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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:39:31 +0000

The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Akamai seeks to bring UltraViolet to every device

Ryan Lawler — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:00:57 +0000

With the number of devices supporting IP video continues to expand, content creators are seeking ways to reach consumers on as many screens and as many devices as possible. That’s the impetus behind cable’s TV Everywhere initiative, as well as Hollywood’s new UltraViolet video format. In order to cater to these customers, Akamai is rolling out new capabilities to its HD Network for video distribution that will make it even easier for content owners to securely distribute content to nearly any device.

While Warner Bros. has spearheaded the launch of UltraViolet-enabled movie titles through the launch of its Flixster applications, the promise of allowing viewers to buy a movie once and stream or download it from multiple retailer websites or applications has yet to fully catch on. That’s why Akamai, which provides content distribution services to a number of different studios and media companies, believes it is well positioned to offer up a solution that provides an easier way to make UltraViolet movies available. Ahead of CES, Akamai is announcing that it has integrated with the UltraViolet Coordinator, which controls access to the digital rights locker and manages entitlements and other information around which movies consumers have bought.

The Akamai for UltraViolet product is designed to connect with the digital rights locker and offer up storage, security and delivery of UltraViolet-enabled digital assets. The idea is to create a common reference point that studios and retailers can point to whenever a consumer tries to access an UltraViolet title. Akamai is pitching the studios first, since they are moving quickly to make these services available.

But as time goes on, and digital storefronts from the likes of Walmart’s Vudu, Best Buy’s CinemaNow or Amazon Prime Video begin supporting the digital rights initiative, having a unified storage and delivery point will simplify access to, and distribution of, UltraViolet movies. That’s because those retailers won’t necessarily have to duplicate the process by storing and managing their own copies of the files — they’ll be able to point to those already under Akamai’s control. That could make things a lot more efficient for everyone involved.

Akamai is also announcing that it’s adding new security features to its HD network to ensure that content owners and retailers can distribute video assets to multiple devices. Akamai’s SecureHD offering provides four layers of protection, including token authorization, player verification, media encryption and content targeting. With those features in place, media customers will be able to optimize their security protection based on the capabilities of the device, while providing the best playback experience regardless of whatever tablet, mobile handset or connected TV that viewers are watching a piece of content on.

Finally, the content delivery network is simplifying the process of streaming on its HD Network by selecting HTTP as its default delivery method and integrating Adobe’s HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) functionality into its product offering. As a result, customers can take advantage of HTTP streaming without having to make changes to their existing Adobe Flash workflow. The Akamai HD Network also supports Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming protocols.

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SlideShare ditches Flash, rebuilds entire site in HTML5

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:00:31 +0000

SlideShare, the website for sharing PowerPoint presentations and other documents, has had a major makeover. The company has ditched Adobe Flash technology entirely, and rebuilt its website using the HTML5 markup language, SlideShare co-founder and CTO Jon Boutelle will announce at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference Tuesday.

This means that SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device, from iPads to iPhones to Android devices and beyond. Another perk is that the website is now 30 percent faster and its files take up 40 percent less space than they used to. Search engines can now read the content within SlideShare slides, meaning that presentations hosted there should start to get much higher page rankings on sites like Google. Text within documents can now be copied and pasted, as well.

The web as “the biggest app store of all”

SlideShare initially set out to build its mobile experience by making individual apps for the Apple store, the Android marketplace, and others, but quickly realized that in the long term such a strategy would not be sustainable. “If we committed to app stores in general, it would really end up fragmenting our engineering team and our engineering efforts,” Boutelle said in an interview Monday. “We were trying to find an alternative, and the answer is that HTML5 can work on all of these devices. Now the way we frame our thinking is that the web is the biggest app store of all.”

