Internet TV Blog

Tim Street (of the French Maid TV fame) wrote a well put article about why it is important for Internet TV producers to completely control and own their RSS feed, and to have only one video feed.

As Tim says…

It stands to reason that if you make your content available in as many formats as you can that more people will be able to choose what feed they want to subscribe to. Right? Okay, sure but when someone subscribes to your Windows Media feed they are not subscribing to your feed that is featured on the iTunes Store and they don’t count as a subscription for the day that will bring you up in the iTunes rankings. What good does moving up in the iTunes ranking do me? Well if you have content that is emotionally compelling and can really build a large audience it means a lot. It took me over a month to get listed on the iTunes Store and once French Maid TV was featured as new and notable we shot up to number one in 3 days and pick up 20,000 subscribers overnight. Then we were mentioned in Wired Magazine and picked up another 20,000 subscribers. Your feed is very important because it allows you to reach a lot of viewers quickly and the iTunes Store is a great way to get new subscribers and be noticed by business development people and media buyers who are looking for “hot” properties.

Youtube has offered subscribing to their videos for a while but that’s a separate feed from your own feed and now other sites like Revver are offering subscription buttons for feeds as well. That’s all well and good but in the long run where does that get you? You don’t control those feeds. Sure they are another way to get more viewers paying attention to your videos but if these “Partner Feeds” go away you lose all those subscribers.

Having as much information you can about your subscribers that you can share with potential advertisers is very important and moving forward I feel I need to figure out a way to get the kind of info that I have about my subscribers at YouTube on all my delivery channels but beyond that I feel the need to figure out how I can have one feed that I control that is viewable everywhere because I don’t want to dilute my feed.

So what does all that mean…

1. Register your own domain for you Internet TV Show
2. Use that domain to build an Internet TV Site
3. Put your Internet TV video feed under that domain

As reported by many other sites, Revver is for sale!

And it’s at a bargain. Only $500,000. (Although you might be able to get them down to $300,000.)

The catch is you have to take on a $1,000,000 dept! (So effectively, the price is more like $1.3-1.5 million.)

The question is, what happened? How did they burn through $13 million in venture capital?

Revver has been reported as giving large payouts they were giving to Internet TV producers. Revver even payed out $1,000,000 in their their first year.

But this is reported as coming from advertising revenue. (And not from the venture capital.)

For me, I started wondering what was going on at Revver when Ian Clarke (of the Freenet and Dijjer fame) left Revver. It was a sign, for me, that something might be going sour there.

(Discussion about this on the Video Blogging Mailing List appears here.)

UPDATE: Revver may have been purchased.

Dan Rayburn tell us that there are rumors that Apple Computer’s iPhone will be able to play Flash Video soon.

How soon is soon? Here’s what Dan said…

The answer is I don’t know for sure, but based upon who told me the info to begin with, I took it to mean this quarter.

Does this mean the iPod will be able to play Flash Video too?

Actually, the one (technical) question I have though is… does this mean that the iPhone will be able to play any Flash SWF files? Or just the FLV files?

Why are so many of these things in New York?… Well, New Work or California? Why can’t we have these in Vancouver? But anyways….

For those who can make it over to New York next week. NewTeeVee is planning a Meetup. A chance to hang out with other people in the Internet TV industry. Here’s the details….

NEWTEEVEE’S NEW YORK MEETUP

When? Thursday, February 21

Where? Burp Castle, 41 East 7th St. (Jackson’s recommendation)

Time? After work, 6′ish

Why? Do you need an excuse to meet up with other online video folks and drink? Didn’t think so.

Yes, I know it’s not December. Yes, I know it’s not even 2007 anymore. But we’re not that far off, and the information is still useful….

From the Media Blog, the controversial Internet traffic measuring company comScore has stats which assert that there were more video streams than searches for that month. Here are the stats:

• 9.64 billion search queries
• 10.1 billion video streams

It’s about time!… TiVo is finally going to be able to handle Video Blogs and Video Podcasts.

Basically, any Internet TV show with an RSS feed with be able to be watched on the TiVo now. (It doesn’t support Flash though. So make sure you video feeds have actual video files!)

More information is available on their article about downloading Internet videos automatically onto a TiVo.

From the article…

[TiVo will be] applying the powerful Season Pass feature to RSS feeds, so that you can request web videos from these feeds to be automatically delivered to your DVR as soon as they’re made available. These web video transfers appear alongside TV recordings. Furthermore, you will be able to save your own personal videos and home movies to designated folders that are monitored by the TiVo

(Ignore the marketing-speak in the quote )

Kevin Nalts tells us about a top YouTube creator spinning off new video-community site…

One of the most popular YouTube creators, “Renetto,” has been discussing a revolution, and aspirations to create a new website for unmet online-video community.

It’s called RenettoTube.

For the life of me, I’m not quite sure if it is a prank or if it’s faking to be a prank but planning to become real.  (If anyone knows please let me know.)

Kevin lists out some good point on the opportunities and risks in starting a site like this…

Opportunities

• Smaller entity can better meet needs of the smaller subset of YouTube that is primarily participating because of the joy of community.
• If he attracts a lot of big creators, it will be hard to ignore.
• The new site could, in theory, keep lean and more focused.

Risks

• It’s very hard to monetize user-generated content. Renetto will need strong partnerships with online-media buyers, who are still struggling to get their clients to post ads around what they perceive as a risky collection of content.
• Will viewers migrate? It’s a big challenge to get YouTubers to another site. We saw the mess of LiveVideo’s attempt to develop a YouTube clone, and maybe a little more reluctant to migrate.
• The battle against YouTube (with air cover from Google) is not trivial. Renetto and his companions will need to differentiate, focus and outsmart the 100 pound gorilla.

Andrew Baron (of the Rocketboom fame) wrote on his blog about the recent problems with Joost, adding to what Mathew Ingram’s posted about Joost heading for the deadpool.

Andrew referred people back to his 2007 post titled “Why do Video Platforms Fail”“…

1. Insubstantial library of content
2. Poor bit rates
3. Lack of innovation (clone platform)
4. No share in content ownership rights
5. No exclusivity of content distribution
6. Lack of spark/spirit for a centralized community
7. Need for users to d/l proprietary software
8. Awkward interface design
9. Overly excessive emphasis on rights protection
10. Lack of technological foresight & audience expectations

But added 3 more reasons just for Joost.

NewTeeVee has a list of 5 ways to save Joost. But as Andrew says…

I’m afraid trying to save it might be like trying to start a completely new company with a $45M debt.

Here is Hilmi Ozguc (of Maven Networks) talking about the future of online video advertising as he sees it.

A discussion about the video occurs over at the Video Blogging mailing list.