Videomaker has been publishing video production tips and techniques for 25 years and on June 2, Matt York and Videomaker celebrated our Silver Anniversary with a party for family and friends. During the event, Matt sent a live-streaming message to our readers, contributors and a host of others who helped make Videomaker the success it is today. The following is the text from Matt’s live streaming speech.

Welcome to our humble abode and thank you for coming.
As you look around you will find the people most responsible for Videomaker’s success. I want to extend my warmest appreciation to each and every one of them. Starting with my son, daughter and wife (all of whom currently work here), thanks for putting up with me and my devotion to this company that, at times, may have overlapped into our family a bit too much. Thanks especially to my wife Patrice for being the keeper of the purse strings. She and I are a perfect balance, as I tend to be the visionary risk-taker and she’s the pragmatic voice who keeps us grounded in reality. As Vice President she has been and remains “the other half of the sky” involved in every important decision ever rendered here.

Outside of my family, I want to recognize the people who I approached 26 years ago when I first had the idea for this magazine. One of our local business leaders, Howard Isom, and I spoke last week about the day we first met. Howard said I was just a hippie living in the woods with a crazy idea and that no one had ever published an international magazine in this town before.

Some of the people who I pitched actually invested in Videomaker (Howard wasn’t one of them), but Garey Weibel (the then Publisher of our local newspaper, the Chico Enterprise Record) did. Some would say that Garey and I couldn’t have been more different, but we developed a keen relationship based on mutual respect. Garey’s advice over the first few years was indispensable and more than once helped save this fledgling company from disaster. In one harrowing incident in our earliest days, Garey literally rescued the company from the brink of disaster, contributing venture capital when it looked like this start-up was going to run out of cash.

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Advertising Age has a very interesting story about what could become the future of the typical TV network. Just announcing a host of new distribution deals, blip.tv will now be working with YouTube, NBC, the Roku set-top box and Vimeo to create the widest online sharing distribution that currently exists. Blip.tv already works with Verizon Fios, web-connected Sony TVs, Apple’s iTunes, AOL, MSN, Facebook and Myspace. They also announced that YouTube would be sharing analytics with them, in turn given them the chance to feed into ComScore. The whole process will result in creating more accurate metrics for potential advertisers.

This is big news for the future of online video and blip.tv fans. Already the site has over 48,000 exclusive web shows, and this will help blip.tv use their niche market web shows to aim advertisements to the right demographic. Blip.tv is well on it’s way to becoming it’s own TV network, giving viewers the option of choosing exactly what they want to see.