Reel Pop

Microsoft adds Zune TV downloads

Microsoft has added about 800 episodes from MTV Networks, Turner, and NBCU to its online store as part of a subscription push. Other networks and movie deals are forthcoming. The 800 episodes pales in comparison to iTunes' 350 shows (w/ seasons of episodes to each show).

I hate to sound like a fashionably hip MS-trasher (and I've got no severe love for Apple), but truth is the Zune's crappy. I bought one for my mom for Christmas and spent the next 2 days on tech support because the Zune (like most MS products) is not intuitive to use. The download store, which didn't have TV shows at the time, is a mess of un-navigable options. The Zune itself, while pretty, is similarly complex. It's as if MS looked at every thing Apple did with the iPod then changed it slightly for the worse, just to see like they weren't copying from the iPod directly.

That's all very harsh, and, admittedly, I haven't looked at a Zune since December. But it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Google Video redesigns, adds popularity timeline

Google Video launched its redesign Friday, offering users several new methods of sorting search results  -- a list view, a grid view, and a TV view which allows searching while watching -- plus a search results timeline, which lets you research video popularity within the last day, week, month, or year. 

The surface changes allow Google Video to be a more effective window into what's happening online (perhaps competing with Vidmeter and pals?), but the surface changes haven't done much to stem the availability of copyrighted works on the site. The No. 1 mover and shaker right now: a clip from the Wesley Snipes movie "Hard Luck."

The biggest Jooster

Lotta buzz about Joost this past week, starting with this piece "major retrenchment" piece in the Times of London and followed by the tech blogs. Paidcontent followed up with a call to Joost PR (which denies problems, natch), and Om interviews CEO Volpi, who says Joost is focusing on more mature ad markets, mostly abroad.

Here's my brief take on Joost: It's a completely unnecessary application that's been leapfrogged by media conglomerates, who're offering their content online in ever greater numbers and varieties.

A longer take: When I reviewed Joost last October, I called it a good complement to TV that wasn't up to snuff as a standalone platform. Here, in a few simple reasons, is why Joost isn't the game changed everyone hyped it to be:

1. It's an amalgamation of tools already available online
   e.g., online video, chat, and social networking. I can watch video on any number of sites and chat with my friends using AIM, Yahoo Chat, Gchat, whatever. I don't need a platform like Joost to do that. In fact, Joost circumscribes your online wandering.
2. Taking advantage of those tools requires synchronous use
   You can use Joost's internal chat no matter what show you're watching, but there's the rub: you have to be on Joost to use it. The dominant trend in watching media is asynchronous consumption. Why not just AIM outside Joost while using Joost. And if you're doing that, why not look all around the web for content. And if you're doing that, why do you even need Joost?
3. Joost is a download, but there's an excellent variety of non-DL content available
   Joost plans to offer a browser version and live content. Bully for them. But for now, a downloadable app for online video makes almost zero sense -- unless you can give consumers something they can't get anywhere else, which Joost can't. Unless you're all about high demand channels like Earth Talk Today.

I look forward to checking out Joost's future versions. But they better be snappy. Everybody else done caught up already.

3D VideoStar puts your face in the movies

Really vain? Bored at work? Really vain? Check out the preview of 3D VideoStar, a new face-mapping technology from avatar creation co. Oddcast, which lets you superimpose your face onto a movie star's mug.

The technology hasn't been released yet, but there are demos on site that show subjects' faces being mapped into Sweeney Todd, Indiana Jones, and a Konami videogame. The effect varies in efficacy, and works best --like all special effects -- when the camera doesn't linger. Very Vanilla Sky.

Paramount launches Facebook vidshare app Voo-Zoo

Paramount announced today the launch of Voo-Zoo, a vidshare Facebook app that will eventually let users trade clips from thousands of films in Paramount's vault. Here's the Voo-Zoo group on Facebook (recent news: "we're stealth") and the direct link to the app.

Sporting a simple Flash layout, Voo-Zoo currently lets you choose clips from among 24 movies ("Zoolander," "Red October," "Top Gun," etc.) and send those clips to friends. Each time you send a clip you get a v-point, and each time a friend views the video you get another v-point. You can use your v-points to add specific clips to your personal vault, where you can view the clips at your leisure. Though the points system's apparently intended to add a competitive aspect to the collection of clips, there's currently no leaderboard or explanation of why the system is necessary.

After a clip plays, the Voo-Zoo player offers links to add the clip to your profile (yes, yet another app to add to your profile), send to a friend, and buy the DVD. None of those buttons were working when I tried the app out this morning, nor were videos playing correctly on my profile.

All in, if it works correctly, Voo-Zoo looks like a convenient way to share clips, and a low-cost way to buttress DVD sales. That said, it'd be even more convenient if Paramount were offering digital downloads of the movies in lieu of promoting physical formats.

Flickr's Video Conundrum

The recent hubbub concerning Microsoft's offer to acquire Yahoo -- totes fun BTW, if only because MicroHoo is the greatest euphemism ever for Elf wang -- got me thinking, belatedly, about Flickr's plan to offer video. As talk about MicroHoo competing with Google heats up, I've heard the Flickr video plan mentioned as a great way for Yahoo to grow Flickr's user base and ultimately compete with Google's YouTube.

I disagree. Partly because Flickr adding video seems, on its face, a bit like Keanu Reaves forming Dogstar. Or, I dunno, Corey Feldman fronting Corey Feldman's Truth Movement. But also because adding video will complicate the site's elegant organization, potentially alienate Flickr's passionate user base of photographers, and do little to nothing to compete against YouTube.

BTW, quick tangent concerning Corey Feldman: The only actor (besides Jack Black, God bless) to evidence a truly spectacular music career is Matt Damon. If you didn't know Matt Damon had a music career, edify thyself via his dulcet tones in Sarah Silverman's recent hit, "I'm F*cking Matt Damon". Or, better, this romantic little ditty from Eurotrip -- and the best movie song since Dudley Moore duet'd with Christopher Cross -- called "Scotty Doesn't Know", about the "nastiest, freakiest little sex puppet I know". On a related note, Matt Damon's a pimp.

