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YouTube Offers ‘Sesame Street’ and Martial Arts, for a Fee (The New York Times)
YouTube on Thursday detailed its plan to let producers sell paid subscriptions to their videos, creating a prominent new marketplace for programming on the Internet. The first paid video channels appeared on the sprawling video website, a unit of Google, Thursday afternoon, with subscription rates ranging from 99 cents to $7.99 a month. Forbes Google is positioning its video site as the anti-cable TV: a video service willing to offer individual channels on the cheap rather than force people to buy huge bundles of channels, most of which they’ll never watch. Unfortunately, its subscription offerings include almost nothing you’ve ever heard of unless you’re a pretty avid of specific YouTube channels, or a kid (or have kids). VentureBeat Initially, 53 channel partners are participating in the pilot program, including Jim Henson Family TV, UFC Direct, TNA Impact Wrestling, National Geographic Kids, Rap Battle Network, SmartTV.com, TYT Plus, Recipe.tv and Acorn TV. Subscribing to all the initial channels would cost about as much as what you’d expect to pay for extended basic cable TV service. AdAge YouTube’s head of content partnerships, Malik Ducard, said creators could elect to charge subscriptions and to take advertising, but that would be the minority at the outset. “YouTube shouldn’t make the call whether a paid channel has ads or not,” he said. “The partners are smarter about their audience and their content than we are.” TechCrunch As of Thursday, users can subscribe to paid channels from their desktops and laptops and watch across devices, but going forward YouTube will look to add the ability to subscribe from any medium/device. On top of that, YouTube will begin a broader rollout of subscriptions in the next few weeks for “qualifying partners,” and from the looks of it, it will be adding a paid channel recommendation feed — just as it does now for free channels.

Facebook Updates Pages Manager for iOS (AllFacebook)
Facebook released version 2.0 of its Pages Manager for iOS application, adding features such as photo filters and stickers, but removing insights such as clicks and people talking about this, as well as other features, albeit temporarily. Sister blog Inside Facebook reported on the update, saying that the only metric available in version 2.0 is overall reach, and when users tap on that number, they are directed to a page that offers them the option of promoting their posts. Inside Facebook In related news, the social network Thursday announced an update for its Android homescreen experience Facebook Home to address performance and stability. Facebook also revealed at a press event at its headquarters that in four weeks since the launch of Home on April 12, Home increased user engagement by more than 25 percent compared to the standard Facebook app. Reuters Facebook is in advanced talks to acquire Israeli mobile satellite navigation startup Waze for $800 million to $1 billion, business daily Calcalist reported on Thursday. The deal, which would be Facebook’s largest acquisition, would give the social networking company a mapping service and allow it to better compete with Google and Apple.

The Top 100 Vines in Vine’s First 100 Days (SocialTimes)
It’s only been 100 days since Vine first appeared on Twitter, and users are already sending out five Vine videos every second. Video tech company Unruly analyzed 10 million Vines over a one-month period to understand sharing patterns, and the study found that good things come in short, repetitive packages.

Twitter Buys Scalable Computing Outfit Ubalo (AllThingsD)
Twitter announced Thursday it had acquired Ubalo, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that aims to “make large-scale computing easier and more accessible to a technical audience,” according to the company’s site. It’s unclear exactly what Twitter will be doing with the company, but the team looks fairly well versed in scaling and infrastructure issues and has dabbled in Twitter topic analysis.

CheckinDJ is the Foursquare for Spotify (GigaOM)
CheckinDJ may be the cure for the bar jukebox dominated by die-hard Nickelback fans. True to its name, it’s a check-in app that uses music preferences from social network profiles to create playlists for coffee shops and other venues.

New This Year at the Chelsea Flower Show: A Tweet-Controlled Garden (AllTwitter)
Now you don’t need a green thumb to be a skilled gardener – all you need is a thumb, period. At this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, May 21-25 in London, Twitter users will be able to control the appearance of one of the display gardens.

Reddit User Fired by Google for Posting About Job (The Daily Dot)
Next time you get a new job, don’t brag about it on Reddit — especially if you’ve signed a nondisclosure agreement. Two days ago, Reddit user filthy33 learned this lesson the hard way.

The One Thing That Will Change the Business of Television (LostRemote)
There are conversations happening in the boardrooms of every TV network and MSO about the one thing that could have the most impact on television as we know it today. No, it’s not social media, 4k or DVRs – and it’s definitely not 3-D or second screen apps. It’s the one thing that gives television its lifeblood and is the backbone of its DNA: TV’s very own programming – its content.

