Kenneth Blackstone SFC
When Gin first announced her intention to provide a free workout for the men and women overseas serving in our military forces, I knew it was a great idea. Inspired by Kenneth Blackstone, Jr. who was serving our military in Iraq and had contacted us about workouts to help him teach fitness classes to fellow soldiers, Gin set her mind to task. She ran a contest, cast and shot the segments all of which are boot-camp style circuits.
That done, she moved on to several other projects and the details for delivering the content were left to me. At the time, we were using the free Brightcove player – a somewhat classier version of YouTube. By the time the paid gigs were out of the way and time could be spent on the charity project, Brightcove decided to go the way of paying for the service.
Since we are a very small business – interested primarily in paying the electric bill to keep us connected to the outside world – we could not afford to pay for the service. That was coupled with the fact that they had discontinued their pay media downloads – which we had tried with limited success on one of Gin’s workouts.
On the home front, we had succeeded in delivering short choreography clips via digital download through our online store. But having worked with a Shopsite shopping cart for nearly a decade, we decided to shop for other shopping carts.
Fast forward to November of last year… it took nearly 6 months to get the new store up and running. Our 3dCart is a vast improvement, but the one thing it lacks is the ease of digital content delivery that we had with the old store – and our current hosting plan lacks the harddrive space to store the content.
Mindfull of the recession that’s upon us, we decided not to upgrade the store to accomodate the huge video files. Since we changed to YouTube for our preview clips, we checked that option for content delivery, but they exceed the time limit.
So we decided to just post the segments on the main site – free for all! This eliminated the quandry of deciding and delivering the content for some (military and their families) and charging others.
As technology has progressed, some at the video fitness forum have discovered the ability to download the files with Real Player. (Not mentioned is that you can also save the file to your computer if you have Quicktime Pro by going to the iPhone page – those files also work on desktops with Quicktime.) One person wondered if we knew they could download them. As the one who has pondered greatly the delivery of this project, I say more power to you!
Nevertheless, there do seem to be those who just don’t have time to figure all that “right click, left click, save as… what’s an flv file?”
For those who viewed and liked the content, but prefer to do workouts the old fashioned way – put the dvd in the player and press play so I can see it on my TV instead of my laptop or cell phone – we have decided to press ‘cost of goods’ convenience copies of Cramped Quarters.
We’ll keep you posted on the availability.
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