To make it easier for small Web publishers to host videos on their sites, Cambridge, MA-based Brightcove will announce today that it is rolling out an “Express Edition” service starting at $99 per month.

The company’s previous lowest-end offering cost several hundred dollars per month. At the new $99 monthly level—which doesn’t require a monthly contract, as previous Brightcove packages did—users can store up to 50 videos on Brightcove’s servers and use up to 40 gigabytes of download bandwidth. (For $199 per month, they can store 200 videos and use 100 gigabytes of bandwidth; $499 per month will get them space for 500 videos and 250 gigabytes of bandwidth.)

“Nearly every sector of industry and society is embracing online video for marketing, education, and communications, so there is a huge opportunity” for a cheaper video hosting service, says Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s senior vice president of marketing. “Based on the research we’ve done and the demand we’ve seen from organizations of all sizes and scope over the past year, we’re confident Brightcove Express will be a success.”

Brightcove argues that free video-sharing sites like YouTube aren’t adequate for serious publishers because they limit videos to 10 minutes or less and don’t allow live streaming or control over advertising.

The Express Edition pricing is part of the new Brightcove 4 video platform being introduced today, just 13 months after the company rolled out its Brightcove 3 service. In recognition of the growing number of devices that consumers use to access video, the platform includes improvements such as support for developers who want to build video-driven iPhone applications.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Sometimes, you need to keep the diamond and replace the ring. That’s how Cliff Pollan, recruited in March to be president and CEO of Waltham, MA-based VisibleGains, describes the process his company has been through over the last six months.

In this case, the company has kept its core technology, an interactive video engine that lets users plot their own path through a selection of online videos. But it has replaced almost everything else. That includes its old name (PermissionTV), its old CEO (Bob Lentz), and its old business model. The old plan was to build interactive sites for customers with a wealth of video to share, such as Bob Vila, the Boston Pops, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic.

When I last wrote about the company in July 2008, it had just released a development kit intended to allow Web publishers to build their own complex, video-driven sites similar to this one from Intercontinental Hotels, and had recently raised $3 million from BlueCrest Capital Finance, bringing its total funding to some $18 million. But that software kit, and the one-off sites PermissionTV was building as a service for its high-profile clients, just weren’t taking off as intended, Pollan told me in an interview yesterday.

“We were getting wonderful feedback from clients about the experience, but it wasn’t clear that media companies or large consumer brands would get that level of value out of what we were building,” Pollan says. “So we felt after a bunch of research and talking to a lot of people and potential customers that the business-to-business space was the place where interactive video—which you can use to tell a great story—was an appropriate technology.”

In short, while PermissionTV’s interactive videos wowed everyone who saw them, the people who really cared enough to pay for the technology were sales and marketing executives. Hence the overhaul of the company’s technology platform (it’s now an entirely cloud-based, Software as a Service offering) and today’s rebranding of the company as VisibleGains.The name refers to video’s purported ability to increase “conversions,” or the number of visitors to a company’s website who become actual customers.

To fund the relaunch, the company has raised more capital from existing investors Point Judith Capital and Castile Ventures, but it hasn’t said yet how much.

To understand what VisibleGains’ customers can build using the technology, think “Choose Your Own Adventure” meets SalesForce.com. The platform is designed to …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Satellite Communications specialist ViaSat Inc. (NASDAQ: VSAT) says it is buying WildBlue Communications, a suburban Denver company that provides high-speed Internet access to mostly rural areas in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $568 million.

Until now, Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat has specialized in developing satellite-based communications hardware and software, including modems, radios, and ground stations, for use by military and commercial satellite customers. But in a sharp departure from its business strategy, ViaSat announced plans in early 2008 to build and launch its own $450 million communications satellite to provide high-speed Internet service. The company said at the time that its system is designed to provide faster broadband speeds than existing satellite-based cable and DSL providers, at the same cost.

ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg says in a statement that the two companies have been close partners for nearly a decade, and integrating ViaSat and its ground network technology with WildBlue’s Internet platform helps to reduce the business risk of its satellite venture. “Joining forces with ViaSat provides fast and efficient access to next-generation capacity for the WildBlue business and its subscribers,” Dankberg says.

The deal also apparently helps relieve Colorado’s Liberty Media of its ownership stake in WildBlue, according to press reports. Liberty Media, which owns a 37 percent stake in WildBlue through Liberty Entertainment, has been spinning off some operations to ease its potential acquisition of DirecTV Group, the largest provider of satellite-TV service in the U.S.

Since 2005, WildBlue has become one of the top 20 broadband Internet service providers in the U.S., with over 400,000 customers, according to ViaSat.

The Carlsbad company said last year it plans to launch its satellite in early 2011. ViaSat said at the time that its “ViaSat-1″ would be built by a subsidiary of Loral Space & Communications, and would become the North American counterpart to Eutelsat’s high capacity Ka-band broadband satellite planned for Europe, which is set for launch next year.

