Long-distance video sharing is often an asynchronous affair. Links are shared via e-mail or an instant message, and the other party is expected to watch it whenever they get some spare time. Enter Synchtube, a site that thinks the contrary. Instead of your friends and family watching that video whenever they please, it gives the sharer complete control of how and when that video plays.
Synchtube is simple to use and requires no special sign-ups. Interested parties need simply to come with a YouTube video link to get started. The service then creates a special URL for a video room that is good for three other people to join. Included is live text chat and a heads-up display of each user's timeline that shows what part of the video everyone is on. The person in control can then jump the group to a particular part just by dragging their own player's timeline.
Synchtube lets you control what's playing and when it plays for you and three others.
(Credit: CNET)In our brief office testing, Synchtube's system worked well for the majority of the video, but we ran into a few quirks. One of the people we sent it to could not see the video at all, while another hit a show-stopping YouTube error that required refreshing the page for the player to re-appear. These are definitely not the kind of problems you want to run into while sharing something with nontech-savvy relatives. That said, it may work better for you than it did for us.
Synchtube is just the latest in a long series of services that have attempted to make Web video watching a real-time group experience. Lycos tried it a few years ago with its now-defunct Lycos Cinema service, and more recently 6Rounds and Zorap's live video conferencing tools have offered live video watching mixed in with group chat. To a lesser degree, YouTube offers its own social-video watching experience with its Streams service, however it is less focused on everyone watching the same part of the video at the same time.
(via Reddit)
Susan Boyle's first appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" tallied the most worldwide views on YouTube for 2009, the video site said Wednesday.
The video of the once-unknown singer captured more than 120 million views.
Her video was followed "David After Dentist" (37 million views), "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" (33 million views), "New Moon Movie Trailer" (31 million views), and "Evian Roller Babies" (27 million views).
YouTube also looked specifically at which music videos tallied the most views for the year.
Pitbull's "I Know You Want Me" had more than 82 million views this year. That was followed by two Miley Cyrus songs--"The Climb" and "Party in the U.S.A"--with 64 million and 54 million views, respectively. The Lonley Island's "I'm On a Boat" and Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down" rounded out the top five.
You may notice that Michael Jackson videos, surprisingly, didn't capture more views than the top clips of the year. According to YouTube, the pop star's "Thriller" video was one of the fastest rising searches but it failed to acquire enough views to push it into the top five most-viewed videos.
TwitVid, a free video host for Twitter, is launching two new, useful features on Monday. The first is a real-time search engine that will let users sort through videos both on TwitVid and YouTube. The other is an analytics engine that lets video owners know more about who is watching their uploaded clips, and where they're from.
Between the two, TwitVid and Twitter users are likely to get more utility out of the new search engine. Similar to what OneRiot has done with its own real-time search engine, TwitVid's approach takes into account how fresh the video is, along with whether it's been popular on social sites. Recently popular videos then get better real estate on the results pages. It's a big step up for TwitVid users, who up until Monday had no way to search through videos other users had uploaded on the site.
As for the new analytics tools, TwitVid breaks down some very basic information, including when people were watching your video. This is charted out down to the hour, day, week, month, and the total lifetime of that video. The service also shows where your viewers are coming from--or at least the top 10 locations. Included as part of that list are links to the top referrers, which can show you if your video got picked up somewhere.
TwitVid made its debut in March and competes with TwitVid.io (not .com), TwitLens, Twiddeo, Twitc, Posterous, and Tweetube--just to name a few.
Previously: TwitVid app lets you send iPhone videos to Twitter
The new analytics features let video owners see where their videos are being played as well as information on the people watching them.
(Credit: TwitVid / CNET)
About 81 percent of Web users leave an online video page if they encounter mid-stream rebuffering, a new study from video analytics firm TubeMogul has found.
Rebuffering has become a major issue for most Web users. And even though TubeMogul found that just 7 percent of streaming video is slow-loading, it said Web video still can't quite match TV-quality viewing.
