Archive for February, 2007

Veoh Launches Video Sharing Service

February 14th, 2007 No Comments

On Tuesday, Veoh Networks announced it had finally officially launched its video sharing service, after a year of beta testing. Veoh is backed by Time Warner and The Tornante Company, an investment firm run by Michael Eisner, formerly from Disney.
Seems like Veoh is trying to go the legit route, but it isn’t without controversy.

In 2006, Veoh made lots of video bloggers angry because they crawled their web sites, downloaded their videos, transcoded them and hosted them on Veoh’s sites without anyone’s permission.veoh logo

Veoh said that its video sharing service offers producers the option of either pay-per-view, pay-to-own, or subscription-based business lines.

Bonus: Read this story about the top 10 video sharing sites for more on Veoh and others.

Another Bonus: Here’s Veoh’s official blog.

Posted in Digital video, Internet video, Online movies, Streaming media, Video Sharing

IPTV Can Make Gains When People Move

February 14th, 2007 No Comments

Now that IPTV has arrived in the U.S. how can the telcos (namely AT&T and Verizon) make inroads into the TV market? According to research from Parks Associates, 45% of U.S. households “that move every 18 months make their first service call to the telephone company.”

I know from my experience that used to be true.  I don’t have a land line anymore–I just use my cell phone. For the last few years of using my local phone company, I only had a line so I could hook up my ReplayTV digital video recorder. I never made voice calls with it.

But I can understand that most people still call their telephone company when they settle into a new home. And that’s the greatest sales opportunity for the telcos. While people call about a new telephone line, they should use this time to sell them on TV/video services. Offering a bundled package of voice and video would be pretty tempting.
I wonder how many people would take a pretty decent offer? Or would they want to call the local cable company first and cost compare?

I think another reason people may think about switching cable TV providers is when they move to HD and buy an HDTV. I’ve recently made the switch and wanted to try AT&T’s new IPTV service (U-verse) but it’s not available in my area.

So I definitely would have changed TV providers if it was available.

But my cable company is also not very good at capturing my attention for bundled services. When I called to order an HD cable box, I wasn’t even offered an HD DVR–I had to ask for it myself.

Telcos and cable companies must both aggressively use these two opportunities to get customers to buy bundled services.

Posted in IPTV

HandHeld Entertainment Acquires PutFile.com

February 13th, 2007 No Comments

HandHeld Entertainment announced that it was acquiring Putfile.com, a U.K.-based company that hosts user-generated content, for $7.1 million.

The company now has more than 425,000 free and premium videos — including music videos, anime features, television shows, movies, and other programming — available on its network of websites.

[From Digital Media Wire]

Posted in Internet video, Streaming media, Video Sharing

RealNetworks Into Casual Gaming

February 13th, 2007 No Comments

RealNetworks is making a serious move into casual gaming. On February 6, RealNetworks announced that it acquired Atrativa, a casual gaming company based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Last year, Real also purchased The Netherlands-based Zylom game company.

Realnetworks logo

The company’s commitment is so big that in a press release, it even calls itself “one of the world’s largest developers, publishers and distributors of casual games.”

Once upon a time, RealNetworks called itself a leader in streaming media. My how times have changed.

During the Casual Connect Europe conference in Amsterdam, Real won “Casual Game of the Year” in the First Annual Zeebys Awards.

Not only is Real involved in producing and distributing games, but it is also making an early move to in-game video advertising.

Posted in Internet video, Streaming media, Video Gaming

Internet Movie Market to Explode by 2010

February 12th, 2007 No Comments

Digital media research company Research and Markets said that the market for Internet movies will grow from an estimated $9.5 million this year to nearly $60 million by 2010.

The report says that the single biggest factor holding back Internet movie sales is “Hollywood’s reluctance to allow films to be sold over the web so that they can ultimately be viewed on TVs,” adding that existing technologies are “too complex for most consumers.”$9.5 million seems like a lot but there are lots of companies in movie downloading space today. They include old timers like Movielink, CinemaNow, and recent services like iTunes and Amazon’s Unbox.
Thing may change now that NetFlix is starting to deliver movies over the Internet. Also Tivo and Amazon announced that they were testing movie downloads from Amazon’s Unbox service delivered directly to Tivo DVRs. And let’s not forget Apple’s upcoming product, AppleTV, which will deliver movies and TV shows via iTunes to your TV set.
Currently, most downloadable movie sites, like CinemaNow or Movielink aren’t meant to be viewed on TV sets. This gap between the computer and TV is turning into the Grand Canyon.

Analysts call it “The Last 10 Feet”.

This PC to TV gap is shaping up to be one of the bigger stories of 2007. It’s not a technological gap–as evidenced by the Tivo/Amazon deal–but it’s a copyright issue. Hollywood still doesn’t want to make it easy to download content (movies or TV shows) and watch it on your TV.

Bonus: Check out my article on why AppleTV won’t beat Tivo.

Posted in Internet Movies, Internet video, Online movies, TV, Video Sharing, research

Introducing Digital Media Bulletin

February 10th, 2007 No Comments

Hi everyone,

Today, I moved all the content on digital media onto a new blog I’ve started called “Digital Media Bulletin“. It will have all the latest news, research and information on digital media. I hope you enjoy the new blog and come back often.

Alvear.com will still exist but will instead focus on my personal and professional life. I guess you’ll just have to come back and see what it’ll be about.

Thanks for visiting and come back soon!

Posted in Administration

Let ZuneMyTube Download Videos to Your Zune

February 10th, 2007 No Comments

Open source software ZuneMytube, lets you download videos from YouTube or other online video sites and converts it so you can watch on your portable media player, like Microsoft’s zune.

ZuneMyTube is still in early beta and is hosted on the open source mega site, SourceForge.net. It’s a plug-in for Internet Explorer (doesn’t seem to be a FireFox version yet) that adds a button labeled “ZuneIt”.

Press the button and it downloads, converts it to WMV format and saves a copy in the “My Videos” folder where it’s ready to sync with your Windows Media-compatible portable media player. That means products like Zune, Archos, and Zen.

Posted in Internet Movies, Internet video, Streaming media, Video Sharing

TV Households in U.S. To Grow 47%

February 10th, 2007 No Comments

Nielsen Media Research announced a new report that said that the total number of TV households in the U.S. is expected grow 47%–from 111.4 million to 163.7 million-by the year 2050.

The new report is called “Projected Estimates of TV Households and Persons 2008 to 2050″ and it breaks down estimates according to race. Included are Blacks, Latinos and Asians

  • The total number of TV households will grow 66% for African-Americans, 167% for Hispanics and 166% for Asians.
  • The number of people in the U.S. living in TV households will grow 40% (from 283.5 million to 396.3 million).
  • The number of African-Americans in TV households will increase 59%, Hispanics 136% and Asians 155%.
Posted in TV, research

73% of Companies Plan to Advertise in Digital Media

February 9th, 2007 No Comments

According to a survey by the American Advertising Federation (who?), 73% of U.S. companies plan to spend “up to 20% of their advertising budgets on new media experimentation”.

Twelve percent said they’ll spend as much as 40% of their ad budgets on websites, blogs, video games, virtual worlds and other emerging sectors.

[Via Press release]

Posted in research

blinkx Unveils Video Widget

February 6th, 2007 No Comments

At DEMO 2007, blinkx unveiled “blinkx it”, a video widget for inserting videos into blogs and other personal sites like MySpace.

blinkxlogo
You just click on the “blinkx it” link and then embed the HTML code straight into your own blog to add relevant content.

Unfortunately, I just tried looking for it on the blinkx site and couldn’t find one iota of the “blinkx it” link.
Nevertheless, it seems like blinkx is leveraging its Internet video indexing so that users can easily populate content which is a great way of leveraging its technology. Since blinkx performs speech-to-text scanning of videos, you can easily find relevant content for your blog.

Posted in Internet video, Online movies, Streaming media
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