Written by Ryan Lawler
Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 10:00 AM PT
A long-awaited update to Microsoft’s Xbox Live platform that integrates social features from Twitter and Facebook will be released early next week, Marc Whitten, general manager of Xbox Live, confirmed today at NewTeeVee Live.
With the update, which will be released Nov. 17, users will be able to connect their Xbox Live and Twitter accounts, allowing them to post updates and view their friends’ updates through their televisions. The Facebook integration will allow users to find Facebook friends who are also Xbox Live members, share status updates, and post screenshots of games to their Facebook accounts.
But the key will be the ability to share Facebook photos through the television, Whitten said. Facebook integration will enable users to easily flip through those pictures, without having to worry about how to connect their PCs to their TVs.
“When you think about the types of things that are happening on the web and how you bring them into the living room, those pictures want to be on the biggest screen in the house,” Whitten said. “There are dozens of ways to make that happen, but they’re hard.” Read more of this story
Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 8:56 AM PT
Yidio, an 18-month-old startup that has acquired 4 million unique visitors and 32 million page views per month through word-of-mouth, is making a splash today at our NewTeeVee Live conference with the announcement it’s raised an angel round. The company aggregates premium web content to help viewers find TV shows and movies online. Clearly a lot of people are feeling a need to find an clean and well-organized place for web video so strong they want to create companies around it; Clicker is also launching today at our conference.
The funding, which was led by Appolicious’ Alan Warms, was “in the 500,000 range,” he said. Yidio founder Adam Eatros said the key to the site’s early success has been its self-explanatory episode guides. The company sees itself as a search engine, so it doesn’t shut out unauthorized content, which has probably helped with its traffic as well. After a recent refresh for the site, next up is introducing a discovery engine that uses collaborative filtering to make recommendations, said Eatros.
Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 8:18 AM PT
Clicker, a young company we’ve already written about a few times, is launching to the public today only a couple months after it started giving out beta invites. CEO Jim Lanzone is planning to take the lid off the site later this morning at our NewTeeVee Live conference.
Clicker is shaping up to become a significant brand in web TV, with the promise that it will shepherd and expose people to content they want to watch and help them organize it into a familiar playlist format. The site is building a massive index of video content available online: 400,000 episodes from more than 1,2000 sources, including online originals, and more than 30,000 from Netflix and Amazon. During the beta period, it added features like Facebook Connect logins, better recommendations and user comments. Clicker has a number of competitors, including giants like TV Guide and also a bunch of startups like SetJam, Yidio and CastTV. It has raised $8 million from Redpoint Ventures and Benchmark Capital and recently added Sling founder Blake Krikorian to its board and investor list.
This morning’s Video Rights Roundtable was, as we hoped, a rare opportunity for online video industry players to talk about their conflicts and collaborations in the wild — not in a courtroom or conference room. In a (more than) two-hour discussion, the nearly 50 attendees shared their perspectives on the increasingly complex world of rights, responsibility and opportunities surrounding online video content. Complete liveblog coverage is available at GigaOM Pro (subscription required), and Ryan Lawler was on-site with some additional event coverage at NewTeeVee. More links below the fold (and full event video coming soon!). Read more of this story
Written by Ryan Lawler
Posted Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 5:41 PM PT
When BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen was introduced at NewTeeVee’s Video Rights Roundtable this morning, interviewer Schlomo Rabinowitz asked the crowd, “How many people in the audience hate this man?” — and a few people actually raised their hands.
Despite being largely vilified in the media industry for being the grandfather of P2P file-sharing, Cohen tried to deflect responsibility for any widespread piracy that has occurred using the protocol he created. But amidst a conversation between content owners and technology companies who were trying to overcome their differences to find opportunities to work together, Bram was still a polarizing figure.
