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Tag: internet

  • Skype Launches Computer-free Videophone


    ASUS has launched the first Skype certified videophone allowing unlimited video calling over the Internet.

    The AiGuru SV1, part of the Eee Phone product family, has a 7" display and a built-in webcam, speaker and microphone.

    WiFi-capable, the videophone lets users make unlimited video calls for free to other Skype users without the need for a computer.

    The AiGuru SV1 is Skype’s first foray with a partner into the videophone category.

    But with more than 25 per cent of Skype-to-Skype calls including video, it would seem like a logical step.

    Designed to be simple to use, the AiGuru SV1 has an icon-based interface and intuitive button layout which should make it easy for anyone to make and receive Skype-to-Skype video and voice calls.

    Users can also join voice conferences, which could make the videophone attractive as an all-in-one voice and video conferencing solution for small businesses.

    The AiGuru SV1 also allows users to make and receive calls to and from fixed and mobile lines at cheap rates.

    Priced at USD $299.95, the ASUS AiGuru SV1 is now available in North America from Skype’s online shop, and will be available from ASUS authorized resellers later this year.

    Consumers in Europe can pre-order the videophone from Skype’s shop, priced at €269.95/£219.95, with shipment beginning next week.

    The videophone will also be available in retail outlets in Asia Pacific later this year.

  • Boinx Launches Mac-based Live Recording Studio


    Boinx Software has launched a new tool for video podcasters that turns a Mac into a live video recording studio.

    Called BoinxTV, it’s an audiovisual mixing application that allows one person to edit high quality recordings live.

    Aimed at video podcasters or for providing coverage of events, it works with up to three cameras and allows for on-the-fly camera switching, transitions, lower thirds, graphics, logos, crawlers, graphs, title, and so on.

    Created jointly with The Coding Monkeys, the beauty of BoinxTV for video podcasters is that once filming is finished they have a QuickTime movie that requires no post production.

    Oliver Breidenbach, CEO and co-founder of Boinx Software, said the application was going to give more people access to high quality production software that allowed them to create video content.

    He told hdtv-biz-news BoinxTV was a "game changer" because it made it easy to create professional ‘TV style’ recordings – at an affordable price.

    "It’s going to be much more fun and much more appealing to do videos on a regular basis," he said. "But the price is also making this technology available to a much broader audience than before.

    "We are not going to replace the million dollar equipment used in the broadcasting industry but BoinxTV gives people the ability to make professional-looking shows."

    Breidenbach said they had already received very positive feedback from professionals in the US that provided local content to affiliate TV stations.

    He said Boinx’s software meant, for example, a football game could be coverered using three cameras and edited live from the stadium using a MacBook Pro rather than undergoing a lengthy post-match production process.

    Breidenbach said HD content was an important aspect of BoinxTV and there was no limit to the resolution that could be used in projects.

    However, he said there were still streaming and bandwidth issues to be resolved.

    "My feeling is that many people are looking at HD but no-one really knows where it is going," he said.

    "At the moment they are perfectly content with lower resolution, that is 720p, which is still thought of as advanced.

    "HD is very important for us as a future direction but we made a decision that we did not want to delay shipping BoinxTV.

    "In the meantime, we will keep working on whatever we can do to optimise the code."

    Another HD issue was hardware limitations but that required action from Apple.

    "I would expect improvements to the operating system will help in that direction as well," said Breidenbach.

    "In about 6-9 months we will be able to do full HD and ultimately there will be even higher resolution."

    Another future upgrade to BoinxTV will be live streaming, a feature that Breidenbach said was already possible but not in the most convenient form.

    Currently, it is possible to stream content live using an encoding box or using software.

    "In the future we will provide live streaming from the application," he said. "For now we provide a live streaming solution that’s workable but not very convenient."

    BoinxTV can be downloaded at boinx.com/download for USD $499.

    The BoinxTV Sponsored Edition costs USD $199 (single license) and requires a credit for BoinxTV in every video created with BoinxTV.

  • Advertisers Need To Adapt To Mobile Internet


    Internet advertisers will need to create campaigns that work with multiple devices and display sizes if they want to benefit from growing mobile advertising revenue.

