Author: Janko Roettgers

Last week, representatives of 20 hardware makers came together in Google’s Seoul, South Korea office to talk about the future of Google TV, I’ve learned from a person with knowledge of the gathering. During two days of workshops, the companies were told about upcoming Google TV technologies and also talked about future devices powered by Google TV.

I’ve also learned a bit about who was part of this meeting: Unsurprisingly, the list of attendees included representatives from device makers like LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL, as well as chipset manufacturers such as Marvell and MediaTek.

But at least two of the participating companies weren’t previously announced as Google TV partners: Nemustech is a South Korean software systems integrator that also develops launchers and UX frameworks for Android mobile phones, and Wistron is a Taiwanese original design manufacturer that builds TV sets for Sony and others.

Some of these partners have already started to work with the next generation of the Google TV software, which received its last significant update last fall. That makes it likely that we will see another big Google TV update before the end of the year.

It’s unclear yet how that next generation of Google TV will look like. Vizio CTO Matt McRae told GigaOM in January that at least some future Google TV devices could ditch the HDMI pass-through of live TV signals and instead look much more like competing devices from Roku and Apple TV with a clear focus on online streaming apps.

Check out my interview with Matt McRae below:

Image courtesy of Flickr user SLR Jester.

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Social TV startup GetGlue rolled out an update of its iPhone app Thursday, adding a programming guide, show feeds and the ability to chat with Facebook friends about a show. Also in the works is a partnership with Hulu, which serves as a good reminder on how much the TV space is changing.

The iPhone app brings many of the features previously rolled out on the iPad and the web to the mobile phone. This includes a new program guide as well as an activity feed that pulls in content from throughout the web, as well as specific feeds for individual shows.

Also interesting: GetGlue’s new iPhone app uses Facebook likes to determine which of your friends watch the shows you are into, and then offers you the ability to tag them in a Facebook post about the show, essentially extending the conversation beyond the core of GetGlue’s four million registered users. GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold told me Wednesday that he hopes to relaunch the Android app with the same feature set in the next four to six weeks.

But wait, there’s more: GetGlue is currently working on a multi-faceted partnership with Hulu. There is going to be some promotional element that will give GetGlue users the ability to earn a month-long free trial of Hulu Plus, but more interesting is that GetGlue is committed to index all of Hulu’s original content, including shows like Battleground and the Awesomes. “We are not about linear TV. We are about what to watch,” Iskold told me.

That’s a reflection of how the world of TV is changing: There used to be a clear line between the short-form content posted on YouTube and the professionally-produced shows that air on TV, and possibly find their way online afterwards for catch-up viewing. But with companies like Netflix and Hulu pouring millions into the production of original content, that line is becoming increasingly blurry.

The most striking example for this was the launch of House Of Cards on Netflix, but Hulu and YouTube have increased their commitment to professional content as well. It only makes sense for GetGlue to surface that content through their app.

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Crowdsourced video captioning platform Amara launched an improved YouTube integration this week that allows any YouTube user to crowdsource the subtitling of their videos, utilizing many of the same tools that are being used by companies like TED, Khan Academy, Udacity and Netflix. The move could not only help YouTube producers to provide support for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but also expand their international audience.

Amara’s new offering links your YouTube account to a new or existing Amara account. Once that is done, all of your public videos are going to show up on your Amara profile, ready to be subtitled with the help of the platform’s subtitle editor. Users can add subtitles in dozens of languages.

You’ll also be able to invite others to help you, turning the process of captioning your videos into a collaborative project. Complete subtitles are automatically synced back to YouTube, making them accessible for anyone who watches the video. And Amara automatically edits a video’s description on YouTube, prompting your viewers to help you with the subtitling process.

Of course, YouTube already offers automatic, computer-generated captions. However, natural language processing only goes that far, and humans can greatly improve the accuracy of subtitles. But Amara’s offering is interesting for more than one reason: YouTube publishers can encourage their viewers to translate their videos into many different languages, which could help them greatly expand their audience, and subtitles can greaty improve video discoverability in search engines.

Amara, which was originally known as Universal Subtitles, has received $1 million in funding from the Mozilla Foundation and the Knight Foundation. It started out as an open access-inspired project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, but now also offers enterprise tools for corporate clients, which include Netflix, Twitter, TED and a number of online education startups. To date, Amara’s users have created 181,000 subtitle tracks across 238 languages.

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The rumors are true, after all:Dijit Media, the company behind the Nextguide TV guide app, is buying social TV pioneer Miso’s assets. The acquisition, which was announced by Dijit Friday, doesn’t include any of Miso’s remaining eight employees, but Miso’s co-founder and CEO Somrat Niyogi will become an advisor to Dijit. The move is another sign that the social TV space, which has brought us dozens of startups with similar ideas and products, is ripe for consolidation.

Miso was one of the first companies to take Foursquare’s idea of checking into locations to the media space, offering its users to check into TV shows instead. “They invented social TV,” Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman said during an interview Wednesday. But Miso failed to get enough traction beyond its initial user base, was quickly surpassed by competitor GetGlue.