Back to Flickr. Don't get me wrong -- I understand why adding video seems like a good idea. Flickr's a memory repository, a way of collating, archiving, and sharing your work. It succeeded by capitalizing on the burgeoning digital photo market, and exploiting other sites' usage restrictions (e.g., access only to reduced-size thumbnails, onerous ordering schemas, etc). Now that we record more and more on digital video, it seems to make sense -- from an archival standpoint, mind you -- for Flickr to ride the wave and include video. And convenience-wise, it makes sense for people to upload all their memories in a single repository.

But the soul of Flickr isn't archiving. It's sharing. And over the years, an extensive community's developed around the sharing of photographs, a medium that has its own history, aesthetic, and zealous fanboys.  I wonder whether those users will welcome the addition of video capabilities.

And what would they upload? Home videos? Short films? If anything, the Flickr crowd seems more cineaste than anything else. I don't see those types of videos attracting the big views of YouTube vids. Plus you've got to consider the lower signal-to-noise ratio of video to photography. It's relatively easy for an amateur photog to compose a good photograph. And, even if a particular photo on Flickr's no good, it's easily skippable. Not so with video. It's more difficult to shoot properly, more difficult still to edit.

Which brings us to Jumpcut, and whether Yahoo'll include that tool suite into Flickr. That's the inevitable step, right? And it makes sense. But again, Jumpcut's not going to be a huge traffic magnet, either. It's a boutique service, for boutique users.

At the EOD, Flickr's never going to compete with YouTube. Different users needs, different vibe, different roles. Forcing the site into the competitive role will only alienate its users and dilute its strengths. If Yahoo -- or MicroHoo -- is going to compete with YouTube, they should explore other options. Whatever happened to Soapbox? Oh.

Film Festival Entrants to Use File-sharing App

This article from the AP is laughably trumped up. The news: Silicon Valley's Cinequest Film Festival is using P2P app Vuze as an application and viewing platform to attract more participants. AP's nut graf: "But the software they chose also enables illegal sharing of movies, music, software and other content. And that raises the ironic prospect of an up-and-coming filmmaker getting a legitimate distribution deal after succeeding at Cinequest, only to see his future work traded illegally using the same software that gave him his break."

Oh please. If a film's successful, it'll be traded via P2P whether it originated on that platform or on a VHS tape. Executive director Halfdan Hussey has the perfect retort: "No artists have ever starved because too many people knew about them."

Cinequest is also using high-def platform Jaman to screen films.

Related: Showtime's eschewing DVD screeners this year for Brightcove.

Should YouTube's Homepage Reflect Current Events?

So the Hollywood news about YouTube at the beginning of this week was that Michel Gondry would be editing the homepage from Cannes. But by mid-week, the biggest news in town is Heath Ledger's pill-chomping demise. Not to mention the Tom Cruise scientology vids are still racking up views. But if you go to the YouTube homepage right now, you don't see any of this. You see a seemingly-random selection of featured videos. Wouldn't YouTube's homepage be more compelling if it featured timely content?

To answer the question, we have to ask ourselves what YouTube's mission is. If YouTube was a purely editorial publication, similar to a newspaper or news site, then yeah, the homepage should offer timely content.

But YouTube sits at the intersection of varied interests: webcammers making journal entries, auteurs creating short films, brands touting products, politicians touting themselves, etc ad infinitum. If we're to follow the newspaper analogy, in order to serve all these interests YouTube would have to advertise all of its content -- sports, international news, business, etc -- on the front page. Not an easy task, or necessarily something to strive for.

Not to mention YouTube also offers plenty of tools for finding the most viewed and discussed videos. If you're interested in seeing the movers and shakers, just hit up the videos tab.

Even so, I feel the YouTube homepage's lacking. The "videos being watched now" widget is almost useless; the thumbnails are too small to give any indication of what the videos are about, and the number of users watching videos at any one time means the selection is entirely random. Displaying each video's length over the thumbnail is an excellent communicative tool, be even so, that area's not compelling to me.  The "Your Subscriptions" section is useful for obvious reasons. But I take issue with the "Featured Videos" section, primarily b/c each video is given the same font weight title and space. Not to nitpick, but there's a reason why old school newspapers used headlines of different sizes -- to communicate importance and urgency. I get no sense of that on YouTube's homepage, even when I click into the "most viewed" and "most discussed" tabs.

YouTube's homepage has come a long ways since its inception. But the site's an indispensable part of our cultural narrative now. The videos on the site have a tremendous effect on everything from entertainment to politics. But you'd never know that by looking at the homepage.

Tooble.tv: Download YouTube vids to iPods

I haven't tested this myself (i own but a poor iPod Nano), but Tooble.tv apparently lets you download video directly to your iPod. Requires a small download, and is Mac-only for the time being, though a Windows version is under development. According to the site's literature, Tooble converts YouTube files to MP4s. At first glance, seems a little like a tiny Miro with its search ability (though only YouTube).

Shuddup, Apple TV is NOT a Revolution

The old Apple TV: $300, received video from your 'puter, had a cool screensaver, was 'sposed to sell 1 million units in its first year, sold 400k.

The new Apple TV: $229, downloads directly from iTunes, movies start playing w/in 30 seconds (Amazon UnBox takes hours), is the new hotness.

In all the hubbub, there's some rush to compare Apple TV to iTunes in terms of disruptive potential. Not going to be the same deal: iTunes video capability launched in 2005 in a market empty of competitors. Turned peeps on their ears. Apple TV entered last year -- and flopped(ish) -- because it didn't differentiate itself enough.

The new Apple TV also has a host of marketing vectors to contend with: competing with cable companies, competing with Netflix, set-top-box clutter, DVD machines, even net-connected televisions, all of which compete among convenience, volume, and pricing. Apple TV needs to fit into that mix. Starting with $4-5 rentals from the big studios -- including 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, Sony, MGM, Disney, Lionsgate, Universal, and New Line Cinema -- is a great start.

So is it all good news for the consumer? While the idea of a complete end-to-end video solution is appealing to marketers and clutter-eschewing OCD'ers, it's not so fetching for anyone concerned with Apple owning their movie library. Or, of having yet another proprietary system for their movie content. In the future, when you move your video library, you'll basically have to move two to four boxes. It ain't just a stack of DVDs or VHS tapes. Apple's not going to change that.

