We’ve published several articles looking at how NBC & the Olympics are losing viewers with the restrictions they’ve placed on online coverage, and noted that millions may be turning to unofficial sources like BitTorrent or skipping the Olympics altogether as a result.

Some think that NBC has a winning strategy, though: use online video to drive broadcast television viewing and for replays of events after they’ve been broadcast.

For example, Will Richmond of VideoNuze says NBC’s coverage is exceeding his expectations:

“Overall, the user experience is excellent. Beyond the well thought-out navigation, a key part of the experience owes to Microsoft Silverlight which enables totally new broadband video capabilities. Picture-in-picture, 4 live concurrent streams, zero-buffer rewinding, and of course glorious video quality (even in large-screen mode) are all breakthroughs. So far I haven’t seen or heard about any delivery or viewing glitches.”

“One week in, the first Broadband Olympics are redefining broadband’s potential and setting a new quality bar for future events.”

Let me know what you think. Is NBC smart to sacrifice some of the online audience in order to maximize its broadcast revenue?

Open source video platform Kaltura has officially released its Interactive Video Plugin for WordPress.

The free plugin is designed to enable both basic and advanced video capabilities on any WordPress blog (using version 2.5 and higher) – from simple video posting and playing to video commenting and collaborative video editing.

Features:

• Upload, and import videos directly to the blog post (this is what I did a moment ago);
• Edit and remix videos using Kaltura’s online full-featured video editor;
• Easily import video and other forms of rich-media from other sites and social networks, and;
• Allow readers and subscribers to add video and audio comments, and to participate in collaborative videos (I welcome your video comments to this post).

Kaltura offers video hosting solutions, ranging from free plans with up to 3GB bandwidth/month and commercial plans.

Wizzard Media has officially launched its Wizzard Media Player and is demoing it this week in Las Vegas at the 2008 New Media Expo (NME). The Player lets you embed video imported from an RSS feed on web sites, blogs and social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

An example of the new media player in action is embedded above. Give it a try. If you click menu, you get options for sharing videos, downloads, subscribing and viewing older episodes.

The player is highly customizable and can provide audience behavior statistics. Video views are integrated within the statistics on Wizzard Media’s hosting platform, Libsyn, and videos running advertising campaigns are captured and tracked with Nielsen NetRatings for third party verification.

Virtually every aspect of the Wizzard Player is ‘skinnable,’ allowing for a range of options from basic color changes to custom menu and button options. A sophisticated set of user controls and options such as sharing via email and embed codes, version selection (high resolution, low resolution, and HD when available), full screen and mouse-over have been carefully considered to provide the best viewing experience possible.

“The goal for Wizzard is to bring the latest, cutting edge video technologies to video producers and their audiences without sacrificing backward-compatibility for legacy users,” said Libsyn’s Dave Mansueto. “And, in doing so, we are simplifying the video producer’s workflow to one upload that enjoys all the benefits of total distribution.”

Speed Matters, a broadband advocacy project of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), has released its second annual state-by-state Internet speed report, and the results show the U.S. still has a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the world.

The report found that the average U.S. Internet speed was 2.3 megabits per second (mbps), representing a slight gain of 0.4 mbps over last year’s average speed. At this rate, it will take us more than a hundred years to catch up to Japan, where average speeds are estimated at 63 mbps.

The new report is based on data from nearly 230,000 Internet users who took the Speed Matters Speed Test — almost three times the number of tests taken for last year’s inaugural state-by-state report. The fastest states were Rhode Island, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts, while the slowest speeds were in rural states: Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska.

Speed Matters argues that broadband speeds are necessary for America to be competitive.

“This isn’t about how fast someone can download a full-length movie,” says CWA President Larry Cohen. “Speed matters to our economy and our ability to remain competitive in a global marketplace. Rural development, telemedicine and distance learning all rely on truly high-speed, universal networks.”

But it also matters when you want to download that full-length movie – because it will take 27 times as long in the US as it would in Japan, based on Speed Matters’ numbers.

Broadband speeds are an important factor contributing to the adoption of podcasts, video podcasts, Internet Video and other new media, and are likely to limit adoption in the US, unless average speeds rise.

Lifestyle podcast and blog network Personal Life Media today unveiled a new audio player widget for distributing multiple podcast RSS feeds. The customizable widget, in turn, can be added to a user’s social network profile, blog or personal webpage.

The player is free and can be customized to match any web page or blog as well as to include podcast information on Facebook, MySpace and twenty other sites such as iGoogle and WordPress using widget-maker Gigya’s Wildfire widget distribution technology. The player can be branded with a corporate logo “for an integrated look and feel,” according to today’s announcement.

Podcasters who produce more than a single show can use the widget to present up to five shows in a single widget on their site, blog or social services. As each new episode is published, it is automatically updated to the podcaster’s widget. The podcaster’s fans can grab the player and put it on their own site as well.

Early adopters of the new podcast player widget include Chris MacDonald, founder of music discovery publisher IndieFeed, and C.C. Chapman, multi-show podcaster with social media strategy firm, The Advance Guard. The free podcast widget is available here.

The Line – a new web comedy series from Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video, directed by SNL veteran Seth Meyers – is a bomb.

