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Boxee Box Will Be Demoed at CES: Source
Boxee will be showing off a prototype of its widely anticipated standalone set-top box at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show, according to a source close to the company who asked not to be named, with commercial deployment slated for sometime in the first half of 2010.
Despite announcing just last week at NewTeeVee Live that it was still working with a consumer electronics partner on creating the so-called Boxee Box, our source says that the company will have it ready for demos at the industry trade show in early January.
The onus isn’t exactly on Boxee to deliver it — it’ll be up to an unnamed CE partner to build and manufacture the set-top box, for which Boxee is just providing the software. Even so, the kind of turnaround with which Boxee is expected to go to market is practically unheard of in the CE industry, and suggests that the company has been working on this project for an especially long time.
Babelgum Shutters 2 European Offices
UPDATED: Babelgum is closing down its Dublin headquarters and an office in Nice, according to a report in paidContent, moves that could signal the end is near for the online video site.
Babelgum says the cuts will allow it to streamline its business to “ensure continued growth.” The company told paidContent that it will continue to develop applications from other locations, spreading the operations from its shuttered offices across those in London, Milan and New York. But there are questions as to whether Babelgum will continue to develop technology or keep focusing on content investment.
Babelgum is backed by deep-pocketed billionaire investor Silvio Scaglia; he invested €50 million ($73 milllion) in the company in 2008, and has said he plans to spend €40- €60 million annually on the company over the next 2-3 years. But the recent cuts could mean he’s losing patience while waiting for a return on that initial investment.
Vid-Biz: BBC, Sony, Blu-ray Sales
BBC Gives Technical Details of Its New iPlayer On the Wii; the U.K. broadcaster has encoded streams using H.264 at a 700 kbps bit rate, compared to 1.5 Mbps for regular TV or even 3.2 Mbps for HD. (BBC) Speaking of British TV, the U.K. version of YouTube debuted its new site section that hosts roughly 4,000 full-length programs. (Variety)
Silverlight 4 Beta Launches for Developers; new features include out-of-browser capabilities, advanced business application development, and native multicast and offline DRM support for video. (Ars Technica)
Sony Announces Plans for Digital Media Store; new Sony Online Service will sell music, movies, books, and other downloadable applications for mobile devices. (BusinessWeek)
Disney Launches Its First Branded Entertainment Channel; “The Possibility Shop” will be exclusively sponsored by Clorox and promote Clorox products. (Ad Age)
Blu-ray, DVD Sales Expected to Stabilize in 2010; high-definition Blu-ray DVD sales have yet to make up for the decline in standard def DVD sales in 2009. (Video Business)
Digiboo Does Partnership with Movie Gallery; deal will put 100 Digiboo movie kiosks (see previous coverage) in retail locations. (Video Business)
Grey’s Anatomy Gets a Web Spin-Off; Seattle Grace: On Call will be a six episode run that’s on immediately after Grey’s is aired. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Premium Content Drives Connected Device Adoption
The online video revolution will be televised, meaning that it will soon show up on TVs, Blu-ray players and other connected devices, a panel of execs agreed at the Future of Television event in New York on Thursday. But the content that’s available on those devices could affect how much consumers think they’re worth. As Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Electronics Association, put it, “Consumers will pay more money for a connected TV if it has premium video content.”
At the same time, there are some limitations to connected devices. In the short term, most of them carry the same content — Netflix, Amazon video-on-demand, YouTube, Pandora, etc. Zach Klein, chief creative officer for Boxee, said that’s because only so many content partners are willing to work with companies like his to distribute online video to devices.
User Experience Could Hamper TV Everywhere Adoption
Questions about the overall user experience could get in the way of mass adoption of TV Everywhere-type services, a panel of TV executives told audiences at today’s Future of Television conference in New York.
While panelists agreed that there is a great opportunity for broadcasters and cable programmers to profit off the availability of broadband video services tied to users’ cable subscriptions, most believed that the success of such services would depend on companies’ execution in rolling them out.
“The biggest risk to the industry is if it’s not done well,” said Dave Evans, senior vice president of broadband for Cablevision’s Rainbow Media Holdings. “If it’s not done well, consumers won’t use it.”
The biggest questions revolve around the overall ease of use for the service, which could hamper adoption if users find it too difficult to authenticate with their ISPs or are unable to reach content that they should have access to.
thePlatform Announces New TV Everywhere Features, Customers
thePlatform is updating its white-label video management solution with new features designed to make TV Everywhere-type services easier for service providers and publishers to deploy. And the company says it is seeing results, with a bevy of new programmers and a big cable firm announced as customers today.
thePlatform already provides the technology behind On Demand Online, the TV Everywhere project that parent company Comcast plans to introduce to subscribers next month. But with a suite of new features, the online video platform provider hopes to address authentication and authorization issues that challenge other service providers and media companies when rolling out these services.
