I’m going to start this concept by taking a look at the year in online video via WebProNews coverage. It would be near impossible for me to cover every single shred of news that occurred in this area, as this has truly been the year for online video. So I’m going to limit it to some highlights, but don’t worry, there are still plenty of stories to reminisce about. Let’s take it month by month.

January

The year started off with tons of things going on in the online video industry. Netflix announced a partnership with LG  that would see the development of a set-top box for people to watch video content from the Internet on high-definition TVs. Not long after that, Netflix started allowing unlimited streaming of its available online content.

Meanwhile in the month of January, TiVo announced that it would offer online video, MTV partnered with Dailymotion and Veoh, and MySpaceTV partnered with the BBC  to show BBC content on MySpace.

Robert Scoble was leaving PodTech  to join Fast Company and create the video channel FastCompany.tv and the Associated Press was introducing  a new local video feature for affiliate news sites to upload locally produced video.

Nielsen was reporting that traffic to some online video sites had doubled since the writers’ strike, and Pew Internet Research project indicated that about 50% of those surveyed had been to video-sharing sites, up from 38% the previous year. Burst Media said that 72% of consumers had viewed video online and the majority of all age segments have watched online videos. They also reported that over half of people would stop watching videos once an in-stream ad came on.

Comment on January’s happenings.

February

February saw Yahoo acquire Maven Networks for approximately $160 million and introduce a new version of Yahoo Video,  which would embody "the whole spectrum of video found throughout Yahoo!, including music, movies, TV, news, sports, and a whole lot more." Google was preparing video ads for search results, and releasing a beta for AdSense for Video.

Accustream reported that four out of ten people over the age of 65 viewed online video, and User-generated videos totaled 22 billion views in 2007, a 70% increase from the previous year. Nielsen (whose TV panel started measuring online video)  reported on a study that found that women lean towards watching network television online while men favor user-generated content.

An interesting story also came out in February about the police using YouTube for leads. "Everbody’s using YouTube, so there’s no reason police departments shouldn’t use it too," said the Arlington, VA Police Department.

Comment on February’s happenings.

March

March saw a big step forward for online video when not only did Hulu launch publicly, but Sports Illustrated unlocked its video vault  and South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker and Comedy Central decided to make every episode of the hit TV show available online  for streaming at a new ad-supported site called SouthParkStudios.com. And let’s not forget NCAA March Madness.

Also in March, YouTube introduced its video analytics program YouTube Insight, and started playing around with higher resolution video clips. They also released APIs  for uploading videos and video responses, adding/editing user and video metadata, fetching localized standard feeds, performing custom queries, and customizing the player UI and controlling video playback.

eMarketer took a look at online video growth in the U.S. and projected that by the end of the year over 50% of all Americans would be viewers.

Comment on March’s happenings.

April

April saw South Park make another ripple in the online video pool when they aired an episode called "Canada on Strike," which parodied the writers strike and how people were turning to the Internet for their video-watching entertainment. The episode took jabs at a number of YouTube sensations like the Star Wars kid and the dramatic gopher.

Mirroring this theme, the Convergence Consulting Group issued a report about how people are increasingly turning to their computers for their television viewing. "We estimate online viewing of full-episode Broadcast/Cable Network TV as a percentage of the traditional TV base was 9% in 2007 (6% in 2006), and we forecast 14% for 2008, 19% for 2009, and 23% for 2010," the report said. Insight Research projected that streaming video and music would bring in $70 billion in revenue over the next six years.

Also in April, popular Yahoo-owned Photo sharing site Flickr started allowing users to post 90-second video clips. YouTube, who  combined with Google as a whole made up 77% of the video market, rolled out some new policy changes that relaxed penalties against violators of its community guidelines.

Hitwise took an interesting look at how search engines play an increasingly important role in driving traffic to video sites.

Comment on April’s Happenings.

May

The band Weezer put out a video to its song Pork and Beans, which (much like the recent South Park episode) featured many references to YouTube sensations (many of the same ones in fact).

Netflix and Roku launched their set-top box and StumbleUpon struck video content deals with College Humor, Funny or Die, Vimeo, Dailymotion, veoh.com and vbs.tv. Rumors circulated that Google and/or News Corp were interested in video search engine Blinkx.

ABI research was reporting that online video viewers would top one billion in 2013 and TubeMogul examined video view-counting standards. Actors and studios battled over online clips, while a bill came up that would require major producers of Internet video to add captions and video description soundtracks.

Comment on May’s happenings.

