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March Madness on Demand iPhone App Will be Big Test for AT&T's 3G Network
VideoNuze.com Analysis - 3 hours 9 min ago
College hoops bragging rights won't be the only thing on the line when the NCAA March Madness men's basketball tournament kicks off next week. Also under the microscope will the performance of AT&T's 3G network, since CBS Mobile announced earlier this week that its new $9.99 premium iPhone app will offer live streaming of all the tournament's games over AT&T's 3G, EDGE and Wi-Fi networks. As with last year there will also be a free "lite" app that will offer on-demand clips only.
Presumably AT&T, CBS and NCAA have modeled how many concurrent streams could be requested under different penetration rates for the app and 
feel comfortable with AT&T's ability to support these in a quality manner. Let's hope for their sake they got the math right. I continue to hear iPhone users expressing frustration with dropped calls and 3G availability, particularly in Manhattan (in fact I've resisted getting an iPhone for this very reason). AT&T does seem to be getting more confident in its 3G coverage though; just last month it approved Sling's SlingPlayer app for use on its 3G network. In that case, I thought that because few people would likely buy the $29.99 app the stakes weren't that high for AT&T. MMOD is a different story; if AT&T's 3G network fails there will be a horde of angry hoops fans banging on its doors.
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Categories: Video News
Government to the Rescue in the Retransmission Consent Quagmire?
VideoNuze.com Analysis - 3 hours 24 min ago
Earlier this week, in "Will Nasty Fee Fights Fuel Consumers' Cord-Cutting Interest," I conjectured that last weekend's WABC-Cablevision retransmission consent fee fight (the most recent of many fee fights) would ultimately sow consumers' interest "cutting the cord" in favor of free, online-only alternatives. Obviously that would be bad news for multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), but it would also be bad for the whole video ecosystem that depends on consumer payments for its economics to work.
In this context it's only mildly surprising that subsequently this week a group of MVPDs including Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, DirecTV, Verizon and others petitioned the FCC to intervene and revise the retransmission consent rules (for what it's worth, I can't remember the last time MVPDs asked the government for anything, except to stay out of their business). In a sure sign of who currently has the negotiating leverage, broadcasters sent their own letter saying the playing field was level and in no need of a review.
With broadcasters intent on getting paid for their signals, there are many chapters yet to be written in the retransmission consent story. The big risk here is that the parties' jousting will ultimately kill the proverbial golden goose, with consumers getting fed up and deciding they'll make do with whatever they can get through the combination of good old-fashioned antennas and a cheap convergence device that hooks their broadband connection to their TV. Cord-cutting has lacked a strong catalyst to date, but history shows that a wronged consumer is a motivated consumer. The TV industry as a whole needs to figure out the retransmission morass before consumers take things into their own hands.
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Categories: Video News
Movieclips.com Gets Hacker Help for new Video Player
NewTeeVee - 3 hours 32 min ago
Paul Yanez is back: The developer of many rogue and fabulous media players, including the MyMediaPlayer application that brought Hulu to the desktop until being shut down by the video site, got tapped by Movieclips.com to develop its new Flash video player, the company just announced. The new player, which is already live at Movieclips.com, makes it possible to select choice moments of clips hosted by Movieclips.com and embed them on third-party web sites. The player also preserves the original aspect ratio of every film.
Flash developer Yanez got famous in the online video world when he turned Joost into a proof-of-concept web app in the summer of 2007. He made headlines again a year later with an Air-based desktop player for Hulu, which was quickly rendered useless by a Hulu upgrade. Yanez responded with an upgrade of his own, but MyMediaPlayer2 went dark only four hours after TechCrunch worte up it up as Hulu’s “unofficial desktop app.”
Movieclips.com features over 12000 clips from various Hollywood movies. The company aims to be something like a Hulu for choice snippets from blockbusters and cinematic classics alike, and it was able to secure rights from a number of big Hollywood studios to do so. Each clip on Movieclips is published with closed caption and other meta-data, making it possible to find famous quotes from specific films, and the site recently published an API that opened up some of this functionality to third-party developers.
Related content on GigaOm Pro: Interview: Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO (subscription required)
Categories: Video News
Cisco's New CRS-3 Router Strengthens Foundation for Online Video Delivery
VideoNuze.com Analysis - 3 hours 42 min ago
I've often remarked that one of the really impressive things about online video is that there's innovation at every level of the ecosystem; it's not just core infrastructure, delivery, "last mile," aggregation, applications, content, etc. - it's all of them at once that are rapidly advancing. This week's announcement by Cisco, of its new CRS-3 router, is further evidence of this dynamic. Though most online video users never think about them, Cisco's routers are one of the key building blocks on the broadband Internet. Cisco itself knows how important video is to its future; it has been publishing its "Visual Networking Index" Internet traffic growth forecast, which identifies video as the biggest single traffic generator in the future. Cisco CEO John Chambers has repeatedly said that "video is the next killer app."
The CRS-3's capacity of 322 Terabits per second scarcely means anything to most people, so as always, Cisco translated it into real-world examples: the whole Library of Congress downloaded in just over 1 second, every person in China making a video call simultaneously, every movie ever made streamed in less than four minutes. (On the first point, coincidentally I just read in the terrific new book, "Startup Nation - The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle" that it took the CRS-1, introduced in 2004, about 4.6 seconds to download the Library of Congress, so the CRS-3 shows significant improvement.) Next time you're watching something on Hulu, YouTube, Vevo or elsewhere, note that more than likely there's a whole lot of Cisco plumbing helping deliver the experience.
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Categories: Video News
Adobe Preparing To Launch Multicasting Support For Flash
The Business Of Online Video - 3 hours 43 min ago
Back in October, Abobe announced a really long list of new functionality that would be supported in Flash Player 10.1, due out sometime this year. One of those features would be the long awaited support for multicasting that is essential to the way many enterprise organizations deliver video. While music, movies and game content delivered over CDNs in a unicast...
Categories: Video News
VideoNuze Posts from the Caribbean
VideoNuze.com Analysis - 3 hours 47 min ago
If you noticed a little "virtual sand" in your VideoNuze emails this week, that's because I've been posting from St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where I'm on a quasi-vacation with my wife. If you've never been, I highly recommend it. Lounging on Trunk Bay's powdery white sand and snorkeling in its crystal-clear green water is one of life's exquisite pleasures (see below). Apologies for slow responses to emails and voicemails this week. Tomorrow I'm taking the full day off, so VideoNuze will be back on Monday. 
Categories: Video News
Save The Date: Online Video Networking Event In NYC, May 10th
The Business Of Online Video - 4 hours 54 min ago
On Monday May 10th, we'll be teaming up with the NY Video Meetup group to once again host their monthly event at the Hilton Hotel in midtown, the night before the Streaming Media East show opens. Last year we had over 500 attendees watch six promising local online video startups demo their products followed by networking at the Bridges Bar...
Categories: Video News
TV Digital Heads Meet The `Splinternet`
VideoNuze.com News - 8 hours 30 min ago
Categories: Video News
Where to Watch March Madness Online
NewTeeVee - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 18:00
March Madness, baby! If you didn’t already have a good reason to drive down to Costco and pick up a huge new TV, this is it. Of course, that shiny new flatscreen won’t help you much for those games airing during office hours, but there is hope. The good thing about the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament is that all games will be available online and on your phone in real time.
And no, you won’t have to jump through any annoying registration hoops like with the Olympics. In fact, there are so many options to to join in on the fun that we decided to compile a handy little guide for all your March Madness needs.
Here’s how you can follow the games live:
The NCAA’s March Madness on Demand site is the place to go for live streams of all the games, starting with Selection Sunday on March 14th all the way to the National Championship game on April 4th. Missed a game? No worries, the site will also provide game highlights and full game archives. Make sure you have Microsoft’s Silverlight installed if you want to use the site’s high-quality video player, with up to 1.8 Mbps.
The player offers features like picture-in-picture highlights of the current game’s best moments, as well as a boss button. (Now you just gotta find a way to quickly hide those pizza boxes in your desk drawer when your CEO walks by your cubicle.) The high quality player also utilizes IIS Smooth Streaming, meaning it will automatically adjust the bandwidth usage to accommodate your Internet connection and computer speed. No Silverlight on your PC? Don’t worry, the NCAA still has a standard-def video player that will play in pretty much any web browser, thanks to Flash.
March Madness on Demand streams will also be available on CNN.com, ESPN.com, Facebook, TV.com, CBS.com, CNET.com, GameSpot.com and other sites around the web.
The March Madness on Demand iPhone application gives iPhone and iPod Touch users a chance to tune into the games on the go. The application offers access to live video via 3G, EDGE and Wi-Fi for $9.99. There’s also a scoreboard, and users can schedule score alerts to keep up to date with the games. Don’t want to shell out 10 bucks? There’s also a free application available. It doesn’t have any live video, but video highlights and news updates.
FLO TV will provide live video of all 63 games to AT&T customers with compatible handsets as well as owners of the FLO TV Personal Television, through the CBS Mobile channel.
Here are some other good online video resources to check out:
The NCAA Vault features full-length videos of the best games the Men’s College Basketball Tournament has seen in the last ten years. The site offers access to 150 games as well as some nifty social features.
Hulu won’t carry March Madness live games, but the site has come up with its own unique flavor of vaguely related madness, offering a Best In Show bracket that lets Glee compete against Community and Mercy against House. Who said March Madness wasn’t something for everyone?
