Webware

Adobe Systems is revamping its Media Player with a new interface and a deal that will let users of the software watch movies from Sony Pictures.

The home screen on the new Adobe Media Player 1.1 presents more shows to watch with a new interface.

(Credit: Adobe)

The interface update in the new version 1.1, due to ship Tuesday afternoon, presents users with a larger number of video shows. "There's more content that we surface earlier," said Ashley Still, senior product manager for Adobe Media Player.

The new Sony partnership means people will be able to watch full-length movies, including Jerry Maguire and Men in Black, on Adobe Media Player, she said. A total of about 600 shows and 25,000 individual episodes are available. Users can browse various content categories, selecting some as favorites, or subscribe to their own video feeds via RSS, Still said.

Also new are full-length episodes of Beverly Hills 90210, 48 Hours, The Love Boat from CBS, which expanded the content already available through its existing partnership with Adobe. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

Content providers get free access to the player, and can control whether the content is available only in streaming format or can be saved onto a person's hard drive, as in the case of Epicurious shows, Still said. Content providers show what ads show and whether they're in the frame around the content or in the content itself, and the technology lets them embed ads that can't be skipped over, Still said.

Adobe takes an undisclosed fraction of the advertising revenue.

Shows can be encoded in the Flash video format, called FLV, or in H.264. The Adobe Media Player uses Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a programming foundation that lets software run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers. Adobe Media Player, though, works only on Windows and Mac OS X, Adobe said.

Update 10:40 p.m. PDT: I can confirm that Ghostbusters, from Sony Pictures, is in fact available. It's broken into eight chunks, each from 7 to 15 minutes long, and the end of the first chunk has an advertisement. The screen resolution isn't fabulous, but you can at least click a full-screen button that cuts away the clutter, and you can scrub back and forth.

While YouTube continues to be one of the most popular and widely recognized Web video sites, there's a rather large smattering of niche video services out there. Sclipo (formerly known as Visuarios) serves up a bevy of instructional videos in nine different categories. The service won "Best Start-up" last week at the StartUp 2.0 awards in Bilbao, Spain.

Like other video-hosting sites, Sclipo users can rate, comment on, and share the videos with others. What makes it so interesting is its revenue-sharing model. "Masters," or users who provide skills videos, will get a portion based on traffic (a la Revver). They will also soon be able to opt-in via PayPal to be "tipped" by their viewers.

For a young site, there's already a considerable amount of content. Sclipo encourages its users to post multiple videos on the same subject, and you're likely to spot some overlap here and there. One of the more enjoyable categories is food and drink, where you're likely to find a technique or recipe that's both entertaining and instructional.

Where Sclipo varies from some other how-to sites is its upcoming platform SclipoLive. It's essentially a video-conferencing tool, where users can teach their own classes via Webcam. Sclipo is integrating a revenue model, so teachers will be able to charge students and make money off their efforts. Students and teachers will be able to record these sessions, including a transcript of the accompanying text chat. Compared to something like Skype's Prime service, there's a potential for serving more users, and effectively making more than you would if limited to one-on-one expert sessions. While Sclipo is marketing this as a teaching tool, it could just as easily be used as a consulting platform. The SclipoLive service is currently in private beta.

I've embedded an example video off Sclipo below.

Other similar how-to video services: SuTree, HelpfulVideo, TeacherTube, ViewDo, Expert Village, 5min, and VideoJug.

Microsoft is closing its video-sharing site, Soapbox, to new users for up to two months so it can create better safeguards against pirated content.

The software giant, which agreed earlier Thursday to distribute movies and TV shows for big media companies, has seen Soapbox fill up with unauthorized clips since a test version of the site launched last month.

No new subscribers will be accepted, but anyone who has already signed up for Soapbox can continue to access the site, said Adam Sohn, a director in Microsoft's online-services group.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Microsoft stood to be embarrassed by the existence of pirated work on Soapbox. There was a real possibility that the company could have found itself distributing video from News Corp. and NBC Universal, at the same time another one of its units was hosting material stolen from those same companies.

Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo have agreed to be part of a new online joint venture of media conglomerates that also includes NBC Universal and News Corp. The new video network, scheduled to debut this summer, will feature full-length programming, movies, and clips from at least a dozen television networks and two major film studios.

Embeddable video is getting pretty cool. Static preview images seem to be a thing of the past. Blinkx, which is showcasing its service today at Demo 2007, is announcing a new widget called 'Blinkx It' that crawls your blog or Web site to deliver contextual video content. Think of it as Google Ad Sense with videos and no advertising. For example, clicking the 'Blinkx It' widget below will bring up videos related to News.com stories:

This is nice and unobtrusive, but the results aren't necessarily pertinent. In most cases, I was unable to get a smattering of relevant videos with URLs from CNET, Apple.com, and even the NFL. There are some options to tweak how well the widget scrapes for data, but this involves changing code on your Web site, or giving your posts metatags.

What's far cooler--and pulls up slightly more relevant results--is Blinkx's embeddable video preview 'walls.' These let you group together several pieces of video content in one embedded array. Clicking any of the motion thumbnails will take you to the site where the video is located. I've put together one for CNET-related results at the bottom of this post

It's easy to create walls like this. You can quickly choose how many rows and columns you want right from the Blinkx search results. Clicking these thumbnails takes you to the video's source. Also neat is the ability to scroll through pages of content, letting you pack more videos into one embedded array. When using Blinkx's search engine, you can watch the first 30 seconds of each video without leaving the results.

