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VideoLobby Launches Template for Live Video
Edmonton-based Smibs today at the TechCrunch Real-time CrunchUp released a set of tools to package webcasts called VideoLobby. The service integrates Twitter and Facebook chatter, as well as a form to ask questions of a host that’s powered by a backend comment moderation system. Today, anyone who wants to produce a live show can sign up to host it on VideoLobby for free.
Instead of competing with the myriad live-streaming vendors in the world, VideoLobby builds on top of them, allowing a publisher to use live video powered by Qik, Justin.tv, Ustream and Stickam’s StreamAPI and format each stream as an episode of a show. The service seems somewhat superfluous, given those companies already integrate comments and social media themselves.
California Approves Energy Efficiency Measures for TVs
The California Energy Commission just approved measures to ensure new televisions are energy efficient. The proposed standards have been a point of contention with the consumer electronics industry and Hollywood, and a decision had been delayed after extended comments from the Consumer Electronics Association.
The standards will apply only to new televisions sold in California starting in January 2011. Further, they are only for TVs 58 inches or smaller. TV makers, with the exception of Vizio, had opposed the measure on the grounds that they expect to make their TVs greener on a voluntary basis, and the regulation is overkill.
California also thinks that TVs are more of an energy suck than TV makers do; the CEC estimates they account for 10 percent of household power use while TV makers say it’s closer to 5 percent. The CEC says the measure will save 3,831 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2011, at a cost reduction of between $18 and $30 per year, per television.
Hulu Music Video Play All About Norah Jones
Hulu keeps trucking along with Plan A, even though its corporate parents and the rest of the market have developed a case of the meanies. As long expected, the site is making a play into music, today announcing a limited distribution deal with EMI and the launch of a Norah Jones music video section.
The market for music is not as wide-open as was Hulu’s opportunity with TV shows a couple years ago. Universal Music Group and Sony Music are working with YouTube on the launch of a new destination site called Vevo, which has been called from the outset a “Hulu for music videos.” Warner Music also just made up with YouTube, allowing for its content to return to the site itself.
The Norah Jones deal includes a library of the artist’s music videos, concert footage and interviews accessible to Hulu’s U.S. users. and accompanied by lovely 30-second pre-roll ads (grr). EMI said artists from its Virgin, Capitol and Blue Note labels will follow Jones onto Hulu.
Hulu’s Andy Forssell, senior vice president for content and distribution, told the New York Times that Hulu has revised its idea of a massive music video library to building “an immersive experience around certain artists.” While a more limited approach is going to seem odd to users, it might be financially prudent; the music labels have been able to extract an arm and a leg for their content from many web startups, and Hulu doesn’t want to give up any more of its limbs.
New Moon Premiere Stream a Huge Draw
It’s pretty clear at this point that the secret to success on the Internet is Twilight. Check out the numbers from yesterday’s live web cast from the red carpet of the premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, exclusively hosted by MySpace and powered by Ustream.
The Twilight Saga New Moon Red Carpet Premiere
New Moon Premiere | MySpace Video
The two companies report that they had nearly 3 million total views, to a very nice ratio of 2 million uniques, the latter of which is a new all-time record for a Ustream event. And the Twilight kids easily topped out Ustream’s last big red carpet for the premiere of Michael Jackson’s This Is It, which had 1.8 million total views.
Movie Monitor: Find a Movie to Watch Online. That’s It.
Lately we’ve checked out sites such as Clicker, Yidio and SetJam, and that’s only the video aggregators that have launched or sent us previews in the last week. But perhaps their pretty interfaces, organized channels and personalized recommendation systems turn you off. Maybe all you want is a simple database query of what movies are available online and how much they cost.
Enter Movie Monitor, a New York-based startup which just launched. Search for movies by title or genre, and you get a simple list of links to where they’re available to stream or download on Amazon On Demand, Blockbuster, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, and Vudu. The company says YouTube is coming; I also wouldn’t mind if it indexed libraries from sites and devices like EpixHD and ZillionTV, even if they’re a little harder to access (though not if you use one of the trials Epix gave our readers). But then, this is a no-frills service, and that’s the charm.
iPhone Video Streaming: A Must-Have Feature?
