Content

Chernin Group reportedly buys majority of Crunchyroll

http://www.allthingsd.com/20131030/chernin-group-buying-majority-stake-in-crunchyroll-the-anime-subscription-site/ Peter Chernin’s media company is buying a controlling interest in Crunchyroll, reports AllThingsD. The report puts the money spent at less…

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Big publishers sign on to New York Times sticky ad tool

The New York Times offers an ad tool that lets brands use its stories in a unique form of content marketing. The tool, which can provide publishers with a new source of long-tail revenue, will soon be used by other publishers like Forbes and Condé Nast.

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Akamai returns to roots, taps founder as new CEO

Akamai’s 8-month search for a new CEO didn’t take it too far: It tapped co-founder and chief scientist Tom Leighton to succeed Paul Sagan, who announced his intention to leave last April. Now Sagan will cede the CEO slot on January 1.

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What the Last.fm founders did next: scrobble the web

Last.fm ‘scrobbled’ your music tastes in order to recommend tunes you may not have heard. Co-founders Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel, who have since moved on, reckon their new service, Lumi, can do the same for general web content.

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Report

OTT technologies and strategies for broadcasters

As communications and entertainment needs have gone mobile and social, consumers have increasingly embraced internet-delivered video for viewing TV shows and movies. If broadcasters and programmers are to reach this audience, they themselves must embrace a new set of video-delivery techniques.

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Why I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter

Twitter’s ongoing evolution from open platform to global media company has all kinds of ramifications for the social-media industry and for businesses, but it also has implications for users. This is my attempt to look at why I have a love-hate relationship with the service.

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Survey: Weigh in on the state of Twitter

Twitter is at a crossroads: It’s inarguably a mainstream communications technology at this point, but it’s also generating controversy around its developer and user policies as it expands. Join us in sharing thoughts on Twitter’s role in the industry — both now and in the future.

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Acquia buys Mollom to build bigger, better content moderation

Together Acquia and Mollom say they can build a content moderation platform that will let organizations manage user-generated content for many sites from a single dashboard. Acquia’s Bryan House said Mollom will also continue to support third-party (non-Acquia) content management systems.

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HuffPo, The Daily and the flawed iPad content model

The Huffington Post has dropped the price of its iPad magazine to zero, and News Corp.’s The Daily has chopped almost a third of its staff — more evidence that the dream many publishers had about the iPad being their savior is still far from reality.

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Rafat Ali’s Skift aims to be the Politico of travel websites

Though the U.S. travel industry brings in $2 billion a year and employs 100 million people, Rafat Ali says there’s no one website where industry execs and business travelers can go for information. So he’s launching Skift, a website focused on travel news, data and services.

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Next Issue, magazines and paving media cow paths

Publishers may see Next Issue Media’s virtual newsstand as a solution to their digital problems, but it doesn’t fit the way growing numbers of people consume content. For them, the newsstand is already an anachronism, and recreating it in digital form isn’t going to help.

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Fat databases, small pipes: The problem of data inertia

As datasets get fatter and cumbersome, it’s becoming harder to move them around. Even the fattest pipes look like cocktail straws when you’re talking about petabyte databases. It’s getting more and more difficult to move these massive troves of data to the applications that use them.

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Forget the CDN players, Netflix is caching its own video

Netflix is rolling it’s own content delivery network, inviting ISPs to either connect directly to its video libraries at global peering sites or cache its content within their own networks. Called Open Connect, the service will help Netflix cut the umbilical cord to commercial CDN providers.

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Fred Wilson: Content owners, don’t fear the future

The pitched war between content owners and technology companies doesn’t have to persist if media companies would acknowledge and adapt to the new realities of digital distribution, famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson told attendees at paidContent 2012.

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Yottaa gets $9M to speed up more websites

Yottaa, the startup which aims to accelerate website performance, netted $9 million in Series B funding from existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures as well as some new-but-unnamed backers. That company will use the new funding to bankroll customer recruitment..

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Amazon updates CDN for dynamic content

Amazon says its updated Cloudfront content delivery network will better handle dynamic, interactive web content. To date, Cloudfront handled static web pages while Amazon left a lot of the heavy lifting of dynamic content to partners like CDN market leader Akamai.

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Dutch top Euro broadband table, but things are slowing

The quality of Europe’s internet access is right up there with Asia’s — but according to Akamai, if you want top quality continental broadband your best bet is to hit Holland or Romania, which boast the best speeds. Sweden is home to some of the fastest cities.

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May 23: Talking content and its future at paidContent 2012

“Content” is an industry that is going through a renaissance.Despite the current challenges and there are opportunities. All these threats and opportunities will be part of the discourse at paidContent 2012, which will be held on May 23, 2012, at the TimesCenter in New York City.

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It’s not about piracy, it’s about a failure to adapt

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is right when he says that the continued push for legislation like SOPA and PIPA is a result of a failure to adapt to the changing environment the internet has created when it comes to intellectual property and the content industries.

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Flow Platform aims to hook up real-time data streams

Flow Corp. says its new platform-as-a-service will help companies ingest and aggregate multiple data streams, filter them and deliver the right data to the right people or applications in real time. That all sounds great, but it’s a very tall order.

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Report

Federated clouds: for when one cloud isn’t good enough

There are times when putting a company’s computing workload on a single cloud just isn’t the best idea. This is where federated clouds come in, and a new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. For companies looking to put more of their workloads onto the cloud, this is one avenue worth taking a deeper look at.

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Move to the cloud? The two decisions that matter

Moving to the cloud and SaaS is simpler than many executives believe and can deliver significant business gains relatively quickly, says Zohar Gilad, executive vice president at Precise. Gilad shares the two key decisions that a company should make when considering its cloud strategy.

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nRelate’s content recommendation tool surges to 20,000 publishers

NRelate, a small boot-strapped fellow New York City start-up, is growing quickly with its content marketing and recommendation widget and just eclipsed 20,000 publishers after a breakout year in 2011. NRelate focuses on medium and small publishers and blogs, helping them monetize and build more engagement.

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Kilar: More reason for Hulu to exist now than ever

While Hulu was formed primarily as a way for content owners to distribute and monetize content online that would otherwise be pirated, CEO Jason Kilar said Tuesday that there’s more reason for the company to exist now than there was four-and-a-half years ago.

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Akamai to buy rival Cotendo in CDN consolidation move

In a consolidation of content delivery network players, Akamai is buying rival Cotendo. The $268 million cash deal is expected to close in the first half of 2012. Akamai is the legacy power in CDN, while Cotendo was seen as a leaner upstart.

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Outbrain raises $35M for content discovery platform

Outbrain, a content discovery platform that helps online publishers drive engagement, has raised $35 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. That brings Outbrain’s total funding to $64 million dollars.

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Gracenote readies its own second-screen platform

Second-screen apps could soon tell you which actors are on your TV screen, what products they’re consuming and which music is playing in the background, thanks to a yet-to-be launched content-recognition platform from Gracenote. The company gave us a first look at the technology.

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Kids: The next big thing for iOS apps and accessories

Apps just might be the next action figures, and iPad accessories the new Tickle-Me-Elmo. Judging by interest from kids and content partners, Apple won’t just be the device-maker of the future; it’ll be a toy-maker on par with the likes of Hasbro and Mattel, too.

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YouTube’s new challenge: connecting users & channels

YouTube introduced a new homepage Thursday that puts more of a focus on personalization and social features, highlighting the content that’s most relevant to its users. But it does a poor job of showing off all the new content that YouTube is investing heavily in.

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The Internet isn’t just pipes; it’s a belief system

New laws such as the Stop Online Piracy Act threaten to give new powers to Congress and to content companies, and have serious implications for the web — they make it clear that content companies are in many ways fundamentally opposed to the way the internet works.

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Google shows the limits of a free web

Any lingering fantasies of the web as a no-man’s land where content is free from the restraints of geographical boundaries probably should be put to rest. Google released a treasure trove of data relating to content-takedown requests, showing that requests are up and Google often complies.

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Akamai, CDNs face ‘hyperconnected’ world of devices

The exploding number of devices sucking up rich content poses a challenge for CDN players like Akamai, which previewed technologies to address this issue at a customer event. In this “hyperconnected” era, any device that can be connected is connected, said Akamai Chief Scientist Tom Leighton.

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Mobile delivery bugaboos: Litigation, fragmentation, latency

Forget Google and the other web giants. What content delivery specialists like Appcelerator, Cotendo and Urban Airship really worry about is the growing fragmentation of the web software stack they work with and potentially crippling patent litigation that makes everyone nervous.

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Akamai rides Happy Cloud to speed up game downloads

Happy Cloud, a start-up which is trying to speed up game downloads and make them almost instantly playable like streaming gaming services using progressive download technology, has partnered with content delivery network Akamai to boost its performance and make games playable within a couple minutes.

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Amazon shows media companies the future of the web

Amazon’s new browser-based version of its Kindle e-book app is designed to get around Apple’s restrictions on in-app purchasing, but it is also a great example of how media companies should be looking beyond the world of apps to the future of the browser-based web.

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When Akamai goes down, it takes the Internet with it

Major Internet sites like Facebook, Twitter, Apple.com, Best Buy and Buy.com saw an outage this afternoon, as Akamai faced DNS-related issues. For about an hour Monday, those issues slowed down some Akamai sites, while keeping users from accessing others altogether.

