Storing video content can be a pain. Next month Real Networks will release RealPlayer 11, which will greatly simplify storing, finding, forwarding, and sharing content. It will support downloads of Flash, QuickTime, Windows and Real clips, having a “Download This Video” button. Later this year, it will be offered the ability to save video to portable devices, including the iPod.

For $30, RealPlayer 11 Plus will support burning that file to a CD or DVD. The online video movement has been toward Flash. But Real will try pulling things out with its last upgrade. “For online video fans, the ability to capture, store and forward content is going to be transformative,” an analyst of Gartner said.

On the other hand, a Real executive said: “Unlike others, we are universal in our approach, supporting content in multiple formats. Consumer shouldn’t have to care or even know what format they’re watching a video in; they just want to experience the content.” “Think of it as like Tivo for the web,” added.


Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together

For the first time since 1983, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were together on the same stage at the same time. This meeting took place Wednesday night at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital Conference in Carlsbad, California. See the clip on YouTube.

The two tech pioneers showed they have more in common than many people might have thought.


CBS partners with video community sites

CBS has decided to partner with video distribution community sites and social application providers to allow users to share and embed video in various ways: Automatic, Clearspring, DAVE Networks, Goowy Media, meebo, MeeVee, Musestorm, Ning, RockYou!, Slide, VideoEgg, Voxant and vSocial.

“We are taking the CBS Audience Network directly to the user,” said its president. Video syndication with large sites will allow CBS to grow ad revenue, and it will build buzz and loyalty.

CBS has become the most widely distributed professional content provider on the Web.


Upgrading the video player to improve local reach

Local CBS sites have decided to upgrade their video player. They added new features like continuous play of clips, a rotating list of thumbnails, category listing, length of clip counter, a play button layered over the top, improved sharing functionality and a “pop out” player option that allows the user to watch clips in a pop-up player. Take a look at this sample.


CNN to launch redesigned site and online TV channel

CNN.com will launch soon its new design, with new features and functions. “Our goal is to make it easier to get more news in more ways than ever before. (…) Highlights include an immersive video experience and an integrated multimedia, storytelling model,” they say.

Among the new features: a bigger video player, improved weather section, local news section. In our view, this design is clean, simple, easy to navigate, and well organized. Video functionalities are better than CNN’s current site. Here’s the beta site with afeatures tour.



Microsoft unveiled table-shaped touch screen computer

Microsoft has unveiled last week its new technology product called Surface. It is tabletop computer 30-inch screen that responds to touch, and it identifies and downloads content from handheld devices and cell phones (both with Wi-Fii capabilities) placed on top of it.

You can watch video, manipulate photos, play games and surf the web. It will start working in November in Sheraton hotels, Harrah’s casinos, and T-Mobile stores, but the applications as an information kiosk and handle things like basic customer service are endless. It is a touch screen point-of-sale, under a hard-plastic tabletop that will cost between $5,000 and $10,000. It can rread bar codes and identification tags embeded in objects like hotel membership cards.

This “surface computer” is the result of Bill Gates’ view of a future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced by more natural interaction using voice, pen and touch.

\"We see this as a multibillion dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror,\" Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

Kukuxumusu.com, a well-known Spanish firm dedicated to printing its drawings on T-Shirts, will launch this month a branded broadband channel focused on San Fermin fiestas, www.sanfermin.com/tv. Amigot Corp, our New York City based company, has provided all the technology to empower the video platform.

Sanfermin.com/tv will broadcast 24 hours a day on the Internet, and it will do so in three languages: English, Spanish and Basque language. Videos will be able to play on demand, live, with exclusive playlist functionality, and selecting them from a 24h programming schedule.

This video platform is built up in Flash, and can be switched into Windows, depending on the clip format.

It will contain not only the latest sharing features of social networking (as embed player, url, email), but also new ones in the Internet landscape, as external customized feeds and mini-player to be posted anywhere.

Contents will be produced in high quality definition, and they will be able for download on the computer desktop, cell phones and iPod. Visualization will include full screen, standard and mini-mode.

User generated content tool is added, too.

To handle all the contents and features Kukuxumusu’s manager will use a state-of-the-art content manager, 100 % customized, which is created using hand-crafted Open Source software and advanced scripting.

The entire video application has been created by Amigot Corp. The platform has no other limits in terms of number of visitors and channels and sub channels line up, than the bandwidth available itself. This American corporation does guarantee the reliability of the software.

