The music industry's patience with Muziic and the site's teenage founder may have finally run out.
Rio Caraeff, chief executive of Vevo, the recently launched Web site that features music videos from three of the top four recording companies, wants 16-year-old David Nelson to stop using the service's content and trademark. Caraeff e-mailed Nelson on Tuesday asking him to comply.
Vevo wants David Nelson, 16, to stop using the site's music videos but Nelson says he's done nothing wrong.
(Credit: Mark Nelson)Nelson is the precocious high school coder who launched a music service last March that enables users to treat YouTube music videos in much the same way that song files are handled at iTunes. The videos can be sorted and added to playlists and perhaps more importantly, a user can listen to the music without having to watch ads.
I had anticipated the teen would get an adult-size smackdown much earlier than this. The major record companies have stood by and done nothing as Nelson used their content--with the help of YouTube's API--to build a site, a following, and now a burgeoning business. This is no high school science experiment. Nelson has begun selling ads and generating revenue, and the music labels have long signaled that they won't allow someone to profit from their material without getting compensated.
Nelson might be the first prep schooler to do this, but certainly we've seen oodles of sites try to use unlicensed music in a similar way, and how many of them have been sued into oblivion?
It probably isn't relevant that he's just a kid. Digital music is a high-stakes game and the grown-ups aren't playing around. Nelson was bound to run into trouble sooner or later.
What likely set off Vevo managers is that Nelson recently launched a new site and incorporated Vevo's material, once again with the help of YouTube's API. Then, Nelson announced this week that music fans could enjoy Vevo videos at Muziic but without all the ads. Vevo offers videos free of charge and ads are its main source of revenue. On Tuesday, Caraeff sent Nelson this e-mail:
"I kindly advise you to immediately cease the use of the Vevo Logo, trademark and any other references to our corporate name," Caraeff wrote. "With regards to the use of Vevo licensed videos...they are also being used directly without our consent...You can be assured that changes are being deployed to the API in question immediately, however I am still going to ask you directly to cease the use of Vevo videos from within your service."
Vevo executives confirmed that preparations are being made to make Vevo's content inaccessible through YouTube's API.
But Nelson has no intention of backing down.
He says he will stop using Vevo's trademark if that's what they want. But when it comes to the videos, he says he has adhered to all of the requirements of YouTube's API.
Nelson thinks that Caraeff may have the wrong idea about him. He says he's a friend to the music industry and to artists. He said that it's been wrongly reported that Muziic strips out the ads that accompany YouTube and Vevo videos. He says ads have not been delivered to Vevo videos yet via the YouTube API. That's not his fault, he says.
"We have not taken any actions to circumvent the delivery of 'pre-roll' advertisements," Nelson said in an e-mail. "The syndication of advertisements through the YouTube API is beyond our control."
It's going to be interesting to see what occurs here over the next couple of weeks. Most likely, Vevo will remove content from YouTube's APIs and the issue will be behind us. But what happens if Nelson irritated somebody at the labels? When you talk about companies that have run afoul of the music industry, they are typically venture-backed and employ lawyers and staff and own office space and coffee machines.
In Muziic's shoestring operation, you have David and his dad, Mark, working out of their home in Bettendorf, Iowa--population 32,445.
Call me a handwringer but maybe Nelson should avoid confrontation and look to cut a deal. His service is impressive regardless of his age and maybe he and the music industry can find common ground.
Concert footage and other music videos from Brit band Muse were available at Hulu on Tuesday.
(Credit: Screenshot by Greg Sandoval/CNET)Hulu's foray into music videos took another small step on Tuesday, when it struck a deal to offer some video content from Warner Music Group, one of the four largest recording companies.
The partnership calls for Hulu to offer concert footage and music videos from a handful of Warner acts, including Jason Mraz, the rock band Paramore, and alternative group Muse. CNET reported seeing Muse's content at Hulu earlier Tuesday.
To be sure, even with the addition of Warner's acts, Hulu's music video library is modest, at best. In addition to Muse, Hulu cut a deal last month with EMI to access select concert footage and music videos of some of the label's artists. That agreement was believed to be Hulu's first label deal.
YouTube is supposed to be the digital era's version of MTV. The Google video site has penned agreements with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner, and EMI, but that doesn't appear to be stopping Hulu from striking deals with some of the labels.
