Google

Google is, without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest name on the Internet right now. The search giant controls the search sector, is making gains with its Chrome Web browser, has Maps, Street View, and all those other cool apps, and, of course, owns YouTube.

Google has also made the move to smartphones with its Android operating system. But it’s yet to venture into the living room, at least until now.

Google Living Room

There have been rumors of Google attempting to enter the living room by way of a set-top box for a while now, but nothing was really known about the efforts, and whether they would actually amount to anything.

But the New York Times is now reporting that Google TV is its name, it’s very real, and Google already has partners lined up.

Google TV

Google, Intel, and Sony are alleged to be jointly developing the Google TV platform. Google TV would take the form of both hardware (set-top boxes) and software (built into TVs) and bring Google right into the living room.

Google TV would be based on the Android operating system and be open to software developers. The intention being to create a similar buzz and number of applications as experienced by the Apple App Store and other smartphone app platforms.

Google TV would allow users to browse and search the Web, watch online video via Web-based apps including YouTube and Hulu (although Boxee’s efforts to do the same thing have been shuttered), and play downloadable games.

Google isn’t doing this for nothing: it would allow the tech giant to place ads on the system and put it at the forefront of the move to connected TV platforms, of which there are an increasing number.

Conclusions

Google has enough clout to not only make this happen but to sweep away all the other connected TV platforms already out there or emerging from development. But it cannot afford any mistakes on this score, and there’s still no real evidence that people want these platforms in any great number.

More details, and an official announcement from Google and/or its partners are definitely needed before I’ll be getting too excited.

TubeMogul

TubeMogul was the first dedicated online video analytics firm, enabling content creators to track the performance of their videos over a number of online video services.

But that clearly wasn’t enough for the company, which has now launched Play Time, its video advertising platform. And the firm is already seeing results from the year-long beta.

Play Time

According to MediaWeek, TubeMogul is using its experience in video analytics to its advantage with Play Time. The company is aiming to be “far more open and effective than other video networks” and “the largest video ad network in the world.”

Which are big ambitions indeed, but TubeMogul is confident that by using the data from its analytics platform it can target video ads at exactly the right people.

Beta Testing Results

TubeMogul has been testing Play Time over the past year, running campaigns for the likes of 20th Century Fox, Coca Cola, Nestlé, and Kmart. Which are very big names with some very big advertising bucks to play with.

According to NewTeeVee, the company is already reporting higher revenues from this new part of its business than the analytics service it has been specializing in for the last few years. So expect this to become a larger part of the company’s business than it is currently is.

Indeed, Tubemogul has reportedly already started buying “inventory from the top 250 comScore sites.”

Conclusions

Rivals are seeing TubeMogul’s move into video advertising as a conflict of interests, but i really don’t see why. The company is merely attempting to use its experience and the data it has gained from one part of its business to its advantage in another field. And if the results from the beta period are anything to go by, it’s proving a successful strategy.

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Online Video In The U.K.

Online video is veritably booming in the U.K.

The country already has the fantastic BBC iPlayer, my personal favorite 4oD from Channel 4, ITV Player, and Demand Five. And that’s just the catch-up services for the free-to-air terrestrial channels.

There is also Sky Player (for BSkyB subscribers), and the likes of YouTube, SeeSaw, and the MSN Video Player catering for people after older shows online. And Hulu is still endeavoring to kick-start its service in the U.K. as it breaks out of the U.S. and pushes into Europe.

MSN Video Player

Microsoft announced the MSN Video Player in July 2009. The beta version of the fledgling service then launched in August 2009 with an initial 300 hours of content, mostly from BBC Worldwide and All3Media.

Shows on offer from the start included Hustle, Mock the Week, Dead Ringers, That Mitchell and Webb Look, How to Look Good Naked, 10 Years Younger, and Peep Show. All of which were offered for free with advertising support.

Positive Changes

The MSN Video Player has now left beta and fully launched, and many improvements have been made since I reviewed the site over six months ago.

• The site has been redesigned, and is now much easier to navigate.
• As well as TV Shows, there are sections dedicated to TV Clips, Movie Trailers, and even the best Viral Video clips.
• There is a lot more content available now than during the beta. It’s still all archive content, but that was always going to be the case.
• Video quality has been vastly improved, with a shift away from Adobe Flash to Microsoft’s own Silverlight technology.
• The Video Player has a Dim Lights feature, as well as the option to share the clip on a number of social networking sites.