June

In June, CBS and Yahoo partnered to distribute CBS programs and presumably to compete with Hulu. Sony announced   that YouTube would be available on the company’s Bravia Internet Video Link service.

At this point, YouTube and Google accounted for 80% of video traffic. One report showed that YouTube and Disney were the top video sites for kids, while another looked at how online video would drive IP traffic growth. Ipsos MediaCT reported that while during February of 2007, about 11% of video content was watched on PCs, the number grew to 19% for the same month in 2008.

Comment on June’s happenings.

July

In July, Hulu made its way   into the top ten in comScore’s "videos viewed" category, establishing the site as a huge player in the game. Meanwhile, YouTube partnered with Lionsgate to distribute movie and TV clips, and share ad revenue. Mediaset filed a lawsuit against Google over YouTube-related copyright-infringement.

Video advertising was a hot topic in July. The Kelsey Group said that small and medium-sized businesses would play a big part in the expansion of online video advertising with contributions growing from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2012. Classified Intelligence talked about how video was the "new display ad." Ipsos MediaCT found that online video viewers were more likely to accept ads in videos that are professionally produced in exchange for access to free content than they were in user-gerenerated content. YouTube was still struggling with advertising strategies.

Comment on July’s happenings.

August

In August RocketBoom inked a deal with Sony to distribute the webcast across its properties, including Crackle.com, Playstation 3, Playstation Portable, Bravia i-Link and syndicated network of 3rd party distributors. Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen (who is also a Facebook board member) and HP’s business tech manager, Ben Horowitz bought stakes in mobile video streaming service Qik.

The FCC was said to be interested in lowering cable prices as a result of online video’s popularity as Nielsen reported strong growth among video-sharing sites.

Also in August, Search Engine Strategies came to San Jose, and WebProNews covered an interesting session about video search optimization.

Comment on August’s happenings.

September

In September, Hulu was getting episodes of popular NBC shows before they were even airing on television. To me, this truly emphasizes online video’s emergence. NBC further empphasized the importance of online video by reporting that it streamed over 12 million hours of Olympics content across its digital platforms, with 7 million visitors watching over 30 millions streams of live and Video On Demand content at NBCOlympics.com.

Amazon started offering streams of thousands of movies and shows, and also let users start watching some directly from it’s IMDB (Internet Movie Database) property.

Google launched Google Video for business, a new addition to Google Premium Apps that enables workers in organizations to share videos by uploading them to Google Apps and inviting co-workers to view the content. Google also started integrating audio indexing or "GAudi" (Google Audio Indexing) into video search.

MySpace started offering the option to record video directly from there, and Vint Cerf talked about the future of the Internet and how video will become more interactive with more content and ad control given to the consumer.

YouTube unveiled a new and improved video uploader that lets you:

- enter in your video’s metadata (title, description, tags, etc.) while the upload is processing.

- Upload multiple files at once, without downloading a plugin (separate progress bars will display for each file).

- The file-size limit for uploads has been raised from 100MB to 1GB.

YouTube also introduced a "Hot Spots" feature for YouTube Insight that allows you to actually pinpoint the specific parts of videos that get viewed the most, which would be very interesting to advertisers.

Comment on September’s happenings.

October

October was another big month for online video. Playboy announced that it would even drop its DVD business in favor of going strictly online. MTV finally gave fans of the original MTV what they’ve been lacking from the network for years, and that is access to all the music videos they want to see. They launched MTVmusic.com, a site dedicated to watching music videos online.

Netflix opened their API to developers to syndicate content and even allow commercial use of it. They also formed a partnership with TiVo for streaming content.

YouTube started putting commercials in videos, held a live event featuring a number of "YouTube sensations," and finally started an initiative to offer full-length TV episodes. They also provided an option to link to any moment within a YouTube video.

Joost decided to get more competitive and allow users to use the service without having to download an application. Sling.com was announced and would combine streaming content from as many as sixty partners with the home television streaming capabilities of the "Slingbox", which includes "on demand" and DVR content as well as online video.

Veoh reported on a study that found that online video viewers are more engaged, and a Web Influencers Internet Media Tour survey conducted by D S Simon Productions found that:

- 77% of online media sites project the use of video to increase over the next year.

- 45% of TV stations use outside video for their websites.

- 67% of radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and bloggers use outside video on their websites.

- TV stations were most likely to use video at 79%

- websites and bloggers were second at 70%

- Over half of all newspaper and magazines are using video on their sites

Ipsos Media CT’s Motion study found that online video growth was being driven by women and older consumers, and the Wall Street Journal talked about video search engines getting smarter.

