One of Orb's best features is the OrbLive iPhone application which connects with your home computer over the internet to provide access to your media library of audio, video, and photos. Through the mobile application, you can access any of your media files and play stream them over either a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. In the Windows version of the software, PC's with TV tuner cards can also connect you to live, streaming TV in addition to the other shared media saved on the PC's hard drive.

To some extent, Orb competes with Apple's own offerings since it provides access to music and video from either a desktop computer or an iPhone. That's why it was somewhat surprising that Apple ever approved the company's iPhone application to begin with. Even more surprising is that they allowed it to function over 3G when similar products - like Slingbox's SlingPlayer for iPhone, another live TV streaming app - are restricted to Wi-Fi only.

No Live TV for Mac Users Yet

Unfortunately, the Mac version is debuting without the live TV streaming functionality. According to Joe Costello, CEO of Orb Networks, support for live TV support will be added in subsequent versions. In the meantime, however, Mac users can install the Orb software to stream music, photos, videos, home movies and webcam feeds stored in iTunes to their iPhones or to any other internet-connected device including netbooks, notebooks, media players, game consoles and more. All that's needed is the new Mac OS X desktop software (works on OS X Intel 10.5 or later).

Those interested in trying out the new Mac version can grab the installer from here: orb.com/en/download_orb. For now, the Mac software is available in English only.

Lots of New Features

For now, only developers will have access to Android 2.0. Regular users won't be able to get their hands on this update until later this year.

The update features some impressive new functions, including support for synchronizing and managing multiple email accounts, an improved keyboard with a smarter dictionary and a browser that will be more like Safari on the iPhone, with support for double-tap zoom and HTML5.

Here are some of the new features that users can expect to see in Android 2.0:

Contacts and accounts

• Multiple accounts can be added to a device for email and contact synchronization, including Exchange accounts. (Handset manufacturers can choose whether to include Exchange support in their devices.)
• Developers can create sync adapters that provide synchronization with additional data sources.
• Quick Contact for Android provides instant access to a contact's information and communication modes. For example, a user can tap a contact photo and select to call, SMS, or email the person. Other applications such as Email, Messaging, and Calendar can also reveal the Quick Contact widget when you touch a contact photo or status icon.

Email

• Exchange support.
• Combined inbox to browse email from multiple accounts in one page.

Messaging

• Search functionality for all saved SMS and MMS messages.
• Auto delete the oldest messages in a conversation when a defined limit is reached.

Camera

• Built-in flash support
• Digital zoom
• Scene mode
• White balance
• Color effect
• Macro focus

Android virtual keyboard

• An improved keyboard layout makes it easier to hit the correct characters and improve typing speed.
• The framework's multi-touch support ensures that key presses aren't missed while typing rapidly with two fingers.
• A smarter dictionary learns from word usage and automatically includes contact names as suggestions.

Browser

• Refreshed UI with actionable browser URL bar enables users to directly tap the address bar for instant searches and navigation.
• Bookmarks with web page thumbnails.
• Support for double-tap zoom.
• Support for HTML5.

Calendar

• Agenda view provides infinite scrolling.
• Events indicate the attending status for each invitee.
• Invite new guests to events.

Due to an unfortunate technical glitch, users ended up hearing the audio from the film's trailer over the interview audio. Overall, the audio was a mess, and UStream/MySpaceID integration for commenting was a popup-ridden, timeout-plagued, fail-inducing nightmare. Nevertheless, as a first-time integration of real-time, interactive video on one of the world's largest social networks, we suppose results could have been worse.

Neither the "studio" nor the audio, which was fraught with ear-torturing static, were what one would expect at any other kind of press junket. And the MySpaceID integration, which would allow users to comment on the video chat, was far from perfect. Every text comment required a two-click confirmation, but there didn't seem to be any options to have that content duplicated on a user's profile as a status update or bulletin, which might have helped with attracting more users to the chat. Moreover, a few comments we tried to send timed out or simply didn't post.

MySpace is painfully late to the game in integrating technologies such as Twitter, UStream, and other services that could grant the aging behemoth a second wind in terms of reclaiming former users, especially in the U.S.

In general, the ability to conduct real-time, live video interviews might be a great promotional vehicle for entertainment properties, but this effort seemed far too half-hearted to be a successful implementation of the available technology. MySpace, UStream, and the properties they choose to have participate in these kinds of promotions will have to do a much better job of ensuring a glitch-free experience for a larger group of users if these partnerships are to have any meaning in the company's future.

In a blog post, video search project manager Michael Cohen wrote, "We wanted to offer webmasters an additional tool, so today we're taking a page from the rich snippets playbook and announcing support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa."

