Archive for the 'Digital Video Downloads' Category

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…)

Much as the movie industry would like to avoid having Apple becoming the dominant digital vendor for digital movies as it has in the world of digital music, Apple is doing it anyway.

While the movie and television industry experiments with a bunch of incompatible standards and technologies, Apple has been inexorably putting together a video ecosystem that just works.

Independent film studio Lionsgate announced today that it’s struck a deal with Apple to provide digitized versions of its movies that can play on iPods and similar devices. Buy a copy of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo or Jessica Alba’s The Eye, and you’ll get an iTunes code that you can use to download a digital copy of the movie that you can watch with iTunes compatible devices.

“Digital Copy for iTunes is a perfect example of how packaged media and new digital technology can work hand in hand for the benefit of our consumers,” Lionsgate president Steve Beeks said in a statement.

“Our consumers are always looking for new viewing options in terms of the motion pictures they buy, and we are always searching for new ways to deliver content in formats that reflect consumer preference across the entire home entertainment spectrum, from packaged media to digital storage to (video on demand).”

Last fall, 20th Century Fox introduced the concept to the market with the release of Bruce Willis’ Live Free or Die Hard.

Gravitas is a unique video podcast that pairs original music compositions with computer graphic simulations of the universe in motion.

Here’s the podcast description:

GRAVITAS is a visual and musical celebration of the beauty in a dynamic universe driven by gravity. Animations from supercomputer simulations of forming galaxies, star clusters, galaxy clusters, and galaxy interactions are presented as moving portraits of cosmic evolution. Billions of years of complex gravitational choreography are presented in 9 animations - each one interpreted with an original musical composition inspired by the exquisite movements of gravity. The result is an emotive and spiritually uplifting synthesis of science and art.

Astrophysicist John Dubinski combines a knowledge of cosmology, galaxy dynamics and computer graphics to create breathtaking portraits of a universe in motion. Composer-pianist John Kameel Farah merges the soundworlds of renaissance and baroque counterpoint, free improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, minimalism, techno and electronica to create a musical feast that crosses time and dimension.

The podcast explores deep ideas, expressed entirely through visuals and musics.

You can subscribe to the podcast by adding this feed URL to your podcast client software:

http://www.galaxydynamics.org/podcasts/gravitas.xml

NBC & Pando Networks, a provider of P2P content delivery services, announced today that Pando will be providing video delivery services for the NBC Direct service.

While it’s interesting to see a mainstream network using P2P to distribute video, it looks like NBC Direct is going to be another misbegotten proprietary Internet television offering. It requires a special player, it won’t work with Macs and it won’t work with most successful Internet media platform, Apple’s iTunes ecosystem.

What NBC Direct will offer is ad-supported downloads, via a custom Windows player, of programs across the NBC prime time line up. Pando’s p2p solution will ensure protection of copyrighted material using hash matching, digital fingerprinting and content watermarking technologies. Good for NBC - but it means that you’ll be locked into viewing videos on NBC’s terms.
Viewers will also be able to select shows that they’d like automatically delivered to their computers, in a sort of proprietary podcast-like fashion.

Programs currently available include “30 Rock”, “The Office”, “Heroes”, “My Name Is Earl”, “Medium”, “American Gladiators”, “Celebrity Apprentice”, “Friday Night Lights”, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

Kent Nichols - one of the viral video gurus behind Ask A Ninja - has an interesting new post at his site. He looks at the state of Internet video, calling it the golden age:

“The Indie TV movement is on the rise. The club of show runners is now open to anyone with a dream and the entrepreneurial skills.This is the golden age. Sundance in the 80s and 90s. A time when you can create something new and fresh, get seen by millions and have the chance to retain ownership over that property as it enters the big media system.

Yesterday I tested out the iTunes rental feature by renting “Once” — the film that won the best song at the Oscars. It’s a sweet, sentimental and sad at the end. Something you don’t get in the Hollywood system.

Put aside the fact that the dude is 37 and is dating her (she’s only 19 and they’ve known each other for five years — creepy).

$160k was the budget for 86 minutes of content or about $2k/finished minute. Not bad and definitely in the range of where webseries are right now. It also shows you what you can accomplish at that budget range.”

Kent goes on to say:

“We are still looking at the seeds of an indie driven TV movement like the American cinema saw in the 60s and 70s.”

A no-budget exposé on the meat industry can result in the largest meat recall ever. A low-budget movie can win an Oscar. A well-placed video camera can capture the next “macaca” incident and end a political career.

It’s an amazing time. Making a television show, a documentary or maybe even a movie is within your reach, right now.

With the release of Apple TV Take 2, Apple is putting podcasts and video podcasts front and center in people’s living rooms. This means that your podcast now needs to look great in HD.

Here are 5 ways to update your podcast for Apple TV Take 2:

• Increase the resolution of your video podcast. Apple strongly encourages you to increase the resolution of your video to 640×480 or 640×360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Video podcasts at this resolution look good on Apple TV and still play on iPhone and video-compatible iPods. They recommend that you encode using QuickTime’s “Movie to iPod” preset or Compressor’s “Apple > Apple Devices > H.264 for iPod video and iPhone 640×480″ preset.
• Enable video fast starting. When you perform the final encode on your video, enable fast starting. Most recent versions of QuickTime enable this setting automatically. But it’s easy to undo the setting by making changes to the file after the encode. If you do make a change after the encode, be sure to “Save As” again.
• Increase your podcast art resolution. Apple TV displays a large version of your podcast art. Use a 600×600 square JPG or PNG file.
• Make sure your host is up to snuff. iTunes and Apple TV use byte-range requests in some circumstances. For example, Apple TV 2.0 employs this functionality when the user accesses the podcast directly over the Internet. We recommend hosting episode files on HTTP/1.1 servers that correctly support the HTTP byte-range request specification.
• Make sure your server is configured correctly. Make sure that your HTTP servers return the correct MIME types in the Content-Type header. Failing to do so can create errors. A list of MIME types can be found in the iTunes podcast technical spec.

You may want to review Apple’s full recommendations for podcasts to make sure that your podcast is optimized for the company’s devices.

Back in June of last year, we suggested that in the fight between Blu-Ray and HD DVD, Internet TV would be the winner:

Internet TV is plagued by the same problems as Blu-Ray and HD DVD, though: limited content, complex setup and high cost for hardware. Nevertheless, Internet TV is already good enough to make users realize that high definition video discs are a tangent to the real future of video delivery - Internet TV.

When Steve Jobs made his MacWorld announcements earlier this year, we said that his one more thing was that Apple was killing of the DVD:

Don’t expect Apple to kill off the DVD overnight. It took Apple a few years to get rid of the floppy drive, and there are still some PCs that come with floppy drives.

Nevertheless, Apple is looking ahead, not back, and the future Steve Jobs envisions doesn’t included DVDs.

Now mainstream coverage is picking up this idea.

Blu-Ray Death Watch

With the death of HD DVD, the Apple TV update and various new Internet TV services, the idea of a Blu-Ray death watch doesn’t sound so far-fetched anymore.

Here’s CNet’s take:

With the fall of HD DVD, Blu-ray has assumed the throne as the next format of choice, but its reign will be short-lived.

The studios backing Blu-ray already know this. At an HDTV confab last fall, Warner Bros.’ vice president of high-definition media development likened HD packaged media to a set of training wheels for digital downloads.

“We can use HD discs to train consumers to move into digital, but it’s a transition,” said Warner Bros.’ Dan Silverberg. “Downloaded content will come, but the consumer will get quicker tutorial into video-on-demand, etc., by owning a Blu-ray player or HD DVD.”

It’ll happen sooner than they think. With a growing number of alternatives to packaged media, combined with the relatively high prices of Blu-ray players and discs vs. inexpensive, so-called upconverting DVD players, Blu-ray will likely be the last major disc format you’ll ever buy.

What do you think? Are you going to invest in Blu-Ray?

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.

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation, announced earlier today that it would begin selling episodes of some of its popular television programming via the Apple iTunes Music Store. The BBC says it is the first UK television network to offer its shows on iTunes. Episodes of such programs as Torchwood and Little Britain will retail for £1.89 , or about $3.68 US.

Recently-aired episodes will appear on iTunes after they have been made available for viewing on the BBC’s free iPlayer “catch-up service.” The iPlayer is proving extremely popular with viewers, with more than 3.5 million shows streamed or downloaded in the first two weeks after its late December debut.

This is an interesting move for BBC, but the announcement highlights that the size of Apple TV’s hard drive may prove to be a roadblock to people wanting to create digital media libraries.

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it is killing off HD DVD.

“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. “While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.”

With HD DVD out of the way, there will be a window of opportunity for Blu-Ray. However, as DVD offers a “good enough” standard for many people, and digital delivery of HD content is already available, the success of Blu-Ray is likely to be the last gasp of the DVD format. (more…)