I have a 22 minute television show I shot at 1080i, 29.97 fps, 110 mb/s, and now that I'm starting to set up to find advertisers as well as networks to purchase the show I'm stumped as to my distribution.

Traditionally you would run off a bunch of Beta cassettes and send them to the networks since everyone had a Beta SP deck, and you would burn a bunch of VHS or DVDs and send them to the advertisers since almost everyone has a VHS or DVD player.

However, in the HD world there really isn't a clear path. HDCam tapes cost $40 each, plus a $400 deck rental to write a days worth of tapes, and of course the potential advertisers probably wouldn't have access to the decks to play them (some networks might not even, since some use DVCPro HD). And when it comes to consumer media there really isn't anything since Blu-ray isn't really popular and regular DVDs are standard definition which wouldn't show my product off well at all.

So first, I'm trying to wrap my head around a decent data rate that will still make it look pretty good. Fios is 17 mb/s so that would be about a gig a minute or 22 gigs total ... but that is 5x too big to put as data on a DVD. Even half the Fios quality would probably look pretty good, still too big for a data DVD, but maybe some sort of thumb drive option would be cost effective? Anyone know anything I'm not thinking of - a high res way to show this off to people with consumer level equipment and not put myself in the poor house?

For a point of reference, I can tell you that Silverlight will stream 720p HD at 3.5mb/s.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220261

Good and portable

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220261

Good and portable

Yeah, I was thinking a thumb drive but at $72 each thats almost double a HDCam tape, and I was hoping to make up around 50 (15 networks, ~20 breweries, and then a handful of extras of these).
Obviously what I hoped and what may be realistic is slowly getting further and further away from each other ...

But at 7.5 mb/s that would only be 10 gigs, maybe 12gb flash drives would be a reasonable cost.

http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0313592

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313048

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Micro-Flash-SDCZ6-016G-A11/dp/B0018Z0PWY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1256008739&sr=8-1

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820326017

Little bit less than your tapes would be, I'd suggest avoiding some of the "cooler" ones I.E. san disk. Not because they're bad, but because they have extra stuff on there that may confuse some of your less tech savvy clients.

Have you considered online distribution? That 3.5mb/s Silverlight adaptive streaming is what the NFL uses for full screen HD, for example. You just need to rent a Windows Media server with a big pipe and encode your video with Expression Encoder.

Have you considered online distribution? That 3.5mb/s Silverlight adaptive streaming is what the NFL uses for full screen HD, for example. You just need to rent a Windows Media server with a big pipe and encode your video with Expression Encoder.

Yeah, but admittedly I'm out of my league with getting that kinda shit set up. There also is the fact that I am trying to keep it semi-private, given that one day (ideally) this will be broadcast on some network and I'd hate to have too many copies out in the ether.

Obvious benefits would be seeing how many people visited, if I pitch to 50 and I get 30 hits that'd be great. If I pitch to 50 and I get 1 hit (my own :() I'd at least know I need to do things differently.

Maybe even some sort of 2 minute trailer on a DVD (or a CD at that point) and a link to the website ... I'll need to think about that more.

In an unrelated note, I'll probably encode a lower res version and throw it up some day soon and get some reactions.

If you want to fool around with it to test, you can host 10gb of medium quality stuff here for free: http://silverlight.live.com/

And grab a trial of Expression Encoder: http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/products/Encoder_Overview.aspx

I don't know if it's feasible or not for you to host the real deal that way, but I know it can be done at commercial quality. I'm just not familiar with the exact budget it would require.

I bet if you don't count your own labor, it's probably within realm of the amount that all those USB sticks will cost though. Plus, you only pay bandwidth for actual viewers (and only the amount that they do view), and can keep distributing it at a marginal incremental cost if the first 50 don't work out.

In terms of security, I believe SL3 supports DRM. Also, while a streaming video is technically something you can use a utility to save, but it's a lot more work to pirate that than it is a video file sitting on a USB stick.

So first, I'm trying to wrap my head around a decent data rate that will still make it look pretty good. Fios is 17 mb/s so that would be about a gig a minute or 22 gigs total ... but that is 5x too big to put as data on a DVD. Even half the Fios quality would probably look pretty good, still too big for a data DVD, but maybe some sort of thumb drive option would be cost effective? Anyone know anything I'm not thinking of - a high res way to show this off to people with consumer level equipment and not put myself in the poor house?

You've got your units mixed up, I think. Generally lowercase b = bits, uppercase B = bytes.

Rough calculation:
4.7 GB * 1024 MB per GB * 8 bits per byte / 60 seconds per minute / 22 minutes = ~30.5 Mb/s

30 megabits per second should be more than enough for any modern codec.

Or, working in reverse, how much Fios-quality video will fit on a cd?

4.7 GB * 1024 MB per GB * 8 bits per byte / 17 Mb per second / 60 seconds per minute = ~37.7 minutes

Am I missing something obvious or can't you just burn the video to a CD or DVD in a common format like MP4? You don't have to make it an Video DVD as long as the recipients are remotely intelligent. Palarran is right, you have your numbers totally mixed up. You can get away with 720p in 2Mb/s with most any modern codec and clean source depending on the content, I think actual Blu-ray data rate is only like 40 Mb so I question why a sample needs to be anywhere near that.

If you're stumped, pop over to Pirate Bay and see how they're doing Bluray rips.

Kind of sort off topic but still sort of on topic. I recently learned that mass distributors of online streaming use this http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/dcs/dcs9900/ 1.2PB in 2 floor tiles yummmmmeh.

But to echo other's thoughts, why not sliverlight or burn it?

Am I missing something obvious or can't you just burn the video to a CD or DVD in a common format like MP4? You don't have to make it an Video DVD as long as the recipients are remotely intelligent. Palarran is right, you have your numbers totally mixed up. You can get away with 720p in 2Mb/s with most any modern codec and clean source depending on the content, I think actual Blu-ray data rate is only like 40 Mb so I question why a sample needs to be anywhere near that.

If you're stumped, pop over to Pirate Bay and see how they're doing Bluray rips.

Well me having my numbers wrong isn't any surprise to me :) I'll have to run some H.264 compressions and see what size I can make it w/o it looking like ass at 1080p.

Out of curiosity couldn't you just do two DVD's, one with a few minutes of choice clips at high quality then another DVD with full content then if they express interest in the full clip you can send the full high quality file over nearly any means of distribution you choose.

Dual layered dvds bro

Very well done. can't imagine there not bieng an outlet for it.(TLC,Travel,FN) not to stroke you to much but really the kind of shows i love watch.
Have you been in contact with any trade associations?

Since you made a point about beer recently becoming the most popular beverage in the world, have you considered doing shows in other countries too? You might have to rename the show, but something like that might be just what is needed to be picked up by the Travel Channel.

Nice work. I like the beer background on the captions.

Was it difficult to get those people to give you time for a yet-unknown show?

Also, tell her not to talk while she's chewing from now on.