Flingo.tv

As covered by GigaOM, two .tv’s that showed new products are Flingo and Simple.tv.

Flingo, headquartered in San Francisco, launched in late 2008 as a way for sending online video to internet-connected TVs (including sets from LG, Samsung and Vizio). They launched a new product at CES, called SyncApps, which they claim allows users to share easily on Facebook and Twitter, while allowing social content from broadcasters, like polls and updates, to be sent to the user’s TV screen. There have announced a number of really exciting features, including an API that enables developers to create application that use SyncApps to hook into their system. This looks like the next phase of social television and we can’t wait to see where this goes.

Another .tv that emerged from CES is Simple.tv, a set-top device that lets you stream live and recorded TV content to supported mobile devices – including the iPad.  Simple.tv announced availability for Spring 2012 and are taking reservations for their device on their website. Simple.tv also announced a premium subscription package will be available  that will include an enhanced program guide, automatic recording and streaming to a set number of connected devices.

Simple.tv

These are pretty exciting uses of technology for online video – it looks like the future is really here!

We’re also looking forward to exploring great new features that are being implemented in cameras – like Wi-Fi and 3D – that will help take online video up to the next level.

One of the big events of this year’s CES was the International Academy of Web Television Awards. This is an organization that promotes and celebrates online video and the amazing creators behind them. The awards were given out on January 12^th and you can watch the stream of the ceremony here.  We were really excited to see one of our advocates, Brad Powell’s webshow, DadLabs, win Best Educational Web Series – Congratulations Brad!

Once again, the Consumer Electronics Show was an exciting kick-off to the year and we’re looking forward to seeing all of these products in use during 2012!

Twitch.tv website

We’ve written about Twitch.tv before and have followed it’s progress since it’s spin off from Justin.tv in June 2011. Twitch.tv is a site for video gamers to watch, broadcast and chat about their gameplay, a great site to discover new games and personalities to follow.

The site has been growing at an incredible rate – 11% month over month since their launch – and announced in December that Twitch.tv is now engaging more than 12 million unique visitors a month. They also launched an iPhone application, which had over 80,000 downloads in the first month.

Twitch.tv has a premium partner program that includes the Electronic Sports League, Major League Gaming and the IGN Pro League, and is now more than 1000 members strong.

There is an incredible amount of momentum going into 2012 around Twitch.tv and the gaming space – what we see is that this is an incredibly connected and vibrant community that’s passionate about video gaming and online video.

Learn how to create and edit video on .tv

Our new Watch.tv site design has been live for a couple of months now – and we’ve gotten a lot of great, positive feedback on our new look and feel. One of the new sections on the site that we love is HowTo .tv, which is dedicated to educating our users about online video.

In this section you’ll find videos and posts on a number of subjects:

• Steve Garfield‘s video on how to “Plan, Shoot, Edit and Share Web Video“
• A great post on “The Keys to Great Audio“
• An answer to a question we get a lot at Watch.tv, “How to Host Video on the Web“
• And more…

Stay Tuned!

* Disclosure: Rick Griffin and Sandi McKenna are compensated .tv Advocates,  http://cmp.ly/3/LyzHe9 and http://cmp.ly/3/yDVhjL

.tv Advocate Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff

Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff: Phone-Schmone, the iPhone 4© is a great video camera! One that only got better with Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 4s©. While the iPhone 4© does video in a very respectable 720p, the 4s has been upgraded to an eye-popping (not to mention memory-gobbling) 1080p. Granted, you may not think the iPhone 4© or iPhone 4s© would be your first choice as a camcorder to shoot your next TV pilot (but, then again… hey, why not be so bold?). Or you may not think the iPhone 4/4s even good enough to go grab some interviews or OTF (on the fly) videos for your next big internet project (on a .tv website… hint, hint) because it doesn’t have one crucial element for filming great videos: an external microphone input.

Or does it?

Hah! Turns out the iPhone 4© DOES have an external microphone input. That means you can use a pro-quality mic with your iPhone©… all you need is the right cable to do so.

Look at the jack at the end of your iPhone© earbuds.

Notice that it has one more ring than a pair of standard stereo headphones. Standard headphones use what is called a TRS jack (Tip, Ring, Sleeve). iPhone headphones use a TRRS jack (Tip, Ring, Ring, Sleeve). That ring closest to the base is what carries your microphone signal. Lucky for you do-it-yourselfers, TRRS adapters aren’t that difficult to track down.

There’s a company that already makes an iPhone XLR micrphone and 1/8 inch headphone adapter – 3.5mm TRRS Male to 3.5mm Headphone Jack and 3-pin XLR Microphone Jack. It costs $28. Here’s what I used to build my own iPhone external mic adapter for less.

Find yourself a “4 Contact 3.5mm Plug to 3 RCA 10″ AV Cable” (this is the cable on top). At most it should run you $5. Then grab an XLR Female to RCA Male adapter .

plug the XLR adapter into the YELLOW RCA JACK. (which some of you know as the “video” input on similar video cables). Voila! You have a professional XLR mic input into your iPhone to attach a powered lavalier.

And of course, if you wanted to add in a headphone jack in order to monitor your input signal at the same time, you can always plug an RCA stereo male to 3.5″ mini plug stereo female adapter into the remaining red and white RCA jacks above.

Now you have external audio inputs into your iPhone©. It’s a device you carry around in your pocket and with the right cables, and microphone in your bag, you’ll always be ready to do some serious ENG at the drop of a hat!

Happy shooting!

Thanks Mark for the great post – just in time for people going to BlogWorld LA! We want to hear what you think – send us a tweet, comment here, on our Facebook page or our YouTube channel.

Stay Tuned!

* Disclosure: Mark is a compensated member of the .tv Advocate Program,  http://CMP.LY/3/zNxf55

By TDG’s numbers 60%, or 95MM consumers in just the US, are “enthusiastic” about TV Everywhere” services. And, about 34%, or 54MM are willing to pay at least $5 extra a month for the privilege. By my calculations, that’s about $3B a year. Even if that’s lower because of households verses individuals, it’s still a big enough number to get your attention.

Yes, it’s early yet. Michael Greeson, TDG partner and author of the report admits the content isn’t compelling at this stage. But I think it does show the interest users have for video. It’s big and growing.

What do you think? Do you want to watch video anywhere on any device? What would you pay for it?

.tv sponsored Diggnation’s live BigDigg Shindigg on Saturday night and our Street Team hit the conference looking for the Next .tv Star. We had some really great entries (over 75!) and a real down-to-the-wire horserace during the community voting period a few weeks ago, and we can now announce the winners of our Next .tv Star contest – Kosher Dillz and Flex Matthews!

As our winners, Kosher and Flex will be flying to San Francisco to meet with Revision3 Producer, David Prager, for a behind-the-scenes tour of Rev3 shows. They’ll also be getting some tips from David for their new roles as correspondents for our new “Best of .tv” web show that will be debuting soon.

Congratulations to Kosher and Flex, and we appreciate everyone who submitted a video or voted during the process.

Google TV in the works? — The Wall Street Journal (and about everyone that guesses on these things) thinks so. They may (or may not) show it off at their I/O conference May 19 and 20 for developers in SF. It’s expected to be on Android and will leverage the wider development community for applications. Rumor has it Intel and Logitech will be partners. I’m informed by those geeks that follow this that the Intel CE4100 provides a platform to put fancy overlays on the screen or rescale the input signal and pass it through. You can basically have a custom sports ticker or stock ticker running at all times regardless of your channel. Another example of old fashion TV and the web merging. Thanks for the pointer on that Neel!

For Another Point of View — Mark Cuban — never one to be shy putting forth his opinion — says the future of TV is TV … the kind that comes in over a cable and isn’t the Internet. I’m completely with Janko Roettgers from NewTeeVee on this one. While it’s still early; 14MM Netflix customers aren’t likely wrong. I can’t guess the exact moment that online video and that black box in your room merge completely…but it will happen.

Justin.tv Gives Advice on Live Video — Michael Seibel, the CEO of Justin.tv has a nice guest blog post on TechCrunch today. We’re fans of Michael here at Watch.tv and have a video of him here. In today’s post he talks about how to fix availability problems (mobile helps a lot) and how to fix the getting viewers problem. Check it out.

Online Advertising Spending is Shifting to Video — eMarketer’s article from May 3 says that online video advertising is growing at 40% and 94% of agency executives planned to spend more on online video in Q1 2010 than the prior year. Thanks Tempy for that article.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences will celebrate the power of television– and specifically, eight programs that have had significant impact on the viewing audience and the ability to spark positive social change.

The honored programs include:
• CSI, “Coup De Grace”
• Glee, “Wheels”
• Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am?
• Explorer: “Inside Death Row” — “Inside Death Row”
• Private Practice “Nothing To Fear”
• Taking Chance
• Unlocking Autism — “Unlocking Autism”
• Vanguard: “The OxyContin Express”

These programs concern vital issues ranging from capital punishment to racism, prescription drug abuse and trafficking, autism, the military escort for fallen service members, physician-assisted suicide and important disability issues.

