Drop, charge, and lose the cordsImmediately following the Friday night broadcast of MTVU's alternative-music awards show, the Woodie Awards, viewers will be able to watch a 360-degree video of it online.
The Immersive Media technology supporting the online video, scheduled for online availability at 8 p.m. PST, is designed to enable users to freely navigate around a video, 360 degrees, letting them explore angles and shots that they wouldn't normally have been able to see.
While I haven't seen the Woodie feed yet, I did have a chance to play around with the technology on some test videos. The video experience seems perfectly suited for a concert format. It's certainly something worth checking out, even if you don't particularly care for the music, which is scheduled to include performances by Death Cab for Cutie, The Dead Weather, Matt and Kim, and Passion Pit.
This is the first big event for the IM Live technology, so it should be interesting to see how the experience of the fully produced show on TV compares to the IM Live video experience, in which site visitors essentially become their own producers. If you end up making your own comparisons, let us know what you think.
As one of its weekly new features for Hulu for the Holidays, the company has rolled out new advanced search functionality. Hulu's blog notes that the new feature is part of an ongoing effort to improve in the area of search. This is going to be crucial for Hulu moving forward as users have more and more videos to sift through in their ever growing catalog.
This new advanced search allows users to filter their searches by fields like show title, season number, video type, network, air date, and people. This really helps you to narrow down a search if you have a specific video in mind that you want to track down.
When Hulu first launched, search wasn't as big of an issue since the library of videos that they offered was relatively small and easy to browse through. However, as the site has grown larger, it has become more difficult to find what you are looking for. By taking steps such as launching advanced search and debuting support for search operators back in April, it is clear that Hulu is making an effort to correct that problem.
Hulu has debuted a long-requested feature--the ability to find out when new episodes of TV shows will be available to stream.
The video site, which is a joint venture of NBC, ABC, and Fox, calls the new feature Coming Soon. It went live Monday.
Hulu's new Coming Soon feature.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman)The schedule of when TV shows will be released online has been unclear up until this point, leaving people guessing when an episode will be posted. This new feature solves that problem.
The update includes a few additional features. First, people can choose to get an e-mail reminding them when an episode gets posted. This is definitely helpful for those of us who are forgetful and don't use Hulu's excellent Queue feature. Also, Hulu now lets you place the embed code for an unreleased episode on your blog or Web site. I embedded this week's upcoming episode of "The Office" below to show how this feature looks.
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This weekend, starting Friday at 10:30 a.m. PDT, Hulu will be live-streaming the Austin City Limits music festival. Hulu will be using its Watch Now application on Facebook, which has a live events box integrated so that users can discuss the concert as they watch.
(Credit:
Hulu)
You can see the schedule of acts on the Facebook application page for the live-stream. Unfortunately, the stream features only a fraction of the acts that are playing the festival. In fact, some of the biggest acts, including Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dave Matthews Band, and Pearl Jam are missing from the live-stream lineup. Luckily, we still get to check out some great acts like Thievery Corporation, The Decemberists, Ben Harper, and The Dead Weather. There's no real indication of how the selection was made and I'm certainly grateful that we are getting a stream at all, but I can't help but wish that the full compliment of acts would be available for streaming.
Goin' back to Philly.
(Credit: FX)The absurdly offensive "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" makes its season-five premiere Thursday amid a hard social media push by the FX network.
In addition to the standard features (meet the cast, wallpapers, episode guide), FX has included Twitter integration, exclusive video clips, and an awesome trailer mash-up creator.
To collect the buzz around the premiere, its Twitter page is gathering all the tweets with the hashtag #sunnyfx. There seems to be a decent amount of activity there, but it should really pick up as viewers rush to Twitter to offer their thoughts on the first episode.
The creators (and stars) of the show have also flocked to Twitter, maintaining their own accounts: Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, and Danny DeVito.
By far, the coolest thing the site features is the trailer mash-up creator. Built on GorillaSpot's video editing platform, the mash-up creator features signature clips from all the seasons of "Sunny." You can splice these clips together, with music and titles to make your own season-five trailer. From there, you can post it to a variety of social-media sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Blogger. You can also get the embed code, which lets you place your creation anywhere. The trailer I created is included at the end of this post.
I love to see companies doing really innovative things on the Web with their marketing campaigns. Here, FX went above and beyond what's expected and created an engaging experience for fans and potential viewers.
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Brightcove is one of the leaders in the digital distribution of video content. They have landed such big customers as Showtime, Fox, Sony, AOL, and The New York Times. Starting today, Brightcove is going to make it easy for their customers to create branded channels for Boxee, the killer media center app whose popularity has been snowballing. The flagship customer for this partnership is Condé Naste Digital, who will be serving up its content in its own Boxee channel.
I think that this will be a great partnership for these two companies for a couple of reasons. First, while Boxee already has a lot of great content, it was in need of a simpler way for publishers to create content for its channels. With this new partnership, Boxee can just point publishers to Brightcove to create their own channels. Brightcove also benefits here due to the new customers that they will get, who are trying to take advantage of Boxee publishing, thus growing their business even further.
This new feature allows content publishers a great distribution channel for their content, while still being able to control advertising and monitor analytics. By making the Boxee channel creation process more accessible to more people, I think that we should see a surge of new content for the service in the coming months and year.
Back when I initially reviewed Mefeedia in March of last year, I wrote that the site was killer but that it was really lacking in the design department. It took them a while, but Mefeedia has finally rolled out a satisfactory redesign that has a decidedly "Web 2.0 feel." Mefeedia pulls video from all over the Web, from sources such as Hulu, Blip, ABC, and YouTube.
