Entries Tagged 'Video Services' ↓

It seems the 17-year-old truant who created Chatroulette has applied for a visa.

The youngster, be he lucky or brilliant, has indicated he might want to transition to the American scene at some time in the near future. With all the media attention he and his service have received and the explosion of traffic - and monetization potential - on his site, his application further opens the can of worms we've been discussing tonight: Where's the best place to raise your startup?

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In December 2009, Chatroulette had 500 users. Today, just four months later, the site sees 1.5 million daily visitors. That statistic alone is enough to inspire investors to beat down the door of its creator, Russian high school student Andrey Ternovskiy.

But what's much more interesting to many is the mechanics of the site itself. "It's video 4chan. Unbeatable formula," said Muhammad Saleem, considered by many to be an excellent authority on engineering virality. Others have called it "brilliant," "the purest form" of the Internet and its userbase, and "a great way to kill time," one of the most common uses of the social web.

I've frequently described it as a box of game pieces with no rules. Users are invited to create any kind of experience they choose given a simple set of constraints. It's inherently viral, addictive, imaginative and essentially human.

Here's the rub: The site is currently unfinanced and non-commercial. The site's creator, a teenaged school kid, has been placed at the crux of nationalistic, capitalistic and technological debates by being asked to choose between Russian financing and a yellow brick road to Silicon Valley. According to one site, the Russian investors involved are seeking to "break the American hegemony in cyberspace - an ambitious plan, particularly as the United States is home to many of the market leaders in the Internet economy.

"The combined value of Google, Microsoft and Facebook amounts to roughly $500 billion, or about a third of the Russian economy's annual output. So if Russia - which has more than 50 million Internet users and boasts one of the fastest-growing markets - hopes to catch up, then it will need to keep talents like Ternovskiy at home."

The Russian investors who have contacted Ternovskiy also invest in Facebook and Zynga; clearly, they have an eye for social virality and profit and see a great deal of potential in Chatroulette. But Ternovskiy, a longtime hacker, dreams of founding a Silicon Valley startup of his own.

Will this young man reinforce the American idiom of Silicon Valley by relocating his seemingly overnight success to the Bay Area? Or will he prove that the startup economy is truly becoming global by accepting Russian financing and remaining in north Moscow?

A more interesting question: Can Ternovskiy sustain this wild success? Or has he simply become lucky with Chatroulette? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

Almost in the immediate wake of Google's announcing short URLs (goo.gl) and Facebook experimenting with fb.me links, YouTube has made a gesture toward shorter web addresses, as well.

Today, the video site announced it's launching youtu.be links. They're not as short as the super-brief URLs users might see from Bit.ly or is.gd because each one contains a unique ID for the video it links to. But this extra bit of information makes the URLs more useful for developers, too.

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While the resulting URLs aren't significantly shorter than a regular YouTube link, users will have the added benefit of knowing exactly what kind of content they're being redirected to, which isn't always the case with many shortened URLs.

Also, with the video ID as part of the short URL, writes YouTube engineering manager Vijay Karunamurthy, "developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly or track how a video is spreading in real time."

End users can shorten links manually simply by putting the video ID (the part of the YouTube URL that comes after the equals sign and before the ampersand, if there is one) after http://youtu.be/. For example, "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acVM7_rWw4" is the regular URL of an interview we did over the summer with a great startup advisor in Boulder, CO. The short version of that link would be "http://youtu.be/1acVM7_rWw4".

Or, for those copy/paste-averse folks among us, links will be automatically shortened when broadcast thought the site's sharing mechanisms.

TodayYouTube has announced its plan to support 1080p videos.

This means that those amazing, high-definition videos you uploaded last year will now finally be converted to their original resolutions and will finally look as good as they do on your desktop. The new resolution represents a significant improvement over the current 720p maximum resolution, which leaves all those glorious, pirated segments of old movies tragically blurred and pixelated.

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The fine folks at YouTube cited increased resolutions on consumer video recording devices as the impetus for the improvement.

Here's YouTube's example of a 360p image:

If you're not uploading videos from your phone, however, you're probably looking at something like YouTube's current HD setting, 720p:

And, by way of comparison, this is the new maximum resolution YouTube HD videos will have:

Those images are from YouTube. Why they chose a dog's muzzle, we may never know. But we're awfully grateful for the resolution improvements.

Also, users are specifically encouraged to upload videos that will showcase the capabilities of the new hotness that is 1080p resolution. YouTube engineer Billy Biggs tells users in the related blog post, "Be creative and choose subjects that really show off the beauty of your camera. We will run the best examples on our homepage in a future spotlight."

While it'll be nice to see our own classic jams restored to their original awesomeness, it will also be interesting to see professionally produced videos now appearing in better HD. Well done, YouTube, and thanks for allocating the resources.

We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone application which allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too.

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Orb is a desktop software program that facilitates streaming of personal media over the internet. Once installed and configured, you can access your home computer's content library from any internet-connected device. The software easily achieves what many other technology companies are still figuring out how to do - make your media available anywhere and everywhere on any device you use with minimal effort on your part.

One of Orb's best features is the OrbLive iPhone application which connects with your home computer over the internet to provide access to your media library of audio, video, and photos. Through the mobile application, you can access any of your media files and play stream them over either a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. In the Windows version of the software, PC's with TV tuner cards can also connect you to live, streaming TV in addition to the other shared media saved on the PC's hard drive.

To some extent, Orb competes with Apple's own offerings since it provides access to music and video from either a desktop computer or an iPhone. That's why it was somewhat surprising that Apple ever approved the company's iPhone application to begin with. Even more surprising is that they allowed it to function over 3G when similar products - like Slingbox's SlingPlayer for iPhone, another live TV streaming app - are restricted to Wi-Fi only.

No Live TV for Mac Users Yet

Unfortunately, the Mac version is debuting without the live TV streaming functionality. According to Joe Costello, CEO of Orb Networks, support for live TV support will be added in subsequent versions. In the meantime, however, Mac users can install the Orb software to stream music, photos, videos, home movies and webcam feeds stored in iTunes to their iPhones or to any other internet-connected device including netbooks, notebooks, media players, game consoles and more. All that's needed is the new Mac OS X desktop software (works on OS X Intel 10.5 or later).

Those interested in trying out the new Mac version can grab the installer from here: orb.com/en/download_orb. For now, the Mac software is available in English only.

YouTube is throwing a bone to content creators with questions about how to do online video right.

The mega-video site is partnering with Videomaker magazine to offer free webinars on topics of interest to the would-be iJustines and Ask A Ninjas of this world. Topics will cover how to shop for a video camera, microphone techniques, lighting, and all the basics of shooting palatable, watchable online video content.

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We've found out the hard way that shooting video for the Internet can yield mixed results, and the smallest mistakes while the camera is rolling can lead to huge failures once the video is live online.

Because different content creators struggle with different elements of online video, YouTube is asking users to vote for which topics the first webinar should cover. Options include shopping for a camcorder, button basics, lighting and filtering, microphone techniques, the art of composition, and handheld camera techniques. Users can also submit their own ideas and discuss common issues.

The first webinar is scheduled to take place October 27, 2009, at 2 p.m. Pacific Time/5 p.m. Eastern Time. The webinar will last for one hour, and interested parties can register here.

As we already know, one of the best ways to avoid the brutality that is YouTube comments (which were recently voted the worst thing on the Internet, we will have you know) is to shoot high-quality video content. Even with inexpensive equipment and no formal filmic education, many YouTube heroes have learned to generate stellar videos. All it takes is practice and a few hints from folks who know. Props to YouTube for giving their users a small nudge in the right direction.

And if you can't make time for the webinar, just watch this very serious and detailed tutorial on video blogging from Justine Ezarik:

This morning, MySpace users got to see and participate in a live video chat with actor Gerard Butler and director F. Gary Gray through a MySpace promotional page that integrated popular streaming video site UStream.

Due to an unfortunate technical glitch, users ended up hearing the audio from the film's trailer over the interview audio. Overall, the audio was a mess, and UStream/MySpaceID integration for commenting was a popup-ridden, timeout-plagued, fail-inducing nightmare. Nevertheless, as a first-time integration of real-time, interactive video on one of the world's largest social networks, we suppose results could have been worse.

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Relatively few users seemed tuned in for the chat, which was posted at several spots on the MySpace page for the movie Butler was promoting, Law Abiding Citizen. By relatively few, we mean that a the chat's UStream page had around 1,000 views, 3 ratings, and fewer than 30 text responses at "press time."

Neither the "studio" nor the audio, which was fraught with ear-torturing static, were what one would expect at any other kind of press junket. And the MySpaceID integration, which would allow users to comment on the video chat, was far from perfect. Every text comment required a two-click confirmation, but there didn't seem to be any options to have that content duplicated on a user's profile as a status update or bulletin, which might have helped with attracting more users to the chat. Moreover, a few comments we tried to send timed out or simply didn't post.

MySpace is painfully late to the game in integrating technologies such as Twitter, UStream, and other services that could grant the aging behemoth a second wind in terms of reclaiming former users, especially in the U.S.

In general, the ability to conduct real-time, live video interviews might be a great promotional vehicle for entertainment properties, but this effort seemed far too half-hearted to be a successful implementation of the available technology. MySpace, UStream, and the properties they choose to have participate in these kinds of promotions will have to do a much better job of ensuring a glitch-free experience for a larger group of users if these partnerships are to have any meaning in the company's future.

In a Beet.tv interview posted yesterday, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller gave a few clues as to the Foundation's train of thought when it comes to video editing and distribution.

In the interview clips, included below, Moller hints at the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. He compares video to text and image content, subtextually posing the question: If other kinds of non-video content are so easy to grab, remix, and reuse, why not video, too?

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"The typical video that we see on the web is basically a black box format in a Flash container. I can't easily manipulate it; I need to buy proprietary tools to really do things with it or even to rebroadcast it." All these factors go harshly against the free-as-in-beer, Creative Commons grain of Wikipedia/Wikimedia, so it should come as no surprise that the Foundation's video player and tools are to represent a dramatic shift from current web video standards.

Although videos have been part of the Wikimedia stable for a couple years through the open-source Ogg Theora format, the offering has been limited. Now, however, a Firefox 3.5 plugin called Firefogg will allow for server-side transcoding to the Ogg format. In addition to allowing for downloading and editing, the Ogg format also consumes significantly fewer resources during video playback.

Of course, any open-source technology that makes information free (both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-free-to-move-about-the-Internet) is not without controversy. The Ogg codec's role in HTML 5 is of particular interest to those concerned with the evolution of web-based video.

Of particular interest to those concerned with the evolution of content ownership, however, is the Foundation's proposal, as stated by Moller, to allow users to "take a video, to crop it, to edit it, to take different assets and mix them into a single video - not just video... a text slide or... a slide show. You can mix videos, tag them with audio, obviously. So we want to build a completely open standards-based environment that people can use to remix video."

As we reported last month, when news of the new player was breaking, hundreds of thousands of public domain videos from sources such as the Internet Archive and Metavid will be available in the new format.

The editing tools to be made available later this year are led and funded by open source video company Kaltura. Moller also revealed to Beet.tv that Wikimedia is looking for a CDN partner to ensure streaming video performance.