Joost Reestructures to Focus on “White label” Online Video Platform Service

Joost, the once-hyped video service that was supposed to rival YouTube, is scaling back: Mike Volpi is out, the majority of the employees are laid off, and the company announced it’s shifting from a consumer focus to offering a white label technology and distribution service.

The Joost.com portal site will stay open, as an ad for the company’s hosting and distribution services, which it will try to sell to cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators. “This technology and service offering will support content owners’ efforts to build comprehensive branded environments online”, they explain.

Once Joost also had high hopes to become the premium video destination on the web –a space that’s now largely occupied by Hulu.

In 2007 Joost raised $45 million from the founders of Skype and an array of high-profile investors and media companies, including Sequoia Capital and Viacom.

Joost was initially supposed to deliver copyrighted content via a peer-to-peer distribution system and a player that users downloaded to their desktops. But YouTube, and later Hulu, conditioned users to watch video via their browsers, and Joost’s software never caught on. By last fall, Joost began offering video via the browser like everyone else, but it has never been able to generate a significant audience, being well behind rivals like Hulu, MetaCafe, Veoh and DailyMotion.

Now Joost will focus on providing an end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands. “Media companies around the world are embracing internet-based video portals as a key path to distribute their premium video, but building a world-class video portal is increasingly difficult and expensive.”

In addition, “Joost plans to make its white label video platform commercially available to media companies around the world. Joost plans to make its white label video platform commercially available to media companies around the world. This offering will provide a solution for companies looking to build a branded experience for their content on their own site as well as other sites and platforms in their distribution networks.”

But the move seems doomed since Joost is already enlisting another white-label video provider, Ooyala, to manage its ingesting, transcoding and metadata management.


YouTube Offers Publishers Links in Overlays

Now YouTube offers publishers links in overlays, allowing to drive traffic back to their site.

Call-to-Action overlays is intended for a sale, a sign-up, a donation, or any other response in which users take action on your website.

Adding it is easy: First, run a campaign to promote your video on YouTube; then, go to the Video Details page under My Videos and fill out the fields in the section marked “Call-to-Action overlay”. “All you have to do is include a short headline, ad text, a destination URL, and upload an optional image, and the overlay will appear whenerver someone watches your video,” YouTube explains. Clicks on the overlay will be tracked in YouTube Insight.


CBS News Launches New Design

CBSNews.com has launched new design. The new grey look features multimedia, lots of photos, blogs, video, a real time Twitter feed of news, and new series of Web video program. It also provides easy navigation to the news section.

“The new CBSNews offers a more visually rich and navigable presentation of the news as it happens. At the top of the home page, we have rotating images of the top stories, a stack of latest headlines, exclusive content from CBS News, and carousels of the news in photos, the latest videos and additional news stories and features.”


AMC Launches AMC Digital Media, and Acquires Filmsite.com and Filmcritic.org

AMC continues to develop its online movie presence with the launch of AMC Digital Media and the acquisition of two film websites: Filmsite.com and Filmcritic.org. The sites, along with amctv.com, provide film reviews and analysis, news, blogs, user-ranked movie lists, and web apps based on network series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

"These latest acquisitions reinforce our ability to create an entertaining, interactive online experience that celebrates all things movie and story," said Mac McKean, AMC's V.P. of digital media and content.

Google Invites its 25,000+ News Sources to Become YouTube Partners

Google is inviting its news sources to become YouTube partners. Company says the 25,000+ sources already found in Google News are invited to share and monetize news videos on both YouTube and Google News, as official YouTube Partners.

YouTube news partners will receive featured placement on the YouTube news page, youtube.com/news, and on Google News.

YouTube offers also free hosting for all of the video content and allows to embed videos anywhere on the web. As an official YouTube partner, those media organizations are eligible to participate in an advertising revenue share program.

To get started, organizations must apply to the YouTube Partner Program.


More ‘One-Click Publishing to YouTube’ Cellphones

T-Mobile’s upcoming new Android phone, the MyTouch 3G, will have a video camera with one-click (or touch) publishing to YouTube, just like the new iPhone.

Experts wonder if this is becoming a standard feature on new 3G smart phones.Experts find it a little slow to use and still a bit buggy.


Pixelpipe iPhone App Allows To Upload Video Beyond YouTube and MobileMe

An iPhone free app called Pixelpipe allows to upload videos –and audio files and pictures- to more than 40 online services, beyond YouTube or MobileMe. The app, is also available on Nokia and Android-based phones.