Screenshot of SlideShare's homepage on the iPad (click to enlarge)

Starting Tuesday, SlideShare’s site will be displayed in HTML5 on both desktop and mobile devices, and all new documents added to the site will be rendered in HTML5. Over the next several weeks, the company will be porting its entire back catalog of five years’ worth of presentations to HTML5. SlideShare expects the conversion to finish by year’s end, Boutelle said.

A huge engineering project

Making the big switch has not been easy. SlideShare has 50 employees, the majority of whom are engineers, and all hands were on deck over the past six months to work on converting the site from Flash to HTML5. “This is the hardest thing we’ve ever done,” Boutelle said. But that difficulty should not be apparent to the average SlideShare user (the site receives 60 million unique visitors per month.) “The change is so structural that if we’ve done it right, people will just know that SlideShare is better, but they won’t know why.”

SlideShare is certainly not alone in doubling down on HTML5. Facebook’s new Timeline interface relies heavily on HTML5, and the company’s CTO Bret Taylor has said that the markup language will be a huge part of the company’s development efforts going forward. Apple has been one of HTML5′s biggest proponents, as has Google. But it’s shaping up to be even more interesting to watch how smaller companies like SlideShare adopt the platform for their own products.

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The day Apple won the Flash fight

Darrell Etherington — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:35:17 +0000

Adobe announced its new Flash Media Server 4.5 late Thursday afternoon, and it’s an iteration Apple device owners should be very happy about. For the first time, Flash Media Server now enables same-source video delivery to both Apple devices and Adobe Flash-compatible destinations. Basically, Adobe is acknowledging Apple has won when it comes to Flash.

The new version of Flash Media Server will repackage content automatically for Apple’s mobile products, which lack Flash support, and implement HTTP Dynamic Streaming or HTTP Live Streaming, both of which are compatible with iOS. In theory, that should allow iOS to have its cake and eat it too, meaning future Flash content will playback on iOS devices, without the slowdowns and battery drain that are part of what made the technology unappealing to Apple to begin with.

Basically, Adobe is making changes to Flash Media Server in order to once again make it an appealing option for video publishers, by serving their actual needs instead of struggling with Apple in an unproductive either/or relationship. It’s something Adobe has been doing across its product lineup lately, with its Flex and Flash Builder tools for apps, and also with the Adobe Digital Publishing suite for digital magazine publications.

Adobe will continue to offer Flash, of course, but this is a clear acknowledgement that different solutions are necessary for the growing category of mobile video, which is dominated by Apple devices. Apple called this future, refused to waver, and now Adobe is wisely bending in response in order to remain relevant. While this is incontestably a win for Apple, it’s also a big step forward for Adobe, since now content producers and publishers won’t have to look elsewhere in order to serve the entire mobile market.

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Where to watch Farm Aid 2011 live online

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:24:49 +0000

Farm Aid is still going, and going strong: The benefit concert, which first began in 1985, will once again have an all-star lineup of musicians performing in an effort to raise money to help support family farms. But for those who won’t make it down to the Livestrong Sporting Park, in Kansas City, Kan., this weekend, the event will be live streamed on the web as well as on a number of mobile devices.

From 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on Saturday, Aug. 13, Farm Aid will include performances from concert board members Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews, as well as Jason Mraz and Jakob Dylan, among others. A live stream of the concert will be available at www.farmaid.org.

Viewers will also be able to tune in on the go if they’re not in front of a computer this weekend. In addition to streaming to web browsers on PCs, the show will also be available through the Farm Aid website on phones and tablets with Adobe Flash capability, as well as those, like the iPhone and iPad, that rely on HTML5 video playback. Video is being hosted and delivered by Brightcove’s Video Cloud, which auto-detects the device that you’re using and sends the correct stream based on its capabilities.

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Is there a tablet market, or is it just an iPad market after all?

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:25:53 +0000

The non-iPad tablet market is relatively young, but the iPad is still running away with the lion’s share of the tablet market. Aside from the iPad, consumers and enterprises can choose from tablets running on Android, BlackBerry and webOS. But are they buying? Here are a few projected sales figures, as well as several obstacles for the non-iPad market.