    That’s according to telecom analysts Berg Insight, who say a significant proportion of mobile advertising revenues will actually derive from mobile Internet users accessing conventional web sites.

    Smartphones will be the key device used to boost traditional Internet advertising revenues.

    Other predictions for the mobile advertising market included in Berg Insight’s report are:

    • Ad-funded business models will become a new paradigm in the discount MVNO segment of the mobile communications market. Price sensitive young consumers with low income will be most inclined to accept ads in exchange for voice minutes or text messages. Incidentally this group is also highly interesting for major advertisers.

    • Idle-screen will eventually become the largest mobile advertising channel. Virtually all consumers carry a mobile handset wherever they go and check out things on the display many times per day. Embedded advertising on the idle-screen and in the user interface would provide an unmatched exposure.

    • The current economic downturn will hold back revenue growth but not innovation. New unproven channels such as mobile media will see a negative effect from cutbacks in marketing budgets. However there is still going to be much innovation in the mobile space that will create new channels for advertisers to reach out to consumers.

    • Size will matter in the race for market leadership. Financial strength will be especially important if the market develops more slowly than previously anticipated. Existing digital and mobile industry players will have a major advantage over venture capital funded start-ups, many of which will have difficulties to find financing.

  • Global Mobile Web Usage Exploding


    Mobile Web and application usage is growing rapidly, according to mobile advertising agency AdMob.

    In its latest Mobile Metrics Report, the expansion is shown to be widely spread, with 34 countries sending more than 10 million ad requests to AdMob’s network in September 2008, compared to only 16 countries in September 2007.

    Celebrating its first anniversary, the reports states that since its launch the number of monthly ad requests in the AdMob network tripled from 1.6 billion in September 2007 to 5.1 billion in September 2008.

    The increase is attributed to a combination of organic growth from AdMob’s legacy publishers and the addition of thousands of new mobile sites and applications to the company’s publisher network.

    The number of mobile sites and applications in AdMob’s network increased to more than 6,000, with 4,308 publishers requesting ads in September 2008.

    Other highlights from the September 2008 report:

    Worldwide, the Apple iPhone is now the number 4 handset after the Motorola RAZR, Nokia N70, and Motorola KRZR. There were 103 million ad requests from iPhones worldwide in September 2008.

    In the US, 16 of the current Top 20 devices are new from September 2007, including the Samsung Instinct and Apple iPhone.

    In the UK, the Nokia N95 gained share steadily throughout the year and is now the leading handset with 9.7 per cent share of requests. The SonyEricsson K800i and W810i, the number 1 and number 5 handsets respectively in September 2007, both remain in the Top 5 a year later.

  • Flood Of Content Predicted For Real-time HDTV Video Streaming

    While more operators are beginning to offer HD video-on-demand services, live streaming video continues to pose infrastructure and bandwidth problems.

    HDTV.biz-news.com spoke to Alex Mashinsky, CEO of DigiMeld, about the challenges of streaming video – and developments that could open-up the service to millions of viewers.

    Alex Mashinsky, CEO of DigiMeld, was one of the first people to realise the internet’s great potential for voice, now he is just as excited about the possibilities it offers for video.

    He said the demand for real-time streaming of video was going to grow rapidly as high quality internet content was increasingly watched on HDTVs rather than PCs.

    “We are moving to a world where services from the internet do not look any different from cable TV,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge flood of content flowing to this environment, moving away from watching video on a laptop for five minutes at a time.”

    Alex Mashinsky, CEO DigiMeld


    Mashinsky said that while it was easy to get 16 million Americans to watch the same TV channel at the same time, it was impossible to do that with half-a-million viewers on the internet.

    “Voice was the first wave on the web. The second wave is video,” he told HDTV.biz-news.com from DigiMeld’s mid-town Manhattan headquarters. “But while everyone is focussed on it, we have not really solved the scaleability issue.

    Challenges Remain


    Video demands a lot of bandwidth and Mashinsky said traditional unicast and CDN solutions were limited in meeting the challenges on efficiency and scalability.