ViaSat says it anticpates the deal, when completed, will consist of $443 million in cash and $125 million in newly issued ViaSat shares. The company also says the deal will be subject to regulatory clearance and other conditions, and is expected to close before April 2.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Engineers long ago figured out how to deliver high-definition TV signals via over-the-air broadcast and cable, but the Internet is a different animal. Trying to squeeze that much data through a home or office Internet connection can lead to stutter and long “buffering” delays. For some time now, Akamai has been working on upgrades to its global distribution network that will allow it to deliver clients’ high-definition video streams without interruption—including a partnership with Microsoft last October to adapt HD signals for the company’s Silverlight video format and a deal with Inlet Technologies in July that did the same for the Apple iPhone over AT&T’s 3G network.

Today the company added Adobe’s Flash format to the mix and unveiled a comprehensive “Akamai HD Network” that, according to Akamai, can deliver HD-quality video to broadcast-scale audiences. The key to the network, as we reported in the July iPhone story, is a technique called adaptive bitrate streaming, which allows Akamai to raise or lower the quality of a video stream to match the available bandwidth without any interruption in viewing. Deploying this adaptive technique to its network of 50,000 servers around the world will allow Akamai to transmit smooth video to audiences in 70 countries, the company said. Over the HD network, users can also pause and rewind a video stream, just as they would if they were using a DVR.

“We’re entering a different online world, where many content owners and publishers need to deliver HD-quality video to a much wider online audience, with a higher level of interactivity for consumers,” Akamai president and CEO Paul Sagan said in a statement. “With the Akamai HD Network, we are revolutionizing the way content traverses the Internet with a new approach to bringing an HDTV-like experience online.”

To watch a replay of Akamai’s live webcast today announcing the HD Network go here and choose Flash or Silverlight. Or if you’re browsing from an iPhone, go to iphone.akamai.com/hdnetwork.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

A report today that Google is in talks to acquire Cambridge, MA-based video hosting company Brightcove met with curt no-comment reactions from both companies, and has been flatly contradicted by one analyst.

The report, which surfaced on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, came from Mark Glaser, a San Francisco-based freelance technology writer who is also executive editor of Media Shift, a PBS-hosted blog on digital media. Glaser wrote: “Source with knowledge of deal tells me video service Brightcove in talks with Google about buyout in $500m to $700m range.”

But Dan Rayburn, an analyst at market research firm Frost & Sullivan who follows the online video industry, reported on his Business of Video blog later in the afternoon that Glaser’s report was wrong. “I received a call from one of the parties involved in the Google/Brightcove rumor who would not talk on record but confirmed with me that the rumor that Google is buying Brightcove is in fact false,” Rayburn wrote. “I won’t say which side, Google or Brightcove the employee is from, but it’s someone I trust.”

No further details of the alleged talks between Google and Brightcove appear to have surfaced, and the companies themselves haven’t confirmed or denied the rumor. “We aren’t commenting on the rumors,” Kristin Cronin, a spokesperson for Brightcove, told Xconomy. “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation,” said Andrew Pederson of Google’s corporate communications office.

If Google were to acquire Brightcove, it would be a spooky repeat of recent history—because last year, a Silicon Valley-based search giant really did take over a video hosting company based in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Alas, Yahoo’s February 2008 acquisition of Maven for $160 million didn’t go well: Yahoo closed down Maven’s hosting service in June, and has dispersed former Maven employees to other divisions of the company.

Brightcove’s investors would likely welcome an exit scenario of the type Glaser described. The company has raised $91 million in venture capital to date from a group that includes Accel Partners, AllianceBernstein, Allen & Company, America Online, General Catalyst Partners, the Hearst Corporation, IAC/Interactive Corp., Maverick, Transcosmos, and the New York Times Company. A notional $700 million purchase would bring investors a return of almost 8x.

But the 160-employee company has had plenty of work to keep it preoccupied. It rolled out a simplified version of its video hosting platform last October and announced a major partnership with Adobe in April. When I talked with CEO Jeremy Allaire last fall, he said the company’s revenues grew by a factor of 5 in 2007 and a factor of 3 in 2008 and that he expected Brightcove to reach financial independence in 2009. And the company has now reached that goal, as Rayburn reported in June; it’s cash-flow positive and expects revenues of $80 million this year.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

It’s not often in the startup world that you get to build the same company twice, with better technology the second time around. But that’s the basic story behind Extreme Reach, a Needham, MA, company that launched this January with a vision of helping video advertisers and their agencies distribute their ads to cable networks, TV stations, and Web publishers.

The principals at Extreme Reach—CEO John Roland, chief operating officer Tim Conley, chief technology officer Dan Brackett, and vice president of sales Patrick Hanavan—all worked together at FastChannel Network for seven years, until they sold the company to Irving, TX-based DG Systems in 2006. FastChannel helped to pioneer the digital video advertising distribution business, and made $30 million a year at it, Roland told me last week. But at the time, the task required 200 employees, a $15 million centralized data center, and dedicated video servers at 1,200 cable and TV stations across the country.

Extreme Reach, by contrast, has 17 employees and no data center—it stores and serves video ads using cloud-based storage and processing at Amazon and Nirvanix. The startup’s 10,000 clients don’t need any specialized hardware, either.

Roland says when he and his group of fellow FastChannel alums saw what was becoming possible thanks to cloud computing technology and declining bandwidth costs, they couldn’t resist the temptation to build FastChannel over again—but to “completely change the model of how we do it.” They knew they’d be up against their old company, which is now known as DG FastChannel, but Roland says they felt they’d have the advantage, since DG now relies on a satellite-based distribution system and dedicated hardware.

Extreme Reach’s cloud strategy puts it “two generations ahead” technologically, Roland says. Thanks to Amazon and Nirvanix, “I’m able to expand to massive amounts of bandwidth and storage whenever the business demands, and if I don’t have the volume I can go down—so I don’t have any cap-ex [capital expenditure] requirements,” he boasts. “It’s a 100 percent software model, and I can do it for about 20 percent of the cost of …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Cambridge, MA, venture firm General Catalyst Partners is the lead investor in a $6 million Series B funding round announced today by New York, NY-based Boxee, which makes video browser software for navigating online video offerings on the large screen of a television. Existing investor Spark Capital of Boston was also in on the round, along with New York-based Union Square Ventures. The company has raised $10 million in venture capital altogether, and plans to release an improved beta version of its software this fall.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

These are dark times for the newspaper business, which has been suffering from revenue erosion as classified ads, corporate recruiting, and other forms of advertising—not to mention readers—have moved to the Internet. You’d think that means the outlook also would be gloomy at San Diego-based VMIX, a venture-backed startup that provides Web-based software used primarily by media-owned websites to manage their video clips.

But the media world is full of contradictions. Even with its business focused primarily on newspapers, VMIX president and CEO Mike Glickenhaus tells me, “We’re still seeing steady, consistent growth.”

Mike Glickenhaus

The reason VMIX has continued to grow—despite the recession and the decline of its newspaper customers—is that video is by far the fastest growing medium on the Internet, including newspaper websites. When I sat down recently with Glickenhaus and VMIX co-founder Greg Kostello, they told me they expect their revenue to grow by 70 percent this year—after growing by 170 percent in 2008. “We’re still not quite profitable,” Glickenhaus adds. “That’s probably still a quarter or two away.”

The outlook wasn’t always so optimistic. When Kostello started VMIX with co-founder Terry Ash in 2005, their idea was to create a website for video sharing and social networking. Their concept was an extension of what they had learned at MP3.com—one of San Diego’s biggest contributions to the dot-com phenomenon. Kostello, who was MP3.com’s executive vice president of technology, became president of Vivendi-Universal Net Technologies following Vivendi-Universal’s 2001 buyout of MP3.com. Ash, who was a senior vice president of advertising sales at MP3.com, also worked at Vivendi-Universal and Universal Music Group before VMIX.

“Even at MP3.com, we understood that video was going …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something,” physicist Richard Feynman once said. “Their knowledge is so fragile!”

Maybe Feynman’s brain was big enough to simply “learn by understanding”—sucking in and comprehending complex realities in a single glance. But what I think he actually meant was that people should learn by exploring and investigating, rather than just memorizing. Only then would their knowledge be useful and durable.

What makes Microsoft Research’s new Project Tuva website so wonderful is not just that it puts some of Feynman’s most famous physics lectures online, but that it invites viewers to explore the subject matter in exactly the way Feynman would have recommended. The Caltech scientist was famous in part for for his lucid way of explaining things like gravity and quantum mechanics—so the lectures certainly stand on their own as educational set-pieces. But the transcripts, note-taking tools, and multimedia “extras” that now show up alongside the videos make the material even more entertaining, accessible, and, well, explorable.

Project Tuva was unveiled last week. It’s named after the central Asian country Feynman famously and somewhat quixotically wanted to visit before he died. (He never got permission from the Soviet Union, of which it was then a part, as his friend Ralph Leighton chronicled in his 1991 book Tuva or Bust!) The site uses Microsoft’s Silverlight software, a Web-based multimedia player similar to Adobe’s Flash platform, to showcase a series of lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell University in 1964. The lectures were filmed by the BBC for broadcast in the United Kingdom, and weren’t available to Web viewers until Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, a longtime Feynman admirer, purchased the rights and asked Microsoft Research to find a way to host digital versions online.

“I said we could host them, but we could also do something much more interesting with it,” says Curtis Wong, who leads a small division of Microsoft Research called the Next Media Research group. I’ve known Wong for years and I make a point of following his work, because he’s always got some great new idea about how to take a cultural resource and increase its value through multimedia technology.

For the concepts behind Project Tuva, Wong told me by phone this week, he reached back to three projects he led in the mid-1990s. The first was an interactive tour, published on CD-ROM, of the Barnes Foundation’s collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings outside Philadelphia. The second was another CD-ROM about Leonardo da Vinci, built around a digital facsimile of one of Leonardo’s notebooks, the Codex Leicester, which also happens to be owned by Bill Gates. (See this May 2008 column for more on those two projects.) The third was an interactive video documentary, developed as a demonstration for PBS but never aired, in which the program’s closed-captioning information was interspersed with hyperlinks that led to related articles in Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia.

Each project represented a step in the development of what Wong calls his information learning model for interactive media; it’s also been called the “contextual pyramid” or “ECR,” for engagement, context, and reference. It’s a simple idea: first, you hook someone—whether they’re using a CD-ROM, watching a video, or visiting a website or a museum—with a story or an object that produces an immediate emotional impact. Then, at the very moment they’re most engaged and curious, you offer them context that broadens their understanding. Finally, you provide a deep reference layer, for the people who get so intrigued that they want to know a lot more.

