Hey Backstage readers! It’s finally live over at the Firefox Flicks front pages.
We’re launching with three videos and plan on adding another two or three each day or every other day. Rather than just pushing one new video at a time, we’ve decided that it fits a lot better with the kinds of submissions we’re receiving to offer several videos that each represent a different approach, or are targeted at a different audience (we may also do some “themed groups” later on.)
Something that’s really amazed me watching these videos come in is how totally different they all are. I think the only thread that runs through all of the ads is that you can really see that the people making these ads had a great time bringing Firefox to life. In my experience, this kind of authenticity is rare in advertising and watching these ads has really reinforced what I love about working on Firefox and being a part of the Firefox community.
The three videos we’re launching with are “Double-Click Relief” by Craig Kuehne, “Drama Queen” by John X Carey, and “Daredevil” by Pete Macomber. We think these three are a good sampling of what we’ve seen so far in the Flicks submissions and we’ll be following up with the next batch on Wednesday or Thursday.
Thanks to our friends at Revver.com, this site has some great tools for sharing and I encourage everyone here to give them a try. You can embed the videos right in your own web pages, you can email them to your friends, you can subscribe to a feed that’s updated whenever we add a new video, you can comment and rate the videos, and more. If you’re into video, and you’ve got other non-Firefox related projects, you really should check out the Revver.com offering. They’ve got a neat advertising model that lets you get paid for your creative works. On top of that, they’re just cool people :-)
Thanks to everyone that’s submitted videos so far. If you haven’t yet, time is getting short. You’ve got ’till this Friday night to get your videos uploaded.
This is a great website. The three entries are very profesional, and will give a lot of exposure to were web-browsing should be. Can’t wait to see the other ones! Nice job there, very industrial city ;o)
marco, yeah! and those are just three out of more than 100 that we’ve received so far.
- A
Hey, just stumbled upon this site and this video avertising contest for firefox. While taking a quick look at the entries I noted that all the judges in this competition are men. Wow, does this mean that half the TV watching demographic are being ignored when the winner entry is chosen? While I can see that the majoirty of people who will use FIrefox are men I believe that it is important not to exculde the female population who access the internet. From looking at some of the early comments on the entries it seems, to me, that there is a bias towards rating up entries that use sexual connotations, even if they are very slight, or use female actors in the videos. I hope that judging of these video commericals will be conducted in an unbiased approach that does not alienate a potentially large demographic of internet users.
“3 videos par jour en forme toujours” (in french)
“3 videos each day, on top form always”
Go Firefox Flicks
You gotta be kidding :-(
These videos don’t play in FireFox Suse 9.3.
Here I am pushing FireFox to all my clients and friends and you guys can’t put up a site where FireFox will automaticaly play them on an open source desktop!
Very dissappointing :-(
That’s because you haven’t got the plug-in! Download quicktime and it should install the plug-in to Firefox. That’s not Firefox’s fault. It browses the web, it doesn’t play videos… the same applies with any browser!
Any chance you could make it 3 new videos every day? Every other day is too long, plus it’ll take a third of a year to add them all!
@Linux Convert:
There’s a download link in the “Grab this Flick” section. It works for me just fine with xine (RHEL).
Hi, I think the Firefox Flicks campaign is a fabulous idea, but I’m gonna have to complain about Quicktime/MPEG-4 as the choice of video format.
Firefox is an open source browser, right? So surely you appreciate the value of open source and open standards. Why are release video clips in a proprietary, patent-encumbered, poorly documented format… namely Quicktime? As previous posts have mentioned, there’s no default support for QuickTime in most Linux distros due to legal issues (even though functional open-source decoder is in the FFmpeg package), or in Microsoft Windows for that matter.
Why not use Ogg Theora for these flicks? It’s a nice patent-free highly functional well-supported video codec from the people who brought us Vorbis! All it needs at this point is a little publicity. I’ve been ripping all my DVDs into Theora the last few days, using ffmpeg2theora. Out-of-the-box support for Theora is available on any Linux distro, it’s well-documented, and it produces good quality video at bitrates comparable to MPEG-4. In addition, free Theora plugins for Windows Media Player are available at http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ … it’s easier to install than QuickTime for Windows!!!
If Firefox were to adopt Ogg Theora video for it’s flicks, that’d be a win for both projects in my opinion.
I have to agree with Dan Lenski. As a webbrowser Firefox should know the importance of open and free standards. This doesn’t applies only to html and the world wide web. It applies to media codecs, document formats and many more too.