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iPads, connected TVs lead to explosion in encoding

Ryan Lawler — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 19:09:13 +0000

IPads, connected TVs and TV Everywhere services will be the biggest drivers of the global transcoding business, which is expected to grow to nearly half a billion dollars over the next few years. That kind of growth has a number of startups (and investors) excited about taking advantage of a wide-open market opportunity.

Until recently, most video files put online required just a single version, which was typically watched in a web browser through Adobe’s Flash player. Things got a little more complex with the introduction of adaptive bit-rate streaming, which split up videos into multiple different bit rate renditions and automatically switched between them based on the bandwidth available through a user’s network connection.

Then came the iPhone and iPad, which don’t support Flash-based video at all, causing many publishers to create new versions of their videos just to reach the growing number of viewers on Apple mobile devices. And now there’s a wide — and growing! — array of new connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other devices, many of which require different versions or video formats.

At the same time that the number of video files necessary to support new consumer electronics devices continues to grow, there’s increased publisher interest in delivering video to all those devices. With the introduction of TV Everywhere authentication, cable networks and distributors are, for the first time, comfortable with making their content available to streaming audiences.

All of which leads to a bit of a perfect storm for encoding vendors. Take Elemental Technologies, for instance. The company recently announced a partnership with Comcast subsidiary thePlatform. Elemental will be providing transcoding for Comcast’s TV Everywhere offerings. In addition to Comcast’s Xfinity Online streaming video portal, Elemental also delivers video to an iPad app and also could be making Comcast’s on-demand streams available to connected TVs soon. In total, Comcast encodes 18 different renditions of each video file in its streaming library.

It’s not just the usual hardware encoding vendors that will benefit, either. More publishers are moving their encoding offerings into the cloud, with startups like Encoding.com and Zencoder looking to cash in on that trend. Both startups have recently raised funding and are cashing in on the infrastructure-as-a-service model, which gets rid of the upfront costs associated with deploying traditional encoding hardware.

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How businesses can reach the growing tablet market

Colin Gibbs — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:00:58 +0000

Consumers are increasingly using their tablets as shopping tools at home and on the go. So retailers and other advertisers who want to reach that lucrative market must address a few key factors.

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Video files keep growing like kudzu

Eric Quanstrom — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:30:58 +0000

In 2007, online video was the future. YouTube had just been acquired for $1.6 billion. Well-funded competitors such as Joost, Veoh, Babelgum and Revver were all familiar names producing short-form entertainment or hosting user-generated clips. Everyone was using Adobe Flash, which was by far the dominant format for video encoding and playback on the Web browser. Back then, Internet Explorer held 86 percent of the browser market. For most, online video was a straightforward affair: You put a video online; you made it short; and you hoped for the best.

Fast forward four years: YouTube is still around, but everything else has changed. None of the other user-generated video companies still exist in their original form. Adobe Flash is still the default option for video playback, but it’s far from ubiquitous. Browsers are now a grab bag of market share: IE (39 percent), Firefox (30 percent), Chrome (16 percent), Safari (6 percent) and Opera (2 percent).

Meanwhile, HTML5 promises to reinvent the video experience through the native use of the video tag and built-in codec support. And Apple iOS devices — which don’t support Flash — have now grown to more than 2 percent of all web browsing, with no sign of slowing. Finally, there’s a revolution taking place on the TV screen: Internet-connected “smart” TVs are everywhere, and video game consoles and other devices are providing a home to every type of content known to man.

Consumers today demand a TV-quality experience across every device they own. Among key demographics, video is now an always-on, always-with-you endeavor.

