December 15, 2008
Roundbox Raises $20 Million for Mobile Broadcast Software | Digital Media Wire
Florham Park, N.J. - RoundBox, a provider of mobile broadcast software, announced on Monday that it has raised over $20 million in its third round of venture capital funding, led by Montagu Newhall Associates.
If BitTorrent Goes Under, What Then? - AppScout
TechCrunch has an interesting report about BitTorrent handing back $17 million in financing, and receiving $7 million back. The reason? Falling valuations, which has made BitTorrent less valuable to investors. What's interesting is that BitTorrent remains one of the key pieces of infrastructure of the Internet. Yes, it's a peer-to-peer application sucking up valuable bandwidth, which means that companies like Comcast have banned it (although the two sides eventually settled their differences). But others, such as Orb Networks, have viewed BitTorrent as an important means of legitimate content distribution.
So if BitTorrent is struggling as a business, does that mean that the technology is dying as well?
The video recording spy watch is real! | News | TechRadar UK
YouTube Wants To Bring You To The World Economic Forum In Davos
Bush Dodging Shoe Watched By 3.7 Million « NewTeeVee
IT Broadcast and Digital Cinema: Interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg
Just released our new Stickam Live API http://developer.stickam.com Now you can create your own version of Stickam!
Stickam API Lets You Build Your Own Live Video Site
Web Based Screencasting Apps - Create Screencast Videos sans Software
Viral Video Hits Blur the Authenticity Line
The Real Cost Of Licensing H.264: Pricing And Licensing Terms | The Business Of Online Video
Review: Highwinds CDN Reporting System "StrikeTracker" Loaded With Functionality | The Business Of Online Video
Streamingmedia.com: Dicas and Wowza Media Systems Unveil Multiple Bit Rate Live Flash Streaming with dicas2020 Encoders
CBS Going After Hulu With TV.Com (CBS)
CBS Interactive (CBS) will relaunch TV.com, one of the domains it picked up in its $1.8 billion CNet acquisition, to go after Hulu and other TV-on-the-Internet portals more aggressively.
PaidContent's Staci Kramer
: The full-scale relaunch with new content partners is slated for January but the cosmetic changes will start this week with a new look and logo, according to sources familiar with the plans. ...
Some facts about Online video:
- Online TV is growing. The number of people watching online video will grow from 563 million in 2007 to 941 million in 2013 according to ABI research, echoed by NewTeeVee.
- People watch far more hours of TV from the couch than on the PC. According to Nielsen (see table above found via GigaOm), 142 hours/month for TV versus only 2.5 hours/month for Internet video. Online TV will sure grow, but still a long way to catch the habit of watching TV from the sofa. A habit that will surely remain for long duration shows, like movies or NBA games.
- TV devices connected to Internet will grow from 28 million in 2007 to 300 million in 2013 according to IMS research echoed by NewTeeVee.
- Some lucrative consumer segments are ready to pay for quality, speed, ease-of-use and exclusive content (e.g. Apple knows very well this segment). Some reports foresee penetrations as high as 20% and even 50% in developed countries urban areas.
- Online TV is social. YouTube social component is part of its success. Joost has just added Facebook Connect.
- P2P will keep growing, and that includes also a growth of licensed content relying on P2P or P4P networks, although illegal traffic will still dominate for some time.
Looking for the balance between playful entertainment and misleading marketing
The video uploaded by "madflux" in mid-November begins with a fumbled camera. What follows is nearly unreal: a video of a guy on a bike re-creating the experience of the video game Guitar Hero by following markers set on the pavement of a suburban neighborhood. Madflux gives a "shoutout" to "Lars and the rest of the Brierwood Vandals." "Bike Hero" immediately became a YouTube hit, garnering over 1.7 million views, along with hundreds of thousands elsewhere online.
Looking at Online Video Trends | WebProNews
As you are no doubt aware, online video has experienced a tremendous year in 2008 in terms of growth and usage. I have personally documented a fair amount of the happenings in the industry over the year myself.Nielsen is now sharing some data looking at trends after analyzing VideoCensus data over the past year. They say that 60% of online video viewers are over the age of 35, and that people have a hard time believing that. I'll certainly admit it is a bit surprising.