Warner is a likely candidate to test the waters with a new music video outlet. The company has always said it seeks wide distribution of content and doesn't want any one distributor to have exclusive access. Now throw in a nine-month feud between Warner and Google over the terms of their music-licensing agreement, and what you have is an open door, however small, into which Hulu could squiggle.
Clips from a handful of bands aren't enough to make Hulu a power in music videos, which, incidentally, are the most-watched fare at YouTube. But at the very least, the labels do appear to be looking for more control of their content.
Earlier this month, Universal and Sony launched Vevo, a standalone music video site technologically backed by Google.
Warner is also exploring its own online video-advertising strategy. Certainly, for the labels, competition between YouTube and Hulu is good.
Updated at 1:32 p.m. PT to reference the official announcement of a Warner Music-Hulu partnership.
URL shortener, bit.ly, has a new service out, called bitly.tv. Bitly.tv displays a collage of the most-linked videos (through bit.ly) of the moment. Users can also sort by the top videos from the last day or the last two days.
Bitly.tv displays the most buzzed about videos linked through bit.ly.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)The site looks really slick and is well presented. When you click on a video, a light box pops out, which plays the video as well as displays a variety of sharing options (Facebook, Twitter, e-mail) and shows a live stream of tweets about that piece of content. The live stream is especially compelling since you can see what other people are saying about the video as you formulate your own opinion.
The URL shortener space is getting increasingly crowded, with a ton of new and existing companies bringing their offerings to the table. Google is the most recent example of this. Bit.ly is trying to stay ahead of the competition with products like bitly.tv and bit.ly Pro, which currently allows a limited set of beta users to create their own branded short URLs. They have a really strong beta user base for that service already, which includes The New York Times (nyturl.com) and foursquare (4sq.com).
The pop-up video lightboxes play the video as well as feature sharing options and a live stream of tweets about the video.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)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.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Vevo CEO and President Rio Caraeff more or less confirmed on Wednesday my suspicion that the music service was not created to serve a new need for consumers. Rather, it was built to help advertisers and content owners (including labels, artists, and music publishers) capitalize on music videos, and to help Google (YouTube's owner) offload some of the cost associated with administering rights to them. In other words, this isn't a business-to-consumer play, it's more of a business-to-business arrangement.
As he put it: music videos are popular online, fans like them, and content owners think of them as premium content. But they're too widespread, appearing on YouTube, AOL, and many other sites, and the user experience is way too varied--when a user searches on a song name at YouTube, they might get multiple copies of the exact same music video, plus user-posted remixes, live versions shot with a cell phone camera, and even parody versions. More generally, music videos grew up as a promotional tool for albums, and advertisers and users have come to see them as a commodity rather than prime product. Consequently, advertisers haven't been willing to pay much to place their messages next to them, and online music videos have lost money at a "staggering" scale.
Vevo is meant to provide an online clearinghouse for label-approved music videos--the kind of professionally shot videos that often cost half a million dollars or more and used to form the backbone of MTV. Vevo will be the exclusive distributor of these videos, and will handle all licensing and ad sales, although partner Google is handling the actual video hosting and streaming. In other words, if you're running a video site and you want to post a video that's in Vevo's catalog, Vevo will be your only source. By enforcing scarcity, giving advertisers a central place to buy ads, and controlling the user experience--for example, ensuring that there aren't many copies of the same video on YouTube--Vevo believes that advertisers will be willing to pay much more to appear next to these videos. So far, this seems to be true: according to Caraeff, advertisers have been willing to pay between $25 and $40 per thousand views (CPM, in advertising parlance) for Vevo-provided videos, compared with average market rates of $3 to $8. Caraeff claimed that artists and publishers will get about 50 percent of all revenues from these ads--a much higher percentage than they earn from recordings. This is why Mariah Carey and U2 were so excited about the launch.
Interestingly, Vevo will also curate unlicensed videos. For example, if somebody creates a remix of a Beyonce song with an associated video, and it becomes a runaway hit, Vevo might try to claim the video, add it to the Vevo catalog, and handle licensing for its content owners. Caraeff claims they're not going after the home video of your dog skateboarding to your favorite song, but professional-looking videos that have never been claimed, and therefore aren't making any money for anybody. (YouTube doesn't sell ads against unclaimed content for fear of copyright liability.)
