Some Skype users faced a frustrating weekend after a software bug left many unable to log in to the Internet phone service.
The sign on problem surfaced early Thursday afternoon (August 16th), with the company’s blog reporting a software issue. At the same time, Skype temporarily disabled all downloads of Skype.
Continue reading Skype Wobbles On The Weekend
Skype, clearly never ones to stay still, have released a new version of the PC Skype client – version 3.5.
It comes with four new features
Continue reading PC Skype (3.5) Released: New features
Trebles all round at Twofour Digital as they announce the winning of the three year contract to produce and host the webcasts of all proceedings from the House of Commons and House of Lords, made available through the Parliament Web site.
The webcasts include live coverage of all UK parliamentary proceedings and Select, Public Bill and General Committees as well as selected archive footage.
We imagine this is in no small way due to Phil Haggar now being within the Twofour fold, them having bought his Makeni Webcasting production company back in April this year.
What’s the relevance? We first met the very competent Mr Haggar when he ran Westminster Digital way back in 1999 – whose business backbone was … Webcasting Parliament.
It appears that Twofour’s ambitions don’t stop there, besides growing through acquisitions of companies, it’s also working for the European Parliament to design and deliver a ground breaking webTV channel broadcasting scheduled content in 20+ languages.
It looks like there’s finally some sense coming to the world of User Generated Video Content.
Online video site Grouper, that Sony bought last year for $65m, has bid farewell to trying to compete with the YouTube’s of this world.
Grouper has changed its name to Crackle and also change the type of content it will be making available to punters.
Continue reading Crackle: Sony’s New Content Move After Grouper
A nifty mashup reaches us via Perry Aulie, co-founder of VideoIPO.
It’s a service that is hoping to make a success out of the enormous and growing interest in watching videos online, specifically YouTube – but not by following the same now-overdone model of serving videos.
VideoIPO lets you trade on the popularity of YouTube Videos by mashing up YouTube video and the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) trading engine.
Continue reading VideoIPO: Video Stock Exchange: Trade On YouTube Popularity
ISP Tiscali have launched a Movies Now service, giving their customers access to over 500 films and entertainment programs without a subscription fee.
There’s a choice to either rent the content or download to own, with prices starting at 99p for TV content or for older films.
They’re working with Arts Alliance Media, who are providing the content and the technology behind the serving and content protection.
Orange France have picked up a deal with the US studio Paramount Pictures, to distribute their content in France.
It’s not just old content that will be available, but new productions from Paramount including DreamWorks titles, which will be among the latest films available.
Orange France customers with a broadband digital television package or a High-Speed Internet package will be able to enjoy a Video-On-Demand programming schedule including the studio’s latest releases, such as Mission Impossible III, Over the Hedge and World Trade Center, among others.
There’s over 2,500 films, in French or original language versions with subtitles, available on the 24/24 Video service currently, which costs from 3 Euros to rent for 24 hours. Usual features such as unlimited viewing, pause functions and fast forward and rewind are available.
It will be interesting to see if the now-formidable legal department of Google drops a letter to a new site, GodTube that apes their YouTube video service.
GodTube, you won’t be surprised to hear, shows videos that praise god. It’s yet to launched, with the expected out-of-beta date being 1 May.
Looking at the site, loving god doesn’t necessarily mean that you observe the rights of those who have gone before you. The less-than-coincidental name similarity isn’t the only thing that will remind you of YouTube. GodTube also closely-mimics the general look and feel of YouTube.
Similarities don’t end there, they even stretch to the GodTube strapline Broadcast Him, only a small adjustment from YouTube’s Broadcast Yourself.
Listening to GodTube’s CEO, Chris Wyatt, speaking on Fox News, he claims to have “come up with the idea for GodTube” when he was attending a seminary in Dallas. Quite what the idea he came up with he didn’t elucidate, but if it was “I know let’s copy YouTube, but call it GodTube,” we’d hardly call it an idea.
