Entrepreneur, podcaster and blogger Jeff Pulver has announced that his latest venture, PrimeTimeRewind.tv, is now live.
The site is intended to be a sort of TV Guide for Internet television, with a social media twist.
“We would like to put you one-click away from watching your show,” according to Pulver.
“Prime Time Rewind also allows you to present you personalized Facet. It can consist of existing prime time TV shows, Internet only shows or any RSS feed of videos you would like to include.”
The site presents links to current TV show episodes on the faces of a cube.
When I checked out the site earlier in the year, I said that Prime Time Rewind set Web design back 10 years, and that the site “takes you on a hyperlinked virtual reality journey into cyberspace, the likes we haven’t seen since around 1998.”
Maybe that sounds a bit harsh, but a text-based interface would be dramatically easier to use than the site’s current Flash-based one.
Pulver says they are working on a variety of updates to the site:
A couple of words on what we are working on next (other than fixing bugs, improving usability, etc. )
1) Twitter Integration (ability to send out twits when new episodes are available etc.)
2) RSS feeds (various feeds, for users, for shows, etc.)
3) more social features
4) better recommendations
Pulver’s concept for the site is great, and it sounds like they have great ideas for the future of the site. The site is dead in the water, though, until they address the site’s usability issues.
Based on the latest stats from M:Metrics, the iPhone is delivering on its hype, radically changing what people are doing with the mobile Web.
Check out some of these figures:
The iPhone is already the most popular device for accessing news and information on the mobile Web, with 85 percent of iPhone users accessing news and information in the month of January.
30.9 percent of iPhone owners watched mobile TV or video, versus a 4.6 market average, and more than double the rate for all smartphone users.
30.4 percent of iPhone owners accessed YouTube, compared to 1 percent of all mobile phone users.
36 percent used Google Maps, compared to 2.6 percent of all mobile users.
Usage of social networking is also popular among iPhone users: 49.7 percent accessed a social networking site in January, nearly twelve times the market average.
Twenty percent of iPhone owners accessed Facebook, one of the first Web properties to customize its content for the iPhone, versus 1.5 percent of the total mobile market.
The iPhone offers a taste of the future; iPhone users are using the devices in all sorts of leading edge ways. It also shows how mobile users will use Internet media when they get capable devices and unlimited data plans.
“The iPhone has certainly delivered on its hype,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Beyond a doubt, this device is compelling consumers to interact with the mobile Web, delivering off-the-charts usage from everything to text messaging to mobile video.”
“While the demographics of iPhone users are very similar to all smartphone owners, the iPhone is outpacing other smartphones in driving mobile content consumption by a significant margin,” said Donovan. “In addition to the attributes of the device itself, another important factor to consider is the fact that all iPhones on AT&T are attached to an unlimited data plan. Our data shows that once the fear of surprise data charges is eliminated, mobile content consumption increases dramatically, regardless of device.”
TiVo today introduced version 2.6 of TiVo Desktop for Windows, adding deeper support for Web videos and podcasts.
Features include:
You can now transfer all your downloaded Web Video from your PC to your TiVo DVR so you can watch them on your TV.
Automatic conversions of your TiVoToGo transfers to support portable devices that support MPEG-4 or H.264 video—Transfer video to your iPod, PSP, Treo, Nokia and other portables devices.
Set automatic transfers of your favorite shows and videos from your PC to your TiVo DVR.
Improved video quality and aspect ratio in the Series3 and TiVo HD DVRs when downloading high-quality video.
Automatically transfer shows from your TiVo DVR to a Windows PC or laptop.
Browse and listen to your computer’s MP3 library from your TiVo DVR.
Watch full-screen slide shows of your computer’s digital photo collection on your TV.
In a nutshell, the updated Tivo Desktop for Windows allows you to sync content automatically between your TiVo and Windows computers and peripheral devices.
Unfortunately, TiVo’s support for podcasts is fairly convoluted. Details below. (more…)
Advertisers aren’t sure where to advertise on the Internet, how to advertise in new media or how to measure their success, and they’re spending their money on old media as a result, even though they know traditional advertising is becoming less effective.
Incredibly, for every $1 advertisers spend on ads in Internet video, they spend $100 on TV ads.
If It Keeps On Rainin’, The Levee’s Going To Break
Advertisers know that they need to move their money into new media, but they are clueless about how to do it:
Spending on online video ads represents less than 4 percent of all Internet advertising and just 1 percent of the amount spent on TV, according to eMarketer. But growth is expected — with the research firm forecasting U.S. spending more than tripling to $4.3 billion in 2011 — especially as more viewers embrace full-length TV episodes and other video online.
The challenge is finding the right formula — in the creative approach, the format or the frequency with which the ads appear — so visitors notice the pitches without getting so annoyed that they never come back.
“Users love free content and advertisers love to fill up every minute and pixel with the messaging, and publishers do have to find that balance,” said Geoffrey Coco, an advertising executive with Microsoft, which has a video news partnership with The Associated Press. “There’s been a lot of innovation but I don’t think we’ve settled down yet.”
There’s going to be a flood of money coming into new media very soon, but nobody’s sure what path it will follow.
One-third of all Internet videos watched in the US were on YouTube, according to the latest research from comScore.
January 2008 data shows that YouTube.com accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. during the month. The total number of videos viewed in January was down slightly from the more than 10.1 billion viewed during a record-breaking December 2007.
Top Five Internet Video Sites:
Google Sites - 34.3% share of videos viewed. (YouTube.com accounted for more than 96 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.)