What's amazing to me is that anybody approaches these news announcements as if there's one ring to rule them all. The future is a messy, multi-boxed, rent/buy world. The consumer's satisfaction won't be set by one singe provider, but by their success in navigating all the available options. And the market winner won't be the best service, it'll be the service that advertises best. Take that to the bank.

Some thoughts on Fancast

Spent an hour this morning playing around with Fancast, the TV channel guide / trailer depo / streaming video portal that Comcast debuted at CES this week. Overall, it's a gorgeous site that has the potential to be a great video directory, but Comcast needs to improve several aspects of the user experience. Here are a few of my initial observations:

1. When you skip ahead in a movie or show, the first thing you're likely to see is a commercial. Not sure that's the best way to include advertisements, since it may be too disruptive to the viewer. Especially if the viewer is looking for a specific segment, and they have to skip around multiple times to find it.  Plus you can't pause the commercials, which seems like an obviously convenient feature to build in.
2. Each of the movies and TV shows have a different expiration date, but there doesn't seem to get a holistic overview of expiry dates for all video. So, it's hard to plan what to watch first.
3. Each show has tags, but no way to add your own. Understandable, but given that tags are just being used as keywords, why devote a menu item to them. Listing the keywords below the movie description would be as effective and less clutterful.
   It's almost as if Comcast is giving a nod to user-generated features, but not embracing the concept -- after all, there's no way to post comments on videos either, and Fancast doesn't include user-generated video (more on that below).
4. It's sometimes difficult to figure out if a TV show is available to watch immediately. For example, while watching The Family Guy, I clicked on the show TMNT under "Related" and was taken to that show's page, only to find out it was available on DVD, not fancast.com.
5. the label "Watch Now" can be misleading. Example: Currently the movie "Lions for Lambs" is promo'd on the homepage with a link that says "Watch Video". When you click that link, you're taken to the trailer. Not what's expected. When I went back, I saw a second link, "Last chance on demand", which took me to a page that said the show was ending it's run on Comcast's On Demand service after today.

Fancast sits at the tension point between Comcast's desire to promote its networks' long-form content and the Web's user-generated, social abilities.

It's a good directory for TV and DVD content, but not UGC video. That's probably a good decision on Comcast's part; Fancast can't battle YouTube. I certainly would never consider using a TV company's web site to find content created online.

But Comcast should consider adding the ability for users to comment, add tags, and interact with each other around the videos. Conversations spark pageviews, and pageviews spark ad dollars.

Video recorder invites hackers to tinker

Because I'm not a gadget-o-phile, I'll note this briefly and move on: The Neuros OSD is an open source video recorder that lets you capture media from any receiver/player in MPeg4 format. Not only is the device powered by Linux, the Chicago-based company that produces the Neuros literally invites hackers to modify its programming and circuitry to fit their needs. Good for ripping stacks of physical media to a flexible digital format. Very cool.

YouTube Lawyers Miffed Over Songza?

When YouTube first became popular, I remember hearing RIAA lawyers say that one reason the site was dangerous was because people could use streaming music videos like their own personal radio station. That just sounded retarded to me. An interesting use of YouTube, sure, but I didn't see any way users would widely adopt that feature.

Of course, I didn't predict Songza, the online music streaming service that pulls songs from YouTube vids. Over at Valleywag, there's anonymously-sourced reports that Google's lawyers are in a tizzy over this.

"I've heard that YouTube's engineering staff loves Songza," our source says. "But apparently the legal department has been saying things like they "revoke" Songza's rights to use YouTube." Which of course makes sense, considering YouTube signed deals with record labels to split ad revenues.

Dear Santa, please gift Songza with a cease and desist from YouTube. All I want for Christmas is irony.

TorrentSpy Loses Copyright Lawsuit

In a continuing sign of legal troubles for popular torrent-trading site TorrentSpy, a federal judge in California ruled today against the site on grounds that its operators engaged in "willful" deletion of important evidence.

The ruling opens the site to charges of copyright infringement in the U.S. The MPAA originally filed suit against the site last year. The judge then ordered TorrentSpy to track users so that the data could be given to the MPAA, but said that the service could mask IP addresses for the time being. TorrentSpy then decided to block US visitors, after which its traffic plunged.

TorrentSpy's servers are located in the Netherlands, and has continued to serve international users. There are several tools available to get around TorrentSpy's geographic restrictions.

IMHO: Despite the ruling against TorrentSpy, the MPAA and other interested parties are fighting a losing battle when pursuing individual sites. New sites and sharing methodologies appear regularly, making litigation at the site level not unlike a losing game of whack-a-mole.

See THR Esq for more on TorrentSpy ruling.

The AMPTP Needs a Widget

I'm not often that enthusiastic about widgets -- I think the hype outweighs the benefit -- but in the case of the AMPTP's strike cost calculator, they should commission a widget that can be embedded on blogs sympathetic to their cause, or at least interested in covering the ramifications of the strike. Just sayin. The more ubiquitous that ticker, the better they get their point across.

Sony BMG allows users to edit music vid clips on Yahoo

Not sure what to think about this. On the one hand, allowing users more freedom to creatively tinker with copyrighted works is a good thing. On the other hand, this is obviously a half-step that, while helping layusers to use/promote BMG music, will do little to prevent piracy.

The problem is that the tools that enable piracy are already widespread. If I wanted to mashup a music video with a webcam journal entry, it'd be as simple as opening any one of a number of free video editing tools. Combine that fact with the reality that I probably wouldn't be prosecuted for doing so. If I uploaded the clip to YouTube or any other site, Sony BMG would simply issue a takedown notice. And that's if they even find the video. So there's ability without disincentive.

LocateTV

LocateTV: Enter the name of the show you're looking for, and this site'll tell you when it's on TV next, DVDs available, and where it's available online for download and streaming.

NBC's video download service launches, blows

NBC Direct, the network's episode download beta, went live at nbc.com on Saturday. I don't have access, since I'm on a Mac, but here's what you can expect:

• Full episode downloads of several popular shows, including 30 Rock, The Office, Scrubs, etc.
• The shows are available for 7 days after the original air date
• Once downloaded, the shows must be viewed within 2 days, at which time the file becomes useless.

