Tv On Net Blog

Bye bye birdie....

2008-10-10T17:48:00.002Z

This blog will no longer be updated. Please go to http://socialbydesign.wordpress.com for my writings....

Thanks for following this blog folks :-)

Copyright (c) Ingjerd Jevnaker The blog is run by RawFlow employees but does in no way represent the offical views of RawFlow Inc. It is published as is without any warranty of any kind, express or implied, as to the operation of our site, the accuracy of the information or the products or services referred to on the website and we shall not be liable for any losses or damage that may result from use of the website as a consequence of any inaccuracies in, or any omissions from, the information which it may contain. The information contained in the website is not an invitation to invest in the shares or any other products or services or otherwise deal in these or enter into a contract with RawFlow Ltd.. or any other company. The information provided should not be relied upon in connection with any investment decision.

Create your own TV 4 Free!

2007-06-14T11:41:00.000Z

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

2007-02-19T11:19:00.000Z

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

2007-01-30T09:44:00.000Z

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

2007-01-29T15:44:00.000Z

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"

2007-01-29T12:29:00.000Z

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

2007-01-23T11:12:00.000Z

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

2007-01-16T17:03:00.000Z

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!

The Venice Project - not so new or revolutionary perhaps?

2007-01-15T13:47:00.000Z

Finally someone sees through the myth (From Staci D. Kramer's article on the Venice Project in PaidContent):

"Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the creators of the three services and the technology behind them, have Google or Jobs-like status when it comes to new projects: they could start work on a stealth grocery list and people would clamor to see it, be part of it, do their shopping for them, invest in the grocery store. That’s not to say the Venice Project wouldn’t be worthy of attention otherwise but it’s certainly the reason TVP is already on its way to being one of the most-hyped broadband video/TV efforts in a category where start-ups are multiplying as fast as tribbles.

So what is The Venice Project? A code name for a service that would allow viewers to watch high-quality streaming professional video (movies, TV, etc.) using p2p instead of a central server and meshing TV with web capabilities like tagging and search. The plan calls for working with content providers to distribute legit content—no, this isn’t the first p2p effort to do that—and, as the FAQ says, to make it “as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts.” They also want to mesh TV and web in terms of revenue—advertising with rev sharing. Limited beta started last month and the list is already closed to new would-be testers; so far, no live TV."

Read the rest of the article by clicking link below:
The Venice Project: Better Title Might Be YAITVP (Yet Another Internet TV Project)

P2P company joins A2IM

2007-01-15T10:15:00.000Z

The P2P advocate organisation DCIA today announced that DCIA Member INTENT MediaWorks, a provider of technology for online distribution of licensed digital media, is partnering with fellow Member Nettwerk Music Group to distribute Nettwerk’s large and ever expanding catalog of artists, such as Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan, and Avril Lavigne.

Nettwerk has been responsible for the release of over 400 albums that have amassed worldwide sales in excess of 100 million copies, including multiple number one albums and singles.

“INTENT’s approach to digital distribution takes advantage of the sheer volume of the peer-to-peer (P2P) audience in a meaningful manner. It combines the promotional, marketing, and revenue tools necessary for artists to take control of their art and career.”

INTENT puts licensed music and video into general circulation via P2P networks, websites, and social networking destinations. Its technology tracks each file as it makes its way through the Internet for rights holders.

More revolutionary perhaps, is that INTENT also announced this week that they have joined the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), representing a broad coalition of independent music labels. The organization is committed to promoting sector opportunity and enhancing market share for its membership.

“With nearly 30% of the market, indies are gaining prominence at a rapid pace. INTENT offers a way for these artists to significantly accelerate their market presence and adoption,” said Les Ottolenghi, CEO of INTENT MediaWorks.

“People have shared music for decades and online channels are a natural evolution of the practice. File sharers represent behavioral marketing at its best and should be embraced. INTENT brings much needed structure to the P2P market with a platform for profitable and consumer-friendly distribution of digital entertainment,” he added.

INTENT MediaWorks CEO Les Ottolenghi will deliver the opening keynote address at the upcoming P2P MEDIA SUMMIT NY, where RawFlow's CEO Mikkel Dissing will also be a keynote speaker.

Hello Broadband TV!

2006-12-18T13:40:00.000Z

Wired Magazine published a story today on a reporters' experience of switching to watching TV content purely online and he does raise a few interesting points, such as the following:

The issues with sports underscore the problems with internet delivery of real-time video, such as games and breaking news. People don't mind waiting for the long download times of evergreen content such as movies, which generally weigh between 1 and 1.5 GB, but they want higher definition. And getting weekly serial dramas the day after they air is painful only for the most impatient fans. But sports and breaking news lose their shelf life very quickly, and that means the only proper means of delivery is live streaming.

In March, CBS offered all the non-televised college basketball games as video streams from its website, and outside of some hiccups on the first few days, had no problems streaming to hundreds of thousands of viewers, said CBS' McClintock.

But pushing content to a larger number just wouldn't work, said Jupiter's Laszlo. The internet isn't architected for it. "Streaming and downloading work well right now, in part because they are not super-popular," he said. "However, the entire internet might be threatened, if everyone in the U.S. woke up one day and started consuming video over the internet."

Read the full article "Goodbye TV, Hello Broadband" in Wired.

The Venice Project screenshots...

2006-12-15T11:51:00.000Z

The Venice Project just released a new beta version and this time they’ve released some screenshots as well, so if you couldn’t get invited as a beta tester yet, you can at least get a peek at how the UI is looking.

(this is from the Agylen blog)

Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe: Synopsis

2006-12-07T15:06:00.000Z

Next Generation P2P: Digital Hollywood Europe: Synopsis (Pt 2)

Marty Lafferty

07 Dec 2006

Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) gives us a synopsis of the Next Generation P2P sessions at the recent Digital Hollywood Europe conference held in London's docklands.

Ingjerd Jevnaker (pictured right) distinguished the use of P2P for live streaming as separate from file sharing. P2P essentially means interconnecting users computer-to-computer on the same level, and this can be to share bandwidth as well as content. There should be no contradiction between P2P and protecting content. Because of legacy issues tainting P2P's image, however, some successful P2P applications don't advertise that they use P2P – and users don't care. Meanwhile, other P2P networks have increased their popularity with almost a revolutionary appeal to consumers by emphasizing P2P. The biggest emerging failures are digital services that use DRM in too draconian a manner. Flexibility is needed.

P2P companies now are either going open source and in some ways underground and non-commercial, or working to get consumers to sign onto licensed models. We need to encourage the technology sector to support and advance legitimate uses of P2P on multiple networks; and we need to encourage the entertainment sector to think about alternative business models, such as adopting RawFlow streaming and integrating ad-supported commercial content with user-generated content (UGC). In the coming future, there will be no more TVs – PCs will become the video appliance.

Les Ottolenghi explained how P2P is a superior delivery method for rich media content, with INTENT MediaWorks now delivering 370,000 licensed files per day up from 10K/day a year ago and participating in such groundbreaking efforts as the recent Coca-Cola sponsored Jay-Z P2P-exclusive promotion. INTENT uses DRM to track content, converting the open P2P universe into an ecosystem for legitimate business, which is emerging as primarily ad-supported. Licensed content is provided free, giving instant gratification to end-users, with the result that 84% of discovered files are retained. Unified file-discovery across all P2P and social networks has also emerged as an important attribute for success; hence INTENT has just launched its DelveDown service to provide that functionality.

Fostering the community nature of the channel is also very important, and P2P is uniquely configured for social networking. Post-Grokster, major entertainment companies are showing more interest in working with INTENT and, globally, copyright court cases have reduced the reluctance of majors to move forward and embrace P2P. It is critical not to let telecom firms dictate what happens regarding further innovation by eliminating net neutrality. We also need to work to make files smarter – so that content packages themselves have intelligence – plus continue to improve interoperability and attract higher quality content to be licensed for P2P.

Daniel Harris (pictured right) provided Kendra's perspective on P2P from its alliance of content owners and software makers. Daniel's vision is that any application on any device should be able to browse any catalog, and there should be universal interoperability. Record labels have had different ways of managing their catalogs, historically; now we need to show them that with P2P it is possible to aggregate databases and achieve across-the-board content monetization. P2P can bring benefits of non-centralized search and publishing to all sorts of content databases.

P2P can be used for information transfer – not just file transfer. Standardization will help make this a commercially viable consumer medium. It is increasingly futile to pursue legal strategies when open standards are proliferating. Huge advancements could be made in commercial development by simply bolting payment systems onto traditional P2Ps and letting developers earn money by working to make this happen. It is time to embrace, support, and extend P2P with open standards to build a market that has enormous potential. Let's empower developers to make this succeed with the reality of more open standards.

