As part of the Streaming Media East conference in New York, Adobe has unveiled "Strobe," the "open framework" for its Flash video player that the company first announced last month. It's expected to be available in the third quarter of this year.
Since you were probably wondering: No, Adobe is not tweaking the pronunciation of "Strobe" so that it rhymes. Thank goodness.
But here's what it is: Strobe is a product and architecture for accompanying plug-ins based on Adobe's Flash technology that lets a company build a custom video player more easily, should it want to host online videos in-house rather than relying on YouTube or its ilk.
While Adobe's ActionScript language is "very flexible," explained Jennifer Taylor, director of product management for Flash distribution, "everybody's sort of had to recreate that from scratch, and as a result it's taken people longer than they've wanted to to to get their video players up to get their video online."
The meat of Tuesday's announcement at Streaming Media East is that a host of big new partners are on board, from content delivery networks to analytics firms. The full list of supporters is Adap.tv, Akamai, Blip.tv, Brightcove, CDNetworks, Digital Smiths, Eyewonder, GlanceGuide, Grab Media, Incited Media, iStreamplanet, KickApps, Level3, Limelight Networks, Multicast, Nielsen, Omniture, Panache, PointRoll, ScanScout, Thumbplay, Visible Measures, and YuMe.
Strobe is "taking the mystery out of creating video players, and also streamlining and simplifying that process, so people can do it much faster than they could before," Taylor said. She added that ComScore statistics have said that Flash is used to serve up 80 percent of all online videos.
Adobe is calling Strobe an "open framework" and is inviting developers to contribute, but has not finalized the way that it will be licensed. There may, for example, be an open source version that developers are invited to try out, test, and build on, but the version that will be downloadable at Adobe.com may haev a different license. This, Adobe representatives said in an e-mail to CNET News, would "take all the best pieces of the open source code, bundled with plug-ins," but that it would be protected to "prevent modifications, breaking plug-ins and prevent competing branding."
Company representatives followed up later on Tuesday to clarify that "the intent is to work with a license that allows for liberal use and innovation."
But regardless of license, the Strobe framework will be free, and Adobe does not have plans to charge for it. "Our intent is to not monetize Strobe directly," Taylor said. "Obviously, we anticipate and hope that Strobe will help accelerate the adoption of Flash video, and the rising tide helps all boats: it's going to help our partners and those who provide plug-ins for the framework."
This post was updated at 1:43 p.m. PT to clarify the use of open source technology in Strobe.
Disney's ABC Enterprises announced Thursday that it has entered into online-video joint venture Hulu, currently a partnership between NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners.
This means that TV shows from Disney-owned channels like ABC, SoapNet, and ABC Family will be coming to Hulu. Among them are "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," "Ugly Betty," and "Scrubs." There will also be Disney movies available on the ad-supported streaming video site, but a press release did not name any of them. Content will be available "soon," the press release explained.
Reports started to surface about a month ago that Disney was in talks to join Hulu.
Robert Iger, president and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, will take a seat on Hulu's board of directors, along with Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, and Kevin Mayer, executive vice president of corporate strategy, business development, and technology at Disney.
ABC already streams a significant amount of television content on ABC.com, and Disney-owned television and video content was some of the first to make an appearance in the iTunes Store's video download section.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney's single biggest shareholder, having sold animation studio Pixar to the company in 2006.
This post was expanded at 8:15 a.m. PT.
(Credit:
ZillionTV)
A new company called ZillionTV says it will soon introduce a new service that will enable cable and satellite subscribers to cut the cord and get subscription-free movies and TV shows right on their TVs from the Internet.
The company, which officially launched on Wednesday, has struck deals with some major Hollywood movie studios and TV networks, including Disney, 20th Century Fox Television, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, and Warner Bros. Digital Distribution.
The plan is to offer streaming movies and TV shows directly to TVs using a broadband connection. The company has created a small piece of hardware it calls a Z-bar, which provides the connection between the TV and the Internet via an Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi. The Z-bar also acts as a receiver for the company's unique remote control, which works a lot like a laser pointer and uses sensing technology to navigate through the content menu on the TV screen.
The back side of the Z-bar shows the connections to the TV and the Internet.
(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET )The ZillionTV service, which is currently being beta tested, will only be offered through an Internet service provider. It will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Unlike some other Internet-to-TV services, such as Netflix's movie rental service, ZillionTV does not require a subscription. It also doesn't require users to buy an expensive box, such as Microsoft's Xbox 360, Apple's AppleTV, or even Roku's $99 digital video player. Instead, for a nominal activation fee of less than $50, users will get the Z-bar and remote. And then they will be able to view up to 15,000 titles of TV shows and movies through the service without having to sign up for a monthly subscription.
