The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘livestream’

Before livestreaming video networks like Justin.TV can become attractive to advertisers, they need to deal with their piracy issues. It’s the same thing YouTube had to go through, except with live video streams. Like YouTube, Justin.tv complies with DMCA takedown notices and is developing digital fingerprinting technology to identify copyrighted video on its network automatically. It also invites copyright owners to police the site directly.

Despite these measures, a casual perusal of the most popular streams on Justin.tv is filled with pirated streams of professional sports, TV shows, and movies. Right now, for instance, you can watch King of Queens or CNN International, taken straight from TV. The company finds itself increasingly under fire for copyright issues. To help it deal with these issues, Justin.tv now has a new adviser, Eric Goldman, the director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clare University and a highly-respected Internet law blogger. Unlike Justin.TV’s very-expensive lawyers at Wilson Sonsini, Goldman will be less constrained in speaking publicly on behalf of the company about these issues.

Goldman is an expert on how copyright law is applied to user-generated content. But in many ways live video on the Web is a new beast. It is hard for even a vigilant copyright holder to deliver a takedown notice if the video is only live on the Web for an hour. Competitor Livestream takes a “Zero Tolerance Policy” on piracy and challenges its competitors to do the same. Livestream does pretty much the same things Justin.tv does to fight piracy, with one major exception: it limits new channels to 50 concurrent viewers until the channel is authorized manually as a legitimate channel. Should Justin.tv do the same thing? Goldman dismisses Livestream’s zero tolerance policy as somewhat of a marketing pitch, but he thinks the concept of limiting a user’s “ability to put up content until they are proven trustworthy” is worth exploring.

CEO Michael Seibel notes that Livestream can do that because it is pursuing more of an enterprise strategy than a consumer-driven one. He also notes: “We work with the copyright owners. If copyright owners were not happy with us, they would be suing our pants off.” So far, Justin.TV has not been sued in the U.S., while competitor Ustream cannot say the same. Seibel sounds sincere when he tells me, “I don’t want that content on my site.” He really believes he can make money off the pure user-generated video, which costs him one third of a penny for every hour streamed, versus the half-a-penny per hour he can make just on remnant ads.

But if Justin.tv is really serious about cleaning up the pirated streams on it network, why not simply police itself and strip the most questionable content from at least the most popular channels to start? In the bizarro world of created by the DMCA, legally it can’t. Under the DMCA, the responsibility for finding copyright violations lies with the copyright holders. The second that a site starts to take on that responsibility itself, it risks losing the protection of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision. So Justin.TV can give copyright holders the tools to remove content from the site, but can’t do it themselves.

When SXSW sets up its festival, you have to assume they want the best and most engaging keynotes possible. If the public reaction to Umair Haque’s interview of Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is any indication, they failed. Badly.

I wish I could take credit for the title here, but it is all Mike Monteiro, appropriately, by way of Twitter. Below, find a sampling of some of the other best tweets about the keynote. As someone who was in the audience, all seem pretty accurate.

Williams had some news to announce during the talk too. Sadly, he got that out of the way in the first two minutes and then it was completely overshadowed by the mass exodus of the crowd and the humorous tweets as the interview went on.

Update: Ev Williams just tweeted out that he’s heard the talk about the interview and is willing to answer 10 questions over Twitter. Send away.

Live video streaming on the Web is finally going mainstream. Livestream, the NYC-based live video streaming startup, just landed a one-year partnership with the Associated Press to power all of the AP’s live video streams on the Web. The first event to be streamed live under the new deal will be video from the red carpet at the Oscars this Sunday.

The video will be hosted by Livestream at APLive, where viewers can log in to chat with their Twitter or Facebook IDs. It will also be available on Facebook, where viewers will have to become a fan of APLive in order to watch. (APLive only has 1,271 fans right now).

