SAN FRANCISCO--More than a dozen executives from various Web video services gathered Tuesday in a small meeting room in the corner of Adobe Systems' Bay Area headquarters to discuss "the state of online video." The round table, which was organized by video news network Beet.tv, wasn't for an impending emergency, but there was a somber tone. Falling ad rates, crunched credit, and lackluster consumer spending have already started to take their toll on the Web video business.
NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes, who moderated the latter half of the round table, asked the executives how the current economic climate had changed how their companies did business. The answer from many centered on advertising. Not necessarily how much the companies were getting from ads, but how the experimentation that had once opened up new ways to make money and draw attention had been stepped down dramatically.
Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu, which measures the advertising of brands, said that advertisers simply aren't spending as much money, and as a result they can't go out and try new things. Beltramo says the real losers in this situation end up being the smaller sites, as the ad companies then go with the safer ad bet on a bigger site.
What may come out of this lack of experimentation in 2009 is a more ubiquitous ad format for videos though. A much-discussed topic was that ad units inside videos has largely been a custom job, with sizes, shapes, and formats of all types. The end result is that advertisers have to spend more time trying to shape them to specific sites instead of offering something that could be used across the Web. With budgets stretched tight, and advertisers more wary, this may pave the way for new standards, which could benefit some of the smaller companies.
Over a dozen executives from various parts of the Web video industry meet to discuss where it's going in 2009.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)Looking to the future
For YouTube, 2008 was a banner year which can be traced back to politics. More specifically the U.S. presidential election. The site saw a large surge in political content from 2007-2008, with YouTube's News Manager Olivia Ma putting that number somewhere around 600 percent year-over-year.
Ma says YouTube's big focus in 2009 is to let users stream video wherever they are from any device they use. Whether she was referring to the viewing of content, or broadcasting it was unclear. In late 2008 YouTube experimented with live broadcasting as part of its YouTube Live event, although the same technology has not been made available to its users, despite Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube alluding to it last February.
Another focus of 2009 may be streaming costs and storage. For Motionbox, which offers video hosting specifically targeted at family and friends, costs are going up. Chris O'Brien, Motionbox's chairman says that costs in both storage and streaming of HD files is pushing his company to raise prices this year. His company's paid service, which normally costs $30 a year may see a bump to $40. "Storage has gotten cheaper, but not that much cheaper," he says.
This same effect has already been seen on other sites. Last year Vimeo introduced its Plus service, which gives its paying users the capability to upload more HD footage, while at the same time noticeably limiting how much embedded HD playback and uploading its nonpaying members were doing. Flickr, which just introduced HD video on Monday could end up going the same route, as the price of its $25 a year pro subscription allows for uploading an unlimited number of HD clips (albeit small ones).
You can catch the entire three-hour roundtable, which has been split up into two parts, over on UStream.TV (part 1, part 2).
A free Web site and hosting from Microsoft? It's true.
(Credit: Microsoft)The words "free" and "Microsoft" don't often appear in the same sentence, so imagine my surprise at discovering this deal: a free custom domain name, free Web hosting, free e-mail accounts, and more.
As you might expect from the name, Microsoft Office Live Small Business has a decidedly business focus--but that doesn't mean you can't use it for a personal site.
The freebie account includes not only the domain (any available .com, .net, .org, or .info address), but also site-building tools, reporting tools, project and document managers, 100 e-mail addresses, and collaboration-minded online workspaces. You get 500MB of storage, too.
So what's the catch? There really isn't one, though the free domain hosting expires after one year. After that, it'll run you a very reasonable $14.95 annually.
Needless to say, this is a pretty nice offer for anyone looking to start a small business or just carve out a private corner of the Web.
Side deal: Amazon MP3 has Brit-pop star Lily Allen's second album, It's Not Me, It's You, on sale for just $3.99. iTunes price: $9.99.
Nombray is a new site that lets you buy vanity domains for your name. The service is aimed at people with very little experience setting up a Web site, letting them "squat" the page while funneling any traffic to third-party services they're already using.
