According to a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday, Viacom is expected to announce a licensing deal with Joost, a new Internet service that specializes in commercial video content. You can get some background information from my previous posts.
The collapse of talks between Viacom and YouTube/Google just few weeks ago had resulted in 100,000 video clips been removed from the popular video site. What are the tricks that Joost has put in place to win the trust from Viacom? The answer is simple - Joost is designed for commercial video content from day one.
Joost makes it possible to distribute streams of video to its users using P2P technology. There is no central server involved in the process. Each user plays a role in distributing real time video streams just like BitTorrent.
There is no Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection applied on the content. Each user only gets a fragment of the content and it is not saved on the disk to make up the whole video watchable offline.
The pressure on Google to institute more aggressive copyright protections and policies is growing.
A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 newspapers that complained the Google’s “cached” links offered free access to chargeable contents. The court ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites.
Google faces a fine of 1,000 euros a day if it does not remove the copyright violated contents within 24 hours once it has been told in the future.
The media companies have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with Google in the past months. These media companies have established sales channels that are more lucrative than putting their contents online. Two incidents stand out.
1. News Corp. has subpoenaed YouTube for the identity of users who uploaded full episodes of Twentieth Century Fox’s prime-time series 24 before they even debuted on television. YouTube gave up the identities, according to a Fox statement last week.
Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the founders of Skype, are set to launch a global broadband television service in 2007, promising viewers, content owners, advertisers the best of the internet coupled with the best of TV. The project is The Venice Project.
The project is a type of IPTV where a digital television service is delivered using the Internet Protocol over a network infrastructure. The advantages of IPTV include interactive and personalized service, video-on-demand (VOD) and convergence of ICT services.
Traditionally, there are two main hurdles for IPTV - bandwidth and content protection. Friis and Zennstrom believe they have pretty good answer to these problems.
IPTV is very sensitive to packet loss and delays. The bandwidth demand for IPTV is a huge leap as compared to VOIP. On average, Skype only uses 3-16 kbps while IPTV starts with hundreds of kbps. However, Friis believes that the bandwidth available to the general household has reached a point where IPTV is ready for the prime time.
Continue reading ‘Skype Founders to Capitalize on Online Video’
64% of U.S. Internet Users Watch Videos Online
1 Comment Published October 25th, 2006 in Technology.
comScore Media Metrix, a leader in digital media measurement, has released its August rankings of the top U.S. streaming video properties last Thursday.
The report shows the U.S streaming audience has steadily increased each month to reach 110.3 million. About 64 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience is streaming audience (or streamer) now.
In August, 6.98 billion video streams were initiated by U.S. Internet users. The average U.S. streamer consumed 63.3 streams during August, or approximately 2 streams per day. Streamers at Fox Interactive showed the highest levels of video consumption per person at 35.5 streams per streamer, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.6 streams per streamer) and YouTube (19.4 streams per streamer).
Continue reading ‘64% of U.S. Internet Users Watch Videos Online’
The decision for Google to acquire YouTube is largely undisclosed. However, we can still get a sneak peek of the milestones that YouTube has gone through to generate 1.65 billion dollars.
The popularity of Google Video over YouTube remained until the beginning of the second quarter of 2006 according to Google Trends. The news references in the media that increased dramatically in the first quarter help to push YouTube traffic to a series of record highs.
Continue reading ‘YouTube: 6 Critical Steps to Generate $1.65b’