sonyhdbus[Updated with some corrections, see overstrikes and end of post].

Imagine you are doing a gig for professional AV-producers. You notice that there is a big white Sony truck parked outside the conference venue. On stage, during your perfomance, you see two huge video cameras operated by seemingly skilled professionals. The country’s president sits in the front row, less than 10  meters away. You think: "Ah, there will be a nice video from this event". And you hope the arrangers will publish it on the Web afterwords. Which they did…three weeks later (I publised a couple of video streams live).

So what? A good video can wait a few weeks. Things always comes in between (you might notice that this post is published over a month later than later). But my sad state of mind stems from how the production house have published their result. In short. The video, with a couple of exceptions, does not contain my illustrations (slides and videos). Furthermore it is published in a fashion that makes it extremely hard to find and almost impossible to share. Goodmood has (on purpose?) made it virtually impossible to rip their videos. Which means I can not re-publish it myself. Less download it and play it on my mobile players (Nokia, HTC, iPhone, etc). You can, with some effort, find it through one of my video pages. On top of that the video does not contain any information about its context and where one might find more (i.e. a link to the conference web site). In sum, there is no viral value to be found. Time and money virtually thrown in the drain,

As far as I can judge, the video in question was produced and published by Goodmood. Their vision is to be "the leading European software company specialising in the development and delivery of applications and services that enable easy publishing, management and delivery of online video". Sorry guys, but you have a long way to go. Compare my post on Video sharing considerations that I published about a year ago.

I am in a bad mood for two reasons. The first is ego, we did not get a super professional video from one of my gigs. The second is experience, I recognize this case as yet another illustration of the state of the art in many established firms. On the personal side exactly the same thing happened to me close to two years ago, when World Television filmed another of my gigs. More on that  occasion in Swedish, and as translated by Google. In that case I ripped their video and re-published it on Viddler in order to support further sharing.

Hopefully this post may help those of you that arrange meetings to further understand some of the important aspects of video publishing in a social media environment. If not, please let us know.

[Update 23:30] One of the incumbents have asked me via e-mail to correct "a few factual errors" (they also add other insights which I may not share). The video was published two (2) weeks after the conference, then it took another week until I got the message. There is also a video production/editing firm and web sponsor involved, and they most likely contribute to the end result. All parties had decided not to include slides in the video this year. In sum, my impression from the new information I got is that the customer is not always right, it seems to be difficult to make everything right, and one should not always trust your supplier.