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Get Ready for Flash Player 10.1 to Stream P2P Video to Millions, Swap Files BitTorrent-style
Forget multitouch: By far the most disruptive — and overlooked — feature of the Flash Player 10.1 beta that Adobe launched this week is the ability to transmit video via P2P multicast. In fact, Adobe built some enhanced P2P capabilities into both the new Flash Player and Air 2 beta that could be used to replicate BitTorrent functionality within Flash, build large-scale P2P groupware solutions that work right within the browser and stream video to millions of viewers without having to pay a fortune for bandwidth.
Adobe has been hinting at big plans for P2P ever since it bought a small P2P startup called amicima in early 2007. It made some of amicima’s technology available to developers about a year ago, but restricted it to small-scale use cases like P2P video conferencing or multiplayer games based on a few Flash players directly connected to each other via P2P. With Flash Player 10.1, Adobe appears ready to open the floodgates. CDNs and P2P video solutions providers would be well-advised to take notice.
BitTorrent After The Pirate Bay: Do You Still Need Trackers?
The Pirate Bay made headlines earlier this week with yet another dramatic announcement, this time that the notorious BitTorrent site’s tracker has been officially shut down. But the move won’t impact downloading, site admins explained on a blog. Trackers are no longer needed to facilitate BitTorrent transfers, the blog entry explained, because decentralized extensions of the P2P protocol are mature enough to pick up the tab. “It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date,” the blog proclaimed.
As always with announcements from the folks at The Pirate Bay, there’s a lot of self-serving smoke and mirrors, mixed with a good amount of hubris. However, the announcement does bring up an interesting question: Is BitTorrent really ready for a world without trackers? We talked to some of the major players to find out.
Upcoming Boxee Beta Puts TV Content Front and Center
Boxee CEO Avner Ronen stopped by our NewTeeVee Live conference last week to officially announce the first Boxee-branded hardware, a set-top box that will be available sometime next year. I interviewed Ronen after his keynote, and he gave me a few more details about both the box itself and the upcoming beta of Boxee’s software, which will be officially unveiled at an event in New York on Dec. 7th.
The upcoming beta is going to be much more media-centric and less application-focused than the current alpha version, which Ronen told me is largely to make it easier to find movies and TV content. Users will no longer have to remember who’s supplying Boxee with what kind of content, but will simply be able to browse a list of shows or search for specific titles.
NewTeeVee Live: PBS Is Not Just Your Grandma’s Network
PBS isn’t just about Antique Roadshow anymore, PBS Interactive SVP Jason Seiken told the audience at our NewTeeVee Live conference today. But he’s the first to admit that PBS isn’t really the hippest brand around. The average age of PBS television viewers is “pushing 60,” he estimated. Consider that countless Elmo-addicted toddlers actually bring that age way down, and you start to understand that PBS has a bit of an age issue.
That’s a problem that the network wants to solve with an online video platform it launched this spring, and Seiken was happy to report that these efforts are starting to pay off. Forty-eight percent of PBS Video visitors are under 35, he said, and the youngsters seem to dig PBS programming as well. Viewers tune into a stream for 26 minutes on average, which is far longer than many commercial platforms. PBS is clocking 12 million uniques a month for its video site, and video views are growing 80 percent month to month.
One of the more interesting aspects of the site is that it’s also a content repository for PBS’ 357 local member stations. These stations can take shows like Frontline or NOVA and combine them on their own sites with small-town news and other local programming. PBS wants to make this relationship a two-way street next year with the launch of the site’s next version, which will automatically syndicate locally produced content and present it to a national audience.
So what’s the secret of the site’s success? Failure, actually. Seiken said that performance reviews at PBS Interactive now track the times an employee failed at their job, with the goal being not to punish, but to reward failed experiments. “Our engineers actually really love this,” said Seiken.
NewTeeVee Live: How Obama, CNN and Facebook Brought Change to Social TV
CNN and Facebook’s live coverage of the Obama inauguration was hailed by many, including our own Liz Gannes, as the future of social TV. CNN Worldwide VP of Digital Marketing and Development Andy Mitchell joined Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook’s marketing arm onstage at NewTeeVee Live in San Francisco today to share a little bit of the backstory of this cooperation.