CBS Interactive (CBS) will relaunch TV.com, one of the domains it picked up in its $1.8 billion CNet acquisition, to go after Hulu and other TV-on-the-Internet portals more aggressively.
CBS to push online video on TV.com - FierceOnlineVideo
TV.com HD Gallery
December 16, 2008
Contentinople - Ryan Lawler - NFL Taps Move, NeuLion for Online Video Streams - The National Football League is now offering streaming video to subscribers in the U.S. and internationally, using adaptive streaming video technology from Move Networks Inc. and management and provisioning from NeuLion Inc.
Contentinople - Ryan Lawler - News Bits: Video Ad Spend Slows Online - With grim economic news seeping into advertising and marketing budgets, online video was supposed to be one of the few bright spots for advertising over the coming quarters. But now even that is in doubt. The Wall Street Journal reports that the same economic malaise hitting the broader ad market is now slowing growth in online video as well. During an investor conference last week, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said, "The most surprising thing to us is how fast the digital marketplace has come to a standstill in the fourth quarter." Hulu LLC CEO Jason Kilar tells the WSJ that his company is "ahead of plan for 2009," but it's worth noting that the site's video inventory is no longer sold out, as it was in August.
YouTube Video SEO Tips from SES Chicago
Good news for YouTube: Bullish video ad forecast — Online advertising may be dragging, but one analyst firm expects the market for video ads to grow 45 percent to $850 million in 2009. — An eMarketer study released Tuesday forecast more growth in years to come: $1.25 billion in 2010 …
VUDU creates open development platform for TV « OmniVideo: The Future of Video Blog with James McQuivey
Vudu Opens Up, Adds Web Content - Online video provider VUDU Inc. is looking to move beyond its current pay-per-view business model by opening up its set-top box platform to outside developers.
Vudu set-top box no longer a one trick pony, adds support for YouTube, Flickr and more | last100 - My biggest beef with the Vudu set-top movie box is that it’s always been a one trick pony, and an expensive one at that. Focussing on paid-for movies (rentals and to-own), Vudu’s sole proposition was that you purchased one of its set-top boxes, starting at $299, so that you could begin purchasing content. Essentially paying to enter the store.
- Ashkan Karbasfrooshan / HipMojo.com: How eMarketer Under-Reports Video Advertising Figures
- Andy Plesser / Beet.TV: eMarketer Predicts 45 Percent Increase in Online Video Advertising in 2009
Daisy Whitney's New Media Minute What are the five online video startups you should keep your eye on in 2009?
In this week’s edition of the New Media Minute, Daisy Whitney shares her five picks for companies to watch in the year ahead. They are video site MyDamnChannel.com, measurement service Quantcast, technology firm Kaltura, how-to service 5min.com and convergence software service Boxee.tv. For all the details, check out the New Media Minute...
Move Puts Fuel TV Online in Hi-Def - TVWeek - News
Streamingmedia.com: Futurewatch 2009: Big Opportunities, Big Challenges in Educational Video - It’s an exciting time to be working in educational media, but it’s also a critical time as we make decisions on platform, content, format, and management that may well determine the equality of students’ learning for years to come.
Dailymotion Ranked as World’s Largest Independent Web Video Site - Dailymotion continues to be the most popular independent web video site globally, with over 38 million unique visitors worldwide, according to global Internet information provider comScore Media Metrix Data (October 2008). In addition, Dailymotion’s year to date monthly average of over 36 million unique visitors leads all independent online video web sites.
DailyMotion Sees Audience Surge - TVWeek - News
NBC's Zucker sees online video ads slide - FierceOnlineVideo - Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, had some dismaying news for online video advertising at a recent investors' conference. NBC Universal, which is a major backer of online video platform Hulu, reported that online video advertising slowed significantly recently.
Overlay.TV Lands $3.7 Million for Interactive Video Platform | Digital Media Wire
December 17, 2008
Weekday Online Vid Watching Trumps Weekends: Nielsen « NewTeeVee - Nielsen released new online video facts and figures today, among them the top video sites for October, corrected figures from September, and data that shows more people watch online video during the week than on the weekends. The number of unique online video viewers fell 3 percent to just shy of 121 million in October from 124 million in September. However, the total number of streams grew 1 percent to 8.894 million, streams per viewer rose 4 percent to 73.7, and the time spent per viewer surged 10 percent — to almost 172 minutes — during that same time frame.
