Index of Internet video

SplashCast, a startup that lets you create your own broadcasting channel, has announced that it has successfully secured $4M in Series A funding.

While the company once hyped the idea of injecting social networking into podcasting, now its focus is “a new form of online marketing called social advertisements.” According to the compan, their social advertisements consistently receive click-through-rates 75 times higher than typical banner advertisements used on MySpace, Facebook, and other social network sites.

“It’s clear that Internet sites such as MySpace and Facebook are the new TVs for today’s young consumers and that SplashCast is far and away the best tool out there for reaching this audience,” said Bayliss. 

SplashCasts are like multi-channel TV screens that can be placed on an individual’s social network profile page. Brands and media companies can use SplashCast to distribute videos, games, pictures, and other digital content. You can share SplashCasts so that others can embed them in their MySpace or Facebook pages.

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.”

This video, via the always-awesome Seth Godin’s blog, is an awareness test.

Can you count how many times the white team passes the ball?

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.

We’ve noted before that bad advertising is holding back the development of Internet television.

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.

This is despite the facts that:

• Most people get their news from the Internet.
• Kids aren’t watching TV like they used to.
• While TV is declining, Internet TV is set to grow 42% this year.
• Television networks are failing to deliver the audiences they have promised, because people are watching Internet videos.

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.

Where do you think it’s going to go?

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.

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.

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.