Cisco released survey results showing the influence of online video and social media applications on American’s political engagement. This was talked about much more after Obama won the election.

On a funny online video-related note, some guy got arrested only after he pointed the cops to YouTube videos of him driving recklessly.

Comment on October’s happenings.

November

Speaking of Obama, in November it was announced that he would be giving weekly addresses to the nation via online video to be posted at his Change.gov site as well as YouTube (his administration has its own channel). This is another milestone for online video. The upcoming President of the United States is using it to address the nation. That’s pretty big. In other presidential online video happenings, YouTube encouraged voters to "video their votes" on Election Day.

YouTube was quite busy in November. They introduced new translation features and enhanced features in embedded videos.

YouTube also began offering sponsored videos and announced live programming. Then there was the wholetesting of HD content and the unveiling of the new bigger and wider video player. I also wrote a piece on the educational benefits of YouTube.

Blip.tv joined YouTube in iPhone compatibility and MySpace launched its PrimeTime application.

Comment on November’s Happenings.

December

That just about brings us to the present. So far in December, Jason Miller looked at the top 5 viral video searches from Truveo, which were as follows:

1.    will.i.am’s “Yes, We Can”
2.    Paris Hilton Responds to John McCain Ad
3.    Fred Goes Swimming
4.    Kobe Jumps Over Car
5.    Valentina Hasan Sings “Ken Lee”

And YouTube has given musicians a chance to play Carnegie Hall. Being how we are in the very early days of the month, I don’t have much else for you in this section, but it will be interesting to see what else occurs before the year is up.

Comment on December’s happenings.

All in all, there is no question that it’s been an exciting year for online video, and there promises to be even more excitement in the coming year. We’re likely to see much more growth in online video viewing, advertising, and search. We can no doubt expect a few more funny stories as well, and probably some tragic ones like the recent Justin.tv suicide. It’s all just a testament to how the medium has become part of everyday life for so many people. All signs point to tremendous growth in this respect. I’ve said it before. We’re in the middle of an "online video revolution" and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.

Please feel free to point out any other online video-related stories from 2008 that I did not mention. I know there are plenty more.

Clearly, Joost has taken notice to sites like Hulu (and even YouTube for that matter, who is beginning to show full-length television episodes) and decided that the only way to compete would be to drop the desktop client in favor of a browser-based platform that would provide far less hassle for users, and hopefully (for them) attract more of them to the service.

This was certainly a smart move on Joost’s part (although it probably would’ve been smarter to have made the move a long time ago), but still my first impression of the new and improved Joost is a bit on the unimpressed side. As I said last month, one of the reasons Joost has fallen behind in the first place is a lack of content, which shouldn’t really be an issue considering they have struck deals with CBS, Viacom, and even Major League Baseball. For some reason, these partnerships haven’t propelled Joost to the status of what such backing would suggest.

They claim to have over 46,000 professionally-produced videos coming in at 8,000 hours at this point, though browsing through it for a few minutes, I wasn’t able to find much that captured my interest. Provided these partnerships bear fruit, it should be enough to attract some eyeballs. Joost doesn’t have my favorite shows like Hulu does. But my favorite shows aren’t everybody’s favorite shows, so that’s neither here nor there. I guess at the very least, there is another viewing option for online video-seekers. Something else to watch.

They go beyond simply watching videos though. The new Joost is implementing some social features in an effort to generate more interest from users. "People have always relied on their friends’ recommendations to figure out which movies they want to watch, or talked about their favorite TV shows and moments with friends and colleagues – and now Joost has combined those real-life experiences in one online destination," says Mike Volpi, CEO, Joost. "Our integrated social tools make it easier than ever for people to find the shows, film and music they want to watch, and to form communities around that content, which ultimately enriches their overall experience."

I’m not sure if this is going to be something that’s going to necessarily propel them to the top of the game either, but a little social never hurt anybody. It certainly won’t be bad for the site. Their social aspirations don’t stop internally though. They’re working with a number of third-party platforms, including Boxee, chumby, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, Lifestream, Meebo, Mister Wong, Netlog, Netvibes, reddit and VideoSurf, to "make it easier for people to use and access Joost across the web."

They can do all of the socializing they like, but if the content isn’t there, people wont’ use it. As long as they continue to build upon their content and are able to truly take advantage of their big-name partnerships, they will continue to have a chance to compete with Hulu, YouTube, and everybody else. 