Sanfermin.com/tv is the result of a six moths project lead personally by Kukuxumusu founder Mikel Urmeneta and Amigot Corp’s CEO Michael Amigot. “Our aim is to provide entertainment and information about the fiestas in a very agile, direct and free of charge form,” Urmeneta says.

“Urmeneta and his staff have understood better than any other European company that now is the time to step forward using this new technology that is booming all over the world. We share the same vision about the next generation broadband TV platforms that will disrupt the traditional television model. Online video adverting is project to be $1.5 Billion market by 2009,” said Michael Amigot.

“I can say that SanFermin.com/TV is one off the most advanced and well designed video platforms in the world that combine the best of TV and the best the new Internet by offering a unique user-experience. We have put together more functionalities than any other video technology firm, delivering here a truly engaging broadband user experience. We are greatly thankful to Kukuxumusu firm for this opportunity” added.

Alongside this complimentary channel, a corporate channel called Kukuxumusu.tv (also produced by Amigot Corp) will begin to broadcast simultaneously and will also show some of the content of the San Fermin thematic channel.


LX will premiere real estate show with WNBC

Notice the success achieved by LX.tv, a New York broadband channel, which expanded to Los Angeles and is planning to establish itself also in Miami, Las Vegas and San Francisco, that now has partnered with WNBC, to premiere OpenHouse New York, a real state show that features real New Yorkers and their brokers buying and selling their homes.

LX.tv has become into a well-produced, luxury-lifestyle video site that spans food, nightlife, art, shopping, fashion, wellness, weekend escapes and family living.

In ESPN’s view, it is only a matter of time, and mobile technology upgrades, until phone watching is as common as phone calling. “People talk about cell phone as being the third screen, but I talk about it being the first screen because it’s the closest to you,” vice president for digital video and mobile products at ESPN says in the New York Times.

He believes that live events, especially sports events, will be popular on cell phones, and ESPN’s mobile content will become more important than its Web content. Certainly, there is no other medium that most people carry with them everywhere. At least to fill consumers’ empty moments is good.

Along with ESPN, other companies and news organizations like CBS, MTV, The Associated Press and Hears Corporation are investing in original cell phone content. Fox Network and Fox Studios are so fond of short cell phone videos that it has trademarked a term to describe them: mobisodes .

Some analysts speculate these days that the iPhone, announced for June 29, may reshape how people use their cell phone and increase demand for content on mobile phones.

But the mobile media model is far from proven. Only 44 percent of cell phone owners use data services like the Internet or video on their phones, and only 7 watch videos. Screen sizes, battery life and low resolutions are problems.

In our view, the cell phone could bee a substitute for the television when viewers are not near a set. And younger people use cell phones more than their parents do. In addition, people are more mobile than ever. They commute more, they travel more, they are out of the house, and they are going to want mobile content.


YouTube in Spanish and six more languages

Fortified with the financial resources of Google, YouTube announced that the site will be available in seven more languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Polish, French, and Dutch. YouTube will feature videos, ranking, searches and comments in each language.

In the Spanish version they will feature partners like the soccer team Real Madrid, among others.

YouTube already has a global audience, with more than half of its viewers outside of the United States.

In addition, the company’s engineers are testing new features , inviting people to send their feedback. One is called Remixer, and it allows remixing videos with text, audio, graphics, overlays, effects, and transitions. AudioSwap permits to replace the audio on the uploaded videos with officially licensed music. Streams allows chatting with others who are watching the same video. Active Sharing seeks showing other users what videos you’re watching.

More than 70 percent of Internet users streamed video online in March this year, according to the last data from comScore. The average length of a streamed video was 2.6 minutes. The explosion of the user-generated content, as popularized by YouTube, explains also the rise.


Traditional television going to go away, says Joost

“Traditional television as we know it is gradually going to go away,” Michalangelo Volpi, the new CEO of Joost, said. “Television is a massive market, and when you put it together with the Internet, and to be on the ground floor of that, there weren’t many opportunities to do something this big.”

In his first appearance in the Press, Volpi said that “Joost is a piece of software and it can reside on a variety of platforms. It could be on television set-top box. Or potentially it could be embedded in a TV set with an Ethernet connection, or on a mobile phone, or in some alternative device that might come out in the future. The flexibility is really high.”