For these conveniences, NBC adds the following inconveniences:

• The service is PC and MSIE only
• Requires Windows Media Player
• Requires the latest Windows security update

Download Squad put together a video tutorial of the app. Thanks, guys.

NBC's service is interesting in that the company is also participating in Hulu, the recently-launched vidshare co-venture with News Corp. Recall also that NBC's Zucker recently lambasted Apple's iTunes for not providing much revenue to NBC. NBC's obviously experimenting at this point, and personally, I think it's the right thing to do. This first release sucks, but give them time. They're on the right track.

iTune-up

Is Steve Jobs rethinking the iTunes business model?

Tantalizing clue comes from blog The Evan Series that Apple will try a rental model online. Truth be told, I never understood why iTunes is a download-to-own model to begin with; sure, it’s a higher price point than video on demand, but surely there is a bigger market out there for renting movies and TV than buying outright. Then again, methinks this is wishful thinking considering Jobs hasn’t exactly displayed flexibility with the iTunes model. If NBC can’t adjust price points on one dinky series, is Apple really ready to make a much bigger wholesale change? Dare to dream.

Still, tempting to believe given yesterday’s news of Apple’s deal with IAC’s Ticketmaster.com that combines concert ticket sales with digital albums online. Innovative, but not quite the gamechanger that Apple would have with online VOD.

Posted by deputy editor Andrew Wallenstein

Media/Web coalition sets guidelines on copyrighted video

A coalition of major media and Internet companies issued guidelines yesterday for handling copyright-protected videos on large user-generated sites, according to USA Today.

Walt Disney, Viacom, CBS, NBC Universal and News Corp. joined Internet companies Microsoft, MySpace, Veoh Networks and Dailymotion. Google announced their own filtering technology this week and didn't participate. The coalition requires the sites to use filtering technology to block unauthorized uploads, as compared with YouTube's filter, which compares uploaded videos to a database then gives owners the option of removing the vid or placing ads around it.

The coalition sounds like a good idea -- always good to see companies working together rather than suing, which is the incentive in this case. But I have my doubts that a coalition of companies will be able to create a better filter than Google, which has struggled mightily to deploy its own (admittedly) imperfect system. In any case, infringement will continue to be a problem on sites not owned by Google or the four web companies in the coalition. Stop gap measures at best, forestalling a larger change in business models.

YouTube vids in Google Earth

Geotagged YouTube videos now appear in Google Earth.

Joost live TV

Joost to offer live TV in '08. Exactly what the platform needs. Also: Joost will offer widgets allowing viewers to bookmark favourite sporting moments and keep scores - some co-written with content partners, others by the community.

Tape it off the Internet

Haven't used this yet, but recommended by a friend: Tape it off the Internet, a TV info aggregator that provides links to downloads sites, and which is launching today.

How to bypass TorrentSpy restrictions

Following the news that TorrentSpy is blocking access to IP addresses in the US, Jackson at NTV explains the easy methods for bypassing the restrictions.

YouTube Camera

Casio launched two cameras today that include a YouTube Capture mode, which records at 640x480 in H.264.

Basic Hitchcock film techniques

#4: Dialogue means nothing. "People don’t always express their inner thoughts to one another," he said "a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person thinks or needs."  The focus of the scene should never be on what the characters are actually saying.  Have something else going on.  Resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.

rip/mix/burn/lawsuit/repeat

Well hello. RealNetworks dropped on a bomb on ya today at the D Conference when CEO Rob Glaser announced that the company's new (and free) downloadable player will allow users to save and organize video files in all major formats including Flash, QuickTime, RealMedia and Window Media. That's a pretty swell feature set from a company whose spammy products are typically reviled by the technorati. But Real has been making a comeback in the last few years, and its player is included in Google's Google Pack of free software. Real also has a history of bad blood with Microsoft, so interpret their new marketing position as you see fit.

Podzinger's YouTube search isn't that good

Earlier this week, adman and uber-mensch Andy Plesser posted the news about Podzinger's new YouTube search. Podzinger, widely-regarded as an excellent metadata indexing engine for audio files, is moving into video, and Andy noted that the company has analyzed, transcribed and organized some 1.5 million YouTube clips. Virginia Heffernan at the NYTimes' Screens blog followed up with a post, noting that 1.5 million is a small percentage of YouTube's McDonalds-sized 100 million videos served.

Here's another point: Podzinger's search isn't that good. Don't get me wrong, I've met some of the Podzinger crew and they are smart, smart people. But the search results aren't as useful, unfortunately, as Google's.

For example: A search for "machine guns" (first thing that popped in my head, am I sick?) returns this clip of Don Imus' show, this clip of some singing in a mosque, and this clip about dirty roommates. Google Video, meanwhile, returns these clips of machine gun firing ranges. Another search, this time for "taser" (help me) returns these results for Podzinger and these results from Google. Podzinger returns better results this time, but there are a few clunkers in there. Whereas Google returns a series of pertinent clips.

Third search: Kittens. Here's podzinger's results and Google Video results. Podzinger is obviously better than Google in searching beyond the videos' titles, but it looks to me like the engine is outsmarting itself somehow. Those are truly random vids that Podzinger returns.

Find deleted YouTube videos with Deletube

Haven't tried this out yet, but Deletube apparently lets you view and download videos that have been recently deleted from YouTube.

Final Four of Online Video

Click the image above for a full screen view.

In celebration of the 2007 NCAA tournament, and with a hat tip to "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything" (which we haven’t read but hear is super good), Reel Pop presents the Final Four of Online Video. Collected here, part one in the four-part series, which we're calling "Pain and Simple": Among the various ways to amuse yourself online, watching people maim themselves (and others) ranks well for lowest effort and highest reward. From nut shots to happy slaps, errant trampoline bounces to face plants on concrete, the Internet, it seems, was made for schadenfreude.

We'll be pubbing three more of these brackets before March 16th, when the NCAA Final Four starts. Whereas this bracket concentrates on stupid and painful videos, the next brackets will feature famous folks' faux pas, rapping/karaoke/cover bands, and insane stunts involving expensive machinery.

Ubiquity and loyalty are mutually exclusive

Interesting piece in the New York Times today about amateur auteurs and where they choose to syndicate their videos.

