Live Streaming Video

Live streaming video services allow anyone to stream what they want over the Internet to anyone who is interested in watching. The only real rules are regarding the content, with no copyright-infringements or criminal offenses allowed.

There are already a number of well-established companies offering ordinary people the chance to host their own online television show, with Stickam, Ustream, Livestream, and Justin.tv all popular and all user-friendly to varying degrees.

TinyChat

However, TinyChat hopes to compete alongside these established companies with its new TinyChat.tv service.

TinyChat is a startup which has managed to gain a foothold in the live video chat sector over recent months. It’s popular even at this early stage of its life, mainly because it’s ultra-simple to use, with no sign in or technical knowhow required.

TinyChat.tv is, however, a different proposition.

TinyChat.tv

The basic interface of TinyChat.tv is very similar to that of the regular TinyChat. But room owners can customize their rooms and decide whether to force users to sign in using a Twitter or Facebook login.

The main advantage TinyChat.tv has over its competitors is the multi-participant shows. The main disadvantage is how long (relatively speaking) it takes to set up a room and start broadcasting.

Pro members paying the $9.95 asking price can set passwords for private rooms and stream in higher quality video. The service could and should be improved immensely by developers using the free API (Application Programming Interface).

Conclusions

I’m not sure we actually need another live steaming service but then TinyChat.tv is offering something slightly different than the rest. At this moment in time it cannot hope to compete with its long-established competitors but I wouldn’t bet against it managing to do so in a short space of time.

[Via ReadWriteWeb]

From Mail To The Web

In the 12 years since Netflix launched as a purely by-mail DVD rental company, the world has changed considerably, particularly with the Internet becoming the distribution method of choice for all kinds of media, including of course television and movies.

So it’s no wonder that the company decided to introduce a streaming video service as part of its subscription package a few years ago. And the way things are going, it’s that part of the business which provides the future direction for Netflix.

Three Ways To Heaven

Last month saw Netflix announce its Q3 earnings. Ignoring the financial results, the interesting news was threefold: the company is planning to go international; there was talk of a new device being added to the streaming line-up; ‘Watch Instantly’ viewing figures showed the service to be very popular.

As of yet we haven’t heard any more about the international plans, but the other two points raised have been expanded upon.

PS3 Netflix Streaming

The day after the Q3 earnings report came news that Netflix’s ‘Watch Instantly’ was heading to the PS3 in the United States. It’s been available on the Xbox 360 since last year’s dashboard update but is now coming to the Sony games console as well.

With an installed user base of nine million avid gamers and media consumers, it’s an inspired move. And it ends the exclusivity deal Netflix had with Microsoft for the best part of a year.

According to a corporate blog post today, the PS3 discs which are required for Netflix’s ‘Watch Instantly’ to be used have started to be shipped today. 100,000 Netflix subscribers and PS3 owners who requested the discs are the first batch to receive them, with more to follow in time.

Watch Instantly Watched Incessantly

This news comes as a survey conducted by One Touch Intelligence, and reported by Contentinople, shows how mainstream the use of ‘Watch Instantly’ has become. 62 percent of subscribers say they’ve used the service at least once, while 54 percent said they stream at least one movie or TV show every month.

While most still stream directly to their computers, 24 percent stream content to a connected device. And that figure is sure to increase as the range of products streaming ‘Watch Instantly’ grows.

A Streaming Future

Surely now is the time for Netflix to start considering a streaming-only subscription option as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has previously implied could happen. While physical media such as DVD and Blu-ray are still important, the future is clearly both digital and streaming. And Netflix is in the best position to take advantage of this evolving market.

Livestream Livepack Goes Live

Livestream, formerly known as Mogulus, is one of several live streaming companies which offer everyone the chance to be the star of their own television channel. It’s a competitive sector, with Ustream and Justin.tv the other big contenders.

But yesterday saw Livestream launch a new service which could mark it out against its competitors. Livepack is “the world’s first solution for wireless live streaming at HD quality,” and the hardware which makes that possible fits in a specially designed backpack.

Livepack Details

Livepack is designed for broadcasting any and all events live over the Internet. This includes concerts, sporting events, wedding, graduations, and everything in between.

There are other options already for doing this, but all rely on a reliable fixed Internet connection and none can yet deliver high quality video. Livestream maintains that its new Livepack solves both these issued at a stroke.

The hardware comes courtesy of LiveU, fits in a backpack, and includes “a built-in wireless connection with six load-balanced 3G/EVDO modems over three carriers, encoding hardware, Firewire cable, and 30 hours of streaming uplink time per month.”

Integration with Livestream’s streaming video platform and content delivery network (CDN) is included, which means that once the stream is started it streams to your Livestream player and is captured and archived for future playback as well.

