EQAL, the studio behind faux-vlog shows LonelyGirl15 & KateModern, has signed a deal with CBS to create online content.
The two companies will work on producing multi-platform content, including online and mobile, around CBS programming. EQAL will work on a non-exclusive basis with CBS at consulting, producing and scripting.
“This partnering signals CBS’s attention to the web as a new medium across both interactive and the network,” said CBS president Quincy Smith.
Magnify has introduced a new service that promises to make it easy for Movable Type and Wordpress publishers to incorporate media from a variety of sites.
Magnify Publisher is a native blog application that lets you search for video, text, and images, using key words and tags, and embed the content directly into a post, without ever leaving the WordPress or Movable Type dashboard. Magnify Publisher also offers Seesmic-like tools that let you shoot and publish videoblog posts using a WebCam.
“Bloggers in our Movable Type community have consistently told us that their readers respond to posts with relevant videos and photos, so we’re always looking for ways to make rich media easier to find and share” said Six Apart’s Anil Dash. “Magnify Publisher makes that process extremely easy, providing an integrated application that lets bloggers discover, share or even create multimedia content right from within the familiar Movable Type interface.”
Magnify Publisher’s video discovery features currently provide “search embed” from YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, BlipTV, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Clipsyndicate, Google Video, Veoh, Red Lasso, and other sites. Image search is included for Flickr and Google Images.
Wordpress and Movable Type are increasingly becoming rich media platforms that readers turn to for help finding interesting content. While Magnify Publisher’s toolset looks interesting, these types of multimedia features need to be integrated into publishing platforms, independent of third-party tools or social networks. (more…)
Television content available through Apple’s iTunes Store continues to grow.
HBO and Apple today officially announced that programming from HBO is now available for purchase and download via the iTunes Store. Programs include “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “Deadwood” “Rome,” “Flight of the Conchords” and “The Wire.”
“We’re very excited to make these legendary HBO programs available on the iTunes Store,” said Henry McGee, president of HBO Video. “Whether catching up on ‘Sex and the City’ in anticipation of its upcoming movie release or reliving a favorite ‘Sopranos’ episode, we think viewers will love being able to watch these shows on their iPod or iPhone.”
Television shows purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store can be viewed on a Mac or PC, iPod nano with video, iPod classic, iPod touch, fifth generation iPod, iPhone or on a widescreen TV with Apple TV.
With the announcement, Apple also introduces more variation in pricing for TV shows. “Sex and the City,” “The Wire” and “Flight of the Conchords” are $1.99 per episode, and “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “Rome” are priced at $2.99 per episode.
At this point, the biggest hole in Apple’s iTunes Store offerings is movie selection. While Apple’s offerings are steadily increasing, they still are a tiny fraction of what’s available via NetFlix.
The Guardian reports that BT PodShow, an online TV portal, is getting its full consumer launch:
The service is a joint venture with US-based Podshow (now Mevio), in which the backers of Google and YouTube have invested, and which has been running for several months. It has over 1m hours of content.
The two companies signed their original deal in September 2006 and, since then, Podshow has been looking for British talent and helping with production costs.
“We are what we call a brand-safe network,” said BT Podshow president Adam Curry. “There is an expectation about what is going to be delivered, an advertiser won’t just find themselves next to a video of someone shooting a firecracker out of his bum.”
Highlights of the network include an alternative healer and the self-styled sex therapist Dr Cockney.
DreamCatcher has announced the release of iPhone Video Recorder, an iPhone video recorder.
iPhone Video Recorder records audio and video at a frame rate of up to 15fps to the compressed mpeg4 format.
Because of the CPU overhead, iPhone Video Recorder encodes at the end of a recording session, and the encoding can be paused anytime and then resumed when convenient. While it is possible to record and encode on-the-fly, the frame rate will suffer. You can customize the image quality, the brightness and the audio bit rate options.
Here’s a video demo:
iPhone Video Recorder works on iPhone firmware 1.1.x, 1.2.x, 2.0. A limited-functional trial version (recording up to 30 seconds) is available for download.
U.S. Internet users viewed 11.5 billion online videos in March 2008, a 13-percent gain versus February and a 64-percent gain versus March 2007, according to figures from ComScore.
All Your Views Are Belong To YouTube
In March, Google Sites ranked as the top U.S. video property, with more than 4.3 billion videos viewed (38 percent share of all videos), gaining 2.6 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 98 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.
Other highlights:
73.7 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
84.8 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
47.7 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (8.4 videos per viewer).
The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.
The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.
Google has released a new free Mac OS X app, Vidnik, that’s designed to make it easy for users to record video, add a Title, Tags & Description and upload it to YouTube:
You can use Vidnik to create a video diary, or just to quickly record a video comment to attach to an existing YouTube video. Vidnik works with the built-in video cameras on recent Macs, with Firewire video cameras, and with many USB video cameras.
To use Vidnik, run the app, then click the record button to start recording. Click it again to stop. Trim to just the golden moments you want to keep, as in the screen shot above. Fill in the required title, description, and so on. Click the upload button. That’s it.
Or you can drag movies made in other programs onto Vidnik’s column of movies, then click the upload button. And to use another program to do a little post-production, use the Gear menu to show Vidnik’s movie file in the Finder. Edit the movie in the other program, then upload it.
In other words, it’s designed to work with your built-in video camera to make filming and uploading movies trivia - the same territory Seesmic covers.
Google’s entry suggests that user-generated Internet video is going to get easier fast.
The official Blade Runner podcast may be a promo tie-in for the 25th Anniversary DVD of the classic sci-fi film, but it’s also the official Blade Runner podcast.
Queue the Love Theme.
To subscribe, add this podcast URL to your podcast software:
