Former RocketBoom host Amanda Congdon is leaving ABC News, according to Mediabistro. Congdon, the host of a weekly videoblog for ABC News, chose not to continue on with ABC after her one year contract finished. Jackson West of NewTeeVee reports that she plans to “begin a new project in the digital space in the very near future."
See more at NewTeeVee.com.
Sony has launched a new video sharing site in Japan called eyeVio that blows away most other sites’ video quality. The video screen size supports “near DVD quality” resolution (640 x 368 at 16:9 and 480 x 360 at 4:3) and bit rates of 1.5Mbps. The video quality (example) is a result of Japan’s lightning fast broadband connections, which are as high as 100 megabits per second in some areas. In other words, don’t expect to see this sort of quality any time soon outside Japan.
See more at NewTeeVee.com.
In a somewhat perplexing move, NBC announced yesterday that it will offer ad-supported downloads of several top TV shows for up to a week after broadcast through a new service called NBC Direct. The service, which will launch some time this fall, will initially offer Heroes, The Office, Life, Bionic Woman, 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. NBC Direct downloads will only be compatible with Windows machines at first, but Mac and mobile versions are in the works. The move is puzzling in that it will compete directly with NBC Universal’s video venture with News Corp., Hulu.com (which also plans to launch this fall).
See more at NewTeeVee.com.
Starz Media announced yesterday distribution deals with the video download services of Amazon Unbox and Xbox 360 Live Marketplace. Starz will make 400 titles available through Amazon Unbox. The cable TV network has been experimenting more and more recently with digital distribution, signing deals with Azureus’s Vuze service, BitTorrent, Guba, IGN’s Direct2Drive, Netflix and Vongo.
See more at Video Business.
Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee got a sneak peak at web-based slideshow site Flektor last week, and the service sounds fairly impressive. It’s much more than a slideshow tool, as the application includes a wide assortment of effects and transitions you can incorporate, in addition to nifty add-ons like in-widget polls and live webcam imports. Flektor was purchased by MySpace this past May for $20 million.
See more at NewTeeVee.com.
Yet another collaborative video mixing tool was launched yesterday at TechCrunch40 – Brooklyn-based Kaltura. The company, which was the 40th to present at the conference, creates a sort of multimedia wiki environment that encourages users to collaborate on projects. Users can create videos together by importing images, music, and footage and mixing them as they see fit. Projects can then be shared through links or embedded on web pages.
See more at TechCrunch.com.
One interesting startup that launched at TechCrunch’s TechCrunch40 conference yesterday is Viewdle, a company developing a facial recognition service for video that can supposedly pinpoint a face after just one viewing with 85 percent accuracy. Viewdle has already partnered with Reuters to index over 600 hours of news video. Indexed video is searchable by people who appear, and allows you to conveniently jump to segments containing a particular person.
See more at NewTeeVee.com.
According to a new study, consumers aren’t particularly interested in watching web video on their TV sets. A report by Marquest Media & Entertainment Research found that only 20 percent of study respondents said watching online TV shows or movies on a television set was important, while 64 percent believed it was of little or no importance at all. The study shows that, while many believe that a better PC-TV hookup is needed for web video to gain mass appeal, something is still missing.
See more at TVWeek.com.
Another new startup launching at TechCrunch40 is Story Blender, a web-based collaborative video production service that allows users to “blend” their content into a new multimedia show. The site’s online editing tools let users blend images, sound, text, and video clips, and share their final product with friends and the rest of Story Blender.
See more at TechCrunch.com.
AOL debuted a new service at TechCrunch40 yesterday called BlueString , a web application that lets you merge your multimedia into a slideshow presentation. The application lets you combine and mix images, video and audio from across the web into the slideshow, which can then be embedded, shared and even edited by your friends. The service is not quite at the Jumpcut level in terms of editing capabilities, but it does feature some basic transitions.
See more at TechCrunch.com.
