This post is meant for a very particular group: the boyfriends of Twilight fans. You guys are a special class of men. You’ve put up with months of preparatory squealing and sighing over Taylor Lautner’s abs and Robert Pattinson’s…OK, maybe you’re not sure what exactly she sees in that guy. But finally the time has come for the special lady in your life to remind you that she went and saw Transformers 2 with you opening weekend and thus you totally owe her one night at the movies, her choice.

But perhaps, as you sit watching the poorly reviewed second installment in a franchise that many consider to be an extended metaphor for abstinence and/or the Mormon faith, you find that you just need a short break from the pouting and melodrama and werewolves. And that’s why this post is here: to give you something to watch in the bathroom, on your smartphone, before you reluctantly return to the darkened theater.

From Babelgum Comedy and Landline TV comes a scenario arguably much more dramatic than a papercut-induced breakup: Edward reveals that there’s more to the vampire curse than Bella knew.

College Humor has also dove in with a parody that incorporates both New Moon and the Internet’s favorite t-shirt.

And the cast of Saturday Night Live tried their hands at this when Taylor Swift hosted the show two weeks ago, recasting the original film with a different Hollywood monster.

So return now to the movie in progress, boyfriends of Twilight fans, having hopefully laughed out your pain. And just remember this — now SHE owes YOU.

Forget multitouch: By far the most disruptive — and overlooked — feature of the Flash Player 10.1 beta that Adobe launched this week is the ability to transmit video via P2P multicast. In fact, Adobe built some enhanced P2P capabilities into both the new Flash Player and Air 2 beta that could be used to replicate BitTorrent functionality within Flash, build large-scale P2P groupware solutions that work right within the browser and stream video to millions of viewers without having to pay a fortune for bandwidth.

Adobe has been hinting at big plans for P2P ever since it bought a small P2P startup called amicima in early 2007. It made some of amicima’s technology available to developers about a year ago, but restricted it to small-scale use cases like P2P video conferencing or multiplayer games based on a few Flash players directly connected to each other via P2P. With Flash Player 10.1, Adobe appears ready to open the floodgates. CDNs and P2P video solutions providers would be well-advised to take notice.

Adobe’s P2P technology is based on its proprietary Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP), which was previously restricted to one-to-one connections. That means your Flash Player 10 could directly exchange data with another client, but not relay the data. Transmitting video to 10 other clients meant opening 10 connections to other Flash Players, a method that doesn’t scale very well.

All of that changed with 10.1, which supports true P2P multicast, making it possible to retransmit a video stream from a single source to a large number of viewers. And not just a few hundred viewers, or even thousands. “When we think of large, we think of millions,” amicima co-founder and Adobe P2P Project Lead Matthew Kaufmann said when he introduced the technology to developers at last month’s Adobe MAX event. In fact, he said, it should be capable of handing viewing audiences larger than that of the U.S. presidential inauguration, which has to date been the largest live-streaming event ever.

Kaufmann’s MAX presentation, which is available as an archived video online, is fairly technical, but it contains a few very interesting tidbits. Adobe put a lot of work into making Flash P2P both scalable and reliable, which is why it combined a number of cutting-edge video delivery mechanisms. Publishers can, for example, distribute a video stream via IPv6 multicast and back it up with P2P multicast, or they can source a stream from a server and then opt to distribute it via P2P. Kaufmann also claimed that the latency of Adobe’s P2P implementation is a lot lower than many of the existing P2P video solutions out there.

The whole experience should be pretty painless for the end user. “A permission dialog box will pop up for people using Flash Player 10.1 in the browser for P2Pmulticast,” I was told by Adobe’s Flash Media Server product manager, Kevin Towes.

But wait — Adobe’s got a few more P2P tricks up its sleeves. Developers will also be able to use Flash player 10.1 to build various other P2P applications right within the browser as well as within Air. One possible scenario mentioned includes object replication, more commonly known as file-sharing. “It’s a lot like BitTorrent”, explained Kaufmann, adding that one could use this to “write a crazy file-sharing application” or to “replicate how Groove worked in Actionscript.” Adding to that, Air 2 now supports writing your own file servers and similar stuff through a dedicated API.

We’ll probably still have to wait a few months before we can get a true grasp on what all of this is going to mean for online video delivery, but there’s obviously a potential for huge disruptions. For starters, P2P video companies might have a hard time convincing publishers to opt for their solution, if only for the fact that end users won’t have to install any additional plug-ins to access Flash P2P video streams. At the same time, P2P adoption could skyrocket, as live-streaming sites and others start to leverage Flash Player 10.1 to cut down on bandwidth costs.

So what’s in it for Adobe? Well, RTMFP is true P2P, but you still need a so-called rendezvous server to connect users to the P2P swarm before they can access the video. Adobe already offers this functionality though a hosted service called Stratus, which is capable of serving hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users. In the future, you’ll just use your own Flash Media Server as a rendezvous server. In other words: Adobe’s use of P2P may cut out a whole bunch of middlemen, but it still places the company itself squarely in the center of the online video world.

Edmonton-based Smibs today at the TechCrunch Real-time CrunchUp released a set of tools to package webcasts called VideoLobby. The service integrates Twitter and Facebook chatter, as well as a form to ask questions of a host that’s powered by a backend comment moderation system. Today, anyone who wants to produce a live show can sign up to host it on VideoLobby for free.

Instead of competing with the myriad live-streaming vendors in the world, VideoLobby builds on top of them, allowing a publisher to use live video powered by Qik, Justin.tv, Ustream and Stickam’s StreamAPI and format each stream as an episode of a show. The service seems somewhat superfluous, given those companies already integrate comments and social media themselves.

We’d like to thank this week’s NewTeeVee sponsors:

• thePlatform: What’s Your TV Everywhere Strategy?
• Server Beach: Save 30% by switching to dedicated hosting by Server Beach

Today, NewTeeVee gets to do something we don’t normally get to do — review the competition. OK, technically The Web Files isn’t competition for us — we’re just covering the same beat using different mediums. In this web series about the making of web series, Files host Kristyn Burtt interviews various players in the online video space every week about the trials and tribulations of creating content for the Internet.

While the opening sequence — shot film noir-style, with Burtt playing the role of detective — seems to imply investigative journalism, Burtt’s focus is on personalities and content, with minimal scoops in sight. The interview with MERRIme.com creators Kaily Smith and David Weidoff, for example, focuses more on their experiences at the NYTVF (where Smith won the best actress award) than on questions like how they were able to secure name cast members like Tony Hale and Tom Arnold, not to mention their $2,500-per-episode financing, though they do make an interesting point about the value of hiring a publicist.

But while the news component may be lacking, Burtt is still a capable host whose years of entertainment reporting make her very comfortable on camera — previously, she’d done hosting work with MSNBC and NBC, among other entities. And her approach isn’t always just a sit-down-and-chat one; when she interviewed the creators of Coma, Period, for example, she combined conversations with supporting crew members with a tour of the production company’s office.

In fact, probably the strongest aspect of The Web Files is that Burtt and director/producer Sandra Payne are constantly changing the format and location of the interviews in an effort to mirror the show being talked about. Examples include speaking with Cabonauts creator Hayden Black inside one of the futuristic cabs from the series (complete with outer space greenscreening) or hanging out with porn star Demi Delia at her house to discuss Mommy XXX.

The choice of subjects so far is pretty limited to the L.A. web series scene (at least 10 of the people who have appeared on Web Files, in fact, are Tubefilter meetup regulars), but so far there’s been enough variation within that community to keep the series from feeling stale. (A major recent get for them: an interview with the executives at Fox TV’s 15 Gigs studios.)

The only problem is that it’s a bit hard to gauge who the exact audience is for Web Files. The aspiring creator looking for tips on breaking into the space? Those already engaged with the web community? Whatever the answer might be, the fact that Files is taking this medium and those working in it seriously is just another step in the web series world attaining greater credibility. So I’m a fan — unless, of course, they scoop us. (Just kidding.) (Not really.)

Today, NewTeeVee gets to do something we don’t normally get to do — review the competition. OK, technically The Web Files isn’t competition for us — we’re just covering the same beat using different mediums. In this web series about the making of web series, Files host Kristyn Burtt interviews various players in the online video space every week about the trials and tribulations of creating content for the Internet.

While the opening sequence — shot film noir-style, with Burtt playing the role of detective — seems to imply investigative journalism, Burtt’s focus is on personalities and content, with minimal scoops in sight. The interview with MERRIme.com creators Kaily Smith and David Weidoff, for example, focuses more on their experiences at the NYTVF (where Smith won the best actress award) than on questions like how they were able to secure name cast members like Tony Hale and Tom Arnold, not to mention their $2,500-per-episode financing, though they do make an interesting point about the value of hiring a publicist.

But while the news component may be lacking, Burtt is still a capable host whose years of entertainment reporting make her very comfortable on camera — previously, she’d done hosting work with MSNBC and NBC, among other entities. And her approach isn’t always just a sit-down-and-chat one; when she interviewed the creators of Coma, Period, for example, she combined conversations with supporting crew members with a tour of the production company’s office.

In fact, probably the strongest aspect of The Web Files is that Burtt and director/producer Sandra Payne are constantly changing the format and location of the interviews in an effort to mirror the show being talked about. Examples include speaking with Cabonauts creator Hayden Black inside one of the futuristic cabs from the series (complete with outer space greenscreening) or hanging out with porn star Demi Delia at her house to discuss Mommy XXX.

The choice of subjects so far is pretty limited to the L.A. web series scene (at least 10 of the people who have appeared on Web Files, in fact, are Tubefilter meetup regulars), but so far there’s been enough variation within that community to keep the series from feeling stale. (A major recent get for them: an interview with the executives at Fox TV’s 15 Gigs studios.)

The only problem is that it’s a bit hard to gauge who the exact audience is for Web Files. The aspiring creator looking for tips on breaking into the space? Those already engaged with the web community? Whatever the answer might be, the fact that Files is taking this medium and those working in it seriously is just another step in the web series world attaining greater credibility. So I’m a fan — unless, of course, they scoop us. (Just kidding.) (Not really.)

Boxee will be showing off a prototype of its widely anticipated standalone set-top box at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show, according to a source close to the company who asked not to be named, with commercial deployment slated for sometime in the first half of 2010.

Despite announcing just last week at NewTeeVee Live that it was still working with a consumer electronics partner on creating the so-called Boxee Box, our source says that the company will have it ready for demos at the industry trade show in early January.

The onus isn’t exactly on Boxee to deliver it — it’ll be up to an unnamed CE partner to build and manufacture the set-top box, for which Boxee is just providing the software. Even so, the kind of turnaround with which Boxee is expected to go to market is practically unheard of in the CE industry, and suggests that the company has been working on this project for an especially long time.

Boxee wouldn’t comment for this article, but promised more details and a timeline for deployment at its Dec. 7 event in New York. There, the company is expected to have mockups of the device, as well as more info about its features and maybe even final pricing details. CEO Avner Ronen told NewTeeVee that he hopes to price the box for less than $200, but given the cost of hardware involved, Boxee probably won’t be able to reach the $100 price point that Roku has for its IP video set-top box.

Also at the event, the company will be showing off the beta version of its media center, giving users a preview of the software before it’s officially released in January.

While it won’t move the needle much on its content library, IFC Entertainment announced yesterday that it will offer 53 films through Netflix’s Watch Instantly streaming service, reports Variety.

True, that’s not a very large number, but it marks the first time IFC is providing its content to a subscription streaming service. Up until now, the company has placed films from its 300-title library on EST destinations like Amazon, iTunes and Blockbuster.

IFC titles heading to Netflix’s streaming service include Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven.

As we’ve written before, Netflix’s Achilles’ heel is its streaming content library. Though it has over 17,000 titles, it needs to make sure that service is robust enough so that the number of subscribers using the service keeps growing. Check out Om’s recent talk with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at our recent NewTeeVee Live Conference for more on his company’s streaming efforts.

Separately, though we didn’t see anything official announced, it looks like Netflix also just got a whole boatload of Saturday Night Live content in this week, including seasons 1 – 5.

To learn more about streaming directly to TVs, check out the report on The Evolution of Over-the-Top Video over at our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.

UPDATED: Babelgum is closing down its Dublin headquarters and an office in Nice, according to a report in paidContent, moves that could signal the end is near for the online video site.

Babelgum says the cuts will allow it to streamline its business to “ensure continued growth.” The company told paidContent that it will continue to develop applications from other locations, spreading the operations from its shuttered offices across those in London, Milan and New York. But there are questions as to whether Babelgum will continue to develop technology or keep focusing on content investment.

Babelgum is backed by deep-pocketed billionaire investor Silvio Scaglia; he invested €50 million ($73 milllion) in the company in 2008, and has said he plans to spend €40- €60 million annually on the company over the next 2-3 years. But the recent cuts could mean he’s losing patience while waiting for a return on that initial investment.

The office closures come not long after a Babelgum executive detailed plans for an extensive — and expensive — plan to spend many millions of dollars obtaining and developing exclusive, original content. Then-executive vice president and chief revenue officer Michael Rosen told NewTeeVee in October that Babelgum had ramped up operations in the U.S. and that it had a “mandate to launch 10-15 content initiatives per month.” Rosen has reportedly since left the company, according to paidContent.

Babelgum isn’t the only web video aggregator trying to differentiate itself in a market dominated by YouTube, which still delivers about 40 percent of all online video streams in the U.S. Veoh, which was founded around the same time as Babelgum, laid off a number of employees earlier this year as it shifted its focus to developing its video compass technology from that of content. In the meantime others, like Dailymotion and Metacafe, have been trying to cash in on the growing consumption of online video.

Babelgum has also suffered from a lack of strategic focus. On the technology side, the company began as a P2P-based streaming provider, but shifted to browser-based Adobe Flash streaming earlier this year. Like Joost, which also launched as a P2P-based video provider, the slowness with which it moved from proprietary technology to streaming based on a widely adopted video platform may have also held it back from attracting wider user adoption.

Update: Babelgum issued the following statement after our story ran.

This week Babelgum announced to its staff that it would be consolidating its operations into its London, Milan and New York locations. This decision is a natural response to the company’s growing focus on content and viewers, following Babelgum’s commercial launch earlier this year. Despite the current economic climate, Babelgum remains one of the very few aggressive players in the new media arena. In the past two months, Babelgum has: 1) pioneered the release of Sally Potter’s “Rage” – the first time a narrative feature film with A-list talent premiered on a mobile video application; 2) launched the innovative Babelgum Metropolis Art Prize (chaired by Isabella Rossellini) to seek out the world’s best and edgiest video artists; 3) launched numerous new series – including Hayden Black’s “The Occulterers” – originally created, and exclusively produced, for its mobile and online platforms; 4) premiered the latest Weezer video “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To” as an exclusive; and 5) entered into a partnership agreement with RingTales to exclusively premiere the new Dilbert and New Yorker animated series. The company continues to streamline its approach and improve its cost effectiveness to ensure its continued growth in future years. Other major content and partnership deals will be announced before the close of 2009.

For once, everyone getting on board with an online video trend is a good thing. Following on the heels of Google’s announcement yesterday that it will add automatic captioning to YouTube videos, PLYmedia today said that it will be providing live captioning to video platforms Ooyala, Ustream, Livestream, Brightcove, Kaltura, KIT digital and Kyte.

Unlike Google’s captioning system, which automatically creates captions using speech recognition technology, PLYmedia’s SubPLY offering does live captioning with national court reporter-certified transcribers. Using this human approach, PLYmedia says it can deliver more accurate results (Google even admitted that its system can make mistakes and is rolling the service out slowly.)

PLYmedia’s SubPLY also offers automatic translation into “multiple” languages, transcript generation, real-time keyword tag generation as well as Twitter and Facebook integration. The social media hooks allow Twitter and Facebook users to follow a live event through text updates to their news feeds.

In addition to making live video more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, the addition of captions will help make video more searchable.

BBC Gives Technical Details of Its New iPlayer On the Wii; the U.K. broadcaster has encoded streams using H.264 at a 700 kbps bit rate, compared to 1.5 Mbps for regular TV or even 3.2 Mbps for HD. (BBC) Speaking of British TV, the U.K. version of YouTube debuted its new site section that hosts roughly 4,000 full-length programs. (Variety)

Silverlight 4 Beta Launches for Developers; new features include out-of-browser capabilities, advanced business application development, and native multicast and offline DRM support for video. (Ars Technica)

Sony Announces Plans for Digital Media Store; new Sony Online Service will sell music, movies, books, and other downloadable applications for mobile devices. (BusinessWeek)

Disney Launches Its First Branded Entertainment Channel; “The Possibility Shop” will be exclusively sponsored by Clorox and promote Clorox products. (Ad Age)

Blu-ray, DVD Sales Expected to Stabilize in 2010; high-definition Blu-ray DVD sales have yet to make up for the decline in standard def DVD sales in 2009. (Video Business)

Digiboo Does Partnership with Movie Gallery; deal will put 100 Digiboo movie kiosks (see previous coverage) in retail locations. (Video Business)

Grey’s Anatomy Gets a Web Spin-Off; Seattle Grace: On Call will be a six episode run that’s on immediately after Grey’s is aired. (The Hollywood Reporter)

The Pirate Bay made headlines earlier this week with yet another dramatic announcement, this time that the notorious BitTorrent site’s tracker has been officially shut down. But the move won’t impact downloading, site admins explained on a blog. Trackers are no longer needed to facilitate BitTorrent transfers, the blog entry explained, because decentralized extensions of the P2P protocol are mature enough to pick up the tab. “It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date,” the blog proclaimed.

As always with announcements from the folks at The Pirate Bay, there’s a lot of self-serving smoke and mirrors, mixed with a good amount of hubris. However, the announcement does bring up an interesting question: Is BitTorrent really ready for a world without trackers? We talked to some of the major players to find out.

First, a quick primer so we all know what we’re talking about: When you download a file via BitTorrent today, you start off with a .torrent file that contains some meta data, including the address of at least one torrent tracker. These trackers facilitate your download by letting you know who else is sharing the file. The Pirate Bay’s tracker has been one of the biggest and, thus, most important of these facilitators, tracking by some estimates around 50 percent of the world’s BitTorrent traffic.

That’s a pretty impressive number, considering that the whole setup costs not much more than $3,000 per month, but it’s also an Achilles heel. After all, users solely relying on a tracker wouldn’t be able to exchange any files if the tracker became unavailable. That’s precisely why BitTorrent developers came up with a couple of decentralized approaches. Most BitTorrent clients now support a so-called Distributed Hash Table, or DHT.

A DHT is essentially a decentralized P2P network that stores all the information a tracker traditionally offers in the P2P cloud, making it possible to find users to download from even if the tracker server is offline. Most clients also support a feature called Peer Exchange (PEX) that’s meant to let peers talk to each other directly to take the load off a tracker server. The question is: Can DHT and PEX do all the heavy lifting and facilitate downloads for some 20 million simultaneous users without any tracker involved?

The first BitTorrent client that ever incorporated DHT was Vuze back in 2005 when it was still called Azureus, so I figured folks there might have an opinion on this. Vuze co-founder and CTO Olivier Chalouhi seemed bullish. “DHT works well as a technology, and is actually more scalable than tracker sites,” he told me. He cautioned, however, that very new files as well as rare files with few seeders would be served better by a tracker as opposed to a DHT-only environment.

Simon Morris from BitTorrent Inc. seemed a little more cautious. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some impact on performance,” he told me. “In theory DHT and PEX should be sufficient,” Morris explained, adding that the initial discovery of users to download from might be more reliable and robust if you can leverage a tracker server.

I also talked to an admin involved in running one of the big tracker servers that currently functions as the backbone of the BitTorrent universe. He sounded skeptical and said that he didn’t believe DHT to be scalable enough to completely take over.

To be honest, those are all just well-informed musings. We don’t really know what would happen if all of the world’s trackers were to be turned off tomorrow. What we do know is that BitTorrent wouldn’t work quite as seamlessly as it does now, if only for one reason: Bittorrent Inc. and Vuze actually use two different, incompatible DHT networks. This doesn’t matter as much when both clients are connected to the same tracker. However, in a tracker-less world, Vuze users wouldn’t be able to find users of BitTorrent’s client, and vice versa. Chalouhi told me that Vuze is currently working on integrating both DHTs to bridge those two worlds.

The good news is that trackers aren’t disappearing anytime soon. The Pirate Bay may have announced the retirement of its tracker this week, but the site’s tracker has actually been offline since early August, and other trackers have been more than capable of filling the void. In fact, tracker admins are working on new technology that would make their servers part of a federated network to prevent any interruption.

For end users, all of this means that little is changing. You’ll still use a BitTorrent site to search for content, and your client will most likely still connect to a tracker to download it. DHT has been around for years, and it may become more important over time. Some trackers may exchange data among themselves. The overall experience, however, will be pretty much the same. Maybe that’s what The Pirate Bay folks meant when they ended their sensationalistic announcement by proclaiming: “This is the future. And the present.” And the past, one might add.

We’re big fans of the way the Microsoft Xbox LIVE game show 1 vs. 100 blurs the lines between TV and gaming. As the second season of 1 vs. 100 starts today (at 5 p.m. PT! Rush home and get in the mob!), it will have an added twist that makes this endeavor even more unique — measurement.

The folks in Redmond are teaming up with Nielsen to track how many people are playing (and checking out the ads). From a post on the Microsoft Advertising Community blog post:

The Xbox LIVE advertising group has teamed up with the Nielsen Company to launch a pilot test, beginning with Season 2 of 1 vs. 100, to obtain content, channel and ad specific metrics and identify who was playing the game and saw a particular advertisement. This is the first time content delivered through a video game console network will be capable of being measured by Nielsen’s television, online and video game metering technologies, such as the Nielsen people meter. Our goal is to ultimately provide advertisers with concrete Gross Rating Points (GRPs) and Targeted Rating Points (TRPs) to maximize their media spend.

Given that Microsoft said that it got up to 200,000 players each of the two nights the show aired per week during season one, it’ll be interesting how that number a.) does in season two and b.) compares with what a third-party research firm like Nielsen says. Of course, if Nielsen reports big numbers, Microsoft can charge more for in-game ads.

For more on why we think 1 vs. 100 is a good indicator of where hybrid media is heading, check out Liz’s Long View article on the topic over at our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.

The online video revolution will be televised, meaning that it will soon show up on TVs, Blu-ray players and other connected devices, a panel of execs agreed at the Future of Television event in New York on Thursday. But the content that’s available on those devices could affect how much consumers think they’re worth. As Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Electronics Association, put it, “Consumers will pay more money for a connected TV if it has premium video content.”

At the same time, there are some limitations to connected devices. In the short term, most of them carry the same content — Netflix, Amazon video-on-demand, YouTube, Pandora, etc. Zach Klein, chief creative officer for Boxee, said that’s because only so many content partners are willing to work with companies like his to distribute online video to devices.

Another issue is that there’s no good way to navigate through that content. “The second [consumers] connect their TVs to the Internet, they’re overwhelmed by choice,” CEA’s DuBravac said. “The next bit of innovation will be in how to organize that information.”

Even so, the availability of content on connected devices should drive more consumers to adopt services, panelists said. According to Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates, the consumer electronics industry is expected to ship about 200 million connected devices worldwide by 2013. For a market that’s still in its infancy, that might seem like a drastic jump in just a few years — but Scherf said the consumer electronics manufacturers he talks to actually believe that estimate is too conservative.

DuBravac said those numbers jibe with his organization’s research. The CEA, which tracks shipments of CE devices, estimates that about 60 percent of all televisions sold in 2013 will have a broadband connection.

All those connected devices will drive some serious transactional revenues for over-the-top media, to the tune of about $3.4 billion by 2013, Scherf said. But in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money to be made off of IP video is still just a fraction of traditional pay-TV services. To put things in context, Scherf said that together, pay-TV and video-on-demand sales will total between $11 billion and $12 billion by that time.

Twistage has re-imagined workflow for video platforms. Gone is the monolithic, player-centric video experience. The Twistage solution is both modular and flexible, giving you the freedom to define and build upon your own workflow.

As the world’s most customizable video platform, Twistage brings unmatched flexibility to video workflow. Already the platform of choice for many leading video publishers, Twistage liberates media companies and enterprise clients from the constraints of the video 1.0 ecosystem.

The Twistage difference? Our open architecture. We offer robust solutions for content ingestion, content management, video delivery, monetization, syndication and reporting through a simple point-and-click console. There’s no need to replace your player. You can keep your custom built and third-party solutions. Keep your transcoding, reporting, digital asset management, content access control, and other components that you’ve already invested in and trust. The Twistage platform is the glue for a cohesive workflow, adapting to your demands and the demands of a constantly evolving marketplace — not the other way around.

Twistage. Video Workflow Solved.

Justin Johnson, creative services lead at Next New Networks and one of the original writers for College Humor, was sitting at home yesterday with his girlfriend of six years, Marissa Nystrom. It was about 6:30 p.m. EST, their sixth anniversary as a couple, and a quiet night. They were making spaghetti for dinner, Nystrom was checking her Facebook and Tumblr accounts, and Johnson was nervous as hell.

About a month prior, Johnson had begun working with the team at Tumblr to create a wedding proposal that suited them as a couple — a big, splashy takeover of every Tumblr user’s dashboard, in which he’d pop the question in a post only Nystrom could respond to. That night, Johnson had just used a “secret link” to activate the proposal post, meaning that soon the entire Tumblr universe would be able to see it…except that his first attempt to activate it didn’t work.

Meanwhile, the ring box was on his desk, the accompanying proposal video was now live on Vimeo, and he was growing increasingly worried that the surprise was about to be blown. Finally, some urgent IMs to the Tumblr team got the proposal post working — just as Nystrom left the room to go check on the spaghetti. “There was no not-obvious way to be like, ‘HEY, WHY DONT YOU COME OVER AND CHECK TUMBLR!’” Johnson said via IM. “I was thinking of saying, ‘Oh man, so-and-so just put up this hilarious post,’ but that seemed sort of lame.”

Finally she returned to their office and refreshed her Tumblr page — giving Johnson just enough time to get down on one knee and get the ring ready. She said yes to him in person before typing her reply into Tumblr (screenshot here, if you don’t have a Tumblr account), and the two of them left their computers to pop some champagne and eat their dinner. When they returned online, they discovered that Nystrom’s reply hadn’t worked, and that she’d received over 100 Facebook messages telling her to “go check Tumblr and SAY YES!”

With technical glitches conquered, Johnson and Nystrom’s engagement dominated Tumblr for the rest of the day, the happy couple receiving congratulations and meme mash-ups from friends and strangers alike. The entire experience was extremely appropriate for a couple who originally met online via social-networking site Campus Hook — they mark their first phone conversation as their official anniversary, though didn’t meet in person until January 2004, when Johnson flew from San Francisco to Florida for a week. Footage he shot from that trip played a heavy role in the proposal video, a 1:38-minute look back at their relationship that features many candid moments of Nystrom, shot clearly through the eyes of someone who already loves her.

As one commenter on Gawker observed, it was lucky that Johnson had found a girl who was comfortable being filmed so much, “because I would punch my husband in the throat if he did that to me.” But for Johnson, constantly filming Nystrom was just an extension of his ongoing passion for video blogging, especially during the early days of their relationship, where they were separated by thousands of miles. “It was awesome to watch back when I really missed her, in those months apart, and I know she felt the same way. Remembering when we were together made it more than just a week-long fling, and then, as the years passed, it was so fun to go back and see the first days,” he said.

The two have rewatched a video Johnson made of their first week together “a zillion times,” because, in Johnson’s words, “A big reason I think we have a strong relationship, is that was can ‘time travel’ and go back to those moments when we first met, when it was so fresh and so new. This is stuff that we’ll show our grandchildren someday, and they’ll be able to see us as relatable young people.”

The decision to use Tumblr to propose, Johnson said, was a simple one: “Marissa LOVES Tumblr and is constantly, obsessively refreshing her dashboard,” he said, “So it was a mix of [Tumblr founder] David Karp being a friend, and it being something she was really into. Like if she was a huge Yankees fan and I happened to know Steinbrenner.” Of course, not everyone is a fan of the public proposal — definitely not Gabe at Videogum, for example.

But for Johnson, it worked: “All of our friends and contacts are on Tumblr, and I loved the idea of broadcasting it to everyone at once so they could share in our little moment. To me, being so used to posting everything online, it seemed like a very natural extension of how our relationship started, and how I’ve put it online in a way for all to see.” (It also spared him having to call everyone he knew and tell them.)

Perhaps you have issues with the institution of marriage, especially given the fact that not every couple in love is afforded the same rights. And perhaps you don’t personally know Johnson and Nystrom and don’t see why you should care at all. But this is the world we now live in, the private increasingly public, and for once it’s nice that the message being spread is that “these two people are in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together.” This is a community of oversharing, but at least this time what’s being shared is a love story.