Trevor Albery cited Warner Bros.' recent development of new business initiatives in the P2P sphere, while also continuing a strong focus on anti-piracy activities. Examples include licensing BitTorrent and the joint venture announced earlier this year with DCIA Member arvato mobile using its GNAB platform for the In2Movies service in Germany. So far, these approaches have involved offering filmed content in traditional business models, but with a P2P delivery aspect. It is still the very early days for the P2P distribution channel, and now is the time for experimentation in what is a nascent industry in order to learn what will work best.

There should be no apologies for the Grokster case, which was about profiting from inducement to infringe copyright, not about P2P technology. Today's challenge is to build good services that will excite consumers and compete with unlicensed online content. There may well be more litigation, as the channel continues its legitimization. We need to bring all stakeholders together to make DRM work better so that P2P can safely monetize content. P2P will find its place among distribution channels, while DVDs will continue and other electronic distribution will as well.

Anthony Rose outlined Altnet's experience from 2001, when, in retrospect, its approach was ahead of its time. Altnet pioneered DRM-protected content distribution through open P2Ps, but major entertainment content rights holders initially resisted. Now that legal settlements are complete, however, Altnet is finally obtaining licenses. Its newest offering, the Global File Registry (GFR), connects people who own content with people who use content. Five years ago, there was much innovation in the P2P space, but then Web 2.0 became more innovative as P2Ps faced litigation. Now we are at a stage where the transport layer for P2P works quite well, but how people use it is still not working as a business. We need renewed innovation here – for example, with better indexing technologies – so that users will not be polarized.

Of concern is the fact that dispute settlements have bi-furcated the development community into those who want licensed distribution and those who are trying to anonymize usage. What should be obvious is that value will be generated by large-volume licensed-content distribution. Social wrapping in P2P is also an area of high potential. Consumers are more empowered than ever and, therefore, trying to dictate their behavior harshly will fail and drive them to the waiting darknets. The desire for control must be tempered; the winning play will be one based on equilibrium. The future will bring an increase in hybrid systems with a mix of centralized and distributed servers.

Reproduced with permission of the DCIA. For more information, plan to attend the day-long P2P MEDIA SUMMIT NY on February 7, 2007.

MSN pushes video-call service via Hello Christmas campaign

2006-12-05T10:27:00.000Z

MSN has ramped up its online ad activity for Windows Live Messenger, ahead of Live.com's launch in the New Year, with a Christmas campaign site that's aimed at promoting its video-call service.

MSN's Hello Christmas site, which goes live this week, is a video-sharing portal where users can view and upload video messages to friends and loved ones around the world in the run-up to Christmas, promoting the video-calling function of Windows Live Messenger.

MSN, in partnership with digital agency Thin Martian, has created some of the videos itself by filming people sending their greetings from the streets of London, and the site encourages users to post their own content. Visitors to the site can rate the messages and send them on through viral marketing.

"The campaign is aiming to give people an opportunity to get in touch with friends around the world and to show how much better a video message is than simply phoning - it's a much deeper, engaging experience," said Suzanne Cook, MSN UK's consumer marketing manager. "While the Christmas site might run until after the New Year, we're looking at introducing similar concepts for Valentine's Day and other such events through the year."

Sega has also launched a Sonic the Hedgehog-themepack for MSN Messenger, its first advertising on the Microsoft network. The campaign, which launches on Friday, aims to promote the new Xbox 360 Sonic the Hedgehog game for Christmas.

hellochristmas.co.uk

get.live.com

sega.com

Author: By Will Cooper | Source: NMA magazine | Published: 30.11.06

Video Closely Rivals Music Online

2006-12-01T22:17:00.000Z

Demand for video now rivals music online, according to a recent survey. The study, commissioned by iCrossing and carried out by Harris Interactive, noted that video formats like movies, clips, television shows, and sporting events are rapidly attracting more attention from media-hungry consumers. Specifically, the poll found that 46 percent of online adults in the United States listen to, watch or seek to download media assets. And within that category, 31 percent prefer video-related content, compared to 33 percent for music-related assets.

