Bloglines just announced support for flash-based items inside feeds, like YouTube videos. Though I'm not a big Bloglines fan and I don't care for the now ubiquitous adjective "pimped" (see Ask ad highlighted on Bloglines news page - ok, I laughed anyway) this is nonetheless good news for everyone. Flash is clearly a major format, multimedia is subscribed to and should be - so three cheers for this announcement. Bloglines can now do something that not every feed reader can. That and good search spam elimination.
Brightcove, Tivo partner to make online video Tivoable
Jeff Jarvis, who's on the BrightCove board of advisors, just posted from a press release announcing that the mystery/enterprise video company BrightCove has partnered with Tivo to create a means for almost any video online to be distributed by Tivo. Makes a world of sense to me. Tivo: it's not just for Rocketboom anymore!
YouTube now accepts video from mobiles
Via Heather Green at BusinessWeek, YouTube has announced that users can now upload video from their mobile devices. This sounds like a very good move. We'll see if it turns into a citizen journalism type thing, documentation like Peter Gabriel's Witness or just more trash like so much of YouTube. The technology has a lot of potential though. Imagine how fast video can spread now: shoot and upload from your phone, supporters grab the code snippet to display your video on their website and it goes from there. A lot of potential.
Colbert on Bush: A Good use of YouTube
These videos of the
recent Colbert roast of Bush make YouTube worth having in my mind - just so things
like this can get spread around through a mass audience. I'll bet that segment is going to get more viewers than
anything on CSPAN since, I don't know what. Hilarious. I wonder if they'll sue or demand the clips get
taken down. Update: Of course that's exactly what happened a few days later.
Conservative super-blogger Michele Malkin says it wasn't funny and anyone who thinks it was is a moonbat. I believe that moonbats make a barking sound, if I remember correctly.
Conservative super-blogger Michele Malkin says it wasn't funny and anyone who thinks it was is a moonbat. I believe that moonbats make a barking sound, if I remember correctly.
YouTube gets more money, partnerships
BloggersBlog aggregates news about video
sharing service YouTube, including the fact that they just got $8 million more from
Sequoia Capital. Plus a number of very reputable partnerships. It seems they are really making some moves
to dominate that space. See also DVGuru's recent comparison of 10 video sharing
services.
AJAXrelease.com does video
The weekly software releases from AJAXrelease.com continue, now with a move into
video editing. Robin Good has
reviews, interviews, demos and a good overview of the whole web-editing of video field.
Audioblog.com rebranding and expanding
After a
few days off I'm in the swing of things at SXSW, where the first thing I got to do was interview Eric Rice (off-site) of Audioblog.com yesterday. Audioblog started as a service that allowed people to
record podcasts by calling a phone number; today the company offers many more related services - including video
hosting and delivery. Found out a number of interesting things. First, the company is in the process of
rebranding and will soon be referred to as Hipcast - to better reflect their offerings beyond audio and blogs.
Second, they are expanding operations into Japan with Castella.jp. Eric
Rice is a busy man in the podcasting scene and his company looks to be on the ascent.YouTube topping Google Video
Mathew Hurst grabs a couple of graphs from BlogPulse to show that YouTube is getting more mentions
and rising faster than Google Video. He asks if it's the low resolution that
makes it easy and thus more compelling for people to use YouTube. I wonder whether it isn't some of the unhippness
of Google and its plans for world domination. I remember when some one first told me about Google and it had that
coolness from the margins. Both services allow embedding a video into your site. Google Video seems to have
less bandwidth issues and the content is arguably more high-brow if not more compelling. Is YouTube's lead a
victory of the lowest common denominator?
YouTube get legit content
ZDNet is reporting that the video sharing site YouTube has cut a deal with MTV2 for rights to
distribute copyrighted video content, or at least selected short clips. That's a good sign, I suppose.
YouTube got a whole lot of VC money and if VC money is a legit way to start a Web2.0 biz, the video sharing sector
needs to find ways like this to get legit and make some deals with more traditional media.
The story linked above implies that this is related to recent scandals involving Saturday Night Live and other mainstream media clips posted to YouTube without permission. On one level it is related, but isn't there a pretty big difference between letting fans do promo by sharing clips they like on one hand and seeding a system with corporate network selected clips in this case?
The story linked above implies that this is related to recent scandals involving Saturday Night Live and other mainstream media clips posted to YouTube without permission. On one level it is related, but isn't there a pretty big difference between letting fans do promo by sharing clips they like on one hand and seeding a system with corporate network selected clips in this case?
Channel 101 leverages FireAnt
The good people of FireAnt.TV report that the innovative online/f2f media phenomenon Channel 101 has plugged into FireAnt technology (RSS feed submission and FA one-click
subscribe button, specifically). FireAnt summarizes Channel101 like this: Here’s how Channel101 works
— creators submit short “pilot episodes” that are screened in front of a live audience in LA. The
audience votes on their favorites and the top 5 pilots make it to “prime time” and go on to the next
screening — the others get “cancelled.” Prime Time shows continue month to month until they finally
fail to get the necessary votes, at which point they too become “cancelled.” Apparently at least
one Chanell 101 contributer has gone on to SNL.They also point to a NY version called Channel 102. I guess LA and NY aren't interesting enough anymore and even people there have to look online for their entertainment. I think this type of thing seems like a great combination of online and real-world media. I'm impressed.
TiVo adds Rocketboom, vlogs
Just saw that TiVo is now offering Rocketboom broadcast
downloads. This is part of a larger project to offer videoblog content, and as such they're also soliciting your videoblog content. Cool — now it's
not just the Akimbo folks getting fresh vlog content delivered to their TVs. Of course, many folks these days are
forgoing the DVR altogether and hooking up computers to their TVs to function as media centers (raises hand). Out of
curiosity — how many of you get your vlog content a) on your laptop or desktop, b) on your TV via attached
computer, c) via DVR like Akimbo or TiVo? I suppose the related question is really "how many of you watch
vlogs"?
[Via Dave
Zatz]
