What motivates 70 people to spend two days in a conference room, coding their hearts out? For the participants in this weekend’s Google hackathon, the answer was a lot bigger than just winning a new TV. Read more »
Amazon has hopped into the video transcoding business with it’s new Elastic Transcoder service, joining Microsoft, Encoding.com and others as providers of such a service. Read more »
Germany’s music rights group GEMA asked YouTube to block videos containing some of its music – and is now upset about the way YouTube is handling those restrictions. Read more at paidContent »
Beachfront Media just added the ability to build templated apps for Roku boxes, Google TVs and other connected devices. One of the first to take advantage of this seems to be College Humor. Read more »
Artist pages on Facebook just got a whole lot more interesting: Social music startup Soundrop launched collaborative listening rooms for Facebook pages Monday. Read more »
My Damn Channel is looking for a few hundred original comedy series to launch in 2013. The company has hired Eric Mortensen, formerly at Blip, as its director of programming and acquisitions, a new role. Read more at paidContent »
You might not have ever anticipated going to the movies to see a documentary about YouTubers, but for one night only, fans of folk like Daily Grace and Mystery Guitar Man will have that chance. Read more at paidContent »
Silver Lake is doubling down on digital media by bringing on Dave Habiger as a Senior Advisor. Habiger most recently served as the CEO of NDS and before that led the digital movie download provider Sonic Solutions. Read more at paidContent »
About two years after ABC pulled them off the air, “One Life to Live” and “All My Children” are coming back to life online. New weekday episodes will be available on Hulu and iTunes this spring. Read more at paidContent »
After Microsoft bought Skype, some were concerned about the security of their Skype calls. Microsoft did little to assuage those concerns, so a group of human rights organizations and journalists are demanding more transparency. Read more »
Global TV platform Viki banks on content arbitrage – and now syndicates some of its content to Amazon’s Prime Instant subscribers. Read more at paidContent »
Personalized profiles are coming to Netflix this year, according to CEO Reed Hastings – but the company is still testing this kind of personalization to make it simple enough. Read more »
Netflix did better than many expected in its Q4, and the company is already gearing up for another big moment: The release of its scripted series House of Cards next month. Read more at paidContent »
YouTube got a lot of play during this week’s Google earnings call, in part because the site is starting to move the needle for Google. Read more »
U.K. digital satellite TV service Sky has launched Sky Go Extra, which lets customers download shows like Girls and Game of Thrones and movies to mobile devices for offline viewing. Read more at paidContent »
Watch out, AirPlay: Netflix and YouTube are working on an open second screen protocol, and they’ve already secured support from key CE makers and content platforms. Read more »
Ooyala now allows its customers to embed videos right within their tweets – and anticipates that some of the tweeted videos may be very Twitter-esque. Read more »
Jamie Oliver’s new Food Tube channel is live on YouTube – and it’s going to feature some familiar faces for people who scour the video site for unique food videos. Read more at paidContent »
There’s never been more video content to watch, or more ways of to watch it. That, says Jeremy Toeman, of Dijit Media, a big problem. In making TV infinite, we’ve lost its most potent benefit: escapism. Read more »
It’s been common for web series to never make it past a first season. But this year, there are four notable examples of shows continuing their runs, from independent teen dramedies to Jerry Seinfeld chatting with comics. Read more at paidContent »
It’s inauguration weekend, and hundreds of thousands are flocking to Washington D.C. to take part in the festivities. Live streams if the event are going to be available on the web, on iPads, mobile phones and connected devices. Read more »
Microsoft published a first prototype for plugin-free video chat in the browser Thursday. However, it’s a bit different from what Google and others have in mind. Read more »
YouTube is about to take a stake in Vevo, according to multiple reports. That would be a smart move, because it would help YouTube to hold on to more than half a billion views a month. Read more at paidContent »
Redbox Instant is letting its users play for prizes to get feedback on its beta test, and collect a lot of useful data in the process. Data that one day could be used to improve the service’s movie discovery. Read more »
Time Warner Cable wants Netflix’s 3-D movies – but not its Open Connect CDN. That’s why the cable provider is now alleging discrimination. Read more »
Technicolor CEO Frederic Rose is confident that his company’s video streaming service M-GO can compete with iTunes and other VOD vendors, in part because his company isn’t distracted by any related hardware products. Read more »
CBS is touting the upcoming Hawaii Five-0 episode “Kapu (Forbidden)” as a television first — the ending will be picked by those watching in real time, via Twitter and site voting. It’s an interesting experiment, but maybe not the right audience for it. Read more »
Apple TV users in Germany got some content of their own Friday: Watchever, the new streaming video subscription service from Vivendi. The move could open the door to more region-specific content deals for Apple TV. Read more at paidContent »
For the first time ever, the number of U.S. households paying for TV service will go down. The news comes as a tipping point in consumers’ struggles to break away from a TV industry that forces them to buy bundles of channels. Read more at paidContent »
This is cool: Haier showed off vision control for TVs at CES, allowing viewers to adjust the volume or even access smart TV functionality with subtle eye movements. Read more »
As TV viewing has gone online, the delivery of content has become fractured. With more players, there are more things to break, and it’s often the consumer that gets stuck in the middle when ISPs and the content giants like Netflix and amazon fight. Read more »
By multicasting popular content over cellular networks, carriers figure they can conserve valuable 4G capacity. But as consumers use their smartphones and tablets to personalize their multimedia consumption, the ship may have already sailed on multicast’s potential. Read more »
Streaming music from your iPad to your connected TV just got a whole lot easier: Skifta, a popular DLNA media shifting app for Android, released an iOS version on Wednesday. Read more »
Don’t count out DVDs just yet: That was one of the key messages that Redbox Instant by Verizon CEO Shawn Strickland had for a select group of reporters Wednesday. Strickland said that Netflix’s decision to sideline DVDs was a mistake. Read more »
Turn on one of TCL’s new Ice Screen TV sets, and one of the first apps to pop up is Frequency, a video curation app that presents five million new videos every day, neatly organized in a variety of channels. Read more »
Plex is going to the cloud by hooking up with Dropbox: The media center app maker will soon enable its users to sync their personal media collection with their Dropbox account, and then stream everything straight from Dropbox on iPads, phones and connected devices. Read more »
Google TV may be getting ready to take the fight to Apple and Roku by allowing CE manufacturers to build pure streaming boxes without any cable TV integration. Vizio CTO Matt McRae told us that he expects these devices to surface later this year. Read more »
Aereo, the disruptive TV-everywhere service that lets people watch shows on mobile devices thanks to remote miniature antennas, announced it is expanding — even as legal questions remain unresolved Read more »
Netflix is starting to stream a limited slate of 3-D movies – but you’ll only be able to watch if your ISP uses the company’s Open Connect CDN. That way, Netflix is enlisting its customers to move ISPs towards its own content delivery network. Read more »
AT&T is using the big CES pulpit to talk up its work in services and applications, rather than just unveil its latest handsets. It’s exploring a new universal phone number APIs, expanding its smart home program and launching a new video streaming service. Read more »