The series features two friends, Josh (Hader) and Duffy (Joe Lo Truglio – Superbad), as they score the coveted first spot in line outside of a movie theater, 11 days prior to the world premiere of one of the summer’s most highly anticipated films, Future Space.

Could be promising – but the series is also an attempt to integrate sponsored product placement with viral videos.

The Line is sponsored by Sony Pictures. Since the show takes place outside a movie theater, the studio integrated three real-life Columbia Pictures releases, Step Brothers, Pineapple Express, and The House
Bunny, into the webisodes.

“This integrated marketing opportunity with The Line feels like the most organic user experience that I’ve seen in a very long time,” said Dwight Caines, executive vice president of worldwide digital marketing strategy for Columbia TriStar Marketing Group. “The project is so clever and will certainly resonate with our target audiences.”

Unfortunately, the target audience for The Line appears to be next to non-existent. The first episode, which has been up for three weeks, has received just over 5,000 views on The Line’s YouTube channel:

Later episodes are doing worse.

5,000 views might be OK if you’re putting up a video of a huge, dead snake.

But when you’ve got the creator of Saturday Night Live, three SNL veterans & Sony Pictures behind you and you only get 5,000 views, you’ve got a bomb on your hands.

But not just any bomb – a bomb of epic, even Quarterlife-size proportions.

via Cinematech

NBC says that as much as 8% of its Olympic audience is viewing the event online, but it’s becoming clear that there’s a huge number of people that that are turning to unofficial channels because of restrictions and limitations of official Olympics coverage.

In fact, the number of people turning to unofficial Olympic offerings appears to be in the millions. According to TorrentFreak, a blog that covers BitTorrent news, “The broadcast of the Olympics opening ceremony has been downloaded more than a million times already, and the download counters go up every day.”

“The most popular version of the opening ceremony is the HD release, a massive 5GB file,” notes TorrentFreak’s Ernesto. “At the time of publication more than 60,000 people are downloading the torrent, while over a million people have already downloaded the opening ceremony via BitTorrent.”

Wizzard Media announced a new feature today that allows publishers to distribute videos through TubeMogul‘s online video distribution and analytics service, now integrated into the Wizzard Media publishing platform.

TubeMogul’s service lets you upload a video once and then distribute it automatically to top video sites. TubeMogul says that users of this service have historically experienced 3x more views per video.

According to Wizzard, the offering is the first of its kind to combine media hosting, RSS distribution (podcasting), a customizable flash player for viral streaming in social networks and automated distribution to 20 videos sites. The service is open to all online video publishers free of charge in addition to Wizzard’s current video publishers.

Benefits of the deal include:

• Publishers upload videos one time and the TubeMogul Universal Upload tool deploys them to as many of the top video sharing sites as each producer designates upon initial set-up.
• TubeMogul aggregates statistics from each of the video sharing sites and provides detailed metrics back to Wizzard.
• Track Trends & Buzz – create groups of videos important to a publisher and track spikes in viewership to identify trends and monitor the pulse of online video viewers.
• Assess Marketing Efforts – assess the effectiveness of advertising efforts by analyzing spikes and trends in viewership across any range of time.
• Competitive Intelligence – see what’s working with a publisher’s counterpart or competitor and compare and contrast viewership trends.

Wizzard Media is showcasing the new service, along with the Wizzard Player, at the 2008 New Media Expo.

Worldwide online video revenue is expected to top US$4.5 billion by 2012, up from $1.2 billion in 2008, predicts research firm In-Stat.

Much of that revenue is expected to come from online video rentals, with ad-supported online video making up a major part, too.

Research Highlights:

• By 2012, 39% of adults in the US are expected to have purchased or rented online video.
• 54% of respondents to an In-Stat survey of US consumers still favor physical discs when purchasing movies or TV shows.
• By 2012, In-Stat forecasts that 90% of US households will have access to broadband, with 94% of these individuals watching online video.
• Purchased/rented videos are expected to offer the most robust growth for online video in the near term, in large part due to an increase in subscription services such as Netflix, which charges a flat monthly fee to deliver an optimal combination of packaged goods and online content that can be viewed on home TV sets.
• Ad-supported professional video from major TV networks will become a strong revenue contributor by 2012.

“What is now seen as a predominantly younger pastime will spread to encompass a wider group of people, in part due to the aging of current online video viewers, but also as a result of word of mouth, spread of services, growth of in-home networks, and new network-connected consumer electronic devices,” says Gerry Kaufhold, In-Stat analyst.

If you’re doing audio work on Windows, Rain Recording may have just released your dream machine.

They’ve introduced the ION 64, a true 64-bit computing platform designed for audio and video production.

Powered by two AMD Opteron Quad Core processors, the ION 64 has eight processor cores, up to 64 gigabytes of RAM, and room for 4 terabytes of high-performance storage.

By providing a true 64-bit platform, Rain has created a system able to utilize up to 64 gigabytes of memory, giving you what Rain calls “the single most powerful audio production platform available today”.

If it ran OS X, it would be that much better – but this looks like a serious piece of gear for Windows audio work.

Pricing and Availability

The ION 64 – Octo Core 64-bit Digital Audio Workstation is available now from Rain Recording, through Rain Authorized Dealers and the Rain Store, designed and tested by Rain for maximum compatibility with 64-bit audio hardware and software. Free shipping and free third party integration is standard.

Price: from $3699