Wyatt is keen to tell everyone about how well it’s doing, claiming that within 60 days it was the most-trafficked Christian stream video site on the Internet. His ambitions don’t appear to stop there, as if they continue at this rate, Wyatt claims they “will become the most trafficked Christian Web site on the Internet.”
By trafficked, we assume he means the amount of bits that they shift. As they’re putting out video (the most bit-laden content format available), his claims start to sound significantly less impressive.
One area GodTube differs significantly from YouTube is in how open they are in showing the videos of those who want to upload content to their site. YouTube doesn’t put a human filter in the way, understanding that given the number of videos that are uploaded, it just isn’t realistic.
GodTube may struggle with their approach, suffering a plague of videos rather than the mythical plague of locusts. They’re going to pass all submitted content through two manual filters – real people. The first will check if it’s presentable to the public, the second to ascertain its Theological implications!
Here’s a little sample. It’s only a minute long, but will give you an indication of what to expect. Get read for an explanation of a banana. We kid you not.
It may have suffered more law suits than slippery Jeffrey Archer, but new figures reveal continuing growth for the video sharing site, with many visitors seeking out user-generated content.
Research firm Hitwise reported that online traffic to YouTube soared past rival US TV websites, with the site recording more visits than all the television network Web sites combined during the week of Feb. 3rd.
Whipping out their big calculators and pulling out a few pencils from their white coat top pockets, Hitwise calculated that YouTube’s share of internet visits leapt to 0.6031% during the week of February 3.
By comparison, traffic to the whole bloomin’ lot of US TV network websites could only muster a measly 0.4865% share.
Remarkably, YouTube’s US market share actually jumped 13.9% in the two weeks after MTV and Comedy Central parent Viacom had made the company remove 100,000 of its clips.
Hitwise researcher LeAnn Prescott, commented, “This is a landmark event in the changing face of web traffic and entertainment consumption, now that entertainment seekers are now more likely to go to YouTube than any other television network or gaming website.”
The Hitwise research looked at the words and phrases used in Internet search engine queries that led surfers to YouTube videos.
Although amateur videos remain popular, the number one online video search in the four weeks up to February 17 was for television commercials shown during the recent US Superbowl game – something that will, no doubt, warm the cold steely hearts of their marketing dept.
According to Hitwise’s figures, the second most common video search was for “white and nerdy” while “Charlie the unicorn” came in at third.
We didn’t have a clue who the chuffin’ Nora Charlie the unicorn was so we looked it up. And boy, was it rubbish.
US media giant, Viacom, have struck a deal with Joost, the VOD TV to computer previously known as The Venice Project.
Joost is currently in beta, and it’s understood that the Viacom material will be available for the yet-undefined launch date of Joost. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Joost users will have financially-free access to the content. Joost users will ‘pay’ by being shown brief adverts, that we call blip-verts. They only last a couple of seconds and aren’t _that_ offensive, if the video pieces that are being watched aren’t too short.
The Viacom channels covered by the deal are MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Spike TV, Logo and BET.
Clearly Philippe Dauman, Viacom President and Chief Executive Officer, is showing his excitement at being involved, “We’re extremely pleased to be working with Joost, and couldn’t be prouder to be a key partner in the launch of the next generation in broadband video technology.” He’s not looking at the Joost deal as an exclusive though, “we’re determined to keep pushing and growing our digital presence and bring our programming to audiences on every platform and device that they want. In addition to strong partnerships we have with traditional distributors, we will continue to seek out partners like Joost, which has created an exciting breakthrough platform that represents not only a fantastic user experience, but one that is built on a compelling and sustainable business model that respects both content creators and consumers.”
All of this comes only a couple of week after Viacom threw their legal department at YouTube, insisting that they remove their content from the video sharing site and accused Google-owned YouTube of knowingly profiting from material stolen from them.
Joost recently introduced a version of Joost to run on Apple’s Mac. Version 0.8.0.1 for Mac came out on Monday, following a brief period in Alpha test. They describe it as looking “very much like Joost for Windows, while behaving very much like a Mac application.” A growing number of Mac Beta testers are complaining that the software only works on Intel-based Macs.