For those that don’t have those acronyms handy on the tip of your tongue, ccTLD stands for country code top level domain. Examples of those are .de, .us or yes .tv. gTLD stands for global top level domains. Examples of gTLDs are .com or .net. These are not directly associated with a country, thus the global.  So, though .tv is technically a ccTLD (Tuvalu), Google recognizes it’s used as a global brand. In fact, the term TV is a recognized term across most languages and communicates entertainment and video.

In my previous blog post, I discussed the new tag, its usage, and how we are going to have native tags on the web. It just so happens that there is a whole range of technologies, standards and market force that is driving this new native video technology and shaping its future. In order to understand this landscape, it is probably a good idea to have a quick understanding of the video technology, namely video containers and video codecs.

What are Video Containers?
A video container defines how to store video and audio streams in a single file. When you think of video files, you usually thing of “AVI” or “MP4″ files, but they are in reality called “container formats”. A close analogy for container formats is a ZIPfile.

Don’t forget that a ZIP file is a container format that can contain any sort of file within it. It does not really define the contents of the file. In the same way, a video container format defines HOW to store video things (video stream, audio stream, track information, synchronization information, metadata etc.) and not WHAT kinds of data to store. Well, I say that cringingly because not all video streams are compatible with all container formats. Shucks!

Anyway, there are several video container formats in the marketplace. Some of the popular ones are:

• MPEG4 - The Movie Picture Experts Group (MPEG4) video container files usually have an extension of .mp4 or .m4v. This is a specification from Apple and is based on Apple’s old QuickTime (.mov) container.

• FLV - The Flash Video (FLV) container files usually have an extension of .flv. This is a specification from Adobe and is of course used by Adobe Flash runtime, which also supports files based on MPEG4 container. This is very popular and is used heavily in the Internet.

• OGG - The OGG video container format files usually have an extension of .ogv. OGG is an open standard, open-source friendly format that is unencumbered by any known patents. So, clearly Firefox supports this natively and of course all major Linux distributions bundle support for this container.

• AVI – The Audio Video Interleave (AVI) video container files usually have an extension of .avi. This container format from Microsoft has fallen behind in technology and does not support the feature set of many modern containers. Over time many companies have tried to extend it and generally in incompatible ways.

What are Video Codecs?
A video codec defines what kind of data to store in the file. Imagine you’re watching a video; when you do so, there is a video codec (Coder Decoder) that has to interpret the bytes in the stream to display the video and synchronize it with the audio. Hence, think of a video codec as a data structure and an algorithm by which video and audio has to be encoded.

There are several video codecs in the market place. Some of the popular ones are:

• MPEG-4 ASP – The MPEG4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile) is developed by MPEG group and is a popular codec that can be embedded in popular containers such as AVI and MP4. This codec is patent encumbered and is licensed through the MPEG LA consortium.

• H.264 – The H.264 codec is also known as “MPEG-4 part 10″ or “MPEG-4 AVC”. This format developed by the MPEG group prides itself in having a single codec that can be used in cell phones (low-bandwidth, low CPU device) and desktops (high-bandwidth and high CPU device). This is licensed under the MPEG LA consortium too and is considered one of the best.

• THEORA – This is a codec developed by Xiph.org. It is royalty free and goes hand in hand with OGG container. It’s supported by Firfox 3.5+ and popular Linux distributions by default.

So, what is the standard?
HTML5 defines the tag, but does not specify the video container or the codec. The question is when we use the tag in our HTML page, which codec can we count on being present in all browsers and across all platforms including mobile devices. This is an interesting question and a challenging battle between the big players. H.264 is technically better than MPEG-4 and THEORA, with support for multiple profiles lo – low and high end profiles. It also has a good market share as it is currently embedded in many popular products including Apple’s iPhone, Apple TV, Adobe Flash, YouTube HD, and Android phones.

It so happens that Google acquired On2 technologies within the last year and gained rights to a codec called VP8. The VP8 codec is said to be superior to H.264 with more than 40 new innovations delivering outstanding quality at low bitrates and low complexity, thus reducing the cost of streaming video. Interestingly, there is a rumor that Google plans to open source this technology (this may be announced in the Google IO conference this year). Google is obviously interested in entering this space. Flash Video, the most popular internet video format, is feeling left out as Apple announces no support for Flash in iPod and iPad.

As you can see, the big boys are playing politics, but the reality is we will eventually have native VIDEO on the web. And, what does that mean to the average user and to video? It means we will finally have video with no plugins, it will simply work on all browsers and all platforms including mobile phones (and iPads…and that next thing we haven’t thought of yet). You think video is growing now. Just wait!

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.

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.

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!

• Auto-captioning: They will do automated captioning of YouTube videos. To start, it will only be certain channels (mostly educational) but the intent seems to be to make it available across the service;
• Auto-timing: They are using some of the same technology to make manual captioning (still better than the automated version) easier and available to anyone who has a script to do it; and
• Translation They are announcing automated language translation in 51 languages for the captioning (so if there’s a video in say English, and someone who speaks Japanese wants to know what it says, regardless of their hearing status, they can get captions in Japanese for the video).

To find out more about it I called up a former co-worker of mine, Tom Wlodkowski, Accessibility Director at AOL. It turns out he was at the Google Policy office for the announcement. I learned a lot in our brief telephone conversation. It turns out that HR 3101 (aka “the Markey bill”) has accessibility aspects to it and is currently being debated in Congress, as are the accessibility requirements around broadband access at the FCC.

While I believe Google when they say they held the meeting in DC so the disability rights groups could easily attend I suspect the congressional staffers were a target also (and maybe a few three letter agencies too). We here in the DC area are used to somewhat broad pitches really targeted to a mere 435 people. Tom predicts that we’ll see some regulation in this area over the next 12-18 months and he thinks it’s nice to see voluntary efforts like Google’s launch of an automated captioning system on YouTube in advance of regulation. To me this feels like one more step in online video becoming mainstream.

The current mark up of the bill pertains only to “broadcast comparable programming” not UGC. But I give Google kudos for getting ahead of the curve here. So, other than not being evil, why might Google be doing this?

• In the US alone there are 11-42MM people that have hearing difficulties. When looked at more broadly, estimates range from 1/3 of all US households having one member with a disability to 650MM people worldwide with a disability. The Advertising Educational Council speaks to the buying power of this market saying “The discretionary spending power of the disabled—at $220 billion in 2002, per the National Organization on Disability—outshines that of even the revered teen market, which laid out $170 billion in 2002, reports the market research firm Teenage Research Unlimited”. So, overall, it might just make good business sense for them.
• Also, it makes the videos more searchable and Google is all about search. Some people don’t realize this, but Google image search actually searches the text around images, not the image itself. With transcripts, they can now search inside the video. This opens up all sorts of possibilities. And, as an interesting aside, Plymedia launched video captioning the same day and their TechCrunch article only talked about search…nothing about helping the deaf and hard of hearing.
• Only 1/3 of the Internet users in the world speak English. Translations are probably another great business. Now I expect that some of that translation will not work very well; but I’m anxious to see how well it does work. And in many cases some idea (no matter how humorous the syntax may be) is better than nothing.

As to the personal reason for my interest mentioned at the beginning of this post; I’m hard of hearing. For some of my life I was nearly deaf. Two immediate family members have hearing aids. And, my husband is a disability policy expert. So to me, it hits home.

And, in closing, to bring it back directly to .tv not just online video; while looking for information on the size of the disabled community, I found this .tv site deafvideo.tv. It’s UGC of individuals signing their videos. I love that the Internet is a way for all to join in.