joost

Forget social networking. The video bandwagon is rolling

July 13, 2007 By Dan Thornton

I’m beginning to think the fad for social networks is going to start to fade shortly. It’s reaching the mass market, and almost every niche is getting blanket coverage by a range of sites. Almost everything you can think of is being covered in one form or another…

To paraphrase from a film ‘ All the great themes have been turned into themeparks” (Bonus points if you can name the film)

But it seems as if the number of video start-ups and press coverage they are getting is growing close to social networking levels. Now that the implications of Googletube are rocking the foundations of the internet, it’s all about live streaming, peer-to-peer, showing your live webcams etc…

The latest one I’m watching is live TV on web and mobile, with ‘a quality image with no buffering or stopping’, from Skinkers. A potential Joost rival/killer:

“it offers the lure that viewers can “‘click’ on a TV advert exactly as they do on the web but while watching your existing TV channels”.

And, Skinkers says, that can all be done without the TV service having to change any of its existing business processes. A version of LiveStation for Macs is being developed.”

And it’s looking less fanciful when you realise it’s using Microsoft’s LiveStation…allowed as Microsoft owns 10 per cent of Skinkers.

Time to embace new media outlets?

February 21, 2007 By Dan Thornton

First Warner’s decided to sign up with Last.fm, and now Viacom has signed a content licensing deal with Joost.

Meanwhile the UK Government has rejected a ban on Digital Rights Management (DRM), but has acknowledged that DRM might infringe consumer rights.

And James Blacks’ internet TV experiment, www.ansathat.com is entering a new phase, with the findings that a $34 website could result in £30k ad revenue after just 50 days of existence. It also found a solid Google rating, and was approached by two organisations, including BT.
Meanwhile, the famed Ask A Ninja site is looking at $300,000 in a year, if it maintains its’ audience.

My favourite example, being male, has to be French Maid TV, which creates one-off sponsored episodes for around $50k, and also creates revenue by hosting clips on Revver

If you’ve got any kind of capture devices, whether it’s a webcam, or HDTV digital video camera, then if you’ve got any ideas for shows, it’s boom time. The question is how soon the bubble will burst for many of these shows, and how they will manage in the future. Will there be a number of net-only content channels spawned by ninjas and french maids, will they always be engaged in a popularity contest on Youtube and Revver, or will the big existing TV players look to be the arbiters of taste and popularity?

Next stop IPTV. But what have I been using?

January 25, 2007 By Dan Thornton

Currently the rising tide of IPTV has caught the imagination of most internet commentators. Indeed some misguided fools are labelling the concept ‘Web 3.0‘ in the same way as I describe going outside for a cigarette as having an ‘external conference’, or business analysts refer to sackings as ‘headcount reductions’.
Aside from the flawed concept of Web 2.0, and the even more flawed concept of ‘Web 3.0‘, there are interesting developments. The main hope appears to be Joost, with Bittorrent also in the running, and the likes of BT Vision etc.

Well, call me Marty McFly if you like, but I’ve been watching IPTV for over two years now, along with some of my colleagues, friends, and countless sports fans. In fact, I once manned a desk at a large public trade show, and watched an entire Premiership football match at the same time, thanks to the fast broadband connection. Want to join in? Go to almost any reasonably popular forum, and post a topic about wanting to watch any sports without having to subscribe to Pay-Per-View television.

Without fail, someone will mention PPLive. Although the menus are in Chinese, there are plenty of English language sites to explain how to select the channel you wish to view. And then you get streaming football, for example, sometimes with English commentaries. And at a reasonable qaulity, depending on your connection etc…

If you do want to keep up with the ‘Johnny-come-latelies’ of the internet television world, I’d recommend NewTeeVee from the GigaOm network. Part of the NewTeeVee round-up this week links to four potential P2P IPTV problems from Mark Cuban.

I’m off to fire up my Delorean.

IT could lead the revolution…

January 18, 2007 By Dan Thornton

In many companies, the IT dept are seen as the geeky blokes who come and fix your PC when it breaks, and maybe, those who monitor your emails and snaffle all your best gossip and naughty links…

But isn’t there a possibility that someone, somewhere, could make the decision to allow them to lead the changes needed in companies that haven’t been web aware?

Consider this… almost all the great internet brand names come, somewhere along the line, from fairly technical, or at least web savvy people being involved. From Microsoft through to Myspace, Picasa or Wikipedia, there was, at some point, a geek in a fairly prominent position in the company to make the technical side happen, and convey the enthusiasm of a new peer-to-peer TV service like Joost, for example.

In most ‘traditional’ companies, tech words are part of business lingo speak, and to be derided. Meanwhile anyone who can actually log into a site is seen as a tech geek.

Part of this is down to the fact that for most people, their PC is a locked down typewriter. Your email is monitored, downloads are blocked, and sites are banned. And this stops anyone with a vague interest in learning more from actually being able to do anything, unless they can afford a PC of their own, and want to devote their spare time to it. Meanwhile the IT people are seen as a barrier to innovation, and spend their time apologising for the fact you can’t download a new patch to save time, effort, and money in your day job…

So why not actually look to change? Why not encourage any appropriate person in the company to download new software, register to new sites, and actually experience the point of having a net connection in the first place? Even if it’s simply using an IM client to chat, it means somewhere is getting more knowledge about the possibilities out there, and might end up selling advertising, or come up with an entirely new variation.?

The only reasons I can see are the fears that everyone would spend all day mucking around (unlikely…in my opinion the novelty soon wears off. And most people probably wouldn’t be fussed, limiting the interest to those most suited for experimentation and learning), and the threat of internet trojans, viruses, and other malware. But surely it’s better to have an IT dept that is completely up-to-date and taking on those threats and beating them, rather than trying to simply avoid encountering problems. After all, every new business idea comes from identifying and tackling challenges and risks, and that’s what stops every man and his dog from having an idea like Google, or Ebay. And then IT will even be seen as a force for good.

And as an example of this irony, I’m lucky enough to have greater access on my PC currently. Yet I need to get an IT engineer to let me run an anti-virus scan… Genius.