Livepack Video Demo and Pricing

Livestream Livepack is only available in the U.S. and available as a monthly or yearly rental. A one-off monthly rental costs $2,500 while a yearly subscription brings the cost down to $1,500. Which may seem expensive but is a fraction of the cost of professional solutions.

Conclusions

Livestream Livepack isn’t going to appeal to everyone due to the high costs involved, but for those seeking a near-professional solution for live streaming outside events, it’s a genius and affordable solution that fills a gap in the market.

For a very reasonable investment, a whole new world can now be accessed by both amateur and professional Webcasters.

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DeliTV is a Yahoo Pipe created by Tony Hirst, a lecturer at The Open University in the UK.

This pipe allows anyone to program their own online TV channel from Boxee by bookmarking pages on Delicious with the tag “delitv”.

• Yahoo Pipes is a tool that aggregates and manipulates all sorts of content from the web.
• Boxee is free software that streams content from sites like MLB, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, and Flickr on a laptop or connected to a TV.

DeliTV supports:

• BBC iPlayer category feeds
• podcast feeds
• Youtube videos
• Youtube Playlists
• Youtube channels
• another DeliTV playlist
• an MP3 file

Setting Up

After running the pipe, you can subscribe to the RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates in Boxee as a video feed.

Using Delicious as a curation tool offers flexibility: users can generate multiple playlists, users can subscribe to other people’s playlists and created nested feeds.

To subscribe to other users’ playlists, search for the delitv tag on Delicious to see who has been bookmarking content.

You can also subscribe to other users playlists by rewriting a URL:

Use the name of the user whose Deli TV channel you want to subscribe to in the following URL:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=DELICIOUS_USERNAME

So for example, Tony Hirst’s feed is at:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=psychemedia

You then just copy and paste this RSS URL into Boxee and it will then add new video for you to watch every time you tag a page with deli

User Experience

According to the comments on Hirst’s blog, OUseful.info, (where he writes about “things that I think may be useful in an higher education context, one day”) the setup is working well.

It does take some time for Delicious to propagate links to its RSS feeds, but that seems to be the only delay. Also, users outside of the UK will not be able to use BBC iPlayer links. Boxee has a few bugs of its own, including occasional hang-ups, but for the most part, my experience has been very good.

I’ve been using Boxee to watch TV on my laptop for a few months now, and Deli TV is a great way to add personalized content. I can get all my videos and podcasts in one place, rather than visiting multiple websites each day for updates.

It’s sort of like an RSS reader for multimedia. Although popular RSS readers like Google Reader support multimedia, the experience is not as polished.

If you don’t already have a Delicious account, this might be a good enough reason to get one.

Useful Links

• DeliTV
• Boxee
• Delicious

You may also be interested in:

• More about Boxee on WebTVWire
• How to Connect your PC to a HDMI TV – Boxee works great on a TV set.

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Still Emerging From The Gloom

For what is still considered an emerging market which isn’t likely to reach its full potential for many years to come online video is certainly offering consumers a range of options. The number of ways of watching video and television content over the Internet is numerous and growing all the time.

While online video sites on the Web are a niche unto themselves (although just as crowded), there are also a number of options for people who want to consumer video and television in their living rooms using an Broadband connection and either a set-top box or other Internet-enabled device.

ZillionTV Revealed

ZillionTV first came to everyone’s attention back in March of this year. A big write-up in The L.A. Times ended with the newspaper describing it as “the next generation of video on demand.”

ZillionTV was heralded as a new set-top box service with some high-profile backers and a industry veteran in charge in the shape of Mitch Berman.

Something Different?

What differentiated ZillionTV from the rest was a more measured approach to the marketplace.

This came from deals with ISPs that will see bandwidth set aside for the service and a novel approach to revenue with a basic free, ad-supported service, limited time rentals, or purchases giving permanent streaming options.

Delayed & Changing

Now, although the plan to launch with ISPs and have multiple options for viewing options is still in place, The L.A. Times reports that the launch has been delayed. What’s more, ZillionTV will be available directly to consumers in areas where no ISP deals have been secured.

The full service now won’t be available until the second half of 2010, although trials are said to be happening in thousands of homes already.

Conclusions

I had high hopes for ZillionTV on first hearing about it. But a huge delay, possibly amounting to a year or more, and the loss of at least some of what made the service different from the rest, has me starting to doubt whether ZillionTV will be able to fare any better than the many other competitors already vying for control of the sector.

Boxee Is…

Boxee is a cross-platform, open-source media center which allows computer users to access a wide range of online video from one central location.

Designed to work with both PC and Mac, the free software enables Web video to be viewed on a large television, thus blurring the line between computers and the living room.

Boxee is currently in alpha mode and has a small but very loyal user base of around 600,000. It also only has 11 people working at the company, although to grow and truly make a splash against the might of cable companies that will need to grow.