"The technology just isn't there yet to have a TV-like experience," David Burch, marketing director at TubeMogul, said in a statement. "And if it's an advertiser hosting video on a branded site or distributing it across the Web, people are just clicking away when they see that spinning wheel."
TubeMogul conducted its study by sampling 192 streams from leading content delivery networks--Akamai, Limelight, Edgecast, and Bit Gravity to name a few. According to TubeMogul, the services it tested "help to power video across thousands of sites." But they aren't quite doing as nice a job as some users had hoped.
TubeMogul found that Limelight performed best out of all the services it tested, experiencing slow load times just 4 percent of the time. It was followed by Panther Networks, Akamai, Edgecast, and BitGravity, respectively.
Although slow load times are still a problem on the Web, it's not stopping people from attempting to view streaming content. A recent Nielsen study found that online video viewing was up a whopping 34.9 percent in the last quarter, compared to a year prior. Now the CDNs just need to catch up.
For a while, some believed that the Web and social networks would limit the amount of time people spend consuming video content. But Nielsen's latest A2/M2 Three Screen Report has found that people are actually consuming content on more platforms, thanks to digital video recorders and the Web.
According to the report, which looks at content viewing on television, the Web, and several other platforms, online-video viewing was up a whopping 34.9 percent in the third quarter. DVR use was up 21.1 percent, the study found. Surprisingly, 99 percent of video content that's watched in the U.S. is done on a television. So, while Web use is on the rise, it still has a long way to go before the television is supplanted as the "go-to" for consuming video content.
Nielsen shows off video viewing by demographic.
(Credit: Nielsen)Nielsen also looked at how much time the average American spends consuming video content on their TVs, from the Web, or via mobile devices. The company found that the average person watched 31 hours of television per week during the third quarter of 2009. Just 31 of those minutes were spent in playback mode on their DVRs.
Web use, while higher than it has been, was still much lower than television use. Nielsen said that the average consumer spent four hours on the Internet during the third quarter. That user watched an average of 22 minutes of online video per week. Meanwhile, mobile-video consumption was lagging far behind in the third quarter, accounting for just 3 minutes per week of the user's time. Unsurprising to some, teens watched the most video content on their mobile phones, averaging seven hours of mobile-video consumption per month.
A few other interesting tidbits of information: TV viewing followed closely with age. Those aged 65 and older watched an average of 43 hours of television each week, while the average person between the ages of 18 and 24 watched 22 hours of television each week. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 watched the most video content online, averaging 35 minutes per week.
Click here to see the full Nielsen study.
On Monday, the media-viewing app Boxee is going into a closed, private beta test. This app has been in private alpha testing for about a year and a half, and has won praise while generating some frustration among its test users. At first, for example, it was a great interface to the Hulu service, but Hulu made its content unavailable to Boxee users (there's a less-elegant workaround baked into the current product). AppleTV users who hacked the app into their system have also hit speed bumps--the app won't work on the newest updates of the AppleTV product.
Boxee soldiers on, gaining fans and adding content from other sources. I recently covered the Boxee version of Clicker, for example, which shows us how the Boxee platform might some day do a credible job of replacing users' TiVos or cable boxes.
The Boxee experience is improving, too. Monday's new beta has a completely redone interface that is far superior to the alpha's. The idea of the slide-out toolbar menus, an anachronistic throwback to Windows and Mac desktop operating systems, is thankfully gone, replaced by a more visible and consistent interface.
The app also gets new features. If you tell Boxee your Facebook and Twitter IDs, it will scan your friends' posts continuously, and tell you what they're talking about in a new "recommended" column on the Boxee home screen.
The home screen also shows your queue, which can include content that pops up based on shows you're subscribed to. It also has a "featured" column that Boxee can use to promote new content, included paid placements--a new revenue stream for the company.
Boxee can also now search the entire Netflix online inventory. Previously, you could view your online Netflix shows and see a smattering of new ones. Now you can see and stream everything, assuming you're a paying user.
