A blank piece of paper is one of the most frightening things for any creative. It screams possibility and dreams but provides no structure or grounds to base your next masterpiece on. This weekend I have been handed a blank piece of paper.

For the first time in months, maybe even a year, I have a weekend where I have no plans. I have nothing that requires my immediate attention, nothing that demands my presence, I’m just waiting around and killing time before my hectic week. TinyGrab’s been set on auto-pilot, my friends and loved ones are all busying themselves and my current financial restraints stop me from doing anything impulsive or going somewhere. In short I now have to entertain myself for an entire weekend. This is a scary proposition for someone who hasn’t really rested or stopped in years. I’m always working on that next big project, but now I have silence. Upon suggestion of my good friend Alex Hill, I’m taking on the task of creating a short film over the weekend; something that I can be proud of and place in my portfolio.

I haven’t been creative in the video space for such a long time. The last time I really got my teeth into filming and producing content was when Vueo was still around and even then I felt too much like a corporate shill, I wasn’t being creative. This weekend I hope to change all of that and make something that I can truly be proud of.

Staring at this blank piece of paper before me I have no clue what’s going to spring from my mind, all I know is this; I have one weekend, no crew, no actors, no budget and a blank piece of paper. Let’s see what I can do.

Chris Leydon.

Admitting failure is never easy, especially when you’ve ignored all sound advice, thrown caution into the wind and attempted the impossible without so much as a second thought. We all encounter failure everyday in our lives and not accepting it, or appreciating it, is a dangerous mistake to make. Those who do not recognise failure are poetically doomed to fail.

A few months ago I wrote a post about sticking through with my ideas and projects. I highlighted that I have often had a few half baked ideas and projects that have never come to fruition, but with Vueo I was determined to break that trend.

Vueo was more than just a company, it was a concept, it was supposed to be the blueprint of new media channels for the next five years. It was supposed to help revolutionise the way we consume and produce our media. To some extent Vueo still is some of those things, however at the end of March the decision was taken to close down Vueo Ltd and liquidate it. This process is still on going but Vueo has ended.

Vueo’s inevitable closure is not an admission saying that the online television channel format doesn’t work. I still have full faith in it. Instead I’m admitting that as far as Vueo is concerned we got way in over our heads and that our business model wasn’t quite right. Where Vueo was concerned we attempted to launch with 5 fully produced and permanent programmes. The idea was to have 5 brand new episodes a week of fresh and interesting content, with a team of 3 this was near impossible. Despite having pre-recorded content months in advance and having a lot in our backlog, we just couldn’t meet the turn around time. The stress of Vueo emotionally drained us all and took me, personally, to the point of a nervous breakdown. Trying to run TinyGrab at the same time and work on the 2.0 release, as well as Vueo and my degree, was just too much for my system to handle and something had to give.

This is a blog post that I started many months ago (back in March actually) I just haven’t been able to bring myself to finish it off, until now. The recent release of new technology makes Vueo’s closure even more upsetting, mainly due to the dream of independent channel content being able to come true. I still own the rights to the brand and some of the shows, so there is still some hope that sometime in the future I may be able to work on a relaunch. This will only be when I can find a financially viable model to support it though, my personal finances are dire and I can’t afford a loss leader.

So many things have changed since September, so many things have changed since I wrote my original blog post on Vueo. I have grown in so many ways and developed even further as a business man and content creator. Thank you to all of the supporters I’ve had during these past few trying months. Sorry for the tears, the fights, the breakups and the immaturity that has been expressed at times. Vueo really was my baby and I baby I was with it.

Chris Leydon.

I guess it’s fair to say that I’ve had my fair share of pet projects. Some I’ve seen through to the end, some I stick with and some lay in the category of half baked ideas.

Towards the end of April myself and two friends got together and had a friendly discussion. This talk would change all of our plans for the following year, completely. We’d finished our last exam and were talking about what each of us would like to do for the next year. I attend Staffordshire University and after your second year of studies you’re given several options as to what to do for your third year. Everyone is given the option to continue straight away with their degree, or they could take a year off to go on a work placement. There is a third option, however. Students are given the opportunity to pitch viable business ideas to a University board. Those who are successful are given a £3,000 grant and an office on the University’s Business Village. These scheme is called Speed. After many drinks and endless hours of talking myself and my two friends had decided to apply for the Speed scheme together. We just needed an idea.

Ever since my time working for Mevio, as their intern, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of creating my own online video network. I suggested the idea of creating an online video network to my two partners (Hannah and Gemma), who after a few hours seem to love the idea. We’re all creative film makers at heart so the dream of owning our own channel, where our own content was published, sounded like a dream come true. We pitched the concept to the Speed panel and we were awarded a place on the scheme.

Vueo is the name of the forthcoming online video entertainment channel, aimed at UK students, which is owned and operated by Vueo Ltd. The idea behind Vueo is to have 5 stable shows. All of these shows shall be internally produced and constantly in production. Vueo aims to be pretty much like a standard television channel, but with a twist. New content shall appear every day of the week and we have a schedule. Every Monday there’ll be a new episode of the Travel show, Tuesday the Challenge show, Wednesday the music show etc… However you can decided which order you watch these shows in. You can watch them in the set schedule, or pick and mix your favourite bits. We’re also allowing access to the full archive of shows. Once a show has been aired it will always be around and available for viewing / download. Essentially Vueo is the independent UK student equivalent to the BBC’s iPlayer. This is the video on demand dream that I’ve been preaching for the past year and thinking about for even longer.

Due to various non-dsiclosure agreements that’s all I can say about Vueo for now. Launching in February 2010, Vueo is set to become a prime place to get your fresh creative video content.

Chris Leydon.

The modern podcasting climate has changed considerably since its mainstream launch in 2005. Many podcasting giants have risen and fallen within the period but still the technology trundles on. The issue that many people have now is not maintaining a podcast, but actually creating one and successfully launching it.

When the iTunes Podcast store opened its gates in June 2005 the online world exploded with podcasting fever. It wasn’t too long before the technology caught the eyes of the big players within the old radio and television industry, from that point on independent podcasts were doomed.

The independent podcast circle used to be a buzzing pace full of enthusiasm and community. Perhaps I’m painting an idyllic image of the past, as one often tends to do with hindsight, but my point is valid nonetheless. There was talk of commercialising podcasts, in order to maintain them and break even, but making millions wasn’t on the agenda. There was a time when I was a big advocate against the commercialisation of podcasts, but that time has passed and I’ve joined the dark side. Commercialisation of podcasting has, if anything, improved the overall quality of content available.

Something changed after the Summer of 2005. Suddenly it became very hard to launch a podcast and gain the amount of an audience as one would have achieved in June. There wasn’t an issue of over-saturation of the market at all, the issue was that big corporate companies started to move in.

The BBC effectively killed independent podcasts when it started to regurgitate its own radio content. The BBC didn’t come up with new content for podcasts, they recycled the shit that came out of the mouth of Chris Moyles in the morning to turn it into what they called a podcast. “The Best of the Chris Moyles show” quickly became one of the biggest podcasts on the web, the BBC saw the success of this and soon began to recycle the rest of their shit from across their radio network. Soon the market was flooded by other broadcasters doing the same.

Take a look at the front page of the iTunes Podcast store today and you will not see a single independently produced podcast. It’s either crap recycled from the BBC, or other network providers, along with one or two “celebrities”. If fun, independent content is becoming hard to source from the world’s number one podcast store the industry is doomed.

Small little networks and communities used to exist that would serve as directories for independent shows, but they’ve long since died out. The Britcaster forums closed their doors way before I even found a slight moderate success with The Podzone. Mevio are no longer promoting the independent content that’s hosted on their network. They’re plugging the shows that they produce, they’re not even supporting the independent producers with promotion on their front page or channels.

If the big old media networks are tainting what was once hailed as he saviour of high quality entertaining content, what’s the next step? Podcasting was created by pioneers who were frustrated with the blatant commercialisation and dumbing down of mainstream content, it’s sad to see it go the same way as radio.

The only way that we shall see the continuation of podcasting and the saving of independent content within that is for a new network to be built. A united front against all of the shit and trollop that is being pushed out and into our ears by old media companies. If there is one thing that could possibly save podcasting, it’s Twitter. Someone just needs to come up with a way to make the two work together.

We need a community, a new directory, a fantastic piece of software and integration that will save the independent podcast industry before it really is too late.

Chris Leydon.

Recently, with the guiding hands of Steven Troughton-Smith and James Padolsey, I’ve been dipping my toe into the ocean known as Mac OS X app development. I’m a complete and utter newbie to computer programming, but I have a great idea (or at least an improvement on an existing idea) so I’m delving into the unknown territory to see what happens.

Grab Up was a fantastic application for Mac OS X (a promised Windows version has still, after 6 months, failed to arrive) that allowed users to take a screenshot on their computer and have it automatically upload to the web, eventually leaving a URL of the image in the user’s clipboard. It’s supposed to be simple and easy to use. So why am I writing in the past tense?

Towards the end of 2008, Grab Up was acquired from its original developer. Since the acquisition the service that Grab Up provides has declined significantly. The new owner has switched hosting accounts a total of 3 times since the start of the year, meaning all previous grabs have been lost. The domain expired, was bought buy a squatter and all of this went unnoticed until someone tweeted to the new Grab Up owner. The service is frequently down, goes over their bandwidth allocation and can be more hassle than it’s actually worth. The URLs that Grab Up provides are long winded and unnecessary. Grab Up seems to be dying a slow and very painful death.

As I’m sure you’re aware, this leaves a fantastic gap in the market for a competitor. Step into the spotlight TinyGrab. Keyone Productions, the company of which I’m a founding partner in, is putting the facilities in place to create a fantastic image uploading and hosting service. For various reasons I can’t go into too much detail about the plans for TinyGrab, but keep your eyes on TinyGrab.com and this blog for exciting news soon.

Chris Leydon.

Twitter is the social network that half the world is going crazy about right now. The British media can’t seem to get enough of social networks, such as Facebook, but Twitter appears to be the favourite of the month. Hardly a day goes by when the BBC doesn’t have an article on their Technology News site where they don’t mention Twitter.

Just incase you have been living under a rock for the past few months, here’s a bit of background behind Twitter. Twitter is an online social networking application that just asks you one question, “What are you doing?”. The premise behind this is to keep those who want to know what you’re up to, informed. As it has once been described, Twitter is what happens between blog posts and emails.

In all honesty Twitter has been around since 2006, it’s only recently that the traditional broadcast media has cottoned onto it. A few months ago some celebrities, such as Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross began to use the service; with their media influence there has been a sudden explosion of interest in Twitter. This fresh explosion in the social network has unearthed the age old question that has been plaguing Twitter since its initial conception. How on earth is Twitter going to monetize?

Personally I hate the word “monetize” but I think it’s perfectly apt for this post. “Monetize” is a word that’s been floating about since the .com boom of the late 1990s. Business men and women see a new technology and start to wonder how they can make money out of it, how they can “monetize” an existing technology or service.

Usually, with online social networks and services, the typical way to monetize is through selling premium rate advertising on the network or service. Many current social networks already adopt this form of funding, in fact advertising is pretty much the biggest element that’s keeping the internet a float. Google makes money out of advertising, Yahoo supposedly do, Microsoft are attempting to, Facebook is leaning in the direction of selling advertising and many blogs and podcasts have adverts littered throughout them (although not THIS blog, for various personal choices).

The general feeling amongst the online tech world is that Twitter shall eventually follow the rest of the crowd and monetize using advertising. Current suggestions of how Twitter could implement advertising include displaying targeted adverts, that pick up on key words or traits, in between tweets on a user’s personal stream; very much like Google does with their search results (which leads onto another rumour about Google buying out Twitter). However many feel that this will disrupt the way Twitter works and that it wouldn’t really be an effective way of monetizing the system.

Twitter is unique in the fact that it has one massive obvious way that it can make money. People implement Twitter EVERYWHERE by using Twitter’s extensive API. The API that Twitter provides means that third parties can create applications that integrate with the social network. Whether it’s to build a simple Twitter desktop app, to analyse stats, or a plethora of many other possibilities, the Twitter API allows a third party to do this. So many people are coming up with exciting and fresh ways os using Twitter, through the API, that a single way to monetize Twitter seems to have appeared.

Thousands of dollars a day are poured into Twitter to keep it functional. Their server farms require electricity, cooling, security. They have to pay their engineers and keep their shareholders happy. A few months ago Twitter was struggling to meet with the demands of their ever expanding audience; servers were failing left, right and centre and the service became awfully unreliable. However, very few people were actually logging on to Twitter.com and actually using the site. The increase of traffic was coming from third party applications making use of Twitter’s API.

