Still reeling from DivX shutting down its Stage6 online video site? Vreel is here to help. Or it will be soon anyway. Vreel, or the Stage6 clone formerly known as DivXit, is preparing to launch a new online video sharing site featuring a high definition video player like the one formerly used at Stage6. Of course, we heard the same promises almost 2 months ago when Vreel was first announced. But now the team behind the site have released a super-short promotional video that seems to indicate that... well, not much really.
The How To Geek, on the other hand, has a more in-depth look at the new service and an interview with the site's founder. The new site uses the DivX Web Player and a decent looking site navigation. One nice feature is a pop-out button that lets you watch videos in a separate browser window.
Vreel is currently in private beta and accepting beta testers, with a full launch to follow once a few bugs have been worked out, including problems with files uploaded that don't have a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio.
Warner Brothers is broadening its online video strategy. The company recently launched a private beta version of a web site featuring WB television programs from years gone by including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, and Friends. There's also a smattering of original content. Now the WB has announced plans to spread the video love through a series of partnerships.
The WB will be launching two web sites, TheWB.com and KidsWB.com. You'll be able to watch videos on those two sites, but the WB will also be distributing content via DailyMotion, Joost, Sling Media, TiVo, and Veoh Networks.
The whole thing actually sounds an awful lot like Hulu, a similar venture started by Fox and NBC. While you can watch videos at Hulu.com, you can also find Hulu content at other online video portals like AOL Video or MSN Video. The WB already distributes a handful of shows through Hulu, but nowhere near the number you'll be able to find at the new web sites.
Honestly, it would have been kind of awesome if the WB had partnered with Hulu so you could find most of the content you were looking for at a single site instead of visiting yet another page to find a video. Fortunately, some of these partners, including Veoh will have partnerships with both Hulu and the WB, which means you may be able to find a one-stop shop. It just won't be managed by Hulu, Fox, NBC, or the WB.
TidalTV is the latest company attempting to demonstrate that online video doesn't have to look like YouTube. While Joost takes online video away from the web browser, and Hulu embeds high quality network video on a web page, TidalTV has taken another approach by creating a web service that looks an awful lot like an old fashioned TV interface.
When you first visit the TidalTV page, you'll see an electronic program guide with a schedule of currently playing and upcoming shows. In the corner you'll see a video box. You can click the video to enlarge it, or you can flip channels by scanning through the program guide.
If you don't feel like waiting until 2pm for a show to start, you can just click on it. While TidalTV does have a "live TV" feel, all videos are available on demand. You can also click the on demand tab to browse for programs.
TidalTV doesn't have as much content as NBC and Fox-backed Hulu, but the site does have several content partnerships in place which means that you might actually find something worth watching. So far, partners include CBS, National Geographic, DIY network, HGTV, The AP, NBC News, MSNBC, The Weather Channel, The WSJ, and TV Guide.
It might be time to give up your cable box (If you live in the US anyway). Two of the most popular shows on Comedy Central are coming to Hulu. Sure, you could already watch full length episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report at the Comedy Central web site, but we're big fans of one-stop shops around here. And as of today, you can find these programs along with episodes of The Office, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, and Starsky & Hutch all in one place. What more could you need?
While Hulu started out as a partnership between Fox and NBC, the company has been steadily adding content partners over the last few months. While CBS, ABC and the CW are nowhere to be seen, you can find some popular TV shows and movies from networks including Sony, MGM, and Warner Brothers.
Hulu will also be adding PBS content later this month, with shows including Nova, Carrier, Scientific American Frontiers, and Wired Science.
Some online video sites like Hulu have gotten a lot of flack for being unavailable outside of the US. But you know what? It's expensive to stream video over the internet. And it's even more expensive to secure the right to stream copyrighted works internationally. It's also much easier to sign advertising deals in some countries than others, which helps justify the streaming costs.
So how do other online video sites like Veoh pay for worldwide video streaming? It turns out they don't. This weekend a number of Veoh users around the world started reporting on Wikipedia that access was blocked in their countries. And today NewTeeVee confirmed that Veoh has turns off service for all but 33 countries.
Veoh says it's maintaining service in the countries where it has the most viewers, and that only 10 percent of its audience comes from the countries that are experiencing service cuts. The company reportedly is not running out of money, but is trying to focus ont he countries where it has the best chances of actually making money. Again, this all makes perfect sence. But it still stinks if you live in Venezuela, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Romania, Thailand, South Africa, or any of the other countries where Veoh is reportedly no longer available.
