Microsoft Returns

Microsoft is doing all it can to replenish its tarnished reputation. The release of Windows 7 is huge, and Bing is a search engine which may actually manage to provide competition for the ubiquitous Google.

Silverlight 3.0 is obviously proving popular with media companies seeking to stream video over the Internet but 2009 has also seen a few changes take place in terms of Microsoft’s approach to online video.

MSN Video>Soapbox

Microsoft killed its Soapbox video site off in June after realizing it stood no chance of competing with YouTube. Video sites focused on UGC are fine but stand little chance when going up against the ‘One billion page views a day‘ might of YouTube.

On the other hand, Microsoft launched the MSN Video Player in the U.K., which streams classic TV shows for free in a similar style to the BBC iPlayer and Hulu. Just with less style and options.

Bing Bong

Microsoft launched Bing back in June, and its video search differed from Google by the use of live video thumbnails. In essence, rather than needing to click on a video to watch it, you can gain a preview of the content simply by hovering over the thumbnail.

This had two effects: it meant porn was available to watch from right within Bing, without the need to visit any other sites; it raised questions over the fair use of playing copyrighted content from within a search engine.

MSN Video – Bing Video

Now, Microsoft is in the process of converting MSN Video into Bing Video, using the Bing brand to better show off video content. High quality videos from MSN, Hulu, YouTube, ABC and others are now all combined into the one site.

Bing Video looks classy and has a good range of video content, options, and features. And I must admit to having spent a while finding new video picks I hadn’t yet seen featured on WebTVHub.

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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.

The video streaming sector of online video is already a very crowded place. Lead by YouTube, there are also many other video sharing sites trying to compete. And now The Pirate Bay is preparing to join the battle with a little site it calls The Video Bay.

The Pirate Bay

Whether they’ve used it or not, almost everyone will have heard of The Pirate Bay. It’s not the largest torrent tracker in the world, that honor goes to Mininova, but it is the most notorious. In fact, the people behind the site go out of their way to cause controversy, stoke the fires of file-sharing, and generally try to upset the big media companies currently fighting P2P technology.

The Pirate Bay’s latest innovation is unlikely to change how the site is viewed by people in the industry. Not content with providing one of the wheels in the cog required to share files online over a network, The Pirate Bay now wants to try its hand at video streaming.

The Video Bay

The Video Bay is the name of the site, and it’s now live. Unfortunately, the site is in a very early stage of development, even though The Pirate Bay first hinted it would be developing such a site in May 2007, which is why everyone assumed ThePirateCity was that site. Even so, The Video Bay is currently in an “extreme beta” stage, with bugs and errors expected at every turn.

Peter Sunde Speaks

The Pirate Bay founder, Peter Sunde, announced The Video Bay to the ‘Open Video Conference’ in New York recently where he stated that the site “will be done when it’s done, in the future, in like a year or five.” A statement then appeared on the site, which explains a little about what the next steps are:

“To stay in the spirit on which TPB was founded and using the Latest Technology™, TVB aims to use the new HTML5 features, more specifically the audio and video tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats.

This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly.”

Open Source Video

The site is currently online and those people using browsers which support the HTML 5 tags (Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, Safari 4, Google Chrome 3, and Opera 9.52) can view a couple of sample clips. But that’s all that’s possible on the site at the present time, with the search function not working and no other features yet added.

This is an important step for The Pirate Bay to take because it will really be playing with fire if it opens The Video Bay up properly. There would no longer be the need to download copyrighted files, with the new site instead making them viewable right in your Web browser and in an open source video format.

Compete and Copyright

There is the obvious question as to whether The Video Bay can compete in an already crowded market. The site has a built-in audience of millions of users and fans, and will also be aiming to provide different content than its rivals. While YouTube and the like stay within the law whenever possible, The Video Bay will likely be full of copyrighted clips.

The Pirate Bay has already been found guilty of “assisting in making copyright content available” and that’s just for acting as the middle man. Video uploaded to The Video Bay would instead have to be hosted somewhere, and that would put The Pirate Bay at a much greater risk of getting into legal trouble. Even more than it is already.

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Internet Search Options

The Internet search market is dominated by one company – Google. The company boasts an almost two-thirds share of the market, managing 64.2 percent of all searches compared to the 20.4 percent managed by Yahoo! and just 8.2 percent by Microsoft. No wonder then that Microsoft is currently rebranding and re-energizing its search engine.