    He used the example of Oprah Winfrey’s attempt to stream live on her website, a move which caused the site to crash when more than 300,000 viewers logged-on.

    “We believe the only reason why we don’t have live TV on the internet is because no-one can really solve the scaleability and pricing issue,” said Mashinsky.

    “If you can address those two things, you would have linear streaming and on-demand streaming of movies and other things on a much larger scale than today.

    “Amazon, Netflix and Blockbuster have all launched streaming services but they are not launching new movies and having one million people watching at the same time. They rely on many people watching different things.”

    China Forging Ahead

    Mashinsky said China was way ahead of the US in live streaming technology, something it demonstrated during the Olympic Games when PP Live streamed live to 1.6 million concurrent online viewers.

    He said DigiMeld had used a team of former PP Live programmers to develop its grid-streaming technology that enabled massive numbers of viewers to watch content concurrently.

    It has tested the intelligent streaming solution with NASA Television, including a live internet broadcast trial of a shuttle launch to more than 100,000 live concurrent video streams.

    Essentially, the software harvests viewers’ unused uplink bandwidth to relay stream data and offload the stream traffic from the media servers. The company says this optimizes the overall load balance of the network.

    Unlike traditional CDNs or multicast network solutions, the DigiMeld solution allows each viewer in the grid-streaming network to simultaneously retrieve, view, and share streaming video data with other viewers within a safe and encrypted network.

    This approach differs from P2P file-sharing firms such as BitTorrent, which downloads an entire video file to a viewer’s hard drive.

    Mashinsky said DigiMeld only stores a portion of the streamed content in a viewer’s evanescent memory during viewing.

    This slice of video is continuously overwritten by newly-arriving streams, enhancing efficiency of network bandwidth and increasing copyright protection, including digital rights management (DRM).

    He believes grid-streaming is much more scalable because when the number of concurrent viewers explodes, the viewers will offload most data.


    Bandwidth Congestion Reduced


    Mashinsky said grid-streaming also puts less strain on media servers, while enhancing the QoS (quality of service) when the number of concurrent viewers is huge since more viewers can share data with each other.

    “Unlike BitTorrent, if you are not watching stuff, people are not using your bandwidth,” he said. “We are not over-loading the network with our requirements. It’s the opposite as we are balancing the upstream with the downstream.”

    Mashinsky said the software enabled adaptive streaming which sensed the customer’s bandwidth capacity.

    “It decides if it’s going to use HD or lower quality and links into other streams of people watching the same thing.”

    Opportunities For Content Producers

    Mashinsky stressed that DigiMeld’s grid-streaming was not a replacement for CDNs but could be leveraged within existing infrastructure to create greater benefits.

    DigiMeld was offering services ranging from those for customers that wanted to self-launch, self-publicize and self-monetize to those that relied on DigiMeld for hosting and distribution – or any mix in-between.

    The company has a self-publishing video portal, DigiMeld.tv that allows publishers to create live and on-demand video channels easily and monetize the content through subscription, paid and advertising based services.

    Mashinsky said the service was intended for clients that fell between large media companies, which typically used a CDN service such as Akamai, and peer-to-peer video typically found on YouTube.

    “We are trying to capture the middle of the tail to enable these content people to monetize their content in an easy way,” he said.

    Earlier this week, DigiMeld demonstrated grid-streaming’s worth as a video delivery platform by conducting the first feature-film broadcast over the internet simultaneously with the theatrical release of PublicScope Film’s The Third Jihad.

    Gregory Ross, of PublicScope Film, said DigiMeld TV enabled them to reach worldwide audiences with a television broadcast experience at greatly reduced costs.

    If DigiMeld can achieve that desired combination of quality and cost, there will be a lot more producers knocking on its door.

  • Web Sites Must Adapt For Mobile Access


    The rising popularity of smartphones and their increasing use to access the internet means web sites must be prepared for effective handheld viewing.

    With the launch of new phones from the likes of Apple, RIM and now HTC, with Google’s Android-based G1, that trend is set to accelerate.

    Chuck Sacco, CEO of mobile marketing experts PhindMe.net, said the G1 represented another step toward complete Web access for people on the go.

