Showing posts with label youtube. Show all posts
Showing posts with label youtube. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The Composer

Life is going through a super fast mode right now with many new things happening daily to my otherwise mundane life. I am liking the changes but sometimes it scares me too.

Anyways, not going too much in my private life, I thought it is high time for a post. I realized recently looking at my last posts that I put up too many serious and boring stuff on my blog which not many people like to read. So, I thought of a more light post.

I have been living in Germany for more than 8 years now. Yes, I am also surprised on myself. But there are many new things I discovered after coming here and I feel good about them. Maybe, living in India with my IT job and stuck in a traffic jam mornings and evenings might not had given me enough time to explore the world, the way I like it. I might have made some money in India like my peers and then booked a Europe trip visiting all the touristy places, clicking cliched pictures at Eiffel Tower or Jungfrau and then posting them on Facebook. I might have never really absorbed the essence of those places, their cultures and their real lifestyle. Anyways, who am I to judge people.

Moving on to the post. Of many new things I explored after coming to Germany, one was the music of Beethoven. Honestly speaking, I had never knew about him living in India though there had been many incidences when I heard his music without knowing the composer and truly liked it. I had been brought up watching cartoons like Tom & Jerry, Popeye, Looney Tunes, Roadrunner etc. Many of these classic cartoons use classical music. Then, there are also many movies which have used classical movies over the years, specially Beethoven. I only got to know about the man behind those compositions after coming to Germany and staying close to Beethoven's birthplace in Bonn. I saw his museum, read about his history, experience his official music with the distinct symphonies he created. I got the opportunity to go and experience an Orchestra playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the Opera House in Bonn. It was a mind blowing experience for me.

What is so exceptional about Beethoven or what amazes me about him is that most of his famous work came out when his hearing capabilities were close to none. I mean how can you write music when you cannot hear it. I think this is an achievement in itself and what makes Beethoven so distinct. A movie which comes to my mind instantly when I talk about Beethoven is "Copying Beethoven". Though it is more closer to fiction than the real deal still I found the moving fascinating. I would definitely recommend it.

All this introduction was laid out to share a short video I made last time I attended the Beethoven Festival in Bonn. It was pretty cool to see light, sound and water synchronized to Beethoven's Symphonies being played in the night. It was an open air presentation bang right in the city center at Münsterplatz in front of Beethoven's statue. Here is the video:


P.S: I know the video snippet is more like a teaser but unfortunately I lost the bigger video.        

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Touched

In continuation of the last post on the 2012 Olympics, I could not help myself posting this video I saw today morning. A rush of emotions went through my body and I was drenched in pure bliss.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

My affair with Youtube

My affair with Youtube is an old one. It started with hate at first. Way back, in the beginning, the videos just did not streamed properly. There was always this drag and the need to buffer the video before actually playing it. Of course it was a big turnoff but still it fared much better than the other video sites of its time back then.

With time, Youtube kept improving itself. The buffering issues were solved and there was hardly any matching video sharing portal. It was proving far better than its contenders. After moving to Germany, I got close to it even further. It provided unadulterated entertainment at demand. It also became a means to keep in touch with the cultural changes ongoing in India. The latest trends in music, humor, sports etc were all available at the click of a mouse.

The most attractive thing I used to find about Youtube was its unbiased filtering. People could upload anything they want (excluding porn). It became a great tool to interact with people all over the world. It allowed social interaction at a level never seen or experienced before. Another interesting thing about it was the honesty and the rawness in the videos uploaded by people with no commercial intentions. It was pure unadulterated entertainment provided by normal everyday people for other similar people. It allowed true fan following without any marketing blindness. There were no advertisements involved by third parties etc. Its biggest asset was that it was non commercial to a large extent.

But further down the line with time, I felt things started changing and moving towards a more commercial domain. Google bought the whole thing and consolidated its holding on the internet market. Big money was involved. In addition to this, I feel that the people also got a bit greedy. The regular uploaders who were popular and had a big fan following because of their honest videos started receiving money from Youtube to keep the momentum going and to keep the viewers sticking to Youtube. From the uploaders perspective, it was fair. They were receiving rewards for their hard work and dedication in terms of money this time. But gradually, that money thing started making them stray away from their sincerity. Now, they kept trying to increase their subscriptions for the money and not for genuine fans. It has now become a number game. More followers or subscribers means more money.

Now Youtube has become totally commercial, with huge amount of advertisements before starting videos with no options to bypass them, the lower 20-30% of the screen is always covered with pop-up ads which sometimes have nothing to do with the viewer or the video he is watching. A lot of regular uploaders with big subscription numbers get lots of perks from Youtube and the uploaders also show off those perks to encourage more people in following them. A good piece of marketing and business strategy but diluting quality entertainment in the process.