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I spent the last three days at the new video track of the VON conference which has been dealing with Voice On the Net for the last ten years. As we know, video on the net is currently gaining ground on a daily basis with Youtube, Google Video, video blogging and many other passionate artists, producers and and so on. That’s the reason why video was inserted in the VON program this year and I realize that video on the net will probably face regulatory issues that VOIP had to go through in the recent years: intellectual property, copyright protection and network neutrality just to name a few. In fact, Jeff Pulver is being proactive on that issue by launching the Video On the Net Alliance to advocate for this emerging Internet video industry.

Voice over IP is disruptive. The flexibility provided by VOIP is an important factor for its success, but its impact is also quite important in that it opened the telecommunication playing field to new players that can operate outside the grasp of the incumbent telecommunication industry. Jeff Pulver officially stated that VOIP, an industry he triggered, is now well established. “We are now the incumbents who can be disrupted”.

In that respect, video on the net will allow the same type of disruption. Broadcasters and broadcast regulation can (and will) be circumvented by people and organizations who see the Net as an effective distribution platform.

Does Skype ring a bell? Well, they could potentially be #1 in both spaces. But that’s the topic of my next post.

Tags: video+on+the+net, VON2007,

Watching TV-like content through the net is certainly gaining ground these days. Jeff Pulver and his team just published a great list of “cahnnels” only available from the net.

Link

Tags: Internet+TV, Shows, Channels, new+media

• 30.000.000 blogs worldwide
• 100.000 new blogs are created daily
• the blogosphere is 60 times larger than 3 years ago
• there are 1.5 million legitimate posts(by humans for humans) per day

Let’s assume that each post contains 500 characters, no pictures, and that they are posted regularly over time. This would produce a constant bandwidth of:

500ch * 1byte/ch *1.5 million = 750 Mbytes / day

or

70 kbps !

What? The most massive conversation of the world requires only 70 kbps? That’s less than a single digital broadcasting audio channel! That’s 30 million voices for the price of one! Let’s turn the numbers around once again: with 70 kbps we could have each and every Canadian (30 million, all ages!) broadcast one 500 characters message to all other Canadians every 20 days?!?

That’s impressive. Does that make sense? I think I would agree to trade a local FM station in my area for this new “Whole Blogosphere Channel”. Would you?

Technorati Tags : broadcasting+blogosphere, david+sifry, state+blogosphere, blogosphere+channel, blog+broadcast

There is a popular urban myth regarding the Super Bowl — that the game is watched in 234 countries by 1 billion people, a fact unlikely to be true considering the time of the event, and the lack of popularity American Football has outside of the United States. In actual fact, Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005 was watched by 93 million viewers in total, of which 98 percent were in North America. Approximately half of the remaining 2 million worldwide viewers watched from the United Kingdom.

• this week’s President Bush’s State of The Union address (Nielsen): 42 million
• FIFA World Cup 2002 (wikipedia) : cumulative audience 28.8 billion, final match 1.1 billion

My guts feelings tell me that soccer is the real global sport. How could american football be so popular all around the globe?

Anyone has the answer?

… Other firms in the alliance include Intel Corp., Motorola, Texas Instruments and Modeo, owned by Crown Castle International Corp., it said in a statement. The tie-up, called the Mobile DTV Alliance, aims to encourage open standards for TV broadcasts to mobiles, focusing on the North American market.

DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) technology bypasses mobile networks and broadcasts directly to handsets from TV masts, allowing millions of phone users to access the service at the same time.

“At one level it’s clear that the dam has broken,” said Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel. “There’s an inevitable move to use the Internet as a distribution medium, and that’s not going to stop.”

The project aimes at a new architecture of inter-working media services based on infrastructures of broadcasting and telecommunications for the media needs of a mobile information society. 
The project goal is to develop and test new mobile media technologies from an economic point of view paying particular regard to social and cultural aspects with media consumer in its centre.  

 

Producing & disseminating audio is so cheap and easy now, and so much wonderful audio will be produced in the coming years — by smart public broadcasters, and also by joes and janes at home — all of it accessible on net. Why listen to CBC if they insist of becoming AOL audio, and do not understand what’s happening on the web? Why support an institution that does not reflect anything i believe in? (freedom, the responsibilities of a public broadcaster, diversity, non-commercialness etc).

I’ve been following the rise of Jack FM a lot lately… It’s alleged to be the fastest growing new broadcast format in radio today (I think that honor might actually go to latin radio, but it’s certainly one of the most popular), based on the idea of pulling the songs played from a much longer playlist and having no DJs.

…Because it’s not streaming that’s most affected by a combination of on demand and ‘deliver it to me’ subscribable podcast-like functionality. The main potential victim here is broadcast itself. Those of us who have Tivos or PVR functionality are already used to the idea that we don’t have to sit in front of the television when something’s being broadcast to watch our shows. And as a consequence, I very infrequently do.