Any time a copyright holder asks Google to remove a YouTube video, a funny thing happens: Google complies. But the company also adds a bit of metadata to let you know why the video has been pulled down. YouTomb is a site that scans YouTube for that metadata and shows you a list of recently removed videos.
You can't actually watch any videos on YouTomb. But you can find out who asked for them to be removed. You can also check out the site's stats page to see which copyright holders have requested the most takedowns. Currently TV Tokyo, Viacom, Warner Brothers, WWE, and NBC are near the top of the list. When we checked, YouTomb said it was monitoring 223280 videos, and had identified 4396 videos that had been removed for alleged copyright violations and 13363 videos that had been removed for other reasons.
Much to everyone's amazement, Hulu doesn't suck. Seriously. When Fox and NBC first announced plans to get into the online video streaming business, a lot of commenters spent a lot of time talking about how silly it would be to take on YouTube. And then Hulu started showing full length movies and TV shows with minimal advertisements. The video quality is fairly good, and the content library includes things you might actually want to watch. Now, just two months after publicly launching, Hulu reports that:
The site has served up more than 63 million video streams
The average Hulu user watches 2 hours of Hulu video each month
Hulu is now the top network video site
Hulu has also launched a distribution deal with TV.com today, and plans to start streaming video through TVGuide.com, Break.com, Zap2it, BuddyTV, Flixter, and MyYearbook in the next few weeks.
Now for the bad news. Hulu is still completely unavailable to anyone outside of the US.
Google Video, MSN Video, Truveo -- they're all great if you're looking for search engines for free and legal videos to watch online. But OVGuide can find any video those site can find, plus a ton of copyright-infringing videos uploaded to some of the internet's shadier video sharing sites.
OVGuide indexes online video sites ranging from Hulu and YouTube to TV-Links, Sidereel and SurfTheChannel. The layout is a bit busy, to say the least. But if a video's online, odds are you'll find it. You can browse a category list, navigate a tag cloud, or use the search bar which looks for videos on dozens of sites. If you know a site that isn't indexed, you can suggest a link for inclusion.
While OVGuide looks like lawsuit bait, the service doesn't host any videos itself. It simply provides links -- lots of links -- to sites that do host videos, whether they know it or not.
Online video site Hulu has gotten a lot of good press over the last few months for actually offering up full-length TV shows and movies that you might actually want to watch. There are hundreds of episodes of popular TV shows from networks like Fox and NBC, and movies from partners including Fox, Universal, and MGM. There's just one problem, you can only stream these videos if you live in the US.
That's partially because Hulu only has content licensing and agreements to distribute the content in the US. For the most part, anyone outside of the US who has tried visiting Hulu has gotten an error message. But Emily Turrettini of WatchingTV Online reports that Hulu has finally taken the remarkable step of posting a message that explains why the service is inaccessible and stating that Hulu hopes to go online abroad soon.
There's also an option to signup for email notification as soon as Hulu goes online in your region.
Adobe has officially launched its Adobe Media Player application which has been in public beta since last year. Adobe Media Player is a desktop application built on Adobe AIR that lets users watch streaming and downloaded web videos from content partners including CBS, PBS, MTV, Revision3, and Blip.tv.
The interface is slick, and it's clear that Adobe has put a lot of work into the media player since its beta days. Playback is no longer choppy and the content library is choc full of shows you might actually want to watch. Not as full as say, your cable box, but given the web video landscape, it's not bad.
Users can also add any online video to their player with an RSS feed. It took us a few minutes to find the "Add RSS" option, so we'll save you some trouble: It's in the "My Favorites" section.
Adobe has also launched Adobe TV, which is basically a web site filled with tutorials and other information about Adobe related products. You can either watch Adobe TV videos from the web or using Adobe Media Player.
Joost appears to be scaling back its game plan a bit. The Sunday Times reports that the online video platform will focus entirely on distributing content in the US, where it has the largest audience. Up until now, Joost has provided videos globally, although the content you were able to watch was determined by your country of residence.
The company was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype. The goal was to give users a standalone application for viewing high quality videos over a peer to peer network, rather than spending all day squinting at YouTube style videos embedded in web pages. But while Joost has managed to sign a few major content partners like CBS and Viacom, you can generally find more up to date content from Hulu or the BBC iPlayer.