... Read more
(Credit:
NBCOlympics.com)
The estimated $5.75 million in video ad spending on NBC's NBCOlympics.com really isn't that impressive, market research firm eMarketer said Friday.
To put things into perspective, NBC's projected video ad spending for the year is $505 million, making the Olympics extravaganza only 1.1 percent of the total.
NBC's handling of digital Olympics coverage has been criticized. Network President Jeff Zucker has defended his decision to not air the opening ceremony live or to stream some of the more big-ticket events on the Web, choosing to restrict them instead to tape-delayed television.
Plus, as eMarketer pointed out, a partnership with Microsoft meant that prospective Olympics viewers were required to download its Silverlight software before watching any video of the Games, and required downloads typically mean fewer viewers.
"One might just award NBC's online presentation of the summer Olympics a bronze medal then," eMarketer analyst David Hallerman said in a release Friday. "As a signifier for future online events, the games set a high bar for the competition--establishing that major sports events, tournaments and professional leagues ought to offer an abundance of video content online, not just snippets."
Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.
Right now I think the No. 1 thing worth watching on Hulu is the stellar Season 2 premiere of AMC's Mad Men--regrettably, the NBC-News Corp. joint venture hasn't been able to secure the rights to any other episodes of the ad-industry drama.
But there's more that's new on Hulu, the company said in an e-mail statement Tuesday. It's revamping its high-definition offerings in a new release of its "HD Gallery" section, with episodes of current NBC shows like 24, 30 Rock, Heroes, and The Office. As part of a special promotion, they're temporarily ad-free.
It's the first time the site has offered full-length TV shows in the 720p format, the statement explained. But it's important to keep in mind that not all hi-def Web video is created equal.
All that time you waste at the office watching stupid cat videos on YouTube adds up: numbers released by ComScore on Wednesday indicate that U.S. Web users watched more than 10 billion online videos during the month of February. That's a 66 percent gain from the previous year.
Leading the pack, with a 35.4 percent share of videos viewed throughout the month, were Google-owned video sites--in other words, YouTube. The total video count for Google, according to ComScore, is about 3.6 billion, 3.42 billion of which were YouTube-specific. In a distant second place is News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media (MySpaceTV and its ilk) with 5.8 percent of the market.
Following Fox Interactive are a melange of big tech portals and media companies: Yahoo, Microsoft, Viacom, Time Warner (excluding AOL), Disney, AOL, ABC, and Comcast. Nowhere to be seen is Hulu, the joint video venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal--in February, it was still in private beta. It also doesn't include digital download marketplaces like iTunes.
But this could be the golden age of online video, in a sense: my colleague Greg Sandoval noted in his coverage of the National Association of Broadcasters conference that as digital video recorders and set-top boxes grow increasingly sophisticated, consumers may have more options for watching TV shows on demand and for watching content on TVs that's currently online-only.
On the other hand, ComScore's numbers don't seem to indicate that long-form TV shows make up a huge chunk of online video. The average video length, according to the statistics, was 2.7 minutes. And the average viewer watched 75 videos in the month of February, which seems to point to a lot of short clips.
What I want to know: How many of those YouTube videos had to do with Rick Astley?
This post was updated at 10:12 AM PT to correct the spelling of Joost CEO Mike Volpi's name.
Could a browser-based version of its peer-to-peer software save Joost, the heavily hyped video start-up founded by the creators of Skype and Kazaa?
Portfolio's Kevin Maney wrote a lengthy profile of the once-hot company, and buried inside is a juicy tidbit about a future development: "This year, viewers will be able to watch Joost videos in a browser window," the profile read. Right now, Joost requires a software download, which critics have said is one of its prime setbacks when just about every other online video start-up is browser-based. "Go to Joost's Web site, click on shows like Seth Green's edgy Robot Chicken or an old Rocky and Bullwinkle episode and you can watch them as easily as you'd watch a video on YouTube." Well, that all depends on the technology working as smoothly as YouTube, and the quality being up to par.
Representatives from Joost were not immediately available to confirm that a Web-based version of the video player is on track for later in 2008.
