Today on the Net: Local broadcasters are wary of the effect a Comcast-NBCU deal might have on retransmission fees, Apple says FaceTime video chat service won’t count toward carrier voice minutes and strong network upfront results suggest that marketers aren’t done with TV yet Read more »
Wimbledon 2010 kicked off this morning, and if you’re a tennis fan, there is no doubt that you’ll want to watch the tournament live. However, the matches take place during work hours — luckily, there are once again ways to watch all the fun online. Read more »
Facebook has enjoyed tremendous growth in video viewing recently, with more than 2 billion videos viewed per month on the social network. The latest update to its iPhone app will drive more growth by giving users the ability to watch videos directly on the mobile device. Read more »
Digitalsmiths is rolling out the newest version of its video management system with new features to make it easier for customers to add metadata into their videos. The new capabilities build on its automated metadata and advanced search capabilities to search and navigate video content. Read more »
Today on the Net: The BBC iPlayer has live streaming video of the World Cup on the iPad, Shaw introduces a TV Everywhere offering with its Broadband VOD Player, and Nielsen is ahead of schedule in rolling out meters to combine TV and Internet measurement. Read more »
About 40 percent of people use TV and the web at the same time each week, and users spend about 4 percent of their TV time surfing the web, according to Nielsen. But chances are, they’re not surfing topics related to what they’re watching on TV. Read more »
Amazon is promoting its Video on Demand streaming service with Twitter, offering $10 discounts to users who start following its @AmazonVideo account. The discount can be applied to streaming shows from NBC, Fox, USA and SyFy, including House, The Office, 30 Rock and Battlestar Galactica. Read more »
Google is reaching out to local bloggers in San Francisco as part of a new trial of its YouTube Direct citizen journalism offering. The initiative would serve as a showcase of how other news organizations could leverage YouTube’s citizen journalists to augment their own coverage. Read more »
Today on the Net: CBS is testing out HTML5 video on the iPad with old episodes of Star Trek Enterprise, Ustream is making it easier for its professional users to build custom iPhone apps and Rovi is introducing ads into its interactive programming guide. Read more »
Sezmi, after a successful launch in LA, is making its service available in 10 new markets, giving customers access to a mix of over-the-air broadcast content and broadband video content in one set-top box. But how many consumers will pay $299, plus another $5 a month? Read more »
U.S. consumers are not racing to replace their pay-TV subscription with online video services, according to research from Nielsen. In fact, it reports just the opposite is happening: the number of households that have signed up for cable and broadband together has grown dramatically. Read more »
Today on the Net: ABC has doubled the number of ads it shows in its iPad app, Demand Media chooses Joost for its video ad sales and technology, and Epix is adding authentication with a new HD site aimed at Cox and Mediacom customers. Read more »
Using a flexible API, Encoding.com has introduced the ability for allow online video platforms to offer its cloud encoding services as a white-label solution. A couple of major customers have already signed up for the white-label service, including Cisco Eos, Giant Realm, Kaltura and Vzaar. Read more »
The good news for Yahoo TV Widgets is that Sony is expanding the number of markets where those widgets are available nearly seven-fold. The bad news is that Sony is also spearheading the introduction of Google TV on its connected TVs and Blu-ray players. Read more »
In the past, if YouTube users wanted their clips to be perfect, they had to use offline video editing tools. But now, the video share site has rolled out cloud-based video editing tools, giving users a whole new way to remix their existing video assets online. Read more »
After 10 months of studying Redbox rental data, Paramount decided that its $1 nightly rentals were having a negligible effect on new release sales. The result? The studio struck a deal to let Redbox rent its new releases on the same day they go on sale. Read more »
Microsoft made a lot of potential cord-cutters very happy yesterday when it announced a deal with ESPN to make 3,500 live sporting events available through Xbox Live. But those users should probably hold off before canceling their service and read the fine print first. Read more »
Boxee is expanding the premium content it has available with a deal that will enable users to purchase feature films. By teaming up with Sonic Solutions, Boxee users could soon have access to a wide range of film titles, including new releases and Hollywood hits. Read more »
Machinima.com has grown tremendously over the past year and is now looking to capitalize on that growth with new funding. The $9 million financing round, led by Redpoint Ventures, will be used to expand the scale of its operations and improve marketing around new game releases. Read more »
Ooyala is rolling out new reporting and analytics features aimed at helping publishers to determine where and how users are viewing their videos online. The new platform provides more than 500 reports, including local reporting, page-level reports, designated marketing area (DMA) reports and social sharing reports. Read more »