On Nombray's home page, you simply type in your first and last name, and the site will search to see which coordinating domains have been taken and which are still available. From there, you're able to claim available domains for $20 a pop, which gets you a free year of hosting and a page designer with which you can link to various social-networking profiles, such as those for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These sites, along with any other URLs you plug in, will show up like tabs on the top of the page, and visitors can simply click on them to flip between profiles while the Nombray navigation frame remains.
If you've already purchased a domain through another service (like GoDaddy or Domain.com) you can simply link up to it and have Nombray host the page for $10 a year. This offers a little less than a service like WordPress Premium, which charges $15 a year for custom domain registration and hosting (along with a pretty swell blogging platform). I do, however, like that Nombray keeps a frame on the top of the page so your visitors can quickly toggle between activities--it's a nice touch.
Nombray hosts a page for users with top links to their various social-networking profiles, blogs, or Web sites. It also searches the Web to show if domains using their name are available.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
MessageLabs documented a drop in spam eight times less than normal in the 12 hours immediately following the takedown.
(Credit: MessageLabs)Internet hosting site McColo disappeared on Tuesday. Along with it went thousands of pieces of spam, thanks, in part, to investigative work by Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs.
For about four months, security experts have been collecting data about McColo Corp., a San Jose, Calif.-based Web hosting service that may have been used by by the cyber underground, according to the The Washington Post. Krebs said that the McColo hosting company had been responsible for up to 75 percent of all spam spent.
Security vendor MXLogic said it was seeing about a 50 percent decline in spam volume as a result on Wednesday.
Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks, a company that monitors botnet activity, speculated that McColo vanished at around 9 a.m. Eastern time on November 10. Botnets are frequently used to relay spam, and McColo may have hosted some of the command and control servers necessary to coordinate spam campaigns.
Adam O'Donnell, writing on theZDNet Zero Day blog, speculates that the spammers might regroup in Eastern Europe.
The Post credits Benny Ng, director of marketing for Hurricane Electric, an upstream provider for McColo, for pulling the plug on the company. Another provider, Global Crossing, declined to comment, telling Krebs the company "communicates and cooperates fully with law enforcement, their peers, and security researchers to address malicious activity."
Something similar happened in September when another hosting site, Intercage/Ativo, was shut down by its upstream providers.
Too cheap for a Flickr pro membership and scared of Zooomr? Check out TinyAlbum, a super simple and minimalist photo-hosting service that will let you upload as many photos as you want (at up to 8MB a file) into slick little albums.
The UI shares a lot in common with Flickr, and incorporates a handful of really user-friendly features like drag-and-drop reordering, on the fly rotation, and links to various sizes for download. It's missing an open API, something that makes Flickr so incredibly useful in conjunction with third-party services, but the speed and ease of use are top notch for a small, independent app.
I managed to put together three albums with full-resolution shots in just a few minutes. The service is missing something similar to Flickr's explore page, but you can discover new content uploaded by other users in both a stream on the front page, as well as a Digg-spy-like service that shows you the most recently active users as well as what tags they've affixed to their shots.
See also: Photie serves up unlimited storage for your photos
Flickr users will find TinyAlbums familiar; however the service's speed is far peppier than the photo-hosting giant (click to enlarge).
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Calameo is a new service for publishing documents from your computer to the Web. Like Scribd, it's dead simple to use, and will slurp up all sorts of documents of up to 100MB in size. What makes the service noteworthy is that you can take documents online and offline with a click of a button, without removing them entirely--which could be useful to business or education users who want to upload many items, then make them public at a later date.
Of course, the strong suit with any of these document-hosting services is the viewer. Calameo's iteration is not nearly as fast as Scribd's iPaper at the highest quality settings, but it does a fantastic job rendering intricate details on PDFs. Power users can dial down the quality on a sliding scale of 1-100, with the lower numbers loading faster, and being suited for simple text documents. Users navigate the pages with simple page turns, which pop up in the corner of each page. There are also simple arrows on each side of the screen, as well as a table of contents to jump around--fairly standard stuff for a Flash-based document reader, but it works nicely.