In 2007, moving video from camera to production to finished output involved little encoding mastery. That experience was mainly about getting a single compression right — a 1:1 ratio of source files to renditions, if you will. Back then:

Codecs mainly served a single purpose: Flash playback. Most consumption occurred through progressive download, usually over HTTP. The biggest drawback was buffering, or the starting, stopping, stuttering and waiting for a video experience as files arrived at different times.
Higher bit rates, which offer the promise of higher quality, simply take up more bandwidth, which increases wait times and consumer abandonment rates. Internet connection speeds, especially those in the United States, were also fairly slow. The median U.S. download speed was less than 2 Mbps.
Screen resolutions were fairly small. Since they were consistently lower than 1024×768 pixels, that meant native 1080p video was impossible and 720p video was out of reach for a significant portion of Internet viewers.

How are things different today?

There are a wide variety of codecs and player types. Flash is still the dominant Web-only playback runtime, but it features a variety of codecs. It’s also common to see H.264/AVC as the primary codec for Apple’s iOS devices. And the coming HTML5 wave includes WebM, Ogg Theora and H.264/AVC as natively supported codecs, depending on the browser choice.
The median download speed for the nation is 3 Mbps.
The primary method for delivering video is streaming, and with the advent of adaptive bit rate technology, companies are creating a better user experience. But adaptive bit rate is based around multiple renditions of the same video, which means cutting it into five-second chunks with multiple bit rates supported.
More than 85 percent of browsers support screen resolutions higher than 1024×768, compared to only 26 percent four years ago.

Today, the testing, tuning and optimizing of one video to a given screen involves a lot more work: There are many more codecs, screens and processor types that go into delivering an optimal playback experience to an audience. That’s all forcing video content providers to think about more than just the creation of content.

Publishers now have to consider which video players, which browsers, how much network bandwidth and which supported devices they plan to target. They need one rendition of the file for each combination of target device, bit rate and network they choose to deliver to. It’s not uncommon for the most ambitious video distributors to create and deliver upwards of 100 video renditions per source video asset.

So what is the solution?

The video production industry needs to take a strong guiding hand to educate and inform content creators what their choices are, how they might plan efficient strategies to meet their goals, and how to future-proof their infrastructure for what are undoubtedly irreversible trends.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user .:[Melissa]:.

Eric Quanstrom is the COO of Sorenson Media, a vendor with wide expertise in the space of video encoding and transformation.

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Ooyala Expands TV Everywhere Offering for Connected Devices

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:00:53 +0000

Online video distribution firm Ooyala is beefing up its TV Everywhere capabilities, adding new DRM and authentication features, and expanding distribution to new connected device platforms. The new capabilities, being announced at this week’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, will give more flexibility to content providers who want to provide authenticated access to their content.

The new capabilities build on a previous release of Ooyala’s TV Everywhere offering. While that initial release only enabled content providers to establish micropayments and pay-per-view options for videos online, the latest update expands that to include subscription and ad-based models for authenticated streams.

To do that, Ooyala has bolstered its security, now with DRM options that include Adobe Flash Access, Widevine and Microsoft PlayReady. The platform also supports authentication through an operator’s own CRM, Adobe Pass or Ooyala’s own subscription management service, increasing the number of ways that subscribers can log in to TV Everywhere-enabled VOD sites.

But Ooyala is also going beyond the web browser, and extending the number of platforms over which content companies can provide access to their content. The video distribution platform has partnered with LG Electronics and Panasonic to enable its customers to build applications and deliver videos directly to Internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players. The platform also supports distribution to Roku and Boxee broadband set-top boxes, Google TV-enabled devices and upcoming YouView products in the U.K.

Adding new features and supported devices is a positive step for Ooyala, which in a lot of ways it is still playing catchup to other distribution platforms, like Brightcove, Comcast’s thePlatform or Cisco’s recently-acquired Extend Media. All those platforms have supported some form of authenticated subscription offering for at least the last year. While there’s still a large opportunity for Ooyala to capture business from media companies and operators just turning on their TV Everywhere initiatives, it’ll be doing so against some more mature platforms.

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