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.

Clicker

Clicker came out of beta around 18 months ago and offered a new way of finding online video programming. At its heart a search engine built and maintained specially for online video, Clicker allows users to find and view content that is available to watch online. At least from legitimate sources such as Hulu, Amazon, and iTunes.

At the time we profiled the site a year ago, Clicker searched 1,200 sources to find 600,000 episodes from 10,000 shows, but I’m sure all those numbers have gone up since then.

Clicker managed to raise $19 million in funding and built traffic levels up to around 3 million uniques every month. And now it has been bought by U.S. television giant CBS.

CBS Acquires Clicker, Takes Lanzone

CBS has acquired Clicker, adding it to the impressive range of online properties CBS now owns. The man who sold Clicker, CEO Jim Lanzone, has been given a executive role at CBS, so this looks like it was as much a talent grab as anything else.

Leslie Moonves, President and CEO of CBS Corporation, said:

“In just over a year, Jim has created one of the leading navigation and discovery tools for video programming on the Internet. Clicker’s products and proprietary technologies add firepower to our existing portfolio of entertainment properties, and if we can help grow Clicker to its full potential in the years ahead, the strategic value could be tremendous.”

It’s clear from that that CBS hasn’t bought Clicker just to kill it, and instead plans to nurture it. My guess is that Clicker and TV.com will be combined at some stage, especially as the latter has the domain name to die for in this sector.

The price CBS paid for Clicker hasn’t been revealed but is expected to have been somewhere in the region of $50 million to $100 million. Which is really nothing more than loose change for the television network. So it has to be considered a good deal.

[Via TechCrunch]

Viral Videos

Viral videos are basically just normal videos that transcend their humble origins to become huge hits online. The come in many different flavors, but the two common types are engineered viral videos designed to promote something or someone, and organic viral videos that just happen.

As a prime example of this, YouTube’s Top 5 for 2009 were:

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Susan Boyle gained worldwide fame thanks to the viral nature of this clip, while David After Dentist and JK Wedding Entrance Dance hit it big after being produced by amateurs. The New Moon movie trailer is self-explanatory, while the Evian Roller Babies was a genius promotional effort.

PopScreen ‘On Our Radar’

PopScreen is a website which tracks viral videos across a range of sources including YouTube, DailyMotion, and FunnyOrDie. But its existing ‘Popular Now’ column of videos has now been joined by ‘On Our Radar’.

‘On Our Radar’ is what PopScreen is describing as a video prediction engine. Its ambition is to predict which videos are set to become viral before they actually do.

PopScreen claims this is possible by use of a proprietary algorithm which collects unique data points in order to accurately pinpoint the moment at which online video clips move from the niche to the mainstream.

PopScreen co-founder Kevin Nguyen said:

“The predictive engine is the backbone of the PopScreen user experience. But, it also serves as the foundation for PopScreen’s rating and recommendation platform, which provides an online video experience tailored specifically to the user’s interests.”

Conclusions

If this works as it’s meant to (at the time of writing it isn’t even active) then this could be a brilliant innovation. And it would make it easier to fill WebTVHub with great, relevant content.

YouTube Music Videos

YouTube has a long and volatile relationship with the big four record labels.

There was a huge falling out when it came time to renegotiate licensing agreements for music videos. Since the first time agreements had been made, YouTube had grown a fair bit, and was starting to bring in revenue, and the record labels wanted a slice of the money pie.

In the end, as a compromise effort, Vevo was born. Vevo is all about music videos, using the popularity of this genre to drive traffic and bring in revenue which is fairly split with the labels who essentially own the artists in question.

Muziic

Muziic, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a media player and website which, like Vevo, is focused on music videos. But unlike Vevo, it doesn’t have official agreements in place with the music industry, instead relying on YouTube’s.

Essentially, Muziic works by providing access to the catalog of music videos and videos containing audio of well-known tracks without the user having to actually visit YouTube and do the searching. Yes, it’s for lazy people.

There is a Web player and desktop player, as well as Facebook, iPhone, and iPad apps. There is also an entertaining Muziic DJ tool which lets users try mixing and matching two songs together.

Record Labels’ Reaction

The record labels don’t appear to have yet kicked up a fuss about Muziic, probably because the site has managed to squeeze into that small patch of gray area between legal and illegal.

However, as the site grows, and more people start to use the service, there’s always the threat that the music industry will at least try and limit Muziic’s ability to provide access to music videos.

Conclusions

Muziic recently hit the 250 million streams milestone, and it’s set to continue to grow as word of mouth spreads. What could cut its life short is if the music industry decided to act against it, but it appears that as long as Muziic abides by YouTube’s API rules, it’s safe.

YouTube Redesign

YouTube began testing its new redesign as part of TestTube, YouTube’s ideas incubator, last December. And while not all of the features and changes of Feather made it through to the final redesign, most have.

The redesign proper began in January, with all extraneous and unnecessary elements removed in favor of a more minimalist look and feel. Those first changes of a month ago were mostly aesthetic, but the newly-unveiled changes are a little more nuts-and-bolts.

Playlists Galore

Playlists have been given a makeover, with a new interface making the whole idea more seamless and a more integral part of YouTube as a whole.

There is, thankfully, an option to turn AutoPlay on or off, but the default is to have one video queued up and ready to play as soon as the one you’ve chosen to watch ends. This could increase the number of videos each user watches on YouTube considerably.

Video Queuing

The queuing of videos is now possible within search results. So when you search for a topic from the video page, you’ll now be able to select the video which will follow the one currently playing.

This should mesh well with the new playlist options to keep people on the site and watching videos for longer periods. But it’s a feature which has been on most Web-based music players for a long time, so Google is really just catching up.

Integrated Video Comments

Lastly, the comments section will now include text and video responses as standard. The text comments on YouTube are where arguments and insults occur on a daily basis, although that does mean they’re never dull.

The inclusion of video comments as an integrated feature should break up the conversation in a good way.

Conclusions

The YouTube redesign is still very much a work in progress, and I’m sure some features will prove more popular than others. All in all though, they’re so far improving YouTube in a big way. And I hope there is a lot more to come.

Clicker has just raised $11 in funding, and must be hoping that traffic will now follow.

But Where Is It?

There are so many ways of watching television online now. YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and the TV networks own Web sites are just a smattering. But with so many sources it’s sometimes hard to know where to start.

Each site usually has its own search options, but what happens if you want to search further afield? There are a number of search engines dedicated to online video, and search engines such as Google and Bing also provide options.

However, these search the whole Web and can often get bogged down with videos that don’t fit your needs.

Clicker – What’s On Online

Clicker does things slightly differently. For starters, it only indexes professional content, be it TV shows or Web originals. And it searches 1,200 sources to find 600,000 episodes from 10,000 shows.

It’s a fast, free, and easy way to search for online video across the Web. And according to Media Memo, Clicker has recently secured $11 million in venture capital funding from JAFCO Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Redpoint Ventures, the latter of which contributed in an earlier round.

Clicker began life last January but went live last November. It plans to invest the money in engineering and building partnerships.

Funding = Traffic

Clicker must now be hoping this leads to more traffic. ComScore reports the site only received 226,000 uniques in January, although company CEO Jim Lanzone claims internal numbers are closer to 750,000. Either way, Clicker must be hoping the site starts building momentum to warrant the funding.

YouTube’s Fifth Birthday

The YouTube.com domain was registered on Feb. 14, 2005. Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder, marked the anniversary with a post on the Official YouTube Blog.

In it, he talks about how important online video has become, how building partnerships are important, and how YouTube is constantly striving to be the standard-bearer in this constantly-evolving industry.

Where It Began

YouTube began when Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who all worked at PayPal at the time, wanted to share videos with each other but couldn’t send the files via email as they were too large. Hey presto, YouTube was born in all its inbred simplicity.

The first video uploaded to the site was Jawed Karim posting from the zoo.

Word spread, and the site officially launched before the end of the year. The ease of use of the site meant sharing video became a possibility for everyone, in the same way as Flickr allowed everyone to share photos with little effort.

The Present

In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for an incredible $1.65 billion. This is the video showing Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announcing the acquisition by the search giant.

Google then set about ridding the site of copyright-infringing content, adding layers of advertising, and gaining premium content as well as the bread and butter that is user-generated content.

Three years later and YouTube had grown to such an extent that it was serving one billion videos views a day. This makes YouTube the absolute leader in online video, a long way ahead of any of its competitors.

The most-viewed video of all time on YouTube is nothing more than a baby biting his older brother’s finger. And yet that kind of sums up the appeal of the site – ordinary people uploading ordinary scenes of everyday life. If it’s appealing then people will watch it.

The Future

The first five years of YouTube’s life have obviously been very successful. But only to a point. It’s still not turning a profit, although it is getting closer to doing so, and there are still a couple of legal battles hanging over its head.

YouTube will need to continue to innovate to compete as online video enters the next level. TV shows and movies are slowly but surely moving to the Web and it’s entirely possible that a new venture will supersede YouTube as the number one video destination. It may be Hulu, it certainly won’t be Veoh.