What I like about Calameo though, is that it follows your mouse around, and has a beautiful full screen presentation mode that makes documents a highly interactive experience without detracting from the content. Users can add video or audio clips to these documents as long as they have a direct URL to a FLV or MP3 file that's hosted elsewhere. This is partially where the service breaks down a bit in its ease of use. You'll have to venture off elsewhere to find that content and get it hosted. It's really not hard if you use services such as Box.net or DivShare to host your files, but I think Calameo is missing out on a great opportunity to roll the storage for those files in the same place when it's already hosting your files in the first place.
I've embedded a sample Calameo document below. Be sure to check it out in the full screen viewer to get the whole experience.
See also: Scribd, Issuu (review), Yudu Freedom (review)
Thanks Fastjack!
Looking to take on more demanding customers, Amazon Web Services on Thursday rolled out two paid-support plans that give customers access to its engineers to resolve glitches.
The company said it will offer two levels of support--gold and silver--for a fixed annual fee or a percentage of customers' total usage of its services. The support plans are available for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). For more details on the terms, click here.
Right now, Amazon offers pay-as-you-go pricing for its hosted services. Customers pay for how much they use the service. To get support for technical problems, they need to go to free forums.
The paid support is a sign that Amazon's hosted computing is ramping up to take on a broader swath of clients, including large businesses.
Initially, Amazon aimed the hosted service at Web start-ups, but it's signing on business customers too. BusinessWeek reported earlier this week that The New York Times and Nasdaq are now customers.
The support service also casts Amazon more in the mold of traditional IT providers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems, which all offer a variation on hosted computing.
"Guaranteed support will also allow us to develop even more substantial applications using Amazon Web Services, knowing that Amazon is there to support us," Paul Horvath, chief technology officer of health care form-processing company TC3 Health, said in a statement.
Update on Friday: Link added to Amazon Web Services support terms and costs.
Right now, some may look like the online equivalent of a quaint corner store. But catalogs of online applications are the front lines of a brewing battle among platform-as-a-service providers.
Start-up Coghead on Tuesday plans to launch Coghead Gallery, an online store where people in small businesses can hunt for applications.
There's more than one 'app exchange' in town. Coghead launches Gallery for third-party applications.
(Credit: Coghead)The applications, written with Coghead's visual-development tool, run on its hosted platform. The platform, built using Adobe Systems' Flex, runs on Amazon Web Services.
At the start, there will be about 30 partners listing their business applications. Coghead's software is aimed at small development shops or tech-savvy businesspeople.
Although far smaller, its approach is similar to that of Salesforce.com's AppExchange, where people can find more than 800 customized applications written for Salesforce's development platform.
Hosted development platforms and tools, also called platform-as-a-service, are where a lot of software development is going, according to Web entrepreneurs. Rather than purchase a rack of servers and a software stack to run applications, developers can rely on a hosted platform to offer on-demand applications.
For platform providers, building the largest ecosystem of online Web developers helps accrue business, much the way Microsoft woos users of its development tools to drive sales of Windows and other stack software.
Although not a complete development environment, the latest entrant to this platform-as-a-service category is Google, with its App Engine, still in beta test version. Google now lets developers run their Python applications on the company's massive computing infrastructure.
Last week, Google opened up its own marketplace for listing third-party applications written for its enterprise products, including Google Apps and its search appliance. And on Monday, Google and Salesforce announced that Salesforce's customer relationship management, or CRM, applications, will be integrated into Google Apps through the Salesforce development platform, Force.com.
Open source comes to platform-as-a-service
Coghead's development service and gallery are specifically aimed at small businesses, both developers and customers. It is aiming to recruit value-added resellers or independent consultants with 2 to 20 people, according to company CEO Paul McNamara.
With a hosted development environment, they can write a Web application and get into the software-as-a-service business, he said.
"They used to sell their time for money by doing custom application development. It's a tough business because you're always chasing your next lunch, and if you take vacation, you aren't billing," McNamara said.
"Our value to them is that we let them transform the business by building an application for one customer and then selling it to other customers around the world," he said.
