Viacom’s MTV Networks is expected to announce today plans to merge its online digital music offerings into a joint venture with RealNetworks. MTV and RealNetworks, which runs subscription digital-music service Rhapsody, plan to join forces in a bid to compete with Apple Inc’s iTunes online music store.

Verizon Wireless is expected to supply mobile distribution for the joint venture’s digital content. The agreement with Verizon could help the new venture’s battle against iTunes, since Apple’s iPhone is limited to AT&T.

The announcment is also expected to end MTV’s Urge digital music service.

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced the latest update for Adobe Flash Player 9 software, code-named Moviestar, which adds H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support, as well as hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback.

These advancements enable the delivery of HD television quality and premium audio content through the ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player and help pave the way to expand rich media Flash experiences on the desktop and H.264 ready consumer devices. The latest update for Adobe Flash Player 9 will be available in beta for immediate download later today on Adobe Labs.

“Adobe is committed to providing a seamless creation-to-playback solution that allows creatives and developers to produce video and rich-media once, and then deploy that content across the widest array of distribution and playback environments,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe. “The inclusion of the H.264 codec in Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR, the Creative Suite product line, and the upcoming Adobe Media Player will accelerate customer workflows, enabling the creation and repurpose of high-quality Web video content without extra development costs.”

The H.264 standard is already widely used, including content distributed by Apple via its iTunes music store. According to Adobe, their Flash Player is used by 98.7% of Web users. As users update their Flash Player, nearly all computers will have H.264 support.

The announcement could also create new interest in AAC audio encoding as an alternative to MP3. Support is included in the new player, which will make it as widely supported as MP3.

Organizers have announced the BlogWorld & New Media Expo, a new blogging tradeshow, to be held at the Las Vegas Convention Center Thursday – Friday, Nov. 8 – 9, 2007.

The Expo will feature more than 60 seminars, panel discussions and keynotes. The Expo promises sessions on blogging basics, podcasting, video blogging, monetization strategies, increasing readership and blog site “stickiness,” use of RSS (really simple syndication), search engine optimizatio and blogging in the political arena.

“We‚Äôre witnessing a communication revolution. New media is rapidly changing the way people get their news and the way companies communicate with their customers,‚Äù Rick Calvert, Founder and CEO, BlogWorld Expo, said. ‚ÄúThis event is designed to give professional and aspiring bloggers the tools and education they need to take their brands to the next level and to bring the traditional communication world up to speed with the blogosphere.‚Äù

The conference will host several major blogging communities, including business, technology, politics, sports, lifestyle and pop-culture, milbloggers, mommy bloggers and godbloggers.

Exhibitors will include blog publishing software, advertising networks, affiliate program providers, RSS syndication services, news readers, aggregators, computer hardware and software companies, Wi-Fi services, broadband ISPs, web hosting companies, podcasting services, pro audio and video recording equipment and blog consultants.

Details ontopics, session descriptions and registration are all available at the Blogworld site.

If there’s any doubt that video podcasting is going mainstream, the Wall Street Journal’s new video podcast should end it.

The WSJ today announced the launch of a new video podcast, Andy Jordan’s Tech Diary.¬†The show¬†chronicles the often odd stories that can be found when people and technology come together. According to the WSJ, Jordan will spend time with people and the technology they use, watching what happens to the people — and the technology.

The show plays as a sort of mainstream RocketBoom – each episode is about three minutes long, and features Jordan looking into topics like iPhone Loving or WiFi Weirdness.

“Tech Diary is an extension of Andy’s other work as a multimedia reporter covering technology,” said Jason Anders, Technology Editor for The Wall Street Journal Online. “The video podcast format is the perfect complement to the stories Andy tells so well on the quirky intersection of technology and culture.”

Web hosting provider Go Daddy has introduced a new service, Quick Blogcast, that rolls its blogging and podcasting applications into one tool.  

“Quick Blogcast allows people to tell their own stories with audio, video, photos and text over the Internet,” said Warren Adelman, President and CEO of Go Daddy. “It‚Äôs a great way to let people around the corner or around the world know what you or your business are doing.”

Quick Blogcast features:

• More than 50 different design templates.
• Blog¬†remotely from your mobile phone or PDA.¬†
• Incorporate¬†content from Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.
• Multiple author support.
• Share audio and video.

Details are available at the Go Daddy site.
 

A new version of HandBrake, the popular open-source DVD-ripper & video format converter, has been released.

Here are the highlights of the new release:

• User experience is improved through a re-envisioned Mac interface and a Windows interface that‚Äôs been rebuilt from the ground up.
• Picture quality is improved through better image scaling, better deinterlacing, new filters for denoising, deblocking, inverse telecine, and new presets devoted to high quality settings.
• Speed improvements due to updated copies of x264 and ffmpeg. This includes improved multi-threaded encoding for the iPod.
• Compatibility is improved through new presets for devices like the iPhone and PSP. As well, HandBrake now supports DTS as an audio source and has limited support for .VOB and .TS file containers as input. Most excitingly, HandBrake can now output to the Matroska (MKV) file container.
• Stability has been improved due to countless bug fixes. (Including audio drop and mp2 issues). Handbrake also has optional support for MP4 files larger than 4 gigabytes.

