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With the start of the fall television season, a great deal of attention is focused on traditional media companies’ online efforts.  Who’s streaming what.  Premiers being aired online before television.  Much of the discussion is centered on the television networks and their experimentation with video distribution strategies and platforms.   In the cacophony of all this noise, Disney, despite being the parent of a major network (ABC), has managed to stay relatively unnoticed.  Disney’s efforts are worth calling out.

Over this past year, Disney has launched a handful of online content and gaming communities. They’ve redesigned some of their existing properties. They’ve even bolstered their portfolio with the purchase of popular children’s destination, Club Penguin.   The combined efforts are paying off.

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Beta Tests in software development used to be sandboxes for limited 3rd party testing. That was before Web 2.0, before Internet based services and features became the new face of the software industry.  Now, increasingly Beta has become an ambiguous term. 

Today, Beta’s often start out limited, as invitation-only tests, but they morph into full fledged, publicly accessible services.  Beta has become code for “we may still change it” and “it may still break when you use it.”  It’s  a disclaimer for anything goes.  Company’s like Google have stuck the label on their services for years.  It’s no longer a clear marker, nor a clear meaning.

At Google, Larry Page, has said, “If it’s on there for five years because we think we’re going to make major changes for five years, that’s fine. It’s really a messaging and branding thing."

So, Beta doesn’t mean much as a word anymore. That doesn’t mean there aren’t notable milestones.  The transition from invitation-only to public access is a good one.  When a software product is officially unleashed on the world, it’s crossed a bridge.  Joost, the Internet peer to peer video service, passed that marker this weekend. Click to Read More

Friday, place-shifting TV technology company Sling Media announced a deal to stream NFL games to DirecTV customers. The move away from consumer hardware and software and into business to business services came as a surprise.  Even more surprising is Sling’s Monday evening announcement.  The company announced it will sell itself to DirecTV competitor Echostar (operating of Dish Network) for approximately $380m.

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Download a movie from any download service and chances are, you can’t burn it onto a DVD, at least one that will play on any machine (e.g. your home DVD player).  It’s a matter of copyright protection.  Store bought DVDs are encrypted with what is essentially a digital padlock called a Content Scrambling System (CSS).  Your home DVD player was manufactured with the keys.  Your computer, similarly equipped to unlocking the file when it comes to playing a movie, doesn’t have the tools to make a lock of its own.   That may soon change.

Thursday, the DVD Copyright Control Association (DVDCCA), a trade association that oversees these issues, agreed for the first time to begin licensing the encryption technology to consumer device makers.  Click to Read More

More and more well funded startups seem to be aimed at creating portals for internet video.  Brightcove, one of the best capitalized of video centric startups, is going the other way and distancing themselves.   While the company has been running their own video site for the past year, today it was reported they are shifting internal resources to instead focus on greater development of their technology platform and distribution services.  Their video portal, which has been up for a year,  will remain at Brightcove.TV as “something that runs itself” said Brightcove VP of marketing Adam Berrey but the company is “not trying to become the next YouTube.”   The companies priorities are elsewhere.

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Sometimes there is greater value in the sum of a company’s parts, other times, breaking things up just leads to confusion and lost value (or lost customers).  Fearing the latter to be the case with their web strategy, MTV Networks is regrouping some of their slate of websites into a new consolidated property.

In a tip of the hat to the rapid growth of Spike TV, the new site will be called Spike.com.  It will be home to the former Spike TV website along with video site iFilm. Some content from gaming site GameTrailers and Xfire will also move over though those properties will retain their own URL’s.

The new site will target the same audiences in the 18-34 age group as they did when operated individually but as a consolidated effort, and with audience overlap erased, the company hopes they’ll now be better positioned for ad sales.  (And single ad team should mean lower cost overhead too) Click to Read More

In late July, just as HBO’s ThisJustIn video channel was getting canceled, another Internet video studio and distribution channel was coming online in Hollywood.  Rob Barnett, a former exec at CBS radio who also did time at  MTV and VH1, launched MyDamnChannel with creative assistance from entertainment industry veterans Don Was, Harry Shearer and David Wain.  (A detailed Metue profile of the original launch can be found here)

From the start, like Vuguru and 60 Frames Entertainment, the company’s aim was to create original professional quality content for syndication around the net.  Unlike those competitors, their plans included the launch of a distribution site of  their own.  Taking a multi-pronged approach, MyDamnChannel syndicated their videos on a YouTube channel and  also provided embed codes to allow viewers to link or include the videos on their own sites while they were actively looking for syndication partnerships.  Now, a little more than a month later, they’ve found their second partner in a deal with MySpace.

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