The two tried to add social context to live news events during the months leading up to the election with an idea called “debating the debates.” Facebook had just launched its Facebook Connect platform, and both companies tried to have users watch the debates and exchange arguments online, signaling their allegiance for either candidate with a badge on their Facebook profile. Except that it didn’t work. Facebook Connect wasn’t ready to scale.
Then, the day after the election, Zuckerberg was approached by two engineers who told her about their election night experience. They had watched Obama win state after state via a live-stream in one window on their computer screens, and monitored their Facebook status updates in another window right next to it. The folks at Facebook immediately fell in love with the idea and sent a screenshot over to CNN. “We thought: Why isn’t everybody doing is? Let’s make it happen,” recalled Mitchell.
NewTeeVee Live: Comedy Central Gets 500,000 Online Viewers From HuffPost, No Joke
Erik Flannigan, Executive Vice President of Digital Media at MTV Networks Entertainment Group, shared some interesting details at our NewTeeVee Live conference today about the way his networks are utilizing online video. Flannigan’s job is overseeing the web sites of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and these sites have been generating tons of video views for the network. Take Jon Stewart ripping into Fox News, for example. Clips like that receive 500,000 viewers from Huffington Post alone.
Flannigan doesn’t fear that people will shun their cable subscription for HuffPost’s embedded clips and ColbertNation streams. “Putting content online isn’t eating into your network ad sales”, he told the audience of NewTeeVee Live. Comedy Central’s online video traffic is always in sync with its network ratings. “That’s a good thing if you have hits and a bad thing if you don’t,” he added. Part of MTVN’s strategy for the future is to actually disintegrate these properties a little bit so online can have more a life of its own.
So what’s in store for monetizing Comedy Central and Spike TV content online? Flannigan said that he doesn’t see big changes ahead for some of it’s most popular shows. The network produces 160 episodes each year for both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and he doesn’t see anyone spend 99 cents for each episode anytime soon. In other words: Advertising is where it’s at, and the cake is only gonna get bigger.
TVTrigger Is Like iTunes for TV Torrenting
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.
VODO Embraces BitTorrent to Distribute Movies, Compensate Filmmakers
UK-based P2P video platform VODO published its second feature film on dozens of file-sharing sites Thursday, hoping that worldwide exposure will bring in donations, subscriptions and traditional distribution deals. David Miller’s documentary In Guantanamo, which is the result of a press tour of the controversial detention facility, has been downloaded around 15,000 times within the first 24 hours, according toVODO founder Jamie King.
The site’s first feature, Us Now, got downloaded around 250,000 times since its release in mid-October. Part of the volume is due to VODO’s relationships with a number of well-known BitTorrrent sites, with Isohunt and The Pirate Bay currently featuring In Guantanamo on their front pages. VODO hasn’t been quite as successful in making money from these downloads, but King hopes that a combination of one-off donations and a subscription level for documentary geeks and movie buffs will help eventually make the site sustainable and provide an additional revenue stream for filmmakers.
Chinese Online Video Companies Fight for Market Share, Licenses
Chinese P2P startup Xunlei has sued its competitor Sohu for copyright infringement, according to the Shenzen Daily. Xunlei is alleging that Sohu’s search engine, Sogou, is infringing on copyrights related to Xunlei’s P2P software as well as its own search engine, Gougou.com. Sohu had previously filed its own copyright infringement lawsuits against Xunlei and other Chinese P2P vendors.
China has long been a P2P video wunderkind of sorts. Efforts to establish P2P-based consumer video platforms like Joost and Babelgum have largely failed in the U.S. and Europe, but similar offerings attract millions of users in China. However, the Chinese market is saturated with literally dozens of video vendors, and efforts to grow their business beyond the PC have stalled due to strict government licensing requirements.
UK on the Forefront of Online TV, DVR Use
One in three Internet users in the UK is watching TV online, according to a new study by the British media regulation authority Ofcom. This trend seems to be largely driven by the BBC’s iPlayer, which is used by 27 percent of the country’s online population. However, traditional TV viewing still plays a huge role, and time-shifting through DVRs is growing quickly.
Compare those data points to other countries in Europe, and you’ll get a significantly different picture. Online TV platforms are far less developed in Germany, for example, a country that just like the UK has a strong online population. DVRs are also much more popular in the UK than elsewhere. Still, there’s one thing we all seem to agree on, no matter where we are: We do love our TV.
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