The result is Bing, which launched over the weekend. It’s very much like Google, sharing many of the same features and elements as the market leader, including results for online video. But Microsoft is also trying to redefine the power of search, which it’s managing to do already, just not in the way it intended. The name just makes me think of Chandler Bing from Friends (pictured above) but there’s worse to come.

Live Video Thumbnails

They say no publicity is bad publicity, and if that’s true then the immediate aftermath of the launch of Bing will do wonders for getting the search engine known around the Internet. The Video section is at the center of a couple of interesting news stories surrounding Bing. One centers on porn, the other on whether live video thumbnails pulled from other sites is fair use or not.

All video results on Bing are delivered via a page of live video thumbnails. Scrolling your mouse over one of them sets the video playing while clicking the link opens up another Bing page where the video is embedded and available to play. It takes another click to actually visit the video source, which would seem overkill.

Bing Bong – Controversy Calling

As Beet.tv points out, this obviously raises questions around fair use. It’s entirely possible to watch videos in their entirety from within the Bing Video search results page. You may never visit the source and consequently never provide any revenue by way of advertising to the original host of the video. I’m no expert when it comes to fair use but I’d at least guess some of the video hosts would have a problem with the way Bing operates.

Another fallout of the decision to use live video thumbnails is that porn instantly becomes accessible to anyone capable of overriding the search filter, which is everyone as it only require two clicks of your mouse. As discovered by TechCrunch, once turned off you may be turned on by the site of hardcore porn video previews right there in your search results.

While the same results may come up on Google or Yahoo!, they require more effort to turn off the filter and then a visit to the source in order to view the clip. Instead, Microsoft is effectively becoming the front counter for a store full of pornography. Which is likely to displease parents and advertisers alike.

The Trial Begins

The case against The Pirate Bay, and four people connected with the site in particular, has been two and a half years in the making. Ever since the torrent tracker’s offices were raided in May, 2006, the police, the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) and various copyright holders have been preparing to attack.

The four people in the dock for this trial are three of the site’s administrators, Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom who is alleged to have bankrolled the venture early on in its life.

While these four people are the ones on trial, The Pirate Bay itself, and the process it uses to enable peer-to-peer file-sharing to take place is the real target. The prosecutors know that taking down these men, and taking them for every penny they own in the process, will not actually kill the site. So this trial also aims to have the site taken down, and be a catalyst for hardened laws against illegal BitTorrent sharing.

What’s At Stake?

Money is a key issue in this trial, with prosecutors claiming The Pirate Bay makes around $4 million from advertising revenue on the site. The three admins face fines of $140,000 and up to two years in prison. But the copyright holders such as Warner Bros, Fox, and Metro Goldwyn Meyer and seeking damages of close to $14 million.

While the result of this case, which already seems a foregone conclusion, won’t kill piracy or anything close to it, there could be some collateral damage felt by the file-sharing community, especially in the short-term. But The Pirate Bay itself will likely survive the case in some form or another, with the admins on trial already having stated there are back-up plans in case the worst happens.

The Pirate Bay Confident

According to TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm held a press conference yesterday in which they discussed the trial in depth. The pair seemed at ease with the uphill battle they are facing and even joked about framing the bills they may receive if they lose the case.

The biggest and most important aspect of the trial will be the arguments surrounding whether The Pirate Bay is actually doing anything illegal under Swedish law. The Pirate Bay does, after all, only point towards copyrighted content, with nothing illegal hosted on the site’s servers. If the judge rules in favor of the prosecution then it could have big implications for the rest of the Web. After all, doesn’t Google point to illegal and copyrighted material?

News As It Happens

The Pirate Bay, its supporters, and backers of civil rights have fought for this case to be open and attainable to all. The Pirate Bay has set up a site which promises to be constantly updated with the latest happenings at the trial, while Twitter is likely to be awash with updates and progress reports.

We here at WebTVWire will, of course, also post any important updates as the trial continues. The first few days will be taken up with major depositions, while various witnesses on both sides will be called in the coming weeks. The trial is expected to finish around March 4th.

Bound To Happen

When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, two things were clearly marked to happen. The first was YouTube being turned into a profit-making entity, and the second was that Google Video’s time was sure to be up.

Google has for the last year or so been making mammoth efforts to turn YouTube’s potential into the money maker it clearly deserves to be. But until now there has been little happening on the Google Video side of things.

Google Video Dead

Now though, faced with a crumbling worldwide economy that is even affecting the biggest and brightest companies, Google has acted. Google Video is being effectively killed off along with five other seemingly worthless products.

