Blip.tv

Blip.tv began life all the way back in 2005, which in Web terms makes it a golden oldie of sorts. Blip.tv has for most of its life concentrated on assisting those brave souls who create Web series in the hopes of having a hit. By hosting, distributing, and selling advertising against videos, Blip.tv has become an important part of the online video landscape.

Blip.tv TV Network

Now, however, Blip.tv has relaunched with a newly-redesigned website which places content from and center. Blip.tv has become something of a Hulu for original content. And that’s no bad thing.

Of the 50,000 series Blip.tv hosts, around 1,800 will be featured on the site initially, representing the best of the best. These shows can be found via ‘Category’ or ‘Search’ functions which makes the range of content much easier to sift through.

Once the viewer finds what they’re looking for they’ll find each producer has a customized portion of the site, able to promote particular episodes. Viewing options include HD and full-screen, making a lean-back experience entirely feasible.

Free and Fantastic

All the Web series featured on Blip.tv are free to watch, with both the company and the content creator making money from a 50/50 split of the advertising revenue. Which is a sweet deal for all concerned. The content creators get distribution, promotion, and support, Blip.tv gets to exist, and the viewers get to watch stuff for free.

There is a huge and hugely-varied selection of content now on Blip.tv, all handpicked by the company. And the site has become a veritable smörgåsbord of content designed to appeal to all tastes. It’s also returned to its roots somewhat, having started out as a forum for Web series creators to air their wares. The execution is much more refined this time around, however.

Conclusions

This redesign effectively turns the Blip.tv portal into an on-demand television network. Viewers get to choose what shows they want to watch from the best of what the company has to offer. If you’re searching for a place to start exploring Web video series then Blip.tv has just made itself invaluable.

However, navigating the breadth of choice now out there and filtering the available content is getting harder as a result. Enter Magma, which acts like a Billboard Hot 100 for online video.

Online Video Growth

Online video has grown, and continues to grow, in popularity and breadth of content. The choice of sites, portals, content, and video clips now available is breathtaking.

There are the long-form video destinations such as Hulu and the BBC iPlayer, and short-form video factories such as YouTube and Dailymotion. Between all of them the range of content available to your average viewer is simply astonishing. It would take years to watch it all.

Online Video Filter

As it gets harder for the discerning Internet user to filter out the chaff and only watch the wheat, ways of doing the filtering are going to become more and more important.

There are already ways of doing this. Our sister site, Web TV Hub offers a daily dose of the most timely and viral videos doing the rounds. Then there is Digg, which shows which videos are creating enough of a buzz to get featured on the site. Then there is, of course, word of mouth.

Magma – Online Video Charts

Magma is a new video portal that has been in private beta for the last few months. But this week has seen it opened up to the public for the first time.

Magma acts as a filter for online video from all across the Web. It organizes videos into charts based on the number of views, comments, related videos, and social media activity each receives.

You can see a Billboard-style Hot 100 from all corners of the Web or view the top videos on a number of different sites, including YouTube, Hulu, Facebook, and Twitter.

Magma – Other Features

If you sign up for a user account then there are additional features. Everyone has their own channel which they can add videos to, and you can see what other people are adding to theirs, adding a good sense of community.social networking to the whole thing.

Magma uses video embeds to enable you to watch the videos right from the site itself. Meaning you haven’t got to follow links to watch recommended content as you do with other social networking sites.

Conclusions

Magma is a brilliant yet simple idea which should aid most people’s video viewing habits. The one word of warning is how addictive it is – you’re suddenly faced with a mountain of content you know other people are enjoying. And that begs you to want to watch it too.

Michael Moore’s latest documentary film, Slacker Uprising, is set to be available for free on the Internet. Does this signal a change in the movie industry or just Moore’s desire to see Obama in the White House?

When Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, for free over the Internet last year, it was seen as a forward-thinking step which could revolutionise the way music is distributed.

Changing The Status Quo?

The album did well, but most people still ended up downloading it via less legal means. And the experiment didn’t really do anything to end the monopoly that the big record companies enjoy.

Could film-maker Michael Moore do any better in persuading the movie industry that there is an alternative to releasing movies in to cinemas?

Available For Free Online

Michael Moore, known for his hard-hitting documentaries attacking the status quo, is releasing Slacker Uprising for free on the Internet before it gets released on DVD.

The 97-minute-long film will be available to watch on BlipTV for three weeks starting from September 23rd. It will then be released on DVD on October 7th through Amazon and Netflix.

