New networks develop ways of communicating with niche audiences
Next New Networks, a New York-based start-up dedicated to micro-networks, has received $8 million in seed capital to begin a series of video-oriented Web sites on niche topics like do-it-yourself fashion, comic books, car racings and cartoons. This company, run and backed by former executives of MTV and Nickelodeon, is focusing on niche video combining its own programming with external contributions.
Now they have six Web sites, including Fast Lane Daily, which features a daily news program for auto enthusiasts, and ThreadBanger, which offers a five-minute weekly show with MTV-style anchors who discuss the homemade-clothing culture. Also they have Channel Frederator, a weekly program on animation, and VOD Cars , a collection of video clips from the car culture. Some experts consider that Next New Networks is challenging the idea that the chaotic terrain of sites like YouTube and MySpace can be a friendly place for advertisers.
Though it is beginning with just six Web sites, Next New Networks, with 13 employees, plans to begin or acquire 30 new shows in the next two years, each serving a specific hobbyist community. If the business flourishes, the plan is to expand to 100 programs in five years.
What will happen after Viacom’s $1 billion copyright lawsuit against YouTube?
Google’s YouTube was slapped with its first major copyright lawsuit. After demanding YouTube remove its clips on February 2nd, Viacom filed last week a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube. The suit alleges that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
The statement released by Viacom says: “YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden - and high cost - of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.”
Viacom’s $1 billion suit is a wake-up call for user video sites a test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides a safe harbor against copyright liability if online service providers promptly remove copyrighted material when asked to do so. What will happen when users continue to upload copyrighted material faster than the site can remove it? Viacom alleges that the takedown orders and removals and resubmissions of content provide a lag time that YouTube is profiting on. Without filtering technology Google has a real legal challenge on its hands.
Hoping to become the Google of audio and video
A Silicon Valley start-up called Divvio.com hopes to become “the Google of audio and video”, and for that its technology searches several multimedia sites (YouTube, Grouper, iFilm, Google Video, etc.) and brings them into its own player. Divvio, which doesn’t own or license any content, has a Web-crawling in a beta test version.
This company, with 12 employees, is trying to set itself apart from Blinkx, Joost, MyWaves, Podshow and Truve, which aggregate different types of multimedia content from YouTube, MTV, ESPN, National Public Radio and thousand of other outlets. For that, Divvio offers a platform for letting users create profiles and rank content. Software monitors user behavior and rankings, and then recommends additional content..
TMZ.com will feature politicians and media in D.C.
TMZ.com, one of the most popular entertainment site on the Internet, will launch a spinoff site in DC called TMZDE and focused on lawmakers, administration officials and media personalities instead of Hollywood stars.
TMZ.com, which is now part of AOL Entertainment, grew out of a canceled TV show and became a success online due to sort of guerrilla approach to video –freelances equipped with mini-DV cams joining the paparazzi on streets of Hollywook- and freshly updated blog braking entertainment stories.
Flash Media Encoder for live broadcasting
Adobe has announced the release of Flash Media Encoder, a free Windows desktop program to streaming live using On2’s VP6 codec in combination with Flash Media Server or the Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS). However, any live Flash on the web had to be encoded using the Sorenson Spark code.
