The future of education

August 14th, 2009 by Evangelist

Professor David Wiley is bullish on online education (as are we. But his claim that the “institutions will be irrelevant by 2020″ should be tempered by the qualifier “some”. Some others embrace the future, and these are not just trendy upstarts, but such bulwarks as our alma mater and another school in the same town. See Jimmy Ruska’s list for other impressive names.

This is the future not merely because of internationalization, or accessibility. Just like taking notes in a live lecture helps retain material even if you don’t ever look at the notes again, students who also read a text version of the video retain more vocabulary and specific details than they would have otherwise.


And on a lighter note, have you heard taht according to Google, MegaVideo is just Spanish for YouTube (h/t debedb).

Accessibility pays

August 11th, 2009 by Evangelist

Accessibility pays. As the Design for Inclusion: Creating a New Marketplace report from National Council on Disability points out:


Consumers with disabilities find many E&IT products to be inaccessible. A sizeable un-tapped market for universal design products and services exists. However, few companies appreciate the size of the market or know how to tap its potential.

[...]

Designing with access in mind can significantly increase the size of targeted markets for electronic and information technology (E&IT). Good business practice dictates that designers and engineers avoid unintentionally excluding large populations of consumers from accessing and using the E&IT they develop and manufactur

Additionally, According to National Captioning Institute, “66% of viewers of captioned TV are more likely to buy a product that has a captioned commercial; 53% will actively seek out products advertised with captions; and 35% will switch to brands that use captioned ads.”

And not only does accessibility provide increased ROI, the I (investment) part can be minimal, leveraging . The great Jamie Berke writes about how tax credits can help businesses make themselves accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people.

And, finally, for those relying on video for marketing, consider that a “study even showed that the mere availability of subtitles could increase viewership by 40% and increase duration viewed by 38%” (h/t 3playmedia).

A recap

August 5th, 2009 by Evangelist

Many things I wanted to mention probably got lost. So I’d like to recap:

The good

The uncertain

The amusing

  • To our Russian-speaking readers, we’d like to point out a great blog run by an Overstream user and dedicated to translating comedy sketches from around the world: http://sketch-comedy.blogspot.com/

Blogging again

August 4th, 2009 by Evangelist

If we may be so bold as to flatter ourselves that there are those that care, we’d like to explain a bit on recent posts.

  • The nature of blogging and Twitter is such that Twitter Tools in the Twitter-to-Wordpress direction don’t make for good reading. Although some improvements can be made here:

    So, at least until the above-made WIBNI (”wouldn’t it be nice?”) suggestions for blogging/Tweeter integration are done, we’ll tread carefully and will:

    • @Overstream on Twitter is still the Tweet Stream from the Overstream Team. The feeds with latest Overstreams, updated many times daily, are now available from @captioned on Twitter for those that want it — and we see that quite a few of you do!
    • In general, render unto Twitter that which is tweeted, and render unto WordPress that which is… well… more coherent.

Inaccessible Moscow

August 3rd, 2009 by Evangelist

As you know, we focus more on accessibility of online videos (while interpreting the concept of “accessibility” broadly — to overcome barriers posed by things other than technical “disabilities”, such as language barriers or literacy problems; but that’s a topic for another day…). But, of course, the very concept of accessibility in a more general sense is important to us.

So we are happy that we could use our site to bring those of you who share this interest several stories about accessibility (or, rather, sadly, lack thereof) elsewhere.

Today, we bring you a few stories from Russia (they are embedded below).

Moscow Wheelchair Action in the News I

Moscow Wheelchair Action in the News II

One of the featured participants (look for her at 01:31) is a noted journalist and activist Irina Yasina. If you can read Russian, do check out her take on this over at LiveJournal.


Credits

We’d like to credit LiveJournal users who brought this to our attention:


P.S. The title, unfortunately, is an untranslatable wordplay in Russian - “inaccessible” but also “impregnable” (as in, a fortress). So, if any of you professional translator folks out there with better sense of language than us, care to offer a better translation, please do!

27etMoi: Elections in Europe

May 20th, 2009 by Max

27etMoi, a video-rich site about the upcoming elections in Europe, built by NoProblemo for ARTE relies on Overstream Client Services for both subtitle authoring and subtitled video playback.

Overstream Client Services

May 20th, 2009 by Max

Starting in early 2009, Overstream has started offering Overstream Client Services.

These services (Subtitle Authoring Service and Subtitle Playback Service) are intended for clients who would like to host their videos at a location of their choice. The client is provided with their own private instance of the Overstream Server on which they can create an unlimited number of users.

  • The Subtitle Authoring Service’s interface can be integrated into the client’s backoffice.
  • The Subtitle Playback Service includes a subtitle-enabled, fully customizable video player which can be localized into any language of client’s choice.

The Overstream Client Services include a flexible on-demand monthly payment plan that ensures that the client only pays
for the actual service use. Custom code modifications are also available.

If you are interested in Overstream Client Services, please write to
for more information.

Overstream Tutorials #2

May 19th, 2009 by Max

In continuation of our Overstream Tutorials Post, recently we had a couple of awesome Overstream tutorials created by you, our users, right here on Overstream.net:

Thanks a lot, guys and girls, for helping others to use Overstream!

Archive.org Supported

May 12th, 2009 by Max

Archive.org (aka Internet Archive) videos are now supported by Overstream. There are more technical details regarding this in our forum.

The Internet Archive is a an Internet Library of free videos, text, audios and other digital data. As they put it themselves:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

And now hopefully the video portion of it will (with your help!) be available with subtitles, further broadening the usefulness of the Internet Archive-provided data to users from all over the world.

Overstream tutorials

January 30th, 2009 by Evangelist

We’d like to thank some of our users who created great tutorials in addition to our own:

Thanks, folks!


P.S. You can now follow us on Twitter!