Longtime gamers "Bello" and "Merca" were married this past December in Artix Entertainment's massively multiplayer online role-playing game AdventureQuest Worlds, the company reported Monday. The bride and groom have been avid MMORPG gamers for three years and met each other while playing the game. The wedding was held in a private, in-game room and 11,000 avatars were on hand to witness the exchange of vows.
Unfortunately, the wedding was raided by Troll Wedding Crashers, a clan within the game that "camped out on the dance floor of the reception area."
Low-cost pocket video camcorders have enjoyed a resurgence in sales, thanks to Web 2.0, reveals a report from research firm Futuresource. According to the findings, pocket video camcorders represented less than 5 percent of total camcorder sales in the U.S. and Western Europe in 2006, but that number could swell to 40 percent by 2010, thanks to sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and others that make it easy for consumers to upload captured video online.
Online research firm eMarketer released a study Monday claiming small businesses plan to increase ad spending on social-network marketing during 2009. According to the study, 25 percent of all the small businesses surveyed claim they will increase social network ad efforts throughout the year. Twenty-two percent of companies said they plan to increase e-mail ad spending during 2009, while 13 percent of respondents claim they will increase spending on e-commerce sites. The full report can be viewed on eMarketer's site.
An online retailer that allows users to sell goods by providing a 240-character description of the product, has decided to rename its service from Twee Bay to Tweba. According to the company's site, which is basically a Twitter for e-commerce, "some people" asked the service to rename the site and, to no one's surprise, it did just that. The company's founder won't say who asked for the name change, but you can bet they probably worked for a company that has a name that rhymes with Twee Bay.
Balderton Capital, a U.K.-based venture capitalist, announced Monday that it has launched a new fund worth $430 million to invest in new technology and media start-ups. That said, the company told TechCrunch UK in an interview that it would "invest mainly in early stage" firms, but it might "also look at later stage companies."
Blip.tv, a video site that shares advertising revenue with show producers on all the clips it hosts, announced on Tuesday that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round that was led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company also announced that it has grown 250 percent in the past year, serving more than 51 million video views last month alone.
"Our goal is to make online shows sustainable by providing services of scale to independent creators and Web studios," said Blip.tv CEO and co-founder Mike Hudack. "Web show creators should be able to focus on creating great content while we take care of infrastructure, distribution, and advertising on their behalf. With Bain Capital's support, we know that we'll be able to grow our offerings for producers while providing value for distribution partners in the form of excellent episodic programming."
Blip.tv is competing in a tough market. The company is fighting for attention and users with services like YouTube, Viddler, and Vimeo. And although each company has enjoyed success, none of them have been able to find an easy way to become profitable. Just last week, Vimeo launched a new service called Vimeo Plus, a paid solution with additional features for $59.95 per year. YouTube is trying professional content and advertising to increase its revenue.
For its part, Blip.tv has decided to raise more money and maintain its 50-50 revenue split with users. And although each has merit, there's no indication that any single solution will make these companies profitable as their popularity rises and costs skyrocket.
Corrected October 20 at 11:55 a.m. PDT. Details below.
Vimeo, the popular site that lets users upload videos and share them with friends, announced today that it has officially launched Vimeo Plus, a paid service that will offer users more features for $59.95 per year.
Vimeo Plus ups the user's storage limit from 500MB per week to 2GB per week and features no banner ads. Vimeo Plus users will also be able to customize any part of the player, which will allow them to remove the playbar or decide what happens at the end of the video.
But perhaps the most controversial announcement surrounding Vimeo Plus is the company's decision to scale back the number of high-definition videos allowed in its free version. Free account users will only be allowed to upload one HD video per week, while Vimeo Plus users can upload an unlimited number of HD videos. But there's another catch: embedded HD videos can only be played 1,000 times before they're reverted back to standard definition. Alternately, the user can pay more to keep the video in HD through the company's online store.
