Viddling Around™

Wow… lots of industry news this morning, that’s for certain.

JumpCut announced this morning that it’s licensing its video editing application to FoxAtomic, who is using a private-labeled version of the app to allow people to create their own audition tapes for the new Revenge of the Nerds remake. As we’ve seen elsewhere in the video mashup genre - Fox is supplying some footage from the original film, for the audience to play with. All-in-all, great placement & promotion for Jumpcut.

Nice job on the stealth-mode prep work guys. Atlas Ventures-backed Gotuit Media launched late on Sunday night, complete with a substantial library of videos (lots of music videos) ready to go. Typical of the other YouTube clones it offers fast start Flash playback.

I’d say however that Gotuit’s UI is more friendly for general consumer. Not that YouTube’s is hard or anything, but it does feel a little MySpace-esque in light of Gotuit’s. My favorite feature on Gotuit is the one-click zoom. I’ve had dissapointing results with YouTube’s full-screen options, in the way it restarts the video, occassional long-load times, etc. Gotuit’s zoom is blazing fast, and oh-so simple, with no page reloads. Monetization, other than the requisite Google AdWords is through commercial interstitials between selected videos. And of course, they turn off the fast forward and skip control during commercial playback (rat bastards).

Question still remains, with 170+ video sharing YouTube clones out there, how many of these guys can the market support?
Other Coverage:

• TechCrunch
• Gizmodo

Courtesy of our friends at Boing Boing, news it out that a new version of the Democracy Player is available.  For those of you unfamiliar with Democracy, it’s an open-source player that lets you choose from over 500 channels of free videos - in just about any format.   Some of the things I like about the Democracy player is it’s very “cordial” install.  While the player can handle more video formats that you’ve most likely every even heard of, it doesn’t automatically take over your Windows file associations (are you listening Rob Glaser?).   It provides a nice dialog as the 2nd step in the install, and let’s you select which formats you’ll want it to handle - and it doesn’t presume that you’ll want to switch out your existing Windows Media, Quicktime or even Flash playback settings.

Democracy’s all about the viewing experience - so to that end, it focused around letting you shop around through the channels, and then downloading (it even supports torrents) the files locally to your hard drive.   Then you can watch them later, at your liesure, in full screen resolution if you like.    The Channel Guide mimics the iTunes Musci Store in a number of ways, but in my opinion offers a lot more interesting grass-roots video blogs.

Expanding on their early success in the US and Canada, Google this past week expanded their service the the UK. Unlike the typical cost-per-click text ads which then direct the consumer to the advertisers offering - typically their web site - the new video ads are billable when the user simply watches the commercial. This means that the consumer may never actually click all the way through to the advertiser’s site and offering, but the advertiser still pays just for the view. This isn’t necessarily controversial - after all, it’s how TV works today - but in light of how the other ad plays are working in video (re: Revver), this is a bold step relative to how a lot of traditional online ad buys are done. That beind said - it’s just fine for branding plays, where click-throughs to the advertiser site are secondary to the brand play. It will be interesting to see how the click-through numbers compare, especially after the initial novelty wears off.

Click here to see a good example of how these look in action.

Hellodeo - an offshoot of Odeo - is offering video postcards that you can easily capture & create webcam images. It uploads them, transcodes them to Flash, and then outputs the HTML code necessary for you to paste into your blog, an email, whatever. Ultra-simple little utility — very few controls or settings to muck with.

Video email has never taken off due in large part to the issue of file sizes, blocked embedded controls such as ActiveX, and more. This makes it incredibly simple for the layperson. I’d suggest that given the target they appear to be shooting at (no pun intended), they should offer a simple email function in the UI to get people over that hump.

MobiTV of Emeryville, CA has raised a $70MM series C round of venture capital through Oak Investment Partners. These guys are hot - they’re supplying over 20 mobile carriers around the world, and here in the US have deals with Sprint, Cingular and Alltel. I haven’t used this service personally, but have seen the demos at the stores, and I’ll admit, it’s impressive.

I don’t see myself watching a great deal of video on my mobile, but it’s a good way to kill time by catching up on news. Apparently they also had a major hit on their hands with the recent World Cup, which had television-challenged consumers burning up those minutes in bulk to watch the matches.

Any users of MobiTV out there have feedback on the service? As long as I can do DVR-like functions to save programming to my local storage - so I’m not tethered to signal strength in order to watch videos, I’m all over this.

Guba announced on Thursday that it’s partnered with the MPAA to track down copyrighted material. What’s more intriguing is that they’re making the technology available for licensing to other online video sites. Now, how many competitors in the overcrowded video sharing space will want to partner with Guba is a big question, as is whether or not the oh-so-friendly folks at the MPAA will use this as a blunt instrument to force other sites to comply.

The technology itself isn’t that revolutionary - it’s been talked about for years; scanning a piece of digital media to establish a “fingerprint”. What Guba and the MPAA don’t discuss is just how they’re going to crack down on piracy using these fingerprints. Whether or not they’ll just scan files uploaded to Guba, or will actively go out and look for files on YouTube and other sites is the question.

One of my favorite camcorders and objects of Gadget Lust has been the Samsung line of compact Sports Camcorders. Since I used to be a avid skydiver, and jumpmaster - I always saw the benefit of this form factor, and the remote lens.

Now even better, Samsung has gone RF wireless on this device, cutting the cord to the remote lense. RF and not Bluetooth, since the latter sucks up too much battery life to be effective. And, with the RF implementation, Samsung can keep the lens-to-body bandwidth high enough for most decent Web video. You won’t be doing any HD with this baby, but that’s not why you’d buy it anyway.

Continue reading ‘Samsung Goes Wireless with new Sports Cam’

YouTube just revised their Terms and Conditions, and just pimped out all their users. Key section (as highlighted by our friends at Boing Boing);

“…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business… in any media formats and through any media channels.”

Fundamentally, it means you surrender any and all rights to your content when you upload it - and keep it on YouTube. You get these rights back once you remove the item from YouTube. As has been pointed out on this issue on some other blogs, the challenge is that this in reality limits what YouTube can actually do with your content. In practical terms, it’s impossible for them to sublicense your content to another site, advertiser, “Girls Gone Wild” video producer, since once you change your mind and pull it. Not that YouTube would indemnify you or anything, but no reasonable organization is going to use or license something that they know could be contested later. Not to say it’s never going to happen - but unlikely I think.

Google has announced that they now support linking to positions within videos. This is big. Of course, on the surface, it makes sharing video more convenient - i.e. sending someone to a specific point in time within a particular video, versus a raw link, and instructions on what to wait & watch for (good example: Last week’s video from the cameras on the solid rocket boosters of the shuttle launch - couple of really awesome moments, but you had to wade through many minutes of boredom to get to them).

What’s even more impactful with this news however is that it opens up a whole new application layer into the videos themselves. Imagine a mashup that takes you specific moments within a whole movie, or specific soundbites within a longer news story. Continue reading ‘Deep linking in videos opens up whole new types of applications’