Archive for October, 2007
Fora.tv, which wants to become the C-SPAN of the Web, closed a $2 million seed round from Adobe Ventures and Will Hearst. The site has about 1,500 hours of public speeches from people like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and neurologist and New Yorker contributor Oliver Sacks. It gets its videos through partnerships with organizations like the Aspen Institute, the Commonwealth Club, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Long Now Foundation, and, yes, C-SPAN. In fact, founder and CEO Brian Gruber once worked at C-Span as its chief marketer. He prefers calling Fora.tv the “thinking man’s YouTube.” Gruber plans to raise another $5 million in an A round within 90 days. More via TechCrunch.
Trick or Treat!
TubeMogul has released a free report entitled Web Video Marketing - Best Practices. The report starts out with some various statistics supporting the claims that online video is essentially where its at right now. If you have current ad representation for your video content, this is a great report to forward on to them for source material in your media kit.
Essentially what TubeMogul does is allow you to, for free, follow the trend of your online videos, as well as upload your videos to many different video sharing sites simultaneously, including YouTube, Revver, MetaCafe, MySpace, BrightCove, Yahoo, and AOL. Additionally, they’ll aggregate and graph your stats for you across all the sites with which you choose to distribute your video with. It is the stat-tracking and aggregation of data expertise at TubeMogul that really played into provision of valuable data released in this report.
The juicy bits come in the disclosure of a “Secret Formula” for the success of an online video, expressed “mathematically” by the equation:
.5C + .15M + .20T + .15P = Success.
Here’s what it means:
50% C = Content and Production.
15% M = Metadata.
20% T = Thumbnail.
15% P = Promotion.
Full story via Mashable
Viacom is set to unveil a new site that will include 13,000 video clips of its popular “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” representing every minute of the show since its 1999 inception.. wOOt!
To prepare for the site launch, 16 Comedy Central writers and video encoders have worked two shifts a day on the project since June, according to the report. Erik Flannigan, executive vice president for digital media at MTV Networks, the Viacom unit that includes Comedy Central, said one particular challenge for the site was designing ads to satisfy advertisers without turning off viewers. The site will include a database of clips searchable by both date and topic. More via CNN Money
Stream Solutions, a suite of production and programming tools to create customized Internet television networks for national and international companies. According to this press release the “proprietary, Web-based video platform designed to provide effective and efficient communications and training content across the Web in real time. The platform’s flexibility allows it to be customized to provide a turnkey private-label television network for businesses that is delivered over the Internet.”
An online demonstration of the Splash Stream Solution is available Here.
This year’s Fierce 15 IPTV Innovators are small telcos, the majority with 30,000 lines or fewer, that have deployed IPTV via fiber-to-the-home or hybrid copper/fiber systems. Many of the innovators have been among the first to employ MPEG-4 or its Microsoft counterpart in order to deliver high-definition channels to cutting-edge set-tops. They have broken ground with shared headends, brokered programming deals with multinational media conglomerates and field tested untried technology.
A lot of these companies are legacy community phone companies, some more than 100 year old, yet they were out of the gate with IPTV before the Big Bells–Verizon and AT&T. FierceIPTV conferred with several telecom industry executives in the compilation of the list, which was not meant to be comprehensive, but rather a snapshot of the diversity, history and flexibility of some of the most enduring businesses in the United States.
Most software entrepreneurs’ ambition is to sell out for a huge wad of cash, or maybe go public for an even bigger pile. Not so Nicholas Reville: He wants to overthrow the television industry, and he doesn’t care if he gets rich. In fact, as co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501 nonprofit, Reville is unlikely to make much money at all.
Reville oversees the PCF’s core project: a free, open-source video player called Miro. Formerly known as Democracy Player, Miro is a desktop video application that lets you search and view videos. It uses RSS, BitTorrent and media-player technologies. But the PCF’s ambitions go far beyond making and distributing a popular internet video platform. Ultimately, the foundation’s goal is to promote and build an entirely new, open mass medium of online television.
Values aside, Miro still has to make money like any other venture-backed startup or major media company. And as a nonprofit, Reville is the first to admit that that’s not always easy. While the PCF just wrapped up a successful $50,000 fundraising drive, that money is a small portion of the project’s overall budget. Indeed, with 12 full-time staff members and two part-timers, most of Miro’s budget is earmarked for the employees responsible for what Reville characterizes as “the core of the application.”
Full story via Wired
And so the “Aha Hammer” finally drops.. Google has admitted it will integrate the YouTube platform their AdSense unit in order to raise awareness and revenues for themselves all players going forward.
“Video units” will display two different kinds of advertising, both pegged to the content of the site and the subject matter of the video itself. The resulting revenue will be split three ways, with the site owner, content owner and Google all taking a slice.
The two types of ads to be displayed within Google’s new video units are a banner ad that will sit on top of the player at all times, and a so-called overlay ad, which will pop up after the video has been playing for 10 seconds. The bulk of the ads will generate revenue based on how many user clicks they accrue.
We’re not surprised.
The DEMOFall 2007 conference had several interesting streaming video offerings and we’ve clipped some of the highlights from NetWorkWorld’s excellent review below. Also see the demo.com video archives Here.
MotionDSP’s FixMyMovie.com
Very cool technology that replicates the stuff you see on CSI - crime investigators taking a piece of grainy video and being able to clarify it enough to make out the license plate of the perp’s car. These guys take video shot on a cellphone and clean it up - fixing color, removing blockiness and other artifacts. Right now, it’s free to consumers to use at FixMyMovie.com. It accepts most major video formats with a cap at 20MB file size and 352×288 resolution.
DF Splash from Digital Fountain
Digital Fountain’s technology breaks up a file into various bits and somehow is able to reassemble them on the receiving end in way that helps eliminate latency issues. The company is putting the technology to use in its new DF Splash content delivery network, slated to launch in January 2008.
Search with ClipBlast
A new video search engine that’s been busy crawling the Web for video content for the past three years and is now being unleashed to the public. ClipBlast offers two means of search: Through a web site or through a desktop widget that can display video directly in the app or redirect viewers back to the content owner’s site.
The OMMA conference [Video] roundtable on “content costs and creation” hit on a key topic for web video producers and distributors: How much does it cost to make Web video, and how much money can you make from it?
Next New Networks CEO Herb Scannell argued that Internet video only works if it’s dirt cheap or less. Scannell, who spent more than two decades at Viacom’s cable channels, scoffed at the notion that web video could be made profitably for 10% of conventional TV programming budgets: $50,000 for an hour of web video, he argued, was still much too high. Instead, he said, he was looking for programming that costs “hundreds of dollars a minute.” More from the Alley Insider..
