OVGuide Updates Video Search and Discovery Tools

Online Video Guide is a comprehensive video search portal that draws results from sites including Fancast, Hulu, ESPN and Funny or Die.



















They claim to deliver the most relevant search results of any video engine because of their team of editors, who manually comb, categorize, and tag content. In these tough times, I wonder how long they can afford to ....

While video search hasn’t truly come into its own so far on major engines like Google, OVGuide does face several competitors hoping to do the same thing, including earlier players Blinkx, Truveo, and Meefeedia, according to paidContent.

OVGuide currently derives its revenue through ad partnerships with the likes of NBC, ABC, and Warner Brothers. Here is to wish them the best of luck to keep the ad dollars coming!

Truly Free Media Center Software? Try Boxee.

“You are now free to be entertained.”

Who can argue with that?

On your laptop or connected to an HDTV, Boxee enables you to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music, and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.





You can vote for them -- if you agree they deserve it -- in lifehacker.com's five Best Media Center application contest.

Also - see my next post on the 21st about Netflix coming to Tivo, AppleTV, and ... Linux! Would you believe that???

Cybercast credit: Vimeo

Remaking Today's TV into Internet TV

We will look back on the years from 2006 until the end of this decade, as the remake of television into Internet TV. I know people who have cancelled their cable TV contracts and exclusively watch TV on the Internet. We see better and better quality user-generated content too.

Big Cable vs. Ma Bell(s)
Time Warner, Cox, Comcast, and ilk are holding onto their hegemony for as long as they can, lobbying politicians and FCC officials, while Verizon and AT&T lay the fibers for a truly amazing high-definition experience (or so they promise). When there's a TV program I want to watch, even if it's not on Fox or ABC, I can go to Hulu (soon to YouTube too). However, I’m not a Hulu acolyte and use it only as a starting point when I need to find something I want. Hulu does well enough today, but it doesn't get me to YouTube.

Building the infrastructure is a tricky business
Quality streaming over varying connection speeds has now become a reality. Thanks to companies like Move Networks, we've got technologies like adaptive bit rate adjustment; now even the CDNs are starting to build this in. Watch something on Hulu and you'll see that the quality is pretty superb.

Monetizing content and paying for the infrastructure have proven to be even trickier.
At the end it all comes back to how everyone will make money, a subject upon which there has been hardly ant agreement, and relatively little success.

The experiments are fun to watch, though - especially from the receiving end. How is yours?

Lycos as a VOD player? Who Knew?

Remember Lycos? Of course you do. Remember when you last used the site? Of course you don't. Perhaps that's exactly why the company's taking the site in a new direction: video on demand (VOD) rentals.

Started as a Carnegie Mellon University research project in 1994, Lycos was one of the first web search engines. By 1999 it was one of the most visited sites in the world. Then Yahoo and Google happened. While it still maintains respectable traffic worldwide, Lycos, now owned by Daum Communications, the second largest portal in Korea, is hardly more than an after-thought in the "Web 2.0" world.

In 2005 the company decided to shift its strategy away from search to online communities and broadband entertainment. This transition is continuing with the launch of Lycos Cinema.

An online video on demand service, Lycos offers both free and premium content. The free content is ad-supported, while the premium content takes a new approach: fees based on the number of "seats," that is how many people you want to watch the film with. Here is a sample clip from the "Little Shop of Horrors..."





That's the key component Lycos Cinema feels will set itself apart from the competition: social interaction. When you load up a movie, a chat room appears on the left hand side. Here, you can invite and interact with friends about the content you're all watching. It's a cute idea, at least in theory.

In reality there are problems:

First, the content is awful. It's not that I haven't heard of all of the films (only most of them), it's that there's no way I would pay to watch most of them.

Second, Lycos Cinema faces some stiff competition. In the growing field of VOD you have Apple's iTunes movie rentals, Amazon's Unbox rentals and Netflix's Watch-It-Now, among others. All of them offer much better content at similar prices with a much better experience. Even the free stuff on Lycos can't begin to compare with what the NBC and Fox-backed online video site Hulu offers.

The third problem, unfortunately, is that the site throws errors left and right. About half of the time most pages didn't load at all and instead spat out error code. Even if you wanted to rent a movie, you might not be able to -- it's a total crap shoot.

If you are able to get to the featured rentals promo page, you'll notice a top section that looks quite a bit like iTunes movie rentals' CoverFlow view. It's really kind of pathetic.

Lycos sold to Spain's Terra Networks in 2000 for $5.4 billion. It was resold in 2004 to the aforementioned Daum Communications Corp. for $95.4 million. At that rate it's due for another sale this year, priced down even more. Webcast anyone?

Cybercast credit: Lycos Video

YouTube and Ilk Challenge Broadcast and Cable HDTV

A growing number of digital video and ad providers are challenging TV's hold on visual quality with better technology and services. The quickened pace of High Definition TV deployment was expected to slow the exodus of viewers to online offerings.