Niyogi also had his own doubts about check-ins as a core offering, and the company went on to try a few other products: Miso Sideshows allowed anyone to curate and author second-screen content that can be synchronized with existing TV shows, and Quips enabled users to share key moments of their favorite TV show episodes with others.

Dijit said Friday that it is going to continue to support the core Miso check-in platform as well as Miso Sideshows, but that Quips are going to be shut down just two months after the launch of the product. Miso had raised a total of $5.5 million from Google Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Koshla Ventures and others. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Toeman told me that the acquisition brings Dijit a lot of intellectual property and technology, as well as Miso’s existing user base. He didn’t give specifics on the number of users of either Nextguide or Miso, but said that both company’s products together amount to a user base in the “low millions.”

Miso’s acquisition comes just a few weeks after social TV startup Viggle tried to buy GetGlue. That acquisition fell through after debt financing necessary to close the deal reportedly didn’t materialize.

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Everyone was focused on the fact that consumers still buy plenty of DVDs and Blu-ray discs when the NPD Group published its 2012 Home Video Data report this week. It’s true: 61 percent of all U.S.-based transactional home video spending goes towards physical media, compared to 64 percent in 2011. But the real surprise to me was to see how much digital media Microsoft is moving these days.

Microsoft made a significant showing in the area of internet VOD, which is industry slang for those 24 or 48 hour video rentals you can get from iTunes, Vudu and others. That segment currently accounts for just 12 percent of total video-on-demand revenue, with 72 percent of the money coming from rentals through pay TV operators. But it’s an interesting segment, in part because it’s not dominated by just one or two players.

Apple’s iTunes does have a strong lead with 45 percent of all internet VOD revenue, according to NPD, but there’s a fierce competition going on for second place: Amazon Instant Video generated 18 percent of the industry’s revenue in this segment in 2012, followed by Walmart’s Vudu with 15 percent and Xbox video with 14 percent.

That’s a pretty strong showing for Microsoft, considering that the company has just begun to put some more muscle behind its own video rental offering. Microsoft just recently unified all of its entertainment offerings under the Xbox brand and is now beginning to promote it as its home entertainment property across all of its Windows 8 platforms, as well as the Xbox 360. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Microsoft surpassed Vudu and maybe even Amazon by the end of this year for internet VOD rentals.

Of course, one has to look at these numbers with a grain of salt: NPD’s home video data focuses entirely on transactional spending, meaning that Netflix and competing subscription offerings don’t show up at all. That’s despite the fact that Netflix now has some 27 million subscribers in the U.S. alone. But subscriptions generally don’t offer access to movies right after they were in the theaters — and that’s an area in which Microsoft, with a pretty big installed device base, is starting to move a lot of media.

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German music rights group GEMA has filed a lawsuit against YouTube, alleging that the video site is misleading users about the details of an ongoing licensing dispute between the two parties. The lawsuit is the latest escalation in that dispute, which has been going on since 2010, and resulted in German YouTube users being unable to view many popular music videos on the site. GEMA is now asking a Munich-based court to issue a cease-and-desist order in order to prevent YouTube from blaming GEMA for this mess.

I know, it’s confusing, but bear with me. Here’s what happened so far: GEMA, which represents recording artists as well as publishers, wants YouTube to pay a fee for each and every video viewed on the site that contains music of one of the artists represented by GEMA (which include every major label artist, as well as most indies). YouTube has rejected that approach, and instead wants to pay a percentage of the ad revenue it makes with those videos.

Negotiations between both parties broke down in 2010, and GEMA asked YouTube to block videos containing music of some 600 artists. YouTube responded by blocking a wide range of videos, telling users that these videos are “unfortunately not available in Germany” because they could contain music for which GEMA hadn’t granted the rights to YouTube.

GEMA officials have long complained that this wasn’t true, suggesting instead that YouTube simply didn’t pay for licenses to these rights. Of course, the licenses that YouTube is offering are based on the rates that YouTube is challenging, so it’s pretty much semantics and fingerpointing.

Except, most users are upset about GEMA, and the group apparently doesn’t want to shoulder all the blame anymore. GEMA’s CEO Harald Heker told local paper Wirtschaftswoche that YouTube’s handling of the blocking is “pure demagogy.”

A YouTube spokesperson sent me the following comment about the lawsuit:

“YouTube believes that rights holders and artists should benefit from their work. We have dozens of collection society deals in place across more than 40 countries because we provide an important source of income for musicians and a platform where new artists can be discovered and promoted. We are open for negotiations to find a solution with GEMA compatible with YouTube’s business model so that we can again provide a source of revenue for musicians and a vibrant platform for music lovers in Germany.”

So there you have it. Each side wants to sound completely reasonable as, all the while, the actual licensing dispute drags out further and further. At this point, it’s pretty unlikely that German YouTube users are going to get access to their music videos any time soon.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  nyghtowl.

Distributing video content to connected TV platforms just got a bit easier: Beachfront Media, the company behind the video discovery site Mefeedia, added an option to build apps to Roku, Google TV, Samsung and LG to its Beachfront Builder offering. Some of the first publishers mentioned by Beachfront for taking advantage of this are the lifestyle TV network Plum TV and YouTuber Tyler Oakley, but a bit of digging unveiled that College Humor seems to be on board as well.

