Science/Technology
Whatever Happened to Red Swoosh?
Remember Red Swoosh, the P2P company that was bought by Akamai for $18.7 million in April 2007? Red Swoosh used to be a competitor to Akamai, albeit on a much smaller scale, offering P2P-powered content delivery services to corporate customers. Shortly before the Akamai acquisition, the company reinvented itself, rolling out products for amateur videographers and file-swapping consumers.
This new direction opened up a lot of possibilities for Akamai. In particular, it offered a way for Akamai to extend its business model to blogs and other platforms for user-generated content. Call it the CDN solution for the long tail, if you will, complete with options to enter the advertising market. But none of that materialized. Instead, it looks like most Red Swoosh products have been discontinued or taken down.
Starz to Sell on iTunes
Starz will launch on iTunes tonight, said Marc DeBevoise, SVP of business development and strategy for the production company, speaking at a panel at the Future of Television West conference in Hollywood.
DeBevoise said that consumers have demonstrated that they will buy content “as long as it feels like free,” attributing that idea to Fred Seibert of Next New Networks.
Food Fight: History as Told by Cuisine
Bratwurst assault destroys a population of fish and chips. Kebabs and lox bagels engage in a lethal standoff. And Vietnamese spring rolls face off against croissants and hamburgers. Food Fight, Stefan Nadelman’s epic short depicting the history of 20th century American warfare with food, uses computer-generated stop-motion techniques to depict real food engaged in deadly combat. And it’s racked up more than 1.5 million views in the two weeks it’s been on YouTube.
“Before and after the film was completed,” Nadelman writes on his web site, “the friends I screened it to fell into two camps: You Should Have Captions and You Shouldn’t Have Captions. I felt that if I added captions it would be too easy.” He made the right choice; the lack of captions inspires a level of engagement that enhances the film’s power. Without reading Nadelman’s cheat sheet, I didn’t immediately understand some moments, notably the kimchi and the Cuban sandwiches. But there are some beats — some battles — that require no context.
EveryZing Offers Video SEO
EveryZing, a search startup using speech-to-text to analyze what’s inside video, is launching a product to help media sites promote their video content. The company had switched to a business-to-business focus when it raised a $10 million Series B round last June, and new product “ezSEO” is the fruit of those labors. Its original podcast search engine is now a “a good proof of concept and sandbox but not any part of our revenue success,” according to EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde.
The problem, as usual, is it’s hard to find out what’s going on in a video so it can be searched and advertised against like text. EveryZing’s solution is to make video act more like text. For customers such as Boston.com, the company creates transcripts of videos and then maintains search engine optimization (SEO)-friendly pages of text related to them. Google has added 50,000 new Boston.com pages to its index in the last month, driving a fresh heap of traffic to the site’s video. I don’t see why any media company with a video archive shouldn’t give this a try.
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