For another multivideo embedding tool, check out SplashCast which we covered yesterday.

My first run-in with Spymac was a completely accidental encounter a few years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a site that had its own visual style and appeal. It pulled in some design cues from Apple but kept its own sense of personality. This week Spymac has relaunched itself as Leapfrog, a portal for user-generated media.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The old Spymac featured a variety of user services, including e-mail, blogs, and user forums. It was a community-driven site. The new Spymac Leapfrog is all about media. Think YouTube with Google's pastel color palete. Users can browse popular videos, pictures, and music, all through a Flash-based player. Like Viddler, which we covered last month, Spymac lets you plug in your Webcam to record and share your own videos. There's even a revenue-sharing model for user-generated content, similar to Revver.

What's strange to see is that a few of the old Spymac features haven't weathered the transition. The older version of Spymac is now referred to as "Spymac Classic." Services like e-mail, forums, and blogs take you back to the classic version. Likewise, clicking on "galleries" in the classic Spymac pages transports you to the new front page. The two sections feel like completely different sites.

When I look at the evolution of Spymac, I wonder about the rationale. In many ways, it appears they're trying to compete with YouTube and other Flash-video hosting services on a design level. What puzzles me is why they'd completely revamp Spymac to be such a non-Mac site. If anything, I would like to see them focus on integrating the rest of their niche Mac community services to give the site a more cohesive feel in a manner that competitors like YouTube and MySpace haven't been able to accomplish.

Despite the year of video coming to a close, the surge of video hosting sites hasn't really stopped. Jumping into the fray is Liberated Films, a niche site aimed at bringing film enthusiasts and filmmakers together. Liberated Films takes it one step further with a charity service they intend to implement once they have a large enough user base. After-tax profits would go to user-selected charities or help organizations.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As on other video sites, films are served up in Flash with a short advertisement at the start. Videos range from short cartoons about alcoholic reindeer to full-on mob dramas. Unlike YouTube, Google Video, and MySpace, Liberated Films requires that films go through their review process (by real people) before being published on the site. This might ensure quality, but I can't help thinking it hinders would-be submitters from getting their films on there. Undoubtedly what makes other video publishing services thrive is the ability to post videos in a matter of minutes.

Liberated Films has two tiers of membership, a free level and a premium account that costs less than four bucks a month. The premium account nets you early access to new content and downloading rights to the films so you can save and share them locally. You also get access to high-resolution versions, which is pretty cool. I'm not so keen on having to pay to download the original file, but in the case of the content on Liberated Films, it's somebody's hard work--not just a Webcam video of some girl lip-syncing Justin Timberlake.

In the future, Liberated Films aims to add a monetization platform to their service. If it ends up bring anything like Revver's 50/50 revenue share model, the role Liberated Films' review board plays in promoting video submissions on the front page will be very important. I would like to see them add some sort of upcoming section (akin to Digg's) where registered users can promote what is worthy of being on the site and what's not.

I'm on the fence about Liberated Films. I like that there's a human filter to weed through submitted content. I don't think the charity angle is necessarily going to draw filmmakers compared to a comprehensive revenue-sharing model. While charity is noble, the true draw for aspiring filmmakers is an audience, so hopefully Liberated Films will focus on making the sharing and viewing process as simple and elegant as possible.

Short of paying for hosting services or using P2P tools such as Pando, there aren't many ways to upload and share large video files. Viddler, which launched its public beta earlier this month, is a video hosting service with some new tools to enhance both the sharing and viewing experience. Videos can be uploaded to Viddler in batches as opposed to one at a time, a really nice feature. Unlike YouTube and Google Video, which have 100MB limits, individual video uploads are capped at 500MB. During the uploading process, you're shown two separate progress bars; one for the currently uploading video, and another for total uploading status.

The uploader is simple, yet powerful

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Once your videos are uploaded, you can begin the tagging process. Viddler has done something very cool in letting you tag individual parts of the video using what they call timed tags. The same goes for comments, allowing you to leave comments pertinent to specific moments of a video clip. Clicking on a timed tag or comment will immediately skip to that part of the video. For video bloggers, Viddler lets you record straight off your Web cam. Embedding videos with Viddler is easy. There's several ways to get a video onto your MySpace profile page--or wherever else you normally embed videos. You can also easily e-mail them from within the site. The community potential here is huge.

The other thing I like about Viddler is its navigation. Its Explore page in particular gives you half a dozen ways to browse videos, but it's not nearly as overwhelming as YouTube can be. Videos are quick to load, and the quality is comparable to that of other Flash video providers. I would like to see one of these services offer a variable quality by connection, but it appears we're not there yet.

Adding comments is as easy as clicking

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Viddler is a really impressive service. If anything, it improves on YouTube's browsing and uploading experience in almost every way. People feeling hindered by time and size limitations on competing services should give Viddler a chance, as their 500MB cap is very generous, and the uploader is both powerful and easy to use. The community features and commenting system are also very developed for a young Web service. Video bloggers can also enjoy cutting a step out of their production process and not having to use any actual software for their recording. Recommended.