Contentinople - Ryan Lawler - Move Moves to Mobile Devices, Set-Tops
HD Videos in YouTube Get a Bigger Player + Search Trick
Beet.TV: "Wiki-Like" Video Player Gets Big Boost with Public Television Alliance - Kaltura, the company which provides an open source video platform that allows the public to edit video in a "Wiki-like" environment, just announced its first, prominent media company implementation with Public Television's flagship Station, WNET/Thirteen New York. The Kaltura player is being used first on Worldfocus, the show about international events. It is featured on the Talk to Us section.
Kaltura Partners With NYC's WNET on Online Video Conversation | CenterNetworks - NY-based online video collaboration tool Kaltura is announcing a partnership with WNET today. WNET is the parent of PBS stations Thirteen and WLIW in NYC. If my memory serves me, Thirteen is the most watched PBS station in the country and WLIW notes they are third most watched in the country.
Online Video: The Internet's funny business tunes out - Superdeluxe, Turner Broadcasting's ha-ha video site, has finally shut down. Is anyone going to miss it — or the rest of the Web's other humor-clips startups?
Contentinople - Ryan Lawler - Wowza Takes First Step to Multi-Bit Rate Streaming - Wowza Media Systems has taken a step toward offering three-screen availability and multiple-bit rate streaming, by forming a partnership with German encoding firm dicas.
JumpCut No Longer Accepting Uploads « NewTeeVee - Jumpcut, the online video editing service acquired by Yahoo in 2006, is no longer accepting video uploads to its service.
Tilzy.TV » Blog Archive » CollegeHumor Officially Joins MTV - Craving more of Jake and Amir? Head to your living room. We’ve heard rumblings for a while, but today it’s official. As part of an effort to ramp up the network’s original programming, MTV will give CollegeHumor.com its own network comedy series.
The death of the online video ad model? - FierceOnlineVideo
As news broke that online ad-insertion platform Panache is projected to insert its 1 billionth online video ad today, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne released his predictions for online video in 2009 -- one of which is the death of the online video advertising model.
December 18, 2008
ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches — Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube.
- Matt McGee / Search Engine Land: Search Biz: YouTube Growing Up, Google Owns Ad Serving Market & More
- Chris Albrecht / NewTeeVee: Vid-Biz: UMG, YouTube, Apple Sued
- Sam Churchill / dailywireless.org: Video Search: Big Time
- Tameka Kee / paidContent.org: YouTube: A Money-Maker For Music Labels, But What About Google? Scott P. Shaffer / The Pondering Primate: YouTube Is Now The 2nd Largest Search Engine
- Scott Gilbertson / Epicenter: YouTube Adds HD Video Showcase, Larger Player
- Samantha Rose Hunt / TG Daily: YouTube changing format, pushes widescreen HD video
- James Lewin / Podcasting News: YouTube Announces HD Video Rollout, New Landing Pages
- Eric Zeman / InformationWeek: YouTube Goes High-Def
- Steven Musil / CNET News: YouTube launches HD video page
- Chloe Albanesius / AppScout: YouTube Adds High-Definition Videos
- Tam Vo / VentureBeat: YouTube's relationship with HD video gets serious
The number of online video viewers will grow by more than two-thirds to 941 million in 2013, from 563 million in 2008, according to ABI Research. The 2013 estimate represents just over one-half of the 1.8 billion consumers expected to use the Internet that year.
Although online video viewing is growing among Internet users worldwide, viewing varies greatly from country to country. More than three-quarters of consumers in Australia, Germany, India, Japan, the UK and the US surveyed in Q3 2008 by IBM Global Business Services said they watched video on their PCs—outpacing viewership for the world as a whole.
With the medium growing so quickly, and varying by country, marketers should not make any assumptions about a given nation’s online video viewing habits based on global averages. As always, the key is to know your market.
Hulu Growing Fast, But YouTube's Still Far Out in Front - TVWeek - News - Hulu is reaching farther into the mainstream with explosive growth in views in October, according to the latest video viewing figures from Nielsen Online.The site rocketed in October, delivering 206 million streams of video, up from 142 million in September. The number of unique visitors rose to 9 million in October, up from 6.3 million in September.