“People expect me to be some kind of copyright crusader or anti-copyright crusader. On some kind of deep level, I just don’t care. To me, they’re just bits. As for what the bits are, I don’t care,” Cohen said. At that, Rabinowitz contrasted Cohen’s attitude with that of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, who later lobbied U.S. politicians to avert a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
Read more of this story
Written by Janko Roettgers
Posted Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 4:31 PM PT
Remember how iTunes popularized podcasts? The same could soon happen to TV torrenting, thanks to a new BitTorrent application called TVTrigger. Windows-only TVTrigger is like an iTunes for your torrent downloads. It sits on your desktop, giving you access to a programming guide with a few thousand TV shows, complete with torrent links to download each one of them.
Sounds legally questionable? It probably is in the U.S., but that doesn’t bother TVTrigger’s Egypt-based makers, who claim that BitTorrent is legal in their country and they don’t have access to Hulu.com.
Read more of this story
Written by Ryan Lawler
Posted Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 3:46 PM PT
Justin.tv will be rolling out new technology designed to filter out streams of live, pirated video content beginning later this week, according to CEO Michael Seibel.
Speaking to an audience at NewTeeVee’s Video Rights Roundtable, Seibel said that the digital fingerprinting technology, which was first announced in August, would go live in three days. By doing so, the live-streaming company will be able to automatically take down any live video streams that infringe on copyrighted content, without content owners needing to send takedown notices.
Justin.tv is enlisting the help of Vobile to filter videos, using the company’s MediaWise for Publishers product to scan live streams that appear on the site. Vobile then compares those streams against a database of video content that is known to be copyright-protected. Justin.tv had already been using Vobile to filter out videos that had been saved to the site, but extending that capability to live content is likely to further appease copyright holders.
Vobile has partnerships with six studios and three TV networks, which feed their content into its comparison database. Fox will be the first content company to take advantage of the technology. Read more of this story
Nov. 11 is not a good date for Current TV employees. For the second year in a row, the network/web site hybrid Al Gore built has announced layoffs on that day in the double digits. But while last year, the eliminated jobs were attributed to “a new cross-platform programming strategy,” the bulk of today’s 80 lost jobs are directly tied to the cancellation of Current Tonight, Current Takeover and Current Exposed.
The canceled shows were part of a change in strategy for Current following the hiring of new CEO Mark Rosenthal, according to COO Joanna Drake Earl. “We had a chance to step back to see what’s working and what’s not,” she said via phone, “which led to the decision to move away from an over-reliance on short-form content.”
The layoffs will allow the company to reinvest in programming, marketing and affiliate sales hiring, areas where Earl admitted Current is looking for “more experienced leadership,” as well as invest more in longer-form shows like Infomania and The Rotten Tomatoes Show, both of which she described as successes.
When it comes to finding ways to make the web and TV play nice together, Current has always been an innovator, whether being one of the first to incorporate Twitter updates on news broadcasts or what Earl described as Rotten Tomatoes‘ “low-bar audience participation format.” We’ll just have to see if the next reorganization comes on Nov. 11, 2010.
I’ve never had an iPhone. When I was in college, I got a deal on a free cell phone through Sprint, and since then I’ve stayed with that carrier. And not out of blind loyalty: Its service was reliable overall, its rates reasonable, and I go to a lot of tech conferences. Why is that important? Well, because I’ll stand outside a conference hall, phone in hand, and watch the 10 people near me poke at their iPhones impatiently, hoping to retrieve the calls dropped by AT&T. As spiffy as some iPhone apps are, it was little incentive to change.
But a recent spurt of ads from Verizon have been kicking the iPhone where it hurts, attacking AT&T’s service, the lack of open development, and other consumer complaints. And those ads have gone viral. After two years of Apple’s dominance, it appears that the rival service provider finally feels safe enough to throw some punches.
I still remember the halcyon days of the iPhone, where any video even mentioning the sacred device would go viral instantly, commanding millions of views. This would be June 2007, when it was just about to launch and, to paraphrase the mood back then, “change the way we did everything.” We as a community will probably never experience such a juggernaut of hype again — which is why this new backlash feels ever so slightly blasphemous. Read more of this story