Conclusions

Microsoft has clearly used the extended beta period to improve the MSN Video Player considerably. And it has therefore moved several places up the league table. Although there’s no guarantee that there’ll be content on the service you’ll want to watch, the chances are high. And the user experience now makes watching that content more of a pleasure than a chore.

EyeView

The Web offers a whole new platform for advertisers to sell their wares. But as with every other medium, there are ways of increasing the success of campaigns.

EyeView offers video solutions for advertisers, having spent the last three years working for and with big names such as Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, HP, and eBay.

EyeView wants to know how much you know about works and what doesn’t in the realm of video advertising, and has created a Video Marketing Quiz which everyone can take.

Video Marketing Quiz

EyeView’s 2010 Video Marketing Quiz contains eight questions pertaining to the way video advertising can be used on the Web.

The questions cover the following elements, as well as many more:

• Whether auto-playing a video advert is more effective than letting the viewer decide when to start the promo.
• Whether video adverts are more effective than static banner ads.
• Whether the gender of the video voiceover person affects engagement.
• Whether the way the video advert is presented really affects click-through rates.
• Whether a lengthy video – more than two minutes – is a big no-no.

I took the quiz myself and only scored four out of a possible eight points. Mainly because as a consumer rather than marketer myself, I answered intuitively, and not all the answers proved to be so.

Conclusions

EyeView’s Video Marketing Quiz offers an intriguing glimpse at a world which most consumers and Web users will know little about. Which is why companies such as EyeView exist in the first place: to help companies and brands maximize their use of video advertising.

SpeedBit’s Free Video boost the speed of video downloading speed and also ends interruptions in video streaming.

No More Freezing YouTube Videos

I have a fairly old Sony VAIO computer, around 10 years old, that I still use because I don’t have the heart to put it out to pasture yet.  And being an old computer, I’ve had problems with YouTube videos that will freeze a couple seconds into each clip.

The videos start like normally, then just freeze completely, showing that the video is loading but going nowhere.  I do all I can to keep the computer in good shape, but alas, those videos would just keep freezing on me.  So what to do…?

The Accelerating Solution…

So I recently gave SpeedBit’s free Video Accelerator a try, and it did a great job speading up streaming videos on my old box.  No more freezing.

What SpeedBit’s accelerator does is integrates itself automatically with your Web browser and system, and then, once you start viewing videos SpeedBit goes to work behind the scenes and kicks things up a notch.

SpeedBit Accelerator at Work

When you start a video up in YouTube, the video will reach a point when it previously have frozen and a popup will appear in the lower right corner of your screen, telling you that it’s now running:

According to SpeedBit’s site, the Video Accelerator supports videos from over 150 sites such as:

• YouTube
• Yahoo
• Dailymotion
• Metacafe
• Facebook
• MySpace
• 5min
• Veoh
• Grouper
• Stage 6
• AOL Video
• Bebo
• Break
• EA
• ESPN
• Etc.

Although not included in the list, I also tried out some clips on Hulu and these all ran perfectly as well (Yay! More ‘Greatest American Hero’!)

SpeedBit Video Accelerator: Free Version vs. Premium

It should be noted that the SpeedBit Video Accelerator program is a free download, but if you want the full version with all the bells and whistles (namely, HD Video Acceleration and iTunes Acceleration) you will need to purchase the premium version (currently $19.99 a year.)

But for all that it does offer with the free program, its definitely worth checking out as the boost in video streaming speed is noteworthy.

Video Review of the SpeedBit Video Accelerator

SpeedBit Video Accelerator

• SpeedBit Video Accelerator
• SpeedBit Video Accelerator Features

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YouTube Mobile

YouTube’s mobile site is a version of the online video leader built especially for mobile phone users. It isn’t the same as the specially-created YouTube interfaces on iPhone and Android, although users of these two platforms can visit the mobile site at m.youtube.com.

The YouTube mobile site is surprisingly popular, boasting “millions of people all over the world … streaming tens of millions of videos every day.” That isn’t even close to the main YouTube Web site, which now boasts over one billion videos viewed every day.