I’d love to explain all the lovingly crafted ways in which the Barnes and Leonardo CD-ROMs and the PBS demo implemented this model, but it would take too long. Jump back to 2008 or so: as soon as Wong found out about Bill Gates’ quest to put the Feynman lectures online, he realized that …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

5Min, the New York, NY-based publisher of instructional and do-it-yourself videos, announced today that it has raised $7.5 million in series B venture funding. Series A investor Spark Capital of Boston returned for the round, which was led by new investor Globespan Capital Partners, also of Boston. With a library of over 100,000 videos produced in partnership with publishers such as Car & Driver, Elle, Kiplinger’s, and Woman’s Day, 5min is the Web’s “largest ‘how-to’ video destination site,” founder and CEO Ran Harnevo said in a statement. The startup syndicates the videos to more than 200 outside sites covering subjects such as business, food, health, home & garden, sports, technology, and travel.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

What the Sam Hill (as my grandpa used to say) is a Daily Grommet? The answer comes in two parts. “Grommet” is the word industrial designer and entrepreneur Jules Pieri has appropriated for the kind of bewitching product that you might discover in an upscale shop in Puerto Vallarta or Tuscany or Vermont—something that’s so unique or beautiful or inventive that you just have to buy one and tell all your friends about it.

And the Daily Grommet is an e-commerce startup in Lexington, MA, that features one new grommet on its website every weekday. Through videos and short articles, Daily Grommet staffers—often Pieri herself—explain what’s so cool about the products they’ve chosen and the companies that make them. They also sell the products, on consignment from their makers. This week’s finds, for example, include an energy bar with ingredients picked by customers, a solar-powered flashlight (no, that’s not a contradiction in terms), and a garlic shredder that looks a little like a little two-wheeled Popemobile.

If you’re thinking that the Daily Grommet sounds like Hammacher Schlemmer meets RocketBoom meets VeryShortList, maybe with a dash of Martha Stewart, you’re not completely wrong. But there’s something stylish, original, and earnest about Pieri’s business that isn’t captured by any of these comparisons.

For one thing, as I can relate after visiting the startup’s office/studio in a quaint clapboard house just off Lexington’s main drag last week, the women who run the company (and they’re all women) are, like Pieri herself, genuinely nice people. They have a visible passion for uncovering little-known new products, testing and investigating them, and telling their stories to the world.

Left to right: Joanne Domeniconi, Jules Pieri, Jen Lockwood, Barbara Gordon, Patti Purcell, Wendy Chandor.

For another, the Daily Grommet has a common-sense business model that blends old-fashioned retailing with the best of Web 2.0-style interactivity. In addition to the daily videos, which are an easily digested two to three minutes in length, the startup is utilizing the full complement of social media channels, including a Twitter stream, an RSS feed, an e-mail newsletter, a Facebook page, and badges and widgets that fans can embed in their own websites. And every grommet gets its own permanent page on the site where readers can leave comments and even interact with the people who make the products. (The company often singles out companies that are so small or new that a feature on the Daily Grommet can be their first big break.)

It all amounts to a human-centered, high-touch approach that might just help to redefine what consumers expect from e-commerce sites. Whether such a business can be scaled up efficiently is an open question. But clearly, if you had the courage in this age of cloud-based software startups to start from scratch with a business that sells actual stuff, you’d want to take advantage of the media that people are using today for word-of-mouth exchanges, namely Twitter, blogs, online video, and the like.

And ideally, you wouldn’t just dilute these media with empty marketing messages, but you’d tell real stories about the people who make the stuff and what motivated them.

This is the kind of stuff Pieri thinks about. “Social media is not commerce media,” she says. “What travels in social media is news—whether it’s personal or national or just funny videos. I know that the stories around products have that same power, and the potential that people would want to …Next Page »

Comments (13) | Reprints | Share:        

For a long time, watching video on the Apple iPhone meant YouTube or nothing—and it only worked if you were within range of a Wi-Fi network. But now Cambridge, MA-based content distribution firm Akamai is helping many of its customers optimize live and recorded video for direct delivery to iPhones. Which, in effect, turns Apple’s devices into mobile televisions: if you’re at the bus stop and have a craving for Fox Business News, for example, it’s now there for you, even if you don’t have a strong Wi-Fi or 3G signal.

It’s all part of the iPhone 3.0 changeover. When Apple released the update for the iPhone’s operating system on June 17, it offered an improvement especially designed to help people on the go watch video on their phones even when they’re in areas with flaky broadband wireless access. Called “variable bit rate streaming,” the technology has long been a feature of most Web-based video delivery; it allows video providers to adjust the quality of streaming video in real time to fit the available bandwidth.

Last week Akamai said its clients publishing iPhone video can now take advantage of variable bit rate streaming as part of the company’s existing Media Delivery service. It also launched a mobile showcase for organizations doing exactly that. The showcase, at iphone.akamai.com, includes live and previously recorded videos from NASA, NPR, Fox News, USA Today, and the Discovery Channel, among other publishers.