But for now, YouTube is king.

TubeMaster++ is software for capturing video files to your computer and converting them to different video or audio formats. It includes a video and music search feature as well.

What is TubeMaster

TubeMaster++, available for PC, Linux and Mac, is a free downloadable video conversion software that includes search engines for video and audio.  Goofy name, but an impressive variety of features for a free product.

It can capture multimedia files from your internet browser, or you can drag and import files you want to convert. Files can be saved on your PC or converted to other video or audio formats (such as AVI, MPEG, MP3, MP4, IPod, PSP, etc.)

Giving it a Spin…

I downloaded TubeMaster and gave it a try, and was impressed by how well this worked. The software is built around three primary components: media capture/conversion, video search and MP3 search. The audio/video search features in an of themselves are impressive features.

The media capture allows you to click and drag in media that you’d like to convert, while the video and MP3 search features offer robust search engines for finding video and audio. I was impressed by the speed this software returned results for my queries.

Running Some Video Conversion

I was able to use TubeMaster++ to convert films to different formats, then preview them with TubeMaster++. From my own observation, these all converted without a hitch and played fine for me.

TubeMaster++ can convert a number of files at the same time, and lets you preview the video in a smaller popup window in the application.

Video Searches

The Video Search feature is a decent one, and offers basically a no-frills search engine that can perform a global video search across a number of different sources (e.g. YouTube, DailyMotion, and dozens of others) and presents the results back on the screen.

The video results display the video title, length, category and even the source. Scrolling through the results and making a selection, you can then kick off any video which launches in your default browser.

Music Searching too

The Music Search also works in much the same way as the Video Search, and a few of the searches that I ran brought back a number of results.

Once you’ve found a song that you want, you can select the download option to bring it into the TubeMaster++ tool for conversion.

What Reviews Say About the TubeMaster

Most of the reviews that I found for TubeMaster++ were favorable. Freewaregenius noted some of the positives of this software, including how it can be launched independently wihout having to install itself as an extension of your browser.

CNET’s editors were a little more harsh, pointing out some issues with the interface and application instability. They also noted, and I’d agree, that the documentation/tutorials could have been a little more comprehensive.

TubeMaster++

• TubeMaster++
• TubeMaster++ Features

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WatchUWant.tv offers an endless stream of videos to watch, based on your search criteria, and functions in a manner similar to streaming radio sites like Pandora and LastFm.

What is WatchUWant?

From their site, WatchUWant describes the internet as being a new infinite number of videos, but states that its site “automatically separates the wheat from the chaff, recommends new and interesting content, and moreover, tailors its selection to you.”

Sounds interesting enough, but does it work?

Getting Started

What’s interesting about WatchUWant is that there are NO user accounts. You just open the site and jump right in. And while this is nice to just get started, without user accounts, how are your interests and selections saved?

Anyhow, I ran a few searches, and there are some Pandora similarities, but as I’ll explain, there are also a number of notable differences as well.

Viewing Related Videos

My first search was for composer “John Williams”, so I entered these terms and started searching. Right away, I was presented with a number of related and semi-related clips on YouTube.

But what’s odd is that you can’t really rate the videos, but rather, if you don’t like it, you just click ‘Next’. So my question would be, what if you LIKE the clip, but just want to skip it for now? And what if you want to ban a clip you strongly disliked?

Strange and Somewhat Irksome Lack of User Accounts

Most puzzling is, unlike Pandora, you don’t have user accounts to remember what you’ve seen and rated, so in a frustrating way you have to reinvent the wheel every time you visit WatchUWant. I’m not crazy about that, as there were plenty of results from my searches that I definitely did NOT want to view again.

One of the nice things about having accounts with Pandora and LastFm is not just the ability to create accounts that retain personal interests, but also having the ability to share stations with friends and other folks. You can’t do that here, which is disappointing as well.

Following the Trends of WatchUWant

WatchUWant also offers a tab for seeing the current viewing ‘Trends’, or searches that are currently popular with WatchUWant users. Nothing really earth-shaking here, other than spring-boards for viewing currently popular topics.

Again, this would be more interesting to me if these were individually-rated accounts, but instead these just appear to be streaming channels of videos on certain topics.

A Notable Positive…

There are a few noteworthy positives to this system, though, that I think are worth pointing out. First is that, if you want to use WatchUWant as a radio player for music, you could pick a musician or band you like, kick off the station, then work on something else in another browser tab.