Beachfront Media launched its Beachfront Builder in private beta last summer, initially focusing on Android and iOS apps based on a number of preformatted templates. Building apps is completely free, but publishers that want to monetize their apps need to become premium customers, which involves revenue share as well as a startup fee. Premium customers can elect to run their own ads against their content, have Beachfront sell inventory for them, or take advantage of both.

Monday’s announcement extends this model to connected TV platforms, which should help publishers who can’t afford to spend a ton of money to develop their own apps for a number of connected devices. But it looks like some bigger publishers are making use of Beachfront for their videos as well: A quick search on Google Play revealed that Beachfront Media also distributes College Humor’s Android apps.

Beachfront Media started out with a SEO-focused video portal called Mefeedia, but has been focusing on video distribution and monetization in recent months. The company announced earlier this month that it distributed three billion videos on various platforms in 2012.

The popular Spotify app Soundrop is expanding to Facebook, and it’s doing so with a bang: Soundrop announced the launch of interactive music video listening rooms on Facebook artist pages Monday.

The Norwegian company teamed up with Abba, Public Enemy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Hot Chip and a few other popular artists for its launch, allowing Facebook users to enter social listening rooms on the artists’ pages, vote for their favorite tracks and tune into a collaborative mix consisting of a nonstop stream of music videos. “No one has done this before, not even Facebook,” said Soundrop CEO Inge Andre Sandvik during an interview Friday.

Soundrop has been successfully operating these kinds of rooms within the Spotify app: Music fans listened to more than 500 million tracks through the company’s Spotify app last year, according to Soundrop.

The new rooms on Facebook are joined by the hip with the Spotify app: Abba’s Facebook listening room will play the same songs as the band’s room within the Spotify app, and users can vote on a room’s playlist on both platforms. “We don’t want to build a separate universe,” I was told by Sandvik.

However, there is one big difference between the two offerings: The Spotify app relies on the music service’s catalog. Soundrop’s new Facebook rooms on the other hand play music videos from YouTube and Vevo, which means that users can tune in without the need to pay for a subscription.

The offering is also completely free for musicians, and everyone else who is looking to bring some music to his Facebook presence: Any user with a public Facebook page can add a Soundrop room to that page within minutes.

That kind of easy set-up, paired with a pretty solid Soundrop experience that allows thousands of listeners to tune into a collaborative mix and chat about the music at the same time apparently impressed representatives from major music labels that got to see the app before its official launch. “They were amazed that we gave this to them,” Sandvik recalled.

He added that the app will help bands and labels to drive the engagement of ad-supported videos, and also help with marketing by allowing artists to interact with thousands of fans in real-time through DJ sets other online events.

Adding Facebook as an additional platform also shows how Soundrop is maturing: The company launched a first Spotify app when Spotify added third-party apps to its desktop client in late 2011. After gaining good traction on Spotify, it completely revamped its architecture from the ground up late last year to add cross-platform capabilities. Sandvik told me that the Facebook roll-out is just a first step on that journey. The end goal was not to launch the same app with the same UI on a bunch of different sites, but to offer unique experiences that are joined in real time by the music people are listening to and voting for. “It’s much more exciting to tell different stories,” Sandvik said.

Image courtesy of Flickr user humbert15.

Private equity firm Silver Lake has tapped Dave Habiger to expand its work in the digital media space. Habiger, who until last year served as the CEO of U.K.-based pay TV set-top box maker NDS, is joining the firm as senior advisor to the value creation team.

Silver Lake is known for its investments in high-profile technology companies like Skype and Groupon as well as for a growing interest in the clean energy sector. But the firm has also been stepping up its presence in the media space. Last year, Silver Lake bought a reported 31 percent stake in Ari Emanuel’s William Morris Endeavour agency, with a specific focus on digital initiatives.

Habiger brings an interesting background to the table for Silver Lake. Before NDS, he was the CEO at Sonic Solutions, where he oversaw the transition from a software-based business to one focused on premium online video. Sonic Solutions ran Cinemanow, one of the first transactional video-on-demand platforms, and ended up powering the premium video offerings of companies like Blockbuster and Best Buy. Sonic Solutions eventually got bought by Rovi for $775 million.

NDS, on the other hand, has been focused on the other end of the premium video market: cable, satellite and IPTV service providers. But despite working with legacy distribution businesses, the company also looked to innovate through targeted advertising, advanced programming guides and more. Cisco picked up NDS for $5 billion last year, and Habiger left the company when the deal closed.

Having worked in both worlds — over-the-top and traditional pay TV — gives Habiger a unique perspective on some of the key challenges the media business is facing. Many in the industry believe that the big technological problems with regards to digital content distribution have been solved. What’s left are questions around content rights and business models. Addressing these is going to require a lot of capital. Silver Lake’s appointment of Habiger could be a sign that the firm is seeing an opportunity to profit from this process.

Check out this interview I did with Habiger back in 2010 when he was still CEO of Sonic Solutions:

Hulu videos can be viewed on any Android phone with Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1, Absolutely Android reported this weekend. Hulu blocks mobile phones for licensing reasons, but the trick to get them to play on Android handsets is actually pretty simple: Users just have to change the user agent setting of the phone’s Chrome web browser to make it think the phone is a desktop computer, and Hulu’s videos will start playing on the phones with no problem.

