YouTube is pushing its Facebook Connect integration further by allowing its users to see the videos that their friends share on Facebook. YouTube users had previously been able to find their Facebook friends on YouTube as well as update their Facebook profile with their various actions from the site.
While it's nice to see YouTube embracing Facebook more and more, it stops a bit short of being an impressive Connect implementation. YouTube is getting there, but seems to be lagging behind a little in this department. An implementation that shares, on Facebook, what you are watching, on YouTube, would certainly make sense, although it might clutter up users' Facebook profiles if they are a prolific YouTube watcher. For now, the addition of this new feature is a welcome inclusion and serves as a great way of getting trusted recommendations for videos to watch on YouTube.
YouTube said this feature is in "test mode" for the time being. In my testing, I was not able to get this feature to actually work. This can be sometimes be expected while YouTube irons out the kinks with new features that aren't quite ready for prime time. If anyone has better luck, let us know in the comments.
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)
Immediately following the Friday night broadcast of MTVU's alternative-music awards show, the Woodie Awards, viewers will be able to watch a 360-degree video of it online.
The Immersive Media technology supporting the online video, scheduled for online availability at 8 p.m. PST, is designed to enable users to freely navigate around a video, 360 degrees, letting them explore angles and shots that they wouldn't normally have been able to see.
While I haven't seen the Woodie feed yet, I did have a chance to play around with the technology on some test videos. The video experience seems perfectly suited for a concert format. It's certainly something worth checking out, even if you don't particularly care for the music, which is scheduled to include performances by Death Cab for Cutie, The Dead Weather, Matt and Kim, and Passion Pit.
This is the first big event for the IM Live technology, so it should be interesting to see how the experience of the fully produced show on TV compares to the IM Live video experience, in which site visitors essentially become their own producers. If you end up making your own comparisons, let us know what you think.
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.
Hulu has debuted a long-requested feature--the ability to find out when new episodes of TV shows will be available to stream.
The video site, which is a joint venture of NBC, ABC, and Fox, calls the new feature Coming Soon. It went live Monday.
Hulu's new Coming Soon feature.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman)The schedule of when TV shows will be released online has been unclear up until this point, leaving people guessing when an episode will be posted. This new feature solves that problem.
The update includes a few additional features. First, people can choose to get an e-mail reminding them when an episode gets posted. This is definitely helpful for those of us who are forgetful and don't use Hulu's excellent Queue feature. Also, Hulu now lets you place the embed code for an unreleased episode on your blog or Web site. I embedded this week's upcoming episode of "The Office" below to show how this feature looks.
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This weekend, starting Friday at 10:30 a.m. PDT, Hulu will be live-streaming the Austin City Limits music festival. Hulu will be using its Watch Now application on Facebook, which has a live events box integrated so that users can discuss the concert as they watch.
(Credit:
Hulu)
You can see the schedule of acts on the Facebook application page for the live-stream. Unfortunately, the stream features only a fraction of the acts that are playing the festival. In fact, some of the biggest acts, including Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dave Matthews Band, and Pearl Jam are missing from the live-stream lineup. Luckily, we still get to check out some great acts like Thievery Corporation, The Decemberists, Ben Harper, and The Dead Weather. There's no real indication of how the selection was made and I'm certainly grateful that we are getting a stream at all, but I can't help but wish that the full compliment of acts would be available for streaming.
Goin' back to Philly.
(Credit: FX)The absurdly offensive "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" makes its season-five premiere Thursday amid a hard social media push by the FX network.
In addition to the standard features (meet the cast, wallpapers, episode guide), FX has included Twitter integration, exclusive video clips, and an awesome trailer mash-up creator.
To collect the buzz around the premiere, its Twitter page is gathering all the tweets with the hashtag #sunnyfx. There seems to be a decent amount of activity there, but it should really pick up as viewers rush to Twitter to offer their thoughts on the first episode.
The creators (and stars) of the show have also flocked to Twitter, maintaining their own accounts: Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, and Danny DeVito.
By far, the coolest thing the site features is the trailer mash-up creator. Built on GorillaSpot's video editing platform, the mash-up creator features signature clips from all the seasons of "Sunny." You can splice these clips together, with music and titles to make your own season-five trailer. From there, you can post it to a variety of social-media sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Blogger. You can also get the embed code, which lets you place your creation anywhere. The trailer I created is included at the end of this post.
I love to see companies doing really innovative things on the Web with their marketing campaigns. Here, FX went above and beyond what's expected and created an engaging experience for fans and potential viewers.
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Brightcove is one of the leaders in the digital distribution of video content. They have landed such big customers as Showtime, Fox, Sony, AOL, and The New York Times. Starting today, Brightcove is going to make it easy for their customers to create branded channels for Boxee, the killer media center app whose popularity has been snowballing. The flagship customer for this partnership is Condé Naste Digital, who will be serving up its content in its own Boxee channel.
I think that this will be a great partnership for these two companies for a couple of reasons. First, while Boxee already has a lot of great content, it was in need of a simpler way for publishers to create content for its channels. With this new partnership, Boxee can just point publishers to Brightcove to create their own channels. Brightcove also benefits here due to the new customers that they will get, who are trying to take advantage of Boxee publishing, thus growing their business even further.
This new feature allows content publishers a great distribution channel for their content, while still being able to control advertising and monitor analytics. By making the Boxee channel creation process more accessible to more people, I think that we should see a surge of new content for the service in the coming months and year.
Back when I initially reviewed Mefeedia in March of last year, I wrote that the site was killer but that it was really lacking in the design department. It took them a while, but Mefeedia has finally rolled out a satisfactory redesign that has a decidedly "Web 2.0 feel." Mefeedia pulls video from all over the Web, from sources such as Hulu, Blip, ABC, and YouTube.
Yeah, the guy in the $4,000 suit is going to look all over the Internet for videos. Come on!
(Credit: Mefeedia)Since Web video is such a segmented market right now, with many networks having their own sites in addition to the wealth of user-generated sites, sites like Mefeedia offer real value in indexing all of these videos, making them searchable. With this new redesign, Mefeedia is becoming an even stronger competitor in this space.
Boxee, one of the more promising media applications out there today, is announcing the launch of a few new content sources today at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Boxee now has added support for content from Joost and MTV Music. Joost is bringing its usual assortment of video content to the table, while MTV provides a huge amount of music videos. In the United Kingdom, Boxee has also added the BBC's popular iPlayer to its arsenal of content.
In addition, Boxee will be totally opening up its Mac, Linux, and Apple TV alphas to anyone who wants to sign up. The Windows version, however, will not be entering an open alpha, but rather an invite-only alpha while it scales.
Boxee, for those of you who don't know, is a media application that can act as a player for content on your computer or, where it really shines, as a conduit for viewing Web video from a variety of sources. Video sites that currently have a plug-in on Boxee include Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CNN, Apple Movie Trailers, Revision3, CBS, Comedy Central, and more.
Boxee really does a great job of handling all of these different sources of content and presenting them in an easy-to-navigate way. In addition to these video sources, Boxee also integrates music sites such as CBS' Last.fm and Shoutcast. (Editors' note: CBS publishes CNET News.)
As you can see, there's a lot to be excited about here.
After its excellent implementation of Netflix instant streaming, people have been begging Microsoft to bring Hulu and other video sites to the Xbox. Boxee is beating Microsoft to the punch, even offering a Netflix implementation that is more full-featured than the Xbox's.
If Boxee can find a way to get its software off of computer monitors and on to more TVs (as it is doing with Apple TV), I think we could be looking at the next big contender in media software.
