VideoNuze Posts

Brainshark Partners With Brightcove To Publish Video Presentations

Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 2:44 PM ET

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Posted by Will Richmond

Brainshark, which allows users to add voice, music, video and interactivity to PowerPoint and other documents transforming them into video presentations, announced this morning that these can now be "pushed to Brightcove" to achieve greater reach. Brainshark is primarily geared to business users for communications and viewing sessions are fully measurable. Brightcove, which has a large base of media customers, has also moved into non-media verticals such as small business, government, education, etc. The partnership is further proof that flexible, inexpensive tools are becoming available to businesses to help them increase their online video/media competencies.

Categories: Partnerships

Topics: Brainshark, Brightcove
MLB.com's Near Real-Time Video Enriches CBSSports.com's Fantasy Baseball

Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 9:17 AM ET

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Posted by Will Richmond

CBSSports.com and MLB.com announced an exclusive multi-year partnership yesterday that illustrates well how video clips generated in near real-time can add significant value to online experiences. Under the deal, MLB will supply CBSSports.com's Fantasy Baseball Commissioner users with in-game video highlights on live scoring pages for every single player, as the games progress. In addition, MLB will provide a highlights package for each player so users can get a look at him before in action before drafting or trading him. Lastly, MLB will provide live audio feeds of all 2,430 regular season games. All of this is being provided at no additional charge to Commissioner users.

The addition of near real-time video highlights to the live scoring pages is the aspect of the deal that really caught my attention because it requires MLB.com to quickly and accurately create descriptive metadata for each play. The MLB.com example shows how sophisticated metadata creation/management has become, moving it from on-demand video to live video. I don't know which metadata technology MLB.com is using (or if they've created their own, as MLB.com tends to do) but their ability to generate clips, attach metadata and publish them in near real-time is quite impressive (with the caveat being that I haven't seen the video updates feature actually work yet).
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Categories: Sports

Topics: CBSSports.com, MLB.com
Kaltura Raises $20 Million, Now Serving 100K+ Publishers

Monday, February 14, 2011, 10:03 AM ET

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Posted by Will Richmond

Open source online video platform Kaltura is announcing this morning that it has raised a $20 million round, led by Nexus Venture Partners, including Intel Capital and existing investors .406 Ventures and Avalon Ventures. It's not clear what funding to date is since Kaltura didn't disclose the size of its last round. Kaltura also announced it is now serving over 100K publishers, which it believes is more than all of the other proprietary OVPs combined.

Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel has emphasized Kaltura's open source approach from the company's inception. In my interactions with him, he has likened Kaltura to doing for video what RedHat did for operating systems and MySQL did for databases, with each driving open source success. Since Intel Capital and Nexus have both been involved with these two companies, and Nexus' Narun Gupta, who's on RedHat's board will now join Kaltura's board, Kaltura's positioning gains additional credibility with the new financing.
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Categories: Deals & Financings, Technology

Topics: Intel Capital, Kaltura, Nexus Venture Partners
RAMP Exceeds 1 Billion Time-Coded Tags For Video/Audio

Monday, February 14, 2011, 9:31 AM ET

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Posted by Will Richmond

RAMP is announcing this morning that it has processed 20 million minutes of video and audio for premium content publishers, to create over 1 billion time-coded "tags." The milestones reflect steady increases over the last 3 years (see chart below). Tags are descriptive metadata which are essential to video being discovered, shared and optimally monetized. Last week I spoke to RAMP's CEO Tom Wilde who gave me additional insight on how the company is doing and its place in the online video ecosystem.

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Categories: Technology

Topics: RAMP
5 Items of Interest for the Week of Feb. 7th

Friday, February 11, 2011, 10:51 AM ET

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Posted by Will Richmond

Happy Friday! Below is VideoNuze's end-of-week feature, analyzing 5-6 interesting online/mobile video industry news items that we weren't able to cover this week. Enjoy!

Categories: Miscellaneous
Netflix Short-Seller Has Tail Between His Legs

Friday, February 11, 2011, 10:42 AM ET

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Posted by Will Richmond

Less than 2 months ago investor Whitney Tilson gained a lot of attention explaining his short position in Netflix stock. Now, with Netflix stock about 27% higher than where it was when he wrote his analysis, this week Tilson threw in the towel, closing out his short position. While Tilson made a couple of interesting points around margin compression due to Netflix's escalating content costs, and also potential competition, the short sale was flawed by Tilson's near total misunderstanding of Netflix's value proposition and why it resonates so powerfully with consumers, which is what helped Netflix add 7.7 million new subscribers in 2010. That, combined with Netflix stock's darling status, made Tilson's short bet an almost certain loser.
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Categories: Aggregators

Topics: Netflix
Top 10 Super Bowl Ads Gain A Quick $1 Million In Online Video Exposure

Friday, February 11, 2011, 10:37 AM ET

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Posted by Will Richmond

New research is out this morning showing how Super Bowl advertisers benefit from ongoing online video viewership. Kantar Video, an online video analytics provider, estimates that the top 10 Super Bowl ads generated an additional $1 million worth of media exposure in just the first 3 days after the game, with Volkswagen's top-performing "The Force" ad, gaining almost $540K itself. Note "The Force" has already picked up an incredible 27 million YouTube views (see below).
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Categories: Advertising

Topics: Kantar Video
Cisco Feels Pain of Shifting Set-Top Box Landscape

Friday, February 11, 2011, 10:28 AM ET

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Posted by Will Richmond

This week technology giant Cisco reported its fiscal Q2 earnings and once again sales of its set-top boxes to big pay-TV operators were a glaring weak spot. This business has practically gone off a cliff, falling 29% from last year's similar quarter, a loss which followed a 40% decline in North America set-top sales for the prior quarter. While Cisco tried to put a positive spin on things by pointing to stronger sales of its IP-enabled set-tops and international results, the problems reflect a significant shift in how pay-TV operators view set-top boxes in a larger IP-related context, trends which are likely to only accelerate going forward.
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Categories: Cable TV Operators, Devices

Topics: Cisco, Comcast, Samsung, Sony, Time Warner Cable