Video Archives - Page 115 of 122

Jumbotron On-Demand?

Photo courtesy of David Silbey and his T-Mobile Dash

I was at the Villanova/Georgetown b-ball game today contemplating how I could reasonably write off the tickets as an expense for tax purposes, and I started thinking about how Comcast could get more out of its Jumbotron. If there was a way to plug the Jumbotron display into a cable network, Comcast could then broadcast that out on-demand to college campuses. Dumb graphics, half-time show coverage and all.

More interestingly, maybe cable operators should do something equivalent to ESPN’s Full Circle coverage of certain events like last year’s Duke vs. UNC games. Instead of having different ESPN networks covering different aspects of the game, have different on-demand channels showing different game-related content. One station could have the game at 3/4 screen with the rest of the display dedicated to dynamic player and game stats. Another station could syndicate one of the college’s own radio commentators over the broadcast video feed. Another station could feature different camera angles.

Not Everyone Deserves 15 Minutes of Fame

There’s a new trend in online video that I’m entirely in favor of. Editors. And for that matter, producers.

Yes, people have learned that most user-generated content is trash and the way to make money is to provide better filters. Hence the recent Facebook/Ziddio announcement and efforts to offer promising video producers a little professional support.

On the Facebook front, the company has teamed with Ziddio.com to select top video submissions for feature placement on the Ziddio site. In addition, through Ziddio’s relationship with Comcast, these same top videos will be available through on-demand cable. Don’t waste time rummaging through heaps of crappy video. Let someone else do the rummaging for you, then sit back and enjoy the show.

Web Not Good Enough for TV?

There tends to be a lot of confusion around the term IPTV. It doesn’t mean video streamed over the free-and-clear Internet like YouTube. It means television that is streamed over a regulated IP network. In other words, IPTV requires some service provider manage the quality and security of the television experience.

Yesterday Google warned publicly that the Web cannot support broadcast-quality Internet TV over the long term. The system won’t scale. So what does Google plan to do about it? Apparently the company wants to work with cable operators to “combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks’ high-quality delivery of shows.”

TiVo Top Ten

If you watched the Super Bowl last night, chances are you tuned in for and even repeat-viewed some of the commercials. It’s the one time of year when couch potatoes actually want to watch ads, and TiVo capitalized on the phenomenon by making certain commercials download-able for enthusiastic fans. TiVo also put out a list … Read more

Hands On With SplashCast

The DEMO 2007 conference started yesterday, and I’m terrifically jealous of anyone who’s out there now. Luckily, we’ve been able to make a few arrangements to keep us up to date on any juicy DEMO news. Dave squeezed me into Marshall Kirkpatrick‘s schedule for a SplashCast briefing, and I’ve got a friend on the ground who promises to send on-site DEMO photos.

Here’s the deal on SplashCast: Marshall calls it a “media syndication platform” and Liz Gannes calls it a widget. Whatever the right term is, it’s a pretty cool tool. Simply put, SplashCast lets you string together text, images, audio and video for a multimedia production viewable (and listenable?) on a Flash player. Unlike YouTube-alikes, SplashCast also embeds a menu to provide access to multiple videos from just one embedded web player.

Here’s a sample SplashCast with text and random ZNF photos. More details after the jump.

Mari’s Gadget-Giving Post-Mortem, Part 1

I realize that even among the people that celebrate Christmas, few celebrate it the way my family does. We have a particular gene in our DNA that leads to obscene levels of spending on Christmas presents. Yes, you could view it as rampant commercialism, but we prefer to think of it as extreme generosity. Below … Read more

Gotuit Launches SceneMaker

One benefit to covering cool companies is the subsequent rise in status to “official insider.” After writing about Gotuit at the TechCrunch NY party, the company contacted me to set up a pre-brief on a new product announcement. The new product, SceneMaker – which launches today – is a consumer application for tagging video segments within larger video clips. Gotuit calls SceneMaker the “first social video tagging application.” I personally think the word social should have been retired from the lexicon immediately after Zune’s “Welcome to the Social” campaign hit, but semantics aside, SceneMaker is a welcome addition to the world of online video.

Scenemaker works like this: You copy a video URL from YouTube or Metacafe into the SceneMaker application and add metadata to any segment you want within the clip. These user-generated tags are called VideoMarks. Once a video has VideoMarks, that metadata is included whenever someone runs a search in Gotuit’s InVideo search engine. You can also embed a video segment on your website or blog that only includes the section of a video you’ve marked. For example, the middle 30 seconds in a three-minute clip.

The Content Wars

Want to know how cable and telecom operators are going to compete in the short-term? One word: content. Verizon has put a few notches in its lipstick case with recent sports content deals. Exhibit: 1. FiOS TV Signs the NFL Network I’ve been skeptical of the NFL Network, but it does carry a few critical … Read more