Television is going the way of the dinosaur, and the deadly comet is called BitTorrent Live. Today, Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing protocol, demoed his latest creation at the SF MusicTech Summit.
BitTorrent Live lets any content owner or publisher stream video to millions of people at good quality and with just a few seconds of latency…for free or cheap. Sports, news events, simulcast TV shows, education, video conferencing, or uncensored warzone broadcasts — this technology will power the future of video. → Read More
British video search company Blinkx saw its stock spike briefly this morning, following an announcement that it will power AOL’s video search. AOL is one of the largest video destinations on the Web, with about 450 million video views per month according to comScore.
Blinkx will also incorporate AOL’s premium videos in its own search engine. (Presumably, that will include TCTV videos, since we are owned by AOL). Blinkx itself attracts 55 million U.S. video searchers a month. AOL’s video properties are watched by about 40 million unique viewers (comScore), so the deal could significantly expand blinkx’s reach. → Read More
Blip.tv is going through some changes, with founder Mike Hudack gone and a search for a new CEO still ongoing. But the company raised a $6 million C round from its two main investors in December, and now just added to that with another $6 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank. There is also a new logo, and the company is now called just Blip.
So how is the indie Web video distribution service doing? “We essentially doubled revenue in 2011,” reports COO Steve Brookstein. → Read More
This video is making the nerd rounds today and it’s pretty amazing. It shows a set of quadrocopters first righting themselves after a catastrophic failure and returning to a certain point (the scientists throw the little guys into the air and they turn over and fly back to their hands light frightened starlings) and then we see how these monsters can fly in formation around obstacles and through windows.
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Twitter has posted a seriously awful/hilarious recruiting video to YouTube, which the company says was the product of last week’s “Hack Week.” During this time, employees were able to take time away from their day-to-day work to collaborate on new ideas. Although it was only posted on Friday, the video has already seen over 400,000 views at the time of writing. Why so viral? Because it’s parodying the entire genre of startup recruiting videos by purposefully being bad. Really, really bad. So bad it’s funny. Or at least that’s the hope.
The video has everything: amateurish effects, cheesy music, stilted speech, bad acting, poor production quality, and sayings like: “Man this is a sweet job. But working at Twitter isn’t just a sweet job, it’s a way of life – a way of life that’s like a sweet job.”
Yeah, you pretty much have to watch this one. → Read More
If you look closely at Netflix’s fourth quarter earnings, it will become clear why the company wanted to split its DVD and streaming businesses. This is the first quarter that the company is splitting out each business and reporting revenues, profits, and margins separately.
While the streaming business is growing (adding 220 subscribers domestically in the quarter), and the DVD business sis shrinking (it lost 2.76 million subscribers domestically), it’s margins are much worse than the legacy DVD business. The streaming business has an 11 percent profit margin, compared to a very healthy 52 percent margin for the DVD business. → Read More
Tennis anyone? You have to love this. Realtime event coverage startup Livestream recently brought commercial-free, streaming coverage of New Year’s Eve in Times Square to the Web. If you caught more than a few minutes of network TV coverage of NYE, you would have been subjected to the ungodly number (and frequency) of ads. Livestream’s commercial-free coverage was a welcome respite.
This morning, Ooyala, one of the biggest web video and analytics providers, is volleying back with some live coverage of its own. The startup has partnered with Tennis Australia (the governing body of tennis within Australia) to bring free live coverage of the first major tennis tournament of the year to people around the globe. → Read More
Makerbot creator Bre Pettis and his musician friends from Scary Car made this cute little video featuring 3D printed action figures being created in (near) real-time and then discovering love.
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Back in March of last year, we wrote about how video curation seemed to be growing up, or at least taking some strides forward. Its progress being evidenced in part by a young startup called ShortForm, a social network for video jockeys. Or, better said, ShortForm is attempting to let all those video enthusiasts out there create and curate their own personalized channels of web video, pulling that content from YouTube and Vimeo, among others.
It’s been a tricky road, but some big media companies have taken note, as today ShortForm announced that it has entered into a partnership with Japan’s leading social networking service, mixi, which will introduce ShortForm (and video curation) into Japan. In fact, mixi was intrigued enough by ShortForm’s service that it has also made an equity investment in the startup → Read More
After the onslaught of media that is CES, who wouldn’t want more CES? We definitely do, which is why we’re running the TC Gadgets Webcast live at 4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern straight out of our posh studio on the CES show floor. Our goal? To recap the day’s news, interview cool people, and give away amazing prizes.
Today we’re giving away a real, live Sony Vita to one lucky winner – details during the broadcast – but watch this space for some great content and be sure to watch our daily live streams from the show floor. We’ll be running these webcasts every day at 4pm Pacific, giving away great prizes in the process.
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WeVideo, the cloud-based collaborative video editing platform which announced integration with YouTube in October, is today exiting its beta period and launching commercially. The service now has over 125,000 users creating more than 1,000 video projects per day using the online platform.
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After a disastrous Q3 2011, Netflix stands to replace some of the 800,000 subscribers it lost. It’s savior? The Facebook news feed. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed a revised bill to change the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 to allow people to opt in to having their movie rental activity shared. This Act had delayed the Netflix Facebook app‘s launch in the US. Now the Facebook news feed is beginning to show “Josh Constine watched The Walking Dead on Netflix” stories that point back to the Netflix site. After being enticed by something a friend has watched, Facebook users might sign up and pay on Netflix.com so they can watch too. → Read More
There are no shortages of “predictions” articles, here I look at a dozen things that won’t happen in the world of online video in 2012, even though they should.
1) We Will Have Standards and Definitions (No, we won’t)
By the end of 2011, the online video industry didn’t yet have a common definition and standard for a video view. It also wasn’t sure if the click-through-rate or completion rate would become the ultimate yardstick for success. A lot of experts are coming out and saying that 2012 will mark the year where we define these standards and agree on one. Personally, I think that is wishful thinking, 2012 is the year where we admit that we have this problem, but it won’t matter, as online video advertising continues to grow despite a sea of confusion, smoke and mirrors → Read More
Netflix and Hulu are the two leading video streaming services on the Web when it comes to mainstream TV shows and movies. More people watch Netflix online than Hulu, and have since about 18 months ago. In November, 2011, comScore estimates that Netflix.com attracted 26.6 million unique visitors, versus 20.2 million for Hulu
But a better metric to compare the two is how much time people actually spend at each site. And there Netflix trounces Hulu by two to one. U.S. visitors spent 1 billion minutes on Netflix.com in November, 2011, versus 480 million minutes on Hulu, according to comScore. (One caveat here is that people also go to Netflix.com to manage their DVD accounts and browse movie titles in addition to streaming videos, but the growth in time spent is most likely coming from streaming). Netflix has an edge over Hulu in that it streams more movies than TV shows, and those tend to be longer. But if that was the only factor, you’d expect to see the same ratio over time. Yet back in November, 2010, the two services were almost neck-and-neck in time spent, with Netflix users logging 750 million total minutes versus Hulu users logging 690 million. → Read More
Both Netflix’s brand and shares have been battered this year after price hikes last summer and the botched attempt to spin off the DVD rental business. Netflix was roundly criticized for its miscommunication with customers, but what’s been the actual effect? Citi analysts Mark Mahaney surveyed almost 10,000 former and current Netflix customers to find out.
While overall satisfaction levels did decline, 57 percent of consumers surveyed are still either “very satisfied” or “extremely satisfied.” That number is down from 83 percent in May, with a big drop in the number of people who are “extremely satisfied” coming down from 50 percent to 18 percent. (The “very satisfied” category actually grew 6 percent). Netflix is essentially holding its own. What’s more, it actually increased its lead over Hulu among respondents. Asked which websites they use to watch movies or TV shows online, 27 percent said Netflix, versus 15 percent for Hulu. → Read More
Starting in early 2012, when Netflix is set to make its debut in the UK and Ireland, registered members will be able to instantly stream available content on their television sets, tablets, game consoles, computers and mobile phones.
In the beginning of November, the video streaming giant signed up MGM as its first content provider for the regions, and this morning Netflix announced a new digital licensing agreement that will add a host of BBC series. → Read More
The first time I was chased around a room by a glowing, buzzing ball I was in college and I had just come home from a rave. The last time was when I opened the Sphero and set it loose on my rug.
The Sphero is a ball with a brain. Designed by Orbotix, this 3-inch toy has an internal motor and a set of LEDs that can make it flash nearly any color of the rainbow. It’s run by iOS or Android apps that allow you to control the Sphero, play virtual golf, and draw images in light (albeit in a roundabout way). → Read More
We’ve all see video glasses before – those clunky, Geordi La Forge-looking things that promise to display a 10 foot screen in front of your face. The drawbacks, generally, are size and transparency. Lumus, however, has solved those problems and is working on bringing a pair of see-through, HD video glasses to market that look more Minority Report than 1990s Star Trek.
I talked to these guys in September 2010 and the technology has improved immensely since then. They’re basically offering a pair of light, wearable glasses that will show HD video in front of your eyes and even allow you to interact with the world via augmented reality. → Read More
Whoa. I thought Pleo was hot but this thing is out of this world. It’s basically a little walking robot that can see, hear, and recognize you from a distance. Originally designed to help teach autistic children, the Nao is now a fully-featured and surprisingly friendly-looking robot that can walk, play catch, and talk to you. The company, Aldebaran Robotics, updated their original Nao robot, adding a 1.6GHz processor and HD cameras.
This guy won’t be cheap – he’s a service robot and the movement is so surprisingly smooth that I don’t doubt it will be in the upper thousands when it’s finally available. You can pre-order right now although I suspect that these guys choose you rather than the other way around. → Read More
When I first wrote about the dancing quadcopters last week, I noted there was no video. Well, now there’s video.
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