Blog / News

At the moment, we here at upNext Media are running 2 promotional video projects, a graphics and show elements package for Strauss Herb Curling on Shaw, and another new media consulting project just getting underway. Today we have 7 different contractors working on all these projects, and more people outside the company working with us. The difference with upNext is that we don’t have a physical location that we all work at. Our people are spread all over the Lower Mainland, from North Vancouver to Abbotsford and all points in between. All of the collaboration, communication, all the actual “work” is primarily done on the Internet.

The upNext website has a built-in project management system, known as upNext mediaNet, that everyone logs into in order to work together. Messages, to-do lists, due dates, all the information needed to work on the project resides on the system. When we shoot footage or create animations, that footage is crunched down and put on the site so producers can put the shows together, audio can be worked on and reuploaded, and our clients can watch their project progress from planning through to final delivery.

This sort of workflow method has only been made possible in the past few years by the spread of broadband internet and applications that take advantage of these connection speeds. As upNext Media has been growing, I’m spending a lot of time with new partners and clients talking about how the concept works. Once people get used to the system, we’re having a lot of “ah-ha” moments, and new ways of doing things that we hadn’t really planned on going into it. All in all, it’s exciting that something like media production can be done through a virtual office environment. We don’t spend a lot of time in production meetings, it’s better on the environment in that we don’t have to travel as much, and we can still achieve a high level of collaboration.

There is now a term called “Work 2.0″ which is beginning to describe companies like upNext. At the “Office 2.0″ conference this week in San Francisco, many of the players in the space met to throw out ideas on where this kind of work and business structure is heading. CNET wrote a blog post about it, which is starting to put into words the kind of company we’re building here. The possibilities are exciting, and we’ll explore some of these issues further in this blog as we journey along.

Business 2.0 has posted an interview with Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe. Those of us in the content creation business are very used to using Adobe products, but it’s a company that remains fairly invisible to the end user.

Bruce has some very interesting insights about competing with Microsoft, and how Adobe products have woven their way into the fabric of our daily lives.

Read the interview here 

As you know, one of my favourite topics here is YouTube, one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, which also was burning cash like it was going out of style trying to keep up with the growth. Today, Google has swooped in and made the founders very rich, very quickly. It’s an merger that makes a lot of sense. Google has a video service that isn’t nearly as popular, and YouTube needed the deep pockets. Both sides are claiming at this point that the two companies will remain independent, but how long that will go on for remains to be seen.

Read more about the merger here.

Business WeekToday Business Week posted an article about online video sites, and whether or not they are attractive for investment. Speculative company valuations like $1 billion for YouTube are bandied about quite liberally by the author, but the underlying point is a sound one.

The generation coming up is going to be consuming video media over the internet, replacing the dominance of television. The outlets that deliver the content could be sitting on a goldmine, but there will be a shakeout as the dominant players in the medium emerge. At this point it’s too early to know who the winners and losers will be.

Read the article here

It’s hard to know where to start here. So far I’m getting a great education in the hows and whys of podcasting and producing media for the Internet. It’s exciting, because the medium is so new, and it’s the only form of media that has an expanding audience at the moment. Television, radio, newspapers; they’re all facing eroding audiences. The online media audience is young, and will be growing up consuming media in this fashion.

The challenge will be to make online media as easy to watch as flipping on your TV. Right now, you have to be pretty dedicated to go through the trouble of finding and subscribing to podcasts, or just use the iPod + iTunes system. If the early problems can be overcome in ways that expand the market, delivering media over the Internet may yet live up to the early promise that fueled the dot-com boom.