"First of all, you'll only be able to upload one HD video per week," a Vimeo representative said in a blog post detailing the new limitations being imposed on users with free accounts. "You will also be limited to creating one group, one channel, and three albums. It really does pain us to impose these limits, because we want you all to be happy, productive Vimeans, but we feel that if you're going to be a power user, you should help us keep Vimeo working by purchasing a Plus account."
Vimeo's decision to scale back some of its offerings on free accounts shouldn't come as a surprise. The company is operating in a highly-competitive market against companies like YouTube, Blip, Viddler, and countless others that are trying to find the best way to monetize their expanding communities.
Vimeo claims it needed to charge its users because its advertising revenue wasn't covering the cost of hosting so many videos. Now it needs to hope its user base will understand and use the paid service.
This story initially misstated the limits imposed by Vimeo. It is only embedded HD videos that can only be played 1,000 times before they're reverted back to standard definition.
YouTube may be the best-known mainstream video-hosting site on the Web, but it's certainly not winning any awards for the visual quality of its content. YouTube's creators have said higher-resolution videos are on the way, but until then, there are a handful of other services that do a much better job at making your uploaded video look a little less Webby.
There's another problem at hand: size. Video files are big, and a lot of the most popular services place tedious size restrictions. Those restrictions mean that you are either going to have to compress your video through third-party software before uploading or make smaller, lower-quality source recordings to begin with.
We've handpicked four services that have pretty lenient size limits and that don't force you to download software clients just to graduate up to the higher caps. To be fair, we're also comparing all four to the YouTube status quo.
So here's the deal. We took a source video of just less than 2 minutes at full VGA quality at 30 frames per second. It came off a recent-model Canon digital camera that saved it as an approximately 200MB AVI file. Your results for source material may vary, but based on the popularity charts on Flickr, Canons rule the roost both overall and in the point-and-shoot camera category, so we felt that it was a good control.
It's worth noting that Casio has several models of digital cameras with "YouTube capture" modes, though these are simply recording video in MPEG-4 H.264 at smaller resolutions, which takes up less space. You can accomplish a similar feat, albeit using a different video codec, if your camera has a "compact" or "e-mail ready" video-capturing mode.
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Up until this afternoon I had never heard of the expression "hypervideo," although I was quite familiar with the concept having used it in video services like Viddler, and enhanced podcasts in Windows Media Player. The idea is simple--take hyperlinks and textual information, and add it to various times or positions on a video. The result is that your viewers can have added contextual information about whatever they're watching, at the moment it happens.
The hard part is the execution, and making things user-friendly. A service called Asterpix has taken a stab at it with a hypervideo service that lets users build their own link-infested videos, complete with visual cues that tell you when you can access the added URLs and notes. While watching a video that's been enhanced on Asterpix, you won't notice much besides a small glowing circle that will show up on a person or object, and track them as they move. When you mouseover the notification, the video will pause, and you'll get a little page full of whatever text or links users have added to the video.
The actual process of adding these links takes two-steps. The first is picking the video you want to annotate. This is managed through the integrated search tool, which will scour YouTube, Google, MySpace, Brightcove and MTV to let you find whatever you'd looking for. Unfortunately you can't just plug in a video URL from one of these services, but if you know the title, you're good to go. The second step involves maneuvering a box around any object in the video clip and adding a description, URL, and tags. To do this, you simply need to highlight the object with a box. The service will do its best to track the object you've tagged, which it managea to do really well with on clips where there aren't quick cutaways.
The end result is a video experience that is slightly disjointed due to starting and stopping videos, coupled with various flashing indicators that pop up on the screen. If you're just in it to watch the video, you can turn the notes off, or click the link to watch the video on its original site. Also, if you're trying to avoid the flashing indicators altogether, there's a index on the left that shows all the notes for the entire clip. Clicking any of them will jump you right to the spot, complete with annotation.
I actually prefer Viddler's approach to this entire concept with their timed tags and comments, which are visually separated into two groups by color. The only downside with that system is that you can't call action to what's going on in certain part of the screen, and with more than 30 or 40 comments on a short video, things get a little hectic. However, when you scale Asterpix's approach to visual tagging, the entire screen will be covered in little pulsing indicators--not exactly viewer-friendly.
For other solutions that do visual video annotation with existing videos, see BubblePly and the currently defunct Click.TV.
Tag people or objects in a video with Asterpix. In this case, we're annotating Erica Ogg's face for the sake of identification.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Video hosting and sharing service Viddler has undergone a facelift this morning just in time for the Web 2.0 Expo. Embedded videos now have Viddler branding, and a new drop-down menu filled with sharing and embedding options. Users are also now able to comment on video clips, not just certain moments of a video.
What's neat about the update player is that it takes the community experience that you get on Viddler, and puts it on any site where a player is embedded. Anyone with a Viddler username and password can login from the embed, and add or browse comments, tags or notes. Pretty neat.
I've embedded an example video below. Previous Viddler coverage here.
Related: divShare adds video to file hosting service
UPDATE: Added Viddler's self-made explanatory video after the jump. We see quite a few screencasts here at Webware, and this is one of the better ones out there.
... Read moreWe got the tip today about a brand new service called Bubble Guru. Its goal is simple: to give your blog or Web site visitors a short pop-up video message that runs and closes without any user interaction required. You can also record and send message to friends via e-mail. For viewers, there's no escape--the talking bubble will follow them as they scroll down the page.
Annoying and obtrusive, yet compelling
(Credit: CNET Networks)The service is by no means a full-fledged video blogging tool; it falls into a strange subcategory between video messaging and a pop-up advertisement. It's also a little early in development, offering no way to save and track the messages you've created. For now the service is free, but a paid subscription version is on the way for about $10 a month.
We thought long and hard about the usefulness of this for the casual user. In truth, video embedding services from YouTube or Viddler is much more user friendly. Users can turn those videos on and off at their discretion and pass any interesting ones along to a friend. That, however, isn't the point of Bubble Guru. This service is all about grabbing your attention, which it does very well. We've embedded one for you: to see what it looks like, click "read more" below.
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Vlogging social network Vlip launched this morning, providing users with a way to record and share video messages with others using their Webcams. Vlip has incorporated a system similar to YouTube's, allowing Vlip users to post a video response to another user's video. Both the video and its responses can be viewed from embedded Vlip clips on social networking profiles, blogs, and Web sites (similar to the dynamically updating embeds on SplashCast and Searchles.) Posting and browsing the site requires no registration.
What's also neat is the ability to add a response from any embed on other sites, which lets users reply without having to navigate off whatever site they were visiting before.
Lycos Mix is a new video-playlist creation tool that lets you string together video clips from various hosting services. The videos sit beside a live chat window based off of Lycos' Cinema technology. Casual observers can come in, watch videos, and chat with you. It's almost like a bar except a little creepier.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
When you're done adding content, which is done by pasting URLs or using the Lycos Mix bookmarklet from the content's source page, you can watch, rearrange, or chat about the videos, all within the same screen. The adding process is a little arduous, as sites such as iFilm, Viddler, and Revver aren't (yet) compliant. Even worse, in both Internet Explorer and Firefox my botched video embed code couldn't be removed from the Lycos Mix submission box. I had to back out of the uploading form and go back in to clear it out. I seriously doubt the casual user is going to have patience for that.
Video-playlist creation has been done before and by many other companies. Most recently SplashCast and Feedbeat. The chat feature is neat, but 9 times out of 10, I'm watching a video because I've received a link to it via e-mail or from a friend's IM. Nearly all video services have comments now, which serve as a permanent forum for conversation. In that sense, I just don't see a need for live chat integration.
See also YouTube's TestTube.
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.
