Lecture Post #3

This product enables users to find and compile the best quality videos of live performances from their favorite  artists. The company functions in cooperation with video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo to bring consumers the very best in live music recordings and presents them in an organized playlist.

This application could greatly benefit from the tools available through Photoshop and its associated programs. We could start to post photos from concerts and sessions for our users, editing them so they appear as the highest possible quality. This photo album feature would greatly improve users interests in the artists and help the artists' marketability. Special filters and control of white balance, etc. would enable us to give each artist's page and accompanying photos the desired feel. Perception of "image" is vital to the success of most artists. 
 Additionally, using the text inserting tool, advertisements for upcoming concerts and new sessions to be recorded could be created. A sleek interface for this application/ website is key to success because it goes hand-in-hand with user-friendliness. The ability to create and edit photos of the highest quality would be highly beneficial.
Our site would require a large amount of storage to maintain the large volume of user access, producer access, and programmer access. This is also vital for the number of videos, recordings, and images that the application requires. To support all of these utilities and people with access to the program, our company would need to utilize the large amount of storage space viable with cloud computing providers, such as Amazon. Depending on how much traffic our site receives, we will need instant access to storage space that is accessible to all of those who design and manage the program, those who produce and manage the music we stream, and our users. The elasticity of the available cloud storage would be especially useful during times of heavy traffic to the sight, such as award shows and when festival lineups are being announced and people want to check out the live performances of artists being highly talked about. 

Competitive Analysis

Vevo: Video service that provides professionally recorded videos of participating artists through a partnership with Google.
http://www.vevo.com/

• Postitive aspects include attention to video and sound quality and appropriate licensing of cooperating artists. Vevo provides a consistent form of profit for the company and for participating label executives. Through it's partnership with Google, it is able to allow users to comment and rank videos, thus giving other users first hand reviews of all content.  

Baeble: website and app of stored and organized concerts, sessions, music videos and interviews
http://www.baeblemusic.com/

• Positive aspects include attention to video and sound quality, large collection and well organized videos, and a library that is not limited to solely videos of live performances (interviews, sessions are also included.) Baeble also has the unique feature of a partnering blog that gives the well-trained staff the ability to review and suggest music for users. This is helpful because Baeble has a very specific target audience with relatively similar taste. 

How we would compete: Our service will allow users expanded search options, such as by venue, event,etc. Also, we have the advanced subscription option which will unlock special edition videos/performances/recordings. Vevo is limited to videos by artists that have signed an agreement with their company to lease their videos to the public. Baeble focuses solely on indie and alternative music. This service  would expand users access to many different types of music from many different artists. Additionally, Our program would offer the unique ability to compile or  subscribe to playlists of videos to allow for easy continuous play of videos.

Lecture Post #2

This product enables users to find and compile the best quality videos of live performances from their favorite  artists. The company functions in cooperation with video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo to bring consumers the very best in live music recordings and presents them in an organized playlist. 

Since this application would be available to multiple different systems including PCs, tablets, smartphones, etc, we must consider what are the requirements for running the application. A standard PC should be able to run the basic functions to carry out watching and compiling the specified videos. It would be recommended that a computer have at least a dual-core processor and over 4 GB of RAM for those running the application. These specifications would allow the music videos to load in a decent amount of time.

In addition to those components on a PC, a quality video card would be necessary to allow users to utilize input/ output capabilities so they could listen to the music with a good sound quality. A graphics card would also be necessary to transmit better quality images and video to the processor. Lastly it would be useful to have a large number of bits per second in the USB drive so that users have the option to quickly transfer the data from the videos to and from mobile devices.

Employees and those working on the application would also require specifications for the components of their system. A video drive would be necessary to successfully upload videos to the program. This would also require a larger amount of memory on their hard-drives and RAM to store the large volume of videos that from the internet that would need to be processed in some way.  

Entrepreneurial Post

With the expansion of music available online at little or no costs, the need to be able to navigate through individual preferences is present now more than ever. This application works with the vast number of videos available online on sights such as YouTube. It's purpose is to allow users to view only the most relevant videos of live performances that the web has to offer without the hassle of the manual search usually associated with browsing video sharing sights.
 This app functions by searching through the videos with tags that match a desired artist, album, venue, festival, song, etc. and creates a playlist based on user rankings (up-votes vs. down-votes  of the videos. This app is user friendly in that it forms a continuously streaming playlist of the videos.  There is also the option of sorting videos by quality, performance date, etc. With this app (which would have versions available for smartphones, tablets) the struggle of looking through countless videos of poor-quality performances is greatly diminished.
Revenue from this app is generated through paid advertisements from investors. The ads would appear before playing a video or along the margins of the site. If this app garners enough support and grows large enough, we could begin to offer users the option of paying a monthly fee to remove ads and to gain access to other videos not available to the general public, for example videos recorded exclusively for the paid subscribers. This would be possible if the company was able to get enough revenue to pay for exclusive recordings done by more popular artists. Overall, this web-browsing application is the perfect tool for any music lover and has the potential to be very beneficial to artists by getting live performances more attention and thereby increasing interest in shows, etc.