Ultimately, this model is disruptive because many more companies can get off the ground without the need for a large capital investment from venture investors, McNamara said. He added that Salesforce's AppExchange tends to focus more on large independent software vendors, or ISVs.
Developers on the Gallery can choose to take an open-source approach to listing, called the Open Definition model. They can make the template for their application available to others to copy, modify, and distribute--much like open-source projects allow people to tweak the source code.
Since most people don't actually work with source code when they use the Coghead service, they aren't actually using the source code. Another class of applications will be "IP protected," which means that customers can't copy and modify the applications.
Coghead plans to make money from Gallery by collecting a monthly fee for using the platform and listing the applications.
It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.
Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.
People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.
The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted server offering. It allows developers to set aside a storage volume online, on which people save files in different file systems. This differs from what is available now with EC2 because once a compute instance is taken offline, the data associated with it goes away.
With a persistent storage service, data can remain linked to a specific computing instance. Significantly, people can take a snapshot of that data and store it on Amazon's S3 storage service. That effectively acts as a way to create a back-up of their computing operation on the "cloud," according to Amazon executives.
"The snapshot is extremely powerful technology and allows for building highly fault-tolerant applications operating worldwide. Combine these snapshots with Availability Zones and Elastic IPs and you have all the tools to manage and migrate even the most complex of applications," Vogels wrote on his blog.
"And the great thing is it that it is all done with using standard technologies such that you can use this with any kind of application, middleware or any infrastructure software, whether it is legacy or brand new," he added.
Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr also describes the service on his blog, saying it was one of the most requested features from developers.
Thorsten vok Eiken at RightScale, who has been testing the service, talks about the implications of this feature and says his company is making tools to make it easier to use these services.
Von Eiken says that persistent storage is a dramatically important feature that will lead many more companies and developers to hosted development platforms.
"It's going to be like agile software development: if you want to survive as an Internet/Web service you will have to compute in the cloud or your competitors will leave you in the dust by being able to deploy faster, better, and cheaper," he said.
The team behind location-based instant-messaging service Meetro is launching a free hosted forum service this morning called Lefora. CEO Paul Bragiel came in to give me a demo of it in action last week and I came away impressed. It's a wonderfully easy way to set up good-looking forums without a lot of hassle. Bragiel said that the idea came after looking at many of the popular forum tools out there and getting frustrated with "antiquated" systems that involved knowledge of coding languages, or having to host everything on your own dime. Most of all, Bragiel said he and his team wanted to shed the look and feel of forums, which he says have gone largely unchanged since the mid-1990s.
Lefora gives people a decidedly easier route to get their forums up and running. Blog owners can throw in their RSS feed and have forum topics automatically created for them with each post. Links to chat about it can then be integrated into the blog posts in case people want to take the discussion away from the comments and into the forum.
Lefora also handles media from third-party services better than anything I've seen. You can simply plug in a link for a photo on Flickr, or a video on YouTube, and it will automatically place it in the post. There's no need to hassle with the embed codes from either service; it'll just grab the media from the link. Bragiel says you'll be able to do the same thing with media from other services as Lefora matures. In the meantime it'll accept any embed you can throw at it--letting you drop in things like Google Spreadsheets, videos from other services, or custom widgets.
Speaking of widgets, Lefora gives you more than a dozen to add to the side of your forum. They're managed in an identical fashion to WordPress, with administrators manipulating the order and content of each one. Bragiel tells me they're building it out as a platform, letting developers create their own widgets that will be listed in a directory. He's hoping they'll let people create forums that can be custom-tailored to take advantage of some of the content and activity going on in each site, or simply show off the personality of the blog owner.
Lefora is free, due to small ads that you'll find on each page. Bragiel says there will be premium versions of the service later on that will offer even more features and put blog owners in control of advertising in return for a small monthly fee. I've set up a quick and dirty version of Lefora hooked up to our Webware RSS feed. Also don't forget to check out our under-advertised Webware forums, which are a part of the CNET forum network.
Lefora forums can be skinned to match your site, including CSS. They'll also take Web media from all over the place right in forum posts. (click to go to this thread)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
