ReadWriteWeb

Revision3, the online TV network founded last year by Digg's Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, David Prager of TechTV, and others, has announced a new underground music show on Revision3. The show is called XLR8R TV (pronounced "accelerator" TV) and is being produced by XLR8R magazine, a San Francisco music publication since 1993. The magazine and website XLR8R covers hip-hop, indie and electronic music - as well as related trends in style, art, fashion, and technology.

Revision3 told Read/WriteWeb that the sector of Internet television is really heating up, and so they expect their new underground music show to attract a niche audience that will be attractive to online advertisers.

Revision3 told us that their competitors aren't taking the time to figure out what audiences want or expect from on-demand programming - or worse, they just expect the users to create their own content. Revision3 thinks that a show that costs very little to produce, that leverages a known brand in the underground music community, has never been done before. Their target audience is the tech-savvy, young and smart demographic – not dissimilar to digg's audience (although probably less geeky and with more females).

The show itself will be made up of three segments, anchored by a host who narrates from a location relevant to the content of the show. It will focus on emerging artists and music and will cover genres such as hip-hop, indie rock and electronic music.

While YouTube and online video is all the rage currently, I often wonder if there's anything on these video websites other than mentos-coke explosions and bad singing. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy YouTube as much as the next person - but I am also a bit artsy-fartsy, so I like to see artistic stuff being done on the Web too. One such project is Stray Cinema, which describes itself as "an open source film project".

Stray Cinema invites people to create short films, based on raw footage that was filmed in London on a digital camera. The idea is that participants download the footage and edit parts of it into their own 2 minute film. Links to free editing software is provided - e.g. Avid, Windows Movie Maker, Video Edit Magic and Wax. The films are then uploaded onto YouTube and embedded into the Stray Cinema website.

The oddly-named 1dawg is the latest of hundreds of hopefuls to ride the online video wave. 1dawg's differentiating factor is that it provides a free video conversion service to a variety of mobile devices. It's a seemingly minor thing to do, but in the current era mobile devices often use incompatible media formats - and so this really does scratch a decent itch for consumers. As 1dawg's Adam Fichman explained in an email sent round to media folks:

"Each portable media device, like an iPod or PSP, accepts a very limited number of file extensions, if even more than just one [...] What our company does is provide the means for a video in an incompatible format to be available for whatever media device the user wants to transfer it to."

The devices supported currently include video iPod, Sony Playstation Portable, Creative Zen, Zune, Video Cell Phone and a basic Windows/Mac/Linux compatible file format. A few of those use MPEG-4, so mobile devices are not quite as incompatible as it first appears.

Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus

There are now so many companies vying to be the next YouTube, it's easy to lose track of them all. So let's take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the major players. Our thanks to Ali Dagli of Savvian, for providing us a lot of the useful data listed here. 

In this post we've summarized the latest video industry innovations under the following categories:

• Video Sharing
• Intermediaries
• Video Search
• Video eCommerce
• Video Editing & Creation
• Rich Media Advertising
• P2P (Peer To Peer)
• Video Streaming
• Vlogosphere

Video Sharing

Video sharing - and particularly YouTube - have been the poster boys of the online video industry so far. Video sharing sites allow you to upload your videos and share them with others. But even if you are not a content producer, you can watch others movies. So this is a very consumer-oriented industry that has been popularized via blog-based viral marketing.

TVTonic is billing itself as "The Internet Channel". There are plenty of companies muscling into that market currently (the Amazon/TiVO partnership being the latest example), but TVTonic seems more focused on being a subscription service for video podcasts. Essentially they are trying to become a TV station for user-generated or 'amateur' content (and a bit of professional content); as opposed to the Apples and Amazons of this world, who want to put professional video content online.

TVTonic is also positioning itself closely with the new Media Center capabilities of Windows Vista PCs, which I think is a very smart move. There are lots of consumers, and I have to admit I'm one of them, who haven't yet gotten to grips with subscribing to Internet TV shows. TVTonic wants to make it easy for you to subscribe to video content on the Web. Note that the app runs inside an Internet Explorer Web Browser (no other browsers are supported).

Image credit: WebTVHub

Last week I was briefed about a new product just released by Gotuit, called SceneMaker. It enables people to cut up and tag videos from platforms like YouTube or Metacafe. SceneMaker essentially allows users to embed e.g. a YouTube video in a Gotuit page, then add metadata around it.