We’ll add more links with related video content while the competition is underway, so make sure to check back occasionally.
Categories: Video News
3D TVs Are Coming, but Where’s the Content?
NewTeeVee - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 16:30
Panasonic started to sell its new line of 3D TVs through a partnership with Best Buy today, offering a bundle of a of 50-inch plasma TV, a 3D-capable Blu-ray player and a pair of glasses for around $2900. Consumers will also soon be able to buy similar set-ups from Samsung and Sony (sw SNE).
However, at least some of these devices won’t be available at Amazon and other online retailers. Panasonic announced that it’s going all bricks-and-mortar with 3D TV to educate consumers about the technology, according to an article from Marketwatch.com.
Question is, will consumers bite? Not only are 3D set-ups significantly more expensive that your regular LCD or LED screen, with pairs of extra glasses alone costing $150 a pop, but there’s also limited content available to show off the technology. Panasonic will give buyers of its 3D TVs a free Blu-ray disc of Monsters vs. Aliens, which is Dreamworks’s first 3D release. However, 3D box office blockbuster Avatar won’t even be available in 3D when it’s released on Blu-ray and DVD some time before June.
The reason for that decision, according to News Corp. COO Chase Carey, is that “the market is not there” for a 3D release of Avatar, Dow Jones reports. This revelation puts a damper on hopes that Avatar will help to kick-start the home 3D market after becoming the commercially most successful movie ever at the box office. Carey said that a 3D version of the movie could be released later down the road, hinting at the possibility that studios could use 3D as another way to enforce release windows in a world where viewers have gotten used to instant satisfaction.
Hollywood is on schedule to release more than three dozen 3D movies this year, but a slow adoption curve of home 3D set-ups, as well as the need to squeeze as much money as possible out of slumping DVD and Blu-ray sales, could entice other studios to adopt the idea of a 3D window as well – which in turn could hurt sales of 3D equipment. It’s like a snake swallowing its own tail, in all of its stereoscopic beauty.
Relief for consumer electronics makers like Panasonic and Samsung could come from sports programming. ESPN has announced that it will start a 3D sports network by June — just in time for the World Cup — and in the coming months DirecTV also plans to launch three 3D channels with movies and sports programming. Question is: Is that enough to entice consumers to plunk down 3000 dollars or more for a 3D setup?
GigaOm Pro analyst Alfred Poor predicted last October that the 3D market was just about ready for takeoff, but that it will take until 2012 for a critical mass of content to be available. I asked him how he feels about this now, given the fact that consumers may have to be extra patient to get their hands on 3D releases. Here’s his take:
“15 or 20 feature films a year do not make enough content to fill one week of major network prime time programming. There are going to be some early experiments with 3D, such as ESPN’s plans for 3D coverage of sporting events, but that won’t be enough to justify buying a new TV for anyone but the early adopters.”Poor added that it will take until 2013 before 3D uptake will be significant. Maybe Hollywood will have come around and actually put out some 3D titles on Blu-ray by that time.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user bark.
Related content on GigaOm Pro (subscription required):
Report: 3DTV Market is Ready for Takeoff
Are We Putting the 3-D Cart Before the Horse?
Categories: Video News
Broadcasters Counter Cable With Retrans Letter
VideoNuze.com News - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 16:15
Categories: Video News
Comcast Is Absent From Campaign to Change Retransmission Rules
VideoNuze.com News - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 16:05
Categories: Video News
Hulu on the iPad? Not as Easy as it Sounds
VideoNuze.com News - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 15:59
Categories: Video News
Got a Question for the FCC Chairman? Tell YouTube!
NewTeeVee - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 15:50
It’s hard to top having Barack Obama as a live-chat guest, but that isn’t stopping YouTube, who is following up their user-generated interview with the President with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.
Next Tuesday, Mar. 16, Genachowski will be answering user-submitted questions to topics like Access and Affordability, Mobile and Wireless and Security and Privacy. So if you’ve always wanted to grill a member of government about why web access isn’t as free and plentiful as it is in other countries, then go to YouTube’s CitizenTube channel and submit your question.
There are four days left to submit, and so far only 15 questions (one of which is this video, embedded above) have been contributed. So your odds of getting Genachowski’s attention? Pretty good. Oh, and while we’re at it: Feel free to link to your question in the comments if you end up participating.
Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Can Online Video Show Us the Future of Newspapers?
Categories: Video News
Can You Make a Living From Viral Videos? The OK Go Gives It a Shot.
VideoNuze.com News - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 15:49
Categories: Video News
YouTube calling: Now serving ads on the YouTube mobile site
VideoNuze.com News - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 15:45
Categories: Video News
Kyte First Online Video Platform To Enable Wireless High Quality Live Broadcasting
VideoNuze.com News - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 15:41
Categories: Video News
