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Vid-Biz: Voddler, TiVo, 5Min
VOD Site Voddler Gets Another $3.5 Million in Funding; Swedish film streaming site has picked up a further 26 million Swedish kronor ($3.5 million) in funding from Eqvitec Partners, bringing the total amount raised to SEK150 million ($20.2 million). (paidContent)
TiVo: New HD Box Coming?; Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tony Wible points out that TiVo’s $250 HD DVR is out of stock on both TiVo.com and BestBuy.com, which could reflect strong holiday sales or hint that a new product launch is on the way. (Tech Trader Daily)
5Min Is a Top 10 comScore Video Site; 5Min, a small startup with offices in New York and Israel, has landed the No. 10 spot for most viewed video property, according to numbers released by comScore. (Beet.TV)
Howcast Celebrates One Million Mobile Application Downloads; since its launch in February 2008, Howcast has become an industry leader in instructional video content. (press release)
DailyMotion Seeks to Double Its U.S. Market Share This Year; Paris-based video sharing site has been making progress in the U.S., including a 70 percent jump in U.S. traffic during 2009. (Beet.TV)
Sky Deutschland Launches Sky+ VOD; German pay-TV operator to introduce a push-VOD service later this year to viewers that have a satellite receiver with built-in hard disk, which will be used to store new movies. (Broadband TV News)
Downsized Represents an Upgrade in Episodic Drama
- Editor rating:
- Premiere: July 2009
- Length: 3 minutes
- Crew
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- Writer / Director: Daryn Strauss
- Cinematographer / Editor: Chris Shimojima
Created by New York-based actress Daryn Strauss, who also acts in the first episode, Downsized premiered last summer on YouTube (though distribution via Strike.TV and DailyMotion has begun over the last two months).
Each episode focuses around an new set of characters trapped by financial circumstances with broader implications, whose lives are often touched by the occasional burst of absurdity to liven things up. The heavily handheld filming and editing style by Chris Shimojima invokes a documentary feel without pushing the narrative into a fauxumentary place; instead, it just adds to the intimacy of the episodes.
According to a director’s statement on the site, the bulk of Strauss’s cast come from an on-camera master acting class, and while the quality of the acting is occasionally a bit uneven (Chris Henry Coffey as the uptight businessman from episode 2, for example, lacks a third dimension), there are moments which truly sing. Read more of this story
Tasty Awards Honor the Delicious Side of Web Content
Focusing on a specific realm of the food world has been prolific fodder for many producers of web content, a fact reflected by last night’s Tasty Awards in San Francisco, where several creators working in the space were celebrated for their achievements.
Frogwater Media’s Naked Wine Show, for example, pulled off an upset win over Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV in the Best Critic or Review Series, while Average Betty won Best Home Chef in a Series.
Clicker Announces Best of 2009 Winners
The Legend of Neil, Compulsions and The Web Files are among the winners of online video content discovery platform Clicker’s 2009 Best of Clicker Awards.
The list of web video winners and finalists:
Best Web Original Comedy
Winner: Legend of Neil
Finalists:
Safety Geeks: SVI
Life with Kat & McKay
The Temp Life
Blue Movies
Best Web Original Drama
Winner: Compulsions
Finalists:
Anyone But Me
The Fall of Kaden
After Judgement
Angel of Death Read more of this story
Is Blu-ray Finally Becoming A Platform?
One of the big trends emerging from this year’s CES is that Blu-ray is starting to become more than just a better-looking replacement for DVDs. DivX announced its new DivX TV platform yesterday that will bring Internet content straight to Blu-ray devices, including the upcoming LG NetCast players. Vudu revealed partnerships with CE makers that include embedding the company’s app on various Blu-ray players, and L.A.-based Dreamer Corporation is demoing its new BluTV service that could become an online content portal for any BD-Live compatible player.
At first, this growing list of announcements just reads like a crowded marketplace with lots of players trying to become the middleman for online video in the living room. And while an eventual shake-up seems inevitable, there’s also a more profound development going on here. Blu-ray is growing up, moving beyond the disk.
Vid-Biz: Boxee, Sling, NAB
Boxee Box Remote Has a QWERTY Keyboard; the company says for people to get the most out of the box the remote was going to need to do more than just point and click. (Boxee blog) Meanwhile, Engadget goes ‘hands on’ with the Boxee Box. (Engadget)
Sling Unleashes a Placeshifting Quartet; the Sling Monitor 150, Sling Receiver 300, Slingbox 700u and Sling Touch Control remote are all new, but they won’t be available for sale direct to consumers. (Zatz Not Funny!)
