Live video streaming service Ustream.tv has launched a pay-as-you-go and self-serve platform for live, interactive video, called Watershed. It targets Web sites and businesses that seek a branded player and more customization for live events than what they can get by simply embedding an Ustream.tv player.
Watershed offers plug-and-play as well as API integration solutions. It comes with a lot of extra management capabilities like the ability to customize the player, add a logo, turn on features like chat, polling, picture-in-picture video chat, Twitter integration, analytics…
Watershed is a cloud computing service, with pricing on a pay-as-you-go basis. Pricing starts at $1 per viewer hour for 1,000 hours per month or less and scales down to $0.25 per viewer hour for streams that reach 50,000 viewer hours per month or more. (A viewer hour is one viewer watching a stream for one hour, or 60 viewers watching for one minute, etc.).
So a live stream (like a live stream meetings to employees) watched by only 30 people for a half hour would cost $15, but a stream watched by 30,000 people for a half hour would cost $7,500.
COMPETING SERVICES
Competing Mogulus Pro service is cheaper for anyone delivering more than 500 viewer hours per month. 30,000 viewers watching for 30 minutes would cost $3,490, but the quality/bitrate is worse.
Watershed allows broadcasters to choose-their-own-quality or bitrate up 2 Mbps. At 750 kbps and 50,000 viewer hours, Watershed is more economical. In fact, because he charges $0.80/GB at higher bitrates his cost balloons.
Techcrunch has a good write up with a comparison sheet on the pricing model, noting that cloud computing model could end up being very pricey for a lot of producers.
Making chips to make television fully Internet-enabled
An American company called Personal Web Systems says making browser chips for television is a good opportunity.
Intel Media Processor CE 3100’s chip allows full browsing. It has been adopted by only a handful of television manufacturers. Other companies of Internet-centric TV chips are Broadcom, Texas Instruments, ST Micro, Free-scale and NXP.
Samsung will sell TVs this spring that provide access to news, weather and finance channels provided by Yahoo. Sharp’s Aquos TVs already have widgets that provide traffic, weather and financial information, access to daily syndicated comic strips, and some Web-based sports and entertainment programming from NBC. Sony offers similar widgets on some of its TVs.
Other competitors are set-top box makers, deployed by cable companies.
Personal Web Systems will ship this quarter its first product, a $150 adapter that will attach to television to make them fully Internet-enabled.
Hulu stops allowing its programs to be shown through Boxee
Hulu will stop allowing its programs to be shown through Boxee, the free software package that combines multiple sources of Internet video content –like Hulu.com. As the Times says, “the dream of a free and easy way to watch Internet video on a television set just ran into some harsh reality”.
Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and Fox, is uncomfortable with the idea of allowing Hulu contents being watched on Apple TV set-top boxes for free, competing directly with the cable and satellite channels.
VC capital rising in China, India and Israel
Venture capital investment is still rising in China, India and Israel, while in the U.S. fell last year, according to Dow Jones. In China, venture capitalists invested a record $4.2 billion, up 50 percent from the year 2007. In Israel, 132 IT start-ups received more that $1.5 billion.
