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On Monday, the media-viewing app Boxee is going into a closed, private beta test. This app has been in private alpha testing for about a year and a half, and has won praise while generating some frustration among its test users. At first, for example, it was a great interface to the Hulu service, but Hulu made its content unavailable to Boxee users (there's a less-elegant workaround baked into the current product). AppleTV users who hacked the app into their system have also hit speed bumps--the app won't work on the newest updates of the AppleTV product.
Boxee soldiers on, gaining fans and adding content from other sources. I recently covered the Boxee version of Clicker, for example, which shows us how the Boxee platform might some day do a credible job of replacing users' TiVos or cable boxes.
The Boxee experience is improving, too. Monday's new beta has a completely redone interface that is far superior to the alpha's. The idea of the slide-out toolbar menus, an anachronistic throwback to Windows and Mac desktop operating systems, is thankfully gone, replaced by a more visible and consistent interface.
The app also gets new features. If you tell Boxee your Facebook and Twitter IDs, it will scan your friends' posts continuously, and tell you what they're talking about in a new "recommended" column on the Boxee home screen.
The home screen also shows your queue, which can include content that pops up based on shows you're subscribed to. It also has a "featured" column that Boxee can use to promote new content, included paid placements--a new revenue stream for the company.
Boxee can also now search the entire Netflix online inventory. Previously, you could view your online Netflix shows and see a smattering of new ones. Now you can see and stream everything, assuming you're a paying user.
There are also new content partners: The Escapist (which makes the Zero Punctuation video), and SuicideGirls. (I wasn't aware until I got the beta demo that Boxee supports adult content; the NSFW feeds don't appear until you disable the parental controls.)
The new Boxee begins to address my biggest gripe about the system, which is that it can be hard to find content from the multitudinous streams that feed into the platform. A new TV menu combines content from the user's hard drive as well as subscription and streaming sources, and it has a useful search feature. There's also an improved table of contents for shows. But Boxee still doesn't have a global search to find everything it can play, so in some cases you need to know which "application" (Boxee content stream) has a show you want to watch. Boxee VP Andrew Kippen did tell me it's an ongoing goal to improve the search process on the platform.
Kippen says the company recommends the Mac Mini as the best platform for the app at the moment. There are also OS X and Linux versions, and a Windows port, but it's for 32-bit installations only. The Linux port will be used in the dedicated Boxee hardware, details of which are being announced shortly. In the meantime, Roku has a somewhat competitive hardware-based product now shipping, and it has the additional benefit of offering access to a user's Amazon streaming-video account, which Boxee doesn't do.
Boxee is still closed to most new users. Everyone, even existing alpha users, has to sign up for the beta lottery to try it out. The beta will open to all around the Consumer Electronics Show time frame, in January.
New Boxee home screen
(Credit: Boxee)
The new show browser searches both locally stored and streamed content.
(Credit: Boxee)
A new control menu can pop up above any playing video.
(Credit: Boxee)
Just a few days ahead of the scheduled public beta launch of media app Boxee on Monday, the excellent Clicker Internet video directory has been ported to the platform.
To review: Boxee is a media viewing app designed for living room use--that is, at a distance, with a remote control. It's a good interface for sources like YouTube, Netflix, CNN, and CBS (our publisher), as well as music, home movies, and photos. We've covered it a lot and quite like it.
Clicker, which we also like, is an extremely well-curated directory of streaming television shows. Clicker on Boxee is that directory on the Boxee platform, and also designed for control from a remote. It works very well. The Clicker service and Boxee appear made for each other.
Clicker on Boxee gives users a nice big interface for browsing shows.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Unfortunately, Clicker on Boxee doesn't have access to the entire Clicker database, which is a big disappointment. In particular, Hulu was removed as an official Boxee content partner earlier this year, so Clicker, which indexes Hulu just fine on its Web interface, won't display Hulu episodes when run on Boxee. Boxee itself has a workaround that shows Hulu content despite the licensing issues, but it's not the full, authorized interface that Boxee used to have, and Clicker doesn't have access to those shows. So if you're on Boxee and want to see a show that's on Hulu, you have to leave Clicker, fire up the Hulu Feeds module, and search for it there.
One of Boxee's other issues at the moment is that there are nearly 40 different content sources that it can view, and several have unique interfaces and search functions. Clicker may be able to find a lot of video content, but it can't find all of it, and if you use Boxee you might have to know which network or service a show is on to find it if it's not on Clicker. Hopefully the upcoming open beta of Boxee, which is said to feature a new interface, will address this issue. We'll have a report on the new version of the app, and how Clicker works inside it, when it launches.
The search function is also designed to be used with a remote control.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
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.
ComScore on Wednesday released October viewing statistics for online video. And although there weren't any surprises at the top, the figures did provide some interesting insight into how users are consuming video on the Web.
According to the research firm, more than 167 million U.S.-based Web users watched video online during October. All told, they watched 28 billion videos. Google easily led the pack, servicing a whopping 38 percent of all videos Americans viewed online, with 99 percent of those videos watched on YouTube.
In a distant second, Hulu delivered 856 million videos, accounting for 3.1 percent of the market and setting a new record for monthly views. Microsoft came in third, with 451 million videos viewed on its site, capturing 1.6 percent market share.
ComScore also took a look at the total number of viewers that consumed video content during October. The research firm found that the average viewer watched 167 videos during the month. Google sites attracted 126 million unique viewers. Fox Interactive Media followed Google, with 53 million unique viewers. Yahoo sites attracted 50 million viewers. Although Hulu didn't make the top three in unique viewers, the average user watched 20.1 videos on the site during October, representing another all-time high for the site.
Some interesting tidbits rounded out ComScore's report. According to the company, 84.4 percent of all United States.-based Web users viewed online video. The average viewer watched 10.8 hours of video in October, which is especially shocking, considering that the average online video was just 3.9 minutes long.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Movie and TV show streaming service Hulu on Monday added tagging to the mix, allowing users to add up to 30 tags to each piece of content for the sake of organization. These tags also work site-wide, which means that users can see all types of related content regardless of whether it's a TV show or feature-length film.
Users have two choices for tagging: one is creating an all-new tag, while the other is to vote up a tag someone else has made. Each time a user does this it adds to the number, giving certain tags more validity, although unlike size-based systems it's not as immediately clear which tags are more popular or common. Users can also delete tags, but only their own--meaning that if there is a bad tag placed by another user there's no way to report it.
Hulu's new tagging system is part public, part private and works on all content.
(Credit: CNET)Tags are made public and can be seen by other users immediately, although they do not yet appear to be an integrated part of Hulu's search engine. Instead, users can search for a specific tag within the tag section of each video. It's also worth noting that some content on Hulu has an expiration date, so you can spend all the time in the world tagging videos, but something you tagged a few months ago might not be able to be watched at a later date.
One thing Hulu could do with tags (but probably won't) is add timing to the mix. Recently-launched (although still in private beta) AnyClip organizes movie clips by what's happening in them. Hulu could do the same thing with its content by giving users a way to tag by time the way video host Viddler does. Though again, this wouldn't be nearly as useful as AnyClip due to Hulu's frequent content expirations.
Worth noting is that competitor YouTube has long had tags for its hosted movies and TV shows. However, it does not let users add them.
YouTube might still reign supreme in online video, but the big surprise coming out of Nielsen's VideoCensus release on Thursday is that Facebook is now the world's third most popular place to view video online.
According to Nielsen's latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams.
In October, Facebook placed second in total number of unique viewers: over 31.5 million. YouTube had almost 106 million unique viewers during October. Hulu placed fifth with 13.4 million viewers.
According to Nielsen, the amount of time Web users spent viewing videos on social-networking sites increased 98 percent year over year. In October 2008, users watched 503.8 million minutes of video; they watched 999.4 million video minutes in October this year. That growth far outpaced growth in number of online video streams as a whole, which grew 26 percent year over year.
Facebook has moved its way up to third place.
(Credit: Nielsen)"During the past year, online video viewing has become central to the Web experience," Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs said in a statement. "In conjunction with this increase, we are seeing remarkable growth in video viewing on social networking sites and it is only natural that these two trends would converge in consumers' minds, making sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, increasingly important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video."
But it was Facebook, not MySpace, that led the way in video streams on social-networking sites, nearly tripling MySpace's 85.2 million streams during October.
According to Nielsen, the "total time spent viewing video on Facebook" grew by 1,840 percent year over year. The number of unique viewers grew 548 percent over the same period. Total streams increased by 987 percent year over year.
"Facebook's rapid growth in online video during the last year illustrates the site's evolution from simply a communications focused tool to a media portal," Gibs said. "Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online."
Boxee Box: More fun than kittens?
(Credit: daveyp.com)Even though Hulu Desktop and other software have stolen its thunder a little, we love Boxee. It was one of the first and best ways to browse streaming media from multiple outlets on a big screen, and we like its indie spirit, even though some content providers have given it a hard time.
Rumors of a Boxee Box--an actual piece of hardware to free the software from a PC--have been floating for a while, but it's becoming real very soon, according to the Boxee blog. Boxee's first hardware partner has been found, and we are already guessing as to what the Boxee Box will have inside. More importantly, how will it compare with Roku? Or, could it possibly be...
A launch event on December 7 in Brooklyn will give a lot more details including mock-ups, and CNET will be there. Look for more then. Until that day, enjoy the kittens.
The online video directory service Clicker launches Thursday at the NewTeeVee Live conference. If you watch TV, you will love this site.
Clicker is not a full-on video search engine like Bing or Google, and it's not a video-viewing site like Hulu. It is, instead, a carefully curated directory of full-length video content, with several extremely nice features and user interface flourishes that make it a good first stop online if you're looking for an episode of your favorite show to watch.
Unlike a search engine, Clicker won't give you every last shred of online video on your search query. If you're looking for the "Dr. Horrible Sing-along Blog" on Bing or Google, you'll get hundreds of clips and related videos. On Clicker, just four: the three 15-minute episodes individually plus all of them combined into one long stream. Each video also has a very good "Related" sidebar showing other videos that are thematically linked. No matter what I threw at it, I found the Related suggestions pertinent.
Clicker's behind-the-scenes engine is constantly crawling video sources to add and remove content as necessary. The "remove" part is key, as many networks take episodes off the Web as frequently as they add them.
Clicker is a great site for finding professional video content.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)In the Clicker interface, an auto-completing search box that's focused just on video makes it incredibly fast to find content. Searching within a show (for example, looking for "Clinton" in the Daily Show page) is also very fast, as the search results change in real time as you type.
When you want to watch a video, Clicker plays it either by linking to the source, such as aggregator like Hulu or a network site like that of CBS or AMC, or it displays an embeddable player. This depends on the content owner's terms of use. Some content is not available for free, but Clicker knows that it can be streamed on Amazon.com or Netflix; Clicker will direct users to log on to their accounts on those services.
This service does an amazing job of taming the morass of online video, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The site has been in private beta for a few months; it is scheduled to go live Thursday at 10:30 a.m. PST.
What's next
Clicker directs viewers to the rights-holders' sites.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)From a business perspective, advertising will become a part of the model, although Clicker won't try to get in the way of pre-roll videos from the content sources. In some key vertical content areas, though, like health and finance, Lanzone thinks there's a good opportunity. Also, Clicker could end up driving traffic to sites like Hulu and could potentially monetize those click-throughs.
The challenge for Clicker is to get viewers to know about it. A strong SEO effort will be applied to get Google searchers to the site when they're looking for shows. That will help. There may also be privately labeled versions of the service for various institutions. But--and I rarely say this--this service is good enough to grow organically. Once you try Clicker, you'll be back again.
Listen to a Larry Magid discussion with Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone.
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Unlike when you stand over your coworker's desk, Microsoft's Bing search engine actually works better when you hover.
One of the key features of the would-be rival to Google is that when you hover to the right of a result, you can get a preview of what to expect. As part of an update this week, Bing's hover result will now feature more information including a thumbnail preview of the site in question.