There are also new content partners: The Escapist (which makes the Zero Punctuation video), and SuicideGirls. (I wasn't aware until I got the beta demo that Boxee supports adult content; the NSFW feeds don't appear until you disable the parental controls.)
The new Boxee begins to address my biggest gripe about the system, which is that it can be hard to find content from the multitudinous streams that feed into the platform. A new TV menu combines content from the user's hard drive as well as subscription and streaming sources, and it has a useful search feature. There's also an improved table of contents for shows. But Boxee still doesn't have a global search to find everything it can play, so in some cases you need to know which "application" (Boxee content stream) has a show you want to watch. Boxee VP Andrew Kippen did tell me it's an ongoing goal to improve the search process on the platform.
Kippen says the company recommends the Mac Mini as the best platform for the app at the moment. There are also OS X and Linux versions, and a Windows port, but it's for 32-bit installations only. The Linux port will be used in the dedicated Boxee hardware, details of which are being announced shortly. In the meantime, Roku has a somewhat competitive hardware-based product now shipping, and it has the additional benefit of offering access to a user's Amazon streaming-video account, which Boxee doesn't do.
Boxee is still closed to most new users. Everyone, even existing alpha users, has to sign up for the beta lottery to try it out. The beta will open to all around the Consumer Electronics Show time frame, in January.
New Boxee home screen
(Credit: Boxee)
The new show browser searches both locally stored and streamed content.
(Credit: Boxee)
A new control menu can pop up above any playing video.
(Credit: Boxee)
In a nod to efficiency, YouTube on Thursday began testing a more lightweight version of its video player pages called "feather."
Feather pages do a number of things to speed up the video-playing process, from defaulting to the standard quality version (instead of high quality or high definition), to removing various on-page features such as being able to control the size and coloring of an embed. The idea is to get the video playing as soon as possible with fewer on-page distractions.
Other efficiencies include limiting the number of loaded comments to just 10, which users are now unable to vote on or respond to. Video replies, real-time sharing, and auto-suggest from YouTube's search bar have also been cut. However, related videos remain--albeit at a more limited 5 videos compared to YouTube's usual offering of 21.
Users who want to try out the new interface can do so by opting in to it on YouTube's TestTube page, which houses experimental, or otherwise not-so-ready-for-primetime features. These include YouTube's visual warp browser, its live streams product, and comment search tool. Once it's enabled, it can quickly be disabled from any video page with a little green box that sits on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
It's worth noting the feature does not yet appear to work on all videos just yet. We had the best luck on popular videos, including those from YouTube's featured section. Also, if you're a YouTube power user who regularly makes use of things such as video replies and user comments, it's worth staying on the standard version of the service.
Below you can see a before and after of feather mode on the same video. Click it to enlarge.
YouTube's new feather mode ditches many of YouTube's advanced features in favor of a faster-loading page.
(Credit: CNET)
Just a few days ahead of the scheduled public beta launch of media app Boxee on Monday, the excellent Clicker Internet video directory has been ported to the platform.
To review: Boxee is a media viewing app designed for living room use--that is, at a distance, with a remote control. It's a good interface for sources like YouTube, Netflix, CNN, and CBS (our publisher), as well as music, home movies, and photos. We've covered it a lot and quite like it.
Clicker, which we also like, is an extremely well-curated directory of streaming television shows. Clicker on Boxee is that directory on the Boxee platform, and also designed for control from a remote. It works very well. The Clicker service and Boxee appear made for each other.
Clicker on Boxee gives users a nice big interface for browsing shows.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Unfortunately, Clicker on Boxee doesn't have access to the entire Clicker database, which is a big disappointment. In particular, Hulu was removed as an official Boxee content partner earlier this year, so Clicker, which indexes Hulu just fine on its Web interface, won't display Hulu episodes when run on Boxee. Boxee itself has a workaround that shows Hulu content despite the licensing issues, but it's not the full, authorized interface that Boxee used to have, and Clicker doesn't have access to those shows. So if you're on Boxee and want to see a show that's on Hulu, you have to leave Clicker, fire up the Hulu Feeds module, and search for it there.
