Wizzard Software, the parent company of Liberated Syndication and several podcast hosting services, announced today that revenues for the fourth quarter of 2007 were $1,540,992, a 108% increase over revenues of $739,551 in the fourth quarter of 2006.
For the full year of 2007, the Company recorded revenues of $5,163,491, a 75% increase of $2,195,967 from revenues of $2,943,578 in 2006. Wizzard posted a gross profit of $1,562,703, a 47% increase versus a gross profit of $1,064,115 in the full year 2006.
The company noted several podcasting-related accomplishments in its announcement:
Acquisition of Podcast Company Liberated Syndication (Libsyn) 3/19/07
Completed Raise of $7,500,000 for its Podcasting Business 7/9/07
Adds Nielsen//NetRatings’ Site Census to Advertising System 9/12/07
Announces Largest Ever Industry Ad Campaign 11/14/07
Ends Year with Approximately 10,000 Podcast Publishers 12/31/07
1 Billion Download Requests in 2007 12/31/07
In 2007, Wizzard Media surpassed download request forecasts with one billion podcast download requests achieved, surpassing the 450 million download requests for 2006.
“Podcasting is becoming a necessary audience expansion tool for content publishers and brand advertisers seeking cost effective, high return outlets to capture the migration of audiences from traditional media outlets to the internet,” says Chris Spencer, Wizzard CEO. “We are seeing an increase in advertiser understanding of the high quality, subscription and episodic benefits of podcasting versus other internet video offerings. We believe that our ambitious undertaking of targeting similar audiences through interesting, engaging podcast micro-communities is a very compelling advertising opportunity and we expect advertising revenues to grow substantially in 2008.”
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…)
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:
Libsyn has announced an update to it stats offering will be released on Monday.
Addressed in this release:
lack of updates for new files
low numbers for past 9 months
speed to load stats UI
accuracy of data
user agents list (zune, appleTV, iPhone, miro, etc added)
real trending data over time.. per month/week/day downloads of episodes or entire show
general confusion from v.1.5.2
The “old stats” 1.5.2 will continue to be updated while “new stats” 1.6 continues to catch up for some users. They expect to stop updating the old stats offering by the end of the month.
What does $4.5 million and the help of a superdope homeboy from the Oaktown get you these days?
Not much, if the just-out-of-beta Dancejam is any indication.
Dancejam is a YouTube clone that focuses on urban dance. The site lets you view videos of people doing various types of dance, rate the videos and upload your own. The Dancejam video player offers a few features that are designed specifically for learning dance steps - slow-mo and 5-second rewind buttons.
It doesn’t have a lot of things that you expect from a video site, though:
You can’t adjust the volume of videos in Dancejam’s player.
You can’t embed videos in other sites.
There’s not much content. We counted a little over 500 videos, and many of these are duplicates.
There’s no audience of users on the site. There are currently only about 1,000 users and few are active. As a result, the most viewed video currently only has 879 views.
Dancejam looks DOA. It doesn’t offer standard features that you expect from a video site. And, while it targets a niche with with the potential for broad audience appeal, it doesn’t offer dancers a reason to use the site instead of YouTube.
The challenges facing Dancejam are ones that will face any niche video site. If a site doesn’t offer some really compelling, unique features, there’s no reasons to prefer it over YouTube, which offers a mature platform and active member base, or just publishing on your own site.
Content delivery network Limelight’s legal problems won’t affect PodShow, says PodShow founder and podcasting pioneer Adam Curry:
We have spoken with LimeLight management and they have assured us they will not go ‘dark’. They have been a good partner to us, we trust them and stand by their word and their excellent service.
As with any well planned media infrastructure, PodShow’s platform is completely CDN agnostic. We can use any CDN without any interruption to our service and I would presume most companies that use a CDN for delivery would never allow themselves to be locked in to any one provider for any type of service.
In my personal opinion this story is being overhyped in the ‘twitter-verse’. These things usually end up in some form of settlement long before there’s any danger of ‘darkness’
An Apple patent reveals that the company is working on a podcast aggregator that would dynamically collect the news that you are interested in and deliver a personalized news podcast, according to a report at AppleInsider.