Boxee Funding

Boxee today announced it has secured $6 million in fresh funding from Boston-based General Catalyst. Prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures are also participating in this new round of funding.

Boxee claims to need more than just money right now, with General Catalyst also becoming a valuable partner in seeking new content, and building and strengthening the relationships between Boxee and the cable and media companies necessary for the product to do well.

Boxee Plans

The money is to be used for:

Improving the product – currently in alpha, Boxee is keen to release a beta version by the end of this year. user feedback is essential in this process.

Adding more content – Boxee believes it makes a good partner for content producers and so is seeking to build new partnerships with them. This should ensure new content including Web shows, TV shows, and movie comes to Boxee in the future.

Attracting more developers – Boxee wants to improve its App Store both for developers and users, as well as to extend its APIs to improve Boxee.

I wonder if Hulu can be attracted back on to the service?

Boxee Living Room

The last use for the new funding is by far the most interesting. Boxee currently caters for a very tech-savvy audience who know how to hook their computer up to a television. But to truly become an essential piece of software, Boxee is going to have to add more mainstream appeal.

That means getting into bed with manufacturers of consumer electronics such as television, set-top boxes, and games consoles to ensure a bigger user base can access the service. Boxee claims to already be working on this effort with a view to being available on a variety of platforms by 2010.

Conclusions

So, Boxee has lots of money in the bank and big plans for how to use it. But all of this still doesn’t explain where revenue is going to come from. Maybe Boxee will one day become a paid-for product but its open source nature makes that unlikely. Surely these investors haven’t just ploughed money into a company with no plans for how it’s going to return the favor.

Live Video Streaming

The live video streaming sector is one of the most competitive across the whole online video market. Big names such as Justin.tv, Ustream, and Mogulus continue to evolve and improve in their efforts to become the number one brand and recognized in the same breath as Google, eBay, Amazon, and YouTube.

Mogulus recently rebranded itself to LiveStream, buying the frankly worth its weight in gold domain name to go with it. While Ustream underwent a radical redesign this time last year and then again in April of this year. Now, Justin.tv, the current traffic leader, has done the same. As well as a complete redesign of the site there are also a number of new features being added to the mix.

Justin.tv Redesign

The Justin.tv site has been given a visual overhaul, now looking cleaner and more simplified than before. The usability of the site has also been made more simpler, obviously an attempt to persuade more people than broadcasting isn’t something which requires degrees in film-making and electronics.

The main way this simple approach is achieved is by the introduction of one-touch recording. There’s no longer any need to sign up for an account or log in to an existing one. You can now start sharing live video with the world by “Live broadcasting in one click.” There is also now a Meebo IM chat bar present on each page of the site.

Camtweet and DVR Functionality

Justin.tv has also introduced a couple of very nice features in the last month. June saw DVR functionality come to the service. Now, when you’re watching something and realize you need to pause or stop watching for a while, you can click a button to give you the option to, “Continue watching this later.” The video will be recorded and you can begin watching from the point you left the video stream for up to seven days.

Just a few days ago Justin.tv also unveiled Camtweet, a new side project aimed at users of the micro-blogging social networking site Twitter. In essence, the yet-to-launch Twitter app allows you to broadcast live video on Twitter. Camtweet is a devilishly simple idea that brings Justin.tv functionality to the much-hyped Twitter just as it goes mainstream.

Conclusions

These changes are making Justin.tv a whole lot more user-friendly than it was previously. Which has got to be a good thing in such a crowded and competitive market. By appealing to the masses, and taking the pain out of live streaming, Justin.tv could be about to increase the lead it holds over its rivals. Until, of course, they up the ante once again. Either way, it’s broadcasters who benefit.

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Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a Web site which, like Google and eBay, has become famous enough to be known even by those who have never visited it. It’s an online encyclopedia which offers (mostly) accurate and relevant information on a full range of subject matters.

However, Wikipedia is mainly based on text, with a few, but not a great deal, of photos punctuating each page. There are even a few video clips embedded throughout the site but they’re currently few and far between.

Wikivideo

Until now, or at least some time in the next few months. According to Technology Review, Wikipedia plans to launch an editable online video encyclopedia which is being designed to enhance and embellish the world-renowned text one. The hope is to both evolve Wikipedia to the next level and persuade more content owners to place their video into the public domain.

Wikipedia hopes to roll the service out within the next three months, at which time Wikipedia editors (which is everyone) will find a new ‘Add Media’ button on each article. Initially, videos can be searched and used from three repositories of copyright-free material: the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, and Metavid, which contains clips of Congressional hearings and speeches.

In time, Wikipedia hopes other content providers will be added to that list. Exposure on a site as trafficked as Wikipedia is not something to be sniffed at so content holders could be pressured into making their videos open source and available for public viewing or risk missing the boat.