Joost will remain in test mode for the rest of this year, growing around a million viewers, and then to open its doors more broadly next year.
In this time, the company will try some creative experiments, according to the New York Times. For example, after a 15-second commercial for toothpaste, a small graphic called an “ad bug” will float in the corner of the screen reminding users of the brand that was just advertised.


VeohTV launch new application to watch video on-demand or record it

Veoh has launched this week a new version of its download-to-your-PC desktop application. VeohTV lets you watch any video, not just on Veoh, but anywhere on the web, whether it’s on NBC.com, CBS, CNN, Fox, YouTube, or any other channels.

You can search for it and subscribe to shows and then save many of those video streams as downloads to watch later.


AT&T betting on IPTV

“Now wireless is the center of who we are. IPTV will be our next multibillion-dollar revenue stream. We’re working hard to have the largest video platform in the U.S.,” says AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson.

The long-awaited Apple iPhone has arrived, complete with a version of OS X, push e-mail, Internet browsing, a 2-megapixel camera, a high-resolution, 3.5-inch display, $500 - $600 priced. Too much hype...but wait a minute what happens if you try to use as a mobile video device?

Well, the web browser can\'t handle Flash or Java, which deprives you of millions of Web videos. The camera can\'t capture video, and you can\'t send picture messages or MMS to other cell phones. You can\'t install new programs from anyone but Apple; other companies can create only iPhone-tailored mini-programs on the Web.

So what does it lack? Flash, Java, stored passwords, RSS, and streaming audio or video (except for some QuickTime videos).


Microsoft encourages telcos to use its IPTV software

Microsoft is making a new push to turn its IPTV software into the standard opening it up as a development platform for companies that want to create interactive TV apps. The company has rebranded its software as Microsoft Mediaroom. This is considered an early first step towards bringing together the PC and TV environments, and trying to create a killer TV experience.

Microsoft has encouraged its 18 telco customers around the world –like AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, British Telecom, Telefonica, TOL France and Portugal Telecom- to add Microsoft.

Delivering video over private networks

IPTV is the way most telephone companies hope to provide TV service over fiber or DSL lines to compete with cable and satellite TV providers. IPTV uses Internet protocols, but is not delivered over public Internet. IPTV has very little to do with the Internet. It is delivered over a telco’s own network. With IPTV, telcos can offer a broad array of both premium and niche channels, high-definition video, multiple picture-in-picture views, a built-in digital video recorder, no delays when flipping through channels, and added features like caller ID on your TV screen. It combines the image quality of broadcast television with the two-way connectedness of things like YouTube and BitTorrent.

Many experts consider that 2007 will mark the beginning of an IPTV boom. With IPTV, telcos will be able to offer hundred of channels of TV over their existing telephone wires or fiber lines. (Fiber is obviously better, but it costs about $1,000 to link up each new home with fiber, versus about $350 for an advanced copper technology). Personal video channels could also be part of the mix, with viewers being able to upload their own video from whatever device they like. Other scenario as sharing a TV show with another IPTV subscriber will be possible as well. A drawback of the IPTV is that is not truly on-demand: it is still scheduled because of legal and licensing issues, so people will need DVRs.


MySpaceTV, a new destination in a bid to take on YouTube

MySpaceTV.com is the new video destination of MySpace, launched in a bid to take on YouTube. MySpaceTV.com claims that it integrated video more seamlessly with social networking and it features more appealing video, more professional video. Focusing primarily on professional and original content, MySpaceTV hopes to attract advertisers who are concerned about associating with user-generated fare.


Slate launches its online video magazine

Slate.com has launched SlateV.com, a companion video site to its magazine, powered by Brightcove. It combines original features hosted by Slate writers with some user created components.

SlateV.com will cover politics, the arts, science, business, among other topics. They also will have a section called Did You See This?, where they will post their picks for the best short videos from around the Web.


Site collects huge list of video resources

Online video world is becoming so huge that it’s proving hard to keep track. A website, Mashable has put together an exhaustive list of applications and websites centered on video, from sharing sites to video mixers, mashups, hosting, converters… More that 150 sites in this category. There are many tools really unknown.


GodTube for Christians

Check out GodTube, a Christian version of YouTube which according the founders, “utilizes Web based technology to connect Christians for the purpose of encouraging and advancing the Gospel worldwide.”