Blinkx BBTV incorporates the web interactivity to TV and offers speech tracks
Video search company Blinkx has launched a P2P video service called BBTV , that promises “a new kind of online television: full-screen, TV-quality and truly immersed in the Internet. By fusing TV and other video with the Web, BBTV can link what you’re watching with relevant information on the Internet.” The service requires a small software download, free of charge.
Cory Bergman, columnist of LostRemote, writes this: “Sound familiar? Yes, just like Joost, which I watched a couple of times and then never returned. But BBTV has a couple cool features: First, you can click a button to get deeper information on something on-screen. Second, you can read and search a show’s transcript while it’s playing.” But they aren’t working properly.
Most of the content is already available online (or via TiVo, AppleTV, Media Center PC, etc), so why you download an application to watch it? People don’t watch platforms, they watch content. In terms of quality, Hulu has about the same quality. Here is again Cory Bergman: “I think a critical success factor for BBTV is to focus on a niche that would make sense for that feature set: documentaries, for example. (…) By building up an expansive library of documentaries that aren’t readily available online, BBTV would be a compelling experience.”
Like others in this increasingly crowded space, which includes Joost, Babelgum, VeohTV and HP-backed Next.TV, BBTV is a desktop application that user P2P connections to stream video content.
iTunes becomes No. 1 music retailer surpassing physical stores
iTunes has become the top music retailer in the United States, surpassing Wal-Mart. The store now sells more music than any retailer in any format. Since its launch in 2003, iTunes has sold 4 billion songs and now claims to have over 50 million customers.
Paid downloads accounted for almost 30 percent of all music sold in January, bringing even closer the day when the sale of digital music outpaces the physical product.
iTunes sits atop this list with 19 percent, Wal-Mart (brick-and-mortar stores and online) is second at 15 percent, with Best Buy third at 13 percent. Amazon is fourth at 6 percent, followed by physical stores and online services such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, and Rhapsody.
The BBC’s iPlayer on the UK’s iPhone version
The BBC had introduced an iPhone version of its iPlayer which allows people to download BBC programs or watch them over the Internet. But it is only available to residents of Britain. And only work on the iPhone when it is linked to a Wi-Fi connection, not a cellular network. (The BBC has contracted with The Cloud, a network of 7,500 Wi-Fi hotspots, to allow iPhone users to connect to the BBC sites free at its localion.)
Apple has built into iPhone’s Safari browser some video playback capabilities, but has not enabled the iPhone to play programs in the Flash format. (Google presents a subset of YouTube’s video library on the phone).
So the BBC has had to reformat its video into the Apple QuickTime version of standard h.264 video format. For reformatting video, the BBC has built a “transcoding farm” of 50 powerful computers that can convert 400 hours of programming a week into formats for PCs, streaming, set-top boxes and an increasing range of mobile devices.
The Web is becoming a video medium
Hear what Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal columnist, says : “The Web is becoming a video delivery medium in a big way”.
