The popular media player application VLC just added support for Opus, the new open audio codec co-developed by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and others. Meanwhile, there has been more speculation on how music platforms like Spotify could benefit from switching to Opus. Read more »
A year after launch, Encoding.com has decided to bring its Vid.ly universal URL service in-house. The cloud encoding vendor will make Vid.ly, which was originally rolled out as a standalone service, part of its offering to enterprise customers, which will bolster its overall product offering. Read more »
A full 80 percent of videos are encoded in H.264, according to new data from MeFeedia. The latest figures show just how far the industry has come in adopting the H.264 video format as the de facto standard for video encoding. Read more »
H.264 remains the dominant force in online video, as the video codec now accounts for more than two-thirds of online video, according to a blog post by MeFeedia. Meanwhile, Google’s WebM format has yet to gain any significant traction after being released a year ago. Read more »
Want to play a DivX or an MKV file on your iPad, iPhone or Apple TV? Then check out this Cord Cutters quick tip, where we show and explain how to easily convert any kind of video file to make it playable on iOS devices. Read more »
Any new video uploaded to YouTube will be automatically encoded in WebM, the open-source video format that’s backed by Google, Mozilla and others. YouTube has also been busy transcoding its back catalog and has now around 30 percent of all videos available in WebM. Read more »
Want to watch the Coachella festival’s live stream on the iPad? Then you’re out of luck, at least if you access it via YouTube’s live streaming platform, which doesn’t support iOS. However, a new web app makes all those live streams available to iPads as well. Read more »
Several significant events set the tone for the digital media ecosystem during in the second quarter. First among these was the release of the iPad, the impact of which went far beyond device uptake; among other things it does not support Adobe Flash, which has impacted the entire chain of web-based video production from content sites re-encoding video to new tools being developed for HTML5-based advertising.
Another principal event in the quarter was the announcement of Google TV, a software platform built on Android 2.1, Google Chrome and Flash 10.1 that will be incorporated into a variety of companion devices including TV sets, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes. The platform offers significant advancements in merging TV and the web experience (although TiVo says it has done just that for years). Sony and Logitech have both announced plans to launch Google TV products in fall 2010.
Also in the second quarter, both YouTube and Hulu refreshed their sites, reflecting the market’s growing maturity. But while YouTube spent the quarter on the defensive in its ongoing legal battle with Viacom over copyright infringement, Hulu was on the offensive, introducing new services and preparing a paid subscription service launch. A paid service would bring new revenue streams to the video site, and would put Hulu in more direction competion with Netflix, which is increasingly shifting toward its streaming video service, away from its former mainstay of DVDs by mail. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
GIPS, a San Francisco-based company that licenses intellectual property including codecs for audio and video, says it’s come up with a technology that would allow third-party developers to embed video chat in their iPhone-related applications. The new technology is called VideoEngine (VEI) Mobile. Read more »
