Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth: Video Archives

April 26, 2008

Riding the Wheaton Express

One of our favorite things to do when the weather is nice is to take Kayleigh to Wheaton Regional Park, just north of Washington DC, where they have a charming toy train that rides through the park. I thought it would be fun to stream a live tour of the train ride; here's the archive of the video I shot.

Posted by acarvin at 2:59 PM

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March 28, 2008

DC Cherry Blossoms Walking Tour

Today during my lunch break I streamed some live video over my N95 mobile phone from the Tidal Basin in Washington DC, home to the annual blossom of DC's famous cherry blossom trees. The first video didn't work so well - I had the video at such a high resolution the network crashed - but the second take worked like a charm. The video is about 16 minutes long, and features lots of cherry blossoms, some helicopters, and my disembodied voice talking about the history of cherry trees in DC. My wife Susanne and daughter Kayleigh even make a brief cameo - they were touring the cherry blossoms with my mother-in-law and I bumped into them near the FDR memorial. Enjoy! -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:17 PM

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March 25, 2008

Live from the Salt Lick: BBQ and the Future of Mobcasting

I'm back in Austin, TX for a couple of days of NPR meetings, so last night I convinced my colleagues to make the 45-minute trek outside of the city to the Salt Lick, an old-time barbecue joint with some of the best BBQ in the area. While we waited for our table, I thought it would be a great occasion to break in my new Nokia N95 video phone. Using the streaming service Qik.com, I was able to stream a live video as I toured the barbecue pit, watching cooks slapping briskets onto the fire and slathering them with their tangy sauce. (I also managed to let the video keep recording after I thought I hit the stop button, so the end of the video is kinda funny.) This video is an archive of the live event.

As far as I'm concerned, being able to stream live video from a mobile phone to the Internet is an absolute game-changer. I'm hoping I can get some of these phones into the hands of NPR colleagues so they can test them out in the field, but imagine the possibilities when everyday people can press a button on their phones and start broadcasting. I keep thinking of the Tibetan protests that took place against the Chinese government, or the Burmese monk protests last year. In both cases, there was a limited pool of video available, and much of it came up after the fact. Imagine if a protestor - or a whole group of them - were able to broadcast what was going on around them in real time?

It's very much an extension of the mobcasting concept I advocated three years ago. Back then, I talked about using open source tools to allow protestors and citizen journalists to post audio and video to blogs and RSS feeds as events unfolded:

[W]ith the proliferation of video-enabled smartphones, it seems that it would be a natural progression to mobilize the millions of people who are buying these tools with an easy, no-nonsense way to capture socially-relevant footage and get it online in near-real time....
...A quick example: imagine a large protest at a political convention. During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the event, but not live. For the protestors and civil rights activists caught in the melee, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and publicized as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for the handful of journalists to file a story on it, activists at the protest capture the event on their video phones -- dozens of phones from dozens of angles. Thanks to the local 3G (or community wi-fi) network, the activists immediately podcast the footage on their blogs. The footage gets aggregated on a civil rights website thanks to the RSS feeds produced by the podcasters' blogs. (Or perhaps they all podcast their footage directly to a centralized website, a la OneWorld TV but with an RSS twist.) This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's mobcasting.

Back then, though, we were limited to somewhat crude mobile podcasting tools like Audlink.com and Audioblogger.com, both of which are now defunct. Today, we're seeing the deployment of new services that allow for near-real time audio and video posting, like Utterz and Kyte.tv. These services also incorporate social networking features that allow users to track each other's content, comment on it, and cross-post it to various social media sites, like Twitter or Facebook. And now with Qik, near-real time becomes actual real-time. Rather than waiting for you to finish recording your content before posting it from your phone, Qik streams it with just a 5-10 second delay. That's not so different than the delay you see in "live" broadcasts on TV news or radio.

In some ways, the term mobcasting is more appropriate than ever: groups of people using mobile phones in coordinated actions to cover an event without any easy way to censor them. It's both exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. It's just a matter of time before there's another government crackdown, police beating incident, voter intimidation or other incident that authorities wouldn't want the rest of us to see. But we will see it. Live. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:19 AM

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March 12, 2008

Billy Bob Thornton vs. the Studio

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Actor Billy Bob Thornton, speaking at the 2008 SXSW festival in Austin, TX, describes the fight he had with a Hollywood studio over his creative independence while making the film All the Pretty Horses. -andy

Formats available: mp4, iPod, mobile

Posted by acarvin at 9:33 AM

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February 19, 2008

Unveiling My $17 Burger at the LA Biltmore Hotel

Posted by acarvin at 9:21 PM

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February 11, 2008

Studio 4A: Inside NPR on Super Tuesday

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On February 5, I spent the better part of the night working at NPR, helping out with online coverage of Super Tuesday 2008. One floor above us was Studio 4A, NPR's broadcast command center. Inside, dozens of NPR staff worked to bring live coverage of the voting results, including making projections for every primary and caucus that night.

I spent some time visiting Studio 4A observing the action. I'd only planned to take some still pictures, but ended up shooting this video as well. Because I didn't have a proper video camera with me, the audio is somewhat embarrassing, but at least the visuals will give you a sense of some of the things taking place behind the scenes. Included in the video are Featuring Beth Donovan, Ken Rudin, Ron Elving, Ellen Weiss, Robert Siegel, Michelle Norris, Mara Liasson, EJ Dionne, Scott Simon, David Folkenflik, Andrea Seabrook and Nina Totenberg, among others. -andy

Formats available: mp4, iPod, Mobile, Flash

Posted by acarvin at 8:36 PM

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Anonymous Protest Scientology in Washington DC

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Footage I shot for Rocketboom at the Washington DC protest against the Church of Scientology by the group known as Anonymous.

Formats available: mp4, iPod, mobile, Flash

Posted by acarvin at 12:12 PM

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January 17, 2008

Feeding the Giraffes

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Video of me hand-feeding the giraffes of the Brevard Zoo in Viera, Florida.

Formats available: mp4, iPod, mobile, Flash

Tags: animals | Brevard Zoo | giraffes

Posted by acarvin at 1:26 AM

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December 30, 2007

Reliving My Grandparents' Wedding

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When I visited my parents last February, I spent some time examining a small reel of 8mm film - footage from my the wedding of my grandparents, Cy Kaplan and Theresa Goldman, in December 1938. The film was practically falling apart, and much of it had been damaged years ago when my grandfather had someone clean the film, and they ended up corroding it instead.

I spent a lot of time investigating ways to restore and digitize the film, along with a number of other reels we had from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. So you can imagine my surprise when I came back to Florida to see my parents and grandmother this week, and they told me that a cousin of mine had given them a copy of all of the footage on a DVD. It turns out that when my grandfater had the film restored, they got transferred to a VHS copy. A cousin had a copy of this tape, so he decided to burn it to DVD and send it out to the family.

A couple of nights ago, we spent the evening watching the footage, largely at half-speed, so my grandmother could identify people for us. Even though she's 92 years old, it's amazing how many people she could spot almost instantly. She also got to see footage of her parents, who died more than 60 years ago, for the first time in decades.

Since I've been documenting my grandmother's stories on this blog, I thought I'd share her wedding film as well. It's about seven minutes long, including the very end of the ceremony, the wedding reception, and brunch back at her family's house in Chelsea, MA the next day. I know it might not be very interesting to everyone, but having it in digital form means the world to us. -andy

Formats available: mp4, iPod, mobile, Flash

Posted by acarvin at 6:33 PM

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Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

The Video Archive

April 26, 2008

Riding the Wheaton Express

March 28, 2008

DC Cherry Blossoms Walking Tour

March 25, 2008

Live from the Salt Lick: BBQ and the Future of Mobcasting

March 12, 2008

Billy Bob Thornton vs. the Studio

February 19, 2008

Unveiling My $17 Burger at the LA Biltmore Hotel

February 11, 2008

Studio 4A: Inside NPR on Super Tuesday

Anonymous Protest Scientology in Washington DC

January 17, 2008

Feeding the Giraffes

December 30, 2007

Reliving My Grandparents' Wedding

December 26, 2007

A Christmas Lumiere

December 3, 2007

Matzah Ball Madness!

December 2, 2007

Scottish Christmas Walk

November 17, 2007

Dulcimer Dance

October 28, 2007

Martin Luther King III on Blogging, the Media and the Jena 6 Protests

Martin Luther King III Discusses Media Ownership

Brookside Gardens in Bloom

October 12, 2007

Train Goin' Home

October 9, 2007

Horse Auction

Sack Race

September 13, 2007

Praying Mantis vs. Bumble Bee

Kayleigh's First Steps!

September 4, 2007

Kayleigh Composes Her First Song

August 26, 2007

Butterflies

July 25, 2007

Carvin's Eleven

July 24, 2007

My Michael Moore Video

July 7, 2007

Kong Nay, Cambodian Chapei Master

July 2, 2007

Unwelcome Questions for Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson

July 1, 2007

Waiting in Spin Alley

June 29, 2007

Dramatic Sharpton

June 28, 2007

It's a Wrap

Unvarnished: Scenes from the Media Center

Greetings from the Presidential Debate Media Center

June 16, 2007

Meeting a Living Goddess: The Bhaktapur Kumari of Nepal

June 2, 2007

Happy Birthday Kayleigh!

May 29, 2007

Toasting Eric and Kim at their Wedding

May 6, 2007

Defying the Fire: Rallying Behind Eastern Market

May 3, 2007

Protests on Demand: The Floating Lab Collective

April 29, 2007

Harper's Ferry Arsenal Blues

April 13, 2007

Grandma's Stories: The Dairy Farm on Auburn Street

April 11, 2007

Snapshot: Dizzy in Flight

April 7, 2007

Project Hope International

April 6, 2007

Jonny's Busted Laptop

April 5, 2007