News from the niconico convention
July 5, 2008
Nicovideo had their first big convention yesterday which you could follow live on the site. There were some interesting news and a lot of answers to questions, such as the future of MADs, fan-created movies that remixes anime.
The convention was held as a promotion for the coming site upgrade and as a thanks to the users who’ve made nicovideo so big. Here is the official thank you video:
The biggest news coming up in nicovideo version (beta beta) is probably the translation of the site into German, Spanish and Chinese. They are probably not ready for the horrible English-speaking anime fanbase, but both the Spanish- and the German-speaking world has a longer standing with anime culture over-all and they stand a better chance to understand it. English-speaking people will get a translated player while Spanish-, German- and Chinese-speaking people will get a site-wide translation where everything from categories to tags will be translated.
The site will also enable people to engage with each other in a community of some sort. It looks like it will become some sort of forum where people can create threads about uploaded videos. Premium users will have the ability to take part of this and also become managers (something like mods) of the forum. The managers can name threads, give access restrictions and more. People will be able to join the communities with mail invitations or with an application. The community feature will be available this evening after the maintenance (fifth of july, 2008), according to the nicovideo blog.
Addition: It seems like communities are just for people to join if they are interested in a subject. There, they can post videos that has something to do with that subject. I can’t see a way for people to discuss the videos, but I guess it’s a nice way to collect people with the same interests.
It also seems like the videos you add to the communities can have separate comments for the communities and for the usual audience.
Nicovideo will also start implementing creative commons under the name of “Niconi-commons“, where people can tag their uploaded videos to be available for other people to use under the creative commons umbrella. This will probably be very interesting, not only for ordinary users but also for companies that want their works to be spread among a lot of people and generate a recognized name. The start of niconi-commons will be in the mid of august.
New nicoscript commands will include @BGM, where you can insert an uploaded video or uploaded music in the background of your own video and also @ポーズ which will pause the video for n seconds. People have lately seem to take a liking to make use of surveys in their videos and with the new survey script, it’ll be even easier. You’ll be able to specify a timeframe, when in the video it’ll start and so on. The results will be presented in a link and also sent to you.
I posted the news about nicovideo removing copyrighted content a while ago and it seems like Hiroyuki doesn’t feel all too bad about it since people will make use of other content than anime to make up for it instead. I still feel that it’s a lot of wasted opportunities here, but what can you do when you have an army of lawyers on you yard…
In other news: ai sp@ce will be using nicovideo, nicovideo released a clothing collection and Niconico ichiba, the ad-platform, finally got it’s own theme song, as seen here:
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July 6th, 2008 at 12:27 am
Thanks for all the niconico news coverage. Its interesting how they’re shunning the english-speaking world like that. Germany and Spain more in tune with anime culture? Uh, what? I doubt those two countries have contributed more to the anime industry (and Japanese industry in general) monetarily than the english-speaking countries.
All in all, a real sad state of affairs for the site as of late. So long, nicovideo, and thanks for the fish.
July 6th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Spanish speaking countries and Germany have had anime in their main stream culture long before it got big in the US. Especially with series such as JOJOs bizarre world and Dragon ball.
The english translation of the site is probably later because they need more power to handle the increase of users that will come. It’s probably a good thing to try out the waters with the other translations first. And shit, you don’t get shafted as they’ll even translate their player to english.
July 6th, 2008 at 1:04 am
Well, its not really the translation thing that irks me that much. All of it is pretty much moot since most of the content that made the site popular in the first place is now banned. I was expecting a large outcry from the Japanese userbase but it doesn’t look like that is the case.
Fortunately it seems that music isn’t covered under the ban so at least we’ll still be able to watch cute girls dance to that stuff. I guess the site is still worth visiting after all. ^_^