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With new UI, 3Crowd keeps it simple stupid

Technology startup 3Crowd just made the process of managing and rolling out a CDN even easier, by rolling out an updated user interface for its CrowdDirector CDN management product that gives its users an at-a-glance view of all the CDN and caching resources available to them.

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On Copyright, Eric Schmidt Is Right and Britain Is Wrong

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been taking some flak from global media and content companies for comments he made about copyright while in Britain, but he’s right, and Britain and Schmidt’s critics are wrong. Copyright is changing, whether they like it or not.

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Yottaa Uses the Cloud to Boost Site Speed

Yottaa today announced its Yottaa Optimizer service, which promises to improve website performance by leveraging a global network of cloud servers. Yotta claims the service delivers results “with just a few clicks,” which would make it a welcome alternative to CDN technologies.

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Cotendo Offers a CDN for the Future With Cloudlet

Cotendo is mixing the benefits of both cloud computing and content-delivery networks (CDN) in an attempt to boost performance and speed when delivering dynamic content to users. Cloudlet could be a boon for Cotendo in the cutthroat CDN market against Akamai and Limelight Networks.

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Apple’s Message to Publishers: Content Is King

This week Apple caused a storm by announcing their new iOS App Store terms and conditions for publishers. In a nutshell; long-awaited in-app subscriptions are here, and publishers are worried about their bottom lines. But maybe what they should be thinking about is content.

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Yojimbo 3 and Yojimbo for iPad Released

Yojimbo, the personal organizer for the Mac, has been updated this week alongside the introduction of a new companion app, Yojimbo for iPad. Yojimbo now lets you sync over Wi-Fi with the app for iPad, so you can view all your Yojimbo items on the go.

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Primal Makes Content Automation Almost Too Easy

Primal, which launched at the DEMO conference today, thinks its content-publication service has something extra: Its semantic tools allow publishers to create an entire site of inter-related webpages around a topic automatically. Unfortunately, this could be very useful for spammers as well as regular content publishers.

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M-Files: Traditional Applications Meet Cloud Storage

Motive Systems, is today releasing a cloud storage offering, M-Files Cloud Vault, that enables companies to organize and manage company documents and information on cloud servers. The market for this sort of product is massive and there is an opportunity for many vendors to be successful in their particular niche.

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Box.net Joins the Move to Social

Cloud content management application Box.net is today unveiling an updated UI that aims to encourage adoption of a social news stream for enterprise users. As more and more cloud based applications provide social news streams, the issues around filtering the noise will become ever more pressing.

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Report

Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud

The growing ubiquity of the Internet is having a major influence on the video and software industries, which are using it to enable delivery of their products online.

Advanced infrastructures are required to deliver those contents efficiently. The Internet has been built on a best-effort model, but is under increasing pressure as traffic skyrockets. To speed delivery times, web pages and video content are being served through content delivery network (CDN) technologies, which optimize the network usage through different techniques, including primarily caching servers and, increasingly, P2P technologies for hybrid approaches. Software is delivered through cloud computing and its infrastructure offered as a service (IaaS).

In the cases of both CDN and IaaS, end-users benefit from third-party providers’ infrastructure investments, which are shared among the providers’ clients. End-users, therefore, can operate more rapidly and transform most of their capital expenditures into more variable operating expenditures. They can also be more flexible and are able to scale more readily in the case of traffic spikes or rapid growth.

The objectives and benefits of CDN and IaaS solutions are therefore very similar, even though they address generally very different types of services and applications. CDN and IaaS have therefore many common points, both on technology and business aspects, and could converge at some point as they have developed expertise on some complementary elements of the infrastructure. The overall architecture is very similar, as well, with both operations relying on similar building blocks, such as distributed data centers. However, CDN focuses mostly on network aspects to ensure efficient delivery, while IaaS is primarily about virtualization and software abstraction of the hardware layer. But both assets may become useful for providers (telcos, etc, …) and in the context of rising Internet traffic that could bring some congestion and impede the quality of service, they are likely to converge.

This report looks at the different business cases for both technologies and identifies areas of opportunity. The report also provides a look at key players, a market forecast, and recommendations for CDN players, Internet giants, technology service providers, hosters and telcos.

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Report

Will Automated Rights Management Take Down Fair Use?

While both content owners and platform providers have taken steps to minimize the fair-use impact of takedowns — such as employing teams of lawyers to review individual posts before asking to have them removed — automating the process to make it faster could put a squeeze on the breathing space needed to make a fair determination of fair use.

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iTunes 9: Keeping In Sync

iTunes 9 brings about a much more flexible setup for syncing. It’s definitely an improvement, in some senses, but still far from…

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Is Content King Again?

Which is a better business to be in right now: content creation or distribution? The New York Times alluded to this question…

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