The Oscars will be the first of many live video events Livestream will power for the AP. Under the deal, Livestream and the AP split revenues associated with the APLive video. Revenues can come from licensing (AP-affiliated publishers can embed the video on their news sites) or advertising (partners can embed the video for free with the APLive branding, which comes with pre-roll plus overlay ads sold by the AP and Livestream jointly). Consumers and fans can embed the APLIve player for free on their blogs or Facebook pages as long as less than 500 people watch concurrently from any one page.

Livestream is seeing significant growth in live video viewership overall. In February, it streamed 1.1 billion unique viewer minutes, compared to 650 million last August (or nearly double in six months). CEO Max Hoat says Livestream is showing videos to 17.5 million people a month across its embedded player network, with 3 million of those on its own Website. Other partners include ESPN, NPR, Fox, Scripps, and National Geographic. Its biggest competitor, Ustream, is also growing rapidly and just closed a massive funding round.

Will this be the year live video on the Web goes legit? Livestream recently issued a public challenge to its competitors to do more to fight piracy on their networks. It is clearly gunning for mainstream, and media company, acceptance.

The idea was a way to show people the best food in Japan beyond sushi — to literally show them, in picture form. Then the thought morphed into writing to a book, where the best food in the world was shown. But that’s a lot of travel for one person. So the thought became, why not crowdsource it? That’s Foodspotting.

Foodspotting is an application that allows you to take picture of a food, say what it is, and pin it (with geolocation) to the restaurant where you got it. You may wonder who would use such an app — but just think for a second about how many of your friends on Twitter tweet out pictures of food. People have been doing this long before Foodspotting, this app just gives them more of an incentive to do so, and let’s them organize it.

It’s also one hell of a new food discovery tool. And that’s exactly why the team behind it, Alexa Andrzejewski and Ted Grubb, hustled to get the official iPhone app done in time for the SXSW festival, which starts next week in Austin, Texas. With it, you’ll be able to use the “Guides” to easily find (and contribute to) the best foods in Austin. The Foodspotting team put together a few of these guides (including a scavenger hunt, and a street food one), but other users have already created others as well.

From these guides, you can easily mark which foods you “want” to bookmark them for later. You can also note which foods you’ve already eaten (“nommed”). Of course, you can also use the app to search for a particular food or restaurant. Or simply scroll through the pictures on the main screen to see a stream of food (which can be sorted by “latest,” “nearest,” “best,” etc). And yes, you can use a map view to see the food too.

When you yourself spot a food, you can tweet it out to your followers. Or, thanks to Foursquare’s relatively new API, you can also check-in to a venue simply by foodspotting (yes, the service hopes the name becomes a common verb).

It’s one of the most interesting location-based plays that will be on display at SXSW — a conference that will be rife with location-based services. But Foodspotting is a bit different because they’re not aiming to be a location platform like Foursquare or Gowalla. Instead, they’re happy to use location to augment their own reality-based game. That is, after all, essentially what Foodspotting is. Just like with the other two aforementioned location services, you earn some badges for tagging certain types of foods in pictures (they called them “Expert Badges”). And you earn others for participating in the Guides. And, of course, there are points for doing all of this.

While the “lite” version of the app has been available in the App Store for a few months, the team has done little to promote it, waiting instead until the full version, which launches today in the App Store. Still, the lite version (and the very nice-looking website) proved that there’s a demand for this service. Already, Foodspotting has seen over 15,000 foodspottings. Top cities include San Francisco, New York, and Honolulu.

So how do you make money off of this idea? That’s a question the Foodspotting team has had to answer a lot recently, as they’re currently in the process of raising a seed round of funding. The natural idea is to become popular enough that restaurants and brands want to partner with the service to promote themselves. ”It’s kind of like pumping a scent out of your bakery window to draw people in,” Andrzejewski says. Already, the service is teaming up with 7

CrunchGear had its own booth at a CES event this year and of course we streamed all the interviews live. East Coasters may have missed out due to the late schedule though. So here they are for a second time. Daniel Brusilovsky started out the panel with a demo of mSpot video streaming Android app.