Both the Facebook Share and RFDa markup formats will enable webmasters to give Google - and video-searching users - vital details, including video titles and descriptions. Like other semantic web technologies, these details allow our search engines to become smarter, our results richer and more relevant. And by allowing webmasters to specify the content type as video content, users' searches for video will yield more results with greater relevancy.

"While we've become smarter at discovering this information on our own," Cohen writes, "we'd certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters."

Yahoo! SearchMonkey, a semantic search technology which we've covered extensively in the past, gives webmasters the opportunity to create descriptions about content - in this case, online video. With these machine-readable descriptions, the search engine extracts structured data about videos and renders that data as enhanced search results.

The Facebook Share markup format also allows for the inclusion of metadata with video content.

In the company's latest report (sample) "Mobile Broadband Traffic Across Regions 2009-2017," they've determined that this increase will account for nearly three quarters of all global traffic via mobile broadband portables. The top region for video consumption will be Asia Pacific which will account for over half (53%) of the traffic. That will be followed by Europe (26%) and then North America (14%).

The reason why Asia Pacific comes in so high is because, in many countries, mobile broadband is often the sole option for internet connectivity. Another forecast states that two-thirds of the global traffic will be via LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G wireless technology, where Asia Pacific will consume just under half (45%) of LTE traffic. In Europe, 80% of traffic will be LTE-based and in North America, 75%.

It Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better

According to Steve Smith, founder of Coda Research Consultancy, "the sheer amount of traffic people will consume worldwide will put pressure on operator revenues and network capacity, necessitating radical efficiency drives." He also notes that, in the short term, end user frustration with bandwidth and speed will increase. To illustrate this point, he mentions that today as many as three-quarters of Europeans are dissatisfied with the speeds they currently receive. That's an interesting comment, especially considering all the grumbling we hear about AT&T in the U.S. and their general failure to deliver on the promise of high-speed internet for iPhone users. (In many urban areas, they can't even consistently deliver a signal!) Although this report didn't focus specifically on smartphones, it's somewhat comforting to know that overseas users are experiencing the same struggles as we do here in the U.S.

However, once mobile broadband operators complete their build-outs and upgrades to this high-speed data network of the future, the resulting impact it will have on the internet as a whole will be mind-blowing. One could even argue that bandwidth speeds have accounted for many of the major revolutions the internet has seen over time - since the invention of the hypertext protocol and the web browser, that is.

The Next Revolution for the Net: Extremely Fast, Lots of Bandwidth

In the early days, slow dial-up speeds left us with simplistic, HTML-coded web pages where the most action to be had was an animated GIF. As bandwidth and speeds increased, pages became more robust, too. This change led to sites like Amazon and eBay, both of which launched in 1995, allowing people to shop from home using their PCs. By 2001, the usefulness of the net encouraged enough people to come online to make sites like the crowd-sourced Wikipedia possible. By 2003, the still-increasing speeds meant users could now download music from the newly launched iTunes store, customize (and overload!) their online profiles on MySpace, and play in online virtual worlds like Second Life. The following year, online photo-sharing prepared to go mainstream thanks to the launch of Flickr. Facebook, too, launched this year and eventually became the largest photo-sharing site in the world only three years later when they announced how they hosted over 10 billion photos on their site.

Also in 2005, the abundance of high-speed data connections made video-sharing site YouTube a hit among a new generation of user-generated content producers. By 2007, broadcasters banded together to launch Hulu, a video-streaming site for commercial content in an effort to compete with pirated peer-to-peer downloads as well as iTunes, which by now was serving up TV shows and full-length movies. In Europe, the BBC iPlayer was doing much of the same. In 2008, the launch of the 3G iPhone brought the high-speed internet to the handheld and revolutionized the mobile phone industry. This year, the handset's hardware was upgraded to record video, too.

As you can see, many of these changes were either directly or indirectly impacted by the increasing speeds and bandwidth provided by both mobile operators and ISPs. But currently, it's the mobile broadband networks which are having more of an impact on the latest trends. Even with all their struggles (cough AT&T cough), without the bandwidth provided, phones like the iPhone wouldn't even be possible and the smartphone revolution wouldn't be underway as it is now.

So what will the world look like by 2017? It's almost hard to imagine. But the promise of 4G could deliver things like live streaming HDTV, real-time updates from a variety of services, video chat, abundant use of MiFi, mobile cloud computing, streaming via iTunes instead of downloading (we like that!), and much more. In other words, the high-speed net that you use at home could go with you everywhere via your netbook, tablet, smartphone, or some other device in between. What will that mean for the world of online applications and cloud computing? Only that the next big shift for the internet as a whole is underway and we're privileged to be watching it happen now.