Joost is also hardly the only name in the game these days. The company faces competition (if you can call it that) from other online video services including Babelgum, Vuze, VeohTV, and Miro. But there's still one major question that needs to be answered: Does anybody actually use any of these services on a regular basis to watch videos, or are they the sort of programs you download once to check out and then maybe remember to launch every few weeks to see if there's anything new?
Do you actually care if Joost shuts down in the UK and other markets? Would it matter to you if they closed up shop in the US too? Let us know in the comments.
Because the world didn't already have enough internet TV applications bringing you B-list movies and video podcasts, online video site Blinkx has entered the fray. Blinkx Broadband TV has all the usual bells and whistles including the ability to stream high quality video from the internet, watch in fullscreen, and browse through a list of "channels" with independent films, comedy clips, movie trailers, and the like. In other words, good luck finding any content you've actually heard of.
The one thing that sets Blinkx BBTV apart from the competition is that it incorporates Blinkx's speech recognition technology. While this feature isn't available in every video, when you click on the little dialog button in the toolbar in certain videos, you'll get a list of lines spoken in the film. Click on a line of dialog and you'll automatically jump to that point.
The application also features IMDB integration. What that means is you can pull up the information window on selected videos, and click on actors, directors, genres, and other information to bring up their IMDB pages in an in-application browser window.
Is Blinkx BBTV a Joost killer? Honestly, if anyone is a Joost killer these days, it's Joost. The company started out with a lot of buzz, but hasn't managed to sign the content partnerships necessary to keep viewers coming back. While Blinkx BBTV and many similar services present a nice tool for watching internet video, it's still not clear if there's a huge market for internet video that isn't watched in a browser or downloaded to a portable device.
Over the past few days a number of folks have been noticing a new "watch this video in higher quality" message popping up below selected YouTube videos. Now, "higher quality" does not mean HD. The aspect ratio of these videos remains the same, but if you've got a fast internet connection, clicking this button will display a video encoded at a higher bitrate, which means it will likely look a whole lot sharper.
The eagle-eyed folks at CyberNet noticed there's also a new option in the YouTube account settings that should keep you from ever having to click the "higher quality" button. Just navigate to your account settings, and under the Account heading you should see an section labeled "Video Playback Quality."
In other YouTube-related news, TiVo today announced plans to add a YouTube video section to its set top box software later this year. The software update will be available for TiVo HD and TiVo Series3 units only, which is probably because older TiVo models don't have the hardware to decode H.264 video. Now, if you've ever tried watching YouTube videos on a high definition TV, you know that most videos look like crap when you blow them up on a big screen. So hopefully a larger percentage of YouTube videos will be available in higher quality by the time the TiVo service launches.
One of the moves that has made YouTube successful is the ability to embed YouTube videos on any site. Now YouTube is going a few steps further and giving web developers tools that will let users upload and edit YouTube videos from any web page.
What that means is you can essentially build a web page that lets visitors upload videos of kittens and puppies doing cute things, send video responses to one another, edit their video metadata, and never ever have to click through to YouTube, even though all of the transcoding and file hosting is taking place on a Google server.
Web developers can also customize the look and feel of the YouTube video player using a new Javascript API.
Online video site Hulu emerges from private beta tomorrow. Of course, we'll forgive you if you didn't realize the service was in private beta. The site has given away thousands of invites, and users can easily embed videos on other sites, which has led to a cottage industry of Hulu cloning.
Over the past month, Hulu says its videos have been streamed over 5 million times, either from Hulu.com or from other sites, including Hulu clones and content partners like AOL and MSN.
When Hulu launched, it was basically a content distribution outlet for NBC and FOX. For the past few months,. Hulu has been busy signing additional content partnership deals, and tomorrow Hulu will add content from Warner Brothers, Lionsgate, and a whole slew of other networks and studios including sports content from the NBA and NHL.
All the content is professionally produced. Hulu ain't no YouTube clone, it's a place to watch full length movies and TV shows complete with 15 and 30 second advertisements. We've been checking it out during the private beta, and we've been pretty happy with the selection and video quality. We'd be a bit happier if Hulu would make entire seasons of TV programs available instead of just a few episodes at a time. But that would probably eat into DVD sales.
