Book authors on videos, cameras for rent

NEW YORK—What is Penguin Random House doing in a video meetup, especially the NY Video Meetup? It turns out the publishing house carries a collection of videos in different subject matters with some tongue-in-cheek book reports.

http://www.meetup.com/nyvideo/events/226241170/

Penguin Random House also carries videos of authors, so you can see your favorite authors talking about the creative process or just talking, all on its YouTube in channels called Papercuts (for fiction) and Videcracy (for non-fiction material). It makes complete sense, because it publishes 3,500 books a year and there are several ideas and inspiration that it can be mined.

Penguin Random House was also with KitSplit, Viosk, and YouNow were also at the meetup last March 24 at HBO. Steven Rosenbaum hosted and gave his audience his usual recap of video industry news and updates before the show-and-tell demos.

YouNow’s Dorian Dargan demonstrated how its live streaming channel can be so much fun and popular, especially among the millennials, as it picked a random musician online to interact with a birthday celebrant in the audience, singing Happy Birthday to her on split screen view, to everyone’s delight. The platform, which made it in the list of Inc.com’s most innovative companies, has over 150,000 broadcasts or real-time streaming daily.

No if you want to make some videos for viewing anytime, Viosk’s Alex Romanovich showed how to make simple drag-and-drop videos in a few minutes complete with voiceover (even your own voice, if you prefer) and music (with Viosk having an in-house musician composing the tunes). The videos can be uploaded on YouTube.

“It’s a self-serve product with existing templates,” Romanovich said.

And if you’re strapped for cash, it need not stop you from making videos. Kitsplit makes camera rentals made easy, vetted – and even insured. It carries 20 million worth of camera gear, even drones and VR rigs, with delivery. It’s a marketplace site.

“Rental houses work with us. It’s also a marketing tool for them,” co-founder Lisbeth Kaufman said.

Dennis Clemente

Shuttling between New York and other US cities, Dennis writes about tech meetups when he's not too busy working as a Web Developer/Producer + UX Writer and Digital Marketer.

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