Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing “hundreds” of new movies to the service. This deal isn’t as large as March’s partnership with Discovery, which saw some 3,000 new titles added, but it does introduce what are arguably more big-name movies. Included in the deal are titles like Mission: Impossible 3, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Mean Girls, Nacho Libre and Clueless, to name a few, and Amazon says more will be added “soon.”
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The lowly photo slideshow is not dead yet, or at least that’s the hope of the team at Tel Aviv-based EasyHi, which is debuting its new product Slide.ly today, backed by $1 million in seed funding. The company aims to pick up where Slide.com (acquired by Google in 2010) left off. It’s building a slideshow creation tool for the new age, using sources like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pickplz, and Picasa, as well as Google Images, photos from your friends or those from your computer. You then mix that content with music from SoundCloud and YouTube and add – you guessed it – Instagram-like effects.
Although there’s no space on Facebook to “embed” your glorious creation permanently, as Slide.com’s shows were once pinned on dizzy Myspace pages, the resulting slideshows can be shared to your Facebook Timeline or page, tweeted or emailed. → Read More
This video by Tenable Security is pretty wild. It shows a visualization of an office network. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent and received to each machine.
The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on vulnerabilities and even change the shape and position of mobile devices. You can see a little more of the visualization over here.
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It’s hard to find a live morning show or sports event coverage on TV these days that doesn’t feature tweets or Facebook comments from viewers. For most programs, though, getting those messages on air is actually more difficult than it seems and often involves custom software and expensive hardware. Vidpresso, which officially launches today, offers TV stations a far easier solution. All they need to display social media posts on the air is a Mac mini or Apple laptop that is connected to their existing production equipment and, of course, a subscription to Vidpresso’s web service. → Read More
This morning, Google officially rolled out Google+ Hangouts On Air to all users worldwide, following the feature’s limited introduction back in September. At the time of its initial release, this live broadcasting feature allowed top Google+ users (like celebs) to stream live video feeds directly to their Google+ fan base. The service kicked off with a Google+ Hangouts stream from will.i.am, but soon saw a number of notable participants, even including the President of the United States, Barack Obama, at one point.
The worldwide rollout of Hangouts On Air, announced today via the official Google Blog, represents an interesting shift for the feature, which before was more about public figures and other types of broadcasters, like news orgs, reaching a large audience of viewers via the social platform. Now, anyone can be a live broadcaster. It’s the same promise made by services like Ustream, Livestream, and and Justin.tv, for example. It’s now also the promise of Google’s own livestreaming property, YouTube.com/live – a property which just opened up to all. Well, all who have a Google+ account, that is.
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Video chat is still something quite a few people don’t feel comfortable with. For U.S. teens, however, it is quickly becoming a pretty routine way of communicating with each other. According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 37% of teens now regularly use Skype, Google Talk or iChat to talk to each other.
There are significant differences between how many boys and girls use video chat, though. Only a third of boys use video chat while 42% of girls said they have video chatted. Maybe unsurprisingly, those teens who use the Internet more frequently also use video chats more often than their peers who only go online a few times per week. The same is true for teens who text and use social media more often than their peers. → Read More
Content companies have struggled to monetize on the Web, and there has been plenty of debate over the effectiveness of paywalls. What’s more, tech startups really can’t seem to rush fast enough into the hands of angel investors or venture capitalists. That’s why, as a digital content company that has been around for years and has yet to take a penny of outside investment, Lynda.com has such relevance in today’s landscape.
While it didn’t happen over night, Lynda.com has been able to build a paying customer base of over 1 million, outshining every major newspaper, and its traffic is on the rise. Using a passion for education, industry experience, knowledge of what is important to its customers, and focus on product-before-profit, co-founders and married couple Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin have turned $20K of their own investment into a platform that produced $70 million in revenue in 2011.
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Vungle, a new company that wants to help mobile developers market their apps through video “trailers,” has just raised an enormous $2 million seed round from the who’s who of Silicon Valley. The round includes Google Ventures, AOL Ventures [Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL], Crosslink Capital, SV Angel, 500 Startups, SoftTech VC, as well as several notable angels like Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper. → Read More
Seven years in, Revision3 and its stable of web stars have more than survived the tough early days of building a video content business on the web. The San Francisco company is now bringing in a respectable 100 million video views per month, following a big 2011 — and it may be about to cash in. → Read More
Social video browsing app ShowYou has often been referred to as something like a “Flipboard for video content,” but now, that comparison may no longer be as apt. The company today is bringing its signature video grids, which contain all the videos you’ve liked or shared, to a notable new platform: the web. No longer confined to mobile phones and tablets, ShowYou isn’t just an “app” like Flipboard anymore, it’s a service.
Alongside ShowYou’s arrival on the web, the startup has also beefed up its search engine using social signal data to return more accurate and timely results. → Read More
You may know TED, not as the guy from marketing, but as the nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading” — or as the set of global conferences, Talks, and videos that touch on the many heady, relevant issues surrounding Technology, Entertainment, and Design. As an increasingly powerful medium through which the world’s experts share their hard-won knowledge, TED is also an educator. In March, the organization launched the first phase of its “TED-Ed” initiative, in practice a series of a dozen short animated YouTube videos “created for high school students and lifelong learners,” in the big picture an invitation to teachers to collaborate with TED to create more effective video lessons that can be used in classrooms.
Tonight, TED is announcing the second phase of its education initiative — a website that lives on TED.com, which is designed to enable teachers to create unique lesson plans around its video content. → Read More
AOL has had a few knocks from shareholders over whether it’s on the right track with its content strategy — a mix of high-volume, ad-based websites that cover lifestyle, tech, travel, news and more — but CEO Tim Armstrong has stayed the course, and today the company is launching a video portal that it hopes will prove that the value of those holdings extends beyond even what you see on the sites themselves.
AOL On, as the new site is called, is a premium content portal that will work across desktop, mobile and tablet optimized sites and apps, as well as connected TV devices. And the guy running it, Ran Harnevo, SVP of AOL On, makes clear that it is nothing like a YouTube wannabe: “No dogs on skateboards, and no upload button,” he says. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Jordan Kurzweil is Co-CEO of Independent Content, an agency that helps media companies launch new digital products and businesses. Prior to starting Independent Content, Jordan worked at AOL running original programming, and News Corp, where he helped bring its traditional brands to digital. You can follow him on Twitter @jordankurzweil.
I love movies. I love TV shows. I hate web videos.
They suck.
But let me qualify: An overwhelming number of professionally produced made-for-the-web videos are just not worth watching and barely hold a viewer’s attention for their miniscule run-time. Largely, they’re ill-conceived, poorly executed, poorly commercialized or downright boring. → Read More
Yesterday at New York Tech Day we met with quite a few great companies including Digital Ocean. These guys are pretty established in the cloud space. They offer OS agnostic cloud servers and are giving away some service space for free to NYTD participants and their minimum package is $5 a month. Pretty basic stuff.
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WeVideo has just secured $19.1 million for its cloud-based collaborative video editing platform, in a round led by Crest Capital Ventures of Houston, Texas. The company says it plans to use the funding to further ramp up its development team.
Unlike desktop editing software, which is restricted by computer hardware limitations, WeVideo’s online video editing solution can scale up processing speeds on demand, based on an end user’s needs. As users move up through the company’s paid tiers, speeds increase, as does the available storage space and video resolution. → Read More
While I seriously doubt the staying power of this game platform, the concept is pretty cool. Called Jumala, this free-to-play online game allows players to stop the action mid-game and flip things around and change the entire level. Level too scary? You can add flying hot dogs and flowers. Too boring? Add demonic death heads.
The game is all about level design. You earn points by creating games and environments a la Little Big Planet and you can earn currency to buy various pieces of content and interactive items. Each level you create is shared via Facebook with other players and you can change items mid-game, just to mess with people. → Read More
FriendCaller, a Skype alternative which, let’s face it, we haven’t heard much from in years, is today launching new web and mobile apps that support up to 7-way group video chats at once. The addition comes on the heels of FriendCaller’s earlier expansion this year into multi-point video and voice conferencing, the company says.
In addition to the seven video participants, the new apps also support 20 participants in a voice-only chat. → Read More
When you watch a video on the web or your mobile phone, the odds are pretty good you are using the MP4 video format and the H.264 codec. There are a lot of choices when it comes to video formats. But, MP4 is the top pick for both web and mobile viewing, according to a new survey released this morning by Sorenson Media.
69% of video professionals use MP4 regularly for the web, and 58% use it for mobile. Nearly four out of every 5 pros say they use the H.264 codec for file compression.
The report has some bad news for WebM, Google’s sponsored royalty-free open video compression format. WebM came out on the button with just 5% usage on the web and 3% on mobile. → Read More
Eric Elia (@ericelia) is a member of the founding team at Brightcove, and is currently the vice president of TV solutions. Brightcove, a video and app solutions provider, went public on Feb. 17 on the NASDAQ and now trades with a market cap of $509.3 million.
When we started Brightcove seven years ago, we expected a five-to-10-year transformation period until we reached a world of purely Internet-based, on-demand TV, motion pictures and “long tail” content. Sometimes it’s hard to see change happen when we are in the middle of it, but amazing to look back and see just how far we’ve come. I look at the past seven years as driven by three waves of innovation. → Read More
By all accounts, Y Combinator’s latest Demo Day held last month for its Winter 2012 class was a biggie. With 66 companies presenting their apps, it was pretty impossible to name a startup that was the clear star of the group. But judging from the buzz I’ve heard over the past few weeks, Socialcam, a mobile app for shooting, editing, and sharing smartphone videos, certainly emerged as one of the standout companies from this latest YC batch — at least in the eyes of the venture capital investor set.
That’s why we were pleased have the chance to talk with Socialcam’s co-founder and CEO Michael Seibel last week when we visited Founders Den, the co-working space in downtown San Francisco. Watch the interview above to hear Seibel talk about how Socialcam looks at growth just two weeks at a time, why they chose to work in Founders Den rather than renting out their own office, why now is an extremely good time to be a tech startup founder, and more.
Of course, something big has happened since we sat down with Seibel: Now that Instagram has been snapped up by Facebook in an eye-popping $1 billion deal, it’s become even more clear that the excitement around apps like Socialcam may just be getting started. → Read More
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