To generate the live video streams, which include Fox Business News and NASA TV, Akamai turned to Raleigh, NC-based Inlet Technologies for help. Inlet’s “adaptive streaming” technology turns a live TV broadcast into digital packets that go out over a wireless system like AT&T’s 3G EV-DO network at whatever bit rate the network and the destination device can handle. That means users don’t have to pick from high- or low-bandwidth video streams, don’t have to wait while video “re-buffers,” and aren’t even aware when the stream shifts from a lower rate to a higher one, or vice versa.

Inlet also makes video encoding software that helps media companies build up libraries of recorded video content that can then be delivered on demand. That’s what most of the companies featured in the Akamai iPhone showcase are doing; today’s lineup, for example, includes several short episodes from USA Today’s “Talking Tech” video feature and a selection of animated slide shows accompanying audio reports from NPR News.

Akamai’s role is to transport the Inlet-encoded video over its global network to the AT&T media servers closest to the actual iPhone users requesting the material. The company hopes to work with more broadcasters to get their programs to iPhone and iPod Touch owners, who consume far more broadband content than owners of other mobile devices. (Some 80 percent of all data requests from mobile devices over Wi-Fi networks come from iPhones and iPod Touch devices, according to Akamai.)

“Apple’s extensive support for new web standards like HTML 5 and HTTP streaming of live and on-demand video to the iPhone and iPod touch has transformed the quality of video content that consumers can now view while mobile,” Tim Napoleon, Akamai’s chief strategist for digital media, said in an announcement last week. “To be able to watch video anytime, anywhere at a quality this high is nothing short of amazing.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

[Update 12:30 a.m. 6/30/09: We've revised this story after speaking with a Yahoo official.]

A report Monday in TechCrunch asserting that Yahoo is killing off its Cambridge, MA-based video hosting company Maven Networks just 16 months after acquiring it for $160 million is inaccurate in some respects, but accurate in others, according to the company.

A spokesman at the troubled Internet portal company, reached by phone late Monday, confirmed—as TechCrunch reported—that the company plans to shut down the service introduced by Maven under which it publishes online videos for third parties such as Fox News. That decision is part of a reprioritization effort that “will allow us to focus our resources on the continued improvement of our core video offerings,” the company said in a statement that the spokesman shared with Xconomy by e-mail.

However, the technologies Yahoo acquired when it purchased Maven aren’t going away—in fact, they’re integral to the company’s new video player and its video ad server technology. And contrary to the TechCrunch report, the Maven division has not been singled out for mass layoffs. While members of Yahoo’s video divisions have been among those affected by several waves of staff reductions at Yahoo—including a recent 5 percent across-the-board layoff—talent from Maven continues to lead video initiatives across the company.

The TechCrunch report, citing unnamed tipsters, said that “Yahoo has effectively decided to shelve Maven, firing most of its employees in a move packaged as a restructuring.” Xconomy relayed that report—which now appears to have been unjustified—while attempting to contact Yahoo for confirmation and clarification.

While the report of mass layoffs may have been wrong, however, recent months have brought many signs of downsizing and attrition across Yahoo’s video operations, including Maven. Former CEO Hilmi Ozguc, who founded Maven in 2002, left Yahoo last September, six months after the acquisition. Internet video news site NewTeeVee reported in early May that “many members of the [Yahoo Video] team have quit or been laid off amidst a lack of strategic direction,” and reported later that month that the head of company’s video platform division was leaving. The site even asserted that Yahoo planned to phase out Maven altogether—not an outlandish prediction, given that other Yahoo video services Yahoo Live, a live video streaming service, and JumpCut, an online video editing tool, have already been shut down.

But while Yahoo has been scaling back its investment in some areas of online video, it says it has been increasing them in others. Video initiatives “remain a priority for Yahoo, both for its consumer and advertising experiences,” the company says.

The full statement we received from Yahoo is as follows:

Since acquiring Maven Networks in 2008, Maven has played an important role in our video strategy, providing essential talent and core technology that has helped Yahoo! to enhance its consumer and advertising offerings. Maven technology is used in the Yahoo video player, as well as in the Yahoo Video Advertising Platform that is being used to serve both on- and off- network advertising for Yahoo! partners.

While video initiatives remain a priority for Yahoo!, both for its consumer and advertising experiences, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others. After careful consideration, Yahoo! is planning to wind down its Maven Networks customer base. This decision will allow us to focus our resources on the continued improvement of our core video offerings, such as enhancing the consumer video experience on Yahoo!.

Since Q4 2008, we have closed or announced our intention to close, nearly twenty Yahoo! services– such as Yahoo! 360, GeoCities, My Web and Yahoo! Briefcase. We continue to evaluate our portfolio of products and services on a regular basis, and plan to share details of further changes with people who use our products in the months ahead.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Boxee, the popular Internet video browser program for Macintosh computers, has some new competition. Today Littleton, MA-based ZeeVee is releasing the Mac version of its Zinc video browser, which gives owners of desktop or laptop computers an easy-to-use interface for locating and watching TV programming on the Internet.

The free software, downloadable at www.zeevee.com/zinc, is an offshoot of ZeeVee’s original line of video appliances, which made it possible to “localcast” a video signal from a PC to a high-definition television over the same coaxial cables used to transmit cable TV signals. The “ZvBox” never really took off (I found it too complex and buggy, and ZeeVee CEO Vic Odryna later said he agreed with me). But one part of the ZvBox setup—the “Zviewer” onscreen software—proved very popular with users. ZeeVee made Zviewer into a standalone Windows program last November, and changed its name to Zinc in March.

