Here at Watch.tv we’re proud to say that honor is reserved for the live streaming sites like Justin.tv and UStream.tv. YouTube has about 24 hours of video uploaded per minute. But, Justin.tv claims 30 hours and Ustream.tv claims over 53 hours per minute according to Ryan Lawler at NewTeeVee.

That said, we’d like to give a shout out to YouTube.com today as it is their 5 year anniversary (I’m on record as being partial to such birthdays). YouTube announced today that they are now serving 2 billion (yes “B”) streams a day. While there is a part of me that’s reminded of McDonald’s with that statement, I’m very excited for online video, .tv, and our prospects for the future.

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.

When asked why .tv, they said they use .tv because people expect there to be video attached to it and for it to be fun. So watch the video below to hear from the founders of one of the largest video sites on the web, Justin.tv.

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

“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.

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?

Muzu.tv Signs Lucrative New Deals –Thanks to www.everything.tv for pointing out this announcement on Muzu.tv. They announced a number of deals to distribute their music videos with AOL, Bebo, and the Telegraph Media Group. among others. The Irish based company says it’s traffic is “growing at 20-30 per cent month on month” and “is serving more than 14 million music related videos in the UK every month.” Music videos are a hot category and go great with .tv

Justin.tv Makes it Easier To Go Live — Last week www.justin.tv rolled out a new version of its broadcasting tools. Cnet is quoting that ” a simple change has led to a 700 percent increase in the number of people who make it from clicking the “broadcast” button on Justin.tv’s front page to actually beginning a live stream.” Those are impressive stats.

Ustream.tv Gets Money to Go East — They announced $20MM in initial funding with an option for $55MM more. That’s real money. What do they plan to do with that? Tech Crunch says “money will be used to expand on the other side of the world, particularly Japan (obvious, given the SoftBank involvement), China, Korea, and India. Mobile video is particularly hot in some of the Asian countries”. At the $75MM mark, the smart money is saying Ustream.tv is worth $230MM.

Vator.tv Splash — This past Thursday Vator.tv launched their event for early stage start ups to pitch their companies to over 300 investors, founders and members of the press. The 10 finalist are listed here. It’s an interesting group with a number of the companies involved in online video. Congratulations to Vator.tv

Online Video to Become Mainstream in 2010 — Speaking of VCs, our friends at Beet.tv interviewed Ross Levinsohn, former digital chief at News Corp and now a venture capitalist at Fuse Capital. Seems his company gets a pretty wide view of whats coming next, looking at over 500 companies a year. When asked what trends he saw, he was bullish on online video — saying it will become mainstream in 2010 — even admitting some already say it is that.

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.