Joost could use a boost. Once touted as a "YouTube killer" that would address rampant online video piracy by offering professional content creators access to a high-quality video platform and revenue from top-notch advertisers, it fell from favor when the content proved tepid and more enticing competitors sprang up--namely Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.
Recently, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith, whose company counts Joost among the partners in its "Audience Network" of online video outlets, said that he hasn't given up on it and that CEO Mike Volpi "knows what he's doing."
And perhaps Joost can resuscitate itself. While the Web-based Joost remains shadowy, the company has been making other moves: experimenting with live TV programming, for one, starting with the NCAA basketball championship. It's a good PR move, as the availability of "March Madness" games has, at least for now, put Joost back into the vocabulary of Web users--and onto the computer screens of workplace procrastinators.
TiVo Desktop Plus 2.6 software lets you view Web videos on your TV--but they need to be downloaded to a PC first.
(Credit: Slashgear)TiVo has added the ability to view downloadable Web videos on the company's DVRs, making good on its announcement at January's Consumer Electronics Show. The update will allow Web videos such as video podcasts to be downloaded with the same Season Pass functionality used by TiVo viewers to record their favorite TV shows. But don't expect to just punch in a URL or an RSS feed into the TiVo remote. Videos must first be downloaded to your PC's hard drive, after which they'll be transferred to your TiVo via your home network. That's a departure from Amazon Unbox videos, the Rhapsody subscription music service, and TiVo's forthcoming YouTube service, all of which are accessible online straight through TiVo's onscreen interface without the need to have a PC running elsewhere in the home. (By contrast, the Apple TV can pull down PC-free video podcasts, so long as they're indexed on the iTunes Store.)
The Web video functionality requires TiVo's Desktop Plus 2.6 software, available for download today ($25 for new users, or a free upgrade for users of the existing software). For now, it's a Windows-only solution, though TiVo says that the company is continuing "to work with Roxio on delivering equivalent functionality on the Mac platform." With any luck, perhaps the new Desktop Plus software will also swat those TiVoToGo bugs that have been afflicting some TiVo users for the past several months.
U.K. residents with iPhones can do a little rejoicing after yesterday. Amid the wave of announcements surrounding the release of the SDK, the BBC quietly launched iPhone and iPod Touch support for its iPlayer TV service. We've blogged about this being a feature after footage of the iPlayer working on the iPhone was shown off in a promotional video made more than 10 months ago, but the videos on the streaming service use Adobe's Flash, which is not a part of the iPhone's built-in software.
Unlike the software iteration of the iPlayer, shows can't be downloaded, but users have access to a limited selection of streaming content that's been formatted to work on the handset. Instead of featuring the beautiful Coverflow-approach seen in the video, the service uses a system similar to what's been seen on Apple.com and Break.com, with little blue play buttons to indicate the videos that can be played on the portable device when connected to a Wi-Fi connection.
The BBC has been a little late to the game with putting television content online for its viewers; however, in comparison to content providers in the U.S., it's the first to make its content readily viewable on the mobile device without any special subscriptions through the carriers. In the U.S., Verizon is currently one of the only major players in providing recently released television shows (in their entirety) over the air to its subscribers through its VCast Mobile TV service. Sprint and AT&T will also have initiatives to bring TV and movie content to phones over the air.
It's worth noting the service only works to residents of the U.K., who pay for the programming with their tax dollars. No mention of whether a paid version of the service for residents outside of the region is on the way. See more on the BBC's iPlayer blog.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Some would say that peer-to-peer video start-up Joost, created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa, failed to live up to the overwhelming hype that surrounded it. CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith, whose CBS Audience Network of online video sites includes a partnership with Joost, isn't one of them.
Speaking to a small gathering of tech and media reporters at CBS' New York headquarters Thursday, Smith gave a firm "no" when asked if Joost--which requires a software download and has slipped from the Web video radar since its buzzworthy debut--was dead in the water. "(Mike) Volpe knows what he's doing," Smith said of the Cisco Systems veteran who serves as the start-up's CEO. "It's got a good team."
Smith did add that he thinks Joost should be Web-based, not a download.
And with regard to Hulu, the joint Web-video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. that has turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise, Smith would not rule out the possibility that CBS might jump on board, presumably by adding Hulu to its list of Audience Network distribution partners--which include AOL, Bebo, Microsoft, Sling Media, Veoh, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com. He said that there are no technological barriers to bringing CBS' video content to Hulu and that CBS Interactive's "door is always open."
Regarding Hulu's team, Smith said, "We talk to them all the time.".