And now the program is available to Apple devotees—or at least those running Leopard (OS X 10.5) on Intel-based Macs. “The Mac community is very important to us, especially since they tend to be very media savvy,” Odryna said in a statement released today. “The response to Zinc, both in the U.S. and globally, has been outstanding and we can only imagine how much more popular it will become once Mac enthusiasts experience it, use it and share it with their friends.”

At the same time, ZeeVee has added a new feature to both the Windows and Mac versions of Zinc that potentially makes it far more useful. In the past, Zinc users have effectively been limited to the selection of online video providers that ZeeVee featured on the browser’s main screen—about 20 sources such as Netflix, Hulu, Fox, ABC, CNN, ESPN, and Revision3. But with the newest version of Zinc, users can subscribe to any video published on the Internet, as long as it has a standard RSS feed.

In other words, Zinc has become the video equivalent of a news aggregator, complete with a feature showing which feeds have newly published videos. A new “More Content” button on the main Zinc screen lets users access an introductory list of video RSS sources—including, for example, the “MIT Media Labcast,” a series of videos about projects at the MIT Media Lab.

“Until now, ZeeVee decided what content to include in Zinc, and performed all of the organization and presentation of that content,” Odryna said in today’s release. “Content owners and users can now expand Zinc at will.”

ZeeVee still sells a version of the ZvBox, by the way. But when it comes to hardware, the company’s emphasis has shifted to selling boxes that commercial establishments like hotels, hospitals, and airports can use to transmit HDTV signals from PCs to networked televisions.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

If you followed news articles mentioning Visible Measures, you might get the impression that the Boston startup’s technology is devoted entirely to tracking viral Web videos. An article in Sunday’s New York Times, for example, cited Visible Measures’ statistics on singing sensation Susan Boyle; it turns out that clips of her performances on “Britain’s Got Talent” are the fastest-spreading videos in the history of the Web, racking up more than 220 million views in the last month alone, according to the company’s Viral Reach database.

But in reality, “The viral statistics are actually a small part of our business,” CEO Brian Shin told me earlier this month. “It’s just what we talk about all the time, because we don’t want to talk about the other stuff we’re doing. When we do our pitch to VCs, the viral stuff has one slide.”

So what’s on all the other slides? Shin’s not joking—he doesn’t want to talk about it. All he’ll say is that the company’s developers are hard at work on a new product that will come out later this year and that will allow customers to see more of the information Visible Measures collects about the rapidly expanding world of online video. Listings like the Ad Age Viral Video Chart—a rundown of the week’s most-viewed videos, based on data provided by Visible Measures—represent only a tiny portion of the company’s picture of the video universe, he says. “We have gobs and gobs of information we’re not showing there.”

Whatever the new product does, though, it’s not likely to stray too far from Visible Measures’ core business proposition, which is that publishers and advertisers’ digital media efforts are more likely to pay off if they understand how their content is being used. General Web readership is notoriously difficult to measure, with analytics companies like Comscore and Quantcast producing wildly varying traffic estimates for major websites. But it’s a slightly easier problem to count how many people watched the latest Susan Boyle clips—assuming that you’ve figured out, as Visible Measures has, how to identify those clips once they’ve been virally shared and remixed.

And that makes Visible Measures a key part of the Boston area’s growing digital entertainment cluster, which spans production, distribution, marketing, and, now, measurement.

“In this economy, advertisers can’t put their money somewhere where they can’t measure it,” says Shin. “They have to know what they’re getting. And publishers, in order to maintain high rates [for ads], have to be able to offer transparency.” (Shin will speak more about many of these themes during the “Entertainment Economy” breakout session at the June 24 Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship.)

Visible Measures’ top-secret new product is the main preoccupation for a big chunk of its 38 employees, who work, Being John Malkovich-style, in a space that spans both the fifth and the fourth-and-a-half floors of an old office building in the increasingly startup-heavy neighborhood near Boston’s South Station. The office’s exposed-brick walls are decorated mostly with big posters for newly released movies, courtesy of the Hollywood studios who are some of the startup’s biggest customers (movie trailers being one of the biggest genres of viral Web videos).

Founded in 2005, Visible Measures has raised just shy of $30 million in venture funding from General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and a group of angel investors, including a $10 million Series C round that closed just two months ago.

For the moment, it has only two main products. The first, called VisibleCampaign, is built around the Viral Reach database, which is the Web video equivalent of Google’s vast search index. Matt Cutler, Visible Measures’ vice president of marketing and analytics, says the database consists of information on over 100 million videos culled from more than 150 video sharing websites such as YouTube, MySpace, AOL, and dozens of lesser-known sites. The company uses it to give advertisers and marketers a better sense of who’s watching their videos and who’s making copies, remixes, and parodies.

“As far as we know, it’s the largest collection of viral video in the world,” Cutler says. “It allows us to have really broad coverage of what’s going on in the world of viral video, so that we can track not just specific companies but their peers and competitors and how videos have performed, going back in time several years.”

