“Live video can help you motivate a crowd to tell their friends what’s happening, follow you on Twitter, buy a product, donate to a cause or get up out of their chairs and take action. Justin.tv is built from the ground up to support any audience, whether it’s 5 people or 50,000. One new live video starts each second, and users watch more than 300 million videos every month.”

Watch this expert’s story on how Justin.tv was created, the importance of online video and the branding power of .tv.

YouTube Launches Auto Caption For All Videos: As reported on this blog back in November, Google started auto captioning their videos. It started with educational videos, but just extended it this week to all English videos. What does this mean for video on the web? Well besides being accessible to the deaf, it also helps immensely with search. If you have the text of the words spoken, then search algorithms can find and sort videos much better. The online video history is only at the beginning, with many more changes to come.

Vote for .tv In the Streamy Awards: No, .tv isn’t up for an award directly. But, the nominations came out this week (streamed live by Ustream.tv) and .tv shows up 14 times in the various awards categories [warning, not all have a "G" rating]. From the Streamy Awards site, here is a description of their work

“The Streamy Awards is the first and most prestigious awards ceremony devoted to honoring excellence in original web television programming and those who create it. The annual ceremony, and its live online broadcast, brings together top talent, decision-makers and influencers shaping the online entertainment industry. Awards are presented for the past years’ finest achievements in a variety of categories spanning multiple disciplines, including Performance, Directing, Writing, Editing, Visual Effects, Sound, and more.”

As they say in that “other” awards show…and the .tv nominees are:

Best Drama Web Series

Compulsions.tv

OzGirl.tv (who I see is using Blip.tv…so another mention)

Best News or Political Web Series

Obama’s War on VBS.tv

Best Foriegn Web Series

OzGirl.tv (representing Australia)

Best Animated Web Series

Ellie’s Dirty Jokes on GoPotato.tv

Best Branded Entertainment Web Series

TheTempLife.tv

Best Directing for a Drama Series

Compulsions.tv

Best Female Actress in a Comedy Series

Sex Ed on KoldCast.tv

Best Male Actor in a Drama Series

Compulsions.tv

Best Female Actress in a Drama Web Series

OzGirl.tv

Best Visual Effects in a Web Series — The Crew

TheCrew.tv

Best Live Production in a Web Series

Coin-Op.tv

Fantasy Live Football using Ustream.tv

Twit.tv

Best Product Integration in a Web Series

(Kodak) on WokeUpDead.tv

Best of luck to the nominees!

Ustream.tv Recognized as Most Innovative: In the category of the “web,” Ustream.tv was ranked one of the top 10 most innovative companies by FastCompany. Since launching it’s pay-per-view and social stream feature, the site has really grown “in January, the site attracted 70 million unique viewers, up 500% from the year before.”

One Quarter of New TVs Sold in January are Connected to the Internet: Making it that much harder to tell the difference between the Internet and TV, and making the online video space much more interesting, iSuppli released information that 25% of all TVs sold in January were connected to the Internet. Wonder where this will lead…

Mr. DNS is Great: I took DNS (Domain Name System) training today given by VeriSign’s very own Matt Larson. It was a terrific class. It’s fascinating to understand the history and all that goes into resolving a domain name or an email address. For those of you that would like to really know how domain names work, his podcasts can be found at www.ask-mrdns.com

Introducing the VeriSign Trust Seal: This announcement isn’t about .tv or online video specifically; but our sibling division at VeriSign had a big announcement this week that helps the Internet as a whole; so I wanted to pass it along. Fellow VeriSign blogger Tim Callahan’s blog has more details, but the new product adds daily malware scans and will make available the VeriSign Trust Seal to sites that don’t require SSL encryption.

VeriSign’s Domain Name Industry Brief provides a review of the state of the domain name industry, including up-to-date trends in new registrations, renewals, and growth opportunities.

VeriSign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2009 fourth quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at www.verisign.com/domainbrief.

VeriSign worked with Major League Baseball on a case study on MLB.tv several years ago. In it, their VP of Marketing said MLB.tv was “the clear favorite” for choices on a URL. ”We wanted to select something that would reinforce the MLB branding but would also convey the interactive and innovative side of this new service”.  (More details on the case study can be found here.)

So, it’s almost time for the boys of spring. If you’re a baseball fan –  grab your scorecard, your beverage of choice, and .tv to enjoy the fun.

Justin.tv Part of Fund Raising in the UK: UK personality Tim Shaw is live on Justin.tv closed up in a box. He refers to it as Man in Box and he’s in there for 30 days unless using Google maps and clues, Brits find him before that. There’s a prize if you find him, and funds raised will go to Help for Heros (a UK organization that raises money for wounded soldiers). An interesting cross between reality tv on the web, helping veterans and .tv. Thanks Justin.tv!

