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Divvying up internet video
March 15, 2007
YouTube may still be hogging the headlines but, in other news, more internet video channels are on the way.
Divvio.com launched this week with a channel model designed to provide a more personalised and organised online video experience.
Divvio allows you to set up video and audio channels according to your interests. For example, I created a Manchester United channel and Divvio searched for the term and came up with a list of soccer clips from YouTube, which I could then play in a window on its website or create a playlist from the best of them.
Many didn’t work, were of poor quality or had already been removed from the site. The Divvio service is therefore only as good as the sites it links to, but its video player at least smoothes the process by being able to handle all types of files.
Hossein Eslambolchi, former head of the old AT&T’s Global Network Services division, founded Divvio in Silicon Valley last year and attracted angel funding from the likes of Eric Benhamou of Palm fame, former Yahoo executive Geoff Ralston and former Cisco executive Mike Volpi.
He says Divvio will be different from rivals such as Blinkx and Joost in searching more sites more intelligently.
Meanwhile, the chipmaker AMD is promoting another means of moving internet video to your television through its Active TV Technology, launched on Wednesday at CeBIT. Using middleware partners such as MediaMall, it is creating a link between the PC and the set-top box to carry a range of internet-channelled content to the big screen. Reuters, the BBC and Movielink are among the featured channels.
It’s very similar to Microsoft’s media extender for the TV and the channels available through its Windows Media Center.
The technology is unlikely to gain much traction in the US where cable and satellite providers prefer to keep tight control over the content coming from their set-top boxes, but AMD is hopeful of a bigger take-up in Europe where free-to-air digital TV boxes are commonplace.
