It’s all about video


With broadband lines now being the basis of internet connectivity, video is THE “theme du jour” in internet hype.

With YouTube clones springing off faster than you can blink your eyes, even traditional german print media houses are thinking that they should also have one.

Rem.: Over here in germany you very rarely have integrated media houses bringing the print (say local newspaper), audio (local radio station) and video (local TV). This is mainly due to regulatory issues. So the publishers see online video as one possibility

With Apple grabbing the news with its slew of yesterdays announcements , another announcement nearly was unnoticed, with techcrunch being the usual exception:

Determined to not stand on the sidelines while Apple made its anticipated video announcement, NBC chose today to launch their new video aggregation service called the National Broadband Company, or NBBC.com. It’s a marketplace for short form videos that the company’s 230 affiliate stations and other media partners can go to and find video to post on their own sites. Advertising revenue will be split between the people who made the video, the people who publish it on their own sites and NBBC. Publishers could take many forms beyond local TV stations; RSS vendor Newsgator, for example, has announced that it will participate and deliver NBBC videos as well. Other partners include Break.com, About.com and CNet.

IMHO this is the kind of videoplatform for quality video that is missing in the marketplace:

  • B2B2C Platform
  • Complete package for Content Providers, Advertisers, and Website Publishers
  • Revenue Share between all parties
  • Brandable FlashPlayer and SDK

Rem.: At least my employer should have a very close look if this kind of platform is not a natural next step in fulfilling it’s mission: Providing content and infrastructure to media companies.

Apples’ forthcoming streaming device (codenamed iTV) finally brings online video to the big screen TV in your living room.
But the piece i missed was the possibility to play flash movies on the device. Given the NBBC announce from above this piece is even more pressing. Or was this subsumed by the rocketboom vidcast demo? If not a tool to convert flash movies to H.264 (the standard used by Apple) is on my most wanted list.

Adding H.264 to the formats supported by NBBC would be another , but unlikely (at least as long as no distribution deal between NBBC and Apple is signed), way to solve this.