The Weekly Online Video News Roundup - The Return Edition

Welcome back ladies and gents to the newly resurrected weekly online video industry news roundup where we compile all the stuff that was interesting, but didn't quite make our coverage here at ReelSEO. So grab that mug of coffee, throw your feet up and flick through the quick hits for this week in online video. I'll try to entertain as much as I inform again with these. As always, I stray from straight Internet video news into a range of realms, but it all relates one way or another.

I've Got Timeline...*sniff* *sniff*

Ha! This literally crossed my desk just as I was starting to pull together the news for the week, so I thought I would share. It's not news, but it's bloody funny and it's video. It's raising awareness about a serious problem plaguing hundreds of millions, Timeline. It even offers a cure...

The video is a spoof of those silly Valtrex/herpes commercials that are far too prevalent on places like Hulu and late, late night television. Bravo Evan Jennings who made the video and thanks to Laughing Squid for putting it in front of me at the perfect moment. Now go find Real Life and cure your Timeline problem!

In more serious news (though I like starting with a funny video so I'll either do that or spin out an article that covers what I watch each week to give everyone a peek at some videos I thought were well made and entertaining, not like you can't all go do it yourselves anyway but, for the weekends.

Encoding.com Hooks Up with AOL

Encoding.com, the world’s largest video encoding service, and provider of Vid.ly, the universal video platform, announced that it will encode videos across The AOL On Network.

Encoding.com’s powerful cloud platform provides dynamic, elastic capacity to support AOL’s varying video volume requirements. Its ability to process tens of thousands of videos each day eliminates long video queues, while ensuring that videos are immediately available to view on the Web and mobile devices.

Ooyala Rolls Out New Website

IT'S A WHOLE NEW OOYALA.COM

We are thrilled to unveil our brand new website this week. The entire user experience has been updated, with a refreshed look and feel.

From Newsletter

Oracle Loses Java Patent Suit Against Google Android

Oracle lost their patent suit against Google Android when a federal judge found in favor of Android in regards to Oracle's claims that it infringed on Java patents. They might still get some damages out of the copyright infringement though:

Source: eWeek

New Amazon Store Offers Never Before on DVD Store

Not everything gets put on DVD right after it airs or is released in theaters. Amazon has a whole new area offering just that type of content. It offers a combination of classics like The Reluctant Debutante to modern things like Southland and Rules of Engagement. The main categories are Movies and TV but hopefully they'll have a third someday soon called "Original Web Series" and we'll all be in that one. Why not right? Just because we make video online doesn't mean we can't pack it up for physical retail.

Dish to Stream on Roku

The Dish Network is coming to Roku boxes via streaming according to the recent announcement from the two companies. According to the Roku Blog post:

The DISHWorld service offers a variety of live foreign language programming including sports, movies, news, children’s programs, music, cooking shows, talk shows and general entertainment. At launch programming includes:

• Arabic channels exclusive to DISH including MBC, Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera;
• Hindi channels including aapka Colors, Sony, SET Max, Star Plus, Zee TV, B4U and aaj Tak;
• Willow Cricket and TEN Cricket with eight Cricket Boards and more than 150 days per year of live cricket;
• Seven of Pakistan’s most popular television channels including GEO TV, ARY Digital and Hum TV;
• Four popular channels from Bangladesh including ATN Bangla, Channel I, ETV Bangla and NTV Bangla;
• TV Globo Internacional and PFC which showcase the best Brazilian television programs and soccer events.
• Packages start as low as $19.99 per month, and are structured for streaming only – this means there is no authentication, or satellite subscription required.

NoFilmSchool Talks Better Production Audio

Audio is critical to good video and NoFilmSchool had a great post this week about getting better audio and it attracted some pretty awesome comments and ideas, like Luke Neumann who said, "I will even get my shotgun mic in frame, take a reference pic of the background and then mask it out in post."

Some other suggestions?

1. Use sound blankets to knock down noise reflection
2. Boom away from Windows
3. Unplug unnecessary devices
4. Get in close and personal
5. Above is better than below
6. Record high for easier post-production

Source: Getting Better Production Audio is Easier Than You Think by Joe Marine at NoFilmSchool.com

Nero Helps you Find your Stuff

My stuff, images, music, video is all very neatly organized in sub-folders on particular drives and in certain order, because I have a lot of it and I like to be able to get to it quickly. But not everyone has the foresight to do something like that and for those people, there's Nero Kiwk Media.

From the press release:

The new release of Nero Kwik Media, available now as a free download, takes the frustration out of finding photos and videos on your PC, mobile devices and external hard drives. It automatically finds the content on your PC and devices that are connected to it and then catalogs everything into a smart media library.

The latest version of Nero Kwik Media now includes:

• Improved usability to get you started even faster
• Better performance to manage and browse through your photos, videos and music instantly
• Automatic timeline of photos and videos based on the dates they were taken
• Face tags to find photos by who is in them
• Automatic keyword tags derived from your existing folder structures and the metadata within each photo and video file
• Customizable keyword tags that can be added to as many individual and groups of photos and videos as you want
• Tag filtering so you can quickly combine keyword and face tags to find the exact photos and video clips you want
• Rating and marking so you can identify your favorite photos and videos quickly
• Smart albums that save keyword combinations and automatically add new content that is tagged with the same criteria

Netflix Names VP of Original Content

Cindy Holland was doing TV licensing at Netflix. Now, she's the new person in charge of acquisition and original series launches. Her former role will be taken over by Jason Ropell who is VP of Content Acquisition.

It all goes to illustrate the rise of online content in those services that were formerly re-transmission services of content from others.

Source: Yahoo! finance

Android/iOS Tally up 80% of Market

Android is crushing it with 59% compared to iOS' 23% of the market place according to the lastest report from IDC. Based on first quarter 2012 shipments, there were 152.3 million smartphones sold and the percentages shook out with those two on top. Other notable platforms? No, not really. Symbian had 6.8%, Blackberry 6.4% Linux was 2.3% and other was 0.3% so I have to ask ... where is Windows Phone 7 in it all? I bet they suffer from an utter lack of cool phones because the best of them, the Nokia Lumia 900, is locked to the evil empire, AT&T (my thoughts and wording, not ReelSEO's). They show 3.3 million units shipped for the quarter which is 2.2% of the market.

Source: IDC Press release

Ultra-HD Standard Recommendations

The ITU, International Telecommunication Union, has set forth their recommendations from the Radiocommunication Sector's (ITU-R) Study Group 6 for Ultra-HD TV or UHDTV.

The ITU-R Recommendation lays out the quality standards for UHDTV in two steps. The advances made with each of these quality steps are roughly similar to the step from the old ‘standard definition television’ to ‘high definition television (HDTV)’. HDTV pictures today have the equivalent of between 1-2 megapixels. The first level of UHDTV picture levels has the equivalent of about 8 megapixels (3 840 x 2 160 image system), and the next level comes with the equivalent of about 32 megapixels (7 680 x 4 320 image system).  As a shorthand way of describing them, they are sometimes called the ‘4K’ and ‘8K’ UHDTV systems.

How many pixels does it take to make the average human skin pore? Do we really want to know?

Source: ITU press release

Taking submissions

I'm always open to submissions for regular articles, interview possibilities (for my new Reel to Real World interview series) and of course, the weekly news round up. Drop me a line: