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Rovi Media Cloud Aims to Turbocharge Connected Devices
Rovi is announcing its "Rovi Media Cloud" for consumer electronics companies and service providers to fully capitalize on the proliferation of connected
devices. The rollout, following Rovi's recent move to acquire Sonic Solutions, underscores Rovi's march to become the premier provider of "under the hood" services that will transform connected devices from clever gadgets into a full-blown video and services platform.
Categories: Devices, Technology
Topics: Rovi
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Cisco Unveils Videoscape; But Can Customers Handle It?
Watching the replay of Cisco CEO John Chambers presenting the company's new "Videoscape" TV platform yesterday at CES, I was reminded of the powerful, climactic courtroom scene in the movie, "A Few Good Men." In it, the tough-as-nails Marine colonel (expertly played by Jack Nicholson) barks at the cocky young Navy lawyer (Tom Cruise), "You can't handle the truth!"
Why did I see a connection? Because in his remarks, Chambers, in his own gently persuasive way, both explicitly and implicitly sent a clear message to Cisco's pay-TV customers that executing the company's vision of "reinventing the TV" will be very, very tough work (as an illustration of how complex this is, check out the eye-chart below from Chambers' talk). By delivering this "truth" to Cisco's large and small pay-TV operators around the world, they received yet another reminder that massive new investments in both technology and people will be required to effectively compete in the future video industry.
Categories: Technology
Topics: Cisco
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Online/Mobile Video's Top 10 of 2010
2010 was another spectacular year of growth and innovation in online and mobile video, so it's no easy feat to choose the 10 most significant things that happened during the year. However, I've taken my best shot below, and offered explanations. No doubt I've forgotten a few things, but I think it's a pretty solid list. As much as happened in 2010 though, I expect even more next year, with plenty of surprises.
My top 10 are as follows:
Categories: Advertising, Aggregators, Broadband ISPs, Broadcasters, Cable Networks, Cable TV Operators, Deals & Financings, Devices, Mobile Video, Regulation, Satellite, Technology, Telcos
Topics: 4G, Android, Apple, Google TV, iPad, Net Neutrality, Netflix, YouTube
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6 Key 2011 Trends in Online and Mobile Video
Yesterday Colin Dixon from The Diffusion Group and I presented a webinar describing our 6 key trends for 2011 in online and mobile video. Colin is one of the sharpest analysts of the pay-TV and online/mobile video industries and we had no shortage of ideas to sort through. Our list is a joint effort, and during the webinar we each presented the 3 trends we felt the strongest about. In today's post I share and explain each one. At the end of the webinar we conducted a poll asking attendees whether they agreed or disagreed with our predictions. I've noted those results in bold font. If you want to download the slides and/or hear more of our detailed discussion, just register for the on-demand version of the webinar and you'll be emailed a link.
Categories: Aggregators, Broadband ISPs, Cable TV Operators, Mobile Video, Predictions, Regulation, Satellite, Technology, Telcos
Topics: FCC, Google, Net Neutrality, Netflix, TV Everywhere
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New "ACC Vault" Launches With Classic Men's Basketball Games
Online video continues to make reliving the best moments of your favorite sports teams easier and the latest example is the new "ACC Vault" launching today. Through a partnership of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Raycom Sports and Thought Equity Motion, an archive of full-length, classic ACC Tournament and regular season men's basketball games from the 12 member programs dating to 1983 are now freely available to visitors (for an example, see the below clip of UNC's Michael Jordan hitting a nice jumper against Duke in 1984). The partners plan to add more sports highlights over time and envision ACC Vault eventually becoming an "all sport video Wikipedia."
Categories: Sports, Technology
Topics: ACC, ACC Vault, NCAA Vault, Raycom Sports, Thought Equity Motion
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With Widevine Acquisition, Google is Poised to Go Hollywood
Just as the week is wrapping up, Google has announced its acquisition of Widevine, a provider of digital content protection and video optimization technologies. Widevine was a private company that had raised over $50 million to date. The acquisition is very noteworthy as Google will now own a
60+ patent portfolio in the critical area of securing digital video delivery to every conceivable type of viewing device. As such, Google has a critical building block in its ability to deliver premium content to devices using its Android, Google TV and Chrome technologies.
In addition to the technology, Google is also inheriting Widevine's customer relationships with many leading consumer electronics, content and distribution companies. Among Widevine's long list of customers are Panasonic, LG, Best Buy, boxee, Sonic Solutions, LOVEFiLM, Samsung, DISH Network, Netflix, Blockbuster and others. All of these relationships give Google further opportunities to drive Google TV adoption and further immerse itself in the video ecosystem.
Categories: Deals & Financings, DRM, Technology
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USAToday.com Implements Taboola's Video Recommendations
USAToday.com has begun implementing video recommendations engine Taboola to power videos on all of its News pages. I confirmed with Taboola's CEO and founder Adam Singolda that USAToday.com is using the company's "Text2Video" product on its news pages currently and that a fuller rollout is planned, though he wouldn't provide further details.
With the Text2Video product, Taboola analyzes web pages and uses its proprietary text algorithms to understand the content of those pages. This data is combined with cookies to gain insight into users' interests. Videos are then recommended based on this information using Taboola's EngageRank video solution.
This is the 3rd big recent publisher win for Taboola, following both NYTimes.com and Bloomberg (additional customers include Demand Media, Revision3, Kiplingers and others). What's distinctive about the USAToday.com implementation is that the video recommendations are given the most prominent placement yet (see below), at the top of the right column with 3 thumbnails exposed. That's highly valuable page real estate, and it shows the confidence the USA Today team must have not only in the quality/relevance of the recommended videos, but also in their ability to deliver superior monetization.
Categories: Newspapers, Technology
Topics: Taboola, USAToday.com
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British OVP vzaar Gets Investment From Oliver Stone
vzaar, an online video platform company based in England has announced the director Oliver Stone has invested an undisclosed sum as part of its most recent financing round. Stone was so enthusiastic about the company that he recorded a short commercial for no fee (see below) in which he says that "vzaar is one of those lightning bolts that hit me right between the eyes" in a serious yet somewhat menacing tone.
vzaar's CEO Stephen McCluskey told me that Stone got involved via one of vzaar's key investors John Moreton. Stephen himself joined the company in March of this year and turned its focus onto profession and mid-sized users in vertical markets including fashion, media, corporate communications, sports and government, as well as for direct marketing applications. The company recently raised its entry tier from $15/mo to $49/mo and 60% of its customers are in the U.S. Stephen said that monthly revenue is growing by 20-30% and is already more than the whole of last year.
Categories: Deals & Financings, International, Technology
Topics: Oliver Stone, vzaar
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Digitalsmiths Acquires Gotuit in Bid to Become Video Metadata Powerhouse
Video metadata solution provider Digitalsmiths has acquired Gotuit Media, another player in the video metadata space. Digitalsmiths' CEO Ben Weinberger explained to me over the weekend that the combined company will have the most comprehensive solution for video indexing and metadata management/monetization for multi-platform distribution of various content types. To date Digitalsmiths has been mainly focused on library TV and movie content while Gotuit has concentrated on live sports and news.
Metadata is crucial to online and mobile video because it's what enables search, recommendations and higher-value monetization. It's especially important given the proliferation of short-form clips created out of longer-form content which need to be indexed and easily searchable. Accurate metadata is hard to produce and Digitalsmiths and Gotuit have used different approaches that will be complimentary as part of the new solution. Ben said that the goal is to introduce the comprehensive solution to each customer set to deepen existing relationships, while developing new opportunities based on the comprehensive approach.
Categories: Deals & Financings, Technology
Topics: Digitalsmiths, Gotuit Media
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SpotXchange Rolls Out Real-Time Bidding Application
Video ad network SpotXchange is introducing SpotMarket RTB this morning, an application that offers real-time bidding for online video ad placements.
Using SpotMarket RTB, advertisers, agencies, ad networks and demand side platforms can buy ads on an impression-by-impression basis in SpotXchange's auction-based market which includes 700+ publishers.
Targeting can be refined using SpotXchange's own behavioral targeting and retargeting tools and/or any third-party data sources. Using SpotMarket RTB, advertisers are able to increase their campaigns' performance by reducing waste and focusing on those sites with the best conversion results.
Categories: Advertising, Technology
Topics: SpotXchange
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TokBox Raises $12 Million for In-Browser Video Conferencing
TokBox, a streaming video communications provider, has raised a $12 million Series C round, led by DAG Ventures, to support the rollout of OpenTok, which allows in-browser video conferencing. With the new funding the company has raised $26.4 million to date. I got a demo of OpenTok last week and spoke to company CEO Ian Small and VP of Marketing Micky O'Brien.
What makes OpenTok interesting is that developers can use its JavaScript APIs to build video conferencing right into their web pages. That means that instead of opening separate video chat windows in Skype or other apps,
participants appear within the web page itself. With OpenTok's APIs enabled, the web page "listens" and detects video streams from participants' web cameras. Video is controlled in the cloud by media servers which decide how to route the call to appropriate web pages, via Flash. A set of master controls lets the site owner manipulate the prominence of individual participants. Importantly, no plug-in is required by users. They simply click "Join call" or whatever prompt the web site owner implements to invite participants.
Categories: Deals & Financings, Live Streaming, Technology
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Clearleap Raises Another $4.5 Million To Accelerate Delivery To Connected Devices
Clearleap, a web-based technology platform, has raised a new $4.5 million round from current investors, bringing total capital raised to $16.8 million. It is also announcing a new "Stream On Demand" solution which is targeted to pay-TV operators who want to deliver authenticated video streams to connected IP devices. Clearleap introduced this concept over the summer by partnering with Roku to allow pay-TV operators deliver video to its devices.
At the time I wrote that the partnership blurred the boundaries between traditional video and broadband-centric or "over-the-top" video distribution. As Clearleap's CEO Braxton Jarratt explained to me the other day, those boundaries will become even more blurry as customers adopt Stream On Demand. With the new solution, pay-TV operators can authenticate, manage quality of service (QOS) and bill for video delivered to connected devices that are either owned by the consumer or by the operator itself. Braxton said that Stream On Demand's first customers will be announced later this year or early next. Clearleap's focus to date has been on incorporating online video into legacy linear and VOD systems.
What do you think? Post a comment now (no sign-in required).Categories: Deals & Financings, Devices, Technology
Topics: Clearleap
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Brightcove Opens Korea Office, Lands New Customers
Brightcove is announcing this morning an expansion of its Asia-Pacific operations, with a new sales office in Seoul, Korea to be led by James Yoon, a former 24/7 Real Media sales executive. He'll report into VP of APAC Dennis Rose. Separately Brightcove reported adding 4 new Korean customers, Autodesk Korea, Cheil Worldwide, Overture Korea and Proctor & Gamble Korea.
Korea seems like a natural place to expand given its historically high broadband penetration (ranked #5 in the world), leadership in mobile and headquarters for both Samsung, which is making a very strong push into online and mobile video, and LG. There should be no shortage of opportunities for helping manage online and mobile video.
Categories: International, Technology
Topics: Brightcove
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SubPLY is Mining Value of Captions for Online Video
SubPLY, a captioning technology provider, is finding that captioning, a long-mandated feature in television, is also quite valuable in online video. Whereas in TV captioning has largely been a regulatory-driven requirement, captioning in online video is strategic as well, as VP of Business Development Matt Knopf explained to me recently.
For example, captions generate a written transcript of the video content, which is far more search-engine friendly and therefore helps drive discovery. In addition, as the Internet incents global distribution of content, the need for language localization is growing. But the cost of dubbing multiple languages and then managing all the files is expensive, so generating cost-effective captions is a great alternative. In addition, there's even a benefit to at-work viewership, allowing viewers to watch without risk of audio tipping off colleagues and supervisors.
Categories: Technology
Topics: SubPLY
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Brightcove 5 Launches
Brightcove is launching the next version of its online video platform today, dubbed Brightcove 5. It is a free upgrade to existing customers and will be fully rolled out by mid-January 2011. Brightcove 5 expands on the themes of Brightcove 4 (released in Nov. '09): delivering video to more devices/places, enhancing the financial return of online video and improving publishing productivity. Brightcove's president and COO David Mendels walked me through the key highlights last week:
- YouTube distribution - publish video and metadata simultaneously to YouTube channels so that content on both owned properties and on YouTube remain in synch.
- Streaming support for Apple iOS devices - integrated multi-bit rate delivery for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
- Updated mobile app SDKs for iPhone and Android - enhancements to those released in Brightcove 4, plus a new reference app for the iPad.
- Improved analytics - over a dozen new reports for tracking video playback.
- Integrated HTML5 and Flash analytics - in partnership with TubeMogul, reports now aggregate HTML5 and Flash video metrics into one view.
- High-quality live-streaming and DVR functionality - using Akamai's HD network, multi-bit rate HD live-streaming plus DVR rewind in live events and ad insertion.
- New "Smart Players" - single video player design for HTML5 and Flash video with browser auto-detection feature serving the right format to each user.
- Accelerated file upload - integration with Aspera for faster video uploads.
- Mobile video upload from iPhones - app that allows remote users to edit and upload video to their Brightcove accounts.
Brightcove separately announced that it will hold its first customer conference, Brightcove PLAY, May 23-25 in Boston.
Categories: Technology
Topics: Brightcove
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NCAA and Thought Equity Motion Renew Deal For Video Archive Access
The NCAA and Thought Equity Motion are announcing this morning a multi-year extension of their technology and rights management agreement. Last March, in conjunction with the NCAA Men's Basketball March Madness, the "NCAA Vault" was introduced, which contained searchable access to every moment of video from the last 10 years of the final 16 teams' games. One of the things I was most impressed about with the NCAA Vault is how flexibly exact clips could be found and also how fast the response times were.
In the renewed deal, Thought Equity will also be adding other NCAA Division I championship events like Women's Basketball and Baseball and Wrestling, plus add social media capabilities and enhanced metadata. Thought Equity will also be working with the NCAA to identify other rights windows and business models.
Categories: Sports, Technology
Topics: NCAA, Thought Equity Motion
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Ooyala Introduces Paywall Feature
Online video platform Ooyala is introducing "Ooyala Paywall" this morning, a feature that allows customers to charge for their video. Paywall is integrated with
online payment processor PayPal so that selected videos can be paid for with a user's PayPal account or with a credit card. The demo makes it look pretty simple for Ooyala customers to set up and experiment with Ooyala Paywall; they choose which on-demand or live videos to include, how much to charge for rental, how long after start-time the paywall appears and how long the rental period will be. They can experiment with pricing and get reports on activity.
As the online video industry continue to mature, utilizing a range of different business models will be increasingly important. In particular, as connected devices proliferate, which allow familiar on-TV viewing and better experiences, I believe a perception change will begin to occur as users are more in the mindset that paying for content is the norm. In other words whereas many people equate the Internet with "free," with 90 million+ homes subscribing to multichannel video services, plus millions more buying or renting DVDs and or subscribing to services like Netflix, TV viewing is more associated with "paid." That's not to say getting users to pay for online video will be a slam-dunk, but connected devices are going to help a lot.
What do you think? Post a comment now (no sign-in required).
Categories: Technology
Topics: Ooyala
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SeaChange's Adrenalin to Power 3-Screen Delivery By Pay-TV Providers
SeaChange has unveiled "Adrenalin," a back office technology platform to enable its pay-TV providers to deliver multi-screen video experiences. Adrenalin is meant to help pay-TV operators deliver on their customers'
expectations for anytime/anywhere/any device video deliver. As SeaChange president Yvette Kanouff told me last week, Adrenalin's goal is to help pay-TV operators achieve 3-screen goals by evolving from, rather than replacing existing back office systems. Key goals are reliability, faster time to market and proven scalability.
Adrenalin is an upgrade of SeaChange's Axiom on Demand back office, with new functionality integrated from acquisitions like VividLogic, eventIS and Mobix Interactive. Adrenalin uses a service oriented architecture to deliver 4 components: business application and content management, content distribution and session management, advanced monitoring and client publishing across multiple device including set-top boxes, Android, iOS, and other connected devices.
Categories: Technology
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5 Items of Interest for the Week of Oct. 11th
Continuing VideoNuze's Friday feature of highlighting 5-6 interesting online/mobile video industry stories that we weren't able to cover this week. Read them now or take them with you this weekend!
JetBlue Unvails Ads Created By Mullen
Take a moment to head over to YouTube today where JetBlue has bought out the top-of-page expanding banner for a hilarious new ad campaign, "You Above All," featuring a series of reality-style videos of New Yorkers in situations that mock the JetBlue competitors' service. The clever JetBlue campaign follows the head-turning Sylvester Stallone YouTube ad for "The Expendables" from a couple months ago and underscores the ascendance of YouTube as the #1 piece of online real estate for break-the-mold video campaigns for high-profile brands. Google is capitalizing on YouTube's appeal by featuring it prominently in its current "Watch This Space" ad campaign promoting the value of display advertising.
Google TV Guns for Cable Deals
And speaking of Google, with the recent introduction of Google TV, the company is reaching out to cable operators to ink integration deals similar to what it showcased with satellite operator Dish TV last week. Google TV offers tantalizing potential, particularly to smaller operators, to add Internet elements to their core video service, helping better compete with over-the-top entrants like Netflix. Conversely, as we saw this week with the funding/public launch of BNI Video (and in a series of separate product announcements coming next week), technology vendors are lining up to offer cable operators the ability to deliver their own Internet experiences. It's a very confusing time for cable operators, who must figure out whether to go it alone and invest heavily, or partner with a tech giant like Google.
comScore Releases September 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings
comScore's video rankings for September yielded no big surprises, as Google/YouTube continued to be the dominant online video provider and Yahoo narrowly retook the #2 spot from Facebook. comScore changed the way it publicly reports its data this past June which has made it a little harder on independent analysts like me to show trending data as I used to do. Nonetheless, I'm hoping to have some new trending charts to share soon.
Blip.tv Predicts Best Quarter Yet for Web Creators
More encouraging news on the online video ad front, as video platform/distributor blip.tv said this week that Q4 '10 is on track to be its best quarter ever. Blip has been a very important player in bringing independent web series to market and its ability to monetize is a key driver of sustainability for many fledgling creators. Blip's news synchs with overall online video ad momentum in first half '10.
Introducing the JW Player for Flash and HTML5
Last month I wrote about how the open source JW Player is receiving 15K downloads per day. This week version 5.3 of the JW Player was released which integrates Flash and HTML5 into a single video player, using a unified JavaScript API. What that means is that anyone embedding the new player can seamlessly deliver either Flash or HTML5 video with the browser auto-detecting which playback mode to use. Since browsers and devices are still quite heterogeneous in what formats they support, initiatives like this help reduce friction in publishing and user experience.
Categories: Advertising, Cable TV Operators, Devices, Indie Video, Technology
Topics: blip.TV, comScore, Google TV, JetBlue, JW Player, YouTube
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Critical Mention Releases Snazzy New CriticalTV 4.0
After 2 months of beta, this morning Critical Mention is introducing the 4.0 version of CriticalTV, its broadcast TV and radio intelligence platform, which captures and digitizes 24/7 streams from over 1,000 media sources on 4
continents (including all 210 U.S. TV markets). The streams are then indexed and instantly searchable by clients. Critical's CEO Sean Morgan gave me a demo of CriticalTV 4.0's new features earlier this week which impressively expose broadcast assets for online/mobile use.
Sean explained that Critical has activated 240 data centers that are now ingesting a whopping 27 hours of media every 60 seconds. In effect Critical is digitally capturing an encyclopedia of TV and radio news around the clock. The real secret sauce to CriticalTV though are the tools it gives to its 600+ mostly PR and corporate communications clients to monitor, mine and flexibly distribute the broadcast assets that are uniquely valuable to them.
Categories: Technology
Topics: Critical Mention, CriticalTV
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