WatchUWant will continually stream content non-stop, so if you want to listen to video content like a radio, this is a nice option. The player will just endlessly stream related content based on your search without stopping.

Another Positive

Another thing notable about WatchUWant is that the site/player is VERY open and uncluttered. It’s a minimalistic player with no comments, ratings and other clutter, so if all you want is streaming video watching and nothing else, this is an ideal system.

Being able to use a back arrow to the previous film also makes this a notch better than Pandora and LastFm, both of which systems do not let you jump to a previous song.

Maybe with addition of user accounts this could be an ideal system in which one can rate films and retain these ratings for future viewing.

WatchUWant

• WatchUWant
• WatchUWant – Information about how it works

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Rippol is an video search engine for searching and rating various TV programs and movies online.

The Idea Behind Rippol

Rippol is a straight-forward search engine for finding television programs and movies online, with searches broken into various categories for searching. From my experimentation with it I found it to be a comprehensive engine yet still a work in progress that could use a little tweaking.

What Rippol is About

According to the site, Rippol works based on how users view and rate films, with content changing dynamically per user preferences. According to the site:

“Every video you watch, rate and review affects The Butterfly Effect Network which changes the order you and others see content in real-time. The Butterfly Effect Network cross references videos similar to what you like and have watched with the habits and opinions of your friends and demographics.”

It’s a clever idea, namely the idea of cultivating similar videos based on what others are doing, in addition to your own preferences. Makes me wonder, though, if your tastes are completely eclectic, are really going to find many similar cross references?

Getting Started with Rippol

Registration is required to get started, either via Facebook or Twitter account, or you can just create a Rippol account, which is what I did.

Following registration, I received an activation email, which I selected that led me back to Rippol to log in. I entered my user-id and pswd, and instantly received a popup box prompting me with “what do you like?” Once registered, you’re up and running!

First Search with Rippol

Well, I’m curious to find obscure 80’s programming like “Automan”, so I entered that as my search and hit “continue”.

The initial hits weren’t very close: I’d wager that with YouTube I’d have a couple screens of results, but here I got one, and it wasn’t even related to the “automan” television program.

Second Search with Rippol…

Not to be deterred in my quest for obscure 80’s television, I entered a new search of term “Manimal” which brought back two hits: one of clips from the show (a hit!) and the other for an unrelated musical band.

So my initial thoughts is either no one has really bothered incorporating nostalgic 80’s television, or Rippol is still building up it’s content, which is fine, as the site ran smoothly and quickly returned the results.

What Exactly is Buzzy?

The ‘Buzzy’ link, when selected, gives no real clue as to what it does, but presents a numebr of categories that can be selected, such as “Comedy”, “Music” and “Education”. I selected Education and received a bunch of seemingly random video clips on the screen.

Oddly, I don’t see the connection with a number of these videos to the category of “education”, but rather these just seemed like films that arbitrarily got tagged as “educational” (e.g. “Make $3275.70 before Christmas”?)

Full-length TV Episodes on Rippol

Selecting “TV Shows” from the header banner presents a large selection of categories on the screen, such as “Comedy”, “drama”, “action”, “crime”, “thrillers”, etc. I selected “History”, and was routed to a number of different programs.

I selected the “Biography” category, and within this were a number of full-length episodes. I selected a Biography episode featuring Drew Carey, and was routed to the full-length episode.

Controls and Features

In addition to standard video controls, the page offered a number of features such as the ability to offer reviews, see who else had watched the program, add as a favorite, and even mark the video as a like/dislike. Facebook and Tweet links are also offered for the videos watched.

Some of the video links direct to a Netflix login prompt (the Monty Pyton episodes did this for me) and, since I’m not a Netflix user, that was the end of the line.

You Call These Movies?

Next I checked out the ‘Movies’ page, and the films are far from impressive. “Steel Dawn” and “Attack of the Puppet People”? I haven’t seen titles like this since I was shelving films in the 2-for-a-$1 section at the video store.

I selected “The Giant Gila Monster” and watched a few minutes of this goofy gem, and like the TV Shows on Rippol, the movies offer the same controls and rating options.

Final thoughts

For a beta, Rippol is still pretty impressive. The navigation and controls can be a little wonky, and every now and then a button or link will appear half-visible on the screen, but otherwise I was able to easily navigate to several television shows and movies.

The ‘Social Stream’ on the left side-bar is a nice addition, reminiscent of what YouTube does in allowing you to see what other folks are viewing at the same time. I like the idea here on building content via ratings and other users, and think there could be a lot of potential to Rippol.

Rippol Online

• Rippol
• Rippol Tutorials

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