CNN Media
The Web Files Pounds the L.A. Web Series Beat
- Editor rating:
- Premiere: July 8, 2009
- Length: 7-8 minutes
- Budget: Medium
- Cast
-
- Host: Kristyn Burtt
- Crew
-
- Director / Producer: Sandra Payne
While the opening sequence — shot film noir-style, with Burtt playing the role of detective — seems to imply investigative journalism, Burtt’s focus is on personalities and content, with minimal scoops in sight. The interview with MERRIme.com creators Kaily Smith and David Weidoff, for example, focuses more on their experiences at the NYTVF (where Smith won the best actress award) than on questions like how they were able to secure name cast members like Tony Hale and Tom Arnold, not to mention their $2,500-per-episode financing, though they do make an interesting point about the value of hiring a publicist.
But while the news component may be lacking, Burtt is still a capable host whose years of entertainment reporting make her very comfortable on camera — previously, she’d done hosting work with MSNBC and NBC, among other entities. Read more of this story
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.
PLYmedia to Provide Live Captions to Online Vid Partners
For once, everyone getting on board with an online video trend is a good thing. Following on the heels of Google’s announcement yesterday that it will add automatic captioning to YouTube videos, PLYmedia today said that it will be providing live captioning to video platforms Ooyala, Ustream, Livestream, Brightcove, Kaltura, KIT digital and Kyte.
Unlike Google’s captioning system, which automatically creates captions using speech recognition technology, PLYmedia’s SubPLY offering does live captioning with national court reporter-certified transcribers. Using this human approach, PLYmedia says it can deliver more accurate results (Google even admitted that its system can make mistakes and is rolling the service out slowly.)
PLYmedia’s SubPLY also offers automatic translation into “multiple” languages, transcript generation, real-time keyword tag generation as well as Twitter and Facebook integration. The social media hooks allow Twitter and Facebook users to follow a live event through text updates to their news feeds.
In addition to making live video more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, the addition of captions will help make video more searchable.
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
NPD: Consumers Sticking With Entertainment Subscriptions
Newspapers and magazines may not be faring so well in this economic climate, but consumers are holding onto their entertainment subscriptions, according to a new survey from The NPD Group. The research firm says that monthly per-capita entertainment-content subscription spending rose to $115, which is up roughly 7 percent since last year.
As of August 2009, 81 percent of U.S. households subscribe to a TV service (cable, satellite, etc.), NPD found. The company also discovered that 14 percent of consumers subscribed to a home video subscription service like Netflix, up two percentage points from last year. Additionally, the increased smartphone adoption has bumped up the number of mobile data subscribers to 9 percent of U.S. consumers, up from 6 percent last year, NPD said.
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
Scott Gairdner’s Tiny Fuppets: Just the Tip of a Hilarious Iceberg
- Editor rating:
Gairdner, named the “King of Dot Comedy” by G4’s Attack of the Show, is a solo act who’s been creating web comedy since 2006. After his first spoof shorts went viral, Collegehumor began commissioning pieces; his stuff has also been featured by YouTube and FunnyOrDie. It’s deserved attention, as his work represents some of the best in pop-culture parody (with a heavy emphasis on video games), enabled not just by Gairdner’s solid acting and directing chops, but technical skill as an editor and effects artist, which helps him to nimbly parody MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 and imagine CNN’s hologram technology getting disturbing real-world applications.
But it’s Gairdner’s unique POV that helps his shorts stand out in an admittedly oversaturated marketplace for sketch comedy. Today, for example, he released one of the most perfectly bizarre shorts to grace the web recently, a third installment of Tiny Fuppets. Read more of this story
Sezmi Gets $25M, Rolls Out LA Trial
Color us surprised. Not only is would-be cable killer Sezmi not dead, the company announced today that it has received $25 million in new funding from existing investors and it has launched a pilot program in Los Angeles.
Sezmi’s two-part set-top box solution consists of a receiver that receives over-the-air transmissions (Sezmi leases spectrum to broadcast content) and a 1TB DVR that stores shows and aggregates broadband content.
To get Sezmi, customers will either rent the equipment for an undisclosed amount, or purchase the equipment outright for $299. Ongoing service fees are $5 a month for broadcast-only channels or $25 a month for a broadcast/cable combo. As the service expands, it is supposed to be available through retail channels and through small and medium telcos and ISPs.
Where to Watch the Space Shuttle Atlantis Launch Online
When the space shuttle Atlantis takes off for its STS-129 mission to the International Space Station later today, space exploration enthusiasts will have a few options for where to watch online.
The launch, which is set to happen at 2:28 p.m. ET, will be covered by NASA TV, the official online video station of the U.S. government’s space exploration program. NASA TV will stream its coverage in Windows Media format, with archived videos from the launch available later on NASA TV’s official YouTube channel.
In addition to NASA TV’s coverage, Spaceflight Now will have live video from the launch beginning at 10 a.m. ET, with commentary from former CNN reporter Miles O’Brien and former astronauts Bob Crippen and Mike Foale. Spaceflight Now, which is a privately owned site devoted to providing live launch countdowns and other space news, is streaming its coverage in Flash with help from live video startup Livestream. With the recent introduction of iPhone streaming from Livestream (which was launched at NewTeeVee Live last week), viewers will be able to watch the video on their iPhones at http://iphone.livestream.com/spaceflightnowmobile.
Spaceflight Now’s coverage will also include photos from the launch, a frequently updated status center blog and a Twitter feed.
Though NASA’s live footage of bombing the moon last month wasn’t quite as dramatic as we might have hoped/feared, it did result in the major discovery of a “significant amount” of water. Today’s launch isn’t expected to be quite as exciting — the mission is a simple equipment and crew delivery and trade — but it will be live, so you can see for yourself.
Update: The shuttle launch can also be viewed on Spacevidcast.com, which is powered by Ustream.tv.
Popular
- BitTorrent After The Pirate Bay: Do You Still Need Trackers?
- Tumblr Marriage Proposal: Behind the Scenes of Justin and Marissa's Engagement
- Ten Sites for Free and Legal Torrents
- Get Ready for Flash Player 10.1 to Stream P2P Video to Millions, Swap Files BitTorrent-style
- The Megawoosh Waterslide Viral: How It Was Really Done
- Six Steps To Get More HD From Your Scientific Atlanta Set-top Box
Recent
Network
- 10 Green Tech Gift Ideas for Black Friday [Earth2Tech]
- AOL Reveals Lame New Look & Logo [GigaOM]
- How Video is Changing the Internet [NewTeeVee]
- e-Book Echo: Nook Sells Out; Kindle Update Coming [jkOnTheRun]
- WWD Weekend Reading List [WebWorkerDaily]
- Weekly App Store Picks: November 21, 2009 [TheAppleBlog]
© 2009 The GigaOM Network. Marketing consulting by ACS.
