Azureus announced today that it has opened up its online video distribution platform, Vuze (see our earlier review), offering content producers, big and small, the chance to distribute and monetize their content in a variety of ways including ad-supported streaming and download-to-own. The company also revealed that it has reached the milestone of 10 million unique downloads for its Mac and Windows-based client, with the company adding 2 million new “viewers” in September alone.

Dubbed the Vuze Open Entertainment Platform, content creators can mix and match from a variety of business models: free or ad-supported streaming and downloads, as well as paid-for rental and download-to-own. Additionally, producers can decide whether or not to employ Windows Media DRM, and Vuze soon hopes to be able to offer watermarking as an alternative.

In a phone briefing, Azureus CEO Gilles BianRosa told me that since we’re in the very early days of online video, the Vuze platform is designed to help content creators experiment with digital distribution and the various associated business models. For example, a producer might choose to offer a lower quality version of their program as a free download and charge for the HD-version.

Vuze’s PC-to-TV strategy

I asked BianRosa if, like a number of its competitors, the company had any plans to offer its service via a set-top-box, in order to make it easier to get Vuze content onto a television. BianRosa explained that there a number of reasons why doing so was not currently a priority. Continue reading »

It’s October, and you know what that means. No, not the World Series. Hulu, the joint online video venture between News Corp. and NBC, is scheduled to make its grand entrance, at least in beta form.

The question is: Is Hulu too late?

Shira Ovide explores this question for SmartMoney, noting that in the six months since the formation of the site the now-named Hulu may have lost its “cache” and become “irrelevant”. Continue reading »

“PC-to-TV”-type devices, often referred to as media extenders, have been around for a number of years, and yet have failed to reach anything like mass adoption. The reason, argues Tim Lee over at TechDirt, is that unlike the “open” MP3 format, which in the early 90s acted as the catylst for a burgeoning digital audio player market, there hasn’t been an equivalent standard for streaming content from a PC to the television.

I think the big difference is that the lack of DRM on CDs allowed the industry to standardize on the open MP3 format, despite the music industry’s best efforts to shut down the makers of the first MP3 players. Once the courts confirmed that CD ripping was legal, it created a thriving ecosystem of software and hardware around the MP3 format, and it made it easier for startup firms like iRiver to jump into the market quickly and produce innovative new products. On the other hand, because DVDs are encumbered with DRM, firms wanting to make digital video devices have to kowtow to Hollywood to get permission to make devices that can play their content—even if the user has already paid for it. Getting Hollywood’s permission requires the sort of endless negotiation and bureaucracy that is fatal to a high-tech startup.

Lee then gives the example of the original XBox “games console”, which has been hacked beyond all recognition to bypass the limits Microsoft placed on the device’s original media extender capabilities, so that it supports almost any video and audio format.

While I don’t quite follow Lee’s first example, since lots of software exists for ripping a DVD to a user’s computer (although such functionality is notably missing from iTunes), it’s certainly true that DRM and the need to pander to Hollywood has held back the adoption of video downloads, and therefore media extenders. And, perhaps as a result, too many hardware offerings are “closed” in the sense that users are stuck with the audio and video formats, and Internet services, which are supported “right out of the box”. Continue reading »

Thank you, TV Guide. Finding television video clips on the Internet just got a whole lot easier.

TV Guide, famous for its listings of the week’s television shows in print and on the Web, officially launched its online video guide this week at video.tvguide.com after being in beta since April. Its lofty goal is to filter out the junk and clutter and give television lovers the best Internet video as it relates to favorite TV shows.

“We’re filling a niche that Google and YouTube are not because they are not strictly TV-focused,” said Paul Greenberg, TV Guide Online General Manager. Greenberg says that as many as 70 percent of YouTube users are seeking professional content, not user-generated, when it comes to their TV shows. Continue reading »