One of Boxee's other issues at the moment is that there are nearly 40 different content sources that it can view, and several have unique interfaces and search functions. Clicker may be able to find a lot of video content, but it can't find all of it, and if you use Boxee you might have to know which network or service a show is on to find it if it's not on Clicker. Hopefully the upcoming open beta of Boxee, which is said to feature a new interface, will address this issue. We'll have a report on the new version of the app, and how Clicker works inside it, when it launches.
The search function is also designed to be used with a remote control.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)MOG offered me a free trial to its subscription-based streaming music service, MOG All Access, which launched on Tuesday. The service costs five bucks a month, and gives you unlimited on-demand streams of more than six million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies. The site is trying to differentiate itself from competitors like Rhapsody and Napster with high-quality streams--all songs are 320kbps MP3s--and some fairly sophisticated music discovery features, like playlists posted by musicians (David Byrne got the featured spot on the day of launch) and other fans with similar tastes to yours ("Moggers like me").
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Screenshot)
I've been sampling the service for about an hour, and I do appreciate the sound quality (although better volume-leveling between songs would be nice) and recommendation services. And I'd like to thank the designers personally for the ability to add any song to the already-playing queue--a feature I love on Grooveshark and my Zune HD and that I always miss whenever I use one of my iPods. But there's one big problem: song selection.
Because MOG is licensing content directly from copyright owners, there are big gaps from artists who simply don't want to participate in online music. The usual suspects like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles are mostly missing in action. There are also strange gaps elsewhere. For instance, half the songs on the Pixies' "Surfer Rosa" are unplayable. Compared with Grooveshark, which relies on user-posted content, MOG has too many holes. And of course, Grooveshark remains free (although a $3/month subscription gets you a version without advertisements).
Song selection could improve over time as MOG signs more licensing deals, but I found some other related glitches as well. For instance, '70s folk artist Roy Harper, whom I often use as a test case to see how well an online service does with relatively obscure old content, has almost no playable content, but does offer a nice list of albums with links to Amazon. The only problem: when you follow the Amazon link on unplayable songs, it takes you to the Amazon Music front door--most of his songs aren't available for download there, either.
In its demonstration video, MOG touts its online radio service as a unique feature. When you're playing a particular artist, a slider lets you control how much variety you want, from "play only songs by this artist" all the way up to "play mostly songs from similar artists." It could use some fine-tuning, however. When I started a queue with a Modest Mouse song, it used Modest Mouse as the basis for its selection. Fair enough, but when I added songs by Talking Heads and Public Image Limited, the radio algorithm didn't account for those artists. It simply switched my radio playlist completely when the new songs started playing, showing all Talking Heads songs, all PIL songs, and so on. Pandora and Slacker do a much better job of creating custom stations based on multiple artists. (Although, of course, those services don't let you play individual songs on demand.)
Finally, as I wrote last week, I still think MOG's lack of mobile support is a fatal flaw, but one that could be easily remedied: Apple's approved iPhone clients for subscription services Rhapsody and Spotify, so why not MOG?
All of these flaws can be fixed, although licensing content takes time and convincing. I'm a big fan of competition, though, and MOG takes many of the best features of a lot of other services, combines them in one place, and improves on some of them. For that, the company should be commended.
As one of its weekly new features for Hulu for the Holidays, the company has rolled out new advanced search functionality. Hulu's blog notes that the new feature is part of an ongoing effort to improve in the area of search. This is going to be crucial for Hulu moving forward as users have more and more videos to sift through in their ever growing catalog.
This new advanced search allows users to filter their searches by fields like show title, season number, video type, network, air date, and people. This really helps you to narrow down a search if you have a specific video in mind that you want to track down.
When Hulu first launched, search wasn't as big of an issue since the library of videos that they offered was relatively small and easy to browse through. However, as the site has grown larger, it has become more difficult to find what you are looking for. By taking steps such as launching advanced search and debuting support for search operators back in April, it is clear that Hulu is making an effort to correct that problem.