Microsoft is using Wolfram Alpha to help power certain results, such as this search for the fat content of french fries.
(Credit: CNET News)One of the ongoing challenges for Bing, besides just getting more people to use the site, is letting them know that the hover feature is there. Microsoft's research has shown it gets high usage from those who know about it, but also finds that lots of people don't know the feature is there. Microsoft has been experimenting with some different visual cues that might make it easier to stumble upon the previews.
The hover feature was developed by the San Francisco-based team that Microsoft acquired as part of last year's acquisition of Powerset. Powerset, which developed a semantic search technology, also powers Bing's index of Wikipedia.
Bing's fall update update also includes the first fruits of a deal with Wolfram Alpha. As part of that arrangement, certain health related searches, such as "how many calories in a hamburger" will now feature information from Alpha. Bing will also rely on Alpha for some math calculations, Microsoft said in a blog posting on Wednesday. Wolfram noted that Microsoft is one of the first customers for a commercial licensing program that was formally announced several weeks ago.
Other changes to Bing include improved local results for topics such as weather and events.
It's all part of a wave of updates Microsoft is making to Bing this week. On Tuesday, Microsoft said it is moving its MSN Video site under the Bing umbrella, with a new video page that can be used to watch videos from places like Hulu and elsewhere.
The company also announced some enhancements to Bing Maps, including the ability to use the mouse to alter a suggested route and have one's directions re-calculated.
The improvements come as Microsoft is looking for ways to stand out from Google as it tries to wrest share from its much larger rival. The software maker has seen a modest uptick but faces steep hurdles in trying to make more significant gains.
Experian Hitwise said Wednesday that Bing's share reached 9.57 percent in October. That's up from 8.96 percent in September, but still well behind Google, which had more than 70 percent and Yahoo, with 16 percent of the U.S. search query market.
While adding features is clearly important, trying to stay ahead in the search game can be quite a challenge. Just hours after Microsoft announced a deal last month to index real-time tweets from Twitter, Google announced plans to do the same.
Microsoft has also gotten some unwanted attention for one of its features--the Bing Cashback program--where users can get a portion of their online transactions rebated by starting off on Bing. A blog posting outlined a flaw in the mechanism that could allow people to get cash back without ever spending money via Bing.
That posting was pulled after a
Video might've killed the radio star, but the Web sure hasn't killed music videos. Less than a week after News Corp.-owned social site MySpace announced its MySpace Music Videos portal, video search engine Blinkx announced the debut Tuesday of "Blinkx Music," a search tool specifically designed to trawl through music videos across the Web.
"There are hundreds of thousands of music videos available on the Web today which makes it nearly impossible to navigate and find what you are looking for," Blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake explained in a release. "Based on the success of blinkx Remote, our online TV guide, we recognized there was a need to help organize music videos and make them easily searchable on the Web. By leveraging our award-winning video search index, we built Blinkx Music to help our users find their favorite music videos quickly, easily and in one place."
Blinkx says that its search engine has thus far indexed more than 33,000 hours of music videos from about 10,000 artists. While it says that Blinkx Music will let users "post comments and interact with other fans, and also offers background information about bands and their work," the release doesn't say whether it will provide links to streaming or download partners, from which it could potentially rake in revenues shares.
But this is a tight space, and MySpace's music video portal won't be Blinkx Music's only competitor. Universal Music Group is still putting together Vevo, a Hulu-like portal for music videos that aims to bring artists and labels the revenues they might not be getting from YouTube (though the Google-owned video platform is providing Vevo's technology).
Also looming in the background is Google's forthcoming music offering, which the company plans to formally unveil in a press event on Wednesday in Los Angeles. This could instantly run away with a huge market share in music video (and music download) search.
Some background on Blinkx: it's a publicly traded company based in the U.K. It merged with a search engine called Autonomy and then was spun off from it when it went public in May 2007. When rumors started to swirl last year that Google and News Corp. (which, coincidentally, owns MySpace) were interested in acquiring it, shares of Blinkx stock soared.
A correction was made at 11:31 a.m. PT on November 2: Blinkx has been de-merged from Autonomy.