Online Video Given “Highest Focus” in 2009’s Digital Marketing Campaigns, Says Survey
Yesterday the online video platform, PermissionTV, released its survey findings on online video initiatives for 2009. One standout finding: 2 out of 3 respondents listed online video as a primary focus of their 2009 digital marketing campaigns – higher than every other category, including social media and search. I asked PermissionTV’s VP, Matt Kaplan, if there were any questions and findings on Video SEO?
People Prefer Streaming Over Downloading « NewTeeVee - Good news for Netflix and Hulu — new data from Ipsos MediaCT shows that people are more interested in streaming longer-form content like movies and TV shows than downloading it. The Ipsos research found that for U.S. Internet users 12 years and older, 17 percent had streamed a movie and 25 percent had streamed a TV show in the past 30 days vs. 11 percent who downloaded a movie and 11 percent who had downloaded a TV show during the same time frame.
Joost Kills P2P; Gets Focused on Getting Bought | Online Video Watch - After much speculation Joost has announced the shutdown of their downloaded player app and P2P video service as of tomorrow. If content is king then Joost is dead. But if user experience is king they may still have a shot, at least in the form of acquisition by a mainstream media company seeking to increase online engagement.
December 19, 2008
comScore Releases November 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings — comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In November 2008, Americans conducted 12.3 billion core searches …
- Stephen Shankland / CNET News: Google snatches search share from rivals
- Samuel Axon / Obsessable: Google, Yahoo!, and YouTube: Where are people searching?
- Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch: ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches
- Arnold Zafra / Search Engine Journal: As Google Tops November Search Ranking, YouTube Gets A Chunk of its Search Volume
- Henry Blodget / CNN: Google clobbers competition - again Sam Diaz / Between the Lines: YouTube overtakes Yahoo, Microsoft in U.S. search
Top Ten Online Viral Video Ads of 2008 - Yesterday, The Feed Company released its list of the top ten online viral video ads for 2008. “You have a lot of younger creatives at the ad agencies who have grown up on the Web who don’t think in terms of traditional 60-second spots anymore. Our Top 10 shows that this new type of creative - less brand, more entertainment - is finding bigger and bigger audiences online.” - said Josh Warner, President, Feed Company
YouTube Unveils Unique View Counts. Now You Can Tell If Your Mom Is Your Only Fan
YouTube has just released a new feature for its analytics platform that allows content owners to see how many unique visitors are watching their videos. While YouTube videos have long displayed their view counts to the public, until this point it hasn’t been possible to tell if the hits were coming from a wide audience or just a few devout fans who repeatedly watched the same clips.
Report: YouTube Making "Tens of Millions" for Universal Music | Digital Media Wire
San Francisco - Major record label Universal Music Group is generating "tens of millions of dollars" from Google's YouTube, the company told CNET News.com this week. "(YouTube) is not like radio, where it's just promotional," Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of the label's eLabs digital division, told News.com. "It's a revenue stream, a commercial business. It's growing tremendously. It's up almost 80 percent for us year-over-year in the U.S. in terms of our revenue from this category."
Streamingmedia.com: Streaming Continues to Grow, But Physical Media Still Wins Out - New studies from Deloitte and Ipsos show impressive growth in online video usage, especially among women, but when it comes time to pay for content, viewers are still more likely to purchase on DVD.
PixelFish buys Eyespot assets - FierceOnlineVideoContentinople - Steve Donohue - Brightcove Pulls Plug on Consumer Product - Brightcove Networks pulled the plug on its consumer product, leaving YouTube Inc.Brightcove 3 as the main outlet for amateur videographers looking to generate ad revenue from online videos. The move to fold its Brightcove Network service, which had been planned for several months, follows the recent rollout of the company’s platform, which is designed to drive increased traffic for videos distributed by Brightcove, and to improve the quality of videos by automatically detecting a user’s bandwidth and delivering the best video quality available based on each user’s settings.
Will Video for Food » The Anti-Virus to Online Video - I’m still procrastinating my AdAge article for online-video, but the process awakened me to something vital about online video. You see, when I was featured for the first time on YouTube it was mocking a “viral video genius.” It was meant to be a joke. Viral video was not an art form, and remains a mix of luck, timing and the impact of the video. But I’ve still been using the term “viral video” like it’s some sort of holy grail, and I’d like to change course in 2009.
