Vimeo, one of the classiest players in the online video world, is now offering High Definition transcoding for user uploaded video. At 4 times the industry standard bitrate, the new videos look really nice. Unfortunately, the HD quality videos can only be viewed on the Vimeo site and cannot be embedded in HD elsewhere. I hope that will change.
Owned by IAC, Vimeo can afford the extra costs incurred and its community of artists is sure to appreciate the option. The new service will presumably pay for itself as an increasingly competitive high-end video ad unit, something Vimeo has been put to use for in some cases already. It also appears that the HD vids are being sponsored at launch.
The new Vimeo videos look great full-screen and the ability for viewers to toggle between HD and standard resolution depending on their bandwidth is a very nice touch.
The other online video service that's worked hardest on its encoding quality is probably Brightcove - but its usability is challenging enough and its business strategy confused enough that there's likely little overlap between Vimeo users and the Brightcove community.
I heard about the Vimeo HD first via Scott Beale's Laughing Squid blog, a great place to learn about all thing artistic and online. For more on Vimeo see also CenterNetwork's in-depth comparative review of Vimeo and competitor Viddler last week. Viddler has offered HD for some time but is earlier in the development of its community.
It's been a very busy Monday on Read/WriteWeb - so here's a recap of the day's posts, plus Network highlights:
- Attention - NewsGator and Bloglines Join APML Workgroup (Marshall)
- Discovery Purchasing HowStuffWorks for $250 Million (Josh)
- AdBrite: Full Page "Skip This Ad" Units Now Available for Everyone (Marshall)
- On Copyright: YouTube Punts (Marshall); related: YouTube’s new video identification system places burden on copyright holders (last100)
- Adobe Partners with BBC on Streaming Video (Josh); related: BBC partners with Adobe to add iPlayer streaming option; Mac and Linux will be supported (last100)
- HypeMachine Readies a Relaunch of Its Popular MP3 Service (Marshall)
- Pew: Most Kids Online Not Threatened by Strangers (Marshall)
- The Top 35 Environmental Blogs (Josh)
- BadBuster Helps You Identify the Greenest Companies (Josh)
- Five environmental Internet TV offerings (last100)
Richard was at he Mobile 2.0 event today in San Francisco. Here are his posts:
- Mobile 2.0 - The 7th Mass Media & Business Opportunities
- Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 1
- Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 2
- Taptu Launches New Type of Mobile Search
AltSearchEngines is also on the conference circuit this week - ASE editor Charles Knight is in NYC for the Search Marketing Expo - SMX.
The MP3 blog aggregator HypeMachine is set to relaunch with a whole new website once 10,000 people have the site's splash page open simultaneously. When they reach that number, I expect the relaunch to be very well received. At "press/blog time" there are just over 3,000 people waiting, but major music sites will likely cover it soon and put that number over the edge. (Update: It appears the new site has launched.)
A new design, lots of smart social networking features and a DRM-free emphasis are the key points of the relaunch. Details and screen shots below.
Today we're a participant in Blog Action Day, a collaborative blogging event in which over 16,000 blogs across the web have marked off a single day to blog about the environment as it relates to their particular niche. In our case, that means web technology, and we've already published our list of the top 35 environmental blogs. That's why it was very apropos of a new web site called BadBuster to email us today about their product.
BadBuster is an online search engine of companies and products that displays information to consumers about whether those companies are environmentally friendly. BadBuster aggregates information on companies from a good number of publicly available databases of environmental ratings, including the Carbon Disclosure Project, Calvert Online, Knowmore.org, and ClimateCounts (who we wrote about in July). BadBuster then condenses the numbers from those sources into a single score for each company.
As noted last week, a group of startups promoting themselves at Mobile 2.0. Part 1 was in the morning. Here now is the afternoon session (note it was just 5 minutes per speaker, so we only got brief overviews of each service).
We've written before about Webwag, a personalized start page. Webwag Mobile is a Java app. It looks very much like a desktop widget service (like Yahoo! Widgets). Certainly looked slick and the ability to sync with the Internet version is useful for heavy Mobile Web users. The TomSoft blog has more details of Webwag Mobile.
The BBC's much-maligned iPlayer online video player will be getting a companion streaming version later this year. Through a partnership announced this afternoon with Adobe, the BBC will begin offering streamed versions of its television programming via an online version of the iPlayer delivered in Flash format.
The BBC already uses Adobe's Premiere Pro and Production Premium as its desktop creative suite, so it will now be employing and end-to-end Adobe-powered solution for the creation and delivery of its online video content. I spoke to Mark Randall, the Chief Strategist for Adobe's Dynamic Media Organization, who told me that the company was excited to be partnering the world's largest content producer (the BBC creates over 14 terabytes of digital content per week), and that he thought this would be an excellent showcase of Adobe's end-to-end capabilities for digital media producers.
The choice of Adobe's Flash technology makes sense. According to Adobe, Flash is deployed on over 99% of Internet-connected computers and the latest version of the Flash player supports the H.264 codec. Further, the 1.0 release of AIR should also incorporate Flash's HD video capabilities, so should the BBC wish to bring Flash video to the offline version of their iPlayer, Adobe's runtime will support 1080p. I was told that the BBC will be evaluating the possibility of using Adobe's Media Player in the future.
iPlayer allows residents of the UK to watch the past 7 days of BBC television programming on their computers and store it for up to 30 days. For more analysis, check out the post at our network blog Last100.
After more than a year of back and forth, YouTube has rolled out an official video filtering tool to protect the copyright of content owners unhappy that their content has been uploaded to the site. It's hard not to want to hold your breath now that it's finally here - it couldn't possibly be this simple, could it?
It can't - YouTube has chosen to follow the letter of the DMCA law only; today's announcement will not come close to satisfying angry rights holders. It may or may not be enough to protect them in court.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs dedicated to the environment on the Internet. That's really no surprise given that environmental conservation is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and has become especially pertinent in recent years due to concerns about global warming and mega-hit documentaries like Former US Vice President Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
As part of our participation in Blog Action Day, we waded through much of the environmental blogosphere and picked out our favorites (caveat: not all of these are blogs in the strictest sense of the word, but those that aren't are generally still long-tail environmentally focused content sites). It's very likely that we've left a few of your favorites off the list, so please feel free to leave them in the comments below. Presented in no particular order:
The most recent of the always interesting Pew Internet and American Life reports was released today and offers some interesting statistics concerning children online and their experiences being contacted by strangers.
The gist of the results is this: 11% of girls reported that they had experienced uncomfortable or scary contact by strangers online, that number was significantly higher than for boys and many respondents felt stranger contact and the corresponding risks were a "cost of doing business" as a user in online social networks.
Taptu is a new kind of search engine for mobile phones, being launched today at the Mobile 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Taptu uses a new technique which they call "Social Assisted Search" (SAS) - it combines algorithms with human feedback (from which it derives "social relevancy scores") to deliver the results. Taptu's aim is to enable users to search and find useful content "in 10 taps or less." Taptu CEO Stephen Ives claims that for other mobile search services it “takes an average of 30 taps and scrolls and two-and-a-half minutes to get to good results."
The other notable feature of Taptu is that it includes rich media - e.g. playable audio and video. Here's an example:
