Major television producers like CBS, ESPN, BBC, HBO, Comedy Central, AMC, PBS, Turner Classic Movies, IFC and National Geographic stand to benefit from Playbox by gaining broader distribution of their programming, as do video hosting platforms such as YouTube, Blip.tv, Metacafe, Veoh, Daily Motion and ClipSyndicate. These and thousands of other video content providers are automatically Playbox-compliant.

Apparently the widget Playbox is launched so users can watch, save and send videos; expand to full screen; see other video recommendations; and continue to scroll through web page content while the video plays — without ever leaving the site. Meanwhile, if you’re searching for video from Lonely Planet TV.. here’s a bunch.

Just imagine.. pacing like a caged lion, this time-lapse security footage of a man trapped in a lift for 41 hours — almost a decade ago — has become the latest internet hit. according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Almost 300,000 people have viewed the ordeal of Nicholas White, a production manager for Business Week who was trapped in the New York elevator in October 1999.

The video was posted online to accompany an article in the April 21 edition of The New Yorker magazine. White sued the building managers and the lift maintenance company and won an undisclosed settlement, the article said.

Wonder what other treats from the time-machine will start flooding online?

The Mogulus web video platform gives producers everything they need to launch their own LIVE 24/7 television station. The free, ad-supported service, launched in November 2007, has already helped more than 50,000 producers launch their own Internet television stations, streaming more than 100 million unique viewer minutes every month.

Whether you want to turn existing video on-demand content into a 24/7 linear TV station on the Internet or produce live multi-camera events with broadcast graphics – the Mogulus Studio provides the complete solution in an easy to use collaborative web browser based application. The Mogulus solution is touted to be integrated at the core of the service providing a turnkey scalable content delivery network for Flash technology based, linear, on-demand, and live broadcasting.

Sign me up.. looks waaaay sweet!

SchoolTube provides students and educators a safe, world class, and free media sharing website that is nationally endorsed by premier education associations. All student created materials on SchoolTube must be approved by registered teachers, follow local school guidelines, and adhere to our high standards. SchoolTube’s partnership with The Student Television Network leverages a nationwide network of broadcast journalism teachers and students who share their expertise with each other in an effort to create quality student videos of all types. Through this innovative private/public partnership, SchoolTube provides up-to-date information to SchoolTube members at the click of a mouse.

Google says.. “damn.. we can’t exactly order them to cease & desist”

Youku.com announced that data released by the China Internet Society underpins its leadership position in the Chinese online video destination. According to the DCCI report released in March, over the past six months Youku has increased market reach measured in terms of Internet users visiting the site as a proportion of all Internet users (34.8 percent, as of January, 2008), and registered an increase in the time viewers spent on its site — now averaging over 3 hours per month — and surpassing top competitors while also narrowing the gap with established Internet portals. Over one third of all Chinese Internet users, now totaling approximately 210 million, visited Youku.com in January 2008.

Via: XPRN

Today, Vonage founder Jeff Pulver throws his hat into the ring with PrimeTimeRewind.tv. Like the others, PrimeTimeRewind.tv attempts to put a consistent skin on what is fast becoming a disjointed experience. Pulver’s contribution to this user-interface challenge is to turn the TV Guide into an interactive video cube. When you go to PrimeTimeRewind.tv, you are presented with a cube filled with video thumbnails on each face. Spin the cube horizontally and each face shows the Web video offerings of a different TV network (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, TNT and USA). Rotate it vertically and each face shows a different category (action, comedy, reality, drama). Click on any one thumbnail and you are taken to another page in which the full player opens up.

More details via: Tech Crunch

How would you like to be handed this IT project: create a website that will present 2,200 hours of live, interactive video, plus integrated broadcast coverage. The site will have huge spikes of traffic, and operate under worldwide scrutiny, so it has to be designed for performance. It has to be done in the next 150 days; no schedule extensions are possible. And it must deliver a brilliant user experience.

It’s the job in front of developers for the NBC Summer Olympics website, which also will offer expert commentary and sports biographies and permit users to share links to favorite event videos.

More via: CIO: Computer World

The left nav. scrolling Flash interface is pretty slick!

The Queen (Yes.. of England) is set to post her annual Christmas message on YouTube competing with clips of skateboarders and somersaulting dogs (Egad!) according to the Times Online. The broadcast, her 50th since the message was first televised, will help to launch a royal channel on the video sharing website. Fans will be able to view rare archive footage as well as clips of royal tours overseas and users will be able to rank the videos by giving them a star rating. The channel went live just after midnight last night and is a royal first. By tapping into the YouTube community, the Queen’s advisers hope she will be able to broaden her appeal.

As the Beatles said: .. she’s a pretty nice girl..

Today marks an important milestone in Web video. Hulu, which is quickly becoming a favorite online video destination, has started to add HD videos to its site. The most recent release of Adobe Flash Player added support for streaming HD, using H.264 encoding. Hulu’s HD Gallery is a little bit limited off the jump, only offering nine HD movie trailers, but there’s little doubt they will be adding HD versions of other content in the future.

Via: cNet

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

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

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.

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.

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..

The CDS implementation of Adobe Flash Media Server 3 will offer the full benefits of Adobe Flash technology including improved performance for faster user response and increased streaming protection to ensure that valuable content is better protected as it is delivered to viewers. The CDS platform provides additional benefits for the hosting and distribution of Flash Player compatible video content and services including content and service routing, dynamic hierarchical caching, load balancing, failover protection, IP multicast extensions, unified management tools, and end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) support.

While you might be excused for thinking that Hulu is a developer focused on delivering complete end-to-end solutions within the wimax technology or an interior district of Terengganu, Malaysia.. it’s the new official name for that long-awaited joint venture video portal from News Corp. and NBC Universal.

According to this post on AdWeek:

The site will allow fans to stream episodes of NBC series such as The Office and Friday Night Lights, along with the soon-to-launch remake of The Bionic Woman. Meanwhile, Fox is planning to offer on-demand episodes of staples like The Simpsons and Mad TV as well as premiering shows such as the New Orleans-set cop drama K-Ville. In addition to Hulu.com, the sweeping venture will see these series distributed across the biggest sites on the Web, including AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo!.

Why is Hulu the new venture’s name? According to a note posted on the site by newly installed CEO Jason Kilar, it’s meant to connote fun and simplicity. “Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce and rhymes with itself,” he wrote. “Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premiere content when, where and how you want it.”

Apply Here for beta access, full launch due in October.

Not to be outdone by Silverlight, Adobe has announced a beta version of its Flash player with the ability to play high-definition video. The new player adds support for H.264 – as used in the Blu-ray and HD DVD standards – plus High Efficiency AAC audio.

The company’s Premiere Pro and After Effects software for content creators already supports H.264 encoding, and support for the standard will also be added to Adobe’s AIR platform for rich Internet applications. Get the beta Flash Player here. The final release is expected during the next few months.

We’re coming to this a bit late.. the SuperNova 2007 event was held last month to explore “Business, technology, and social interactions”.

“Intelligence is moving to the edges, through networked computers, empowered users, fluid digital content, distributed work teams, and powerful communications devices. At the same time, new opportunities are emerging through social software, pervasive wireless networking, massively multi-player virtual worlds, and distributed e-commerce, among other trends.”

Whew, we double dare ya to chant that one 3x fast..

The presentation from John Hagel who is billed as a ‘renowned strategy consultant and author, who recently joined Deloitte and Touche, where he will head a new Silicon Valley research institute’ is def. worth watching.

via: Bubble Generation

Who’s Your Daddy announced that the company has launched a media partnership with RawVegas.TV a channel that provides 100% original Internet video content reflecting the uninhibited “anything goes” spirit of Las Vegas, while capturing the essence of Who’s Your Daddy. Popular television shows on the site feature UFC fighters, nightclub promoters, professional poker players and a wide variety of influential and well-known people from various industries, sports and entertainment venues.

After 11 years, Slate has decided to become a parent. So, light up a cigar and say hello to Slate V.

That’s “V” as in video, not the Roman numeral for “5.” The new video magazine will deliver original features, compelling documentary segments, and buzz-worthy video clips culled from the far reaches of the Web.

On the site you’ll find familiar Slate franchises such as “Explainer,” “Dear Prudence,” “Damned Spot,” and “Ad Report Card”—now in living color!—alongside newly created segments about politics, culture, business, technology, and [oh soooo much] more.

Nielsen Wireless announced will begin measuring mobile phone users to see how many people use content services such as mobile Internet and mobile video and what impact this has on established media behavior. The company estimates that in the first quarter of 2007, more than 33 million persons 12 and older used mobile web in the past 30 days, and more than 8 million persons 12 and older viewed video on their mobile phone

Their first product – Mobile Vector – will launch in the U.S. in July 2007 using information culled from Nielsen’s existing National People Meter TV sample to report on media behavior and audience demographics segmented by wireless carrier.

The 11th Annual Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring Web sites, online film and video, interactive advertising, and mobile content. The judging panel for The Webby Film and Video Awards was comprised of more than 80 entertainment industry leaders, including The Sundance Channel’s Larry Aidem, Showtime chief Matt Blank, 20th Century Fox Chairman Jim Gianopoulos, and Harvey Weinstein.
We’re SO in the mood to paaaaaartay

In an industry just beginning to understand how to slam video down broadband pipes to achieve new, improved television experiences, there’s still advertising and revenue requirements to meet, still a few speed bumps before reaching the new media ecosystem. Huge growth is anticipated. IPTV households are expected to grow worldwide from around seven million to 48 million between now and 2019 – a 60 per cent annual growth rate over five years, according to market researcher Infonetics.

So when will the revolution be televised?
What are the programming and business forces needed for escape velocity?

Check-out this new book to get the full skinny!

via: Silicon Networks

National Lampoon has decided to expand its stake in the Web video market, the company already produces feature films and short video content on AOL Video and Brightcove, which runs Nationallampoon.com and TogaTV.com.

“Everything we develop or produce today, whether it’s audio for the radio network or video or film, has an online component,” said National Lampoon Chief Executive Daniel Laikin.

Talk about a real “Animal House” video portal..!!

via: Switched.com

Tubearoo is building a network of internet video, social networking and people-powered websites, which currently consists of Tubearoo.com, Shoutwire.com and Tubearoo.cn. Catering to Chinese speaking internet users who wish to view, upload and share video, revenue from online video in China is expected to rise 580 per cent by 2010, according to this article.

The Amazing Boobkini is getting a pretty good rise out of us already

Here’s a super-slick app. we just noticed via TechCrunch:

“Cozmo.Tv wants to create a TV 2.0 by changing the way you consume online video from a random walk to personalized content. Next week at Always On, they will officially announce the new embeddable video widget they’ve been working on for the past couple of months. The widget functions like an online TV, streaming channels of personalized video content based on the initial preferences set by the widget publisher and the preferences of the viewer.

Publishers seed their widget with the initial channels by adding explicit RSS feeds to video sites or keyword searches run on Cozmo’s video index. Basing channels off of feeds means that a widget can be set up and forgotten, adding content to its channels as new shows appear in the feed. At launch the indexed sites will include videos from YouTube and Blip.tv, but will expand to include Google Video, MySpace, Brightcove, and Break.com.

We’re gonna give that one a go for sure!

Here’s a standard for wannbe streaming portals to look at up to!

Hat-tip to Steve Garfield’s Off on a Tangent

Manify.net has been doing some great work helping folks to get into the web video streaming game. We came across this post about how they even include Creative Commons tagging for their uploads.

Chances are, you’ve noticed the CC – and maybe even know what it means. But for most casual users of the Uploader, the deftault share and share alike license is just fine. But if you haven’t dug deeper – you should. Magnify.net provides a whole array of license options (courtesy of the folks at Creative Commons) that allows you to define with great specificity the rights you are willing to share, and the rights you want to retain.

Gotta love the opening line of their company page

The Magnify team is a growing band of media makers, code wranglers, and web evangelists who are committed to making video a team sport.

Hats off to Steve, Simon and crew!

Frisbee Golf anyone..?!?

Via: Steve Garfield

Thanks for the tip Mr. J

In short, it enables paid Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls. You can charge other people for calling you either a one-off fee or by the minute. Conversely, if you are the caller, you can call experts who charge for their services, and you can then pay the fee and access the expertise that the other call party provides.

When you call someone who is a Skype Prime call provider, and you both have the new version of Skype, the provider can initiate what we call a “payment request”. That is, all calls start as free, but you can then switch to the paid calling, charging either by the minute or a one-off fixed fee. The call then proceeds as a paid Skype Prime call and your Skype Credit is deducted by the appropriate amount that then goes to the receiver’s account. The provider does not get the call fees directly as Skype Credit — rather, they go into a special holding “box”. The provider then receives the revenue via PayPal.

Another way how Skype Prime is “more than a phone” is that you can also have paid video calls. This has not really been possible previously in the regular phone system. Since we first launched the free Skype Video feature, we have received many moving stories about how it has really made a difference, for example from family members living on different continents who have been able to see each other’s faces again after being separated for years. We believe that Video coupled with Prime will similarly boost many services that were previously unfeasible.

This could well spawn a whole new meaning to the call-girls industry!

Via: Feld Toughts

Jeff Han is a research scientist for NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here at TED he demonstrates — for the first time publicly — his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure. Steve Jobs.. take notes..

Damn.. we’re def. gonna get one of those units for the home-office!

The Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium is the biggest fish tank in the whole world with a plaque from Guinness to prove it. They also have three whale sharks, the largest and one of the rarest fish species known to man, in that gigantic ocean zoo!

Check out this quick video [.wmv], to get an idea of how massive that aquaruim really is with 7,500 tons of water behind 5ft thick acrylic glass wall.

Thank Tokyo Mango for the tip.

We were hoping he’d pull a Doc Vader move with that fan in the foreground.. lol

Via: Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth

Last Wednesday, Michael Wesch posted this five-minute clip, set to techno music, to help explain Web 2.0. As part of an article that is intended to appear in a journal of anthropology, Wesch created the video to appear on the publication’s Web site. “I was trying to explain this stuff in the traditional paper format, and I thought, ‘This is ironic,’ I can illustrate this much better in a video.”

The difference between HTML and XML, the formation of blogs and the nonlinear quality of digital text are topics addressed in Wesch’s piece. The title, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” is a reference to a point made in the video — that we are teaching our computer new ideas every time we click on a link. As Wesch says: “The more we are aware of the machine, the better we can make it serve us.” And as he writes in the video, “Digital text is no longer just linking information. The Web is no longer just linking information. The Web is linking people.”

Via: Inside Higher Ed.

Hey Ze Man.. Congrats on making it to the reeeeeally big show!

We saw the news on Steve Garfields site last week and thought it was an early April fools trick. We’ve been loyal Sports Racers since even before the full-time March 2006 launch.. all the best in yer new digs. Don’t forget us little people sleeping under your bed who loved you long-time!

Last summer, Sharon Sheinwold, a partner at United Talent Agency, arrived at zefrank.com via scobleizer.com and spent the next three days “getting lost” in the site. Soon after, she and U.T.A. owner Nick Stevens flew out to New York to meet Ze Frank in person.

The power meeting went down at the East Village eatery Zum Schneider on Sept. 10. During the courtship, Mr. Frank was struck by Mr. Stevens’ energy as well as his language. “He was like, ‘We’ll do this, we’ll do that, we’ll pump that area.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, did you just say you’ll ‘pump that area’?” said Mr. Frank. “In a way, it was my best expectation of Hollywood. In and of itself, it was such a creative statement, I definitely felt like I could work with this guy.”

Full article Here.

Guitar World has complied a list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Solos. Over the last few days Howard Stern has been playing clips from the list. CityRags found listening to these great classics such a moving experience, they took it a step further and dug up a video link for each of the top 20! Listen And Watch the musical genius that made these classics famous!

1. Stairway To Heaven – Jimmy Page
2. Eruption – Edward Van Halen
3. Freebird -Collins/Rossington
4. Comfortably Numb – David Gilmour
5. All Along The Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix
6. November Rain – Slash
7. One – Kirk Hammet/Metallica
8. Hotel California – Don Felder/Joe Walsh
9. Crazy Train – Randy Rhoads
10. Crossroads – Eric Clapton
11. Voodo Chile – Jimi Hendrix
12. Johnny B. Goode – Chuck Berry
13. Texas Flood – Stevie Ray Vaughan
14. Layla – Clapton/Allman
15. Floods – Dimebag Darrel
16. Heartbreaker – Jimmy Page
17. Cliffs Of Dover – Eric Johnson
18. Little Wing – Jimi Hendrix
19. Highway Star – Ritchie Blackmore
20. Bohemian Rhapsody – Brian May

The grand prize winners in the Avid 30-Second Spot contest have been announced and the winner in the Professional’s Choice category was In the Halls of Avid, One is Many by Aaron Osborne. This spot was shot in HD with the HVX200 and put together using Avid Xpress Pro and Adobe After Effects. The winner in the People’s Choice category was CaveMan by Bob Chambers. It was shot with the Sony WS790 and created with Avid Media Composer Adrenaline and Digidesign Pro Tools. See all the entries Here.

Via: DV Guru

This documentary film on Lenny Bruce, the godfather of stand-up shock comedy, is available in full via YouTube! While potentially not safe for the conservative types it’s a detailed look – with narration by Robert DeNiro – at the legendary rise and fall of fame and fortune of a true pioneer.

Adbrite has created an embeddable video player similar to YouTube, Photobucket, etc. If you choose to show a video, you can use their embedded flash player, and at your option it will include Adbrite ads and your logo as a watermark. Anyone who takes the content and embeds it on their own site will show the same video, with the same ads and watermark, and revenue goes to you — the original video creator.

Adbrite is not hosting video, so you’ll have to upload it to YouTube, Photobucket, or wherever, in .flv format and then point Adbrite to the URL for the video. InVideo is in private beta testing – users can sign up for an invitation on their about page.

Via: TechCrunch.

On December 31st, you can welcome the New Year in unique style – by connecting with millions of music lovers from around the world as they count down the final minutes of 2006. Nokia New Year’s Eve, a global music event stretching across four continents, will feature a number of international artists including The Black Eyed Peas and Scissor Sisters to entertain audiences at New Year’s celebrations from Hong Kong to Rio de Janeiro. Those unable to attend in person can experience the party via television or the internet.

To orchestrate this unique global celebration, Nokia has enlisted the services of Harvey Goldsmith CBE, the producer of Live Aid and Live8. Nokia New Year’s Eve will travel from east to west, starting in Hong Kong’s Harbour City Ocean Terminal, followed by Mumbai’s Andheri Stadium, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro and rounding off the night in New York.

This movie was made by the Danish Road Safety Council and aims to draw attention to speed signs and speed limits in Denmark. Despite a decrease in speed violations, 7 out of 10 Danes still exceed the speed limit on a regular basis. Respecting speed limits is the best way to save lives.

Potentially NSFW if you’re non-European..

Can’t decide which place is best to upload your video..?!? Chris Pirillo has a few suggestions that should help make the decision easier..
Via: Off On A Tangent

On 28 November, T-Online and the European Space Agency (ESA) have announced they will produce the first-ever space web video chat with astronaut Thomas Reiter responding to questions via the Internet live from the International Space Station. In a unique media tie-up, Germany’s leading Internet service provider and ESA will conduct a live space video chat via the Internet on 28 November 2006, starting at 21:15 (CET).

The event will enable German-speaking space enthusiasts to communicate with ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter – from Germany – via the web direct from the ISS, 400 km above the Earth where Reiter is now in the closing stages of the historic Astrolab Mission.

Since America ‘votes’ today we thought this was a timely post..
via Google video. (Run-time 1hr 21mins)