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.