Yeah, the guy in the $4,000 suit is going to look all over the Internet for videos. Come on!
(Credit: Mefeedia)Since Web video is such a segmented market right now, with many networks having their own sites in addition to the wealth of user-generated sites, sites like Mefeedia offer real value in indexing all of these videos, making them searchable. With this new redesign, Mefeedia is becoming an even stronger competitor in this space.
Boxee, one of the more promising media applications out there today, is announcing the launch of a few new content sources today at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Boxee now has added support for content from Joost and MTV Music. Joost is bringing its usual assortment of video content to the table, while MTV provides a huge amount of music videos. In the United Kingdom, Boxee has also added the BBC's popular iPlayer to its arsenal of content.
In addition, Boxee will be totally opening up its Mac, Linux, and Apple TV alphas to anyone who wants to sign up. The Windows version, however, will not be entering an open alpha, but rather an invite-only alpha while it scales.
Boxee, for those of you who don't know, is a media application that can act as a player for content on your computer or, where it really shines, as a conduit for viewing Web video from a variety of sources. Video sites that currently have a plug-in on Boxee include Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CNN, Apple Movie Trailers, Revision3, CBS, Comedy Central, and more.
Boxee really does a great job of handling all of these different sources of content and presenting them in an easy-to-navigate way. In addition to these video sources, Boxee also integrates music sites such as CBS' Last.fm and Shoutcast. (Editors' note: CBS publishes CNET News.)
As you can see, there's a lot to be excited about here.
After its excellent implementation of Netflix instant streaming, people have been begging Microsoft to bring Hulu and other video sites to the Xbox. Boxee is beating Microsoft to the punch, even offering a Netflix implementation that is more full-featured than the Xbox's.
If Boxee can find a way to get its software off of computer monitors and on to more TVs (as it is doing with Apple TV), I think we could be looking at the next big contender in media software.
Men in Black playing on Joost's new iPhone app.
If ever there was a Web service that experienced a rapid fall from grace, it was online video start-up Joost. What started out as a much anticipated new service ultimately fell short of expectations and has recently struggled for attention. Friday, Joost released an iPhone app for its service that might be a game changer. Joost's iPhone app lets users stream and watch any of Joost's 46,000-plus videos for free.
Say what you will about Joost's library of content, the concept behind this app is fantastic. The ability to stream a movie, TV show, or other piece of video content on the go is great. I know the technology is nothing revolutionary--after all the iPhone has had a YouTube app, complete with streaming video, since the device launched. Even given that, when you load up Men in Black on Joost, it just feels like a whole different ballgame. This isn't a video of a dog on a skateboard anymore. This is real, Hollywood-produced content, delivered to your phone, for free.
I have not experienced the major hiccups that very early users, like MG Siegler did, so those issues seem to have been taken care of. I did notice some occassional stuttering of the stream over Wi-Fi. I am, however, disheartened by the lack of streaming support over EDGE or 3G. Joost requires a Wi-Fi connection to work.
Even though Joost appears to have a really slick UI (in many ways it does), it breaks some of the conventions for UI design set forth by Apple. Flicking to view the next page of search results does work. However, it does not slide over as you would expect, rather a spinning wheel is displayed while the next page loads. Joost also did not implement the incremental find that we have all grown accustomed to for searching.
For me, Joost's iPhone app falls just short of greatness. I really like what they are going for here, but I would certainly like to see more content added to Joost's library and support for 3G at the very least, if not EDGE. Even though the videos appear to choke at times, even over Wi-Fi, 3G should be more than capable of streaming video.
I hope that Hulu and Netflix, with their expansive content libraries, are paying attention to what Joost is doing because they are both prime candidates for this sort of mobile application. I get excited just thinking about having access to all of those videos (almost) anytime I want.
Update:
Netflix is calling this a "soft launch" since it is only rolling out such a small number of videos for HD streaming. The move mostly serves to stake a claim in the HD streaming market as opposed to being a full offering.
Contrary to what others are reporting, HD streaming will be available on all streaming devices eventually. That means the Roku, LG, and Samsung boxes will all be able to stream these HD movies movies at some point after the feature is available on the Xbox 360. The PC- and Mac-based versions of Netflix, will not, however, be able to stream HD immediately. In addition, streaming in HD will require a large amount of bandwidth. Netflix estimates the requirement being in the 8-10 Mbps range.
We already knew that Netflix streaming was going to be included in Microsoft's "New Xbox Experience," launching for the Xbox 360 on November 19, but Netflix had a little surprise in store for us today. In addition to its catalog of over 12,000 titles that will be available for near-DVD quality streaming, Netflix will stream 300 titles in HD to the Xbox 360.
This is the beginning of the dream that we talked about when Netflix gave its subscribers unlimited watching time, back in January. Even though 300 titles is a very small portion of Netflix's entire catalog, at some point, we can assume that Netflix will offer most of its catalog for streaming at some point and even further down the road, most of its catalog in HD. While browser-based streaming is great, with great set-top boxes, like the $100 Roku and now the Xbox 360, Netflix is slowly but surely invading living rooms across the country and making it easier to stream its content.
In order to take advantage of Netflix streaming on the Xbox 360, you must be an Xbox Live Gold member. Again, Netflix HD streaming will go live on the New Xbox Experience, which launches on November 19.