So what's in it for Google? Simple--although YouTube has tons of viewers, it also has more inventory than it can sell advertisements against. Licensing for music videos is complicated, and not in Google's core area of expertise. Google is happy to hand this task off to Vevo and accept a lower percentage of advertising dollars because it believes the cost savings and higher CPMs will eventually make business sense.
Finally, about the botched launch: As Caraeff explained, Vevo was basically a B2B play, and the company didn't expect many users to visit its site on the first day. But the publicity created by the big launch party drove massive interest, and the company got more traffic in its first hour than it expected for its entire first year. For what it's worth, the company has added 32 servers in the last 24 hours, and I'm now able to get videos to play on the site with no problem.
In addition, Vevo didn't think it was critical to launch with a full complement of content--remember, it's mainly a back-end and clearinghouse for YouTube and other sites, and if you were watching videos there yesterday, you'll still be watching those same videos there tomorrow (as long as a takedown notice hasn't been issued). So Vevo launched with only about 15,000 videos from Sony and Universal Music. In January, it will add about 30,000 more from EMI and several independent distributors.
I still don't understand why they launched Vevo.com as its own Web site, but at least I understand the thinking behind the company. It won't change my behavior--I'm still going to YouTube, and if a video happens to be provided by Vevo, I'll know that the artists are making some money from it. Fair enough.
Got a case of information overload? You're not alone.
A study released Wednesday from the University of California, San Diego, reports that the average American consumes a whopping 34GB of data and 100,000 words of information per day.
Over the course of 2008, Americans as a group gobbled up 3.6 zettabytes of data. (In case you missed the definition of "zettabyte" in your daily data binging, that's a million million gigabytes.) For all you visual learners out there, the researchers helpfully point out that 3.6 zettabytes is equal to the "information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska."
Between 1980 and 2008, the number of bytes consumed by Americans increased 350 percent. The average annual growth rate was calculated at 5.4 percent.
Here's how TV and the Internet stack up in the "How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers."
(Credit: University of California, San Diego)Dubbed the How Much Information? project, the study measured data consumption both at home and away from home. It includes several information sources, "including going to the movies, listening to the radio, talking on the cell phone, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and reading the newspaper."
Besides bytes and words, the study also noted the number of hours spent consuming information.
In terms of time, traditional media still has a strong hold on the U.S. The study reported that "a large chunk of the average American's day is spent watching television." On average, 41 percent of an American's day is given over to watching television shows, viewing recorded TV, or watching DVDs.
Noncomputer sources, the study says, account for more than three-quarters of U.S. households' information time.
But if bytes are the standard by which American days are judged, it's the video game that takes the top prize. Researchers found that the average American consumes 18.5GB of gaming data per day, representing 67 percent of all bytes they consume daily.
"Games are almost universal, but most of the gaming bytes come from graphically intensive games on high-powered computers and consoles, which have the equivalent of special-purpose supercomputers from five years ago," report author Roger Bohn, director of the Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, said in a statement. "Games today generate their bytes inside the home, rather than having to transmit them over cables into the house, but gaming is increasingly moving online."
The study found that 16 percent of daily information consumption comes from the Internet. A staggering 79 percent of all American two-way communications is done through the Internet.
If you want to see what else UC San Diego found in its study, click here.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Vevo, the new music-video site operated by Google (which owns YouTube) and co-owned by three of the four major labels (EMI, Sony, and Universal; Warner Bros. not participating), launched on Tuesday to some fanfare in New York. Big music celebs rubbed elbows with Google and label execs in the kind of self-congratulatory bash that only the entertainment industry can pull off.
This is as far as I got when I tried to play U2's video for "Even Better Than The Real Thing" on Vevo.
Maybe that's too harsh, but I visited the site on Wednesday and I quite honestly can't figure out who or what it's for. It's got music videos, but only from three of the four majors and some independent distributors, which leaves huge swaths of the entertainment landscape blank. As far as I could tell from a search of the site--and the search engine should work, given that Google's behind the site--Vevo is sadly lacking in classic rock and modern indie rock, which are the two genres I listen to most.
There's no Roger Waters or Pink Floyd. No Pixies. No Grizzly Bear. No Led Zeppelin. No Animal Collective. No Beatles. No Eric Clapton. And on and on and on. Go ahead and try your own, you'll get the idea--if you can get the site to work to work at all. (It's been plagued by glitches since launching, and my effort to play U2's "Even Better Than the Real Thing" around 1 p.m. Wednesday met in failure--the video froze around 80 percent loaded.) Apparently, if you can get a video to load, you'll probably have to watch a video advertisement before it starts.
