Internet TV comes into focus

“In 10 years, there will be a monitor on the wall in the family room. It will be connected to a box, and I’m going to watch programs on demand over the Internet,” says Internet strategist and investor Richard Wolpert.

The Internet makes it possible to profitably reach smaller audiences with niche programming.

source

Long-form video gaining viewers on the web

The web is still the preferred source for short video clips of 3 to 5 minutes but recent statistics provided by Move networks show that people are using the web more to watch longer videos than ever before.

· So far in November, more than 100,000 new individuals are watching long-form video (anything 20 minutes or over) online each day, twice as many as in August.

· In November, the average session length is more than 50 minutes.

· In October 2007, more than 6 million people watched long form streaming video online.

· Since March 2007, Move has streamed almost 50 million hours of television.

Move networks powers the media players and back-end streaming infrastructure for ABC, ESPN360, Fox On-Demand, and the Discovery Channel

Via Techcrunch

How appleTV is failing ..

and how we are helping to save it with channl.tv

Louis Gray has made a list of 8 reasons why the thinks the Apple TV is not living up to what it could have been.

The reasons he brings up are :

1. No Compelling Exclusive Content
2. No Flexibility In Displaying Content
3. TV is Free, Stupid
4. Purchasing Movies Makes Little Sense
5. Apple Is Distracted
6. Apple Isn’t Supporting Eager Developers
7. iTunes is Losing the Video Streaming War
8. iTunes and the Apple TV Have No Answer for Rentals

Louis has also listed some possible actions Apple could take to turn the box into a success :

1. A Solution for Movie Rentals is Needed Now
2. Cut Exclusive Deals With Movie Studios
3. Make the Box Something New: A Game Device?
4. Open the Box Up to Developers and Support Them
5. Act Like You Care About Apple TV
6. Watch What the Industry Is Doing and Learn

I think up until now the Apple TV has tremendous potential waiting to be tapped, the fact that there is no compelling content available on it doesn’t convince you into buying it. When everything you want to watch on your television needs to be accessed/collected through iTunes you are limiting the viewer experience to those of iTunes which turns some people off. And since this enforces the limits exposed in displaying whatever it seems the Apple TV is prevent its adoption by consumers.

But the good part of the story is that thanks to the BackRow SDK created by Alan Quatermain we have been able to create our own extension on the Apple TV platform so that we are able to integrate with the webapplication at channl.tv so that we can sync channel information between the website and the Apple TV. The extension we created gets the video from the internet and caches the video on the local hard disk before playing it on screen so you will not experience any of the “buffering.. ” annoyances that you get when watching large video files in your browser. The video you watch using your channels on the channl.tv website is not the same file that you watch on your television, the file that gets downloaded to your television will be the highest resolution file available so that you get the best quality on your television screen.

I am a strongly in favor for Apple to Open up the box to developers like us that want to bring content and a user experience to the Apple TV box. So Apple , if you can create an SDK for the iPhone why not create one for the Apple TV ?

channl.tv open invite-only

Robin Wauters has written an article on Blognation about my newest project called channl.tv. I’m happy to be be able to start talking about it in the open and tell you more about what we are doing.

We are working out the latest small bugs and will start handing out some invites soon. More information on channl.tv will follow.

Getting internettv into the main living room is a big deal

The title of this post is the last line of an article by Liz Gannes on NewTeevee, The article mentions talks between Joost and DivX. All of the latest news that i have received , some of which through non-public channels, seems to point in a direction where the founders of Joost are looking for a quick “sell and cash strategy”. There was a time where i saw a benefit and future in Joost but i believe a whole of a lot more in an open tv platform like the one i mentioned on a slide in a presentation i gave at the IEEE Benelux chapter and WIC Wintermeeting at Eindhoven University on January 19th 2007

I have been working on a cool project in this space and i’ll be able to open it up in the coming days as we are getting it ready for invite-only release but i’m sure some of you will like it, i hope