AllThingsD » streaming video

DirecTV Consider Bid for Hulu

Shalini Ramachandran — Fri, 17 May 2013 23:40:19 +0000

DirecTV is weighing a potential bid for Hulu, the latest company to show interest in the six-year-old video site, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Hulu’s owners, including Walt Disney Co., News Corp., and Comcast Corp., are considering various strategic options for the site including a sale. Other firms that have bid or expressed interest in Hulu include cable operator Time Warner Cable Inc., Guggenheim Partners, Yahoo Inc. and former News Corp. president Peter Chernin’s investment group.

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Netflix Still Eats a Third of the Web Every Night; Amazon, HBO and Hulu Trail Behind

Peter Kafka — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

For the last three years, Netflix has accounted for a third of the Internet traffic zipping into North American homes every night.

But Web video competitors like Amazon, HBO and Hulu all say they’re seeing significant growth. So is anyone cutting into Netflix’s lead?

Not really, said Sandvine, the broadband service company that tracks Internet usage.

A Sandvine report out this morning pegs Netflix’s share of prime-time “downstream” traffic delivered over “fixed networks” — that is, wires and pipes — at 32.3 percent. That’s just a hair down from the 33 percent estimate it provided last November.

Meanwhile, Sandvine said Amazon and HBO have seen their share of traffic hold steady, as well. Sandvine said Amazon dropped from 1.75 percent to 1.31 percent, and that HBO dropped from 0.5 percent to 0.34 percent. But that’s not a lot of movement either way.

The one service that did leap a bit is Hulu, which is up from 1.1 percent to 2.41 percent.*

Bear in mind that these numbers do include data transmitted from a home network, via Wi-Fi, to iPads, iPhones, Android tablets, etc. And that Sandvine said this kind of “home roaming” accounts for a whopping 20 percent of traffic now, up from 9 percent a year ago.

But Sandvine also tracks streaming traffic to mobile devices over wireless networks. And here it said that Netflix has made a move from 2.2 percent of downstream traffic to 4 percent in the last 12 months. YouTube, though, is still dominant: If you’re on the go, and you’re watching a moving image, there’s a very good chance you’re seeing something hosted by the world’s biggest video site.

So what does any of that mean? Short answer: Netflix is streaming more video than ever — it added at least two million American users between measurements, and likely many more — but so are its competitors. So its lead is staying more or less the same. Sandvine said the average Internet household uses about 18 gigabytes of broadband a month — up from 10GB a year ago.

Still here? If so, you’ve probably read Ashlee Vance’s excellent Bloomberg Businessweek piece on the engineering that lets Netflix move all those bits into your house. If not, you should definitely read it now.

* Sandvine researcher Dan Deeth notes that the numbers his company provided last fall were collected in the first two weeks of September, which means that Hulu wouldn’t have had access to a batch of new TV shows from its broadcaster partner/owners. The numbers in today’s report were collected in the first two weeks of March, which means Hulu would benefit from new programming that ran during February sweeps; Netflix would have also benefited from any surge in “House of Cards” viewers.

Microsoft Developed Prototypes for a TV Set-Top Box

Ian Sherr — Thu, 09 May 2013 20:00:03 +0000

As videogame fans await the unveiling of Microsoft Corp.’s next Xbox, questions about another piece hardware loom for the software giant.

The company has been quietly developing designs for a separate, simpler set-top device for streaming video and other entertainment options rather than sophisticated game software, people familiar with the matter say.

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CBS Buys Stake in Video-Streaming Firm

Amol Sharma — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:09:28 +0000

CBS Corp. has taken a minority investment in Syncbak, a company that allows local-TV stations to stream programming to consumers over the Web, a move that comes as broadcasters are fighting unauthorized Internet distribution of their content.

Syncbak, founded in 2009 by Jack Perry, has created a technology to deliver broadcast-TV signals to tablets and smartphones. The service isn’t yet commercially available. It is being tested by more than 100 local-TV stations in 70 markets.

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How a Webcam Pointed at a Police Radio Won the Internet Friday

Arik Hesseldahl — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:02:24 +0000

The events in Boston — starting Monday with a pair of explosions that killed three and injured 176 near the finish line of the Boston Marathon — came to a dramatic close Friday night with the capture of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected of carrying out the attacks. He had been hiding out in a boat parked in the backyard of a house in Watertown, Mass.

A furious citywide manhunt brought Boston and surrounding towns to a standstill, and there was little else to do all day but watch the live TV coverage. All day, reporters repeated what they knew, which was precious little beyond the bare facts. One suspect was dead, the other on the run after an intense gunfight with police. The “Breaking News” banners became meaningless, because throughout the day there was not much actual news breaking other than that the search continued.

Not 30 minutes after a news conference during which local officials told Boston residents they could probably go outside again, police engaged in a firefight with the suspect hiding in the boat.

It was at this point that a quarter of a million people, including me, tuned in to the streaming video image of Uniden Bearcat scanner radio picking up publicly available police communications traffic in Boston.

As anyone who’s ever worked at a local newspaper can tell you, the real “breaking news” is often heard on police scanners. And, with right kind of radio, it is perfectly legal to listen in on how cops on the beat and firefighters conduct their business. Listening to the scanner is often how reporters and camera crews know where to go when there’s a story breaking.

The scanner in question was set up in an anonymous home in Framingham, Mass. The owner had inexplicably placed his radio in the bathroom at the base of the toilet, trained a live Webcam on it, and streamed it to Ustream.

Police scanners are so common that enthusiasts have been streaming live audio from the airwaves to the Internet for years. And apps that tap these livesstreams are common on iOS and Android devices.

During a week in which professional media organizations like CNN and the Associated Press had so often failed to meet the standards to which they hold themselves, reporting arrests where none had occurred, the desire for a raw feed and clear information was understandable.

Those listening to the scanner audio naturally turned to Twitter and Facebook, relaying news of the capture to the world, and allowing the city of Boston and the rest of the world to breathe once again. Some thought the scanner stream was not a very good idea. The suspect might have been monitoring social media, the thinking went, and might be tipped off to the movements of police. Unlikely, as police were bearing down on him while he was bleeding in the back of a boat after two exchanges of gunfire during the day.

Space Rogue on Twitter was one of those listening and, at 8:42 pm ET, had the first tweet I saw containing the news:

“Suspect in custody but nobody inside the perimeter, still a hot scene”

April 19, 2013 5:42 pm via YoruFukurou ReplyRetweetFavorite

@spacerog

Space Rogue

Here’s what the live audio of the capture sounded like. The audio below lasts three and a half minutes, and begins with some routine-sounding traffic. At about the 50-second mark, you’ll hear someone say, “no other elements on the boat, HRT only,” referring to a hostage rescue team that had been called in, presumably to talk to the suspect and negotiate his surrender, if necessary. Then there’s a long, agonizing silence, broken up by indistinct radio noise. At about the 2:45 mark, you’ll hear the first reference to “still a hot scene,” followed by the confirmation “suspect in custody,” and a call for a medic. The cheering of local residents started soon thereafter.

Update: UStream has just published a corporate blog post on this video feed, saying that at its peak, 265,000 people were watching, and that throughout the day more than 2.5 million people tuned in. Half of them were on mobile devices.

Play Ball! Free MLB Streams On Twitter, Facebook (And AllThingsD).

Peter Kafka — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:32:28 +0000

MLB Advanced Media, pro baseball’s digital arm, continues to find interesting ways to promote its popular subscription service. Here’s the latest: Free streaming across Facebook, Twitter and the Web. Even here!

You can watch today’s spring training game between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals for free just about anywhere you can point a browser, either on a desktop machine or an iPhone or Android. MLB.com is handing out embed codes so people like us can stream the game from our pages, and you can also check it out live on Facebook or Twitter.

Baseball has been playing with free Facebook streams for a couple years now; in the past, MLB.com boss Bob Bowman has said the idea has been “de minimus” as a conversion tool to his paid product, but he must think there’s some promotional benefit to doing stuff like this on a site with a billion users, because he keeps doing it.

Twitter is more interesting, simply because Twitter seems to be more and more interested in seeing what it can do as a video platform (for example: its upcoming music app, which will play music videos from Vevo).

Two years ago MLB.com streamed a minor-league all-star game on Twitter, but I believe this is the first time the league has used Twitter to show a game with real pros. My hunch is we’ll see more of this stuff in the near future.

Oh yes: And starting around 2 pm ET, you should be able to see the game below. Meanwhile, if you want to see Bowman live, head to our D: Dive into Mobile event next month in New York. Registration info here.

HuffPost Live Thrives on Tape

Peter Kafka — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:28:44 +0000

Late last summer, Huffington Post launched a streaming video news service, backed by 100 employees, lots of cash and a heap of hype.

So how’s it going?

Pretty good, says HuffPost Live boss Roy Sekoff. Especially if you choose to look at HuffPost Live as a video clip generator: Sekoff says his service is set to serve up 48 million streams this month, up from 17 million in November.

The vast majority of those views don’t come from people who are watching HuffPost Live itself, but are finding embedded videos on AOL and HuffPo pages, like this story about Sasha and Malia Obama’s spring break plans.

If you’re looking at HuffPost Live as a standalone news “channel” a la CNN or Fox News, it has a much more modest reach: A bit more than 2 million viewers a month, and a live audience that wouldn’t register by TV standards. Sekoff says its concurrent viewership tops out around 40,000 people.

But those patterns are standard for the Web right now. Just about everyone who does live video, including AllThingsD’s corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal, gets almost all of its viewership after the fact, on demand.

It’s possible that all of that changes if and when we get True Convergence Of All Devices All The Time. But it also may be that in the brave new world, truly “live” video is less important to most people, because there’s very little out there that everyone needs to see at the same time; dudes dropping out of spaceships on YouTube are the exception that proves the rule.

