Industry

Patch WinDVD… Or Else

I can’t imagine there are gazillions of people currently watching HD-DVD or Blu-ray discs via PC… But the dozen of you who both watch AND use WinDVD better upgrade before InterVideo shuts you down. Their press release blames “hackers” though InterVideo forgot to mention they left the keys unprotected. WinDVD customers who are currently using … Read more

Another BitTorrent Client Goes Legit (Yawn)

Following in the footsteps of BitTorrent, Azureus just launched Vuze with Showtime and the BBC onboard: Formerly code-named Zudeo, the site already attracts more than two million unique monthly visitors after only two months in existence. Vuze breaks new ground by offering a powerful tool set of enhanced features and functions that enable content providers … Read more

Digital Media Bytes

A periodic roundup of relevant news… from our other blogs. Web Video and The Speed of Change: Connected Home 2 Go Networks in the CE Spotlight: Connected Home 2 Go Did MediaPortal steal WebGuide MCE code: Rakesh Agrawal Vyyo, How Cable Will Compete with Fiber: Connected Home 2 Go

Sega To Kill Dreamcast Support

Come 9/28, Sega will end repair support for the Saturn and Dreamcast in Japan This isn’t so newsworthy here in the US or here on this blog… However, there’s a special place in my heart for the Sega Dreamcast. I worked for a small company back during the Internet boom and a few of us … Read more

Gotuit Powers Sports Illustrated’s FilmRoom

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News from Gotuit: The company has just announced a deal with Sports Illustrated to power the 2007 NFL Draft FilmRoom feature. Gotuit has essentially created a video database of Draft candidates’ top college plays. If you visit FilmRoom you can search for players by name, position or school and then watch mini highlight reels of touchdowns, passes, blocks, etc.

This is a very cool application for football fanatics, but it’s even more interesting to me for its potential across the landscape of online video.

Gotuit considers itself an online video publisher and will work with businesses in a number of different ways to make video on the Web engaging. In a situation like the SI deal, Gotuit encodes and transcodes video for the Web, adds massive amounts of metadata, and then provides the publishing and sharing tools to create a dynamic, semi-personalized application.

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Big Brother is Watching… Web Video

We humans have a tendency to want to quantify absolutely everything, which is why it’s no surprise that bean counters have fixed their beady little eyes on the world of online video. Where Nielsen dominates broadcast TV metrics, web analytics companies are now carving out a niche in video on the Internet. And the nature … Read more

DRM-Free Tracks On iTunes

Apple and EMI will begin offering DRM-free songs via iTunes in May. I honestly never saw this day coming… Not on a voluntary basis without the might of several European countries behind it. There’ll be a 30 cent premium here in the US for unprotected tracks, but with it comes higher audio quality (256kbps versus … Read more