Internet TV Blog

Recently there have been a few announcements of Internet TV sites doing HD Video.

Some of the recent High Definition Video announcements came from: Dailymotion and Vimeo. There’s even ways to do HD quality video on YouTube.

Chris Albrecht is arguing that no one wants HD video on the Internet yet. Chris’ article points out that….

AOL pulled the plug on its HD-like offering last year after low user adoption and CBS was hesitant to jump into HD content, believing that audiences don’t care so much about video quality.

Chris’ article also says…

And in an odd way, Dailymotion’s HD offering may prove the naysayers’ points. The Dailymotion blog concedes:

Word to the wise, however: HD is both bandwidth and processor intensive, so a 1.6 Mbps connection is advised (and dual-cores don’t hurt ;).

In an initial test, I had trouble with one video stopping almost every three seconds. A subsequent video worked fine, though there was still some stuttering.

I think that it’s not that users don’t care about video quality, as CBS states. I think it’s that viewesr want their video to start playing instantly and to play smoothly.

But currently, with HD video, the video takes a long time to download and is jittery when it plays. That’s the real reason HD if failing on these video sharing sites.

Let’s face it… HD Video looks better. If viewers could get HD right now without all the slowness and jittery playing, they’d watch it. (Especially those people who are already watching Internet TV on their big screen TV’s.)

The problem is, with these video sharing sites, you can’t really do that yet. The video takes a long time to download and it’s often jittery when it plays. (Which drives viewers crazy.)

If this situation keeps up, we could see a return to Broadcatching!

Not too long ago, before everyone and his pet cat created their own video sharing site… before YouTube, Blip.tv, Revver, Dailymotion, Veoh, and all the rest… people were getting Online Video using a technique called Broadcatching. (Basically… broadcatching involved pre-fetching the video before you want to watch it. So that when you want to watch it, the video was already on your computer’s hard drive, and playing is instant and smooth.)

Broadcatching may see a new surge of popularity because of HD video.

HD video may push people to primarily get their video using Broadcatching software, like: Miro or iTunes.

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