Unfortunately it will only be available to watch for free online in the United States and Canada, which alienates a lot of the world who would want to watch the documentary.

Slacker Uprising Trailer

Get Bush Out!

Slacker Uprising is a film following Michael Moore’s 62-city tour around the US swing states in the build-up to the 2004 US Presidential Election. Moore wanted Bush out and democrat John Kerry in.

While Moore’s hope wasn’t fulfilled, the documentary is now being released for free over the Internet in order to reach as many people as possible before this year’s US Presidential Election between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Moore Speaks

Moore released a statement explaining the move:

“This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans. The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November. I think Slacker Uprising will inspire (millions) to get off the couch and give voting a chance.”

The film cost an estimated $2 million to make, and Moore thinks that this method of release will end up costing him $1 million. But neither Moore or the distributor, Brave New Films, plan to profit from the release.

Conclusions

This is an intriguing development, especially as Moore could have guaranteed a pay day by releasing this film in cinemas. He has instead decided to give his fans a present in the hope of inspiring more people to vote.

This comes just a week after No End In Sight was announced as being the first widely-released feature film to be screened in its entirety on YouTube.

Will this revolutionise the movie industry? Not a chance. But it does at least show the Web is becoming a more accepted form of distribution for long-form content.

Related Ad

Buy the ‘Slacker Uprising’ DVD from Amazon

The biggest and best one was by market leader YouTube, who decided to take the RickRolling phenomenon and take it global and mainstream.

What Is RickRolling

RickRolling is the trick of getting someone to click on a link to go to a story or page related to the subject at hand, maybe in a forum thread or chatroom.

However, instead of the link that is expected, you’re taken to an image or video of Rick Astley performing his one and only hit from the 1980s, Never Gonna Give You Up.

I’ll admit to having been RickRolled a few times, but today I was RickRolled by YouTube itself, as it changed the links from all the ‘Featured Videos’ on the front page of both the global, and regional sites redirect to Rick.

Kill Or Cure?

By doing this, YouTube are either going to kill the meme or make it grow even bigger. It’s estimated that 3 million people have already been tricked by this April Fools joke today.

Apart from YouTube, other video companies also decided to get in on the act.

Blip.tv and Break A Leg

Blip.tv also went down the RickRolling route, this time announcing the introduction of the Rick-Roll advertising format, to work alongside the Pre-Roll and Post-Roll.

Hugely popular Web TV sitcom Break A Leg has been cancelled, or not as the case may be. The announcement was posted on an ominous sounding post on the site, with some people even believing it.

I’m just glad that April Fools Day only comes around once a year as however funny some of these may be, and being RickRolled by YouTube was indeed funny, it’s still annoying being bombarded online for 24 hours.

More vloggers are setting up their own video blogs on independent blogging platforms, causing an overall decrease in the percentage of vlogs on YouTube, according to a quarterly Mefeedia survey.

The number of independent vlogsites are up a total of 7% this quarter. The popular vlogging platform Blip.tv seems to have benefited the most from this shift, registering a 17% rise in just three months and now hosting 56% more vloggers than YouTube.

The benefits of independent vlogsite operation are claimed to be primarily in the monetarization process through advertising and sponsorships. However, some video producers claim that the total control over the context of the videos is important as well.

Mefeedia based its statistics on 23,010 video blogs releasing 4,159 new videos per day, and averaging 10 episodes per vlog.

• YouTube
• Blip.tv
• VideoEgg
• MetaCafe
• Dailymotion
• Veoh
• Google Video
• Grouper
• Jumpcut
• Eyespot
• MSN SoapBox
• MySpace Video
• AOL Uncut Video

So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick look to see just how popular these video sharing sites really are, and how their popularity compares.

I’ve just done this quickly using Alexa rank, its not the most accurate, but its the best we’ve got really. Here are the results:

It is is no surprize to see that YouTube is at the top, but it is particularly to see how closely tied DailyMotion.com and MetaCafe.com are.

Unfortunately Google Video, AOL Uncut, MySpace video or MSN soapbox could not be represented as Alexa does not give results for subdomains (e.g video.google.com), but just the main domain.

The growth of the top 5

The graph below compares the growth of the 5 most popular sites sitting at the video sharing table. The graph covers the past three years.

As you can see MetaCafe has not seen any growth for a number of months and meanwhile DailyMotion has shot up from behind to become a serious contender in the video sharing wars, most likely because it became a bit of a haven for pirated videos.

Am I missing out any of the big video sharing players here that have an Alexa rank higher than 50,000?