Full Transcript:

Benjamin Higginbotham: Benjamin Higginbotham with technologyevangelist.com. I am here with Ed Kohler. He is in San Jose, actually you're at the airport Ed, aren’t you?

Ed Kohler: Right now, I am actually in Phoenix. I am making my way between gate B-26 and A-27 and pretty much crossing the entire airport.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, the Video on the Net conference is complete and you spent most of the day there, tell us a little bit about what you saw today?

Ed Kohler: I just tried to get rest of the booths, that I haddn't had the chance to look at and get caught up on a few more products and the one thing that works more products that I already knew about, but I just see what’s changed since last time I heard about it, so one of those would be FireAnt group. FireAnt has been around for a while and its basically like a video version of iTunes, except it does lot of things that goes way beyond what iTunes are capable of doing. So,.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, how was it, we use lot of Democracy player from the Participatory Culture. How is FireAnt different than that or what are FireAnt’s fine points?

Ed Kohler: Well, both Democracy and FireAnts are much better than iTunes, in fact they support Torrent which is obviously a great benefit for the content creators, because they are not going to get killed with the bandwidth cost that associated with direct download. Something is that FireAnt is different than Democracy include, the program is capable of converting your files other formats for you, so if you have a large webversion of your file and its downloaded through FireAnt, once someone has it on their computer they can have it converted to an iPod version or a Zune or PSP, so it does a lot of stuff within the program where just Democracy is basically just a files downloader.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, I know that Democracy is moving towards that, but it sounds like FireAnt has that today which makes it really cool and its definitely something I will be checking out in the near future then, because if they can do that, how awesome is that.

Ed Kohler: Right and I think any tools that would make it easier for content creators to focus on creating content rather than creating additional forms of their content is a good thing I would say.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah.

Ed Kohler: It's something Move Digital does too by creating a phone version and like forcasting to do a Flash version as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right, The phone actually Moved Digital does phone, Torrent and then they are looking to do Flash as well, which makes in my mind very-very powerful, but that’s just me. I think FireAnt is really cool and it does the iPod and the PSP version and you are right as a content creator myself, I have to create the iPod version, the PSP version of 487 of 20 1080p. I need to create a Windows Media version, and it just becomes, by the time I am done a got 10 versions of this same file and it’s just almost impossible to manage.

Ed Kohler: Right. It’s so crazy. May in an ideal world you create one extraordinarily high version of the file. Upload that somewhere, and have it create all the separate versions for you. It’s indicating is appropriate. So we are not there yet by any means.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, but that I would love to see that. I mean that is like the holy grail for me.

Ed Kohler: I am really seeing the mix-fire interpreted at the Democracy is that it’s sort of business instead of it as a non-profit, and they do have a revenue stream, and that comes from creating the skinnable versions of the application, where it’s so far I think that their best clients are both corporations, where a corporation could create an internal communications tool, using the fireant. So to distribute of video talk to the sales force for example, and I let them put it on their Zune on their iPod whatever the heck they want to use while they're out in the field.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s cool.

Ed Kohler: Just signed on  a deal with the TV station, that’s placed in the Netherlands, where I guess all the content will be syndicated to the tools.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, that’s cool. I mean so we could make a Technology Evangelist branded version of FireAnt is what you are saying.

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Wow!

Ed Kohler: How much you want to brand it is the matter of money I think.

Benjamin Higginbotham: In the past I had issues with the fireant :// tag not being cross platform cross browser here. It only seem to really work in Windows. Do you know if they have fixed that at all or is that something that would just going to test and see if it works.

Ed Kohler: I think let’s check it out in a big video ticket report and drugs as far as one click subscribed, but I am sure that were aware of being working on it, already fixed. Let’s check it out. I didn’t take bask and ball.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So what else did you see on the floor today?