That’s very useful information for advertisers and publishers, who can spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars producing an Internet video campaign for their own sites, only to find that …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

I last wrote about Lexington, MA-based Wistia in September 2008, which, I’m sure you’ll remember, was approximately when the economy went all to hell. CEO Chris Savage said it was clear by October that Wistia’s original business model—licensing its Web-based video-sharing platform to large enterprises—was insufficient. So this week the startup is launching a reconfigured version of its technology. Called Zebra, the system has been overhauled to meet the needs of small- to medium-sized businesses, which are increasingly using video for marketing and training purposes.

The basics of the technology remain the same: Wistia hosts video produced by its customers on its servers, and keeps detailed records on who watches them—records that customers can then use to verify compliance (if the videos are being used for education or training) or to help identify the best leads (if the videos are part of the sales process). But Zebra can now track videos published on a company’s public-facing website, which the older Wistia system couldn’t do. And the service is now being sold on a subscription basis, with prices starting at $79 per month.

Wistia had a good first quarter, growing from 20 customers to 70, but almost all of the new customers were small businesses, says co-founder and CEO Chris Savage. “We’ve set out to really align the business and the application with those customers,” Savage says. “People said they loved the private [video] sharing and the ability to see what parts of a video people watched and what they’re interested in… but they started saying they wanted this for their public videos too.”

There’s another Boston firm, Visible Measures, that makes tools companies can use to study the behavior of Web surfers watching public videos, including which parts of a video they view more than once, and how often videos get forwarded. But Visible Measures’ services are aimed mostly at big media companies that want to track the viral spread of their videos as part of multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns. The Zebra system is designed for non-media companies whose videos likely get thousands of viewers per month rather than millions, Savage explains.

Using Zebra, companies can collect data such as the IP address of every Web visitor who views a video and how many times specific viewers come back. That information can be used to prove that a company complied with training requirements, or to fine-tune a pitch to prospective customers.

For example, one of Wistia’s customers is Kiva Systems, a maker of robotic warehouse automation systems that we’ve covered extensively. “They have video on their site that they use to help people get a taste of what their robots do,” says Savage. As prospects enter the sales process, he explains, Kiva creates a custom Wistia project for each one. The company can see which videos the prospects are focusing on and tailor its next communication accordingly. “It’s a video funnel—a whole interaction that hopefully leads to a longer relationship,” Savage says.

Wistia isn’t leaving behind its enterprise users, but “we are definitely not going after whole-enterprise solutions anymore,” says Savage. “We found that the applications in the enterprise were really at the departmental level, or started small and grew up from the department level. That was when the light bulb went off for us: this is much more like WebEx, where any sales person can buy into it, than it is like company-wide messaging.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

In a column published last July, I vacillated publicly about whether it was time to stop paying extortionate rates to my local cable provider, Comcast, for the privilege of watching 17 minutes of commercials with every hour of programming.

Well, it took me a while, but in early March I finally cut the cord. I pared back my cable TV lineup to the basic $10 per month level (which includes 30 local and community-access channels) and handed back Comcast’s set-top box/DVR. At the same time, I canceled my land-line digital telephone service and went cellular-only, of which I’ll say more some other week. Of course, I kept my cable Internet service—which is surprisingly fast, averaging 15 to 20 megabits per second.

And I am here to report that life without premium cable channels is just fine.

Now, I certainly have not given up watching TV shows. In fact, I probably consume just as much video content now as I did before, maybe more. The difference is that these days I’m getting the majority of it on demand, over the Internet, with few or no commercials. It’s easier to do this than ever before, given the explosion of new technologies and services around online video—a few of which I want to describe in today’s column.

First a quick illustration of how quickly the online video market is changing. Here’s a chart that I included in my July column, showing which of my favorite shows were available online and where. (By ABC and NBC, I mean ABC.com, NBC.com, etc.):

Here is the same chart today, with the addition of two new favorites that I wasn’t watching last year (24 and Fringe) and one video source that hadn’t fully emerged as of last summer (Amazon Video on Demand):

As you can see, the chart has filled in quite a bit. All of my favorite shows* are now available on Hulu. Many of the shows that weren’t available last year from iTunes now are, thanks in part to last September’s rapprochement between Apple and NBC Universal. Veoh has also filled out its list significantly, and Amazon Video on Demand has come out of nowhere to become a serious rival to iTunes (well, not quite nowhere, but its predecessor service, Amazon Unbox, sucked, to be frank).

[*I have to mention in passing that I no longer watch Friday Night Lights, which lost its magic somewhere in season 2, or Heroes, which jumped the shark ages ago. But I kept them in the chart for completeness' sake. Also, Battlestar Galactica, Pushing Daisies, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles have all ended or been canceled. And I haven't listed the shows that I only ever obtained online, such as Mad Men. Also, you'll notice that I don't watch any TV sports. I realize that the prospect of giving up the sports broadcasts monopolized by ESPN and their ilk would be a show stopper for many sports fans.]

“But wait,” you say. “Why would I want to watch TV on my laptop or my desktop monitor, especially when I dropped a grand last year on a new HDTV?” I have three words for you: Cables to Go. This one-stop online shop has cables for connecting every type of computer to every conceivable brand of television. I have one cable that connects my Windows computer’s VGA port to my TV’s serial input, and another that connects the mini-DVI video port on my Mac laptop to my TV’s DVI-I input. A third handles audio. I can just fire up Hulu or iTunes on one of my computers, plug it into my TV, and I’m ready to watch from across the living room, often in high-definition quality.

