History

This article describes about the begining of the youtube channel, Midnightmaldives

Introduction

    Midnight Maldives is a youtube channel launched on June 20 2008. The whole attempt was for the sole purpose of sharing rare and vintage media with an audience specifically for the Maldivians. As the author and the founder of this channel I wish to share the development of this channel with a worldwide audience which my channel has brought for me.

How It All Began 

        2008 was a very entertaining year. TVM started a 24 hour broadcast for every Thursday. The late night broadcast feature of my early childhood tv shows, like dhiriulhumakee mee, floak the international, bahabaru and so on. It even had vintage music show and songs which i would label were from the golden days of Maldivian entertainment. Every Thursday night I put my tv tuner to record and checked what I got in the morning. The quality was very good. And since every Thursday night a new sequel of each series appeared, I decided to keep all what I got since collection 

of similar sets was another habit of mine. I watched these episodes of the 

series over and over again, until it hit me that even though I may be a video capture freak there are so may who may not be and in this day where VHS was on its way out and DVD was in, it may be that only a handful may have the ability to do what i have done. And those of them who cannot would have to strain their eyes all night to watch their favorite tv shows. I decided that it was time that I share what i have with the people of Maldives and anyone else who yearns for these super hit shows. I went on youtube and made an account and started to upload all what i had captured from the midnight shows. I never expected any feedback or even an audience. But to my surprise, within weeks, my uploaded videos featured on blogs and web pages that others had made. And I was surprised to see that my channel was attracting an enormous crowd just to view the finest work of our people.

    Soon afterwards we were welcomed by the glorious days of the holy month of ramazan. I started to get requests for the drama series, songs, and all other stuff broadcasted on TVM. I had to decide on a content filter and came to a decision that my channel will only feature pure entertainment pieces. So from then onwards anything entertainment related appeared on my channel.

Channel name and Icon

   The name of the channel wasn't given much thought and it wasn't actually giving the true picture of the site as you see it today, but for the first batch of uploads being all taken from a Maldivian tv station which was broadcasted from midnight onwards, I decided that the channel name Midnight Maldives was perfect at the time. The main picture was to show that the ownership of the channel was held by a Japanese teenage girl who liked anime and admired the vintage tv shows of Maldives. It was a hilarious unbelievable story indeed but i decided to start as it is. The icon was from an all time favorite video game and anime character Mai Shiranui from Fatal fury series. Even though I never considered these factors to become as any major channel identities, The Mai Shiranui's pose and the channel name is what I use as my channel's icon.

Mohamedh The Messenger Of God series

   Even though the channel is purely entertainment, I decided this series is another piece of footage that all people wish to cherish specially in the holy month of ramazan. With this seires the channel's resolution was upgraded from 360p to 480p. And continued with this resolution for all other footages.

Thihandhaanuga series

    The channel got most of it's exposure when i posted the famous Thihandhaanuga remix, where a a great number of comments and ratings flooded the channel. Upon arrival of this hectic audience I had to introduce a comment filtering system since a lot of the viewers left comments consisting of filthy language. The channel was meant for all ages, and I decided that such an action if left unattended, would result in leaving my channel as a source for children learning R rated language. I tried to get the viewer one by one to stop posting such comments and criticize with respect for one another. But i didn't get even a single response which showed any curtsy or even respect as an owner of the channel. So I posted a bulletin saying that anyone who posts any comments using filthy language, would be BLOCKED from the site without warning. And all videos which may be a target for mass comments were filtered for my approval. I got a some angry mails about my policy but today I find very few people commenting using dirty language on my channel. And I found an enormous amounts of criticism on videos which was negative, positive and neutral but which was good enough to be posted.

TVM to MNBC and TVM again

    In the last few years of political dispute, the national media broadcasters took some of the major hits. Midnight Maldives stayed out of the turmoil and posted anything entertainment related. During MNBC's time one of the major advancements in the entertainment category was the introduction of Maakana Show. Viewer from all over the world enjoyed this series. At the same time I had to fight a lot due to the international copy rights law. Various editings were made to the captured clips of Maakana Show to avoid Youtube from disabling the content. Almost all the episodes were uploaded.

Other Interesting Videos

    Among other interesting items in my collection include, research material which has all sorts of historical documentaries of Maldives, Niru: a program dedicated for infant health, and the Interschool singing competition 2012.

Recent Advancements

    I the recent few months, I started the Midnight Maldives FB page and rss fed all the youtube uploads to the page. A twitter page was also created which gave regular updates to those who followed me.And my recent job at Capital Radio got me to start a celebrity radio playlist in the channel which featured all the interviews that I got in my radio show. Also from May 28 2012 all videos uploaded to the channel would be in 720p HD resolution. This upgrade was made possible by my discovery of the arc soft media converter which gave a much smaller file but a much finer picture. But still TVM broad casts at 4:3 ratio and the HD 16:9 ratio makes the picture stretched.

Technical Info

     Here is a process of from a clip being captured to being uploaded being proceeded. First of all the tv tuner card that i am using now is called leadtec Winfast PVR 3000. Captured at high quality of 720 x 576 resolution. I usually schedule the capturing for the times I need. Next the captured footage ( usually 3-5 hours long) is cut to the clips ( max 15 mins long) using ulead video studio. After that i categorize certain things. High quality uploads and low quality uploads. The high quality uploads are clips that people may want to download at high quality such as music videos, live shows etc. Low quality clips include dramas, and things that people wouldn't want to download but want to watch online. The high quality clips are uploaded without any more encording with huge size of about 200- 300 mb. The low quality clips are encorded to divx format using imToo encorder to a smaller size of 60 to 100 mb. But now using arc soft  media converter which has a more finer picture quality.