Software
Brightcove Wants a Piece of Move’s Long-Form Market
Brightcove tonight is launching a new version of its platform that “competes directly with Move Networks,” SVP Marketing and Strategy Adam Berrey told us today. Nothing like putting a target on your enemy’s back! Brightcove, which is especially strong with news media customers and their short-form content, is trying to goose growth by modifying its delivery tools and its interface to accommodate long-form content.
The new tools are launching in beta and are to be widely available this fall, though selected Brightcove customers, like Beliefnet, Lifetime Networks, and Showtime are already trying them out.
Six Open-Source Mac Video Apps
Our sister blog OStatic, the open-source reviews and community site, has a roundup of six essential open-source Mac video apps that will help you storyboard, animate, convert, share, watch, and more. It’s a nice weekend read.
Qik: iPhone Was Video-capable All Along
Wait, we thought the iPhone wasn’t capable of shooting video! So we were surprised to hear today that not one, but two startups have figured out how to stream live video from the older versions of the phones. These devices have been out nearly a year now — so why are these guys figuring it out now? And not just shooting video, but streaming it live?
Qik discovered that the camera on the iPhone was video-capable earlier this year, co-founder and VP product marketing Bhaskar Roy told us this afternoon. But the phone had no built-in encoder or video engine to actually capture video. In the past few months the company worked on building a solution, but was waiting until Steve Jobs’ iPhone 2 release on Monday to see if Apple would include a video engine itself and make Qik’s solution obsolete.
When Jobs’ keynote came out video-free, Qik decided to push out its own product — an encoder bundled with live-streaming software. Roy said he was as surprised as we were that competitor Flixwagon also posted a near-identical demo online today.
Vignette Adds Video to CMS Products
Vignette this week integrated its acquisition of Vidavee into its content management system, aiming to offer a one-stop-shop for clients to deal with the various types of content on their web sites. Vignette’s advantage over other white-label video companies is its long list of existing CMS customers. It said American City Business Journals, Scenedaily.com and Mobifest had already signed up for the new video product.
Vignette’s Flash-based solution sounds like it has a few nice, but not unique, features, like dividing videos into scenes and giving users the ability to cut up and share videos. It will be sold as software as a service. Customers can use their own CDNs or pay Vignette to deliver video.
Vignette paid $6.6 million in cash for Vidavee in April. Vidavee had been working on heat maps of viewer interaction to insert advertising when people are most engaged, but that’s not yet part of the Vignette product. Let us know if you try Vignette Video out; we’d be interested to know how it compares. The company provided us with the screenshot above — not exactly the image I’d choose to showcase supposedly high-quality video transmission. Update: Vignette provided an alternate screenshot:
Shares of Vignette (VIGN) closed at $11.72 Wednesday, down $0.86 over the last two days.
Scoop: Boxee to Go Alpha on Monday
Boxee wants to be the Firefox of the connected media home, and it wants you to join its alpha testing this Monday. I caught up with Boxee founder and CEO Avner Ronen at the On Hollywood conference in L.A., where he gave me a sneak peek at the upcoming service.
Boxee is a free, open-source software platform that lets users control their media from a PC-connected TV. Like other media applications, you can watch movies or web video, listen to music, look at photos and more, all with your remote control. The platform also sports social features so you can make recommendations and share your media with friends.
Animoto Upgrades Quality, Asks You to Pay
Animoto, a service that helps users make videos out of their pictures, today launches a new revenue stream: paid high-quality downloads and physical DVDs. Business-model-wise, this is similar to what personal media startups One True Media and Motionbox do.
For its new paid products, Animoto upgraded to 864×480 resolution and 24 frames per second in ISO and MP4 formats and is charging $5 for DVD-quality video downloads and $20 for DVDs themselves, plus shipping. Not cheap, but more probably exciting than whatever else you’re planning for your dad this weekend. (You are planning something, right?)
Animoto’s technology automatically matches pictures to the nuances of music (don’t call it a slideshow!). Another company that does this is muvee. Until now, Animoto would host your videos on its site and allow you to embed them elsewhere. Animoto is based in New York and funded by Amazon.
Pop-Up Video Comes to YouTube
YouTube has unveiled a new tool, Video Annotations, which, according to YouTube, allows creators to:
- Add background information about the video
- Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to the next scene)
- Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
Annotations are only available in English and don’t work with embedded videos at this point, but you can see them being put to use in this skydiving video, magic card trick and this interactive shell game.
BitTorrent Teams Up With Orb
Popular peer-to-peer network BitTorrent is continuing efforts to grow its reach by signing a partnership agreement with Orb Networks. The agreement bundles BitTorrent’s P2P software with that of Orb’s, which allows users to stream their music, movies or other media to their PCs, phones and other devices.
Users will have the option of downloading the bundled version or not. In practice, an Orb user would get access to BitTorrent content on his PC and then be able to use Orb to stream that content to any of his devices — from a PS3 to an iPhone. Typically BitTorrent is used to download content — video or music — to a personal computer, which is difficult to share within the home.
From that perspective, this alliance with Orb makes a lot of sense, though we’re not sure how big an impact it’s likely to have: As of February 2008, Orb had about 5 million users, big — but not big enough.
Truveo: Here’s $100,000 to Help Us Do Our Job
Apparently searching video is really hard, as market leader Truveo today declared a competition to help it find new video search applications. And the prize? $100,000 in cold, hard cash.
The problem with video search is not just difficult technology, but usage habits — or more specifically, the challenge of getting people to use your product. So it makes sense that Truveo would be focusing on “customized applications that use Truveo’s open API,” as it said in a press release announcing the challenge, which is being put on through TopCoder.
The prize money may not be a huge draw, though, considering it will be divvied to death. Nine winners will get $10,000 and 20 more just $500. The deadline is July 21 and the winners will be announced July 31, after factors such as usage statistics, innovation as determined by judges, and community voting are considered.
Entrants also have to give up some rights to enter, such as preventing TopCoder and Truveo from producing, using and promoting what they make.
ICTV Is Now ActiveVideo Networks
Interactive television company ICTV (previous coverage) is officially changing its name to ActiveVideo Networks, a move aimed at reflecting the ways in which video distribution is evolving. Ed Forman, ActiveVideo Networks’ executive vice president of strategy and corporate development and its chief strategy officer, told NewTeeVee:
“We renamed ourselves ActiveVideo Networks because the future of television isn’t just TV, it’s a lot more, it’s something the viewer participates in. A future in which includes recommendations and a broader range of video content.”
As part of this, ActiveVideo Networks is looking to broaden its capabilities to include giving users access to web video, photos and other social media through their TV sets.
Unlike upstart rival Sezmi, which wants you to purchase new hardware, ActiveVideo Networks specializes in creating interactive channels for programmers like CNN and Accuweather that can run on existing cable boxes. Forman said the company’s service will be in 2-3 million households globally by the end of the year, and it will double the number of programmers with which it works to 40 from 20.
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