Seth Gilbert, 08-23-2007
Over the years, Sony’s sometimes made it easy to question their strategies and management. Whether it’s been missteps with trying to market proprietary technology (Betamax, Memory Stick) or betting heavily on the future at the expense of the present (PS3 platform), the technology giant has made bold, and sometimes bad, decisions. One thing is clear, however, Sony’s ambitions are huge; especially when it comes to our living rooms. Sony wants to be a hub in the wheel of connected entertainment. And that’s never been more clear than today.
In Europe, Sony has unveiled a Playstation peripheral that is both TV Tuner and Digital Video Recorder. The device, called Play-TV brings an added set of features to the already powerful platform. Click to Read More
Seth Gilbert, 08-22-2007
Borrowing a page from IPTV company Joost, YouTube is embracing interactive overlay advertising as a way to monetize their popular video portal.
Beginning today, Google will display the semi transparent, interactive ads on the bottom of select user-generated videos hosted on the YouTube site. The ads will reportedly occupy no more than the bottom 20 percent of the screen. They will appear after a fifteen second delay and disappear after a ten second presentation (unless the viewer engages the ad with a mouse click).
Unlike pre-roll ads, a competing ad format which holds a viewer hostage before the desired content is played, overlays are a relatively unobtrusive solution aimed at minimizing the negative impact on the user experience.
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Seth Gilbert,
Eight figure funding rounds for net video companies are starting to become frighteningly familiar. Joining Joost, Brightcove, and Veoh, Palo Alto based Metacafe has become the latest winner of the high-valuation funding lottery.
It was announced today that the company closed a $30m 3rd Round of financing. The deal was led by Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures. Previous investors Accel and Benchmark also participated (Accel has also invested in Brightcove). The cumulative investment in the video portal now exceeds $50m. Click to Read More
Seth Gilbert,
Adobe’s Flash has been the defacto standard for web video clips. It’s proponents range from major networks to YouTube. They’re all attracted to its relative ease of implementation. It’s ubiquity is attractive to. The Flash player is browser based and resident on well upward of 90% of desktop computers. Flash is also widely used and well represented with portables and hand-held devices.
Where Flash has struggled (if you can characterize a market leader as struggling) are issues related to speed and image quality. Small competitors like Move Networks have been able to find opportunity with big clients (Discovery Communications and ABC) by selling against those weaknesses. They push a higher quality video that plays with less pre-load time and buffering; desirable features for full length television shows and features. (Streaming video content plays while simultaneously downloading the rest of the video. The time cushion between what is playing and what is downloading still is often called “buffer time”)
Tuesday, Adobe quietly addressed one of the weaknesses with an offering code-named Moviestar. Click to Read More
Seth Gilbert, 08-21-2007
For all the hype, the battle to define a next generation DVD standard hasn’t yet been winning hearts and minds. Ask an average consumer “Bluray or HD DVD?” and most will give an indifferent sigh or a puzzled “huh?” There’s no urgency to buy absent a single unified standard.
Only about 3million high definition discs have sold so far (both formats combined). In contrast, standard definition DVD’s sell about a billion units in the U.S. every year.
Those facts haven’t stopped technology giants, and their competing camps, from raging an all out marketing war for the future. In one corner there’s Sony, inventor, tech giant and proud father of yet another proprietary technology: BluRay. They’re hoping BluRay will win, and not join Betamax and the Memory Stick in their archives of “Close but not quite.” On the other side, there’s Toshiba and its partners championing their less expensive, evolutionary solution.
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Seth Gilbert, 08-20-2007
Will the next Simpson’s or Family Guy find its start online? A small Israeli startup called Aniboom hopes so.
The company, which was founded a year ago and has raised about $4.5m in financing, thinks it can be an ideal venue for connecting animators and producers, and provide a forum in which new ideas can be test marketed.
If Aniboom were described as a Hollywood pitch, the kind of mashup of past hits that goes like “a cross between Princess Bride and Die Hard”, the tagline might be “YouTube meets Talent Agent.”
So far more than 2500 animators from around the globe are using the site.
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Seth Gilbert,
While the theories of technology convergence lend themselves toward the marriage of the set-top box and the TV, the stand alone TV peripheral isn’t ready to go away. Just the opposite, from Apple TV to efforts from Cisco and Motorola to Tivo, the set-top box continues to try and reinvent itself as its own model for a convergence device.
Entering the fray with a Hollywood caliber entrance (in the form of a substantial new financing) is Building B, a year old company founded by former semiconductor entrepreneur and Harvard professor Buno Pati and Chaired by Phil Wise, the former CTO of Sony of America.
Building B hasn’t gone far beyond cryptic descriptions and buzzwords in public description of their stealth startup and in-development hardware but they have convinced investors there’s substance behind their speech. In a first round, just closed, the company has secured $17.5m
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