Texas Congressman Will Arm Twitter Follower With an AR-15 (Mashable)
Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) used his Twitter account to announce an AR-15 giveaway. He invited all interested U.S. citizens to submit their names in hopes of winning the same kind of assault weapon that was used in the Sandy Hook massacre and has since become a symbol for those opposing new gun regulations.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Earlier this year, social TV content and data solutions company SocialGuide launched SocialGuide Intelligence, a social TV data analytics engagement platform that helps provide networks with the big picture about how fans are engaging with their content.  This week they’ve taken things to the next level, launching a new tool called “On Now” that actually enables users to view Twitter activity live, as it’s happening.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Streaming video service Netflix is rolling out a brand-spanking new design for its website’s video player today, which may make people think twice about favoring their set-top box over the web browser.

As you can see in the screenshots below, the new player is gorgeous. The new design better matches the user interface on Netflix’s main navigation pages. Player buttons are larger as is the text displayed — both of which will be helpful for people who have a big enough screen to sit a few feet back when watching videos.

Another huge improvement is the navigation between episodes of a TV series. Previously, the Netflix web video player was pretty bland, and didn’t provide you with much more than the title and episode number of a show. I suspect this is because more people are primarily using Netflix to watch TV content instead of movies (which don’t really require navigation). Now, when a video is paused you can hover over the “forward” button to bring up a thumbnail of the next episode and a short description. Clicking the button next to it will bring up a full list of episodes within the current season of a particular TV series. There’s even a progress bar for each episode to show you how far along you’ve watched.

I’ll admit, I rarely use the website when it comes to Netflix because it lacks these basic pieces of functionality. But that could change now that the company has wised up.

The new video player design should work fine in most browsers, provided you have the most current version of Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin downloaded. Let us know what you think of the design changes in the comment section below.

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

TV networks’ dominance of the delivery of TV content is rapidly collapsing, as alternatives expand and people build up their libraries:

Primetime Mystery: Where Did All the TV Viewers Go? – Derek Thompson via The Atlantic

The networks’ share of primetime TV audience (dark blue in the graph below [above in this post]) has declined from 45% in 1985 to 25% in 2009. Basic cable ate the networks’ lunch post-dinner audience, and now it’s technology’s turn gobble up what’s left.

Even with this long trend line (and despite the fact that viewers often unplug in the spring), there is a sense that we’ve reached a tipping point thanks to what Gaspin calls “built-up libraries.” There is more good stuff to watch not-on-live-TV than on live-TV, and even the head of entertainment at NBC knows it. Television technologies are dragging us away from live television, to a world of smaller screens, shifting “windows,” and no more ads. In 2000, a company called Netflix was experimenting with movie rentals. Now they have more than 20 million streaming customers. In 2005, about 1% of households owned DVRs. Today, it’s more than 40%. In 2006, Hulu didn’t exist. Today it has just under 30 million monthly uniques, with more than 1 million paying subscribers. In 2009, there were no iPads. Today, there are 60 million, and most of them are in the United States. That’s a Cambrian explosion of options for “watching TV” without literally watching an actual TV.

So people are ‘watching TV’ but not watching network programming in real time: they have defected from the ‘appointment TV’ model, or defected from broadcast and networks as the delivery mechanism for TV media.

PS DVR is a strange intermediary technology, one that foreshadowed keeping your TV shows in the cloud. (Apple’s iTunes in the cloud is poised to destroy the market for DVR devices.)

(h/t emergent futures)

Eat your heart out Humpty Dumpty. Comcast has managed to put the Internet back together again with just a few simple keystrokes and mouse clicks. But before you go patting the company on the back, you should know that it’s responsible for fracturing the internet in the first place — or at least implying that it’s fractured.

Confused? Allow me to explain.

Just days ago the cable company launched its Xfinity TV app on Xbox 360, which allows Comcast subscribers to watch both OnDemand and live streaming video content through their gaming console. One of the Xbox app’s big perks is that data from watching those high-quality videos doesn’t count against Comcast’s self-imposed 250GB per month data cap. The company’s FAQ page initially explained that “since the content is being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet, it does not count against a customer’s bandwidth cap.” In other words, there are two different parts of the internet, according to Comcast.

VentureBeat previously declared shenanigans on Comcast’s “private network” for Xfinity TV content , because both the “public internet” and “private networks” are delivered over the same broadband infrastructure. Since other streaming services on the Xbox do count against that data cap (and don’t have their own broadband infrastructure), Comcast arguably has an advantage. Comcast is essentially treating the Xbox 360 like one of its cable set-top boxes, which also don’t affect that 25oGB data cap.

Earlier today, GigaOM noticed that Comcast had removed all mention of “private networks” from the FAQ page — and just like that, the internet is no longer two segregated parts, (right?). The revised language reads: “The Xbox 360 running our XFINITY TV app essentially acts as an additional cable box for your existing cable service, and our data usage threshold does not apply.”

The truth is, Comcast probably decided it wasn’t wise to imply that its TV service is a separate, private network that just so happens to be delivered through the same broadband infrastructure as its internet service. Some people have pointed out that Comcast’s current TV service isn’t IP-based, and thus, is different from other streaming services. That isn’t necessarily true for its Xfinity TV content. And if Comcast is prioritizing its own video services over competitors by imposing data caps, then it definitely merits investigation by federal regulators.

Humpty artwork via Vertigo/DC Comics

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

Eat your heart out Humpty Dumpty. Comcast has managed to put the Internet back together again with just a few simple keystrokes and mouse clicks. But before you go patting the company on the back, you should know that it’s responsible for fracturing the internet in the first place — or at least implying that it’s fractured.

Confused? Allow me to explain.

Just days ago the cable company launched its Xfinity TV app on Xbox 360, which allows Comcast subscribers to watch both OnDemand and live streaming video content through their gaming console. One of the Xbox app’s big perks is that data from watching those high-quality videos doesn’t count against Comcast’s self-imposed 250GB per month data cap. The company’s FAQ page initially explained that “since the content is being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet, it does not count against a customer’s bandwidth cap.” In other words, there are two different parts of the internet, according to Comcast.

VentureBeat previously declared shenanigans on Comcast’s “private network” for Xfinity TV content , because both the “public internet” and “private networks” are delivered over the same broadband infrastructure. Since other streaming services on the Xbox do count against that data cap (and don’t have their own broadband infrastructure), Comcast arguably has an advantage. Comcast is essentially treating the Xbox 360 like one of its cable set-top boxes, which also don’t affect that 25oGB data cap.

Earlier today, GigaOM noticed that Comcast had removed all mention of “private networks” from the FAQ page — and just like that, the internet is no longer two segregated parts, (right?). The revised language reads: “The Xbox 360 running our XFINITY TV app essentially acts as an additional cable box for your existing cable service, and our data usage threshold does not apply.”

The truth is, Comcast probably decided it wasn’t wise to imply that its TV service is a separate, private network that just so happens to be delivered through the same broadband infrastructure as its internet service. Some people have pointed out that Comcast’s current TV service isn’t IP-based, and thus, is different from other streaming services. That isn’t necessarily true for its Xfinity TV content. And if Comcast is prioritizing its own video services over competitors by imposing data caps, then it definitely merits investigation by federal regulators.

Humpty artwork via Vertigo/DC Comics

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

Have you ever wondered how video content created exclusively for the web stacks up against broadcast TV content online?  In an interview with Beet.TV, Stokes Young, Executive Producer of MSNBC.com, provides some interesting insight.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Social TV has been blowing up over the past couple of years, but there has been no really great way for networks to monitor the social media buzz surrounding their networks, series, and episodes…until now.  Earlier this month, social TV content and data solutions company SocialGuide launched SocialGuide Intelligence—a social TV data analytics engagement platform that taps into Twitter to give networks the big picture when it comes to how fans are engaging with their content.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

SkyGrid, a startup that offers a powerful news aggregator to consumers is venturing into the TV content and media business with the launch of Touchtv, an iPad app that allows viewers to watch recent programs from popular sports, entertainment, politics, and news channels.

Custom designed for the iPad, Touchtv, which is a free app, aims to give viewers their own personal TV via the iPad to watch their favorite channels. SkyGrid has partnered with a number of networks including Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC, ESPN, OWN, E! and others to show specific content and programming.

You can simply launch Touchtv on your iPad and “touch” any channel to start watching. From the Home Screen viewers can watch their channels and personalize their TV. As SkyGrid CEO Kevin Pomplun explains to me, Touchtv aims to replicate an identical experience to watching TV and flipping through channels. Unlike Hulu, Netflix, or others, Touchtv not trying to provide full sitcoms or games, but instead is trying to give users the channel watching experience.

In addition, LG has selected the Touchtv experience to be embedded in 40 million of their TVs which will be in market in the next year and a half. The aim of this could be to give cord cutters the ability to watch network programming without cable.

Touchtv still faces competition from Hulu, Netflix and even the individual iPad apps offered by cable operators and networks for the leanback experience. Pomplun says that SkyGrid will continue to operate independently from Touchtv.

Apple is said to be pushing forward with its plans to launch a full-fledged television set, holding meetings with media executives and sharing their vision for the future of the living room, including the possibility of storing recorded TV content in iCloud.