Sling Media is mostly known for its "SlingBox", a piece of hardware that lets users stream their regular TV signals to wherever they want. Its "Sling Catcher", which allows TV signals to be transferred from room to room in a user’s house is getting ready to ship as well.
 
Sling.com will combine streaming content from as many as sixty partners with the home television streaming capabilities of the Slingbox, which includes "on demand" and DVR content – the whole enchilada. In other words, if this is all it’s cracked up to be, Hulu, Joost, and others better be thinking of new edges as well, or at least adding the home-TV concept into their current packages, and partnering with as many content providers as possible.

As I’ve said nearly every day this week, I believe, we are seeing strides made every day toward a future of online video domination, and this offering from Sling looks to be the latest piece of the pie, and potentially a pretty big one at that.

It’s not even launched yet though, so I’m not going to hype it up anymore than that. Just suffice it to say, I’m intrigued. I can’t wait to see what video news surfaces tomorrow. I’m still pretty excited about the Netflix Starz partnership, if just for the simple fact that Netflix seems to be taking the expansion of its streaming content catalog more seriously.  TechCrunch has a look at an email Sling sent to its Beta invitees, and Mercury News has more details on the SlingCatcher if you’re interested.

Hulu has been getting a lot of attention lately, as it climbs up the charts. This is especially helped by the fact that they are even giving users TV shows before they air on real TV. Amazon just started streaming thousands of titles through Amazon Video On Demand. Netflix is being streamed right into television sets through the popular XBox gaming console. And nobody’s completely forgotten about YouTube.

Joost is beginning to realize that they need to do something to keep themselves in the game. They have now decided to ditch their desktop client, an application that users had to download in order to view programming, in favor of a simpler browser plug-in that will let users simply watch videos online.

"Joost isn’t the only startup to give up backing solely the client," says Om Malik at GigaOm. "Veoh and Jaman adopted a browser-and-client strategy, which has helped boost their audience." Joost is no doubt hoping for a similar effect for their own business as the market has been flooded with other options for viewers to find stuff to watch.

One of the reasons Joost has fallen behind in the first place is a lack of content, which shouldn’t really be an issue considering they have struck deals with CBS, Viacom, and even Major League Baseball. For some reason, these partnerships haven’t propelled Joost to the status of what such backing would suggest.

"Considering Hulu is backed by News Corp and NBC Universal, it’s doubtful Joost will be able to do much to improve its catalog either, since Hulu’s huge competitive advantage is its access to content," says Mashable’s Adam Ostrow. "Making things even worse, Joost’s own investor and partner CBS has many shows available on its website that are nowhere to be found on Joost."

For that matter, you can even find links to CBS shows on Hulu. If Joost wants to truly compete, they’re going to have to do something about problems like this. Making the move to the browser is probably a good step in the right direction, but it’s going to take a lot more than that.

Update: TechCrunch is showing screenshots and video of the new Joost.

Normally we see clever people leaving the staid establishment for the exciting run along the catastrophe curve that is life in a startup. Sometimes people run that path in reverse, leading to the news out of the BBC today.

Van Gulik may have been helped along that path by Joost. At NewTeeVee, the story goes that a Joost spokesperson said they fired their chief technical officer.

Whatever happened, van Gulik will be able to start quickly with his new BBC duties. He brings some nice geek credibility with him, as a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Membership in the prestigious open source group comes by invitation only.

Van Gulik will be responsible for the design and construction of the BBC’s next generation back-end infrastructure to support all interactive services including bbc.co.uk, BBCi and BBC Mobile, the BBC said in their statement.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/bbc-squeezes-joost-cto-2008-01/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/joost-meebo-partner-on-channel-chat-2007-11 http://www.webpronews.com/joost-meebo-partner-on-channel-chat-2007-11#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:35:11 +0000 Doug Caverly http://www.webpronews.com/?p=41674 When watching a movie in a public theater, it’s usually best not to talk.  But when watching online videos in your own home, there’s no reason not to, and Joost and Meebo have just partnered to provide a new communication option. ]]> When watching a movie in a public theater, it’s usually best not to talk.  But when watching online videos in your own home, there’s no reason not to, and Joost and Meebo have just partnered to provide a new communication option.

These networks – or any users, really – should provide positive publicity for both Joost and Meebo, the latter of which powers Channel Chat.  And actually, since Meebo users can reach people on a number of instant-messing products (including AIM, Yahoo, and Google Talk), there will be few things to stand in the way of the service’s spread.

