- Baseball with Urgency – This video, written and narrated by Tom Verducci, will give you chills. Guaransheed. I long ago fell out of love with baseball but not its playoffs. As Verducci explains, in October, “we sit on a knife’s edge between fame and infamy.” And now think of why we watch college basketball. There aren’t 162 games and when it comes to its great stage, that knife’s edge is as sharp as they come. March offers no room for error, no opportunity to ‘get ’em tomorrow.’ The baseball playoffs are no doubt fantastic, my second favorite season’s end. But if urgency is what you need, you’ve come to the right blog.
- Sights, sounds from Arizona’s Red-Blue Game – Homer linkage? Perhaps. But this was produced by friend of the blog and friend of mine, Sarah Kezele. Who is she? SK is amongst the sharpest, brightest, most driven producers out there. Currently, she’s on Arizona Central’s video team, a group bringing new media to its dated paper model. Which is to say, SK is cutting edge. Give her a follow. Also – in case you were wondering – Arizona had some 30-stars worth of talent in attendance at their sold out Red-Blue game and five of those stars, committed.
- Youtube wants you to pay for premium video content – Well so too does HBO, Netflix, and Amazon! Tube sparked the change in digital consumption, offering us unlimited video content as well as a video voice. Talents have been discovered on Youtube, careers ignited, yet their model hasn’t necessarily kept up. I think part of Youtube’s business fault has been in distinguishing our content from theirs. Is this a first step in that direction? Will “premium content producers” have the same reach or be happy with that reach? If Youtube isn’t going to fund high production programming (like Narcos, House of Cards, etc.) will people be willing to pay for ad-less access to Charlie Bit My Finger (full disclosure, I’m not sure that’s the content they’ll be charging for but damn that thing has 830 million views). But maybe it’s not Youtube’s to solve? Google has its fingers in seemingly everything (and owns Youtube). Presumably, Youtube’s direction can/will be Google’s direction through the evolution of media distribution. This ‘premium service’ is a glance at that direction.