That’s a nice trick for Nexus One owners trying to catch the Lost series finale on the go, but the revelation also points to something much bigger: Hulu videos will inevitably find their way onto the Google TV platform when it launches this fall, and Hulu won’t be happy about it. In fact, the site’s corporate overlords could force it into an all-out war on over-the-top streaming devices, and the results could hurt both Hulu and Google.

Don’t believe me? Then consider this: Google TV Product Lead Rishi Chandra did a search for House when he demoed the platform at the company’s developers conference last week. The search results clearly included episodes from Hulu. However, he didn’t demonstrate Hulu streaming and instead proceeded to watch a trailer from Amazon.com’s VOD platform.

Google’s VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra didn’t really want to say whether Hulu runs on Google TV. Technically it would be capable to, he said during an I/O press conference, but the ultimate decision would have to be made by the content owner. In other words: Google would like to play Hulu content on the Google TV, but it can’t promise that it will work. Hulu didn’t comment on whether it will play on Google TV or not when contacted by us.

Of course, that’s very similar to the issues Boxee dealt with a year ago when Hulu decided to lock out Boxee users. The difference is that Google TV is an open source operating system, capable of running a whole bunch of code that goes far beyond of what’s possible with Boxee.

Not only does the most recent version of Chrome for Android allow users to switch user agents, which means they’re essentially pretending to access a web site with a different browser and device, there’s also a number of third-party browsers that have been supporting this functionality for a while. In fact, there are even dedicated Android tools to mask the identity of your device. Many of these apps should run on Google TV out of the box, and one can be certain the developers will come up with new ways to extend the platform and in turn play Hulu videos.

Hulu will likely respond by stepping up the security cat-and-mouse game, which will result in developers coming up with even better ways to circumvent these roadblocks. Who will win? I think it’s too early to tell. It’s been more than a year since Hulu first went after Boxee, and Boxee’s users can still access the site’s content through the application’s integrated browser. Hulu eventually could get the upper hand by relying on Flash security, but that would mean to permanently lock itself out of HTML5, while other are starting to innovate with it.

Google and its partners on the other hand could have a hard time selling Google TV to consumers if their answer to “will this play Hulu” is “maybe it will, maybe it won’t.”

The solution would obviously be to make peace before the war starts. Hulu and its owners should give up on the notion that content is allowed to play on a 27″ screen, but not on a 32″ screen, and Google could help to make this happen by offering some insights into its plans for advertising on Google TV. Once the money is on the table, people will talk. But expect some more shots to be fired before that happens.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Nevada Tumbleweed.

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Murphy was in the room when Google unveiled its Google TV platform at its I/O developer conference today. The demo was plagued with numerous problems, with remote controls losing sync and questionable content showing up on the TV feeds used to demonstrate Google TVs integration of the Web and the TV. Those snags turned the keynote, which was also used for a much smoother presentation of the new Android 2.2 version, into a three-hour long marathon session, and Best Buy’s CEO  Brian Dunn had a hard time sounding convincing when he said he wanted a Google TV device “right now.”

However, technical hiccups weren’t the only issues that made the Google TV pitch sound less than ready for prime time. Google also made no mention at all of its new WebM initiative that was announced yesterday, which includes open sourcing its VP8 video codec. And in the inverse, Intel is powering all of the Google TV devices announced on stage today, but the chip maker was notably absent from the WebM announcement. Asked about this at a press conference following the unveiling of Google TV, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that the first version of the company’s Atom chip won’t actually support any hardware acceleration for VP8, but that the company plans to enable this through software updates.

Also puzzling was that Google’s video sharing site YouTube played a minor role in this announcement. Google VP of Product Hunter Walk was invited on stage to demo a beta site offering a lean-back experience for YouTube, but Chandra resorted to Sesamestreet.org, and not Sesame Street’s clips on YouTube, to demo some of the device’s customized search capabilities. YouTube representatives weren’t even invited on stage during the Google TV press briefing, and there were no indications that Google has any plans to ramp up its content offerings on YouTube to make it the content repository of choice for Google TV.

There are also some open questions how Google’s will incorporate advertising into its TV platform. Google CEO Eric Schmidt dodged a question about new advertising formats through Google TV, simply stating that ads on Google TV devices will either be delivered through websites or traditional TV programming. Of course, there’s also a third option, which would be to deliver ads through Android apps optimized for Google TV, which could potentially compete with broadcast ads running on the same screen. Chandra clarified later that there is no immediate plans to roll out such formats when the devices launch this fall.

And finally there are still unanswered questions about whether content from Hulu will actually play back on Google TV devices once these ship in fall. Hulu search results showed up during today’s demo, but the video site wasn’t actually part of the demo itself. Vic Chandra said during the press briefing that Google TV, in combination with Flash 10.1, will enable the capability to play back any Flash content. However, there’s a caveat: “Sites can make the decision not to enable content,” Chandra added. In other words: Hulu could still lock out Google TV users, just like they did with Boxee in early 2009.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ryan Holst.