    “What we’ve seen with the BlackBerry and the iPhone is a shift away from cell phones to smart phones and the G1 is going to further spur that shift,” he said.

    “With Google’s Android technology also available to other cell phone manufacturers who want to develop smart phones, we anticipate a spike in the number of people using handhelds for the kind of online information they used to access while tethered to the home or office computer.”

    Sacco said most businesses had yet to investigate whether their Web site was accessible to handheld users.

    But an M:Metrics survey showed that 85 per cent of iPhone users accessed the Web for information and were 10 times more likely to search the mobile Web than cell phone owners.

    Jon Cooper, CMO of PhindMe.net, said companies spentd a lot of resources on intricate Web sites that simply didn’t translate to the small screen.

    He said that with the market transitioning toward smart phones, businesses were missing an important opportunity if they didn’t create streamlined versions of their sites that were both accessible to handheld phones and provided information that people on-the-go actually need.

    “Someone looking for lunch isn’t going to care about the history of your restaurant –they need timely information such as where you are and how to get there, what’s on your menu and what’s on special,” he said.

    “You should make that information accessible on their phone to maximize your marketing opportunities.”

  • Smartphones Fuelling Mobile Search Growth


    The increasing numbers of smartphones on flat-rate data plans, coupled with ever-improving handsets, is leading to a surge in mobile search, according to comScore.

    It has published the results of a survey which show that searching the internet from a mobile phone is gaining in popularity in the United States and Western Europe.

    In June, 20.8 million US wireless customers and 4.5 million European subscribers searched from their mobile handset – an increase of 68 per cent and 38 per cent from the year before.

    comScore said Google was the dominant mobile search provider, with an estimated 60 per cent share in all countries measured.
    Recognising the potential yields from mobile searching, Google has attempted to build up its presence in cell phones.

    As a result, the search company is the default search provider for Sprint handsets, the iPhone, and is reportedly in talks to provide mobile search and advertising for Verizon Wireless.

    With the first smartphone using Android, the company’s mobile OS, due to be launched shortly, Google’s share of mobile search revenue is certain to increase.

    In the US, Yahoo has around 35 per cent of the market and is second to Google in most countries.

    The UK tops the penetration rate table for mobile subscribers using search, with 9.5 per cent, followed by the US at 9.2 per cent.
    Industry analysts expect penetration to grow in all markets, particularly with US subscribers.

    Alistair Hill, a comScore analyst, said that as the number of mobile search users increased so did the frequency of activity.

    “The number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50 per cent in Europe, with France and Spain leading at a rate of 69 and 63 per cent, respectively,” he said.

    “Meanwhile, the number of US users accessing mobile search has more than doubled as a result of expanded 3G penetration and smartphone adoption, as well as the proliferation of flat-rate data plans.”

    Hill said there had also been a substantial improvement to the mobile search offerings in the US market.

    "The number of US users accessing mobile search has more than doubled as a result of expanded 3G penetration and smartphone adoption, as well as the proliferation of flat-rate data plans," he said.

    "We have also seen a substantial improvement to the mobile search offerings in the U.S. market."

  • Survey shows viewers shifting towards web but preference is still for television screen


    Over a third of all US broadband users have watched at least one TV show on the Internet, according to a study conducted on behalf of the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM).
    But the research found that while broadband users are increasingly turning to the web for their video content fix, 94 per cent still prefer to do their viewing on a television screen.
    For cable and satellite networks concerned about the growing threat of online TV shows and movies, the survey provided some comfort.
    Of those who watched online shows, 82 per cent did so because they had missed a specific programme on TV.
    Based on this, the report points out the “critical importance of strong marketing for the initial TV showing”.
    That said, technical limitations that make viewing web video onto TV difficult are not likely to remain so for long.
    The research comes as ByD:sign announce they are launching the first LCD HDTV with DivX Certification for the Japan market. (See Separate article hdtv.biz-news.com/news/2008/06/30/0017)
    With guaranteed DivX video playback, users will be able watch content from the PC on the television while maintaining superior video quality.
    Video On Demand also continues to have a growing presence, with availability in approximately 28 million US homes and over half (54%) of these households ordering On Demand movies or programs.