I was impressed with the usablity of SceneMaker, but one question I had was how the likes of YouTube and Metacafe will react to having their user-generated content manipulated on another site - which they may view as a competitor? The Gotuit folks didn't seem concerned about this, saying that the hosting of the videos always remains with the likes of YouTube - Gotuit simply provides a platform to add metadata to those videos. Techcrunch has more details about SceneMaker's features.

Essentially this is another bit of progress in what I recently described as the holy grail of online video, searching within videos. In that post I described another web app, called Coull.tv - which allows users to search for specific moments within videos, as well as click on and interact with "moving objects". It was noted in the comments to that post, by regular R/WW commenter "old school developer", that Coull.tv is currently Microsoft Windows technology only and the ability to manipulate or interact with objects inside video is an MPEG-4 feature.

Online video sharing sites are a dime a dozen these days, but a newly launched one caught my eye this week. Coull.tv promises to enable users to search inside videos - to find specific segments within a video that they want to view - as well as interact with "moving objects" inside the video. You may remember that Gotuit does a similar thing, by manually inserting metadata within videos. I'm tracking their progress too, so I thought I'd also investigate coull.tv's system. Note that Gotuit is focused on 'professional' content, while coull.tv is a YouTube-like consumer play on amateur videos.

The key differentiator with coull.tv (from the likes of YouTube) is that it allows users to search for specific moments within video - as well as click on and interact with what the company calls "moving objects" during play. The latter is done via a downloadable app called ‘video activator’, which enables users to make objects within a video interactive. Using this app, objects within the video can be edited by the coull.tv community - with the aim of making video searching more contextual and relevant. So this in turn enables viewers to find specific points in a video and perhaps send specific links within a video to friends.

Video Activator in action

Reality Digital is an online video and social networking platform for business websites, for example those with a media and entertainment focus. Crudely put, Reality Digital enables businesses to set up their own branded YouTube. They view their competition as being the likes of VideoEgg, VidaVee, BlipTV - which are all video publishing platforms with social networking aspects. Plus of course they're kind of competing with YouTube itself, as increasingly businesses are distributing marketing campaigns and messages via YouTube.

I spoke to Reality Digital CEO Cynthia Francis to find out more about their product. But first a look at the features...

Reality Digital is a video production and sharing platform, designed for businesses - an example is the website for the popular CBS tv show Survivor, which uses the Reality Digital platform. Also part of the product is blogging, forums, an admin dashboard and an advertising portion called Opus AdCel (which they are patenting). Blogs and forums have only just been added to the product. Their business model is being an ASP (application service provider), so Reality Digital hosts everything for their customers.

As if we needed any further proof that the online video market is white hot right now, the founders of Skype have now set their sites on a Web TV service - according to this Yahoo News story. After creating the file-swapping service KaZaA and then VoIP software Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom plan to launch an advertising-supported Internet television shortly. Said to be just a month or two away, the service will enable "people with professional content" to put it up on the Web for users to download for free. The code name for the project is "Venice".

In related news, Brightcove is ramping up its long-awaited Web TV service. Today they launched the Brightcove Network, which lets content owners release their own "commercial Internet video channels" for free and generate revenue through advertising and video download sales. To accompany this news, Brightcove also launched today a new video advertising network, the ability to offer video downloads for purchase or rental, plus a new-look portal for consumers. Brightcove has also partnered with AOL to get a wider distribution.

As Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire said in the press release, this is "the beginning of the Internet TV era".

Techcrunch has more on the Brightcove story. See also Read/WriteWeb's post last night about YouTube competitior Metacafe, which has just released a revenue sharing program.

Metacafe, a YouTube-like video sharing site originally from Israel, has just gone live with a revenue sharing program called Producer Rewards. The payments are on a sliding scale and based on 'views'. Payments start at 20,000 views ($100) and go up from there - e.g. 2 million views is $10,000. Videos must also have a rating of 3.00 or higher (maximum is 5.00) to qualify for payment, of which Metacafe notes: "this tells us that the viewers like the video." What I liked best about this scheme though is that the users retain ownership of their videos - the license to Metacafe is a non-exclusive deal. However the users must own the rights to the video to begin with and there are some content guidelines which the video must pass (e.g. must be family friendly).

There are already Metacafe users who have earned over $1000 - the top earner so far is a user called Reel Stunts who has earned $23,215 (as of now). That was earned from a single video, called Matrix - For Real.... It's a 3 min 41 sec camcorder video of a University student doing gymnastics - pretty amazing athletic ability, but there's nothing that special about the video. However it's been viewed 4,642,700 times, so has earned big bucks.