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Logitech is one of the first companies to bring a device based on the newly announced Google TV platform to market, the company said today at Google I/O. The company calls its as-of-yet unnamed product a “companion set-top box,” meaning that you connect it to your TV set as well as your TiVo, your DISH set-top box or whatever else you have on your living-room shelf. Consumers will essentially daisy-chain these devices via HDMI and then use Logitech’s box to control all devices in the chain.

Logitech’s box will be available in the fall. The company hasn’t made any information about pricing available yet, but a spokesperson told me today at a Logitech press event that DISH subscribers will be able to get a subsidized box through the satellite TV provider. Logitech gave members of the press a really short demo of the device, mostly showing off how it plays well with other devices while putting lesser emphasis on the actual Google platform. It also showed off two remote control apps for Android and iPhone OS that will be available at launch time.

The Logitech box prototype shown at the event featured two HDMI ports, as well as two USB ports, an IR blaster and an Ethernet port. It will initially be sold with a compact-sized keyboard, and there will be a camera for video chats available as an add-on.

Logitech’s CEO Jerry Quindlen told me that part of the reason the company embraces Google TV is the option to extend the TV experience, which in turn gives Logitech a chance to sell more peripherals. “People want to access the full web”, he said, and that adds the desire for new devices that people are used from a PC or web experience.

Quindlen also said that it’s not about adding another box to your living room, but about enabling a complete Internet experience, and said he believes people are willing to pay for that. Watch the complete interview below.

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Google’s move to open source its VP8 video codec as part of its WebM Project has gotten wide support from browser makers and other industry players, but the open source community was notably absent from today’s announcement, with the obvious exception of Mozilla. There was no shout-out from the Free Software Foundation, who had urged Google to open source the codec earlier this year to kill Flash.

Instead, a smiling Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch walked on stage to announce that his company is going to ship VP8 support as part of Flash. So what do open source developers think about the move, and what’s going to happen to Ogg Theora, the current open source video codec of choice for projects like Wikipedia?

“This is great news,” said Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, founder of the Xiph.org Foundation, when I reached him by phone right after the announcement. Montgomery is spearheading the development of Ogg Theora and is a Theora developer himself, but he called VP8 going open source “absolutely wonderful” and sounded honestly stoked about the initiative. Montgomery did mention that Google didn’t make too much of an effort to reach out to open source developers ahead of the official announcement. He was notified of the development, but many others weren’t. “We have to see how it’s going to play out in the open source community,” he told me, adding that it will be a while until VP8 will really have an impact.

So will VP8 kill Ogg Theora? “Maybe in the long run it will,” he said, but the Theora community is for now committed to its road map, and Montgomery said he doesn’t think this development will be immediately affected by VP8. He did acknowledge that Theora is about ten years old now, adding that codecs usually have a life cycle of 20 years. Theora is based on On2′s VP3.2 codec, which was first released in 2000. There have been ongoing discussions in the open source world about whether Theora is as good as H.264, but Montgomery doesn’t think this matters anymore. “We don’t want to play catch up,” he told me, “we want to be leapfrogging.” Having an advanced codec like VP8 available would finally make this possible.

This sentiment was echoed in a blog post published by the Open Video Alliance, which has been advocating HTML5 video with open codecs for some time. “This is excellent news from Google, Mozilla, and Opera, and will help catapult web video into the next generation,” the post reads.

Florian Mueller, founder of the European NoSoftwarePatents Campaign, was a little more skeptical: “While it appears to be a nice gesture if a major player releases software on open source terms, it’s imperative to perform a well-documented patent clearance,” he wrote us in an email. He mused that HTC being sued about Android shows Google might stand on the sidelines if developers get into trouble with video patent holders, and added: “We all know Steve Jobs’ recent email in which he said a patent pool was being assembled to go after open source codecs. So the patent question is really a critical one.”

However, Montgomery didn’t share this outlook. He acknowledged that Google and other companies supporting WebM are a much bigger target than Theora’s supporters have been, but said that patent litigation around open source video codecs isn’t any more likely after the announcement than it was before. He pointed to the fact that no one has ever tried to bring claims against Theora, but admitted that you can never say never. “Patents are like every teenager carrying a hand gun,” he told me.  Sooner or later, one of those guns could go off.

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Flash Co-creator and former Macromedia CTO Jonathan Gay is disappointed that the media is letting Steve Jobs trash Adobe’s Flash as a closed platform while Apple is at the same time advocating for H.264 and a closed app environment that doesn’t support and cross-platform development. Gay, who left Adobe in 2005, told Cold Hard Flash in a lengthy but very interesting interview (hat tip to Flashstreamworks) that Jobs’ attacks could be a sign for many partners and customers asking Apple to support Flash on its devices. He also said that Apple’s anti-Flash stance is not about openness at all. From the interview:

“Apple wants to displace Flash’s role in video delivery on the Web with the H.264 standard and Apple wants developers to build custom applications for the iPhone and not cross platform applications. Both of these goals support Apple’s business goals driving their closed iPhone application platform but are destructive to openness on the web.”