Today on the Net: ABC and Univision rake in millions of World Cup viewers, but online and mobile viewing was also strong; Hulu loses its founding CTO, Eric Feng, to Kleiner Perkins; and AOL teams with the Jonas Brothers for a new video network. Read more »
Video analytics firm TubeMogul is adding a whole new layer to its reporting suite, giving its users the ability to drill down to a city-level view of how videos are performing across their sites. Even better — the new reporting features will be free. Read more »
It looks like Facebook might get even more mobile videos uploaded, thanks to an upcoming tweak to Apple’s new mobile operating system. A piece of code in iOS 4 will add direct uploading to Facebook as one option when exporting a video from the iPhone. Read more »
YouTube has never been particularly well known for high-brow content, but it’s looking to change that through a new initiative in conjunction with the Guggenheim Museum and HP called YouTube Play that will seek creative, artistic and experimental videos from its users. Read more »
Are you a hardcore gamer that wasn’t able to make it out to Los Angeles for this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo? Well have no fear, because IGN has teamed up with YouTube to stream live coverage of all the major happenings at the show. Read more »
DumbDumb, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman’s new branded content production house, launched its first online video campaign in conjunction with IAC’s Electus yesterday, a series of videos for Orbit gum. With the launch, Bateman says DumbDumb is looking to go head-to-head with other content on YouTube. Read more »
Today on the Net: Adobe expects its Flash Player to be available on 250 million mobile devices by 2012, Google TV is the search giant’s way to get into the $70 billion TV market and Cisco is pushing video to enterprises with its Quad offering. Read more »
Maybe online video viewing isn’t growing as quickly as we thought. In fact, it might be declining, if you believe stats from Nielsen. In its Three Screen Report, Nielsen reports the amount of time people spent watching video online dropped from the end of last year. Read more »
Comcast-owned social TV site Tunerfish is going live today, and it already has a major media company on board to help cross-promote the service. According to a media alert, cable programmer HBO has teamed up with Tunerfish to promote the season premiere of True Blood. Read more »
Today on the Net: Rogers Communications gets 100,000 subscribers to sign up for TV Everywhere, Netflix’s new UI causes some trouble for Roku users and Spotify lands on TV sets for the first time in Sweden and Finland, but still has a long way to go. Read more »
Akamai, in a move aimed at helping it better deliver customer websites to a wider range of mobile devices, has acquired mobile services company Velocitude to dynamically transform customer websites to fit all the different screen sizes and form factors of mobile devices. Read more »
While Google is hoping to have its integrated TV and web offering available later this year, TiVo says that you can already get similar functionality on its existing DVR products — and you’ve been able to do so for years. Read more »
The new Glee Superfan player incorporates a number of social features that aren’t included in the normal Fox video player, including the ability to check out character bio pages, connect to your Facebook and Twitter profiles and view a stream of Twitter chat about the show. Read more »
Today on the Net: More rumors about Hulu’s subscription and mobile device plans emerge, Mozilla commits to adding WebM support in the next version of Firefox and AT&T U-verse adds ESPN 3-D ahead of the World Cup, making it the third affiliate to do so. Read more »
mDialog is offering video publishers a new content security feature for HTML5 video delivery that could convince hold-outs to embrace video publishing on the iPad. The new feature works by leveraging Apple’s HTTP adaptive bit rate streaming, applying AES-128 encryption to individual video segments. Read more »
For years online video has been seen as complementary to broadcast TV, but now there are signs that video on the web could be displacing traditional TV viewing during the prime-time hours. So is web video finally starting to replace broadcast TV viewing? Read more »
Today on the Net: Apple’s FaceTime could lead other industry heavyweights to adopt the open standard for video chat, Android phones on Verizon Wireless now have access mobile video content through its VCast service, and a Discovery exec will lead the programmer’s 3-D TV joint venture. Read more »
While shows like American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and NCIS top Nielsen ratings week after week, viewers watching TV content online tune into a different type of fare, with Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill and Vampire Diaries topping viewership on video search site SideReel. Read more »
The US patent office issued a ruling against patents held by TiVo that could affect its lawsuit against Dish Network and EchoStar. The PTO rejected two software claims related to TiVo’s “time warp” technology, which enables users to record and play back TV programs. Read more »
The IAB is taking a cold, hard look at the market for advertising on the iPad and other tablet devices, launching a new “Tablet Task Force” and issuing a report on the future of “tabvertising.” But lack of Flash on the iPad shouldn’t be an issue. Read more »