In just the few months since it was released this summer, Apple’s video streaming to the iPhone has become a part of many business plans. Two announcements were made on that front today:
Multicast announced full support for transcoding, managing, delivering and displaying content on the iPhone, both live and on-demand. However, the company’s customers tend to be corporate — from internal teams like investor relations, human resources and sales that put on live events — while the iPhone is still mainly a consumer device. Nevertheless, it’s useful to have your main online video platform provide extensions to all sorts of devices.
Meanwhile, Stickam, the live video community site, today launched an iPhone SDK of its own. The idea is that other companies, for instance partner 211me, which works with celebrities, can build their own iPhone apps that include Stickam live streaming and chat. 211me’s first Stickam-powered app will be for Twilight star Peter Facinelli. Competitor Kyte already simplifies this process even further, enabling stars and their entourages to make video apps for various mobile platforms.
In other recent iPhone video news, Brightcove pre-announced an iPhone SDK and Livestream added iPhone streaming last week at our NewTeeVee Live conference.
New Flash Beta Dialing Into Phones
Adobe will on Tuesday release developer betas of Flash Player 10.1 for the web and AIR 2 for the desktop. Both runtimes are to be released to the public in the oh-so-very narrow and specific time frame of “the first half of 2010.” Key to plans for the next year is compatibility on netbooks and smartphones — first up for Adobe is full Flash functionality on x86-based netbooks, then the Palm OS, then Android. RIM has also said it will bring Flash to BlackBerries in 2010, and AIR is also due for mobile later next year.
A side benefit of these mobile optimizations is that Flash on Windows desktop will in turn get hardware decoding of H.264 video and graphic acceleration, said Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager, Adobe Flash Platform. Adobe has also added support for multitouch and gestures for both phones and Windows 7. Update: Some mobile devices will also get graphics acceleration; it is not available for PCs.
There are also neat new features like microphone access from within Flash — so developers can access binary data from wave forms from a computer’s microphone and manipulate them. Guess what that means? Opportunities for developers to create in-Flash Auto-Tune and karaoke. (Whoo!)
Also, as expected, the beta will support client-side file based encryption, HTTP streaming, in-browser DRM and improved buffering — though those will be more fully appreciated as we get closer to the actual product releases and developers are making things for real audiences.
Somewhat left out of this push is televisions, which can only get Flash Lite for now, but Barclay said to expect fuller support later next year.
YouTube Signs Comprehensive Deal With Univision
In a non-exclusive content deal YouTube is heralding as one of its most comprehensive, Univision will provide both short-form and long-form content to the video site starting early next year. The most popular U.S. Spanish-language network is to offer both new and catalog programs including Nuestra Belleza Latina, Cristina and Don Francisco Presenta; will participate in YouTube’s Content ID program for user uploads; and will make use of the site’s pre-roll and overlay advertising.
YouTube has seen 80 percent growth in Spanish language visitors in the past year, up now to 6.5 million per month, said Chris Maxcy, YouTube’s new head of content partnerships, on a conference call announcing the deal. Kevin Conroy, president of Univision Interactive Media described the U.S. Hispanic online community as fast growing but under-served audience in terms of web video. In part due to a recent court decision regarding streaming rights, the deal does not include Televisa content, Conroy noted.
Video: The Changing Economics of Video Processing
Along with the prediction that the Internet will not destroy pay TV because consumers will demand a high-quality experience across their various platforms, Sam Blackman’s Elemental Technologies launched its parallel processing video server at our NewTeeVee Live conference yesterday.
In a further conversation with Stacey from GigaOM on the show floor, Blackman predicted the cost of computing would be less than the cost of caching within three years, which would change the business of how people store and transcode content to make it more flexible. Here’s the video; for more, see Stacey’s post on GigaOM.
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