newteevee

Mark Cuban: Netflix's streaming success unsustainable

Sounds like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings can count Mark Cuban among his fans.

"Netflix has been brilliant at monetizing previously unmonetizable content," Cuban said this week. The founder of high-def cable station HDNet and owner of pro basketball's Dallas Mavericks, Cuban made the statements as part of a blogging debate he's engaged in with Newteevee reporter Janko Roettgers.

Cuban is skeptical that Netflix or any other Web video service are serious long-term challengers to cable companies. On Monday, Cuban wrote a blog post called "The Future of TV is TV." He was talking about … Read more

High-quality YouTube videos coming soon

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon. Although YouTube's goal, he said, is to make the site's vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer's Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it.

Why wouldn't they? Because the need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of … Read more

NewTeeVee Live Twittercast - YouTube's Steve Chen

Josh and I are at the NewTeeVee Live conference, learning about the future of television... mostly from people in Internet businesses.

Please note, I'm not going to Twitter everything that happens on stage here. I plan to spend more time circulating with the attendees, as I think that will be more interesting. Watch this space.

Update: The conference organizers just interviewed YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, who predicts YouTube on Mars in three years, or, failing that, a usage model where everything you do is recorded to your device, and then later you decide what to upload.

Click through to the story page for the Twittercast, and reload frequently for the latest updates.

Two ways to monetize video downloads

This morning, the NewTeeVee Live conference had a heavy emphasis on monetizing video: that is, advertising. I talked to two companies here that have different takes on producing revenue from downloaded video, as opposed to streaming video, like you get on YouTube.

The challenge with downloads is that if the viewer of the file is offline when he or she views it, or if the file is watched on a player that doesn't phone home, there's no easy way to get statistics or analytics on how an traffic for ad (or content) is doing. That's not a … Read more

AT&T president demos new TV apps

At the NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco today, AT&T Group President Ralph de la Vega gave a peek into projects from the AT&T lab.

The focus of all these demos was the interplay of the Net, mobility and television, what AT&T calls, "three-screen integration." The most compelling was a cellular-based videophone application where the video call could be transferred to a television. "Wouldn't you take that call? It's only 50 cents," de la Vega said.

Also in the labs: Multiple picture-in-picture, so you can watch multiple video … Read more

Conference overload! But in a good way

This week I'll be at two Bay Area Web 2.0-ish conferences run by friends.

First up, on Wednesday, November 14, NewTeeVee Live, a GigaOm production. This conference is about online video, which means it's really about the future of television. Webware readers in the area can get a 15 percent discount for conference admission.

Then on Thursday, November 15, I'll be at the Under the Radar: Mobility conference. As with other UTR events, it will be an orgy of startups. I'll be moderating two morning sessions. In the first, four mobile search companies will be … Read more

Trivialities: The New York NewTeeVee scene, Mark Cuban's budding dance career

On Monday night, just about everybody involved in online video in New York headed to a remotely located loft space in the post-industrial West Chelsea neighborhood for the Gotham edition of the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings, hosted by Valley blogebrity Om Malik of GigaOm and the rest of his blogger crew. Well, they weren't actually on a pier, but the event space had a great view of the Hudson, so we'll let that count. Spotted were folks from Mogulus, Vimeo, GroundReport, and a handful of well-known broadcast brands, as well as sponsors Metacafe, Next New Networks, and Blip.tv.… Read more

NewTeeVee will take Manhattan on Sept. 24

Many a Gotham geek was jealous of the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings, those outdoor short-film festivals hosted by the Om Malik-helmed new media blog--they were, at the time, restricted to the San Francisco Bay Area. But now NewTeeVee's coming east for a night of user-submitted short films on September 24, held at the XChange event space in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

The theme is "love stories," and NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes emphasized that while pornography is not allowed, the films submitted may encompass anything from lost lovers to favorite foods. There will, in addition, be popcorn and beer … Read more