Dana Delany, star of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, will host the evening.

So the power of video – whether it be on that black box in your living room or the PC on your desk – is amazing and should be celebrated. It’s not much of a prediction to say that the difference between that black box and the PC is blurring and will blur more; so I think a toast to the Emmy’s is in order. Here’s to a voice through video…no matter where it lives. Go to Emmys.tv for more information.

I look forward to catching up with old colleagues and learning new things. Looking over the sponsors, presenters and exhibitors; I think it’s telling that it’s a mix of the big guys (e.g., Google), the old guys (e.g., AT&T) as well as the smaller up and coming players (e.g., Boxee.tv and Blip.tv). That makes for a nice mix, I think.

Some of the sessions that caught my eye in a quick scan:

• Did you know that even though the US online video add spend is $1B, it’s still only 1/16th of the overall video add spend (but 1/7 the audience). Hear what’s right, what’s wrong, and how to make those lofty 5 year projections.
• How a quiet revolution was developing with video in the ecommerce arena. This session will talk about how video is redefining the way we buy products (a topic on this blog before http://bit.ly/6ZYOXo ).
• Going Mobile: with all the buzz on iPhone, iPad and Android, video is finally reaching the mobile world (at least here in the US, many countries are light years ahead of us). This session says it will tell us how the world of mobile video will change the future. http://bit.ly/9qzrgsr
• For the geeks in the crowd, there’s a session on HTML5 and web video which we’ve been interested in here at the Watch.tv blog (and Adobe is there to raise the debate to an interesting discussion). http://bit.ly/9mtN91
• There’s some sessions on how online video is changing the traditional TV space such as cord cutting which has all sorts of implications for video.

So anyway, if you’re in NYC next week, stop by. Should be an interesting time.

Twitter held its first ever developer conference “Chirp” in San Francisco on April 14th and 15th, 2010. The conference was attended by 500 developers from all over the world. Twitter believes in an open ecosystem. Ever since Twitter was launched, their API and the platform has been open to the public and developers. Currently there are about 100,000 registered third party applications that were built using their API. The third party application development on the Twitter platform is growing at a rapid pace. Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced that 75% of the traffic comes from third party applications and 60% of the tweets come from these third party apps. Ev admitted that Twitter is too hard and gave an example: if you type in “I don’t get” in Google search box, then “I don’t get Twitter” is number 2 in the list. However, it is Twitter’s highest priority to make this experience “friction free” to users and developers.

For the first time ever, Twitter announced the roadmap of their platform during this conference.

Here are the highlights of the roadmap for 2010:

1) Location API – The current location API provides Longitude and Latitude only. Twitter is planning to allow you to associate city and places to tweets. So, not only you can read tweets from your followers, you can read tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city, whether you follow them or not.

2) @Annotations – Adding location to the tweets was a first step, now with the annotations you can associate any arbitrary meta-data to your tweets when it’s published and you can query back the tweets using the same meta-data. The new annotations open the possibility for making tweets and search much richer.

3) User Streams or Streaming API – So far we have been using their REST API for publishing tweets, searching tweets, following etc. The new streaming API allows the applications to receive tweets in near real-time. So, no more rate limitations, no need for waiting or polling for the tweets. The tweets will be pushed to you automatically as soon as they are received.

4) @Anywhere – The idea of @anywhere is to plug Twitter seamlessly into your own website with a few lines of Javascript code. So, when you visit a website that supports @anywhere, you’ll be able to follow any Twitter account associated with that site without navigating away from that site. @anywhere is analogous to Facebook Connect.

5) Twitter launched http://dev.twitter.com/ during this conference. Twitter promised to keep this website up to date with the information. In fact, the documentation is generated out of the code itself so it will never be out of date.

6) Twitter also announced their long-awaited revenue model which is not about ads, it’s about promoting tweets. Promoted tweets are shown as the top tweets. However, there are still questions how promoted tweets will actually work.

Twitter is growing at a rapid rate, currently Twitter has about 105 million registered users across the world and the investors are expecting this number to rise by half a billion in the next 1 to 2 years. Twitter has about 175 employees, for such a small team their impact across the whole world is enormous.

Watch live video from Twitter Chirp Conference on Justin.tv

Watch live video from Twitter Chirp Conference on Justin.tv