Video Vignettes Roundup: December 24
Posted by Michaela B., VeriSign
OK, three weeks of a weekly round-ups makes a trend I guess. This week is a short one, so the post is also.
To all those that celebrate Christmas, may you have a safe, peaceful and happy one with your friends and family.
Justin.tv Adds Subscription In an exclusive interview with Beet.tv, Evan Thompson of Justin.tv announced they were launching a subscription service next month with fuller roll out in Q2. Producers can charge what they want (with a minimum $1 fee) and Justin.tv will handle the authentication and payment.
The interview also had some impressive numbers on the current services:
- 35MM monthly views
- “On a daily basis, some 40,000 creators stream their programming live;
- About 1,800 shows going at any given time; and
- Some 800,000 individuals around the world are registered to upload to Justin.tv”
As an aside, I just love that this story is a .tv twofer with both Justin.tv and Beet.tv.
AppleTV Drumbeats Get Louder: Not this AppleTV (which Steve Jobs once referred to as a hobby), but the one that’s going to compete with the cable companies. TechChrunch’s headline on the topic even referred to it as “kneecapping” the cable industry.
An over the top subscription service by Apple has been rumored by those in the know for a while. But this week, the rumors got mores specific with Disney and CBS’ names thrown in the hat. Given the ever tight-lipped Apple, one might be forgiven some cynicism in thinking it had anything to do with last week’s timing on Comcast’s TVEverywhere roll out.
Mobile Video Applications to Reach $2.4B by 2013: iPhone and the expectations of Android are driving the trend according to UK researcher Screen Digest. as reported in Video Business (thanks to NewTeeVee for the pointer).
Hulu and Captioned Search: As discussed in a previous post on this blog, captioning on video allows for much more interesting search within videos. Hulu launched their version this week. There’s some fun searches you can do (how many times does “Twitter” get mentioned or what’s the exact episode of where they said something). Besides those fun aspects, truly opening up search to the video world has the potential to really revolutionize the medium.
NPR Highlights Lightchurch.tv On All Things Considered this week, they had another installment of their exploration of technology and religion. In it, they highlighted an online church Lightchurch.tv. According to the piece “The Web site brings worship services to approximately 60,000 computer screens each week.”. I did a little research and according to The Hartford Institute there are 300,000 churches in the US alone. That makes for a large potential market. As I learn more about how .tv is being used, the creativity of people continues to impress me.
Tagged apple, beet.tv, captioning, justin.tv, mobile, NPR, subscription