To upload content, you go into Pixelpipe’s settings and select your destinations. All of your options are arranged in a neat list, and in most cases, you simply enter your login and password for the sites you choose.


Yahoo discontinues Maven Networks white-label video service

Yahoo will discontinue at the end of this year its Maven Networks white-label video service, which powered video for sites like Fox News. Yahoo has bought Maven, for $160 million, in February 2008.

Yahoo continues to leverage Maven technology in its video player and for video advertising both on and off its network. At recent conference, Yahoo CEO indicated interest in buying new video startups.

Facebook Allows Anyone to Add Its Chat

Facebook has released a feature called “Live-Stream Box”, which allows anyone to add a Facebook chat on its own site or its Facebook page. We saw this feature on CNN during Obama’s inauguration, among other sites.

When the box is enabled, users will be prompted to log into their Facebook accounts from a page where they want to watch a live video broadcast. They will then be able to toggle between an “everyone watching” tab, which shows all global status updates submitted by people watching through the app, as well as “friends” tab which just shows all their friends updates in real time.

This feature uses Facebook Connect.

“You can run the Live Stream Box next to live streaming videos of concerts, speeches, sporting events, webcasts, TV shows, presentations, or webinars,” Facebook says.

To get this widget it is needed a Facebook API key, upload a small file to your site, and embed a few lines of code into your Web page. Here you are the full instructions. And here it is a general explanation.


Real Goes Beyond RealPlayer 11 and Makes Video Portable for Cellphones

Important move by Real Networks launching RealPlayer SP, which re-encodes downloaded video and makes it portable. Two years ago they launched RealPlayer 11 (over 300 million downloads since then) and now adds a feature inviting the user to move and share the video. It converts the video for a BlackBerry, Nokia, iPhone, iPod or Xbox.

Many content owners have said that this feature is not legal, but Real says its software it doesn’t work on sites that put DRM around their videos, such as Hulu.

The beta is available here. A Mac version will be available at the end of the year.

(A good idea is using http://reeplay.it to bookmark/share/save video)


Brightcove Is Now Profitable, Says Its CEO

Brightcove CEO Says Company is Profitable, Cash-Flow Positive; Jeremy Allaire credits the revenue growth, in part, to traction in the enterprise and government verticals.

Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire said company now is profitable, cash-flow positive. “While this is a big deal for Brightcove, it’s an even bigger deal for the industry and is validation that companies in this market can in fact create scalable, profitable businesses,” expert Dan Rayburn writes.

Brightcove now has over 700 premium customers. Rayburn estimates that the company will do about $80 M this year, after seeing 50 % revenue growth.

Jeremy Allaire credits the revenue growth, in part, to traction in the enterprise and government verticals.


Animating a Set of Photos As Never Seen

Slideshow creation platform Animoto.com has raised additional $4.4 million funding that will be used to accelerate product development, add video, explore distribution possibilities with photo-sharing sites, and make new hires.

New York-based Animoto, which has 18 employees, is cash-flow positive. It has 750,000 registered users, of which 10 percent have paid for a premium product, which include consumer and professional subscriptions, as well as DVD purchases.

The company’s speciality is animating a set of photos to practically dance to the music through its analysis of song structure. It’s cooler than an average slideshow.

Animoto won best services and applications web site this year. Here is the Webby Award slideshow.


FOLLOW THE LATEST NEWS AT MICHAEL AMIGOT.COM

A Video Website Designed for Children Stays Afloat Using YouTube as Platform

See how a kids video start-up Totlol.com is staying afloat. Economic pressures forced initially close down. Audiences implored to keep it up, and site now features obtrusive ads and registration before they can go any further.

Creators explain: “Totlol is a video website designed specifically for children. It is community moderated. It is constantly growing. It is powered by YouTube. The videos were submitted, screened and rated by parents. The selection is huge and if you like, you can participate too.”

Totlol creators developed an application in which users can create profiles, manage their favorites, and do specific searches. They use YouTube as a video platform. Independent developers can do it so –courtesy of Google/YouTube.

Hundred of parents have submitted more than 15,000 clips. Totlol has received tons of press, was an official honoree in the 2009 Webby Awards, was named in the Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites in 2008 by PC Magazine, and even has an iPhone application.