Apple isn’t the only one criticized by Gay. He also has some choice words for the MPEG LA consortium that’s overseeing the licensing of H.264. Macromedia didn’t have enough money to license H.264 in its early days, according to Gay, which is why they had to settle for a codec made by On2. Again, from the interview:

“The H.264 license fee model is very anticompetitive. H.264 licensing is free for very small users, expensive for medium size companies and inexpensive for very large companies.”

However, Gay is skeptical that Google’s plans to open-source its VP8 video codec will be able to fundamentally change this situation, cautioning that it may be impossible to build open-source codecs that don’t infringe on someone’s patents.

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All eyes are on San Francisco’s Moscone Center this week, where 4,000 developers will gather for Google’s I/O conference. The event was used last year to launch Google Wave.

It promises to put a lot of emphasis on the future of TV and online video this time around, as Google is expected to introduce its Google TV platform in cooperation with Intel and Sony as well as to open-source its VP8 codec.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini has been quoted as saying that Google TV promises to be the “biggest single change in television since it went (color),” and the Free Software Foundation predicted earlier this year that open-sourcing VP8 could kill Adobe’s Flash. In other words: It’s history in the making — at least for Google fans.

Unfortunately, Google I/O has been sold out since early March. However, you’ll be able to follow the fun through the keynote live stream available at YouTube.com/GoogleDevelopers.

Here’s the exact schedule of the keynotes:

• Day 1 Keynote: Wednesday, May 19, 9:00-10:30 a.m. PT
• Day 2 Keynote: Thursday, May 20, 8:30-10:00 a.m. PT

Don’t want to miss out on the feeling of sitting in an overcrowded room while watching these? Then you might want to check with your local Google Technology Users Group, many of which are organizing screenings of the live stream at Google offices and other appropriate places around the world.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ryan Holst.

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs has published an essay titled “thoughts on Flash” on the company’s website today, lashing out against Adobe and its “100% proprietary” products. Much of the missive is repeating well-known arguments in the feud between the two companies, but it’s worth noting that video is playing a central role in the piece, which is supposed to justify why Apple doesn’t allow Flash on its iPad and iPhone devices. Here’s a quick excerpt:

“Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.”

Jobs goes on to mention a number of video publishers ranging from YouTube to Netflix to Fox News who already support Flash-free video delivery for Apple’s devices, only to conclude that “iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.” He also bashes Adobe for not having been able to roll out Flash for mobile devices sooner.

One of the most curious arguments in Jobs’ article is that not using Flash helps to achieve longer battery life. Jobs argues that batteries last much longer if video decoding is supported by a device’s hardware. Again, from the article:

“The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.”

He goes on to argue that many devices have been optimized to decode H.264 video, and that Flash only recently started to support H.264, resulting in many still serving video with an older codec. Jobs doesn’t specify which sites he is talking about — big sites like YouTube and Facebook have been using Flash with H.264 for a while now — and he also doesn’t mention the fact that Apple only this month allowed Adobe to support hardware decoding for Flash under OS X 10.6.

However, it seems like this part of his rant is really written with someone else in mind: Google is going to open source its VP8 video codec at its Google I/O event next month, and Jobs just let them know that he won’t accept a new format without a fight.

Image courtesy of Flickr user jurvetson.

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Napster, Grokster, Kazaa, Morpheus, Torrentspy, Audiogalaxy: Hollywood and the music industry have forced countless file-sharing services out of business in the last decade, and major record labels have sued tens of thousands of individual file sharers in the U.S. alone. But go to a site like The Pirate Bay and you’ll find millions of users busy swapping practically every movie, TV show or song imaginable, even as music sales free-fall and DVDs follow suit.

More and more, entertainment industry insiders are seeking alternatives to lawsuits and legal threats, realizing it’s time to finally work with, instead of against, P2P network operators and their users.  Some of these initiatives are still in stealth mode, while others are emerging to establish entirely new ways to compensate rights holders. Here’s a look at three approaches I described in a recent article for GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Flat-fee Licensing:

This approach to monetizing music sharing is as simple as it is disruptive: Instead of regulating file sharing, the music industry wants to monetize it through small monthly fees paid by users. Two years ago, Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman hired digital music distribution pioneer Jim Griffin (who was a sharp critic of the industry when it started to go after P2P networks) to explore the idea of licensing P2P downloads through a flat fee that would let users legally download as many MP3s as desired. Griffin and his company, Choruss, approached universities early on to act as a test bed for flat-fee licensing and say they are looking at broader deployments later this fall. Though no school has publicly declared to be a Choruss partner, Griffin recently stated in an interview (subscription required) that half a dozen schools have signed on for field tests. The Isle of Man proposed a similar licensing scheme in early 2009, and Noank Media has been building tools to legalize music and video sharing in P2P environments as well. However to date, none of these projects has gone beyond the planning stages.

Ad-supported P2P:
LimeWire, one of the most established file-sharing clients, proposed a different type of monetization scheme two years ago: The company would show contextual text ads, similar to the ones popularized by Google, next to search results within its file-sharing client and split any revenue from those ads with rights holders. The system might, for example, display an ad for Gwen Stefani’s perfume next to search results for No Doubt tracks. Advertisers would pay only if a user clicked on the ad, and rights holders would receive around 40 percent of the revenue generated by that click. LimeWire is the first company to tackle advertising in a P2P context by using Adsense-like ads within a file-sharing client. Others have claimed to deliver ads over P2P networks before, but most of those efforts were little more than thinly disguised spam, and no other company has so far proposed to give rights holders a cut of its P2P ad revenue.