The aforementioned artists are all over the place on YouTube--a site that everybody knows and loves and is largely free from video advertisements. And because Google is behind both sites, videos licensed for Vevo will also appear on YouTube, with Vevo getting the credit (and ad bucks) when a YouTube viewer watches a Vevo video. So why would anybody go to Vevo? Why bother building it, instead of just making it a new channel on YouTube? Who is this for?
The music industry, that's who. It wants to control the online music video experience--Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris flat out said so. They're tired of mean old Google using its content to sell advertisements. But I honestly can't imagine why Google agreed, unless the labels held it over a barrel, refusing to license their content for YouTube unless Google agreed to help them create a music-industry answer to TV-streaming site Hulu.
Here's the thing. The big winners in the old music industry of yesteryear don't like the Internet. U2 manager Paul McGuinness has said that Internet service providers should bear part of the blame for piracy. Doug Morris earned some scorn two years ago for a Wired interview in which he revealed that his label didn't even try to come up with a digital strategy in the early days, when P2P file-trading networks first started becoming popular.
If you don't like the Internet, you're not going to be able to create an Internet service that people like. More than 15 years into this Interwebs thing, some people still don't understand that if they create an experience that users don't like, it won't get used. It's like they're still living back in 1973 when we only had three TV networks and one or two daily papers and a handful of local radio stations. We now have unlimited choice. Offer me something better than what's out there now, or please, save yourself some money and effort and get out of my way.
Hulu succeeded not only because the TV companies played hardball, refusing to license their content too broadly to other distributors, but also because it launched strong, with a big selection of desirable content. Vevo could certainly turn itself around, but its launch doesn't look very promising. I suspect it'll end up like every other entertainment industry effort that offers no clear benefit to users: on the digital scrapheap.
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.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
On2 Technologies has filed an update with the SEC on its proposed merger with Google, hoping to put to rest some key questions.
On2, which makes video compression software, announced Monday that the update includes certain key highlights about the merger and some frequently asked questions.
On2 agreed on August 5 to be acquired by Google for $106.5 million, a deal already approved by its board of directors. The terms call for each share of On2 to be exchanged for 60 cents worth of Google common stock.
With its board anxious for investors to approve the deal, On2 outlined some of the risks to itself and to shareholders if the acquisition is prevented. On2's merger-related expenses have already exceeded $2 million, an amount it would be responsible for if the deal is stopped, it said. With cash reserves of only $2.2 million, such a debt could certainly hurt the company.
Without Google's acquisition, On2 said it might have to grab additional financing to run its business, which could include the sale of certain assets, the issuing of debt, or the release of even more shares.
On2 also admitted that it's had trouble hiring and retaining skilled, qualified employees, a challenge that might be resolved if employees knew they'd be working for a Google instead. Otherwise, if the merger does not move forward, On2 believes its revenues would be impacted by its failure to attract or keep good employees.
To address any conflicts of interest, On2 said none of the members of its board would serve as directors, officers, or employees of Google or receive any money from Google in connection with the merger.
On2 also released an FAQ, hoping to address any concerns on the part of shareholders. Since the Google offer, the board has received no other offers or inquiries from other firms about an acquisition, the company said. The FAQ also goes into great detail about On2's board and key executives and their involvement in the merger.
On2's board has set a special meeting for December 18 for shareholders to vote on the deal, and is urging them to approve it. Proxy cards have also been sent out. If the majority of stockholders okay the merger and all other conditions are met, then it should become effective within two days after the meeting, said On2. Google has said it plans to make On2's technology part of its own Web platform.
The merger initially triggered some On2 shareholders to file lawsuits against the company in August, alleging that the deal undervalued On2 and that certain provisions prevented On2's board from considering other offers. But those suits were settled on October 26, though are currently awaiting final approval by the court.
Under terms of a memorandum of understanding in the settlement, On2 agreed to provide additional disclosures in its final proxy statement and prospectus. However, On2 said the settlement implied no wrongdoing on its part, there was no monetary damage, and the company would have released the same information in its proxy statement regardless of the lawsuits.