YouTube Now Allows 2 GB Uploads

YouTube has doubled the size of standard uploads for regular accounts holders (non partners videos) to 2 GB from 1 GB, but length is still limited to 10 minutes. The move was in order to accommodate user’s HD uploads.

YouTube is also making it easier to share and embed HD videos. There is a “play in HD” option when you’re configuring an embed code to copy and paste elsewhere. Also, any video plays in HD adding ton any URL this code: &hd=1. In the past it was possible only appending &fmt=22.


Video Site Seeismic Turns into Social Aggregation Tools

Seesmic.com, that raised significant funding -$12 million- and made multiple round of layout, has redesigned its size deemphasizing its video conversation service in favor of supporting its social aggregation tool, Seesmic Desktop, and associated products.

Seismic CEO Loic Le Meur posted a video on his site saying that the video community was not growing. He asserted that competitors like 12seconds are not seeing growth either.

At times Seeismic experimented with producing original shows and hosting chat sessions with famous people.

Experts think that quick-upload video from phones and webcams is definitely growing on larger sites like YouTube and Facebook.


‘The Simpsons’ Worth More on Hulu.com than on Traditional TV

This is cool: For the first time, ads presented during shows like The Simpsons and CSI are getting higher ad rates online than they are on TV. Bloomberg reports that The Simpsons got a $60 CPM on Hulu, while a typical prime-time ad on television carries a $20 - $40 CPM.

It means that having a loyal audience is paying off for premium video content portals like Hulu and TV.com in the form of higher CPMs than what the networks are getting.

“The reason people are paying such a high premium for these ads on the Internet is they do have a captive audience,” experts said. “You know you have eyes on the screen.”

However, Web viewing and ad sales while increasing are still too small to replace traditional revenue sources. As the economy improves, it is expected that demand for premium programming on the Internet will increase as well.


Mobile Video Growing Exponentially on YouTube

The new iPhone 3GS –sold out in many stores- is already affecting web video in a big way. YouTube said the new iPhone was responsible for more than half of its mobile uploads in the last week. Since its release, video uploads are up 400 percent per day (no total number of mobile uploads are disclosed).

FOLLOW THE LATEST NEWS AT MICHAEL AMIGOT.COM

Firefox 3.5 Allows Watch Videos Without Adobe Flash Plugin

Wait a second! Web videos... without Adobe Flash plug-in?

Firefox 3.5, which is now a very stable beta, is faster than earlier versions, and most importantly, it embraces open-source video standards and treats videos like web pages (you can’t do any of that with Flash). If this takes off, Flash video could become history.

Built into the Firefox 3.5 browser is a video player based on the open-source video formats Ogg Vorbis and Theora. The video player supports HTML5, which means that links and other interactive elements can easily be placed inside videos. Ogg Vorbis format makes video programmable.

Videos today are still for the most part siloed off from the rest of the Web in their Flash players as a separate experience. Same expert proclaim that “it is time to break down those walls.”

Already, DailyMotion offers videos in the Ogg Theora format. Its platform is located at openvideo.dailymotion.com.

These new encoding formats, supported by the Mozilla foundation, are Ogg, Theora + Vorbis. They’re not yet as good as other common codecs such as H264, ON2 VP6, but there are free to use, and the quality is improving.

The demo page can be found here (but the effects only work if you are looking at it in Firefox 3.5)

“Being able to treat the content inside videos like Web pages opens up a whole new world of possibilities for Web video, ” experts say.


The New iPhone 3GS Will Enable Video Capture and Upload To YouTube

June 19 will be on the sale the new iPhone 3GS (starting at $199). This device will finally enable video capture (something that had only been available by “jailbreaking”), using for that its 3-megapixel autofocus camera. Video-specific tools include touch editing, timeline view, and sharing directly from the phone to email, MMS on supporting carriers, YouTube and MobileMe.

Old 3G iPhones won’t get a software upgrade to enable video. Application developers will also have access to video capture.

Apple also announced in the same San Francisco developers conference an innovative HTTP adaptive bitrate streaming for both the desktop and iPhone. Streaming video will pick the right bitrate and go through firewalls because it’s over HTTP.

People now will be able to rent and purchase movies, TV shows and audiobooks from the iPhone.


Qik’s Live-Streaming Software Will Be Pre-Loaded on Nokia N97 Phone

Qik’s live, mobile video-streaming software will be pre-loaded onto all of Nokia’s Symbian S60 handsets, starting with the N97. See a sample here.

This live-streams will be shareable to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

This Qik’s live-streaming software had already been featured on Nokia’s Ovi App Store.

Big mobile players are jumping avidly in the capturing and sharing video business.

Apple has unveiled its new video-enabled 3G iPhone, and Google Android has added this feature too.


A Logical Extension of the Web into the Cable VOD

Cable VOD (Video-on-demand) is becoming more Web like, adding Internet-like capabilities, such as search tools, playlists, and new storage systems to centrally keep the videos and then distributing them via fiber interconnections to edge devices.

Advanced server side search technology is being developed to navigate through ten of thousand of titles. The industry also wants to add a kind of “recommendation engines”, to boost sales in Amazon and Netfilx, among other vendors.

Playlists may be linked between smart phones and the set-top devices in the home. The goal is to provide a personalized experience for individual users, developing two-way network.


Cisco Says the Web of the Future Is All About Video

By 2013, 90 percent of web traffic will be video, from services like Hulu.com to video-on-demand via the local cable provider, predicts Cisco.

Cisco notes that video is slowly moving from being deliverd via broadcast and cable TV to being delivered as an IPTV service. People are also carrying around more video-capable devices, such as mobile phones that can also capture video –and once that video is captured, people are inclined to share it via the web.

Sorenson 360 Allows Web Video on the iPhone

Sorenson is now able to publish web video on the iPhone’s Web browser without any separate app. This technology, called Sorenson 360, uses H.264 codec.

“Sorenson 360 detects how your audience is trying to view your video and delivers an optimized playback experience for whatever device they have. One embed code is all you need,” this firm states.

There is a free 30-days trial. See the video here.

FOLLOW THE LATEST NEWS AT MICHAEL AMIGOT.COM

YouTube Launches Another Development To Bring Internet Content To Television Screens

YouTube unveiled this week YouTube.com/XL, a revamped version of YouTube.com/TV that is intended to be viewed on a television set or on a large PC screen.

This YouTube.com/XL (YouTube extra large) works on any Web browser that can be connected to a TV, whether it is a game console, a PC or another device.

It can be controlled not only with a keyboard, but also with some remote controls (including Android phones).

Rather than a donwloadable app for viewing, like Hulu desktpop -see below-, YouTube is choosing to go all browser, no plug-in required (It is an AJAX-powered IU).

Not all the YouTube content is available here. Many content providers have been reluctant to allow television viewing of full-lenght episodes they post online.

Hulu Desktop

This development comes just a week after YouTube’s top online rival, Hulu, unveiled a desktop app that can be controlled through a remote. This free, downloable app, works either in Windows or Mac. It allows to navigate Hulu’s entire library with just six buttons.


Google Launches An Alpha Version of Chrome Browser For Mac And Linux

Google has developed a version of Chrome browser for Mac OS X and Linux.

“Please don’t download it unless you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software” “How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won't yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print,” Google warns.

Some developers say that this is the fastest browser even seen.

However, there are just too many missing features that people expect in a browser.


Apple’s App Store Developers Nightmare

After the Apple App Store has passed the 30,000-titles milestone, developers are complaining that with Apple’s way of working it’s very difficult for an app to rise above the noise.

Experts say that Apple’s criteria for featuring apps is based not on how well they’re selling but because they show off the best features of iPhones and iPod Touches, so they can sell more devices.

For a developer wanted to gaining entrance in the playing field, he need to pay a nominal $99-a year for the iPhone Developer Program. A completed app must secure Apple’s approval before it is put on sale in the App Store. It’s often a slow process. Apple takes a 30 percent cut of App Store sales.


Multi-fingered Touch Technology Coming Up

PC manufacturers and software makers (HP, Dell, Microsoft and Intel, among them) are seeing a future in 10-fingered touch screens, far beyond the two fingers technology.

Computers with the special screens will cost consumers about $100 more than standard machines.

Now only two milion of about 300 million PCs sold last year were touch Computers. Among them is the $1,150 TouchSmart HP computer. Tablelike Computers with plastic pend remain a niche, too.

In addition, HP has been selling touch technology to large businesses. Customers can turn both desktops and laptops into kiosks, for, say, ordering merchandise at a sporting evento r flipping through a menu while waiting in a restaurant.

The new version of Windows 7 will use touch technology allowing people to interact with several fingers.


BBC World News App For Live-streaming on iPhones over 3G and Wi/Fi

BBC World News has launched this week the BBC World News app, allowing users of the iPhone and iPod Touch in sixteen European countries to watch the channel live on their devices over Wi-Fi and 3G networks.

This app is available for €7.99 at the Apple App Store.

Jim Egan, Director of Strategy and Business Development at BBC Global News, says: “This is an exciting new way for BBC World News viewers living in Europe to watch the channel anywhere. With live TV streaming alongside the BBC’s mobile news site the app is a complete on-demand news service. Having a news channel available live on the iPhone at this level of broadcast quality is a world first. We aim to extend this service to iPhone owners in other regions soon."


Nokia's New App Store Includes Video

Now some video apps are available through Nokia’s new app store, called Ovi Store.
It includes an app allowing users to download movies from Amazon. Users can also record video with their phones and upload it to YouTube. An app called MinimobiTV allows, as a subscription service, watch TV episodes and shows.

Like the iPhone App store, the Ovi Store features movie-related and other games, movie trailers, podcast and location-based services applications.

Ovi Store apps run on about 60 different Nokia S40 and S60 phone models.

FOLLOW THE LATEST NEWS AT MICHAEL AMIGOT.COM

Online Ad-based Web Start-Ups Are Searching For New Revenue Streams

Since 2004, venture investors have put $5.1 billion into 828 Web start-up companies, and most of them are supported by ads, according to the National Venture Venture Capital Association. But now that advertisers have cut back their online spending, Web start-ups are searching for new ways to make money, like selling real, or virtual, goods or asking customers to buy subscriptions. And, according to the New York Times, venture capitalists who envision a sale of the company in the public markets are encouraging these efforts. Some firms say they consider only companies with one or two revenue streams in addition to advertising.

The latest and best example of success is OpenTable, a restaurant reservation site that makes money selling its software to restaurants and charging them $1 for each diner seated. Last week it became the first venture-backed company to go public in two years. The stock went up 43 percent the first day.

Other sites like Wetpaint.com, which allows anyone create a Web site free, now charges its big company customers, like HBO and Fox, a fee in exchange for providing extra services like site promotion and moderating readers forums. Also, smaller customers can pay to keep their site free of ads. And it is planning to add more paid services like storage for big files, personalized domains, and virtual goods. All these attemps to get new source streams come after rates for leftover ad space fell to 25 cents per thousand views from $1.

Pandora, an online radio site, now has 10 million listeners a month, and since ads are not enough, it has started a subscription service -for $3 a month listeners see and hear no ads and receive a desktop application and faster streaming.

Pandora's new model is called "freemium" -a mix of free and premium.

This model is becoming the most popular among Web start-ups.

Consultant firm eMarketer says that ad growth online grew 10.6 percent last year, and it will expand 4.5 percent this year. Advertisers are expected to spend less on display, classified and e-mail ads, and more on search and video ads.


On CDN Pricing, It Is Not Expected A Big Drop This Year

Pricing from the major CDN (or Content Delivery Networks) is getting pretty stable, without much decline, according to the analyst Dan Rayburn, especialist on this issue. Many of the contracts from the fourth quarter was for new business in the market; but those with renewing contracts saw on average about a 50 % decline in pricing from a year or more ago.

Another trend is that many of the major CDNs are giving volume discounts on lower tiers.

"Pricing is a factor but it is not the only factor for customers when signing contracts. For the quarter, the lowest pricing I saw in the market was still from newcomer BitGravity and the highest pricing was still from Akamai".

Akamai is still charging 20-25 % more than Limelight, Level 3 and CDNetworks.

"For 2009, I don't expect to see a big decline in pricing," Dan Rayburn says.

"CDNs have to multiply the volume of traffic on their network many times over before the next round of major pricing discount can take place. I think it will at least a year in the market before we see that happen."


Intel Launches Its Own Operating System, Called Moblin

Intel is launching a version of the open-source Linux operating system called Moblin, in a direct assault on Microsoft Windows. “This software resembles Windows or Apple’s Mac OS X to a negree, ” says The New York Times.

A polish second version of the software, which is in trials, will appear on a variety of networks this summer.

Intel says that Moblin is built with smartphones in mind. Intel’s main goal is to make its newest and low-power, low-cost Atom a success. For that, it needs Moblin because most of the cellphone software available today runs on chips whose architecture is different from Atom’s. A suplí of good software can make Atom a worthwhile choice for phone makers.

In the last few years, Intel’s investment in Linux has increased. Intel has hired some of the top Linux developers, as well as has bought open source software companies. Last year, it acquired OpenedHand, a company whose work has turned inte the base of the new Moblin user interface.

Intel thinks people are ready for something new on mobile devices, which are geared more to the Internet than to running desktop-style programs. This Moblin operating system reaches the Internet in about seven seconds.


Video Recording on G1 Google Android Phone (Cupcake update)

Google has added video recording capabilities to its Android operating system. This Android version 1.5, code-named Cupcake, also features video sharing via YouTube, email and MMS. The G1 phone (here the T-Mobile HTC phone) records 3gp videos encoded with the h.263 video codec.

There are two recording modes: High-quality offers a resolution of 352x288 and a 360 Kbps bit rate, while the low-quality setting (designated for MMS usage) comes with a resolution of 176x144 and a bit rate of 192 Kbps.

Some reviewer say that the camera on the G! Is not particularly good. Motion is pretty jerky and the colors are not great.

The killer app may be live streaming. Qik and similar companies can get implemented on the G1. Broadcasting live has a number of great potential uses.

Follow up Michael Amigot.com here.

Google is inviting its news sources to become YouTube partners. Company says the 25,000+ sources already found in Google News are invited to share and monetize news videos on both YouTube and Google News, as official YouTube Partners.

YouTube news partners will receive featured placement on the YouTube news page, youtube.com/news, and on Google News.

YouTube offers also free hosting for all of the video content and allows to embed videos anywhere on the web. As an official YouTube partner, those media organizations are eligible to participate in an advertising revenue share program.

To get started, organizations must apply to the YouTube Partner Program.


More ‘One-Click Publishing to YouTube’ Cellphones

T-Mobile’s upcoming new Android phone, the MyTouch 3G, will have a video camera with one-click (or touch) publishing to YouTube, just like the new iPhone.

Experts wonder if this is becoming a standard feature on new 3G smart phones.Experts find it a little slow to use and still a bit buggy.


Pixelpipe iPhone App Allows To Upload Video Beyond YouTube and MobileMe

An iPhone free app called Pixelpipe allows to upload videos –and audio files and pictures- to more than 40 online services, beyond YouTube or MobileMe. The app, is also available on Nokia and Android-based phones.

To upload content, you go into Pixelpipe’s settings and select your destinations. All of your options are arranged in a neat list, and in most cases, you simply enter your login and password for the sites you choose.


Yahoo discontinues Maven Networks white-label video service

Yahoo will discontinue at the end of this year its Maven Networks white-label video service, which powered video for sites like Fox News. Yahoo has bought Maven, for $160 million, in February 2008.

Yahoo continues to leverage Maven technology in its video player and for video advertising both on and off its network. At recent conference, Yahoo CEO indicated interest in buying new video startups.

Joost, the once-hyped video service that was supposed to rival YouTube, is scaling back: Mike Volpi is out, the majority of the employees are laid off, and the company announced it’s shifting from a consumer focus to offering a white label technology and distribution service.

The Joost.com portal site will stay open, as an ad for the company’s hosting and distribution services, which it will try to sell to cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators. “This technology and service offering will support content owners’ efforts to build comprehensive branded environments online”, they explain.

Once Joost also had high hopes to become the premium video destination on the web –a space that’s now largely occupied by Hulu.

In 2007 Joost raised $45 million from the founders of Skype and an array of high-profile investors and media companies, including Sequoia Capital and Viacom.

Joost was initially supposed to deliver copyrighted content via a peer-to-peer distribution system and a player that users downloaded to their desktops. But YouTube, and later Hulu, conditioned users to watch video via their browsers, and Joost’s software never caught on. By last fall, Joost began offering video via the browser like everyone else, but it has never been able to generate a significant audience, being well behind rivals like Hulu, MetaCafe, Veoh and DailyMotion.

Now Joost will focus on providing an end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands. “Media companies around the world are embracing internet-based video portals as a key path to distribute their premium video, but building a world-class video portal is increasingly difficult and expensive.”

In addition, “Joost plans to make its white label video platform commercially available to media companies around the world. Joost plans to make its white label video platform commercially available to media companies around the world. This offering will provide a solution for companies looking to build a branded experience for their content on their own site as well as other sites and platforms in their distribution networks.”

But the move seems doomed since Joost is already enlisting another white-label video provider, Ooyala, to manage its ingesting, transcoding and metadata management.


YouTube Offers Publishers Links in Overlays

Now YouTube offers publishers links in overlays, allowing to drive traffic back to their site.

Call-to-Action overlays is intended for a sale, a sign-up, a donation, or any other response in which users take action on your website.

Adding it is easy: First, run a campaign to promote your video on YouTube; then, go to the Video Details page under My Videos and fill out the fields in the section marked “Call-to-Action overlay”. “All you have to do is include a short headline, ad text, a destination URL, and upload an optional image, and the overlay will appear whenerver someone watches your video,” YouTube explains. Clicks on the overlay will be tracked in YouTube Insight.


CBS News Launches New Design

CBSNews.com has launched new design. The new grey look features multimedia, lots of photos, blogs, video, a real time Twitter feed of news, and new series of Web video program. It also provides easy navigation to the news section.

“The new CBSNews offers a more visually rich and navigable presentation of the news as it happens. At the top of the home page, we have rotating images of the top stories, a stack of latest headlines, exclusive content from CBS News, and carousels of the news in photos, the latest videos and additional news stories and features.”


AMC Launches AMC Digital Media, and Acquires Filmsite.com and Filmcritic.org

AMC continues to develop its online movie presence with the launch of AMC Digital Media and the acquisition of two film websites: Filmsite.com and Filmcritic.org. The sites, along with amctv.com, provide film reviews and analysis, news, blogs, user-ranked movie lists, and web apps based on network series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

"These latest acquisitions reinforce our ability to create an entertaining, interactive online experience that celebrates all things movie and story," said Mac McKean, AMC's V.P. of digital media and content.

Interactive video platforms are getting momentum among advertisers. The ability to immediately sell products seen in video content goes beyond straight-up advertisements and product placements.

To that end, startup Clikthrough has just raised $1 million for its interactive clickable video efforts. This interactive video platform allows content owner to associate video with specific products and places and then push that content out.

Now they have 39 music videos up on its site to showcase. For example it highlights the shirt Kelly Clarkson wears, or the hotel she’s in, so the viewer can learn more about it or purchase it.


“YouTube Will Be Very Profitable”

Google CFO said YouTube will be “very profitable” in the “not too distant future”. The site’s monetized views have “more than tripled in the past year”. “We’re now monetizing billions of views of partner videos every month.”.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he is “very pleased” with the site’s money-making trajectory.

As areas for revenue growth, YouTube points out featured videos on search, the YouTube home page masthead, pre-rolls and long-form content.

Google believes that potential for revenue from advertising will do nothing but grow and cost of delivering online services will do nothing but fall. That’s why it keeps giving away more and more services that used to cost money.


Cellphone Clients Are Treated Miserabily In The U.S.

There are many things that are broken, unfair and anticompetitive in the American cellphone industry that Congress should investigate and fix, according to the last column of David Pogue in the New York Times.
Let’s list them:

- The price of a text message are gone to 20 cents, from 10, in two years. All four big U.S. carriers raised their fees at the same time.
- In the U.S. you are double billed: when you place a call and answer one, and also when you send a text message and when you get one. (In Europe you are billed once).
- You are charged an astonishing $1.50 to $5 a minute when calling overseas.
A good suggestion is using Skype Out or Google Voice, which is 2 cents a minute when calling China.
- The voice mail 15-second instructions messages. David Pogues writes about it:

“To page this person, press 5.” Page this person! Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize this was 1980. “When you have finished recording, you may hang up.” Oh, really!? So glad you mentioned that! I would have stayed on the line forever! And then when I call in for messages, I’m held up for 15 more second. “To listen to your messages, press 1. “Why else would I be calling!?

Verizon, with 70 million customers, makes $850 million a year with those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.

Right now, the cell carriers spend about $6 billion a year on advertising, and clients are treated miserabily. “Persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress”, says Pogue.


Apps That Can Make YouTube Even Better

Some software developers are releasing apps that can make YouTube even better. Desktube and iDesktop.tv are among them.

Desktube is an Adobe Air-based application that runs YouTube without launchig a browser. It adds a social-networking feel to YouTube, letting you video chat with up to three friends while you all watch YouTube videos. Also you can update your Facebook or use Twitter.

iDesktop.tv is a browser-based Web 2.0 application. Among some cool features, you can easily resize video windows by dragging the corner. Also you can watch multiple videos at once, and download videos and save them for offline viewing.

NewTeeVee describes in detail both apps.

Several years after the first version was released, the open-source video and audio player VLC has finally turned version 1.0.0. And it is getting good critics among video experts, and, as you can imagine, a great acceptance on the open-source community: 3 million downloads three days after been released.

It runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and is capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac ...), as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

It can also be used as a media converter or a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6.

This major release introduces many new features, new formats and new codecs to the VLC multimedia framework, and fixes a very high number of bugs that were present in the 0.9.x or 0.8.6 versions.

It can be downloaded from here.

The VLC project only lives with volunteers.


Qik Gets Another $5.5 Million from Venture Capitalists

Despite not being able to broadcast through the iPhone, Qik has secured another $5.5 million in funding. Quest Venture Partners and CampVentures led the round, along with several unnamed investors.

This Redwood City-headquartered start-up had previously raised $4 million in funding through angel investors including Salesforce.com founder Mark Benioff and Internet poster boy Mark Andreessen.

Competitors include Kyte and Bambuser.


Screenjelly: Scnakable Screencasts

The owner company of ScreenToaster has launched Screenjelly, “a sort of snackable screencasting service”, as NewTeeVee.com describes it.

Screenjelly is a browser-based tool that lets users create short recordings of what’s happening on their computer screens and instantly share them via Twitter, Facebook, email and other social media outlets.

This is what their creators say:

“Screenjelly differentiates from Screentoaster, which is for producing a tutorial or demo meant to be hosted on a blog or web site. Screenjelly focuses on the communication/sharing aspect, not on the ‘production’ aspect, and its interface is simpler and designed for that. Main use cases are sharing software tips, bugs, or anything on your screen that would take too long to describe via text.”

See a sample here.


Blogs and websites, not email or search, drive video views

Blogs and websites with embedded video and links, but not email referrals or search, are the single largest referrer of video views, according to TubeMogul.

Kaltura.com announced this week a self-hosted version of its open-source online video platform., called Kaltura Community Edition. “The new product, available for free download at Kaltura.org, allows any site owner or web developer to integrate highly customizable video and interactive rich-media funcionalities, including video management, publishing, uploading, importing, syndicating, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising”. This “Community Edition” is a free version under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.

Analyst say that it is surprising that the competitive white-label video companities let Kaltura claim this open-source angle.

According to Kaltura, “online video is one of the hottest and fastest-growing markets. Rich media is being adopted and integrated into a growing number of websites, web-platforms, and web-services across all industries, including media and entertainment, enterprise, education, healthcare, government, defense and more. Until now publishers and developers who wanted to integrate advanced rich media capabilities had only two options – to develop rich-media functionalities in-house from scratch, or to subscribe to hosted services provided by one of the many proprietary SaaS video vendors. While in-house development is very time-consuming and not cost-effective, the latter 'outsourced' alternative has proven to be less secure, too pricy, and insufficiently flexible and extendible.

Today's release of Kaltura's Community Edition breaks this build-vs.-buy conundrum by allowing publishers and enterprises for the first time to build upon and extend on an existing robust platform to fully customize, integrate, and deploy their own self-hosted solution, on their own servers, behind their own firewalls – and completely for free. Publishers who do so also have the option to subscribe to Kaltura's paid services, which include support and maintenance services, professional development services, and the most cost-effective ancillary digital services in the market, including video streaming, hosting, delivery, syndication, advertising, and search-engine-optimization”.

Community Edition is multi-platform and runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and “soon on leading cloud computing platforms” (Amazon S3?). The software contains many APIs and reference applications in PHP, Ruby, .Net, and Java, as well as off-the-shelf pre-integrated extensions to leading web platforms, such as WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, MindTouch, Moodle, ELGG and others.

Kaltura's business model is based on providing commercial services on top of the free platform such as support and maintenance packages, streaming (a SaaS solution), professional development services, hosting, back up and other digital services like delivery, syndication, advertising, and search-engine-optimization.


24 Video Companies Get Venture Funding in 2009

In the first half of 2008 there have been 24 venture funding for U.S.-based video-related companies., $135 M in total, compared to $348 M in the same period of 2008. This is according Dow Jones VentureSource.

Some funding are Invodo (white-label video), TubeMogul (video distribution and analytics), FreeWheel Media (rights management), OVGuide.com (video aggregation and search) and The Filter (recommendation engine).