From one perspective, the study suggests a horserace, though most consumers are enmeshed in multiple and overlapping formats. That opens the door to a number of creative sales opportunities, including those that traverse music and video formats. "Companies must continue to create new and innovative strategies to reach consumers wanting music, video and ringtones online," said Jeffrey Herzog, CEO of iCrossing. For artists and labels, that means bundling experiments that involve downloads, ringtones, and video sneak-peeks, as well as traditional assets like concert tickets and merchandise. Meanwhile, iPod users have shown an overwhelming preference for music downloads, according to a recent finding by Nielsen Media Research.

Story by news analyst Alexandra Osorio.

Online video 'eroding TV viewing'

2006-11-27T11:05:00.000Z

(from BBC News, published Monday 27/11)

Video sharing site YouTube has taken online viewing to the masses

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, an ICM survey of 2,070 people for the BBC suggests.

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

And online and mobile viewing is rising - three quarters of users said they now watched more than they did a year ago.

But online video viewers are still in the minority, with just 9% of the population saying they do it regularly.

Another 13% said they watched occasionally, while a further 10% said they expected to start in the coming year.

But two-thirds of the population said they did not watch online and could not envisage starting in the next 12 months.

The success of sites such as YouTube over the past year has helped open the door for those who want easy ways to find, watch and share videos over the internet.

The UK is not yet as advanced as the US, where hit TV shows are routinely available from networks' websites and services like iTunes.

But it is catching up, with the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all planning to offer most of their shows on demand on the internet from the end of this year or the start of 2007.

In the survey, one in five people who watched online or mobile video at least once a week said they watched a lot less TV as a result. Another 23% said they watched a bit less, while just over half said their TV viewing was unchanged. Some 3% said online video inspired them to watch more TV.

Online and mobile video is far more popular among the young, with 28% of those aged 16-24 saying they watched more than once each week.

An average of 10% aged 25-44 were net video regulars, with that figure falling to just 4% of over-45s.

Earlier this year, media regulator Ofcom said the number of 16 to 24-year-olds watching TV in an average day had dropped 2.9% between 2003 and 2005.

Comedian Ricky Gervais, whose audio and video podcasts have become hits on the web, said amateur video would never replace TV - but broadcasters would harness the power of the internet.

"You can't knock up an episode of The Sopranos or 24 on a little handheld digital camera," he told the BBC News website.

"I don't think you'll ever be able to sidestep TV or DVD. But TV companies will embrace it."

The choice offered by new platforms was "exciting", he said, and any future developments depended on how many people started using the technology.

"I'm sure when the BBC first launched, they were going: 'Ah, not many people have got tellies. Who's watching this?'

"So it's good to get your act together. And then people catch up with the know-how and the means to watch it."

The first award ceremony for web-only video, the Vloggies, was held in San Francisco at the start of November.

Alive in Baghdad, a site featuring videos of real Iraqis telling their own stories, won the top award.

ICM interviewed a random sample of 1,008 adults aged 18+ recruited from the ICM online panel between 17-19 November. They also interviewed a random sample of 1,062 people aged 16+ by telephone.

Panellists were recruited from across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

CBS enhances TV ratings by measuring YouTube audience

2006-11-23T10:38:00.000Z

CBS issued a release today with some of its YouTube clips viewing numbers, which while heartening in some of the numbers it portrays, is what I call “reductive speculation”. The way the release is structured it is meant to imply that since CBS clips officially went onto YouTube, the “Late Show with David Letterman” has added 200,000 (+5%) new viewers while “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” is up 100,000 viewers (+7%). Right.

Anyway, the news part in there: CBS clips are doing well on YouTube...it has uploaded
more than 300 clips that averaged about 850,000 views per day in the first month. About 20,000 users subscribing to CBS programming on YouTube since the channel launch last month. Good to hear and let’s just stick to that for now...

(posted on Paidcontent.org)

Watch video from CBS on how to get sponsored on YouTube by clicking the video below:

2006-11-17T17:03:00.000Z

EMI admits apprehension over YouTube

EMI has revealed it will not rush into a deal with YouTube without ensuring proper copyright protection, following comments by EMI executives at yesterday’s financial presentation.

The company famously held back from striking a deal with YouTube before it was snapped up by Google for $1.6bn last month, even though Warners and Universal secured deals.

Industry speculators have since suggested EMI’s cautionary stance is a negotiating tactic to ensure a deal similar to Universal’s, which gives it a 1% share in YouTube’s equity and a payment of around eight-tenths of a cent every time a Universal song is played on the site.