User Donations:

Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay has been known to make fun of rights holders in response to take-down requests, but one of the Bay’s founders recently launched a startup that explores yet another way for rights holders to monetize sharing of their works. Flattr, which launched in private beta earlier this year, offers users the ability to donate money to writers, musicians, filmmakers and other creatives. Rights holders list their works with Flattr and, in turn, receive a badge that looks very much like the button used by social news site Digg. They can then embed this badge onto their own sites and ask users to contribute with a click, just like they would vote on a post with a Digg button.

Choruss, Lime Engine and Flattr aren’t the only companies and projects looking to monetize file sharing, but are among those closest to deployment. The very fact that more than one solution exists represents a huge opportunity: Smaller and bigger rights holders alike can figure out which solutions work best for them, experiment with various approaches and possibly even combine multiple models to receive new revenue streams through a mix of donations, advertising and flat-fee licensing.

Entertainment industry executives have lost the war on file sharing, and it’s time to start to building a peace-time business. The tools are there.

Ever since we broke the news earlier this week that Google is going to open source its VP8 video codec at its Google i/O event next month, speculations have been abounded as to what this means for Ogg Theora, the video codec of choice of open source advocates and free software developers alike.

Theora is currently supported by the Mozilla foundation, whose Firefox browser utilizes the format instead of H.246 for HTML5 video playback, and the Wikimedia foundation, which is planing to use the codec for its upcoming Wikipedia video roll-out. However, Google and others have been skeptical of Theora. So is Google going to kill Ogg Theora by open sourcing a superior video codec?

Talk about Theora and VP8, and there’s no way to avoid a little lesson in video codec genealogy: Ogg Theora is based on an erstwhile proprietary video codec called VP3.2, which was developed by a little company called On2 Technologies. On2 introduced VP3.2 in August of 2000, originally with the idea in mind to optimize TV quality video broadcasts for users with as little bandwidth as 200kbps. On2 released a successor dubbed VP4 less than a year later and announced in August of 2001 to open source VP3.2. It took a little more back and forth between open source advocates and the company, but eventually, VP3.2 became Ogg Theora. On2 meanwhile continued to develop new codecs, reaching its 8th generation with VP8, which was announced in September of 2008.

Long story short: VP8 came out eight years after VP3.2, eight years in which much happened in the online video world. Consumers got increasingly faster broadband connections, video hosting sites moved towards HD, and codec developers figured out a whole lotta tricks to improve things like HD streaming. That’s why some have been concerned that Theora isn’t up to competing with H.264 for online video. One of the most prominent skeptics is Google’s Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona, who said last year that it would need “substantive codec improvements” before Theora could power a site like YouTube.

Others have been more optimistic about Theora. Wikipedia has started to host Theora files, and Wikimedia Foundation head of Communication Jay Walsh told me in January that the site plans a wider roll-out of video based on the format in the near future. I caught up with him this week to see how these plans are affected by Google open sourcing VP8, and he said that his organization would be open to host multiple open video formats, just as it is now supporting a number of patent-free image formats. “Ultimately this isn’t so much about switching formats as it is about making more options available for more web users”, he added.

Ben Moskowitz from the Open Video Alliance echoed this sentiment, proclaiming: “Theora is here to stay.” He added that Firefox and Chrome would likely support VP8 as well as Theora, but was also enthusiastic about VP8’s potential. “A royalty-free codec that’s indisputably superior to H.264 will be very disruptive,” Moskowitz said.

The most revealing answer I received about Theora’s future came however from Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, the founder of the Xiph.org Foundation, which is the driving force behind Theora. Montgomery told me that he couldn’t specifically comment on our article, only to state: “I think it’s important to repeat that we think open sourcing VP8 is a great thing, a big deal,
and we’re all for it.” And asked by someone on a Xiph.org mailing list whether the news meant “an end for Theora,” Montgomery replied: “Maybe. Unlikely.”

Montgomery is right. It’s unlikely that open sourcing VP8 is going to kill Theora. There will still be a small but dedicated community supporting the format, and there are going to be cases when it actually makes sense to use Theora and not VP8. What it will kill however, is the notion that Theora could one day become the standard of the HTML5 video web. For that, it would need to be a codec that’s superior to existing commercial solutions, and Theora just never was up to that challenge.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY SA) Flickr user llimllib.

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So you got your brand-spanking new iPad, and you’ve spent the last half hour rotating the screen, importing your media and playing with a few apps. Time to take a break and watch some web video. Problem is, not every site is ready for iPad use. Many are serving videos exclusively in Adobe Flash, a format Apple’s tablet can’t display. So where to turn for news, sports, TV and viral video fun?

No worries, the list of sites that do play videos on the iPad is growing every day. Here’s a quick run-down of some the most popular destinations, complete with a few words about the quality of the video viewing experience. Think of it as your personal guide to watching without having to install a single app.