But we go on to take a look Sticker, Shapeways, a Geek Not Needed router, the L5 iPhone remote, v.Clone Iomega software, Blue Microphones, Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. mouse, LowJack computer software, an HP CTO, PocketCPR, Pogoplug and finish up two hours of interviewing with a look at the Gunman iPhone game.

Forgive all the shuffling. We did this via Livestream, after all. Click through for all the interviews and general CrunchGear hijinks.

Israeli startup Siano Mobile Silicon, a developer of mobile digital TV receiver chips, has just raised a $23.5 million in funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners, DFJ Tamir Fishman, Star Ventures, Walden Israel, and Bessemer Venture Partners. This brings the startup’s total funding to $75.5 million.

Founded in late 2004, Siano develops and markets silicon semiconductor chips for reception of digital TV on mobile, portable and hand-held devices. The company’s chips are mainly used for the implementation of mobile TV in emerging markets such as China, Brazil and Europe. The company supplies its chips to Samsung, Motorola, ZTE, Huawei, Mio, Garmin, Dell and others. The new funding will be used for product development and market expansion.

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Universal Music Group is partnering with new ad-sponsored digital music download service FreeAllMusic.com to let anyone download music from the record label’s artists, which include Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Jay Sean.

Via Free All Music’s platform, thousands of tracks will be offered at a rate of 20 free downloads per month, five per week, starting every Tuesday. The recently launched FreeAllMusic.com, which appears to be in private beta, lets users access downloadable, high-quality, iPod-compatible MP3s of advertiser-paid, free, legal, and unrestricted song. The catch: users watch a video commercial per download on the site, Users’ music selections and sponsoring brands are then promoted externally through an opt-in, digital advertising network.

To download a free track, users can select a participating brand and then need to watch a video advertisement from that brand. Brands who are participating in the initial launch are Coca-Cola, Warner Bros, Zappos, Lionsgate, LG, and others.

Universal Music has long been a little trigger-happy on the lawsuits against music and video sharing services (MySpace, Veoh and its investors, Grouper / Bolt.com, etc.), so its interesting that the startup has been able to bring on the record label. With the ad-supported downloads, FreeAllMusic may have found a way around the music label’s onerous fees. According to a New York Times article from December, FreeAllMusic has already signed on another record label but declined to name the new label.

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Epix, the movie and entertainment streaming network that works across your TV, computer, and mobile phone, has officially landed a second cable provider for its service: Cox Communications. We wrote about the service here and here. Cox was rumored to be in negotiations with EPIX in December. SAI was tipped on the deal over the weekend but the official announcement of the partnership was made today by the two companies.

Jointly backed by Viacom, Lionsgate, and MGM, EPIX provides access to over 15,000 movie titles. The company originally signed a deal with Verizon FIOS, which was somewhat limiting considering only some 2 million people use Verizon’s cable service. Cox brings more clients to EPIX with its base of 6.2 million customers, which including 2.7 million digital cable subscribers. EPIX will brings its programming to Cox customers starting in April 2010. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

One of our main issues with EPIX was that it was tied to Verizon FIOS but it appears that the company is steadily adding more cable providers to distribute its service. Epix was also said to be close to an agreement with the Dish Network, which would bring a large list of 14 million subscribers. Unfortunately, the platform offers a sliver of available movies out there, since it only includes only the movies available through the studios that are backing the company. But EPIX is useful because it transcends over the TV and your computer and its fairly easy to use.

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Check out the live stream, Devin is interviewing the creator of the Gran Turismo series. He’s photorealistc, and I hear that he’ll show damage just like a real person in this version!

Go here to see the original:
We’re live with the creator of Gran Tursimo

John is down at the Palm press conference, and we’ll be going live in just a few minutes. Keep your eyes open, we’ll see what they might have up their collective sleeves

Go here to read the rest:
We’ll be live with Palm in about 5 minutes