Now with iGoogle video chat, the threat of the unwanted video chat is even more constant. For many iGoogle users, opening the main page is similar to opening a morning newspaper. Imagine opening your news feeds and having your boss or mother-in-law call you when you least expect it. Egad! We'll have to keep our homes clean, brush our hair and put on respectable clothing. And what about home office productivity? All of those precious morning minutes we spent mentally prepping for phone interviews will now be spent picking out an appropriate shirt.

If you're the kind of upstanding citizen that gets dressed before 10:00 am, install the iGoogle voice and video chat plug in and try it out. But if you're a nudist, self-employed hermit or hopeless slob, consider holding off until the community has established guidelines for etiquette.

2. 12cast: After much anticipation, 12seconds.tv released their video application for the iPhone 3GS. The app allows users to create a short 12 second video clip and from here they can share the video's short URL with their friends through Twitter.

3. Twitvid and Posterous: Both Twitvid and Posterous allow users to create videos on their mobile phones and email them to be uploaded to the site. With Twitvid, friends receive a DM message with a link to the newest video. ReadWriteWeb recently covered Twitvid in a round up of Twitter video apps. Meanwhile, with Posterous, your files are instantly converted and embedded as a flash player on your site.

4.Livecast Bambuser and Flixwagon: Livecast, Bambuser and Flixwagon are all similar services that allow users to stream videos live to their channels, blogs and Facebook accounts. Depending on your community preference you can upload vlogs, short films and vignettes.

5. Qik: Qik allows users to stream live videos to their channels, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Justin.tv accounts. One nice feature of the Qik video for Android is that users can trim their clips via their phones before uploading them. ReadWriteWeb named Qik one of the top 100 products of 2008.

6.Kyte: While it doesn't support live streaming, Kyte's iPhone 3GS app allows users to record video and upload it to their channels in an extremely easy manner. The service also offers branded mobile sites for big name celebrities.

We know we're only skimming the surface. If your favorite app isn't listed above, let us know about it in the comments.

The company just raised its first round of venture capital funding last November, but when we talked to Boxee's CEO Avner Ronen yesterday, he stressed that the company thinks this is the right time to expand. Ronen noted that Boxee will use the money to grow its development team to about 20 people, as it sees a chance to become a major player on connected TVs and set-top boxes. These devices are only now starting to gain a foothold in people's living rooms and will give Boxee a chance to go mainstream.

Currently, the software runs on Macs, Windows, Linux, and Apple TV, but while it is getting easier to connect a PC to a large TV set in the living room, this is definitely still a niche market. In order to reach a larger audience, Boxee will have to get its software onto TVs, game consoles, and set-top boxes directly. The company is already talking to a number of manufacturers, though Ronen wasn't ready to announce any partnerships yet.

Ronen also told us that the company plans to offer a platform for content producers and doesn't want to get into the content business itself. Instead, Boxee will give media companies and independent producers options to sell subscriptions to their content or give users access to content on an a la carte basis. Major League Baseball started to offer access to its content to its Premium subscribers on Boxee last month.

Dina Kaplan, COO and one of blip.tv's original co-founders, started this morning's press event by noting that the company has been quiet over the past year because they had been working on closing a number of deals and doing the necessary QA work in order to launch the associated new features. Thanks to all the new partnerships announced, including those with YouTube, Vimeo, Roku, and NBC, content creators can send their videos straight to these new sites and services - and even to set-top boxes that allow viewers to watch the content on the big screen TV in their living room. Already, the company distributes to iTunes, AOL Video, MSN Video, Blinkx, Facebook, Twitter, Sony Bravia televisions with Bravia Internet Video Link, TiVo, Verizon FiOS Video On Demand, iPhones and the Internet Archive.

The Roku box, best known for its ability to stream Netflix movies to your television set, currently provides access to over 50,000 TV shows and movies, but according to Jim Funk, VP of Business Development, the company wanted to offer more content to their users - something that will now be possible thanks to blip.tv. With the new SDK designed for Roku's open platform, content creators will be able to launch their own channel on the Roku player. The update that provides this functionality will arrive this fall.

Blip.tv also announced an expanded relationship with the makers of another well-known set-top box - that being the TiVo. Now, content creators will be able to publish their shows directly to the TiVo DVR from their content dashboards.

The video service will help show creators make a splash on broadcast television, too, at least in New York City by way of a new partnership with WNBC, NBC's flagship station. A new show called NY Nonstop will syndicate 5,000 to 10,000 of blip.tv's top shows on a channel dedicated to information and lifestyle.

Perhaps the biggest news, though, out of all the partnerships announced today, is blip.tv's new distribution deal with YouTube. Show creators will be able to send shows directly to this major video portal directly from their blip.tv account. Blip.tv will also be able to serve its own advertisements within the YouTube player itself, providing a revenue share for the content creators.

Other partnerships announced include deals with TubeMogul and FreeWheel, for analytics and advertising, respectively. TubeMogul is providing the audience and engagement data to content creators via the revamped dashboard. They're even able to track the "unofficial" views of unauthorized uploads. FreeWheel will provide optional advertising opportunities for blip.tv users across all of the service's distribution network.

Blip.tv's New Dashboard

Along with the numerous partnership deals, blip.tv also announced their revamped dashboard where content owners upload, manage, and track their videos. Some of the new features - like the "upload to YouTube" option - were added to facilitate interaction with the new distribution partners, while others - like the ability to reorganize episodes - are just great upgrades to the service.

The main screen of the new dashboard features an easy-to-use interface where creators can quickly see the number of views and revenue earned for all their media. It also offers an "activity stream" which displays a list of everything happening with the content, like when a video gets a comment on YouTube, for example.

The process of uploading videos to blip.tv is now easier, too, with a simplified feature that lets you just browse for a video on your computer then send it to the service where it's uploaded in the background while you move on and fill in additional metadata about the video.

Content creators can also better organize their episode list now, thanks to new features that let you re-order shows via drag-and-drop. As soon as you make the change in blip.tv to the order, other lists on the web - such as those on iTunes or in RSS feeds - will update as well. Videos can be batch-edited as well, allowing creators to quickly send multiple videos to YouTube, for example, or any other service they choose.

On the dashboard's analytics page, blip.tv users can track views and revenues on a chart, even adjusting the timeframe that displays via a provided drop-down box. Other information includes an engagement summary (how long people watch the video), referrer list, browsers used, episode details, and more are also shown on this page.

All the changes to the blip.tv dashboard should be live as of today.

We've spent the past couple of days testing and retesting a slew of these sites, and we are ready to present our top five picks for sharing video content on Twitter. Read on to find out which app comes out on top and which ones didn't make the cut.

Type: Twenty-five second webcam uploads that are embeddable and linkable with Twitter-enabled comments.

Test Video

4. BubbleTweet is a service we've been trying and testing for several months with mixed results. However, the premise is great for Twitter. The site lets users upload a simple, 30-second webcam recording, which then shows up on Twitter as a small, unobtrusive "bubble" of video over the web interface. BubbleTweet also lets users upload prerecorded video content.

Type: Thirty-second webcam recordings or video uploads that appear in a video bubble over the Twitter web interface.

Test Video

3. TwitVid.io is the Twitter-friendly video recording and uploading tool from video website-creating service Fliggo. It allows users to record up to ten minutes of video from a webcam or upload videos they've already created and tweet a URL. Co-founder Chrys Bader also tells us they're getting ready to launch an iPhone app soon.

Type: Single-user webcam recordings of up to 10 minutes or video uploads from a drive.

Test Video

2. Twitcam is a pared-down offering of parent company LiveStream. It runs a Twitter-based chat program alongside the video itself, and videos are archived for linking and embedding after the fact. Unfortunately, the tweet/chat module only allows users to send out one tweet every 30 seconds, which minimizes the real-time fun to be had. Still, it's been one of the easier, more fun apps we've tried today.

Type: Single-webcam live-streamed video with Twitter-based chat module and post-stream archive of video and chat.

Test Video

1. TwitVid is a great little app we wrote about recently that allows users to record and upload video from a webcam or any video-enabled mobile device or to upload prerecorded video. They also have a nifty iPhone app that works like a charm. The site also lets users auto-post their TwitVids to other sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Best of all, each video has its own "like" and "retweet" buttons as well as Meebo-powered chat, all of which feed back into the Twitter stream. As far as Twitter integration with video, we tend to think TwitVid does it best.

Type: Single-user webcam/mobile recordings with retweet, chat, "buzz," and other Twitter options.

Test Video

In the interview clips, included below, Moller hints at the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. He compares video to text and image content, subtextually posing the question: If other kinds of non-video content are so easy to grab, remix, and reuse, why not video, too?