However, with growth quoted as “over 160% in 2009,” and that likely to rise even higher in 2010, Google is keen to wring every drop of revenue possible out of YouTube as it endeavors to make a profit from the site.

Mobile Advertising

Google today announced it was rolling out advertising on the YouTube mobile site. At least in the U.S. and Japan. The decision follows a trial last summer which was successful in terms of “click-throughs, user experience, and brand awareness.”

Banner ads will now appear on the Home, Search, and Browse pages, but none will yet appear on the actual videos.

Google has been filling the full-fledged YouTube Web site with ads, including overlays and pre-rolls on the videos themselves. But the lack of Flash on handsets and the range of different standards throughout the industry means they aren’t yet available on the mobile site. Google is planning to introduce overlay and pre-rolls in the future though.

Conclusions

With big name advertisers including Sony, Kia, Land Rover, and L’Oreal having already bitten the YouTube mobile advertising bullet, the future looks positive. It seems most advertisers will now want to be present on the mobile site as well as the main Web site.

Which can only aid Google’s effort to turn YouTube from being the online video standard to the ‘profitable’ online video standard. How close it is to managing that is open to interpretation.

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Online Video Viewing Figures

Online video viewing figures are generally on the up. To a vast degree. As more and more people start turning to the Web for new ways of watching movies and television content, the big players are generally picking up new viewers left, right, and center.

But it isn’t exactly plain sailing, especially for everyone other than YouTube who is currently fighting to maintain or steal second place behind the Google-owned site.

January 2010 ComScore

ComScore today revealed the online video rankings for January 2010. After declaring after the December figures were released that online video is “showing no signs of slowing down in growth,” the inevitable happened: a slowing down in growth.

Overall viewing figures dropped by around 2.5 percent, from 33.2 billion views in December 2009 to 32.4 billion views January 2010. Unique viewers also dropped, from 177.9 million to 173.4 million.

YouTube, listed as Google Sites, is still number one, and by a huge margin. The site accounted for 39.5 percent of the total views in January 2010, although that was down on its total for December 2009.

Hulu & Vevo Suffer

Hulu’s sweet victory last month was only short-lived. While it hit one billion video views in December for the first time in its history, that figure dropped back massively to 903 million in January. The obvious explanation is a lack of must-see episodes as shows such as Glee take mid-season hiatuses. And the loss of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report won’t help Hulu recover in the future.

Vevo actually gained video views in January, rising from 28.1 million in December to 32.4 million. However, as the site didn’t launch until December 9, this actually constitutes a drop in real terms. And that’s despite comScore including YouTube music videos in Vevo’s numbers.

Conclusions

Is this merely a short-term glitch or a sign that the growth of online video has suddenly and inexplicably hit its peak? The fact is that the same sites are dominating and until a new venture rises up the charts a certain amount of leveling off should be expected.

Movie Piracy

Movie piracy has been with us for decades. The advent of home video made piracy a huge problem for Hollywood, and DVD and Blu-ray have continued that trend. But it’s the Internet that truly made piracy mainstream and something everyone does.

That is if you believe sharing media files on the Internet is piracy, of course. The law says it is, naturally.

File-sharing sites are probably more numerous now than ever before, with both well-known and underground options available to anyone who wants to acquire a media file – be it movie, TV show, game, computer program, or whatever – for free online.

And The Piracy Oscar Goes To…

TorrentFreak recently compiled data pertaining to the ten movies nominated for ‘Best Picture’ at the 2010 Academy Awards. The real winner of the Oscar is expected to come from Avatar and The Hurt Locker. And yet these two films play second (and third) fiddle to District 9 in the piracy stakes.

TorrentFreak’s Piracy Oscars

1. District 9 – 12,639,000
2. Avatar – 11,326,000
3. The Hurt Locker – 7,930,000
4. Up – 5,437,000
5. Inglourious Basterds – 5,376,000
6. Precious – 4,922,000
7. Up In The Air – 4,855,000
8. A Serious Man – 3,836,000
9. The Blind Side – 1,845,000
10. An Education – 683,000

It’s important to note that these films range in age considerably, and so high quality torrents have been available to download for varying lengths of time. Had they all been available for the same length of time then Avatar would undoubtedly take the number one spot.

Hollywood’s Fightback

Hollywood, the movie studios, and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have collectively tried to nip movie piracy on the Web in the bud. And they must have thought they were getting somewhere when they won their case against The Pirate Bay.