Watch live video from Man In Box on Justin.tv
Cisco’s Predictions on Mobile Video: Cisco recently released one of their reports that tries to predict traffic into the future. They had a number of things about video that I thought were interesting:

• Almost 66 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2014.
• Mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 131 percent between 2009 and 2014.
• Mobile video has the highest growth rate of any application category measured within the Cisco VNI Forecast at this time.
• Video will be responsible for the majority of the traffic growth between 2009 and 2014.
• Overall mobile data traffic is expected to grow to 3.6 exabytes per month by 2014, and over 2.3 of those are due to mobile video traffic.

ComScore Shows There’s Lots of Room for Video Sites: Yes, YouTube gets the majority of the traffic at 26% of time spent, but the next 24 spots only add an additional 22% according to a recent report from ComScore. That leaves over half of all time spent — 52% is in the tail. If you use videos watched as the metric, the second company on that list is already into low single digits (Hulu at 3%); and by the time you get to the 9th position on that list, you’re below single digits (CBS Interactive at .9%). So this story of video on the web is just beginning with lots of changes and growth to come. Great for .tv. Stay tuned.

Half of NetFlix’s Customers Stream to their TV: The Diffusion Group issued a press release on a report they recently did which says 1/2 – yes that’s 50% – of their large base is using the “Watch Instantly” option on their TVs. No, this isn’t the lone college student streaming to their laptop (though they do have that demographic too). This refers to someone who bothered to buy a box to make it easy, or hack a way to get the stream from the Internet onto a TV (full disclosure, I’m one of the box variety). What does this say for the over the top option for video on the web in the near future?

Though it’s just beginning, I suspect this blog will be more about the future than it will be about the past. However, when I saw this posting on my friend’s Facebook page (thanks Mike). I thought there were some interesting similarities to today’s pontifications and ponderings. This site from the American Historical Association has snippets of what people debated about television in the 1940s.

• It talks about movie studios being fearful of putting their good movies on TV, as people might stop going to movie theaters (substitute TV, for online, and how much different is the question now)?
• There’s a whole section on the FCC and spectrum. We might have finally given up the ghost on that one after 60 years with the switch to digital; but the debate still continues if you count wireless broadband in the mix to get video via the Internet;
• There’s a whole debate on standards; do we have the right ones to go forward (OK, in 1945 it might not have been Blu-ray verses HD-DVD, or HTML5…but you get the picture…pun intended); and
• There’s a section about advertising’s place in the new medium and what role subscriptions play (free verses paid is NOT a new dilemma).

So, in summary, everything old is new again. In the next 60 years (yikes…that’s 2070) how will our grandchildren look back at our debates and discussions about video in the dawn of the 21st century? And, how much will be a slight twist of today’s debates.

Photo via Library of Virginia: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_virginia/

Flo.tv is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm: a multi-billion dollar wireless company that’s brought you the technology behind Verizon’s mobile services and many of the other newer high speed mobile services you’re starting to see in the marketplace. Their package of technology, content and partners allows viewers to see their favorite shows while on the go. One of their tag lines on their site is “Now TV goes where you go”. They had two humorous ads that showed how you’d use their service (one a hen-pecked guy shopping with his girlfriend and one a mini-van full of screaming kids that calm down when presented with Flo.tv’s content). Their third ad tied in cleverly with the half time act. It’s a remake of The Who’s My Generation by Will.i.am played over major news and cultural video clips from over the years. The tag line on this is “Don’t miss a moment”. Perfect for a personalized mobile TV device. And perfect for .tv. Also, if you download the single, the proceeds go to to Haiti Relief.

The CBSCares video is evidently a Super Bowl tradition with .tv. It got a great reaction from the small crowd that I was watching the commercials…oh I mean the game…with. It’s a quiet ad featuring Mark Sanchez, quarterback for the New York Jets, talking about how heart attack symptoms present differently in women than men and encourages women to pay attention.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Interestingly, both Flo and CBS also have .com sites as well as their .tv sites. We here at VeriSign have nicknamed that “double dot”. More about that in a future post; but I think it represents some very interesting opportunities for .tv and is a sign the web and its many uses might be growing up.

And last, I’d like to give a shout out to Bruce Marler, Everything.tv and King.net for also posting about the .tv appearance on the big day.

P.S. I saw on the news last night that one couple getting married yesterday in the blizzard used www.ustream.tv to have their wedding and broadcast it to all their guest that couldn’t make it due to the snow. Seems not only did they get their guests, but over 800 people signed in to see the couple take their vows. What a great use for streaming video and .tv!