Critical Mass Productions

Fresh on the heels of a (delayed) Form 10-Q filing, the Outdoor Channel started another round of layoffs at Winnercomm in Tulsa on Tuesday. Twelve staff members got the boot, including some long-time friends of CMP.

Looking at the 1st quarter numbers for ’09 vs ’08 (pre-Winnercomm purchase), we can estimate that Winner’s income for the period was $4.5 million but had expenses of roughly $92K higher than that, so this round of layoffs is not unexpected. In fact, it was rumored to be on-tap since October of last year.

If you hear of any production work, please consider contacting some of these recent re-entries to the job market.

LinkedIn has recently added an “event” feature, so I tried it out for our Red One launch party. You can invite up to 50 of your contacts, and they of course offer a chance to advertise to the general public. I was seriously considering it, but for some reason you can’t limit the geography to any city in Oklahoma – they had no listing whatsoever. Strange. They do have Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Austin & San Antonio. Base price is $10 CPM ($25 minimum), with $3 additional for the geography targeting. Other targeting includes company size, job function, industry, seniority, gender and age. (Seniority will run you an extra $6)

Facebook, on the other hand, offered me no way to pay to promote, had no restrictions on # of invites, and even offered to let me upload email addresses of people I’m not already connected to. Plus, they have a place to add photos, videos, links, etc. It was a much nicer end-user experience, in my opinion. Click here to experience the Facebook version.

MediaDailyNews reports that Nielsen is not reporting the overnights for January 29th because “a sufficient number of households in the market are not capable of receiving digital TV signals.”

No word as to the long-term impact on OKC as a metered market.

The rumours are true – Tulsa’s troubled Winnercomm has been sold to the Outdoor Channel.

Here’s hoping this is a happy ending for our colleagues there – it’s been a rough year, with a round of layoffs that hit the editors hard. It is interesting that they did have to give up Skycam in the deal, which was perhaps the best hard asset they had available. No word yet about how the sale will impact the ad agency part of Winner, or how the integration will be handled.

Don here…

So, it’s official: I’ve been slacking in the blog department. While not really a New Year’s resolution, I am committing to at least one post per week in 2009. I know I have at least one reader in Tulsa who may quit giving me grief with this announcement, assuming I follow through.

In other news, look for a redesign of the website sometime this quarter, with a move back to a more traditional home page combined with this blog. We’ll have some announcements regarding our new RED camera, some exciting news on the production front, and perhaps a few other surprises in the weeks and months to come.

Thanks for reading,

–Don

…more info soon!

Critical Mass has been experimenting with voice over IP (VOIP) telephone service from Vonage for about a year now, but we just found out about a free service which allows people in Canada, France, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom and the US to phone us as if it were a local call.

It’s called “V-Access” and can be accessed by clicking here. On the website, you select your current location and choose a local-to-you phone number to call. Once you’re in the system, simply dial 1 to place an outgoing call, then dial normally, including any country or dialing codes as necessary. For instance, to phone us from Canada, you’d dial 011-1-405-842-3343. From the other countries, it’s 00-1-405-842-3343, and our US clients simply dial as normal, without the IDD prefix.

We’re in the GMT -5 timezone, which means someone should be in the office from 1400 to 2200 GMT, but if you call earlier you’ll be forwarded to either Don or David’s cell phone. Give it a try – we’d love to chat with you. And with the weak U.S. dollar, you may find that our services are extremely competitively priced.

If you haven’t checked out our In-House Resources page yet, please take a moment to take a look. This is an up-to-date listing of the many tools & resources we have to offer our clients, many with no extra charge!

Over the last month, we’ve greatly expanded the amount of video “clip art” animations in our collection, much of which comes from our friends at Digital Juice

. We have links to thumbnails and web movies so you can get an idea what the elements look like, and they are all very customizable, too. And the best part is: we provide these as a service to our clients at no extra charge.

But wait – there’s more!

Last year, we added a great new high-definition video camera with a ton of accessories. If you’d like to see it in action, please call David for a demo at 405-842-EDGE (3343).

We’re always investing in new “toys” to better serve our clients, so if there’s a piece of gear you’d like to use on your next production, don’t hesitate to let us know about it. You never know – you might be the justification to our wives for getting some more fun stuff!

As the picture above shows, you can always see the current page by clicking the link on the right frame. (IE users may have to scroll to the bottom of the page.) Thanks for looking!

One-time CMP freelancer Kevin and his wife Laurel just had their baby girl after 30 hours of labor – and no epidural! Congratulations to you both, and welcome to baby Naomi from CMP!

• When a Man Loves a Woman on dvd

Krippendorf’s Tribe

• Hook on dvd

The Secret video Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil download Spring Breakdown ipod

In case you’ve missed it, the FCC has been phasing in requirements that programs longer than 10 minutes be closed captioned. As of 1/01/06, all new nonexempt programming* must be captioned.

We’ve put up a page to help you make sense of all of it.

Besides just meeting regulations, closed captioning info has other uses as well:

Tivo wants to use it for making programming choices

Google Video can search the text and return relevant results

*As Joe Clark points out, new networks, Spanish language programming, and programming that airs between 2am and 6am are some examples of exempt programming. The Spanish language captions, for instance, are being phased in over the next 4 years.