Television “as you know it” will die soon!

In the last millenium Jeremy Allaire and his brother J. J. established the Allaire Corporation, which made ColdFusion, an early tool for making Web sites. In 2001, Allaire was bought by Macromedia for $360 million. Mr. Allaire became Macromedia’s chief technical officer and helped oversee the development of Flash, which originally was to add animation to Web sites. His work with Flash video persuaded him to start a company devoted to Net video, Brightcove’s system combines software tools for producing and distributing video with methods for making money.

Consciously modeled after Google, it is starting a network that will sell video ads associated with independent video producers, much as Google sells ads on many blogs. It also includes technology that allows producers to charge fees to watch or download video, including a way for Web site owners to place links to video content on their pages and split the revenue with the video producer.

Meanwhile Participatory Culture Foundation is building DTV software which use BitTorrent clever protocol to download videos and tv shows, allow anybody to launch its own channel using the Broadcast Machine PHP scripts and provide a Channel Guide. They aim to create an independent, creative, engaging, and meritocratic TV system for everybody. My favorite channel are Rocketboom and MacTV. Very similar approach without the BitTorrent protocol, Fire Ant (previously know under the name AntNotTV) and the brand new iTunes 6, both can subscribe to video podcasts RSS feeds.

If you rather like watching those internet videos on your TV, turn to Akimbo setop box, connect it to your broadband internet connection and your tv to watch on demand videos. Akimbo distribute Internet content straight to your TV set, no PC Needed. Channel mix iFilm, Rocketboom and BBC and CNN…

Or Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition optimised to record and watch traditional network tv minus the ad, it can be enhanced with TV Tonic which delivers high-quality video programming direct to your Windows Media Center PC, providing a full-screen, DVD-quality viewing experience with only one click. Watch ZeTools‘ Alloy, the first end-to-end solution to enable producers and distributors of digital media to accelerate and streamline the creation and distribution of content for any Internet-enabled (IP) platform. AllOY combines content capture, accelerated encoding, automated authoring and publishing, and secure UDP distribution into a single package. With AllOY, production processes that used to take an experienced technical team days to accomplish can now be done by a single production intern in minutes.

If you can’t afford your own channel management package, to create your own nano-broadcast, get Orb a free software that allow you to stream your home tv live feeds, photos, videos, music to any internet connected device that has web access (laptop, pda, mobile phone, portable game machine, …). If you are lazy buy a SlingBox an hardware equivalent. Or the Location Free from Sony (compatible with your PSP).

You may also surf to Internet networks the Oxygen Network a 24-hour cable television network that puts a fresh spin on television for women. They just launched vertical internet tv channel oh! baby.

But the future may ressemble more to NewsViewz, the first of a new generation of internet broadcast that have been conceived, developed and produced to empower the viewer with as many layers of control and participation as possible. They dubbed these broadcast ChannelBlasts.

Or french initiative Vodeo which sell 3 to 90 minutes documentaries for 3 to 5 euros (streaming version).

Or ManiaTV live Internet Television channel, broadcasting live 24/7 for youngsters which even developped Viral TV a channel broadcasting those viral clips that are swapped by email on the internet. ManiaTV! delivers Internet addicts the best mix of music, short films, action sports, video games, cartoons and news with a twist. All shows are hosted live by “CyberJockeys” (CJ’s for short). You can rap with ’em in real-time via webcams, chat, and more. And you can submit your own shows, short films, dedications, and requests to interact with the network and influence what gets aired. In addition to their live ManiaTV! channel, their network has several VOD channels. Check ’em out. Join the revolution.

If you are lost searching on the web with all that video online, the good news is that most big Internet player are launching their multimedia search engine like AOL with their Singing Fish.

Google goes further and allow even content providers to upload on their Google Video server, just like the free world Our Media which provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. And YouTube which aim to become the Flickr of video, just like Vimeo and Medicine Films and Blip TV.

Altavista Video and All The Web video search technologies where combined by Yahoo into Yahoo Video Search, but they search essentially meta content, not real video content. Those major player initiatives are already challenged by specialized video blogs search engines like VLogDir.

Unlike Video search engine Blinkx TV, a service of innovative software house Blinkx, that use advanced speech recognition and video analysis to actually listen and watch thousands of hours of podcasts and video-blogs every day to allow you to jump straight to the item that is most relevant to you. Blinkx use technologies from Autonomy Corp subsidiary Virage‘ VS Archive is a content management solution to efficiently store, categorize, manage, retrieve and distribute video, audio and other rich media content.

While aiming for “deep indexing,” Yahoo isn’t giving up on metadata. Along with the test video search service, it launched an initiative called Media RSS, a syndication format based on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and designed to make it easier for Yahoo to index — and for providers to contribute — video content.

It’s going to be an interesting time for traditional network and channels.

2 thoughts on “Television “as you know it” will die soon!”

  1. Hi!

    That was some interesting piece of information. I am working on an article about the varying trends across decades in the entertainment industry and I believe that your page could support my work. So, I would want to refer to your page. I hope that is okay with you. Appreciate your help.

    Respectfully,
    Parimar Kohen

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