In a series of blog posts this week, Google announced the demise of Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebooks, Jaiku, and the application we as an online video site are concerned with, Google Video.

Official Google Video Blog

Google Video has been left to rot since the acquisition of YouTube made it a little pointless. Now the rot has set in, it’s time for Google to start the process of shutting down or modifying the service.

Google announced the cull on the Official Google Video Blog. Amongst some slick language explaining how Google does business, there are a couple of key points.

Google Talks

“In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video. Don’t worry, we’re not removing any content hosted on Google Video — this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service.”

“We’ve always maintained that Google Video’s strength is in the search technology that makes it possible for people to search videos from across the web, regardless of where they may be hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.”

“There are still great options for people who want to upload content to Google, and we invite them to explore YouTube’s dynamic global community or Picasa Web Albums.”

“We’re confident this decision is the right one for our users, and we’re looking forward to making Google Video an even better place for you to search and find videos from all over the web.”

Pointing To The Future

In essence, disabling the ability to upload new content means the site dies. Google is canny in not deleting any videos as it will still make money from them but once a certain transition period is concluded, I suspect this will change.

Google directs users to move over to either YouTube or Picasa, the latter of which has been converted to allow video uploads. With three video options available to its users, one of which is YouTube, the most trafficked site in the world, culling Google Video seems to be an obvious move.

Google Search and YouTube Money

Google clearly now intends to convert Google Video into an all-encompassing, all-singing, all-dancing video search engine covering the whole of the Web. And again, this makes perfect sense when the popularity of online video is paired with Google’s expertise with search engines.

YouTube was already having a lot of care and attention lavished on it, from a new HD option, the change to widescreen, and all those various attempts to better monetize the site. But with Google Video now on its way out of the door, expect YouTube to evolve even more in the next couple of years.

An Evolving TV.com

I know TV.com as an information and community resource all about television. If there was a new series that I needed to find out about, or a need to check the episode guide for Lost or Heroes, TV.com would be my first port of call.

While those factors remain, with new added social networking features, the site is now being rapidly turned into a comprehensive database of online video. If there’s content to be had, CBS wants it on TV.com.

First Hulu, Now More

TV.com has been syndicating content from Hulu for the last six months, but CBS has now also tied up deals to offer video content from MGM, Sony, PBS, Endemol USA, and Showtime. As well as starting to offer its own content at last.

The new content has coincided with a redesign of the site which has improved the old, clunky, and disorganized layout into one much easier to navigate. The forums and ways to interact with fellow fans of individual shows have remained.

Fighting The Competition

With these new efforts to reorganize the site, CBS is trying to become a one-stop shop with elements of Hulu, Joost, and Fancast. The much sought-after domain name and already impressive traffic numbers (up to 16 million monthly unique visitors) will surely help CBS in this aim.

None of the deals announced are exclusive, with all content being available on at least one other Web site. However, while CBS.com already has CBS shows Hulu does not, meaning it’s already got an advantage over its nearest rival.

Hulu Vs TV.com

Hulu is of course the master at building a comprehensive portal for long-form Web video, but that’s really only because the joint venture between NBC and News Corps was to first to seriously attempt such a thing.

CBS has now made TV.com a serious competitor in this field. And with the traffic already there, and the social elements drawing people in, I wouldn’t bet against the venture succeeding.

[Via The New York Times]

We’ve been keeping a watchful eye on the many and varied ways in which YouTube is being monetized here on WebTVWire, and the past few months have seen a lot of effort being put in to the site.

Monetization Efforts

We’ve seen pre-roll and post-roll adverts introduced, the YouTube homepage filled with banner ads, and a variety of different deals with media companies to improve both content and profits.

These include CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, and independent producers. Then there are the new ‘click to buy’ adverts being added to music videos and the like.

In the last few days, Google has announced two new methods for monetizing YouTube: Sponsored video search results, and overlay adverts on embedded partner videos.

Sponsored Video Search

This is the more controversial measure of the two as it means the top search results on YouTube will be given over to the highest bidder for that particular keyword.

YouTube is the second largest search property behind Google itself, beating the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft comfortably. There are over 2.5 billion searches made on the site each and every month.

So YouTube has now given in to its paymasters at Google and is allowing sponsored search results to take precedence over keyword and traffic generated search results.

The Sex Factor

As TechCrunch points out, this may be fine in some quarters but online video has a long history of being associated with porn, and so sex is likely to now figure highly in a number of non-porn related YouTube searches.