Fox Interactive - 6%
Yahoo! Sites - 3.2%
Microsoft Sites - 2%
Viacom - 2%
Other notable findings from January 2008 include:
More than three-quarters of the total U.S. Internet audience (75.7 percent) viewed online video.
78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com (41.4 videos per viewer).
49.4 million viewers watched 534 million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer).
The average online video duration was 2.9 minutes.
The average online video viewer consumed 70 videos.
Internet video viewing will grow massively this year, according to research from Accustream. Professional and “user-generated video” (UGV) views are expected to grow by 43.4% in 2008, following a 57.6% increase in 2007.
Other highlights of the research:
Partner Channels on YouTube, for example, accounted for a 10.6% share of total video views in 2006 - 2007, forecast at 15.4% in 2008.
Comedians/Directors captured 8.9% total viewing share on YouTube in 2006 - 2007 and forecast at 11.1% in 2008.
Universal Music Group claimed the top channel partner position, with a 29.1% share, according to AccuStream.
Combined, Partner Channels, Comedians and Directors made up 19.5% of total views on YouTube in 2006 - 2007, and forecast at 26.5% in 2008.
Their research also digs into the relative strengths of user generated vs professional video:
Entertainment captured a combined 17.1 billion views, for a 33.1 share, with professional sites owning a 52.4% launch share, and UGV hosting networks the remaining 47.6%.
Music video (including artist info, mash-ups, spoofs, tour videos etc. on UGV networks) captured 12.5 billion combined views, 55.6% owned by professionally managed sites and brands compared to 44.4% for UGV.
News is almost completely dominated by professionally managed sites, with a 93.8% share.
The Sports category remains largely the domain of professional, formal partner or syndication-powered websites, with an 80.7% share compared to 19.3% share for UGV networks. Sports on UGV networks typically include extreme events content and spectacular wipe-outs.
YouTube today announced new features that turn YouTube into a platform for Internet video development:
We now provide a complete set of (CRUD) capabilities for uploading, managing, searching, and playing back user videos and metadata from the YouTube “cloud,” managed by us. We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos, and we provide open access to our sizable global audience, enabling you to generate traffic for your site, visibility for your brand, or support for your cause. Meanwhile, we provide full access to our substantial video library, enabling you to attract users and enhance the experience on your site. It’s all free, and it’s available to everyone, starting now.
This is implemented through a set of new APIs that let developers:
Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software
The move is a smart one for YouTube, because it turns the site from a destination into a platform. YouTube provided some examples of what this makes possible:
Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly into YouTube.
The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube.
Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube.
Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.
YouTube provides several resources to help you get started with the new video API’s:
If you’re going to the NAB Show, you may want to check out the schedule for their Podcasting Summit.
The Summit offers a 1-day boot camp, plus two days of additional training covering everything from planning to production through encoding, distribution and legal issues.
Internet video site Hulu launches today, offering full-length episodes of more than 250 TV series, including Lost and The Simpsons, along with older hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In addition, Hulu will feature content from the Warner Bros Television Group, Lionsgate and from sports leagues.
According to the company, it has already attracted over five million viewers interested in catching up with long-form video online. With its library of older content, the site provides viewers a way for digging into the “long-tail” of television programming.
Even more important to the site’s long-term success is the fact that it launches with a mature advertising platform in place, and advertisers lined up to use it.
I’m still skeptical about Hulu’s ad implementation and navigation. The site’s top level navigation doesn’t give you any idea of the range of content hidden on the site, and browsing is equally clunky, with relies too much on Flash.
Hulu’s ad implementation is equally clunky - showing you long, poorly targeted ads and forcing you to grab a mouse and click to continue watching the show.
The site does a great job delivering the shows, though. I caught up with much of season 3 of Lost via the site, and the video has the best I’ve seen for streaming HD. This, along with the fact that it’s lined up an impressive range of content, should give the site a chance at taking on YouTube.
A scandal has broken out over the fact that the most-viewed video of all time on YouTube, Evolution of Dance, has been beaten by a fan video for the song Music is My Hot Hot Sex.
A lot of people are crying foul - not just because the Hot Hot Sex video is so bad, but because YouTube’s stats suggest that many of the video’s views may have been generated by spambots.
“There’s still a possibility that this torrent of traffic is coming from a legitimate external source, but it seems increasingly unlikely,” they concluded. “It’s either a bug or some form of cheating.”
ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has a different view, suggesting that the clip is “a defining video for the current era online - the heady days and American flavored story of “well, golly look at that” user generated content are over.”
While Kirkpatrick acknowledges suspicions around the video’s ranking, he suggests that globalization may be a factor in the Hot Hot Sex video’s popularity.
“YouTube now gets a majority of its viewer ship from outside the U.S. so it only makes sense that the #1 video of all time isn’t from the U.S. There are now three of the 20 all time most viewed videos on YouTube with non-English titles,” notes Kirkpatrick. “Non-native English speakers and other languages are an essential part of US culture and English titled videos are of course viewed substantially outside of the US - but the growing internationalization of the site can’t help but increase the prominence of non-English videos. The victory of Hot Hot Sex is a strong signal of the global reach of YouTube.”
“After Andy Baio called ‘bulls**t’ on CANSEI DE DER SEX Music is My Hot Hot Sex, there’s been renewed interest in stats-gaming on YouTube,” notes Jackson. “The video is still online at 91,195,785 views and counting, but it’s no longer listed as the most viewed all time”
Is Google The Real Culprit Behind The YouTube Sex Scandal?
While these explanations are all plausible, there’s another, simpler explanation: Google may be responsible for the success of Hot Hot Sex.
Based on the latest stats from 
TiVo today 
One-third of all Internet videos watched in the US were on YouTube, according to the latest 
Internet video site 
