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.

And Now Miro 1.0...from the Painter's Apprentices

Update, update to my post of August 16, 2007!!!

For a open source project, the Miro folks have been doing an amazing job. Here are the main features of Player 1.0, now officially off the beta threadmill:

* Watch Full Screen
Since Miro works so well for HD content, you'll find lots of video that looks beautiful in fullscreen on even the largest displays.

* Resume from Where You Stopped
Miro will remember where you stopped watching a video and will start at that point when you play it again.

* Play Almost Anything
Forget about the format wars. Miro can play MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and almost every other major video format.

* One After Another
Set your Miro preferences to either play videos one after another (in the order they appear) or to play a video then stop. If you have Miro set to play videos one after another, you can always right-click on an individual video and have it play then stop.

Congrats and lots of luck!