Wizzard Software, a leading podcast hosting network, has announced that it recorded record revenues of $1,428,097 during the second quarter ended June 30, 2007, an 83% increase from the second quarter of 2006 and a 97% increase over revenues in the first quarter of 2007 ($725,926). For the six month period ended June 30 2007, Wizzard recorded revenues of $2,154,023, a 56% increase over revenues of $1,384,437 for the same period in 2006.

Wizzard announced record downloads for its Wizzard Media podcasting business, where it received over 85 million download requests for all hosted podcasts.

When you look at the steady stream of companies that are hyped at sites like TechCrunch – companies like Cluztr, Validas, Wablet and Weebly – it doesn’t seem like a stretch to think that there’s something to the idea that there’s a “Web 2.0” bubble, an unwarranted rush of interest and investment in new Internet companies.

Jason Calacanis, who made his name with the with the blog network Weblogs, Inc., thinks that there is a bubble, and suggests that we may be seeing the first signs of this bubble popping:

Is it a bubble or not discussions have been going on for two years now. There is no question we are experiencing some bubble-like activity these days, so the only questions is will we see bubble-bursting like activity?

Calacanis goes on to suggest that it will be “a bloody 4th quarter for Web 2.0 companies”:

Will we see thousands of layoffs? Nope. But we will see a lot of folks tighten their belts and move from dream and build mode to control costs and make a profit mode. That’s not a bad thing, but it will certainly change the climate.

Belt-tightening among struggling big media companies and new media startups could create opportunity for indie podcasters. Advertisers are rapidly moving their ad dollars from traditional media to Internet-based media, and podcasters are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this trend.

The best podcasters know how to make great media on a tiny budget, something that big media companies are struggling with. As media companies pull back the reigns, indie podcasters, used to working with low budgets, are well-positioned to compete for the rapidly growing pot of Internet advertising revenue.

ZDNet’s David Berlind has published an interesting article on the Twitterization of traditional media. While the focus of the article is on how Twitter will affect big media, Berlind also does a great job of summarizing the challenges facing corporate media as it is forced to compete with bloggers, podcasters and video podcasters:

Although it was not entirely disruptive to our existing efforts the way the Web was to print or blogging was to traditional Web publishing, podcasting (RSS delivered audio) was and still is clearly a disruptive force that all mainstream media will need to reckon with if they haven’t already.

Video blogging wasn’t far behind and while a combination of YouTube and “YouTube-ready” cameras have made child’s play out of putting video on the Web, I’ve spent the last year figuring out the best way to harness that disruptive force for media companies in CNET’s class (or bigger). We’re no stranger to video and in fact, CNET’s roots are in video production dating back to CNET’s television efforts in the mid-90’s. But that effort and some existing video efforts at CNET are about an old school business process strapped to a new antenna: the Internet. Yes, video on the Net is a disruptive force. But for media companies like CNET or even CNN, the real disruption that we need to harness has to do with two vectors: Multi-medium publishing and economics.

On the economic front, I refer to the business process disruption that I’m working on as the “Broadcast quality production on YouTube economics” principle. Once the recipe for that is figured out (and I think we’re very close), it becomes a part of a bigger multi-medium publishing story that sees the Internet as a way to deliver blogged content to our audience members any way they like it — as text, still images, audio (podcasted or streamed), and/or video.

The focus is on broadcast quality production via YouTube economics. The truth is that we’ll probably never get broadcast quality production or YouTube economics. But with those as our goals, the closer we get to both, the more disruptive the underlying business model is to the status quo, especially in the context of multi-medium blogging.

Mainstream media tends to fixate on the often amateurish quality of podcasts. Doing this, though, can blind you to the fact that there are now thousands of bloggers, podcasters and video podcasters doing works that’s not just creative and entertaining, but also professional. Even more significant, they are doing it with extremely low overhead and competing with big media for advertising revenue.

Berlind’s challenge – creating broadcast quality production via YouTube economics is not just a challenge for ZDNet and big media, it’s also the challenge facing PodTech, PodShow, Andrew Baron at Rocketboom, Tim Street at French Maid TV, Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine at Ask a Ninja, and anyone else trying to make a business out of podcasting.

The ongoing outage of the popular voice over IP application Skype highlights the risk of building a utility service like voice communication on a proprietary identity system. By creating a single point of failure, Skype effectively designed into their system an outage that is now affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Skype apologizes for the outage, but not for the fact that the outage was designed into their system:

Apologies for the delay, but we can now update you on the Skype sign-on issue. As we continue to work hard at resolving the problem, we wanted to dispel some of the concerns that you may have. The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.

Compare Skype’s problems with the relative reliability of the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). DNS serves as the phone book for the Internet. It has a long history of being attacked because of its critical nature. Nevertheless, the redundant, distributed design of the DNS has allowed they system to provide remarkable reliability.

We use Skype regularly for recording interviews; this outage will have us looking for an alternative that isn’t dependent on a centralized, proprietary identity system.