The eMedia Race

The New Generation in Net TV

2007-03-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

Things are starting to happen fast and furious in the online TV scene. There are an increasing number of players coming online seemingly every day. At the same time Viacom and going after YouTube (Google's) Billions.

What users want to do is to watch their TV / Video content when they want to and ideally free. The best place for this used to be YouTube and for headline (illegal) content it often still is.

What is apparent is that the free-for-all in publishing copyrighted media is speeding up rather than slowing down. YouTube has not released it's copy protection tools freely to the large media companies (let alone smaller players) and now companies are being set up to host 'deleted' YouTube content.

I stopped using YouTube regularly around three months ago when I found that every single content item I'd saved in my favourites had been removed for some reason or other. At the time I thought that YouTube must have a reasonably good grip on things. The truth is that if you're looking then you can always find the content as it is continuously re-populated on to YouTube in a very organised manner.

One of my favourite sites is the re-vamped Blinkx site which has three great tricks up it's sleeve. The first is the re-vamped video wall which shows dozens of video clips on the same screen and give you multiple previews at the same time; the second is the continuous play function which pulls together all the 1-2-3-4-5-6 sequence clips into one seamless sequence and allows your video search results to be streamed in a continuous sequence; the final trick is the new full-screen player which has video previews of the other videos in the result set allowing you to view them whilst you're watching a clip.

Another site worth checking out and soon out of it's closed beta phase is Babelgum. This is a slick application but at the same time it feels no different from flicking through channels at home and doesn't appear to offer much more functionality yet. I'm sure it's one to watch though, along with Joost. Both offerings need to embrace the web much better though to be truly relevant and not simply cheap Satellite TV replacements.

Veoh Networks offer a good approach to watching content. They seem to have a similar approach to Metacafe when it comes to the style of content and software solution, what sets them apart from most of the other sites at the moment is that you can watch hour long episodes and entire TV series for free, and download them to your local player.

At my company Emojo we're also rolling out some cool new Affino functionality on the TV / Broadcast side with a new video player, video browser and streamlined Podcasting engine. The beauty behind the whole system is how smoothly the whole system works and the ability for organisations to create all kinds of broadcast interfaces, media stores and media libraries.

On an aside there was a note recently that Search Engines had overtaken pornography sites as the main destination for users online, of course it doesn't take a genius to realise that the search engines probably present more pornography than all the top porn sites put together and users have simply moved to the new medium. With the new generation of video search engines such as Blinkx it's clear that they're going to be having an even bigger impact in the near future.

Party by GPS

2007-02-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

The last time I went out partying in London we ended up spending more time in Ice Cream joints than actually hanging out in bars. We basically toured the West End and wandered into the most obvious places, usually followed by a swift exit.

This time round we were determined not to repeat the same mistake and did a little more planning. The key was a rack of London websites such as Late Night London which allow you to browse bars and clubs by features and location as well as other sites which allow you to review them.

The second trick was to put all the locations into my Garmin Nuvi GPS. The reason we ended up putting a stack of bars into it is that every bar review had some people saying how great it was whilst other said it was terrible. What the GPS does for you is list out the closest bar, lets you know how far it is and tells you how to get there in a way that's easy to follow (even long into the night).

The route we took depended a bit on what we wanted to next, but started out at The Loop; then went to the Match Bar (when we discovered there were no cocktails at The Loop); we then went for a nice sit-down at Momo's Tea Room and finished the evening at Digress with some good moves :o). The Match Bar gets 8/10 for some great music (the bar man was too busy flirting to serve up a decent cocktail) and Momo gets 9/10 for a great overall experience but we're still looking for a great place to boogie, any suggestions?

About Markus Karlsson, editor of the eMedia Race

2007-01-23T17:12:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick intro to who I am and why I'm going to be blogging on eMedia and the developments within the general media space online.

I've been involved in the eBusiness space since the web started to go commercial. I set up one of the first Internet companies in the UK and over the years have worked on hundreds of eBusiness projects and launched a number of sites globally for companies ranging from Diesel and Casio through to MasterCard and the Royal Opera House.

Increasingly the web has become a sophisticated business environment and broadly speaking there are four key elements to it: People / Communities, Content, Media and Business.

I'm the CEO of Emojo based in Regent Street, London, UK and we have developed a pioneering eBusiness 2.0 solution which is a breakthrough solution when it comes to developing eBusinesses and managing media online.

To stay at the leading edge Emojo is continually innovating and working with some of the web's leading companies. I'll be sharing many of the insights and latest developments with you on many of the innovations we come across and are developing within Emojo on the Affino platform.

You can find out more about Emojo and Myself at:

Emojo.com

Markus Karlsson's Linked In Profile

The eBusiness Race Blog

You can also see what Teamojo is working on by checking out our Flex blog at:

Mojo Flex

Welcome to The eMedia Race

2007-01-19T10:48:00.000-08:00

We're all about Media, Web TV, Net TV, Online Broadcasting, EPG's, Flash Video, Flash TV, Internet TV, Pay per View, Social Media and Video on Demand.

We're also all about Monetizing Media and Maximizing the value of your media online.