Brian Conley founded Alive in Baghdad back in 2005, using Iraqis to create weekly video packages reporting the news from the ground. Since then, his group, Small World News, has rolled out projects in Mexico, Gaza, Tehran and other locations in the Middle East and Latin America.
His latest projects are Alive in Egypt, a project to crowdsource tweets phoned in via Twitter and Google's speak2tweet tool during the #jan25 uprising, and its successor, Alive in Libya. Now, however he's working on something on a larger scale: machine-generated subtitling for aggregated video coming out of conflict areas. But the stumbling blocks for automation in the Arabic world are formidable.
I'm a "good news first" kinda guy, so here it goes: The good news is, manufacturers were showing off Netflix on Android devices this past week at the Mobile World Congress and it looks as good as you would expect. What's the bad news, then?
If you already own an Android device, Netflix likely won't work on your device. As a matter of fact, it will only work on new devices and possibly not all of those. We're placing a bet right now that "Netflix included!" is the tagline of the next successful generation of Android phones.
The BBC has clarified its plans for the release of its Android and iPad-compatible versions of its popular iPlayer application - the British TV and radio service that delivers streaming content to the desktop and mobile devices - in light of a flurry of recent speculation. According to a post on the BBC.co.uk's Internet blog, the media company plans to have its new Android and iPad applications in their respective app stores by the end of this week.
There were a few caveats to the use of these new apps, however. And oddly enough, there was no mention of an iPhone application.
One of the big stories for DVD and streaming-movie subscription service Netflix has been its tremendous growth over the last year. According to its recent earnings report, the company added 7.7 million subscribers in 2010, more than doubling the 2.9 million it added in 2009.
Today, the company announced on its technical blog that it would begin redesigning its API - the software interface that allows your XBox, Google TV or Roku to stream content and apps like Instant Watcher to pull content from Netflix's catalog - and shared some interesting stats regarding its use over the past year.
A couple weeks back, Google announced that future versions of its Chrome browser would no longer support the H.264 video codec, causing quite a stir among developers and video content producers. The move left Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 and Apple's Safari browsers as the only ones to support the video standard and a lot of people were upset about this.
Today, Microsoft has fired back, releasing a Chrome browser extension that re-adds H.264 support to the Chrome browser.
If you're a sports fan of any type, then it's likely that you've become familiar with a cryptically-named, poorly designed site called ATDHE that lists video streams of nearly any and every sporting event on TV. It was totally awesome and totally legally questionable. And now, it's totally taken down by Homeland Security.
Of course, the story of ATDHE's takedown and subsequent re-emergence is another example of the resilience of information online and the amusing game of Whac-A-Mole that is illegal information on the Internet.
The Sundance Film Institute announced today that it has partnered with crowd-funding platform Kickstarter and giant social network Facebook to offer its community of independent film makers resources and assistance in funding and promoting their work.
Sundance will highlight selected film projects on Kickstarter and Facebook has already begun offering training sessions in online promotion to film makers.
Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has just announced Mahalo 4.0, the latest pivot for his company that has now moved from being a "human-powered search engine" to a Q&A site. The new Mahalo, unveiled at the Digital Life Conference today, will be focused on creating how-to video content.
The goal, according to Calacanis, is to create thousands of original, high-quality videos each week. These will be supplemented with additional text as well as real-time Q&A offerings. As Dan Frommer from Business Insider describes it "Think of it as Howcast (how-to-video) + Quora (Q&A) + About.com (a more structured Wikipedia)."
Despite all the talk of the explosion in online video, playing it can be an incredibly frustrating experience due to the incompatibilities between the various video formats and devices.
A new service from Encoding.com launches today that seeks to address this with a simple new service to make a video playable on a variety of mobile devices: Vid.ly.
It's no surprise that Netflix is removing the ability for users to add DVDs to their queue from streaming-only devices. After all, it costs Netflix 20 times as much to send a DVD round trip than it does to stream a single movie. According to Digital Society, Netflix spends $700 million a year on postage alone, a number that can only drop as it drives business toward streaming-only content.
Yesterday, we spoke with Netflix VP of communications Steve Swasey and he assured us that the plan for the company in moving forward was to focus on streaming content, not DVDs.
