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Where to Watch the Michael Jackson Memorial Service
Want to tune in online on Tuesday to pay your respects to the King of Pop? Plans for the public memorial for Michael Jackson are just being finalized, but here’s what we know so far.
Everything gets started at 10 a.m. PDT. While broadcasters told us they are still waiting on details of what coverage they will be able to provide of the memorial itself, it does seem that live video will be made public. Los Angeles leaders have encouraged mourners to stay home and watch on TV or online so as to maintain public safety. There is expected to be a pool feed supplied by the Jackson family and Staples Center venue owner and Jackson tour promoter AEG. The venue fits only 20,000, and more than 1.6 million people applied for public tickets online. A pool feed means anywhere you watch, you’ll get the same coverage, though some streams may be more reliable than others.
CNN, for one, is hoping to differentiate by encouraging viewers to update their Facebook status while watching the broadcast, much like it did during the Obama inauguration. You’ll be able to connect to friends who are watching the memorial service by seeing what they’re saying about it and commenting back. Go to CNN.com Live starting at 9 a.m. PDT.
DOCOMO Buys Into PacketVideo
NTT DOCOMO said tonight it has paid $45.5 million in cash for a 35 percent stake in mobile video company PacketVideo, a subsidiary of NextWave Wireless. The two companies have worked together for more than 10 years, with PacketVideo’s pvPlayer installed on more than 90 of DOCOMO’s handset models. They said the stake was intended to help bulk up DOCOMO’s music and video services in Japan.
San Diego-based PacketVideo claims it was the first company to ever put streaming video over a 2G mobile network way back in 1999, and says its software has shipped on 360 million devices to date. Earlier this year, it released a live TV app for the iPhone.
Facebook iPhone App to Upload Video
Facebook expects to “very soon” release a new version of its iPhone app, and via TechCrunch we hear it will enable video uploads from the new iPhone 3GS.
Now, this is just one social network on one (very new) phone, and yes, it’s going to be a holiday weekend in a couple hours. But the news is worth paying attention to because of the volume and nature of video-sharing that Facebook enables, and the active mobile content habits of iPhone users. In the few days after the iPhone 3GS release, YouTube, the biggest user video site out there, said its mobile video uploads were up 400 percent, with iPhone 3GS video already accounting for more than half the mobile video sent to the site.
Meanwhile, Facebook told us it sees a very significant — nearly 40 percent — chunk of its video uploads come from webcams. And at last check, Facebook received six times as many video uploads per day as MySpace, showing its personal video-sharing offering is resonating with users. The simple, accessible video sharing enabled by webcams has a lot in common with mobile phone video uploads — except with the added value of on-the-go, on-the-scene connectivity. Let’s just hope AT&T doesn’t get pissy about the upstream bandwidth.
Will Michael Jackson’s Funeral Be Live-Streamed?
Update: Here’s our list of Michael Jackson memorial service live streams.
Michael Jackson’s funeral will likely be scheduled for next Tuesday, July 7 at 10 a.m. at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, according to various reports. AEG Live, which was planning Jackson’s comeback, owns the Staples Center and says it’s putting on the event. The arena seats 20,000, and AEG is said to have plans to place large screens outside to show the proceedings to an overflow audience. But will the funeral be live-streamed to the King of Pop’s fans around the rest of the world?
Given the ongoing magnitude of global grieving for Jackson, wall-to-wall coverage of the funeral on TV networks goes without saying, and one or more online live streams is a solid bet. Other midday events, such as Obama’s inauguration and college basketball’s March Madness, have had huge numbers of watchers online, many of them office workers who want to see them live.
Hulu has already set up a placeholder page for the live web broadcast, under the account it uses to post special events. That site is mostly geo-blocked outside of the U.S.; surely others will get in on the action as plans unfold.
Pack Up the Kids and Send Them to YouTube Summer Camp
Watercolor, ice climbing, underwater basketweaving — you can pay someone to teach you (or your kids) anything these days — and now, how to YouTube.
A couple years ago, we wrote about Pitzer College offering a media studies class on YouTube. There’s also Kansas State cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, who’s become something of a social media celebrity for his video reports on the web, which often focus on YouTube. But if you’re looking for a little summer extra credit or personal growth, check out these online video workshops, both of which hit our inbox in the last day.
In both these instances, you’ll have to go to New York (but c’mon, NYC is lovely in the summer). First, “From You to YouTube” is a summer camp for young adults ages 12 to 18. Forget campfires and archery, bring your working knowledge of Mac computers. Held at the Manhattan Edit Workshop in August, the camp costs a hefty $2,000.
Dabble (Still) Down
After reading an informative post about the history of real-time search by guest author Mary Hodder on TechCrunch today, I was reminded to check on her social video search startup, Dabble. Founded in 2005, Dabble had undertaken the challenge of organizing the universe of web video with metadata and community-created playlists.
It appears that the site hasn’t been up in months — at least nine months, in fact, because I remember specifically talking to Hodder about it being down in October. None of the search and share functionality is available, with the whole of the site replaced by a note with the headline “Dabble is having a make-over.” The Internet Archive isn’t much help in pinpointing the date the note was put up; it hasn’t posted a fresh save of the site since February of 2008.
In October, Hodder told me that the site had to be taken offline due to problems with her hosting company and a lack of funding. Today via email Hodder said she’s still working on the technology behind the scenes, but without funding the site won’t be back up anytime soon.
So What Will Become of The Pirate Bay?
You’d think before you announce a sale that alienates many of your most passionate users you’d figure out what your next steps were first. But no, that wouldn’t be The Pirate Bay way. Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) said yesterday it’s in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, for 60 million Swedish kronor ($7.8 million).
We parsed through the salient points, but were still left quite confused about what exactly GGF would do with The Pirate Bay. What’s become obvious is that the folks behind TPB are selling its main asset — its user base — so they can stop being a legal target and abdicate responsibility for the site’s upkeep and liabilities. That 25 million-strong user base, however, which expects to use The Pirate Bay to freely track any and every sort of file on BitTorrent, is far from pleased. So what exactly is next for TPB? Here are some further (if contradictory) clues:
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