This quote struck me as odd:

Loyalty does count for something, Mr. Robinett said. "If YouTube stays on top, would you like to be the loyal guy who stuck it out, or the one who ran from here to there to be popular?" he said.

Personally, I'd rather be everywhere. In an online video world where there are no contracts, loyalty is a sucker's bet that gives you no advantages. In return for not getting paid directly for your work, you're able to publish yourself everywhere online. Why would you handicap your own exposure, the very thing you've set out to gain?

How to add any movie to your iPod without iTunes

Lifehacker has a great write-up on circumventing iTunes. You'll need four applications to do it: Floola, a cross-platform media copier; MyPodder, a podcast-copying utility that fills in Floola's gaps; PodPlayer, which lets you use your iPod on any computer; and CDex, which helps you rip CDs.

Also check out the complete guide to managing your iTunes videos, from iLounge.

Veoh relaunches, looks pretty

P2P vid-sharing site Veoh relaunched today with an updated familiar Web 2.0 design today (horizontal stripes! shiny buttons!).

According to Reel Pop friend Marshall Kirkpatrick over on Techcrunch, new features will be rolling out this week and include:

• Veoh will start automatically recommending videos to users; the algo was developed by MusicMatch's Ted Dunning.
• Pro users will be able to charge other users for downloads (sure to please the networks and studios)
• Pro users will also be able to cross-post videos to Google Video, MySpace and YouTube.

Veoh recently partnered with US Magazine and United Talent Agency. Former Disney maestro Michael Eisner is on the board. We briefly reviewed Veoh last year.

Veoh is one of my favorite video clients. Not only does it provide full-length, high-quality vids, but the site also allows you to download vids to multiple computers. IOW, if you install the client on a home computer and a work computer, you can specify which client each video goes to.

Veoh was sued last year by Io Group, a publisher of adult videos, for copyright infringement. Veoh has denied the allegations. A settlement conference for that lawsuit was scheduled for yesterday in San Jose federal district court.

Download Oscar films at oscartorrents.com

Those kids at the Pirate Bay. Such cards. They've launched a site that points to existing torrents (and other sources) of Oscar-nominated films:

To those worried about downloading in case they get sued: by our calculations, your chances of getting nailed are way less than your chances of winning the lottery. Don't think twice about it.

To all intellectual property landlords: we are aware that OscarTorrents might annoy you -- but contain your righteous indignation for a while, and think: we're only linking to torrents that already exist. Face it: your membrane has burst, and it wasn't us who burst it. Your precious bodily fluids are escaping.

You haven't beaten us, so why not join us? Think of a new business model that doesn't involve overpriced pieces of plastic and skanky cinemas hawking cheap carbohydrates while relying on $6/hr projectionists who can't keep a film in focus -- not to mention insulting your audiences by (to pick a few examples) surveilling us with nightvision glasses, searching bags, 30 minutes of commercials and bombarding us with ridiculous anti-piracy propaganda. Take a look at yourselves. Is it really any wonder we're winning?

Oh and look: Me with a free Sunday afternoon and all this extra bandwidth... :)

Brazilian prostitutes use Video iPod to advertise themselves

The more I hear about Brazil, the more I think it's a Joe Francis-sponsored Disneyland.

The lede in this article from Folha Online says it all: "The profession might be the oldest in the world, but the marketing being used is pretty new."  That marketing would be the Video iPod, which women on the Brazilian site mclass use to advertise their services. The site added MP4 downloads six months ago so that customers can compare videos or brag about their exploits.

How to watch TV on your Mac

Ask Metafilter respondents suggest both the Slingbox and a nifty device called the EyeTV Hybrid.

Apple TV announced, but only offers 720p

The Apple Store is still down for updating, but the news is out: Apple officially unveiled its ITV concept product that wirelessly streams video to your TV, and its called Apple TV.

Apple TV is a small(ish) box that can connect to five computers, offers USB, ethernet and HDMI inputs, a 40GB hard drive, and transmits at 802.11 b/g and 802.11n. The video sent is only 720p, which is quite a step below the 1080i that HD TV sets come equipped to broadcast. Apple TV costs $299.

The good news is that Apple TV looks like a great solution for those who have a large video library on their computers. And given that Apple is increasingly signing more content to iTunes, it looks like a convenient way to view movies. The bad news is that Microsoft's Xbox also offers great movie content, is already hooked to your TV, and offers HD content in 1080i. Of course, Xbox doesn't have an HDMI port, but rumor has it that port is coming soon.

Meanwhile, if you're not satisfied with Apple's or Microsoft's gear, you have a bevy of other options.

Zudeo Helps You Find Large Video Files. Sorta.

Azureus is a bittorrent application that I've been using for about a year now on my Mac. It's a great P2P application, so I was excited when I heard that the company was launching a content indexing site for finding large video files. I assumed the site would help me explain why P2P is so cool to someone like, say, my mom.

But when I checked out Zudeo today, I was a bit disappointed. Basically the site collects and collates video files that are too unwieldy for video-sharing sites. But it's hard to navigate and even harder to use. After ten minutes using the site I had managed to download Azureus for my PC, but still couldn't get any of the downloaded files to play. That's too bad, since some of the clips look amazing.

Azureus needs to do a better job of making Zudeo more user-friendly if they expect to get widespread adoption beyond geeks and videophiles.

Motionbox: Saving the Web, One Boring Vacation Video at a Time

Of the three plus hours of video I shot during my last beach vacation, there was exactly one moment -- hidden somewhere between the requisite shots of an early morning shoreline and a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit -- that I want to watch again: My friend Reid McDaniel, John Deere cap turned backwards, screaming the lyrics to "Sweet Child of Mine" into a conch shell. Truly, a thing to be amazed by.

Unfortunately, I've long since consigned the disk that holds that performance to a shoebox. Because no matter how much I want to share it, Reid's Axl-worthy opus is surrounded, literally, by hours of superfluous footage. His three minute karaoke bit would be an instant YouTube classic. But the ten minutes of sand and wind preceding it? Not so much.

This is precisely the problem that a small, 25-person video-sharing company called Motionbox wants to help you solve.

"The video sites are filled with very long, very boring clips that might only have one interesting part in them," said Motionbox co-founder CEO Chris O'Brien from his 10th floor office in Manhattan's financial district. "You're not going to watch it all, and neither is anybody else."

