Can anyone beat the iPhone?
“The global market for smartphones based on open source platforms including Android will reach 100 million units in three years”. That is the claim made by Panasonic’s director of mobile terminal business this week.
Panasonic is placing its bet on Android and other open-source platforms to aggressively compete with other smartphones, mainly iPhones and BlackBerrys.
Now the only Android phone from a major Japanese carrier in NTT’s HT-03A, made by HTC.
Accesing Web Video On Television Is A Big Business
Web-to-TV video streaming –meaning, any video coming from an Internet source as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Xbox, Apple TV, Vudu…- is growing dramatically.
Studies suggest that in the next five years, the number of U.S. broadband households watching web video on TV will grow to 24 million from 2.5 million today.
Research firm In-Stat predicts that by 2013 revenue from web-to-TV streaming will hit $2.9 billion. Now, more than 40 percent of young adult U.S. households (ages 18-35) watch web video on their TV at least once a month.
One of the main drivers will be game consoles, as we saw from the 1 million Xbox subscribers who activated their Netflix streaming earlier this year.
20 Hours Of Video Uploaded Every Minute On YouTube
Every minute, 20 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube. In mid-2007 it was six hours. This was announced this week in the new YouTube Biz Blog .
So YouTube is absorbing all the world’s video, also serving 5.5 billion streams a month.
In terms of audience and interaction, YouTube is the undeniable winner. In terms of revenues, and because of the money losing, the service was even called a “failure” by Time Magazine. In addition, experts say that it’s losing ground to Hulu.
Another announcement from YouTube: Video responses will be easier to upload. When a video is done playing, an icon will appear encouraging user to respond. Clicking the button, user’s webcam will be activated and thoughts will be easily added to the video discussion.
Yahoo Video Under a Lack of Direction
Yahoo Video division is facing a hard time, due to a lack of strategic direction. Many members of the team have quit or been laid off. Live-streaming service Yahoo Live as well as web video-editing service Jumpcut have been shut down. Its original content initiatives have been stop-and-go. Video delivery platform Maven Networks, acquired for $160 million last year, has been left to pasture.
In February Hulu knocked off Yahoo to become the No. 2 U.S. video site.
Mogulus Changes To LiveStream.com And Gets 1,000 pro-accounts
Mogulus has change its name to LiveStream.com. At the same time, it annnounced it’s signed up more than 1,000 pro accounts –which starts at $350 per month and include features such as monetization, analytics and HD- since launching in December.
The company says it has 250,000 total producer accounts.
Flash Video On Your Cellphone
Check out this browser, called Skyfire, for Windows and Symbian phones. It runs Flash video! It opens sites you couldn’t access befote. It is still in beta, andi it is not very fast. Of course it is free.
A Way To Watch Hulu outside the U.S.
There is a way to watch Hulu.com around the World, and it is using free VPN services and anonimous proxy tools. One is HotspotShield.com (despite many times Hulu blocks it). Other streaming sites are Megavideo, Supernovatube and Ninjavideo, along with torrent indexes.
It is known that Hulu is only officially available to users inside the U.S., due to all sorts of complicated legal and contractual reasons. Fortunately, geographic restrictions are difficult to enforce on the Internet.
