Where we are, and aren't, showing our videos on the web
Video content delivery on the web
Almost everyone is sure that TV and internet are merging. Cable now has on demand, the internet now has TV stations. I think that the convergence is inevitable, and that the real question is what form it will take: Do we pick a channel and watch it? Do we pick individual shows/movies/etc. and watch them? Will more intelligence be involved? (i.e. shows are recommended based on previous selections) Will it be something that we haven't even thought of yet? The market could be big enough to hold all of these models successfully, but the world seems to be progressing into greater homogeneity, and even if all models succeed, one will more than likely dominate.
What are the current competing video hosting providers and which should we choose for hosting our videos? We chose DTV for a vareity of reasons. If our review seeems skewed, it's simply because we found it so much better than all of the other options, we don't have anything to do with them, and they didn't pay us to promote them.
The DTV player (and the Broadcast Machine)
The DTV player is simply awesome. If it takes off, it will do better than all of the other services here. At least that's my take. I found that i enjoyed using it more and that it was easier to use than the others here. You pick what you watch, you don't just turn it on. It leverages bittorrent in a way that makes you not even need to know what it is. Within the DTV player is a content browser that uses RSS, a bittorrent engine that's invisible to the user, and a video viewer. You can save the videos, but they are set to auto delete. The DTV player uses H.264 for encoding. This is the best algorithm out today, and allows for use and viewing outside of the DTV player. Everything is open source and portable.
Google has a video search engine that plays the videos within the results window in google's own (proprietary) viewer. I don't know much about the encoding. You can't save videos from google's viewer, but you can go to the site that's hosting the video and get it there, if it hasn't been protected in some way. There is a note saying that content owners can join the "Google Video Upload Program and upload your video for potential inclusion in our future version of Google Video." Since there is no capability for saving, you lose out on potential viral marketing of people spreading your videos.
Prodigem uses bittorrent to reduce bandwidth issues and it uses RSS. It's web-based, rather than software, which makes it much more portable, however, you just get the bittorrent files, and need to use a bittorrent client to get the videos, then video viewing software to view the video. Similar to CommonFlix.
"A DRM-free media store and community video exchange" You can sell or share videos using CommonFlix. "Submit links to your favorite video or upload your own shows, movies and iPod clips and share or sell them via BitTorrent." CommonFlix uses bittorrented files, and can use RSS and podcasting subscriptions, it also uses Flikcr style tags. Similar to Prodigem, and with channels similar to DTV.
Revver has been called Flickr for video because of it's focus on user uploads and content taggin with user selected keywords. One unique aspect is that there are ads above the videos, and each time a video is viewed, the submitter of the video gets some income from the ads.
Denver based Mania TV (you gotta love them just for basing themselves in Denver) are the first 24 hour Music Video TV channel on the internet. They've been up for a while and seem to be serious about sticking around. Whether they're successful or not depends, of course, on how popular they become. So far, I know a bunch of people that work for them, but no one that actually watches it. Maybe it's a younger demographic?
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It's hard to tell exactly what Bright Cove will be. It wasn't up when i wrote this (November 2005), and the site looked like it was designed to attract VC rather than actually do anything.
Who designed their website? The text is so small I can't read it, and it doesn't allow resizing! I'm not sure what they do, so i don't know whether they belong on this page.
MTVs foray into internet based music video television. It relies heavily on DRM and can only be viewed on Internet Explorer for Windows. For choosing such a closed system, and one that creates the most security issues for your computer, I hope that MTV Overdrive dies a slow and expensive death, or comes around to realize that DRM is not the way to the customers/viewers heart. I can't give it any more of a review, because my system is unable to play it.