Blinkx signs with Infospace

2006-11-16T17:27:00.000Z

Binkx has signed a deal with Infospace that will see the video search service be used on Infospace sites, starting with recently launched Webfetchpro. The deal, which comes a month after Blinkx partnered with MSN to power some parts of its Live.com site, shows the importance that video is now playing in the sharing of information online.

Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx co-founder, comments:
"What we're going to see on the web now is this elevation of video search...
alongside the other main search verticals like 'web', 'news' and 'images'," said Chandratillake.

We may also ponder whether Blinkx's business model is increasingly to sell video search technology to sites rather than being an aggreagator itself:

Dominic Trigg, Infospace VP, confirmed that the partnership has come about through Blinkx's expertise in the video market: "The case with us is that we've always gone out and got best of breed, rather than going with whatever technology might work best," said Trigg. "This is a massively growing market and we understand the importance it's playing not just in entertainment, but access to news and current affairs as well."

Infospace has also announced that it's signed a deal to power search for the London Stock Exchange website over the next two years.

We watch this development with great interest. There will increasingly be need for powerful search mechanisms that are more sophisticated than the text metadata search function that most video sites uses today, especially as more and more rich data goes online... So, when will Google buy BlinkX? Or will Google launch a more sophisitcated video search developed inhouse? Let's see shall we...

YouTube in sports content deal?

2006-11-16T11:18:00.000Z

YouTube Cuts First Major Sports Deal; Will Launch NHL Channel; Glimpse Of New Google Video Strategy?

From PaidContent.org

Posted by Staci D. Kramer
Wed 15 Nov 2006 11:29 AM

The NHL, still striving to overcome the labor dispute that shut down the league for the 2004-05 season, already has online deals in place with Yahoo, Comcast and Google. Now the league is hooking up with Google subsidiary YouTube to create a new channel on the video-sharing site, according to the SportsBusiness Journal. The league will provide game highlights and behind-the-scene video; YouTube will put the clips on a dedicated NHL channel supplemented with user-uploaded video. As has been the case with other YouTube content deals, the NHL will be able to remove copyright-breaching content from the site or can leave it and share in the revenue. (That particular form of sharing doesn’t include the user as best I can tell.) YouTube says more league deals are in the works.

In a way, this deal combined with the recent Google Video-NHL agreement displays what could be seen as Google’s new video strategy: the NHL offers downloads for pay at Google Video, clips to share at YouTube. The sites could cross promote the offerings easily—for instance, tell people who download a game video at Google to click on this YouTube link if they want to share highlights with their friends or tell YouTube highlight viewers the full game is available at Google Video. Whether they will is a different question.

Google audio-ad streaming

2006-11-08T12:24:00.000Z

Google Radio Ramps Up; Google Audio Ads To Be Tested Publicly This Year

Posted by Staci D. Kramer Tue 07 Nov 2006 07:54 PM
in PaidContent.

Google Audio Ads will get a public test by the end of the year, allowing advertisers to buy radio spots online the same way they currently use Google AdWords for online search, Reuters reports. Earlier this week, Google announced plans to test an auction system for newspaper ads. Google’s radio plans—the public ones, anyway—began with the company’s acquisition last January of dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million cash in an earn-out deal that could cost more than $1.136 billion over three years. Google said then the goal was a new distribution radio ad distribution channel and has spent the intervening months setting that up.

As part of that, Google has been busy hiring a sales force. Google reportedly is paying about 50 percent more than a typical radio sales person might make, an exec from one competitor told Reuters. The same exec said he’s been told Google is on the verge of a $1 billion radio ad inventory deal with Clear Channels. No comment from Google on that. Thinking out loud here a little—if such a deal is in the works, it could be structured similarly to the one that guarantees MySpace $900 million over a period of time.

PodCast with RawFlow CEO Mikkel Dissing

2006-11-03T09:42:00.000Z

RawFlow recently visited Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica and Streaming Media West in San Jose. While we were there, our CEO and founder Mikkel Dissing met with the PodTech News team and did a podcast discussing peer to peer and how to make the internet into a scalable broadcast medium. Dissing spoke with PodTech's Matt Kelly at Digital Hollywood, an entertainment and technology conference in Santa Monica, Calif., and discussed the benefit of his company's live streaming software.

Download the podcast by right-clicking here and select "save as".

Visit the PodTech site

Brightcove launches Free Internet TV service

2006-11-01T10:53:00.000Z

From TvOver.Net

The big news today definitely surrounds Brightcove, who has finally launched their new service that allows content owners of all sizes to launch their own Internet TV channels for free and empowers them to generate revenue through advertising and video download sales.

Coinciding with the launch of the Brightcove Network, the company announced the availability of several new services designed to generate revenue and increase distribution for Internet TV channels. To make earning money from commercial content easier, Brightcove launched a new video advertising network and the ability to offer high-quality video downloads for purchase or rental. To help online video programmers reach new audiences, the company introduced the beta of a new consumer destination for discovering and interacting with Internet TV channels. In addition, Brightcove has partnered with AOL to give content owners the option to easily sell their pay-media downloads through the AOL Video portal using Brightcove.

"In the last six months we've seen explosive growth in the online video market, especially in consumer sharing, but this is only the beginning of the Internet TV era," said Jeremy Allaire, chairman and chief executive officer of Brightcove. "Now content producers, from serious amateurs to major studios, are looking for an approach to Internet video that gives them commercial opportunities with their content as well as control over their distribution, and that's exactly what we're delivering with the launch of the Brightcove Network."

The Brightcove Network gives any content owner the ability to build a commercial Internet TV channel, launch it on their site, syndicate it to other web sites, and distribute it on Brightcove.com. The service is free to use. Content owners who use the Brightcove Network give Brightcove the right to sell advertising in their videos, and in turn they receive 50% of the revenue from ads that run in their channels. In addition, content owners can choose to offer video downloads for rental or purchase. They have the option to set any retail price they choose, with a $0.99 minimum, and they earn 70% of the sale price for each transaction.

To expand the revenue and distribution options for Internet TV producers using Brightcove, the company launched several new initiatives that support the Brightcove Network:

* Advertising Network -- Brightcove AdNet, the new Brightcove advertising network, aggregates online audiences across major and niche Internet TV channels giving marketers a more efficient way to reach consumers and offer online video programmers a way to more easily generate advertising revenue.

* Pay-Media Service -- The new pay-media service gives content owners using Brightcove the ability to earn revenue from the sale of online video by offer high-quality video downloads for purchase or rental at prices they determine.

* Syndication Marketplace -- Expanding distribution options for Internet TV channels, the company has introduced the first beta of a new online marketplace for discovering Internet TV channels that are available for syndication to third party web sites.

* AOL Video Distribution -- Content owners using the Brightcove platform will have the ability to distribute their paid video content through the AOL Video portal.

* Consumer Destination -- Finally, the company announced plans to make Brightcove.com a consumer destination for discovering and interacting with Internet TV channels. The first beta of the destination site was released today, and the company plans to add significant new features during the next six months.

For content owners that want greater control over their Internet TV business, including full control over the sale and delivery of advertising within their content, Brightcove will continue to offer the Brightcove Platform. The Brightcove Platform gives content owners a broad set of services for building online video businesses. Video programmers who choose to use the Brightcove Platform pay for it based on the volume of traffic that views their content each month. Moreover they have the option to use Brightcove revenue generation and distribution options including the advertising network, pay media, syndication marketplace, AOL Video, and the Brightcove.com destination.

brightcove.com

If You Webcast It, How Many Will Come?

2006-10-31T13:43:00.000Z

In StreamingMedia.com's latest news feature, Geoff Daily writes about traffic planning for webcasts and mentions among other things that content owners should look to CDNs for help on how to plan for audience levels.

I quote:

CDNs are also often a good reference point for learning more about webcasting in general and, not surprisingly, gaining a better understanding of how much streaming delivery will cost for a particular event. “We’ve built a lot of tools that help us to represent the cost to customers with the least amount of error so their expectations are set correctly,” says VitalStream’s Byrne. “We want them to understand the process.”

Many CDNs also have mechanisms in place, such as alerts on bandwidth charges that can help to limit a Webcaster’s exposure to unexpected spikes in traffic. Some CDNs even have ways to set bandwidth thresholds that, once passed, automatically trigger a change in the way their Webcasts are delivered. “If someone has a fixed budget,” Wheaton says, “we can set it up so that once traffic hits a certain level we can take the 300Kbps stream off of the site and offer only a lower-quality one.”

However, none of this is really ideal is it? Many content owners need to monetize the content based on how many impressions the ads surrounding the content makes, and then providing a lower quality of service and/or limiting audience size does hardly seem beneficial.

Had these content owners deployed P2P technologies as enhancement to their unicasting, they could have offered scalability of their broadcasts and would not have had to worry so much about peak traffic or over-runs in bandwidth.

Read the full feature article by Geoff Daily here.

BBC to launch peer based personalised radio

2006-10-31T13:39:00.000Z

04 Jul 06

Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson announced the launch of a personalised radio service using peer-to-peer technology at The Guardian Media Group Lecture at the RadioAcademy in Cambridge (3-5 July).

From BBC News:

BBC to offer 'personalised' radio

The BBC wants to allow audiences to create personal radio stations from its content, its director general has said.

The planned service, provisionally called MyBBCRadio, was revealed by Mark Thompson at the Radio Festival in Cambridge.

It aims to give audiences more control by combining existing services such as podcasts and the BBC Radio Player.

It will be part of the BBC's iPlayer, a free service which will also offer seven days of BBC TV on demand.

Thompson said MyBBCRadio would use peer-to-peer technology to provide "thousands, ultimately millions, of individual radio services created by audiences themselves".

The BBC hoped to share these ideas with the commercial sector, he added.

Online success

The personalised radio scheme is expected to build on the success of the BBC's online radio services.

In March, the corporation said people had listened to 20 million hours of BBC content online, using everything from live streams to downloaded programmes.

The most requested shows include BBC Radio 4's long-running soap opera The Archers, and Chris Moyles' BBC Radio 1 breakfast show.

In May, audiences downloaded 4.5 million BBC podcasts.

In his speech, Mr Thompson said the corporations' governors would decide on whether podcasting would become a permanent service later this year.

The decision will be based, in part, on a study of how the BBC's podcasts affect the commercial sector.

The governors will also look into the market impact of Radios 1 and 2 following criticism from commercial competitors, said Thompson.

However, he defended the stations, saying they had been successful "not because they've become more like their competitors but because they've become less like them".

"If you've got a problem with a popular BBC, the people you're picking a fight with are the British public," he added.

More information:

radioacademy.org
bbc.co.uk

BBC to stream live matches from Wimbledon

2006-10-31T13:37:00.000Z

02 June 06

The media magazine NMA reported today that The BBC is to stream live matches from this year's Wimbledon Tennis Championship via BBC Sport's tournament site. This confirms RawFlow’s emphasis on the growing importance of live streaming for broadcasters. “When large broadcasters such as the BBC puts premium content live, others will follow” says RawFlow CEO Mikkel Dissing.

UK visitors will have free access to five courts at the All England Club, while three-minute highlights packages will be available to worldwide users.Content will include coverage from the BBC's terrestrial broadcasts, as well as its red-button feeds.

"The live streaming coverage will make one of the biggest sporting events in the world available to broadband users in the UK, whether they are at home or in the office so they never have to miss a game" says Barbara Slater, head of general sports at the BBC to the NMA.

Internet as infrastructure for TV broadcasts

2006-10-31T13:31:00.000Z

P2P streaming technologies can help broadcasters and content providers overcome the hitches of live streaming.

After Disney announced last week that they are launching a special web portal, SOAPNETIC, a dedicated web-TV channel for broadcasting their most popular TV shows such as Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief and Lost, journalists and bloggers alike have been questioning whether it is even possible to do this kind of broadcasting online. However, online content delivery could be made possible with a little help from peer streaming technologies.

Technology has always been a vital part of broadcasting and this is even more so today as the digital revolution is driving a convergence of all media; TV, radio and newspapers alike. Digitization allows many kinds of content to be delivered over different networks, and the Internet has become a global infrastructure for communication, opening up myriad possibilities for new industries and services. Convergence between devices picks up speed as technology gaps between TV and PC diminishes: “Finally it seems PCs and TVs will talk the same digital language making it significantly easier to download digital video content over the internet to a PC and then play it back on the TV” (Paul Taylor for FT.com 11/04/06).

With an increasing percentage of the population viewing and listening to rich media distributed via the Internet, broadcasters are expected by the public to provide the same (or better!) service online as offline (i.e. TV and Radio), but the reality is that online activities has been considered as a side-track or something “additional”, and it has not been the focus of the broadcasters attention. However, this is about to change as important players see opportunities for using internet as a content delivery platform. Advertisers for example find themselves threatened by inventions such as TIVO which allows you to record and play content commercial-free, thus the classic model with set times of broadcasting interrupted by 30 seconds of commercials does not seem to be able to survive. The internet on the other hand is perfectly designed for commercials, and can actually enable a real time purchase by simply clicking on the ad.

Broadcasters also see an opportunity to get a larger share of the advertising income by distributing the content themselves over the internet rather than simply licensing the content to cable and satellite providers. Thus, in an attempt to “bake their cake and eat it too”, the world’s top national and commercial broadcasters now announce new Internet based services nearly on a daily basis. Their strategy is monetizing their content, whilst building loyal online communities in order to compete with established user driven content communities, such as myspace.com, and peer based networks where consumers illegally share the latest films, music and TV shows (Limewire, Bittorrent, Kazaa etc). An example of this is the Disney-ABC Television Group April announcement of a launch of a special web portal, SOAPNETIC, dedicated to broadcasting their most popular TV shows such as Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief and Lost online. However, sceptics warn broadcasters against this move towards online streaming. For example Financial times journalist Richard Waters wrote that “the design of the internet is unsuited to the sort of “live” online television services announced by Walt Disney” (FT, 11/04/06).

The sceptics may be right in some respects, but it is not “the design of internet” in itself that is the root of the problem. The internet has actually proven itself as a viable content delivery infrastructure (just look at Itunes!), but indeed, there are two issues at hand here: First of all, broadband penetration in the internet population is too low: According to statistics published by the OECD in late 2005, there are 158 million broadband subscribers worldwide, and the three of the four countries with the highest penetration rates are Iceland, Korea, the Netherlands and Denmark which all have more than 25 subscribers per 100 inhabitants. The United States is the country with most subscribers at 49 million, which accounts for 31% of the broadband population worldwide. This may seem impressive, but considering that broadband can be anything from a 512 kbps connection up to more than 26 mbps, the actual available bandwidth is not optimal. This needs to be addressed by governments and ISPs globally. Interestingly, if the Disney offering gets a large enough audience that could actually be the push needed force the ISP industry to invest in a new infrastructure that is capable of supporting a large mass market online video streaming

Second of all, the current infrastructure of online broadcasting is not built to handle this new digital demand. One of the main problems of streaming live content over the internet is expanding reach whilst achieving economies of scale advantages, and the cost of increased capacity is high. As the size of the audience participating in a live Internet broadcast increases, the bandwidth required for that broadcast increases proportionally. Until now there have been two ways to manage this cost; limitation of audience size or reduction of quality. However, P2P (“peer-to-peer”) enabled streaming may be the solution to a large portion of the problems associated with online broadcasting.

A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers. In practice, many of the files shared on peer-to-peer networks are copies of copyrighted popular music and movies. Thus, some media companies conclude that the networks themselves pose grave threats to the established distribution model. This is now changing, and P2P streaming has become an important issue on broadcasters’ agenda. Even big national broadcasters such as the BBC are currently testing different solutions for using peering technologies in their streaming. When using this technology, the bandwidth requirement of the broadcast is intelligently distributed over the entire network of participants, instead of being centralised at the broadcasts origin: As the audience grows so do the network resources available to distribute that broadcast without adding any additional bandwidth costs. This makes broadcasting over the Internet completely scalable and eliminates the success penalty broadcasters normally experience. RawFlow Inc. is one of the leading suppliers of P2P software solutions today.

Peer enabled streaming helps broadcasters get around bottlenecks and minimizes bandwidth costs, but at the same time it is relying heavily on the upload capacity in the network, and therefore there is a limit on the quality of the stream. Thus, it is not yet possible to stream full-quality movies live. However, we can expect that the high-speed internet penetration in the population will increase dramatically within a short timeframe, as demonstrated by a recent offer in the UK of “free” broadband packages from vendor Carphone Warehouse certainly got the public’s attention as 25,000 people were reported to have signed up just days after its launch (information from Reuters.co.uk). Combined with increased bandwidth, it seems likely that peer enabled streaming technologies is more than a “quick-fix” and can overcome the hitches of live streaming. This has potential to turn the whole broadcasting industry up-side down, and drive content providers who cannot keep up out of business.

Further info:
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