Ed Kohler: One other one worth mentioning is a company called Magnify.net, which interesting little tool they have, where you basically create, it’s the site that allows you to create you own social networking video site. So, if you want to create like a mini YouTube, you can using that software, and there are couple of other companies play on this one, but the key is on the admin side of the program, it has an aggregator there, which allows you to basically search all of the major video sites out there like YouTube, and Blip, and Google video, I don’t know, it just goes on and on. So, if you want to create a site say about snowboarding, you could go there, and search for snowboarding at the back end, and find videos that run on all other sites, and aggregate them, create your little many video site around a top that interests you.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Ok, but how is that all right, so how is that different say creating OPML file of a bunch of RSS feeds that I like, and then using Move Digital because that’s what we use almost exclusively on Technology Evangelist. They have got the upload folder where anyone can upload to my uploads folder, and share their content. How was that different?

Ed Kohler: Because this has all the functionality that you could find on YouTube type site. So it will display the videos, and thumbnails for each one. You could click to play them in a flash format, and you can rate the videos within the site, share videos from within the site. So it has a lot of the functionalities besides placing their video screen uploaded, and then you can upload your videos that you personally make to the site specifically or you can upload them to say Blip or Revver and syndicate the back in to your own site. So it is just a more refined format. It will function in that way.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I assume this is all flash quality content. So this is all be lean forward type content as it points to lean back. Correct?

Ed Kohler: Yeah. It could be used for other sales front. It generally thought around aggregating content, that’s most are going to be online in Flash. So I think one thing that someone would probably do with this is, see if ZeFrank want to create a nice innerface on his sites with thumbnails on all those videos where you can navigate through and rate them and add a lot of that kind of functionality. Well, he can create a ZeFrank site on Magnify.net, and map his domain or a subdomain of his site, which are Magnified.

So it looks like it’s for at this site. He could skin it with the look of this site, and then just as he does now, he could post his videos all through Blip or Revver, and then syndicate them back in to his own site. So it improves that kind of layout, and functionality, but you are still getting paid for this videos as it normally does because they are speed Revverised put on Blip.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Unfortunately, of course  ZeFrank the show is no longer on the air I believe. So which is a bit of a bummer, that was a great, I mean that was one of the premier internet videos sites.

Ed Kohler: I forgot to ask Blip about that... I guess he has moved his content from Revver to Blip.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Oh, I did not know that.

Ed Kohler: For his archives. I guess the home of ZeFrank is Blip now, although for a long time it has been Revver. I heard that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So over last few days of the show, how every conference has like the one big thing. What was the one big thing there?

Ed Kohler: The one big thing was Neokast. Where I mean people were flying in and they managed to sign some deals, they have a lot of people talking to them about ways that their technology could interface with their product. I can’t talk about that one quite yet, but I can say that there are CDN are interested in partnering with Neokast is for Neokast it really worked well. You need to have good seeds that you can be reliably self content. So it won’t work if it’s only just through your site, and you're trying to push HD content. So you don’t have any couple of big boys, that are serving content out there too can be a good thing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Cool. Absolutely I mean having a really good seed to ensure that if there is really no one on the feed right now. Just, getting that thing started can be very valuable. I am honestly, I am really excited to see what Neokast is going to do because that’s world changing stuff. That can change the face of television and seriously it can bring citizen journalism bring it to the map. It can really change how we think of television news and just television in general. I am really excited to see what they do.

Ed Kohler: Right, I think it’s a loss for much heard quality content to, the amount of bit rate that you can send based on distributed platform like that is certainly higher than something that you could probably get from YouTube.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, I know that you are scrambling to catch a plane. I can hear you and the background, and I will let you go hopefully, you plane is not delayed hopefully you get on to it on time, and Ed thank you so much for your time. We will catch up with you certainly back here in Minneapolis St.Paul.

Ed Kohler: I think I just covered a half-a-mile while doing this podcast.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s part of the power of new medias, we can do it from anywhere, and that you just dialed in to my skype account, and we just did this live right on the fly as you are trying to catch a plane. I mean, how cool is that?

Ed Kohler: Anywhere but on the airplane.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, no. On the airplane, and till that door is closed, and even then until the steward comes back, he tells you “shut-off” your phone. Hey Ed, thank you so much. I will see you probably tomorrow.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, see you tomorrow.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Have a good night.

Ed Kohler: Yeah.