In other words - Apple wants to be your news and information station.
The system would allow you to:
Subscribe to and personalize a podcast with software like iTunes;
Select news segments selected from a variety of categories; and
Automatically download the personalized podcast to your Apple TV, iPod or iPhone.
The custom news show could consist of a 5 minute segment from CNN on the day’s national news, a 5 minute segment from a local news station, and a 10 minute segment on sports highlights from ESPN.
In addition to offering mainstream content, the iNews service may let you integrate other podcast content:
“Upon selection of the custom button, a user can be assisted with another dialog screen to create a category of content, namely, media content, that is to be included within the custom podcast.
For example, the user may request to receive sports highlights from the weekend during the NFL season regarding specific teams or teams in the Eastern division. As another example, the user may desire to receive statistics regarding games played during the past week in the NFL.”
Once you select the playlist of content that you’re interested in, Apple’s servers would request the latest podcast content from content creators, stitch the segments together and then deliver the personalized podcast to iTunes or other podcast software. As part of this process, Apple could insert targeted advertising dynamically.
Video blog/video conversation site Seesmic is announcing tomorrow that it has raised $6 million in funding.
The investment is lead by Atomico - an investment group founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The complete list of investors is:
Michael Arrington - Founder, TechCrunch
Steve Case - Co-Founder and former CEO and Chairman, AOL
Jeff Clavier - Managing Partner, SoftTech VC
Ron Conway - Early investor, Google
Steve Garfield - Pioneering video blogger
Dan Gillmor - Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship
Reid Hoffman - Founder, LinkedIn
Michael Parekh - Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
Mark Pincus - Co-Founder and former Chairman and CEO, SupportSoft
Ariel Poler - Founder and former CEO, IPRO and Topica
Jeff Pulver - Chairman and Founder, Pulver.com
Martin Varsavsky - Founder, FON
Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur says the investment “will enable us to launch a site built by and for our community, incorporating the products and features they’ve told us they want through their Seesmic conversations.”
In our testing of the alpha version of Seesmic, we’ve found it to be an interesting new service that trivializes making Internet video. And the fact that it does make creating Internet video so trivial leads to new types of video consumption and conversations.
Note: This news was embargoed until tomorrow, but leaked earlier today at Valleywag.
Podcast host Libsyn reports that they are updating their stats engine to address some ongoing issues with it and add new features:
We know stats accuracy is an ongoing issue and that libsyn users have had to exhibit a lot of patience and swallow a lot of frustration as we’ve worked through the problems over the years.
We took the first step of identifying and fixing the issues with the current libsyn.com stats (mainly, some episodes published after July 2007 not showing up in the system, or suddenly stop reporting downloads). We sifted through the code that processes the raw data into data we can use in the reports we provide to you, and believe we have identified the root of the problem, as well as the fix for it.
We’ve set up a test environment, applied this fix, and are now in the process of re-processing the raw data from Summer 2007 forward and verifying that this “fixed” data is accurate. Depending on how that verification goes, the reprocessing could be finished in as soon as 7 - 10 days.
We are working on a plan that will provide scalability, flexibility for us in terms of administrating the application, and will give us the ability to continue to store historical data indefinitely.
Libsyn note that, while they are reprocessing the older data, stats updates will happen less frequently.
AmigoFish is a site that is sort of like a psychic friend that helps you find podcasts you’ll like.
To use it, you sign up for an account, and then rate some shows. Once you’ve rated shows that you like, you can get recommendations for more shows that you’ll like, based on what people with similar tastes to yours have rated.
According to the site, the more shows you rate, the better the predictions will get.
You can find out more about the site at the Amigofish blog.
Wizzard Software, the parent company of Liberated Syndication and several podcast hosting services, announced today that revenues for the fourth quarter of 2007 were $1,540,992, a 108% increase over revenues of $739,551 in the fourth quarter of 2006.
TiVo today 
Podcast host 