Note: This list is all about web videos that play back in the iPad’s Safari browser. Many TV networks have chosen to make their videos available through native iPad apps instead. We’ll add a separate guide for iPad video apps soon, and will keep this list updated as more sites enable iPad support.

YouTube, Blip & Co. on the iPad

YouTube redirects iPad users to the touch screen version of its page, which is the same page you get to see on the iPod Touch, iPhone or on many other smart phones. Videos play as tiny stamps, or in full-screen mode. Users can elect to switch to the desktop version of YouTube, but any video featuring an ad (which seems to be most of the popular content nowadays) won’t play. YouTube serves up videos from PBS via HTML5 this way, but the UI looks broken. The verdict: Needs some work.

Blip.tv treats iPad users with a really nice-looking iPad front page, complete with video-friendly dark background, a number of video categories and a list featured videos of the day. Blip’s iPad video player features a clean half page of context info in portrait mode, almost full screen video in landscape mode, plus an option to go truly full screen. There’s currently no way to explore any context, click on any links or search for any video, so it’s not all that useful unless you want to browse Blip’s featured clips. The verdict: Too much eye-candy, not enough features.

Vimeo shows iPad users the same page you get to see on your desktop PC, and videos are playable both in context and full screen. The full-screen resolution looked good on clips we checked out. The verdict: Great overall experience.

Not quite there yet: Dailymotion.com and Veoh.com don’t offer any iPad-ready content yet.

Watching TV shows on the iPad

CBS.com has gone all out for the iPad and optimized its entire site for the device. Users can play clips as well as full episodes. Videos can be played in context or in full screen mode, and the video quality looks pretty crisp, even when watched in full-screen landscape mode. The only thing notably absent from the iPad version of CBS.com is HD video. Full-screen playback made our browser crash once, but that may well be an early iPad software bug. The verdict: Bookmark-worthy.

NBC.com redirects iPad users to its mobile site that features a few, low-res clips. The verdict: Only if you’re desperate.

Not quite there yet: Hulu.com, TV.com, ABC.com, Fox.com and Comedycentral.com (as well as its sites Dailyshow.com and Colbertnation.com) don’t have any web video content for iPad users.

Watching Sports on the iPad

ESPN.com forces users to make a choice between its mobile and its desktop page, without so much of giving a hint of what works better on the iPad. Go for the desktop version, and you’ll be greeted with a bunch of video content that plays back right in the page and looks fairly decent even in full-screen mode. Well, press conferences do anyway. Game scenes look pretty washed out. The verdict: Pretty good, but could use higher-res videos.

NHL.com offers up a bunch of iPad-ready hockey videos, which are integrated nicely into the site. Once again something you probably don’t want to watch in full-screen mode, but the clips look pretty crisp when watched in their original size. The verdict: Quite alright.

Not quite there yet: MLB.com has supposedly optimized its page for the iPad, but videos don’t play yet. Yahoo Sports also doesn’t have anything yet for iPad users.

Watching News on the iPad

CNN.com makes a number of its news clips available on the iPad. Notably absent is any live content, which CNN is serving via Flash and Octoshape’s peer-to-peer client on the desktop. The verdict: Okay, but you’ll go here for the articles.

Reuters.com was featured by Apple as one of its iPad-ready sites, but the site simply seems to serve up its mobile videos, which look pretty crappy in full-screen mode. The verdict: Don’t waste your time.

The New York Times serves up a few videos right on its front page. The integration into the page is nice, but the quality isn’t all that great, and the Times’ video page still requires a Flash player. The verdict: Could be better.

Using directories to find videos for the iPad

Mefeedia’s search page makes it possible to only search for HTML5 videos, which should play on your iPad in most cases. There’s no directory for iPad-compatible web videos yet. The verdict: Pretty useful.

Clicker.com has started to optimize its web video directory for iPad users. However, Clicker’s directory has always been fairly TV-centric, and most of the shows listed are only available to Netflix subscribers who have the iPad app installed. The verdict: Will become more useful as more content becomes available.

Also noteworthy: Related iPad Content from GigaOM Pro (subscription required)

Updated: YouTube just informed its partners via email that it’s going to roll out a complete redesign of its video pages later today, making some of the changes that the site has been experimenting with in recent months available to everyone. YouTube is calling this “one of the biggest redesigns in YouTube history,” and the company is scheduled to officially announce the changes later today.

The email sent to publishing partners highlights some of the changes, including a new “see more videos” area on top of the video currently playing, making it possible to load a horizontal grid of all the videos uploaded by the user in question. YouTube is utilizing Ajax for this feature, meaning that the user won’t have to reload the page to browse through additional videos while the current one is still playing.

The redesign will also put more emphasis on channel subscriptions and branding. YouTube has recently been experimenting with a number of other features as well, including auto-play functionality, a new playlist interface and an optimized queue, all of which could significantly increase the video traffic and completion rate for the site as users move from manually exploring videos to a more queue- and playlist-based experience.

It’s unclear, however, which of these features will actually make it into the redesign. We’ve reached out to YouTube for comment, but haven’t heard back. We’ll provide an update once YouTube has officially announced the changes. Update: A YouTube spokesperson declined to comment on this story and instead referred us to the official announcement scheduled for 11 a.m.

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