Since the company's public launch last July, Motionbox has been helping users not only upload their videos, but also trim them and share the relevant segments with friends, family and the Web.

Part of this technology is "deep tagging," or applying labels to specific segments or chapters of a video. Once a video has been deep tagged, any user can navigate directly to those segments of the video^[1], skipping the chaff to get to the wheat as it were.

Or, if a user prefers, they can simply drag a selection box across a video's segments (see picture, left) and crop the video down. Either way, the user can then share or embed the full clip, or just share and embed the segment they like.

As Motionbox co-founder and CMO Douglas Warshaw^[2] tells it, "the container is absolutely irrelevant to you. You want to get to the good stuff, and the good stuff is defined by what you want to watch, it's not an aesthetic or normative value."

This approach to online video solves a problem that's familiar to anyone who's ventured into the dark continent beyond YouTube's "most viewed" category. The videos populating that "long tail" of content tend to depart from the edited, narrative style that makes longer professional videos (Daily Show clips, news reports) and snack-sized amateur videos (crazy dogs, morons) successful. Most of the time, unedited videos are just plain boring.

Beyond deep tagging and cropping, Motionbox's video player can also help users make better decisions about what to watch.

The thumbnail version of the player (see photo, right) lets you preview a clip by "scrubbing" its timeline, potentially saving you the effort of actually watching the video to see if it's good.

These features apply the principles of the attention economy, in which Web users parcel out their precious time in the form of clicks, page views and time spent.^[3]

(In the attention economy, the quality of your video watching experience is indirectly proportional to how difficult it is to watch the clip. This is one reason YouTube has been so successful -- videos are quick to load and there are no advertisements -- and also why pre-roll advertising tends to alienate users.)

On the surface, Motionbox's approach to video seems similar to the approach taken by editing site Jumpcut or Eyespot. All three sites are betting that, as consumers become savvy with online video tools, they'll move from sharing and commenting to splicing and dicing.

"But people who are trying to recreate the iMovie experience online are completely going down a rabbit hole," said Warshaw. According to him, Motionbox is aiming at a much broader audience that simply wants to see and share what's relevant to them.

Warshaw is hoping that Motionbox's simple tools will appeal to lay users who don't want power-editing features. "Some of these things, you have to take a class to figure out. I don't want to take that class," he said.

As Motionbox's traffic stats suggest, the site is still well below the average user's radar. But the company isn't relying on user-edited video alone. Currently Motionbox supports video-sharing for NBC's affiliate stations. Users can upload video through, say, NBC Channel 5 in Chicago and can tag and view that video once it's approved by the station's staff. The video is also automatically added to Motionbox's servers, so the user gets the immediate benefit of interacting with the video at motionbox.com as well.

Motionbox execs are mum about future partnership specifics, but hint that they'll have something to announce in the next 60 to 90 days.

Among the types of partners they're looking at: Media companies and music labels, businesses that need to provide a place for fans to legally -- and easily -- upload videos of concerts and other public appearances. The label would provide the content, while Motionbox provides the video-sharing and editing technology, plus an online community.

"You're a media company," Warshaw said. "But I'm a mosh pit."

[1] Google Video also offers the ability to jump to a precise moment in a video. But Google's solution requires the user to type a timestamp into the video's URL. An engineer's solution to a lay user's problem.

[2] Warshaw looks like a more handsome John Turturro.

[3] Motionbox's technology potentially also addresses the problem of video findability. Whereas searching for text on the Web is relatively easy, a successful search for video requires that the video be tagged and described appropriately. I discussed findability briefly in this post.
 

Remember the good old days, when people knew stuff?

Reporting on the Streaming Media West conference is like being embedded with the 101st Greek chorus division, which only repeats one phrase: "I don't know."

What's the business model for online video? I dunno. What's the right way to advertise with video? I dunno. Who's on first? Dunno, dunno, dunno. The bottom line? There's no bottom line.

So for those of you hoping that Google's purchase of YouTube would bring some order to the online video marketplace, think again. The acquisition may justify the business value of video aggregation (at least to some), but it doesn't begin to answer the pressing questions about advertising, syndication, sales and search that the industry is grappling with now.

First, online video has a findability problem. Finding distributed video is much more difficult than finding Web pages. When you do a Web search, you're searching for text on a page. But when you search for video, you're searching for media described by text. If those descriptors -- known as metadata -- aren't there, or if the metadata is incomplete or innacurate, your search is going to return bad results.

Heck, even if the metadata is good, the search engine can't interpret whether you want professional, first source content or amateur analysis.

A simple search for NASCAR (what? I'm from Virginia) on Google Video returns an EA sports commercial, crash footage, and an amateur talk show. A similar search on Yahoo returns two music videos, some amateur footage, and an ABC news show.

In an effort to solve this problem, video search company Blinkx analyzes contextual information surrounding a video (the video en situ, as it were) and then apply descriptions to the video.

Another promising company is Podzinger, which arguably has the best speech recognition software. Then there's Motionbox, a video-sharing platform experimenting with "deep tagging" of video to help you find a precise moment in a long video.

Beyond search, there are other business needs in the online video value chain that need to be satisfied. National and global advertisers like Avenue A/Razorfish, for example, need to buy inventory in large chunks. And despite the success of YouTube, which serves 100M+ videos per day, there aren't a lot of sites which can offer a large audience.

"Agencies need to operate on scale," said Hunter Walk, product manager for Google Video, in response to a question about amateur video producers disintermediating large portals. "So small buys on small sites won't work."

Advertisers also face roadblocks from different advertising methods on different sites -- pre-roll, post-roll, adjacent banner, etc. Avenue A/Razorfish director of emerging platforms Jeremy Lockhorn says they're also hemmed in by both the lack of inventory online and questions regarding the frequency of repeated video ads. By way of example he mentioned the ABC media player, which can irk viewers by showing the same 30-second advertisement multiple times during a show.

Closely related to the unknowns in advertising are the unknowns on the sales side of the equation. Video syndication is a very popular form of content distribution these days, but most sales teams are compensated based on traffic to a destination site, not traffic to an external destination.

And then you've got the problem of user-generated content and Hollywood. It's a new romantic ideal that an unknown like Brookers or Ask A Ninja will be discovered online and handed a plush compensation package from a studio. But unfortunately, the question of who owns the content and who gets a cut of the profits is still unanswered. Every service which distributes a video obtains certain rights.

"The person who shot the content owns it, obviously," said Chris O'Brien, CEO of Motionbox. "We have some rights too, though, to store it and tag it." Motionbox also submits some of their content to NBC, "but NBC has their own set of rights that they claim on the content."

All these unknowns just skim the surface of questions facing the online video marketplace. The wild west days of video sharing may be ending, but there's still plenty of dust yet to settle.

Metacafe's Pay Scheme Goes Live

Back in my day we didn't get paid when someone watched our home videos. No, and we also had to walk uphill to school. Both ways. With boards nailed to our feet for shoes. But times have changed. These days, that endearing video you took of Aunt Irma breaking her clavicle while doing the funky chicken can earn you some serious cake.

To wit: Metacafe is going public today with its Producer Rewards program, which pays you $5 for every 1,000 views your videos get. Small print: Payment starts after 20,000 views ($100), and the video has to earn a minimum rating of three out of five stars. According to CEO Arik Czerniak, videos can get 20,000 views in just a few hours. Up until today, the Producer Rewards plan was only available on a limited basis.

Metacafe, you'll recall, is the current pretender to YouTube's throne. The site racked up about 535M page views in August, far outstripping every site but YouTube.

The video below has been viewed about about 1.3M times and earned its creators over $6,000.

Friday Night Madness - video powered by Metacafe

As Net users become more and more savvy about the value of their attention online, I'm confident the most fervent users will begin to expect renumeration like this. Pay schemes won't obviate for-free sites like YouTube though, especially since YouTube will have the copyrighted content that everybody digs. At any rate, it should be interesting to see what effect Producer Rewards will have on Metacafe's traffic vis-a-vis YouTube.

MySpace Founder Bets on Sex. Again.

MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan has acquired majority stake in Flurl.com, a Belgium-based video search engine and aggregation site that's known for it's ability to find racy content. Greenspan also owns Vidilife, a smutty social network and video sharing community.

vSocial Launches Custom Branding Video Tools

vSocial, the video-sharing site I knocked for being an Arabic porn magnet, is launching a new suite of video branding tools today. The hosted service, called vConnect, helps publishers to custom brand, stream, and embed their own videos.

vSocial is one of the top ten or so video sites, receiving about 1.5M page views per month. But as CEO Mark Sigal told me, the site really isn't trying to be a YouTube competitor. The real business value is in tools like vConnect, which don't rely on the destination site.

vSocial seems like a good option if you're a small business that wants to promote itself through video, but doesn't want the YouTube logo in the right hand corner. Non-commercial use of vConnect is $30 per year, and a small business license starts at $75 per month.

vSocial also launched a site redesign today, and it looks much, much more professional.

The 2006 Midterms According to YouTube

Can YouTube help predict an election?

If the paucity of political videos on YouTube is any indication, nobody's going to voting at all.

While browsing YouTube the other day I noticed that there weren't very many political videos. I don't mean copies of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. I mean videos uploaded by politicians running for office, or video mashups by voters or other footage from live events.

So I started researching the midterm Senate races on YouTube. I copied this Wikipedia list of Senate races and searched on YouTube for each candidate's name, taking note of the number of videos that search returned. I also noted the most popular or interesting videos, and the number of views and comments they received. The results for the first ten states of the Union (in alphabetical order) are here.

The results aren't encouraging. If viewing political videos is any measure, YouTubers aren't very engaged with our government. Of course, YouTube may not be an ideal test bed for measuring engagement. But in an Internet era supposedly dominated by social media, it doesn't hurt to test our assumptions on what should be the most democratic medium of them all.

Here's what I've learned so far:

• Television ads predominate. But they're not very popular. Politicians either don't have time to speak directly to video-sharers, or they don't know how. The most successful television ads on YouTube seem to be the funny ones. Such as Ned Lamont has a Messy Desk. (143,468 views)
• Candidates don't typically upload their own videos or go to pains to "own" their keywords on YouTube. Most videos are copied segments of national TV shows.
• If a race or candidate isn't covered by the national news, it probably won't be very popular on YouTube.
• Dark horse candidates don't appear very often on YouTube. This may be because they don't have television ads, and thus nobody copies them to YouTube.
• If a candidate doesn't try to control his/her keywords on YouTube, their opponent can use that weakness against them. For example, Michigan incumbent Debbie Stabenow (D) doesn't have a good presence on YouTube. The most popular videos containing her name were uploaded by her opponent, Mike Bouchard (R). Those videos have titles such as Debbie Stabenow Doesn't Want You to See This and Shh...Don't Let Debbie Know You've Seen This.
• Videos about female candidates seem to concentrate on their sexuality. For examples, see videos about Florida's Katherine Harris or Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar.
• Mashups of political ads are funny. One of my favorite's in a mashup of Mark Kennedy's (R-Minnesota) TV ad with this footage.  Politicians should fear these mashups. But they could also use them to great effect. The ones they put on TV now are too slow. Guess they're just playing to the base of older voters.
• The apparently don't like the Internet in Indiana. None of the senate candidates have any type of video on YouTube.
• Barak Obama is popular.
• Ted Kennedy is not unlike Bluto Blutarski.

So go ahead. Check out the 2006 Midterm Senate Races According to YouTube. Let me know what you think. The next ten states will be uploaded later this week.

p.s. I can't promise there won't be a broken link or some such. Lots of copying and pasting. If you find anything, please let me know and I'll fix it.

Blip.tv: Farm Team for the New, New Hollywood

Anyone who followed YouTube phenom lonelygirl15 as she skyrocketed to fame, or watched as self-made stars like Brookers or the Lonely Island trio found mainstream outlets for their work, understands that Hollywood has begun to use online video sites as a new kind of talent pool. These days, talent is less likely to be found at an open audition in Los Angeles than, say, performing karaoke in their bedroom in Worcester, MA.

It's a phenomenon that New York startup blip.tv is hoping to take advantage of.

"It's definitely clear to me that the Hollywood world is beginning to see sites like blip.tv as the farm teams of talent," said blip.tv COO Dina Kaplan from her 3rd-floor loft office in Manhattan's Chinatown.

While some sites try to capitalize on the online video boom by aggregating as much content as possible -- copyrighted or otherwise -- blip.tv is taking a more personal approach. The real value, according to Kaplan, is in the videobloggers themselves.

Like YouTube, Blip.tv is a combination destination and syndication portal that helps videobloggers publish their work both on blip.tv and on other sites. Unlike YouTube though, blip.tv isn't interested in promoting music videos, network television shows, or other previously published and copyrighted work.

"We try very hard to promote a culture of sharing original content," said CEO Mike Hudack. "Don't get me wrong, there's a market for piracy, but we're very careful to steer our users away from that. We just don't need it...In some ways it does put you at a disadvantage, but there's also something very attractive about the higher quality you'll find."

Blip.tv isn't hurting for quality shows. Perhaps the most famous videoblogger using the site is Amanda Congdon, who approached Blip.tv before her Amanda Across America tour.
Blip.tv is also a second home to shows like Goodnight Burbank, Something to be Desired, and the war videoblog Alive in Baghdad.

Blip.tv works like you'd expect it would, with some additional features. Videobloggers upload their work to the site and create a subdomain. The blogger can then choose to syndicate his or her videos to blogs or other sites. Starting tomorrow, users will be able to cross-post their work directly to MySpace. The new video will then be automatically announced in the bloggers' friends' MySpace bulletin space.

The MySpace feature is just one of several new features that Blip.tv will be rolling out on Saturday. Perhaps the biggest change will be the site's new homepage, which will attempt to provide an experience more akin to a television network's site.

Hudack said they're making the homepage change out of consideration for their role as editorial gatekeepers, while trying to retain the site community's independent attitude. "We're sort of removing the heavy hand of the studios," he said.

Saturday will also mark the introduction of several new advertising models on the site.  Hudack and Kaplan said that new advertising deals will allow bloggers to choose between different types of advertising, from pre-roll to post-roll to contextual banner ads that appear alongside the videos.

They noted that on blip.tv, whether to apply advertising to a video is at the blogger's discretion.

So far, Blip.tv's traffic stats -- about 1 million page views per month according to comScore -- seem to indicate the site is still struggling to attract users. Hudack and Kaplan say, however, it's not their intent to be a destination site.

Blip.tv has also recently partnered with video mashup site Eyespot (which also recently added new features), and the company provides the underlying technology for CNN's user-generated video site, CNN Exchange.

By positioning themselves as a conduit for new voices, Blip.tv hopes to become something of a talent powerbroker in the online video age.

"The talent, they're not just going to jump at the opportunity to be on TV anymore," said Kaplan.

"I mean, I'm not saying they're going to turn down millions of dollars, but it'll take a lot more to make them jump from a medium that lets them play by their own rules."

Catching Up: Video Searcher Blinkx Hooks Up with Microsoft

I missed this on Monday: Video Search site Blinkx partnered with Microsoft to provide video search technology on Microsoft's Live.com. Below, a looooong Google video roundtable discussion about vertical search trends that includes Blinkx co-founder Shuranga Chandratillake, and my analysis of the Microsoft deal afterwards.

Blinkx is a powerful video search engine, and they appear to have better video search results than Google. Blinkx already powers video search for AOL and Lycos, and indexes video from big media sites across the Web. Their secret search sauce helps them index not only metadata about a video but the speech in the video as well. They don't copy the videos themselves though -- they just hold the metadata. That makes them a great value-added service and, I assume, frees them up to make licensing deals, such as this one with Microsoft.

It's interesting that Microsoft wrapped up a deal with Blinkx on the day that Google acquired YouTube. The greatest benefit Google will provide YouTube (besides deep pockets) is the integration of Google's search technology. By hooking up with Blinkx, Microsoft will try to compete on that level and increase the efficacy of live.com, their new online search and branding destination, that is partially an answer to Google's online services. No word on whether Microsoft will apply Blinkx technology to MSN Soapbox, though.

Yahoo Buys Video-Editing and Sharing Site Jumpcut

Color me surprised. The video-editing and sharing site Jumpcut has just been acquired by Yahoo. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

By joining Yahoo, Jumpcut joins an impressive and succesful lineup of "Web 2.0" sites, incuding photo-sharing destination Flickr and social bookmarking service de.icio.us,  assocations Jumpcut made sure to tout in their blog post about the deal. Jumpcut has a relatively small amount of traffic -- about 6 million page views per month, according to Alexa -- but I bet Yahoo acquired them less for traffic than for the site's potential. The acquisition is a bet that video-editing will soon trend upward in popularity, much like photo sharing did in the last few years. I think it's a solid bet.

The acquisition also makes sense given Yahoo's perennial interest in courting (or competing with) Hollywood and the television networks. As media companies become more comfortable with handing their brands to consumers -- Chevy's Tahoe commerical experiment and NBC's "Office" promos being early examples -- they will start using community-based sites like Jumpcut to promote those brands.

Jumpcut has made quite a few improvements since I briefly profiled them earlier this year. (Here's a deeper profile from Pete Cashmore at Mashable.) The site recently hooked up with Starz Entertainment in a deal to allow fans to edit clips of the Starz microseries "Stand Up or Shut Up!" And the upcoming movie "The Power of Few" is holding open auditions on the site.

Competitors to Jumpcut include eyespot and Motionbox. Here's an Alexa chart showing their traffic, which has been hovering around 6M page views per month.

alexa website statistics by alexaholic

AOL offers free syndicated video search

AOL is hemorrhaging jobs, business plans and data, so they figured they'd offer to distribute their video search tool for free, too.

In an attempt to garner more vide search share, AOL is making available their video search application programming interfaces (APIs) that Web publishers can place on their own sites for free, but with a limit of 10,000 searches per day.

Translation: Put a little video search box on your blog, but don't spam AOL with search requests.

You can also submit your videos to AOL's video search through AOL Director Accounts. Opening the search APIs will let publishers customize how video results are returned.  

So, for instance, if you run a celeb gossip site you can limit your video search capability to certain categories. Like videos tagged with "Jessica Biel". Or "Me gusta Jessica". Or "Holy McHot Pants."