Archive for May 30th, 2007
YouTube Comes to Apple TV
Speaking at the D Conference, Steve Jobs today announced YouTube videos will be included on the Apple TV. Holy user-generated validation!
Om was live-blogging the speech for GigaOM when Jobs announced that YouTube had made its way to the living room:
“We got this working, and we watched a ton of this stuff. It turned out to be pretty cool. You search from the interface and you can find a lot of things through that. You get what you get, it’s amazing how fun these things are.”
NTV Moneymaker: MovieLabs Challenge
In search of: An engineering ninja who wants to help keep pirates’ hands off Pirates of the Caribbean.
Motion Pictures Laboratories, Inc. (MovieLabs) is a non-profit startup based in Palo Alto funded by the six major Hollywood studios to advance research in areas the movie industry regards as critical. The model is based on the cable industry’s CableLabs R&D incubator and also counts the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as inspiration.
It’s announced an open challenge offering grant money to people who submit proposed solutions to a number of problems the industry feels need to be addressed. For instance, those pesky hackers at the Doom9 forums have unearthed the latest AACS key yet again. Hence, MovieLabs is looking for “innovative techniques for hiding asymmetric cryptographic keys in software.”
Wednesday Morning Vid-Biz Headlines
Fresh off the NewTeeVee news ticker, headlines from the world of online video:
ABC News Does User-Gen, i-Caught show won’t have focus beyond user video contributions (Variety)
iJustine Debuts in Justin.tv Network, with the camera pointing at her head rather than on her head. (site, SF Gate story)
Dominoes Ads Vongo Downloads to Pizza Deal: Order three pizzas from Dominoes, and get a one-month trial for Vongo’s download service. (release)
Emmy Awards Campaigns Go Online; end to screener campaigns? (Variety)
Magnify.net Launches Yet Another Political Video Channel: Policlicks.com is using Magnify technology to aggregate candidate clips web-wide. (release)
Sony Unveils HD Home Wiring System: At the Pacific Coast Builders Conference, Sony unveiled a new system for wiring homes to stream HD video throughout the home. (release)
Will Bud.tv Survive Death Throes for “Edgy” Comeback?
Bud.tv, that undead “entertainment” channel that tried to lure you in with attractive women, chimps, and Chris Farley’s brother will be back, but edgier. And you know it’s bad when the Wall Street Journal article reporting it uses the word “edgy,” in some form, more than once.
Word that Bud.tv will retrench and reformulate comes a mere week after Anheuser-Busch CEO August Busch IV said Bud.tv might “fade away.”
Karina’s Capsule: Clark and Michael
If you’ve heard of Michael Cera, it’s probably because you (like me) were an obsessive fan of the canceled FOX series Arrested Development. Just 15 when the documentary-style comedy started airing in 2003, Cera showed incredible maturity as a comedian in the role of George-Michael Bluth, an awkward good kid trapped in a family full of psychopaths, who just happened to be nursing an unfortunate (but not necessarily unrequited) crush on his cousin. Saddled with one of the more out-there plotlines on a show that built love triangles around Liza Minnelli and cast Charlize Theron as a mysterious mental retard, Cera made incestuous longing seem charming and reasonable.
According to TV Squad, Cera was signed by CBS last fall to produce and star in an online-only mockumentary about two young, hapless TV producers, to be called The Good Life. The show debuted late last week with new title: Clark and Michael.
James Kotecki: All the Presidents’ Uploads
While Jon Stewart does it nightly with razor wit and Steven Colbert does it with truthiness, James Kotecki does political media revue with pencil puppets and a webcam. The Economist cites Kotecki, who posts as “EmergencyCheese” on YouTube, as “probably the world’s foremost expert on YouTube videos posted by presidential candidates.”
Mr. Kotecki, a 2007 Georgetown University graduate and former Congressional page, started posting at the start of this year. “The first few videos were just me parroting what the mainstream media was saying and it was pretty terrible in content, delivery, everything,” Kotecki admitted in a phone interview. “Then I realized that some of the candidates had their own [YouTube] channels and I saw a wide disparity in the content. I didn’t see anyone talking about this, so I thought I’d post a video response.”
CTS Media Claims 90% of Chinese Video Ads
Yesterday we wrote about Click to See Media and its fresh $8 million in second-round funding from Steamboat Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Sequoia Capital China. We had a chance to speak with one of the company founders Tuesday, who declined to be named for this story as he is not the public face of the company.
He had some pretty impressive claims about two-year-old CTS, though, and they seem to check out despite our lack of Chinese skills. Apparently the company has greater than 90 percent market share of online video ads in China, due to exclusive relationships with major portals such as Sina, Baidu, and MSN China. (That claim was also published up by well-reputed analyst firm Pacific Epoch (sub req), which focuses on Chinese business.)
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