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Create your own TV 4 Free!

If you're dreaming of creating your own TV channel or radio for FREE, there's no need to pinch yourself: A soon to be lauched user generated broadcasting tool Selfcast developed by RawFlow will make it happen.

Register to try the beta here.

MSN to sponsor Live Earth climate change concerts

The MSN Network is to sponsor a series of global concerts organised by former US vice-President and environmental activist Al Gore and other environmental groups in a bid to raise awareness of climate change.

Live Earth will take place over 24 hours on 7 July, and is part of a wider campaign, known as Save Our Selves (SOS) - The Campaign for a Climate in Crisis. The UK's event will take place in London's Hyde Park.

"In order to solve the climate crisis we have to reach billions of people. We are launching SOS and Live Earth to begin a process of communication that will mobilise people all over the world to take action," said Gore.

"The climate crisis will only be stopped by an unprecedented and sustained global movement. We hope to jump-start that movement right here, right now, and take it to a new level on 7 July, 2007."

The entire event, which will also include shows in Shanghai, Johannesburg, Sydney amongt other global cities, will be broadcast on MSN.

"At MSN, we have the worldwide audience and the technology to help unite a global community around SOS and Live Earth," said Joanne Bradford, corporate vice-president and chief media officer of MSN.

Performers will include The Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg, Keane and Duran Duran.

Source: NMA.co.uk

Online TV and video to increase ten-fold by 2012

Online TV and video will generate global revenues of $6.3bn (£3.2bn) by 2012, according to Informa's report Online TV and Video: Beyond User-Generated Content.

The report found that revenues will increase by ten times in the next five years.

UK revenues will leap from $42m (£21.5m) in 2006 to $364m (£186m) in 2009 and $708m (£361.7m) in 2012, predicted Informa. The report forecast that the UK will remain the second largest market for online TV and video, behind the US which will have a market worth $3.9bn (£2bn) by 2012.

Broadcast companies will have to be aware of the internet impacting on their core businesses, the report concluded. It found that those involved in deals with online TV and video providers like iTunes Video and YouTube stand the best chance of success.

informamedia.com

Adobe and its P2P Ambitions

Excerpted from GigOM Report by Om Malik

Adobe Systems, owner of Flash multimedia technology, seems to be getting serious about spreading its tentacles into new product categories – from VoIP to P2P networking. But it is P2P that is at the heart of the company’s grand design.

In pursuit of this strategy, the company has acquired amicima, a privately held start-up founded in 2004 to “develop improved Internet protocols for client-server and P2P networking, and to develop new applications based on these protocols.”

Amicima’s publicly available product is amiciPhone, a P2P-based VoIP client that combines presence, text messaging, and file transfers with voice chat.

Adobe also recently announced a partnership with DCIA Member VeriSign, owner of the Kontiki grid content distribution platform. Earlier this month, VeriSign told us, “We will be collaborating with Adobe for delivery of Flash video including movies, TV shows, broadcast media, and user interface technologies.”

The two companies expect to work together to integrate future versions of next generation media technologies leveraging VeriSign’s Kontiki P2P technology and Adobe’s award winning Flash Video software.

Adobe could bundle Kontiki’s command-and-control P2P technology into a forthcoming version of Flash. Given the wide scale adoption of Flash, Adobe-Kontiki will be able to create an Internet-wide P2P cloud.

Publishers are expected to be able to lower their development, quality assurance, and customer support costs because the combined Flash/VeriSign service reduces the problems of deploying video on-demand applications across multiple platforms and browsers.

The Adobe-VeriSign combo could also help overcome some of the issues surrounding the current torrent-based content distribution systems.

Bill Gates: "Net to revolutionise TV in 5 years"

DAVOS: The Internet is set to revolutionise television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday.

“I’m stunned how people aren’t seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we’ve had,” he told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum. The rise of high-speed Internet and the popularity of video sites like Google’s YouTube has already led to a worldwide decline in the number of hours spent by young people in front of a TV set.