An interesting solution to monetizing Twitter is to charge for the use of their API. If Twitter were to start charging developers to access their API, Twitter might have a viable financial solution on their hands. An entire universe of third party applications that make use of the Twitter API exist, it’s part of the reason why Twitter has managed to survive when other similar social networks haven’t. Twitter integrates with everything and has become an incredibly powerful tool. It seems incredibly silly not to start charging for API access, now that the network behind Twitter has built up. Other companies and services are making use of the API, which is currently losing Twitter money. This would also be an effective way of avoiding charging users of Twitter for accounts. To me, it all seems perfectly logical. I have no idea though how much, or how, one would charge for API access; it’s just an idea.

Chris Leydon.

The last few weeks that have just gone by were extremely stressful for my workload. In all honesty, the past three months were incredibly stressful for my workload, full stop.

To refresh your memories, for my University course this semester I had to create a 3 – 10 minute film on anything I wanted. My initial ideas developed into Project New York, a project that was put on hold after a relationship breakdown and a financial storm. The film then evolved into what would have been called “The Woman on the Roof”, sadly due to the lack if a rooftop this film had to undergo a change too.

“Brydges Place” is the name of the thinnest alleyway in London. It’s also the setting and the name for the film that was once called “The Woman on the Roof”. Why the name change and no roof? Sadly the company who managed the rooftop that I wished to film on had to cancel on me at the last minute, due to lack of manpower within their organisation. Like most films I’ve worked on, a bailout plan had to be worked on at the last minute. The bailout plan revolved around shooting in various locations in Westminster with a cut down version of the original “The Woman on the Roof” script.

It’s interesting to see how this University film has changed around the current situations in my life. When I was in love with a man in New York, I wanted to create a drama tackling the low key homopobia that can be found in some parts of the city. When I was going through a breakdown and looking for an escape, the film changed into “The Woman on the Roof” a film about someone coming to peace and terms with everything. In some sort of weird way this film is still dedicated to the person who it was intended to be made for, it’s just now circumstances have changed and we’re all moving on with our lives.

My flash player, for reasons unknown to me, doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. Should you wish to see “Brydges Place”, please click on the image to be redirected to my online portfolio, CHRISLEYDON.TV, where you can watch it in a nice high quality working flash player.

Chris Leydon.

The future of traditional broadcast media is something that has been debated for the past several years. Recently, however, there seems to be a general consensus; traditional broadcast media will not last for another 5 years.

Television as a medium is dead. People are sick of having to watch content when a channel deems it fit. Previously this was the only means of getting programming out into the world, but this linear format is defunct. The technology for the public to have content, on demand, has really been around since the 80s. The video cassette recorder allowed the public, at home, to be in charge of the content that they wanted to watch. For the first time you were in control of what you watched and when you watched it. The success of this technology is evident, we still use video recorders to this day; in the 21st century though, they have evolved onto the digital stage.

The huge future of video on demand services was truly realised when Digital Video Recorders were introduced. TiVo and Sky+ allowed the public to record a seemingly unlimited amount of content and watch it when they wanted to. The problem with this system is that you’re still restricted to the big television companies controlling how often you could record your content. You had to wait for the programme to be broadcast over the television network, so that you could record it in real time. It still wasn’t truly content on demand.

The BBC started experimenting with internet radio towards the end of the 1990′s. They had discovered the potential that the internet had as a content delivery system. In the early 2000′s the BBC started to allow users to stream archived radio shows for up to a week after their original broadcast date. The quality was poor, the technology was flaky, but it allowed people to realise where the future of on demand content laid, the internet. The technology behind the BBC’s online radio services was so successful that other broadcasters started to follow suit.

When Bill Gates started talking about IPTV at CES back in 2007, personally I was imaging television (in its current linear format) being streamed via the tubes of the internet, to a television. A new delivery system. I now realise how wrong I was. Within the past 4 years the phenomenon of podcasting has gone mainstream, many people don’t realise that they’re doing it, or don’t call it podcasting, but the basic infrastructure is the same. Companies such as Mevio (or Revision 3) are starting to deliver fresh, high quality, custom created content to viewers worldwide every single day. Admittedly the primary way of watching this content right now is by streaming it through a web browser, but imagine what one could achieve if it was incorporated with a tool such as Boxee. We would truly have a seemingly unlimited amount of fresh high quality content, right at our finger tips, on demand.

Sometime within the next one or two years, perhaps even within the next few months, we’ll start to see boxes under television sets replacing digital tuners. No more satellite, no more cable, no more freeview; just the “magic box”. Hopefully this box will be running a system such as Boxee, but it will give everyone intuitive easy access to great quality content. We’ll have our “Channels” delivered in a way that Mevio currently is pioneering, where you can hop in and hop out of programming. We’ll have our films ready to go at the push of a button. A back catalogue of all of our favourite shows will be forever easy to watch. I am aware that there are systems that exist like this anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this box will be your ONLY box. The BBC, ITV, ABC, NBC will have to realise this soon. The only way that they’re going to survive is to make all of their content on demand and to lose the linear format of broadcasting. The linear format is old, it’s tired, it’s outdated, it’s no longer practical.

The end is nigh for traditional broadcast television, make way for the real digital media revolution.

Chris Leydon.

Escape, we all need one. We all need to get away from the slum of day to day life. We all need to feel free and clear our head. We all need a clear vision. Where can you go for this relief? That’s your choice.

What is such a dark or deep intro for a post doing on my blog, you may wonder. Don’t worry, I haven’t become some sort of manic depressive. The paragraph above is a quick teaser synopsis of the idea behind my latest film project. What’s happened to Project New York? This has. This, for the time being, is Project New York.

For various reasons, business and personal, the film that I was planning to film in New York had been put on hold. This doesn’t mean that the project has been cancelled, I still plan to make it one day, the story is very close to my heart. However, my film module requires me to man a film this semester so I had to brain storm a new idea. The working title for the film is “The Woman on the Roof”.

“The Woman on the Roof” revolves around a young woman who has recently been raped. She goes to the top of the roof several weeks later, to relive the entire event, looking for some sort of escape. It’s not necessarily the film that I set out to make, or wanted to make, but nevertheless it is now the film that I am making. Maybe it has to do with the mood that I was in when I wrote the script. I was going through an emotional time and needed a release, I guess this film is my roof. I’ve channelled all of my hurt feelings into this project, I just hope that it pays off.

Location hunting for this film has been relatively easy, getting in touch with said locations though has been much harder than expected. As it stands I currently have one location out of three; with a week to go before shooting this is perhaps not a great thing. For this location, however, I am having to hire a policeman to be on set at all times. Apparently you can’t fake the scene of a rape on the streets of London, without a police officer present. I have no idea how much this will cost me, but let’s see.

If all goes to plan, shooting will all be done in one day. These “let’s shoot it all in one day” plans tend never to work, I hope that this one bucks the trend. This is the only window that I have to shoot it, due to equipment and University rehearsal schedules, so I really hope that it all manages to come together.

Chris Leydon.

Recently I’ve spent a lot of time working on my new online portfolio. Back in Nobember I bought the domain name chrisleydon.tv with the intent of turning it into an entertainment channel. A channel that would have been full of blogs, video shows and short films. Whilst this is a long term dream, something I want Keyone Productions to be able to achieve, I realised that it wasn’t something that was plausable for chrisleydon.tv at the present time.

An online entertainment channel requires constant updating with fresh content. It requires time and love, two things which I can’t give to such a project at this current moment in time. I needed to come up with another use for my domain.

Over the past two months and the holiday season, many ideas and concepts have come and gone. The concept that I settled on was to turn chrisleydon.tv into a place for my portfolio. I could have done this through a page on my blog, but I decided that it was wise to have a completely seperate and independant site for this project.

The design of the portfolio was something that was crucial. I wanted as much space as possible for a widescreen flash video player, but I also wanted incredible ease of use. After a few mockups in Photoshop I settled on the final design that is currently being used, the next step was to code the site.

I’ve dabbled with web design and coding in the past, as regular blog readers will know, however this is my most ambitious web project to date. To save on loading pages I wanted everything to be on one page. For accessibility reasons I didn’t want the entire site to be flash based. I required a system whereby the user click on a video to play and it plays in the central video player. From past experiences I knew that this was plausable with little hard work. Such a system is put into use on the Mevio website, as well as the new Podzone site (coded by Owen Jones).

The problem with using the systems from Mevio and The Podzone is that both of those sites run off a content management system, something which I didn’t want to use. As I’m not the most fantastic coder in the world I needed a little help with Javascript, so I reached out into the Twitter community. Sam Starling, student and web coder, replied to my message and created a demo with a walkthrough. This enabled me to code my project with ease, whilst learning how it all worked. I am forever indebted to him for this.

My portfolio, as it stands, contains some of my best work from over the past year and a half. It will continue to be updated with more work as it appears. No doubt that Project New York will play a crucial part in it. That’s the story of my online portfolio. Should you want to check it out, head on over to www.chrisleydon.tv.

Chris Leydon.