Online Video Editing Tools

The other side of the project is to create a series of Web-based video editing tools to make the whole process simple enough for a child to be able to take part. Clips found online will be open for preview, and simple editing such as in and out points.

There’ll be no longer a need to download, convert, edit, and upload a video in order to make it relevant and watchable. The open source video startup, Kaltura, is working on the project alongside Wikipedia, and hopes to take all the time and effort out of video importation.

Conclusions

As Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, states so eloquently, “It is sad and unfortunate that the public broadcasters are not the ones leading this movement. The mission should be to do whatever they can do to maximize distribution, and I’m not seeing that right now.”

Hopefully, this initiative from Wikipedia, a site which has already opened up the Web an enormous amount, will have the desired effect. However, I remain to be convinced that extensive exposure is going to be enough to persuade content providers and copyright owners to give up the DRM measures they currently employ.

Hu(ge)lu Success

Hulu has so far been a hugely successful foray into the online video market for NBC and News Corps. So successful in fact that Disney also wanted in, buying its way onto the service at the end of April. Hulu has attracted millions of viewers, advertisers aplenty, and is by all accounts building a more profitable service than Google is managing with YouTube.

Hulu has managed all this by offering premium content for free, supported by advertising, which can be played from within a browser. But from today there is now another option, with the Hulu Desktop application being released for Windows PCs and Apple Macs. Linux users are once again left out of the loop. No surprise there.

Hulu Desktop App

The Hulu Desktop app take Hulu out of the browser and into a stand-alone player. It’s very much like the BBC iPlayer Desktop in the way it works except that while the British-only service works using Adobe AIR, the U.S.-only service is a native app requiring no external software in order to run.

After all the (some would say) useless features Hulu has added since launch, this one is a definite game changer. The Hulu Desktop app is designed to make Hulu “a lean-back experience”, meaning less of the usual sitting cramped at a computer watching shows and more relaxing on the couch doing the same. Both the Windows Media Center remote and the Apple Remote are compatible with the new release.

Computers Only!

However, Hulu doesn’t want you using the service as a possible replacement to cable, and has added a line to its terms of use insisting, “You may not download, install or use the Hulu Software on any device other than a Personal Computer.” This includes digital media receivers, mobile devices, and supposedly televisions as well. But the temptation to hook your laptop up to your TV to watch Hulu is surely too much to resist.

Boxee Banished Before

Of course, there is an existing application that already allowed you to do this: Boxee. However, in its wisdom Hulu decided to remove all its content from Boxee in February citing pressure from its content partners. There followed a game of cat and mouse, with a workaround by Boxee followed by a closing of the loophole by Hulu.

With the release of the Hulu Desktop application it makes the reasons for that decision a lot clearer – Hulu obviously wants to make the move to the couch but on its own terms. Why let Boxee effectively syndicate content when you can develop your own piece of software to do the same thing? The difference being that Hulu can maintain control over its own Desktop app and even add adverts further down the line.

The guys at Boxee aren’t happy with the development and I don’t blame them.

SlingPlayer On iPhone

A lot of people have been waiting a long time for the SlingPlayer Mobile app to come to the iPhone. It’s been available for BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Smartphone and Pocket PC, and Palm OS amongst others for some time but due to Apple’s vice-like grip over what makes it onto the iTunes App Store, the wait has been long and painful.

At the end of March, Sling Media announced that it had submitted SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone to the iTunes App Store. It made it on there on Wednesday (May 13) but was lumbered with a disability which makes it an altogether less attractive option.

AT&T Did What?

AT&T, the phone company which has total control of the iPhone market in the United States, decided it couldn’t allow the SlingPlayer Mobile app access to its 3G network. Instead, iPhone owners who also own a SlingBox and want to combine the two for fully-fledged mobile video will have to find a Wi-Fi hotspot before the app works.

AT&T responded to the immediate flow of criticism heading its way by releasing an official statement. It not only claims that Sling’s app “could create congestion and potentially prevent other customers from using the network,” but also that applications such as these are “prohibited under our terms of service.”

So, two excuses, one of which suggests that AT&T has very little confidence in its 3G network and the other which means AT&T considers the iPhone the same as a PC and therefore cannot allow it to redirect a television signal. Both bunkum if you ask me.

Conclusions

Interestingly, Gizmodo suggests that the real reason behind this move to cripple SlingPlayer For Mobile may be much simpler. It claims AT&T is working on its own application, currently codenamed i-Verse. This will perform a similar action to the SlingPlayer but for AT&T’s U-Verse instead of a SlingBox. If true, net neutrality clearly doesn’t exist at AT&T headquarters.

If you’re still interested in SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone then it’s available to download now from the iTunes App Store for £29.99. Throw in the price of a SlingBox, the cost of an iPhone, and that monthly contract from AT&T and you have a very expensive mobile television solution. Which will only work over Wi-Fi. Is it worth it?

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