But nothing has really changed. The Pirate Bay as merely one conduit for movie piracy. And there are plenty of other options open to people willing to break the law and download movies online.

Conclusions

The point is that Hollywood hasn’t yet got a handle on Internet piracy. It isn’t going anywhere, whatever efforts are made to that end.

The key for the movie studios is to both utilize the technology to their own advantage and make sure there are legal, low-cost alternatives which could help discourage people from taking this route. Until then, all the Oscar hopefuls will be heavily-pirated ad infinitum.

But as the $2 billion box-office takings of Avatar prove, it’s not like Internet piracy is really harming Hollywood anyway.

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Google’s YouTube

Google acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion in October 2006, just 18 months after the domain name was registered. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has since stated he thinks the company paid way over the odds for the startup, but that it was a necessary purchase.

What Google got was a YouTube that’s very different than the one we see today. Piracy was still rife, with unauthorized clips all over the site. Although these were eventually removed it took a lot longer than it does these days.

YouTube Revenue

YouTube has likely never made money for Google, at least if analysts’ previous attempts to estimate the incomings and outgoings of the company are to be believed.

However, according to MediaMemo, Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney has a different view. He estimates that YouTube made around $727 million in revenue in 2009, will make $945 million in 2010, and $1.1 billion in 2011.

He doesn’t mention the expenses YouTube carries with it, which are likely to be vast. However, with those sorts of revenues there’s a strong chance that YouTube is either already turning, or about to turn, a profit for Google.

Mahaney’s methodology was simple: transpose MySpace’s revenue-to-page view ratio with YouTube’s. Which is hardly scientific but is as good a method as any with Google continuing to keep official figures confidential.

Google Vs. Viacom

Today has also brought new news in the continuing legal battle between Google and Viacom. The latter sued the former for $1 billion in damages way back in 2007, alleging “massive intentional copyright infringement.”

Viacom’s complaint is that Google profited from the 160,000 unauthorized clips on the site before new methods were introduced to combat uploading of pirated video clips.

According to CNET, both sides are filing motions for summary judgment. In essence, this means that the talking is over with both sides now confident enough to put their case forward. It’s now up to the judge to decide the next course of action but the case is likely to come to a head very soon.

Hulu Loses Big Names

Two of the most popular shows on Hulu are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Unfortunately, neither will be available to watch on Hulu after March 9 as Viacom has decided in its infinite wisdom to pull all Comedy Central content from the site.

This is a big deal when you consider The Daily Show is only behind Lost and Family Guy in terms of the number of viewers it gains on Hulu. So if even those kinds of viewing figures aren’t making it worth Viacom’s while what about the less popular shows?

Hulu’s Big Problem

This sums Hulu’s problem up in a nutshell. While it’s the most popular TV catchup service on the Web in the U.S., it is wholly reliant on the networks and content creators for its product. If that disappears then Hulu is left with nothing to sell. Or at least no content to sell advertising against.

The same is true for any content aggregator, of course, but Hulu is slap-bang in the middle of an emerging market which could still evolve in a number of ways. And it could turn out that Hulu is crowded out of the market by initiatives such as TV Everywhere.

Viacom Threatens To Sue

For viewers this news won’t mean too much. Both shows will still be viewable online (in the U.S. only, naturally) on their own Web sites. However, the art of embedding is going to be affected.

While Hulu has the whole show and allows users to crop whichever section they want to, Comedy Central only makes certain clips available. Which is bound to lead to unauthorized clips being uploaded on sites such as YouTube.

The Hollywood Reporter quotes PR rep Tony Fox in saying, “My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem.” he also answered, “Yes, we intend to do so,” when asked if Viacom will now target sites and bloggers who post clips from the shows in question.

Ars Technica got spun a different story, but it’s clear the company will be closely monitoring online video sites after The Daily Show and The Colbert report are removed from Hulu.

Conclusions

Viacom and Hulu were reportedly discussing a deal right up until the last minute, but one which pleased both sides couldn’t be found. My guess would be Viacom was after a bigger slice of the revenue pie, and Hulu cannot really afford to give up any more at this time.

Maybe when Hulu starts charging Viacom will have a change of heart. In fact, I’d suggest it’s inevitable.