Yet Jason Jennings writes, “I look forward to seeing these two services integrated and also to see if Joost is able to build a good enough catalog to be worth while for TV fanatics like myself,” and it’s that catalog that appears to act as a barrier.

I was happy, for example, to see Red Green heavily featured on Joost’s iLaugh channel.  A Joost search for “Red Green” only yields 41 results, however, while YouTube offers around 15,000.  Users will have to decide for themselves if an added chat feature can make up for a deficit of over 10,000 videos.

But the streaming peer-to-peer TV project from the guys behind Kazaa and Skype — Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom — has effectively been open for some time now. Although it took an invitation, anyone who was a beta tester had unlimited numbers of them.

I have to admit that some of my enthusiasm for and interest in Joost has waned since I took part in the early beta, invitations for which were in hot demand (I wrote a piece about Joost for the Globe awhile back, which I cross-posted here). I kept up with the beta updates for awhile, but then gradually lost interest. Why? A bunch of reasons. The player is a resource hog, for one thing. But mostly it was the content. I didn’t mind checking it out now and then, but there was nothing compelling. As far as I can tell, Joost still hasn’t solved that problem.

One of the interesting things that Joost promised, but hasn’t really done anything with so far, is the ability for developers to use the Joost API to add widgets of various kinds, as Liz describes in her post. Apart from great content, this seems like the killer feature to me — ways to build in social networking (other than just chat) that can pull people in and make them want to use the thing. So far that appeal is missing, at least for me, although MG Siegler at ParisLemon still thinks that Joost is da bomb.

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The new projects from Jim Henson Productions, Telepictures Productions and Warner Bros. Animation represent WBTVG’s strategy for Studio 2.0, to feature new projects in the broadband space and act a as stepping stone for new television series.

Studio 2.0 programming will be distributed on a number of broadband and wireless platforms and sites, frequently in partnership with advertisers, as WBTVG pursues a wide ranging networked distribution strategy.

The announcement was made today by Bruce Rosenblum, President, Warner Bros. Television Group, and Craig Hunegs, Executive Vice President, Business Management, Warner Bros. Television Group.

"As I’ve often said, at our heart, Warner Bros. is a content company," said Rosenblum. "For the Television Group’s digital strategy to truly be realized, we are focusing equally on the creation of original programming specifically designed for the digital market and developing advertiser-supported targeted distribution strategies."

"We do not have a one-size-fits-all distribution strategy," said Hunegs. "We will tailor distribution to each project in a way that most effectively reaches its potential audience by working across multiple new media VOD ventures – from new Warner Bros. destinations and branded channels to well-known sites and aggregators like Joost and RealNetworks and oftentimes in partnership with an advertiser."

“In a bid to reach a new audience outside of the biking community, the partnerships will see cycling and biking content, such as professional cycling and Cycling.tv’s own programmes, distributed through both of the channels,” reports the NMA.

This announcement comes just a week or so after Floyd Landis spoke at the Googleplex, and just days after Blinkx announced that its index now contains 14 million hours of content.  A National Lampoon channel recently launched on Joost, as well – it seems like all three companies (or “subjects,” in regards to Landis and Cycling.tv) are keeping themselves in the news.

And Cycling.tv should do a good job of keeping people up to date on the latest biking news.  “Cycling.tv streams live cycling and video on demand every day of the year and recently showed highlights of Tour de France,” according to the NMA.

But beware: as your humble author found out, and a Wikipedia page confirms, “The site requires ActiveX controls for much of its content, making most of the site non-viewable on non-Microsoft browsers.”

That’s not so great.  On the other hand, it makes Cycling.tv’s deals with Blinkx and Joost all the more important.

"We are excited to launch the National Lampoon channel on Joost, as our partnership with this new and innovative service provides another destination for our fans worldwide to interact with our programming," said Daniel Laikin, National Lampoon’s Chief Executive Officer.

"We increasingly have found that more and more of our fans reach us through the Internet, and providing a premier viewing destination like Joost with our content is a natural way for us to extend the reach of our brand."

All of National Lampoon’s new programming will be available on Joost. Initial programming includes webisodes, SpinCycle mashimations and the Fat Guy Nation series.

Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, executive vice president of content strategy and acquisition for Joost, said, "With Joost, people have the opportunity to find, interact and enjoy high-quality programming in every category, and enhancing our comedy offering is one of our key priorities.

"With the National Lampoon channel, people everywhere have access to this popular, world-renowned comedy whenever they want it."