tagged w/ Joost
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If 2010 seemed like a year of great change in the online video sector, 2011 is shaping up to make it look sleepy. To help analyze this complex and evolving landscape, Baseline Intelligence, a part of Baseline and the New York Times Company, is proud to announce the 2nd edition of its flagship digital media research report: Spring 2011 Online Video Now.If 2010 seemed like a year of great change in the online video sector, 2011 is shaping... more
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For the better part of a decade, people like me have been pronouncing that theatrical motion-picture distribution, at least when it came to independent films, was going the way of the passenger pigeon and the daily print newspaper. (You won't believe this, kids, but somebody used to come to your house every single morning with a rolled-up log of paper wrapped in plastic and rubber bands!) Some mystical convergence of the Internet, cable TV, the hand-held SmartHooble and other, yet-to-be-invented networks and devices would open the doors to a hellish new Nirvana of unlimited, 24/7 hi-def cinema, from the most massive Hollywood spectacles to the most obscure art-house offerings.
Well, the future is here, sort of. And as usual with the future, it's not a yes-or-no proposition. Online movie delivery has exploded in the last year, at least compared to its virtual nonexistence before that. Within a few clicks from this page, you could be watching a documentary about barehanded fishing in Oklahoma, the Soviet-era magic-realist classic "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" or "Hotel for Dogs." Come September, Sally Potter's new film "Rage" will premiere as a series of episodes on Babelgum, at the same time it's released in theaters and on DVD. The Palestinian film "Laila's Birthday," an international festival favorite with no theatrical deal, was recently made available for three weeks on the Auteurs, a new cinephile streaming site that's currently in beta.
Those are just examples; I could pick dozens more. But online distribution remains an insignificant factor in the film economy (if anything, movie theaters are thriving in the current recession), and it represents a tiny proportion of the video watched on computer screens. One could argue, in fact, that feature films and the Internet are mismatched forms of media; the former demands long stretches of undivided attention while the latter thrives on multitasking, rapid response time and brief info-bursts. When was the last time you spent 90 minutes or more sitting at your computer and looking at the same thing?
Still, more and more movies are available online every month, and new modes of delivering them seem to crop up almost as fast. Last October marked a turning point of sorts. That was when YouTube streamed the week-long premiere of indie pioneer Wayne Wang's "The Princess of Nebraska" (as a companion piece to his theatrical release, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers") and Hulu streamed its first full-length feature, the George W. Bush-related documentary "Crawford."
Those examples represent one model for online distribution: streaming video-on-demand, or VOD, that's free to the user and best understood as a promotional opportunity for the filmmaker and distributor. In the case of Hulu, some advertising revenue presumably flowed back to the makers of "Crawford" -- probably in the range of a few cents per viewer -- but the real value lay in getting the movie out to a large audience during an election season. (A Hulu source reports that "Crawford" remains the most-discussed video in the site's history.) YouTube's Screening Room site is not ad-supported, but Wang's film got 153,000 views in a week, far more eyeballs than he could likely have gotten from a small-scale, bicoastal theatrical release. DVD and television deals followed, so quite possibly the experiment paid off.
Free VOD streaming definitely isn't the only game in town. There are three basic themes in digital distribution -- the other two, essentially, being online video rental (paid VOD streaming) and online video purchase (paid downloads) -- and many variations upon them. Some online exhibitors, including iTunes, Netflix, Amazon and IndiePix, try to enable various ways of leapfrogging their content over the Berlin Wall between your computer and your TV set. Others, including Hulu, Joost, Jaman and the Auteurs, deliver content to your laptop and leave the rest to you. Yes, I hear you, technophiles: It's easy to connectFor the better part of a decade, people like me have been pronouncing that theatrical... more
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The makers of Miro, the open-source video player and television platform, have stepped up and challenged the big guys behind Joost. Citing Joost as the competition "with the most hype," Miro has posted a list of features and how they compare between the two platforms. The point of this chart is clearly to bring more viewers over to the charity-backed Miro"I think we'll have more users than they do by January," wrote Miro's Nicholas Reville on the company blogand the list paints the player in a very favorable light. But what are the differences between these two, and can they truly be compared? With Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing touting the benefits of Miro, we thought it would be a good time to find out.
Related Stories
* Joost looking to get into live TV, will begin tests in 2008
* Joost finally sheds invite-only status, opens up to the public
* Joost signs on CNN, other programming in advance of official launchThe makers of Miro, the open-source video player and television platform, have stepped... more
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"Theres a time bomb out there with Joosts name on it. Full-screen, broadcast-quality video streamsthe main selling point of Joosts peer-to-peer Internet TV client softwareis quickly coming to the Web. Brightcove will soon be offering such streams to its video publishers using BitTorrent DNA. But the real threat to Joost will be coming from Adobe and its ubiquitous Flash player.
Sometime in the next few months, Adobe is expected to incorporate the H.264 codec in all Flash players with the general release of Flash Player 9. You can already download a beta version from Adobe Labs. The H.264 codec is part of MPEG-4 and is the codec that Apple uses to compress all of the video downloads on iTunes. Once H.264 is part of Flash, the quality of streaming video on the Web will roughly double at current bandwidth speeds. That means YouTube videos will look twice as goodand those will likely remain on the low end in quality.
Every video site on the Web (and quite a few that are still in stealth) is just waiting for Flash Player 9 to be distributed widely and become the new standard. That will allow them to launch their own full-screen Internet TV services with video streams that are just as good or better than Joosts, and that will require nothing more than a regular browser to watch."
Personally, I love using Joost. What's your thought?"Theres a time bomb out there with Joosts name on it. Full-screen,... more
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Broadband video company Joost has released the 1.0 version of its video player application, although it remains in beta testing. It features a redesigned user interface which seems snappier but remains rather unintuitive. Some users also complain that the broadband video platform still suffers from a lack of compelling programming.
Broadband video company Joost has released the 1.0 version of its video player... more
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4 years ago
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