Megan and Warwick have a look at the podcast on the site: http://thiscityrocks.com and also each of the video sharing sites and how their show is represented there.

1. What is ThisCityRocks and how did it get started? What’s the appeal of video podcasting? Goals for the show? It all started out of a love for music, and a half-joking way of getting to see more live music. Warwick also recognized the need to learn more about the technical side of podcasting, and decided to learn by doing.

2. Ways to get your video online – pros and cons of the options we’ve tried. They’ve used YouTube (the mainstream choice), Revver (initially attracted by the 50/50 revenue share, but never really “wowed” by it), Blip.tv (the service we’ve chosen to use mainly), and Video.ca (a Canadian specific video site which we have used to good effect). There are key differences with each, and in fact you have to encode differently for each service for optimal results. They have found Blip to have the most features and user-controllability.

3. How to make money with a video podcast. Well, it’s tough. Unless you are internet stars, raking in hundreds of thousands of viewers, the built-in advertising and ad revenue programs that the video sharing sites offer will never financially sustain a show. You have to get creative, developing sponsorship packages, partnerships, merchandising, etc. For example, a web design company (Zu.com) sponsored their sticker drive to help them promote the show, and they are working on partnering with bigger online portals and sites to help increase their viewership. Once you have the higher numbers, you can be more comfortable going after the advertisers. If you’re good, and relevant, there is always the possibility of being paid by an online video portal to produce shows. Outside of the editorial show-format podcasting, however, Warwick has seen a big increase in his online video production business this year, as businesses are looking more and more to online video to get their messages across.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
ThisCityRocks.com
www.blip.tv – video sharing service we currently use to stream our podcast
www.revver.com – another model that we tried out
www.youtube.com - it’s the mainstream choice…you have to use it nowadays
www.video.ca – canada’s version of youtube essentially

www.meganCole.org – Megan’s website
www.formulaphoto.com – Warwick’s Formula Photographic site

Liquid Crystal Display technology has been around since the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the 70s when it got its first major consumer-friendly boost in items like watches and calculators. The same technology that you used to see in those watches and calculators has been adapted for use in LCD flat panel monitors, but it may not be obvious just how — one technology uses black and white bars while the other is a full-colour display capable of displaying photos….so how do they do it?

The basic property of LCD that makes it all possible is a phase-change between liquid and solid: when it’s in one state it allows light to pass through, and when it’s in the other, it blocks light thanks to a combination of twisting crystals and how they interact with polarized light.

An LCD flat panel display is actually a sandwich made up of several parts. While the actual construction is a bit more complicated than we can explain thoroughly in the space of a segment on the show, the basics are as follows:

- a light source at the back (usually fluorescent, but some new models use LED)
- a diffuser to make the light more even
- pockets of liquid crystal solution injected into a grid
- miniature red, green and blue filters arranged in a grid over top of the pockets of liquid crystal solution, one filter per pocket
- a polarizer over top of the whole screen

Each pixel consists of one red, one green and one blue pocket, each of which is activated individually by a transistor — turned on, the crystal twists and blocks the light, and turned off it allows the light through. But the trick here is that it’s just all on or all off: each pixel can be set to various levels between full-on and full-off, so that you can achieve a wide range of colours based on how strong each pixels’ individual colours are represented.

Ultimately, each LCD monitor generates its display based on how much it’s BLOCKING the backlight. That’s why LCD can have a problem with contrast in low light — it’s a lot easier to see the backlight glowing from behind the LCD elements that are attempting to block the light.