Although videos have been part of the Wikimedia stable for a couple years through the open-source Ogg Theora format, the offering has been limited. Now, however, a Firefox 3.5 plugin called Firefogg will allow for server-side transcoding to the Ogg format. In addition to allowing for downloading and editing, the Ogg format also consumes significantly fewer resources during video playback.

Of course, any open-source technology that makes information free (both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-free-to-move-about-the-Internet) is not without controversy. The Ogg codec's role in HTML 5 is of particular interest to those concerned with the evolution of web-based video.

Of particular interest to those concerned with the evolution of content ownership, however, is the Foundation's proposal, as stated by Moller, to allow users to "take a video, to crop it, to edit it, to take different assets and mix them into a single video - not just video... a text slide or... a slide show. You can mix videos, tag them with audio, obviously. So we want to build a completely open standards-based environment that people can use to remix video."

As we reported last month, when news of the new player was breaking, hundreds of thousands of public domain videos from sources such as the Internet Archive and Metavid will be available in the new format.

The editing tools to be made available later this year are led and funded by open source video company Kaltura. Moller also revealed to Beet.tv that Wikimedia is looking for a CDN partner to ensure streaming video performance.

This is a good day to stay home, watch a baseball game, throw some hotdogs on the grill, eat an apple pie and watch fireworks on your computer. earthTV, an international live TV channel, has cameras located in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New York City, Niagara Falls and Honolulu and will be broadcasting live streams of fireworks displays beginning at dusk in those cities. If you just can't wait until then, go check out its timelapse showing Independence Day displays from years past.

For those of you that are really feeling the American spirit today, check out this silly video we found. After all, it's not really a party until someone shoots rockets out of their butt or blows a hand off, right? (WARNING: Do Not Try This at Home)

Today, Joost announced that it is mostly abandoning its original strategy and that the company will focus on offering white label video solutions for media companies and distributors instead.

As Mike Volpi points out on the Joost blog, the company will also downsize its staff in New York and London, and shut down its development center in the Netherlands. Joost will continue to host content on Joost.com, however, and keep the portal running for the time being. The focus of Joost, however, will be on the white label platform, which the company describes as a "cost-effective, end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands."

Volpi also announced that he is stepping down as Joost's CEO. Matt Zelesko, Joost's current SVP of engineering, will replace Volpi as CEO.

Lots of Competition

Joost is entering a pretty crowded market, with Brightcove, Viddler, EdgeCast and many others vying for customers. There can be no doubt that Joost will be able to deliver the technology, but we will have to wait and see if Joost can make this transition and attract enough customers for its white label solution.

One of the requirements for any video added to the site is that it be based on open-source formats. With the heavy exposure that the Wikipedia web site receives - often the number one search ranking for any subject and the seventh most popular web site in the world - the organization hopes to put pressure on other content holders to release more of their videos into the public domain.

Neither adding a video to the site nor clipping a section of video will require users to have any sort of video-editing software on their computer - all the tools will be provided online. In the future, Wikipedia plans to add more features to the system so as to allow users to edit, add to, and reorganize the clips embedded in the articles, just as users are able to edit text on the site today.

To help with the video effort, Wikipedia has partnered with Kaltura, an open source video solution provider, who is helping to develop the necessary tools for importing the video content. The partnership was originally announced back in January of 2008.

We at ReadWriteWeb have had an awesome time gathering video content lately. We love it so much that we plan to do it a lot more. One of the discussions in the back channels has been about where to post our video content, and after considering a whole boatload of factors and testing several services, we've started posting content on our brand-new Vimeo account.

In the past, team members have used YouTube, Viddler, Blip, and a handful of other video services. We loved YouTube's HD, large-file capabilities, but we hated the media player and the YouTube watermark that ended up all over our lovely content. We adored Blip's customizable player, but our longer, in-depth interview videos were a bit too large for that format.

Our Vimeo Plus account will allow us to upload a healthy-to-ridiculous amount of HD video each week, and the speed of uploading and processing for Plus accounts is mind-reelingly fast. We'll also get to make widgets from our content. And we definitely love the very social component of groups and channels. We couldn't be more excited, and we hope to have a long and productive experience with Vimeo.

As a side note, this post isn't meant as an endorsement of Vimeo; different products work better for different purposes, as noted by many Twitter followers last week.

Another factor behind our decision was the surprisingly enthusiastic user response to Vimeo when we conducted an informal Twitter poll. Since you guys like the Vimeo platform and community so much, we hope you'll add us and check out our social media channel and our RWW group. We've added a few videos to the channel and group so far; if you have a video you'd like us to add to our curated content, just email us.

And as always, suggestions on how we can improve our video coverage are welcomed; just leave your erudite ponderings in the comments.