NAB Says the Retrans Process Works; association praises the retransmission-consent agreements between Fox and Time Warner Cable, as well as between Fisher Communications and Bright House Networks. (Multichannel News)
Fox’s Digital Publishing Group Sold To VantagePoint; News Corp has offloaded the group that develops and manages content management and digital publishing systems for Fox local affiliate TV station websites. (paidContent)
BT Launches Hybrid Set-Top Box for BT Vision; the new set-top box for BT’s Microsoft Mediaroom-powered service will connect to existing TV antennas and also connects to BT broadband lines in order to provide access to on-demand and interactive content and services. (InteractiveTV Today)
Marseille Networks Touts Faster, Cheaper Way to Make Chips; the company says it has designed chips using a new kind of virtual prototyping tool that can cut the costs of chip development dramatically. (VentureBeat)
ReelSurfer Offers a White Label Solution for Video Search; the startup processes long-form video and turns it into short, relevant segments that are easy to watch and search through. (TechCrunch)
Tremor Unveils New Video Ad Formats; the company introduced six new ad formats, each designed to move advertisers away from pre-roll and toward greater engagement with consumers, either by letting the audience choose which ads they want to watch or by delivering a greater variety of ads. (ClickZ)
Blockbuster Starts Converting Stores to Outlets; some of its lesser-performing stores are being converted to outlet-type operations that offer only sell-through DVDs and consumer electronics for sale, but no movie rentals. (Video Business)
Dailymotion Announces Broadband TV Advertising Formats; the newly launched ad formats bring the rich, interactive experience of Web advertising to Internet connected TVs. (IPTVwatch)
The Decade in Online Video, Part 2: Time to Upload
At NewTeeVee, we usually prefer to talk about the future rather than the past. In light of a decade coming to an end that brought us everything from BitTorrent to YouTube, we made an exception and chronicled the development of online video over the last 10 years.
We’ve summarized the years from 2000 to 2004 here, from the dotcom bust to the birth of user-generated content. This post will focus on the second half of the decade, starting in 2005. Once again, we’ll concentrate on a few major events and trends in an effort to make the history of online video bloggable.
Top 10 Professional Favorites from 2009
Looking back at a year’s worth of professionally produced web content (which, by the definition we’re using today, refers to any series that had some sort of official support system to aid in their production and/or release), I kept noticing that most of the great stuff out there was made with the same independent spirit that drove many of my top 10 indie favorites — in fact, at least half of them came very directly from a grassroots background. That said, though, some real money did get thrown at creating interesting content in 2009. And some of it was even pretty awesome.
- Auto-Tune the News
In partnership with Next New Networks’ Barely Political, Michael Gregory and the Gregory Brothers rode the wave of one of 2009’s most defining memes to earn viral glory; guest appearances by Alexa Chung, Obama Girl and T-Pain; an advertising deal with Sony; and some well-deserved applause at NewTeeVee Live.
Vid-Biz: Starz, ESPN360, Q4 Financing
Ex-HBO Head Albrecht Joins Starz As CEO; Albrecht spent more than 20 years at HBO and was credited with a string of successes during his stint as president of HBO Original Programming. (paidContent)
ESPN360 Scores Bangladesh Cricket Rights Deal; ESPN and Nimbus Sport International have reached a three-year deal for exclusive live coverage of all Bangladesh home international cricket matches on ESPN360.com. (Multichannel News)
At Least $150.1 Million Was Raised by Video Companies in Q4 ‘09; at least 21 private companies disclosed financings in the quarter, ranging from $1 million each for Howcast and Mochila to $25 million each for Dailymotion and Delivery Agent. (VideoNuze)
Dutch Love Online Viewing; during the first quarter of 2009, about 30 percent of all Dutch watched at least ten online video streams from one of the public broadcasters or RTL Nederland. (Broadband TV News)
Consumers Want 3D From Cable, Satellite; in a recent online survey, more than three-fourths of consumers would rather receive 3D content via their cable or satellite provider compared with those respondents who prefer Blu-ray/DVD. (TWICE)
Shout! Sells TV DVDs Only Online; Shout! Factory is offering its Jan. 19 catalog releases, including the fourth season of Mr. Belvedere and second season of Room 222, only at its official online store. (Video Business)
The Daily Show and Colbert Report go with SnapStream; hit Comedy Central shows have selected the company’s TV search solution for locating and packaging high-definition clips from television broadcasts. (press release)
Dailymotion Releases iPhone App, Tries to Sell Me Stuff in French
Yes, that is an ad... in French!
What do you do when your short form video site lags the competition on the web? Put the same content on the iPhone! Or at least that’s what global video site Dailymotion has decided to do, releasing a new iPhone app with all the same functionality as the web page and a library of about 12 million videos.
While it’s largely lost the war for online video views stateside — according to comScore, YouTube owns about 40 percent of the market — it apparently does fairly well overseas. According to data provided by comScore, Dailymotion had 60 million unique users per month and more than 1 billion videos served internationally in August. And the site is particularly popular in France, where it started.
Still, it was a little jarring to open up its newly released, free iPhone app and find myself confronted with a series of ads that were firmly targeted toward people who read, speak and understand French. A spokesperson for Dailymotion said that he hadn’t heard of anyone else having a problem with the app serving foreign ads in the US, and that I should mark it up to a first-day technical kink.
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