January 30, 2008
Getting the measure of online video
Palm Desert, California: Online video creation, distribution and analytics are becoming more sophisticated as the industry matures. A number of companies focused on video are launching products here at DEMO 08. The highlights:
Xtranormal, based in Montreal, Canada, introduced "movie-making in a box". It can turn an IM-like chat into a movie, attaching the text to a 3D avatar and using emoticon-type animation icons in the text to add movements. It’s an intuitive interface that should be easy enough for children to construct school projects and adults to make their own chat shows, business presentations or animated blogs. Users can add their own mugshots to the avatar to make it more realistic and their animation can take place in a range of sets. Xtranormal will likely sell additional packs of props and sets. The finished result can easily be published to a blog or social networking site. Xtranormal plans to launch in April.
BitGravity launched BG LiveBroadcast, a Flash-based video streaming service. It showed video in high-definition quality and switched between sources in the rapid channel-hopping style of regular television. There were also digital video recorder features - skipping back and forward. Perry Wu, chief executive, said the service was designed for live broadcasting. "The only thing traditional TV was better at was live broadcasts, today that’s all about to change," he said. To demonstrate its technology, BitGravity has been streaming the DEMO conference itself.
TubeMogul showed off how it could deploy video to different services such as YouTube, Metacafe and MySpace, saving content creators the bother of encoding for the different services and allowing them to instantly reach a larger aggregate audience. For anyone uploading less than 150 videos a month, the service is free. TubeMogul is also able to provide detailed analytics on where the video is being most watched and a breakdown of the demographics of the audience.
Visible Measures can give creators information on how viral their video is and how much it engages its audience. It demonstrated how the well known World of Warcraft Toyota ad lost 20 per of its audience online before the truck actually appeared. It has just acquired Vidmeter, a viral video ratings and distribution service. The Boston-based start-up has also announced $13.5m in second-round funding at DEMO.