So while it makes sense for YouTube to go down this path, sponsored search results are never really a fan favorite and are likely to lead YouTubers to some videos they really didn’t want to see. But there’s money in it so Google obviously feels it’s fair game.

Embedded Overlay Adverts

An altogether less controversial addition are overlay adverts now being inserted in to embedded partner videos, which was recently announced on the Inside AdSense blog.

This change of policy (ads used to only appear on the videos when played on YouTube itself) is being dressed up as a boon to content partners but YouTube obviously also benefits from the deal.

Conclusions

Google needed to monetize YouTube in order to make back some of the $1.65 billion it invested in the site. But you can have too much of a good thing, and there’s a danger that the one resource YouTube has always been blessed with, viewers, will leave the site if the money-making schemes start to inflict on their enjoyment.

Web video is forever increasing in popularity and number, so being able to find what you are looking for is becoming as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. VideoSurf may soon be able to help.

While Google may have the text search market virtually sewn up, video search is another matter altogether. While there are various competitors, not one has become the dominant force.

VideoSurf Enters The Fray

VideoSurf is a new contender to have entered the playing field, and it offers something radically different from the rest of the crowd – visual video search.

The company has only just launched at the recent TechCrunch50 conference, but it is already gaining a lot of buzz around the Internet for its innovative approach to providing users with a suitable system for searching for videos.

Decent Funding

The company has been funded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the latter of which is the chairman of the board. Altogether, the company has raised $5.5 million in venture capital.

The difference between VideoSurf and the rest of the video search market is the technology at the root of its search algorithm.

Multigrid Fast Computation

While most video search efforts rely on meta data to provide the bread and butter of their results, VideoSurf uses computer vision, with a proprietary process called multigrid fast computation helping it provide the most relevant results possible.

While keywords do still play a part, the technology delves much deeper than that. VideoSurf results come in the form of a set of thumbnails from the videos, showing the most unique or recognisable moments from each video.

If you then click on one of the thumbnails, you can watch the video from that point, or even set off on a whole new search related to the people in that scene.

Search Parameters

VideoSurf also allows you to narrow your search parameters either by category, or favourite video sources, including YouTube and Hulu.

In essence, VideoSurf has at a stroke revolutionised video search. Unfortunately, the site is still closed, with invites sent out to people willing to give up their email address.

VideoSurf is a destination site worth watching. A full public launch will hopefully follow, and monetization is already rumoured to be a planned addition in the future.

[Search Engine Land]

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Blinkx has hopefully solved the latter problem with its new Blinkx Remote service. Initially available in the UK, but with a US-centric version to follow, it’s kind of like a Google for free TV content on the Web. It shares similarities with services like tVadio.com and FindInternetTV.com

Blinkx Remote was originally launched in April 2007 but didn’t seem to make good headway and Blinkx is now relaunching a new and improved version of the service.

BBC iPlayer & More

Blinkx Remote filters out all of the illegal content, the spam and falsely tagged material that clogs up the Web to bring a fast and easy way of searching the Web for where you can watch your favourite programmes online in full.

The UK service aggregates all the content from the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4’s 4OD, ITV.com and Demand Five, plus the US networks that allow more than just US viewers to watch content online.

Blinkx CEO Speaks

Blinkx chief executive Suranga Chandratillake told The Guardian:

“We constantly monitor video on the web to see what content people are finding and indexing, and what content people are looking for on a daily basis,”

“One trend we spotted in both the UK and US is the growth of free online, full-length TV shows – in the UK that is driven by the iPlayer and in the US by Hulu.”

“With normal search the results would be mixed up with clips, or videos people had made about shows and put on YouTube,”

“There is only going to be more and more TV on the web, but people don’t often know what it out there.”

Basic Version Free

The service is currently free although Blinkx doesn’t rule out introducing a paid-for service at a later date. This is likely to be in addition to the freely accessible Blinkx Remote in its current form.

First Of Many?

Blinkx Remote is sure to just be the first such tool for narrowing down the kind of search currently required to find all of the free and legal television content on the Web.

With more and more TV networks and channels, particularly in the States, starting to see the potential for having an Internet presence, the general populous, who don’t hear about every new start-up such as Joost and Hulu, will be crying out for services such as this.

Capturing Mainstream Viewers

Unfortunately, Blinkx Remote doesn’t do anything to solve the first problem: how to get mainstream TV viewers on to the Web and using the Internet to watch TV.

That’s surely the next challenge, and we have to hope that high profile events such as the forthcoming Beijing 2008 Olympics being broadcast almost in its entirety will help turn the public on to the potential of Web TV.

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