This hasn't happened. Just the opposite seems to be the case. How come?

The reason this strategy doesn't appear to be working is that the online tv and video sites are also upgrading to HDTV quality web casting. And they have a built-in advantage: the cost is much less and the technology much more flexible, being mostly software based, than the (mostly) hardware based infrastructure necessary for the broadcast and cable companies.

Examples abound:

1. THE TOTAL NUMBER OF VIDEOS viewed was 10.1 billion during a record-breaking December 2007, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.

2. YouTube accounted for 3.3 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. in January.

3. Google sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property in January with nearly 3.4 billion videos viewed (34.3% share of videos), gaining 1.7 share points vs. the previous month.

4. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 584 million (6%).

5. Yahoo! sites served 315 million videos (3.2%).

6. Microsoft sites came in with 199 million (2%) videos watched in January.

7. Vimeo, a video-sharing site owned by Barry Diller's IAC, began distributing user-generated videos in HD late last year.

8. The peer-to-peer Web TV powerhouse Joost also offers high-resolution content.

9. Just a few week ago, the NBC/News Corp. co-venture Hulu launched to the public with limited HD content, as one of the first tests of the new Adobe Flash Player, which supports streaming HD.

10.Rumors are also flying that Yahoo intends to integrate video into Flickr very soon, perhaps in the next three weeks. Part of the delay may have been a long internal debate about how to make Flickr Video special and distinct from what YouTube already offers.

BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti actually believes the Web is better suited for delivering HD content than TV. "HDTV penetration is just 33% of U.S. households, while right now advertisers can use HD content to reach over 65% of all Internet consumers." Sacerdoti says. BrightRoll is an online video advertising firm founded just two years ago in 2006.

The way I see it, as an ad serving company they must have the ability and the need to track video viewing statistics and trends very closely -- although I wonder how anyone can define trends on less than two years' worth of data.

LonelyGirl Jessica Rose Returns

It was Jessica Rose who had the first Internet only video show hit, way back in 2006.

Lonelygirl15, if you'll recall, was the headline-grabbing video diary of a pretty teenager, later exposed by net detectives as a brilliant, CAA-backed fiction. The lonely girl was by no means alone -- she had a team of writers and producers behind her, and though the door was closed on lonelygirl15, the frontier of "webisodic" video was wide open.

The situation with open frontiers is that the people seeking to colonize them, to borrow a quote from Ms. South Carolina, simply "don't have maps." Which is why, almost two years after lonelygirl15, no Web series has established a viable, let alone profitable homestead. However, more wagons are now arriving. Sony Pictures Television just launched C-Spot:

From Crackle: Roadents: Episode 3

an online comedy channel featuring six sharply produced programs with enough short episodes to fill a 13-week season.

And Jessica Rose is planning a comeback too. The almost-21-year-old actress from New Zealand will soon return to the online world as the star of Blood Cell, a new horror-thriller from Web TV studio 60Frames Entertainment, directed by Eduardo Rodriguez. The show, whose trailer is now up on deadcelldeadfriend.com, follows Rose's character, Julia, as she contends with an unseen murderer who will talk to her only via her fancy photo- and video-enabled cellphone. Which hopefully gets good reception because, as the name of the website suggests, if Julia's signal goes dead, a blond somewhere gets dispatched for good. To build their online audience, C-Spot and 60Frames will "syndicate" their shows on Sony's Crackle (see this and my other previous posts), Hulu, and AOL Video; while 60Frames can be seen on Bebo, Blip.tv, iTunes, MySpace and others. And everyone's on YouTube.

Revenue-sharing deals allow the creators to get a piece of the advertising pie no matter where their shows get watched. 60Frames and Sony Pictures hope to find the answer to the overriding question posed by Web-only tv: In an entertainment world dominated by multi-hour, multi-night programs like American Idol, how do you win repeat viewers with three minute webisode.

Even though more of the big name studios are tempted onto the web, the question still hangs in the air: what will it take for large numbers of us (14-year-olds included) to feel like the computer screen with its blinking and ringing distractions is a good place to watch TV?

Cybercast credit: Crackle

Hulu, the anti-YouTube, launches

Hulu, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture designed to compete with video site YouTube, has launched a test version of its site. But it is more of an anti-YouTube than a competitor, because it focuses less on user-generated content.





It comes after months of delay. NBC withdrew its video channel from YouTube last week, and also ditched Apple's iTunes in favor of Amazon's music service. (See my post about Amazon here.)

Hulu will be the exclusive online provider of videos from NBC and News Corp, and it will then syndicate the material to other sites, including AOL, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo, but apparently not YouTube.

Hulu got $100 million in backing from Providence Equity Partners, and arose because of animosity from NBC and News Corp toward YouTube, in part because that site kept hosting vidoes containing copyrighted videos.

NBC had warmed up to YouTube last year, working with the popular video site to promote its vidoes, until Jeff Zucker took over NBC in February. The company then changed its tune, and filed a lawsuit against YouTube.