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… → 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… → Read More
From Redbox and Verizon teaming up to take on Netflix to Connected TV and Netflix’s premier of Lillyhammer, offering consumers video content where and when they want it is no longer just a second thought. Serving content across platforms has become essential for publishers and brands that want to grow their audiences and earn more revenue with online video.
Ooyala, the online video provider… → Read More
Live Matrix, the TechCrunch Disrupt ’10 finalist that proclaimed to be the “TV Guide for the web,” has been acquired by online video guide OVGuide.com in an all stock deal. As a part of the deal Live Matrix co-founder and CEO Sanjay Reddy will become OVGuide’s new CEO.
Although Live Matrix will continue on as a standalone website, both companies will integrate their databases, allowing OVGuide… → 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… → Read More
Yokto is a newly launched video platform which offers an embeddable player that intelligently switches between a Flash-based interface or HTML5, depending on the device being used to view the content. This idea on its own is not original, of course. Similar solutions from companies like Brightcove, Ooyala, Kaltura and SublimeVideo, for example, offer much of the same thing.
But where Yokto… → Read More
In its first quarterly earnings since it announced plans to hike prices for DVD subscribers who also stream videos, Netflix tried to put the best face on its new decision. In a shareholder letter (PDF) accompanying earnings, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells report that during “the quarter, the streaming only plan continued to gain in popularity, with nearly 75% of our new
subscribers… → Read More
Netflix is one of the best performing stocks this year, up 225 percent year-to-date, with a $9.3 billion market cap. But it is also priced to perfection, with a lot of short sellers hoping to profit from its fall and antsy Wall Street analysts downgrading the stock. Today, CEO Reed Hastings defended Netflix’s prospects in a very public, very detailed, and very unusual blog post on Seeking Alpha. → Read More
A few weeks ago, some data came out suggesting that Netflix alone accounts for 21 percent of Internet traffic during peak TV hours. But if you add in a couple other sources of streaming video from the Web, namely YouTube and other forms of Flash video, the traffic share of Web video jumps to 37 percent (with 10 percent from YouTube and 6 percent fro Flash video). BitTorrent is another 8 percent… → Read More
I’ve got to admit, the concept of “branded content” on the Web makes me cringe. It is generally used to refer to Web videos created and packaged specifically for an advertiser. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I like my videos created for the audience first, not advertisers. And yet, in the budding Web video industry, branded content is bringing in some serious dollars and even some serious… → Read More
From an audience perspective, the ability to embed videos on other sites is what expands their viewership and makes them go viral. But from an advertising perspective, most of that video is the Web equivalent of dead air. “Nobody sells embedded video because nobody knows where it is going,” says Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum. He has a partial fix for that, a new video advertising product he… → Read More
A couple weeks ago, in the wake of Steve Jobs’ tirade against Flash and why the iPad won’t support it, I wanted to find out exactly how much video out there on the Web is already encoded in the iPad-friendly H.264 format. Encoding.com provided me with some data showing that 66 percent of the videos it encoded in the first quarter of 2010 were in H.264, up from 31 percent the year before. Today… → Read More
The New York Times has a piece on the impact that digital video recording, on-demand offerings, and web video services have had on advertising budgets for prime time television slots. Apparently if people aren’t actually watching TV during prime time, it makes advertising “trickier to measure and pitch to marketers,” resulting in less ad revenue, giving the networks “no… → Read More
Wonh, woonnh. Seems Joost is acting up with the live streams of the NCAA games. I was able to get a split-second worth of one of those stupid cell shaded Charles Schwab commercials but every other time I’ve tried to get a one of the games loaded up, I’ve been getting an error message. Joost did say “we fully expect things to go wrong,” so I’ll keep trying patiently… → Read More
I’m not all that excited about watching 15 to 30 second pre-roll ads attached to videos. I understand that it’s a necessary evil and that advertising pays the bills and keeps the videos free, but it’s still somewhat annoying. YouTube feels my pain and will begin using a service called InVideo, which basically lays a semi-transparent advertisement over the lower 20% of… → Read More
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