Monday, March 24th, 2008
by Greg Gackle, Principal
© GAH, Inc.
An online firm providing placement of web television ads is now offering online web video production service. You’ve seen the pitches from on-demand printers who offer customization of stock postcards and brochure layouts. Now a company called Spotrunner is offering similar customization of stock video for company web commercials/ads. Pick out your market area, select from a variety of stock footage, send them your unique information/logo and hit the “return” button. Prices start at $500 for the video spot; not bad if you’ve priced hiring a video production crew lately. The cost of placing the video banners on various web sites is additional.
Yellow Page directories and others have jumped into Internet video ads/commercials. Look no further than the City of Bettendorf’s homepage to see some of the results. Through partnerships with chambers, cities and civic groups, such companies use existing video and artwork/logos to put together short videos linked to a business’ web site.
Web video and sports broadening reach
Streaming of sports live via the Internet is gaining popularity on all levels. For the Iowa High School boys basketball tournament, $9.95 would buy you a live webcast of the quarterfinal or semifinal games (The finals were broadcast on network television and weren’t available online). For the NCAA men’s tourney, you can watch all of the games free online. . . if you either sign up early (get a VIP pass) or tune in before the CBS Sportsline servers are filled up with viewers.
QC Times Online Editor get print edition facetime
In an apparent effort to get some “facetime” for its online editor and added visibility for its online entity qctimes.com, the newspaper’s print version recently featured a daily front page “flood” article by Online Editor Jim Gale. In the daily column, Gale traveled to various area river locations to observe flood levels. . . more easily accessed and monitored via the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ online river levels web page.
iphone a travel necessity
A recent family trip to a large metro area gave me a chance to find out how useful an iphone can be. Need to locate a coffee shop near the hotel, just do a quick search. Want to find out what restaurants are within walking distance. Search on the phone. Are the restaurants open and what is the menu? View the restaurant web site on the phone. How far is that museum from our current location? Check the phone. More useful than any hotel room magazine and more detailed than any city visitor map. And, our taxi driver from Dubai confirms the mapping/usefulness of the iphone is just as good in foreign countries.