There are two other new technologies that have helped to smooth my defection from cable. One is the new category of what you might call “10-foot browsers”: video aggregators with big, boxy interfaces that make it easier to …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Cambridge, MA-based video hosting provider Brightcove has long had all of its eggs in Adobe Systems’ basket: the company’s entire platform is built around Adobe’s Flash streaming media format. But now the two companies’ relationship is growing even closer.

At the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas today, Brightcove and San Jose, CA-based Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) are announcing a collaboration intended to make it harder to pirate Flash-based streaming media files and easier for users of Adobe’s video production software to publish their videos through Brightcove’s system. Brightcove also says that it intends to make its platform compatible with Strobe, a new media player development framework unveiled by Adobe today.

Strobe is a response to complaints from Web developers that it’s too difficult to build extensive Web-based media sites using the existing Flash development tools. It provides building blocks that developers can use to create customized, interactive websites that include games, software, advertising, and the like. Brightcove—which serves customers like the New York Times, Showtime, and the Discovery Channel and is the single largest host of Flash-based video for big media companies—says it wants to make sure that developers who turn to the Strobe platform can still use Brightcove to host the video portions of their sites.

I caught up with Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s senior vice president of marketing, by phone last week before he set out for Las Vegas. Whatcott, who’s an Adobe veteran and also helped to launch Drupal publishing company Acquia, says he believes Brightcove was “the first phone call” Adobe made when the media software giant set out to find partners for the Strobe launch. I asked him to explain, among other things, how Strobe’s features overlap with those of Brightcove 3, the new, more customizable hosting platform the company introduced last October.

Xconomy: The Strobe platform that Adobe is introducing today sounds like it actually has a lot of the same features as Brightcove 3, when it comes to customizing the look and feel of a Web video player.

Jeff Whatcott: It’s similar in some ways. But we’re coming at the market from two different directions. They are coming at it from the application developer side—people building totally customized user experiences, which is certainly a valid set of use cases. We’re coming at it from the complete solution side, where people want to do a lot of deep branding that…affects the appearance of the player, as opposed to completely tweaking it out. The two kind of meet in the middle. With Strobe and Brightcove 3, the full spectrum of use cases is covered.

There’s nothing out there like Strobe from a company of Adobe’s stature. If that’s going to be in the marketplace, we want to make sure that people can use it with Brightcove’s service. So we’re going to working with Adobe on interoperability between their player and our backend service, so it will work in that environment.

X: Don’t most Brightcove customers—companies that host their videos on your backend—use the Brightcove player almost by default? I’m not clear on how the Strobe integration would benefit them, unless you’re saying that customers could substitute Strobe-based players for the Brightcove player.

JW: The vast majority of our customers absolutely do use our player today, although with the rollout of Brightcove 3 last fall we made our whole platform something that you could adapt in whole or in part. Our server side has a bunch of APIs [application programming interfaces] for getting video out of our system into whatever framework you want to offer to build a custom user experience. So yeah, customers could theoretically substitute those two.

But again, the focus of Strobe is more application developers who are building completely custom applications that have video as a part of them. The way to think about it is, a lot of times, with video on the Web, you see a Web page with a video player in it, and that video player needs to be customized to look like the rest of the page. That is the classical use case for the Brightcove 3 player today. Whereas Adobe is focusing here on people building out completely custom websites in Flash. For example, think of a major shoe manufacturer running a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. They are going to run a splash page that will be a completely customized experience, where you can …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

[Editors Note: See update below]

Veoh, the San Diego-based Internet video and TV program provider, is reportedly undergoing a “major restructuring” that includes significant cuts in its workforce and a change in strategy, according to VentureBeat.

Another web site, NewTeevee, says the layoffs include some Veoh executives, and the number could be “more than 40 people” while MediaMemo indicates the number is closer to 25—although Veoh’s roster after restructuring will be in the mid-40s. Veoh had about 110 employees in November, when the company said it laid off 20 staffers and shut down an office in Russia.

Veoh, which also has operations in Los Angeles, provides online videos that users can easily find and watch. The company also hosts user-generated content. Veoh has raised $70 million from investors that include Goldman Sachs, Spark Capital, and Time Warner Investments, including $30 million last June from Intel Capital, Adobe Systems, and several prominent private investors.

[Updated at 2:15 PDT] In a Veoh press release carried on some web sites, the company says founder Dmitry Shapiro has replaced Steve Mitgang as CEO, and Mitang is no longer with the company. The company also says that Veoh now plans to focus its business on Video Compass, a browser add-on that recommends videos to users as they surf the web. Venture Beat and NewTeevee now report that Veoh has cut 25 people, which leaves the company with 45 employees.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Boston-based Visible Measures, the Web video audience tracking firm we profiled in January 2008 shortly after it closed its $13.5 million Series B round, said today that it has raised a $10 million C round. Participants in the round included new investor Northgate Capital and existing investors General Catalyst Partners and MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures. “This new financing will help solidify Visible Measures’ market position as the third-party measurement provider of choice for the Internet video industry’s leading advertisers, publishers, and aggregators,” the company said in a statement.

Comments | Reprints | Share: