Journal: Background to Kapital Moto TV

I've been thinking about and looking for a place to write some ramblings about my video website. I decided to make use of the Slashdot Journal as it involves the least setup and effort.

Kapital Moto TV is a niche online motorcycle video website.

Why is such a site needed? Well, firstly because biking is a passion of mine and secondly because I was tired of the trash available on the likes of YouTube. I'm not interested in watching crap street stunts at low quality. Of course there is some decent content on YouTube and the MotoGP people have in fact just launched their own channel. Six months ago when Kapital Moto TV was launched, the YouTube Channel concept hadn't kicked off and videos about motorcycles, worth watching, were not easy to find. Kapital Moto TV was born.

I partnered with a racing friend, Antoine, who is the technical brains behind the site. Antoine wrote the code that makes it all happen. The site runs on a Debian server, uses Apache, MySQL and PHP. A pretty typical LAMP setup.

The videos themselves are within a QuickTime container, using the H.264 codec and AAC for audio. This combination may seem pretty strange given the ubiquitous use of Flash for online video. The video choice for KM TV was made for a number of reasons. We wanted to provide a superior online viewing experience and H.264 provided this, even though at the time we took a hit on the QuickTime install base when compared to Flash. We're also running on a tight budget and frankly can't afford to pay Adobe for their Flash encoding and streaming products. Of course there are various open source Flash initiatives, but this still didn't cover off the H.264 quality advantage.

Clips for KM TV are mostly created using Adobe Premiere Elements (£30), exported to DV AVI files, converted to QuickTime using MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 (free) and then lastly exported from QuickTime Pro ($20). We need to use both MPEG Streamclip and QuickTime Pro for a couple of reasons. MPEG Streamclip will de-interlace video very nicely, but for some reason the QuickTime Fast Start option doesn't seem to work when exporting H.264 files. MPEG Streamclip also provides cropping options. QuickTime Pro does a poor job of de-interlacing, but exporting as Fast Start works just fine. Time and CPU intensive steps, but we haven't found a better way just yet - without paying for expensive transcode products like Telestream's FlipFactory which will do everything we want.

The recent Adobe announcement of H.264 support makes an interesting dilemma for KM TV. On one hand it's great that we can now (shortly) use Flash player for our videos, with increased install base over QuickTime, but on the other hand now that YouTube will offer H.264 content we lose one of our key differentiators - video quality.

So, a key challenge facing Kapital Moto TV now is to continue to grow, competing against all the other offerings out there that now offer comparable video quality.

There's much more to write about our business model, the challenges of sourcing content, future developments and our on-board camera setup but that's for later posts.