In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed programme slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Gates said.
“Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it,” he said. “Internet presentation of these things is vastly superior.”

At the moment, watching video clips on a computer is a separate experience from watching sitcoms or documentaries on television. But convergence is coming, posing new challenges for TV companies and advertisers.

“Because TV is moving into being delivered over the internet — and some of the big phone companies are building up the infrastructure for that — you’re going to have that experience all together,” Gates said. YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said the impact on advertising would be profound, with the future promising far more targeted ads tailored to each viewer’s profile.

“In the coming months we’re going to do experiments to see how people interact with these ads to build an effective model that works for advertisers and works for users,” he said. Advertisers are already racing to adapt their strategies to the growing power of the web, and more and more promotional cash is tipped to migrate from television to websites in future.

37 Percent of Broadband Consumers Are Interested in Having TV on Their PC

JupiterResearch has found that there is no industry consensus regarding business models or expectations for video delivered via TV, PC and mobile devices. Detailed in a new report, "Programming for Three Screens: Leverage PC and Mobile Video to Support Core TV Efforts," media company and consumer interest in broadband video continues to grow, but strategies for building a business out of broadband video remain elusive.

Media companies are increasingly jumping to offer video on an ad-supported basis, for sale as a download, via subscriptions, and as rentals. However, no clearly winning strategy has emerged, and revenues from all these models will remain modest for the next several years. JupiterResearch argues that the main benefit to Internet-delivered video lies in building the audience, or increasing audience loyalty, for traditionally delivered television programming.

"Broadband video nicely complements TV today, but this grace period won't last forever," said Joe Laszlo, Senior Analyst and Research Director with JupiterResearch. "Substitution of Internet video for traditionally delivered video will grow over the next few years, and media companies must account for this coming audience shift in their mid-to-long term plans.

Recommendations from friends and Internet search remain the two most important factors leading people to watch videos online.

"There are many tactics that media programmers should employ to increase interest in online video," said David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan. "For example, by including an e-mail this video link on a page, or using URLs short enough to paste into an IM window, programmers can facilitate audience growth."

The complete findings of this report and recommendations for media programmers are immediately available to JupiterResearch clients online at http://www.jupiterresearch.com/. For details on JupiterResearch's methodology, visit www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/methodology/A>

UGC video to dominate by 2010

by Shankar Gupta, Tuesday, January 16, 2007

USER-GENERATED VIDEO, WHICH MADE UP 47% of the online video market in 2006, will grow to encompass 55% of the market by the end of 2010, according to a report released Monday by media research firm Screen Digest. But despite the growth, video created by consumers will account for just 15% of overall video ad revenue by 2010, the report states.

Screen Digest predicts that ad revenue for user-generated video will grow to $900 million in 2010 from $200 million in 2006 compared to overall video ad revenue of $6.2 billion in 2010, up from $1.2 billion in 2006--maintaining roughly the same proportion over the four years of traffic growth.

Ads on user-created videos are expected to lag both because marketers will be wary of placing ads next to potentially racy clips and because they are afraid of consumer resentment, if the ads are seen as intrusive, said Screen Digest Senior Analyst Arash Amel.

"User-generated video is going to have a lot of issues to resolve before it becomes an effective advertising medium," he said. "There's how will people react to personal media with ads, and how will advertisers feel sitting around rude or offensive content."

At the same time, Amel said it's likely that technical issues surrounding the monetization of short-form user-generated video will be resolved--especially given search giant Google's entrée into the space, with its purchase of YouTube in October. "If Google can't make this ad model work, nobody can," he said.

He added that the broad array of user-generated content sites will have to diversify, in order to separate themselves from market leaders YouTube and MySpace. "With the dominance of YouTube and MySpace Video, smaller sites are going to need to have something different," he said. "Emerging alternatives include online editing, revenue sharing with content producers and hybrid services which offer both premium and user generated content."

Thanks to Marty Lafferty from the DCIA for tip!