to have three ten minutes video, where one thirty minute video would do just fine.

Right. However, if someone is going to cut them up post them ALL at once. Whatever you do don't post ONE per day. This will gurantee you get less views of that video, and also less viewers in general on C9.