Since each ISP introducing TV Everywhere services has chosen to implement a different authentication scheme, media companies need to support multiple login types on their own web properties. To deal with this, thePlatform released a new authentication adapter that enables publishers to verify customer identities across a number of different ISPs. thePlatform has also rolled out tools to map each online video to an individual service provider’s channels, which can then be used to match content available to a given user based on his or her subscription package. Read more of this story
Streaming Media West Roundup: Internap, Ankeena, HD Cloud
Online video platform providers, CDNs and other media infrastructure companies have gathered in San Jose., Calif., this week for the Streaming Media West conference. Here are some highlights from vendors releasing news on Day One of the show:
Internap Updates Its CDN Offering
After a lengthy silence, Internap is announcing new features to its content delivery network that it believes will help make it competitive again. The features are primarily focused around improved ease of use for its enterprise customers, including new “set and forget” capabilities such as single-upload transcoding and continuous bitrate adjustment. The CDN has also been tweaked to leverage Internap’s Managed Internet Route Optimizer technology, which it claims delivers better performance by making sure that content is delivered from the right point of presence. Finally, the company updated its reporting features to provide more granular analytics.
While Internap has struggled to compete in the CDN market ever since it acquired the assets of Vitalstream two years ago, the company’s VP of marketing, Peter Evans, says the latest update may finally make the company competitive in CDN. “Now we have a product that we’re comfortable standing behind,” Evans said. “Do I think we’re going to go head to head with Akamai or Limelight? No. But I do think we can compete with them in an RFP, and I think we can go up against Nos. 3 through 50 in the CDN market.” Read more of this story
Vid-Biz: NBC, ABC News, Fliqz
NBC Launches Social ‘Communicator’ Tool; new ad-supported application allows users to watch full-length episodes of NBC programming, with built-in texting and unlimited VOIP calls. (paidContent)
CBS High School Sports Site Inks Deal With Comcast; MaxPreps.com will produce hundreds of short-form video features on local high school sports teams for Comcast’s Houston affiliate. (MediaPost)
Fliqz Launches Video SEO Product; new SearchSuccess tools will be sold as an add-on to the company’s Gold Edition hosting solution. (FierceOnlineVideo)
ABC News Partners With Ustream for Nightline Twittercast; anchors and correspondents from the show will participate in a half-hour web program once a week streamed by Ustream. (emailed release)
Cox Tests Dynamic VOD Ads With NBCU; the companies will dynamically insert ads against episodes of The Office and Monk that are viewed on Cox’s MyPrimetime video-on-demand service. (Multichannel News)
Tinychat Launches Ustream Competitor; the new Tinychat.tv service will allow users to share their live video conversations with anyone on the web. (TechCrunch)
Pirate Bay Tracker Really Shutting Down Now; founders want to encourage other BitTorrent sites to move away from torrents. (TorrentFreak)
YouTube Direct Launched to Bolster Citizen Journalism
YouTube has launched a new tool, called YouTube Direct, that aims to connect news organizations with citizen journalists producing web video.
Built on YouTube APIs, the tool will provide an easy way for news agencies to collect and broadcast clips that users submit for review. By adding a customizable upload button to their web pages, those organizations can solicit user-produced videos on a variety of subjects.
YouTube Direct provides another advantage for cash-strapped media companies: Because all videos are hosted on the YouTube site, participating companies don’t have to go through the trouble of building out the infrastructure required to ingest, encode, store and distribute videos that have been uploaded. Read more of this story
Streaming Media West Roundup: Ooyala/YuMe, Wowza, Cotendo
A number of CDN, online video platform and other media infrastructure companies are converging on San Jose, Calif., this week for Streaming Media West, which kicks off tomorrow. Here are some highlights of the announcements made by vendors ahead of the show:
Ooyala Partners With YuMe on Overlays
By partnering with ad monetization firm YuMe Networks, Ooyala will be able to better monetize live video streams with overlay ads as it will enable customers of Ooyala’s white-label video management platform to specify ad insertion points into their live streams. Ooyala has its own set of ad-serving platform and monetization tools for on-demand streams, but the partnership shows its homegrown solution may be lacking when it comes to delivering overlay ads into live streams. While the companies just announced general availability of these services, they say there are already dozens of customers using the combined Ooyala/YuMe solution for live and on-demand video management as well as ad insertion.
Wowza Partners With Tandberg
The companies said today that Wowza’s streaming media server will be integrated into the Tandberg Content Server, making it the company’s exclusive technology provider for streaming Flash in live and on-demand telepresence and video conference calls, as well as multimedia presentations. While the announcement specifies Tandberg’s use of Wowza for Flash streaming, the Media Server will also enable Tandberg to serve video to other formats, such as Silverlight, or to mobile devices such as the iPhone. Wowza was the media server software used by Livestream, for instance, during its live streaming of the space shuttle Atlantis launch today, as well as NewTeeVee Live last week, both of which were streamed to the iPhone.
Cotendo Updates Its Dynamic Site Acceleration
Cotendo announced an update to its Dynamic Site Acceleration product, which is designed to improve the delivery of static and dynamic content for a wide range of online retailers, ad networks and professional news sites. Unlike most other CDNs, Cotendo’s product is less about delivering large media files than it is about ensuring the quick delivery of dynamic content. Even so, by accelerating the delivery of these files, the company can help publishers boost engagement times and improve the overall user experience.
NewTeeVee at SMW
And check out NewTeeVee co-editor Chris Albrecht tomorrow as he grills representatives from Motorola, Move Networks, HBO Broadband and Boxee about the threat that broadband video poses to traditional cable providers. The panel he’s moderating, entitled “Bridging TV and Broadband and Cutting the Cable,” starts at 4 p.m. PST on Tuesday, Nov. 17.
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