Web TV / IPTV / DTV

Some friends from the London Tuttle Club are broadcasting live from the Greenbelt festival this weekend on mobile phones using Qik to test this sort of technology. (Tuttle is becoming quite a hotbed for digital multimedia types, what with another bunch going to Cannes for Seesmic, and Phreadz' founder Kosso a regular among many other luminaries - and there's us of course, but we build back end stuff you never see . Anyway, here's the live feed at the moment:



It's not hard to see this will be the way that all sorts of events not currently televised will potentially be broadcast live. I recall some years ago watching the BBC R&D guys experiment with this sort of system in embryo - 3 am-cams and a mixing van gives a pretty pro result. Broadband 'net didn't exist then, but the rest of the technology did - except now its much smaller and cheaper.

Erik Huggers, Director BBC FM&T wrote this on the BBC blog today:

I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web. These technologies have matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions.

The advantage for the audience will be a noticeable improvement in audio and video quality. Furthermore, it should become easier for the media to simply work across a broader range of devices. While it's not a magic bullet, it certainly is a significant step in the right direction. The first service to make content available using these open standards based codecs will be iPlayer.

As Erik notes, he was heavily involved in driving Microsoft services previously, so this is an interesting personal shift as well as a new direction for the BBC.

The BBC is already a heavy user of open source in its system stacks, so in some ways its just carrying on an existing trajectory. Also, it will be very interesting for open source multimedia overall. It is very rare to have a large not-for-profit with the technical skills of the BBC, so it is probably one of the few very large new media organisations on the planet that can afford (both technically and contractually) the commercial risks of open source operation.

The other issue is, though the open standards are open, there is a lot of disagreement, and details to be ironed out (Dave & I chaired the Open Source MPEG forum at IBC 2 years ago, the panel - comprised of all the contributors - was not what one could call united) but a user of this size - with its skill from R&D through to running one of the planet's largest internet multimedia content houses - will play a core part of driving open source / standards we suspect.

Exciting times..... a lot of people will be watching very closely to see what they can make work.

Sat down this evening to have a good play with Phreadz, a video based social network (think Twitter with Video) now that its ourt of alfalfa mode and into closed beetroot mode. I've looked at Seesmic and Qik before, which are in the same space, but - in my opinion - Phreadz is easier to use than Seesmic, and more flexible than Qik as it takes mobile media in and also a whole lot of other input. It takes media from a huge range of sources - live webcams, most media file types (audio, photo, video) , Youtube, Seesmic and Qik of course, Blip.tv, and Slideshare. It also takes mobile input via a Phreadz email address, but I didn't have time to test that.

I gave it a fairly non-trivial use case - taking input from a camcorder via a laptop (a standard mobile mediahead config) and allowing it to be used as:

- webcam,
- live camcorder
- stored media file playout device

In addition I tried it out with a Slideshare presentation.

You can see the camcorder as videocamera taking a video of the Phreadz screen in the embedded file below:



Net net it performed very well - I had no problems getting it to take the camcorder - it just saw it and started to record from it. Ditto an uploaded Youtube video, a saved piece of my video, and real time feed from the camcorder-as-webcam and camcorder-as-TV camera. Ditto Slideshare.

The dynamics of using it as a social network were also fairly simple and intuitive - replying to comments, following friends, navigating the menus etc. Its very quick as well.

Next steps - I'm going to give it 3 more things to deal with:

- a composite media file that I pre-mix
- a mobile video upload
- an audio / slideshare composite media

As I noted the first time I looked at Seesmic, I'm not convinced about VideoTwittering - but this platform can do so many other things. Its quite interesting - after an evening playing, there are quite a number of other things I can imagine doing with it. As with Twitter, the unified comms nature and extreme simplicity lend themselves to high adaptability

There are two stories about the Rocketboom / Sony deal in the feedreader tonight. One is this from TechCrunch:

Rocketboom, the daily video blog, is turning over its distribution and ad sales to Sony Pictures Television in return for a seven-figure guarantee plus a share of revenues. Rocketboom will be distributed on Sony’s Crackle video site, as well as across other Sony platforms such as the PS3, PSP, and Bravia I-Link TVs.

Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron says he went with Sony because of Sony’s distribution strengths and the deal allows him to maintain control of the business. (Whereas selling the business to another media buyer, such as WallStrip did to CBS a year ago for $5 million, would have required him to give up his baby). The deal is structured as a distribution and advertising deal, and sounds like it could lead to a closer relationship or outright sale if things go well. But if they don’t, Rocketboom would regain complete control of distribution and ad sales after the contract expires.

And then there is the Valleywag story:

...it's the tale of Andrew Baron's Rocketboom, an online-video startup held up, inexplicably, as an example of the potential of the medium. Sony's seven-figure deal to distribute Rocketboom is seen by some as evidence that the industry is growing up. But what it really tells us is that having access to a credit line backed by Daddy is as sure a recipe for success online as it was in the old Hollywood. The exciting plot twist: Baron's father was not always happy about the arrangement. We've only learned how daddy-dependent Rocketboom was because Fred Baron loaned his son's company a total of $810,300.40, and then took it to court in order to force repayment last year. If you think it's strange for a father to go after his own son's company in court, then you don't know the elder Baron.

Apparently, Amanda Congdon (ex RB anchor) is suing to get her mitts on the former but intervened to mitigate the latter...it gets better and better! I can imagine a new Web TV startup using this as a plot for a Webcom.....

Brought to you in the interests of balanced reporting (and a love of salacious stuff.....) . Don't you love the New Olde Media

I recall a few years ago, we were doing a piece of work on re-engineering the "VoD" market (nowadays it would be called VoD 2.0 I guess). Anyway, it quickly became clear that having everybody buy a PVR was economically nuts, compared to centralizing it as a VoD type service.

The reason this was not done was commercial risk - any organisation that was recording the service for its customers was liable for legal action, never mind the opprobrium that the Ad industry would heap on them.

So I read today in the NYT that the law has been overturned, you now can run a PVR webservice.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York said Monday that the so-called network DVR, which records programs on a faraway computer rather than on the device itself, does not violate copyright law.

The ruling, a turning point in a two-year legal battle, represented a major victory for Cablevision, which wants to offer network DVR services through its existing set-top boxes. It also dealt a significant blow to the media companies that had sued to stop the technology, which include Turner Broadcasting and the major TV networks.

Expect appeals all the way to the floor of the Oval office though, it will clearly be a time for lobbyists to earn their lunch money.

One the thing that has changed in the time since we did the work is that PVR penetration has moved from c 5% to c 25% of US homes, maybe that made the incumbent's arguments harder to justify. This should drive it far higher - 50%+ over 3 years we would estimate roughly.

An interesting thing to watch is what will companies do about Ad skipping - the whole interactive, online advertising industry has come up from near-zero since when we looked at this the last time, so there are quite a lot of interesting potential opportunities......which will be needed, because as ell as recording shows, PVR's are still used as Ad-Avoidance devices.