My hunch is that in most cases, actual live viewing will be a relatively niche activity, for people who really, really care about a particular topic, band, political issue, etc. And if the rest of us catch up later, that works fine, too.

Speaking of on-demand video, here’s Sekoff, along with a cameo from one of my digits:

[ See post to watch video ]

Netflix Goes Social With Ties to Facebook

Greg Bensinger — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:00:21 +0000

Netflix users may want to think twice before watching that Rob Schneider movie yet again.

The streaming-video service said Wednesday it will allow users to open up their viewing history to friends on Facebook. Those that opt in won’t have to spend their Saturday nights watching romantic comedies alone any more.

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Google's YouTube in Talks to Let Video Creators Charge Viewers

Amir Efrati — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:40:09 +0000

Google Inc.’s YouTube video site has been in talks to allow video creators to charge viewers to access their content as early as this year, said people familiar with the discussions.

The move would add a new revenue stream for YouTube and its thousands of content partners, and it could potentially help the site lure new video creators who want a subscription model rather than rely only on advertising, these people said. YouTube executives have long discussed such a possibility publicly, so the discussions aren’t a surprise.

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Dish to Shut 300 Blockbuster Sites; 3,000 Layoffs Loom

Shalini Ramachandran — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 23:35:25 +0000

Dish Network Corp. plans to close a further 300 Blockbuster stores in the U.S. in the coming weeks, leaving the video chain with less than one-third of the stores acquired by the satellite-television company in 2011.

The closures will result in the layoffs of 3,000 employees, or about 40 percent of Blockbuster’s workforce of 7,300, a spokesman for Dish said Tuesday.

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Netflix Shares Pop Above $100 After Upgrade

Paul Vigna — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:22:20 +0000

Netflix shares were up this morning, after the company got one upgrade that is countering the effects of a firm that initiated coverage with a “sell” rating, sending the stock back over the $100 level.

“Expectations for (subscriber) growth have come down,” Janney Montgomery analyst Tony Wible wrote in upgrading shares to buy, “and sell-side sentiment is generally pessimistic, setting the stage for upside driven by new subs, content cost control (for existing content), and a potential price increase.”

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Despite Media Companies’ Best Efforts, "TV Everywhere" Is Nowhere

Shalini Ramachandran — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:16:50 +0000

People are streaming online video more than ever before but only 17 percent of pay TV subscribers have watched cable programming online using so-called “TV Everywhere” services, according to a new study.

The study, from research firm GfK Media, is the latest bad news for big media companies’ TV Everywhere initiative, which is aimed at reinforcing the value of traditional cable subscriptions. But since its launch four years ago, the effort has been plagued by delays in launch as a result of difficult rights negotiations between various entertainment companies and pay TV operators — cable, satellite and phone companies.

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Bandwidth Hog Netflix to Help Cablevision Manage Network Demands

Shalini Ramachandran — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 21:18:52 +0000

Netflix Inc. knows its video streaming service hogs a lot of bandwidth. Tuesday it announced its first deal with a major U.S. cable operator, Cablevision Systems Corp., to ease the burden.

The Los Gatos, Calif. Company said that it will provide Cablevision with servers directly in the cable operator’s network to store and manage Netflix’s movie and TV content, a deal that promises an enhanced video streaming experience for Cablevision subscribers. Netflix also said that it has struck similar partnerships with other smaller Internet service providers domestically and some abroad. The announcement was made at CES in Las Vegas.

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Big Movies, Big Bill: Netflix Pays Up for a Disney Exclusive

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 23:16:56 +0000

Netflix answered one of Wall Street’s most pressing questions today: Can it get its hands on stuff people want to watch?

The answer comes via a deal industry folks have been buzzing about for a while: Starting in 2016, Netflix will get exclusive access to all of Disney’s big movies — including the Pixar movies and the ones based on Marvel superheros — in the “pay window.”

That is, after they’ve been available for rental and for sale. Or in other words, when pay TV channels like HBO and Showtime get their big titles.

That’s not the first time Netflix has landed a deal like this — it had already inked similar ones with Dreamworks Animation and Relativity — but it’s by far the most important one.

It fills an important hole in the Netflix catalog that opened up last year when the company lost access to Sony and Disney movies it used to get via a deal with Starz. And it’s particularly valuable for Netflix, which already has a reputation as a cheap way to entertain/pacify kids. And it helps bolsters the claim that CEO Reed Hastings has been making for a while: We’re just like HBO (or any other cable channel people like).

Next pressing question for Netflix: Can it afford to pay for stuff people want to watch?

Today, investors seem to think it can, since they’ve bumped up Netflix shares by 14 percent. But Netflix investors are a fickle bunch, so hold off on reading much into that.

Netflix and Disney won’t disclose the deal terms. The Los Angeles Times’ plugged-in reporters quote a “person close to the matter” (likely on the Disney side of the table) who says “Netflix could ultimately pay more than $300 million” a year for the movies.

That figure seems plausible, at the very least: A year ago, Netflix said it was willing to pay $200 million or more a year for the Starz/Sony/Disney deal. This deal doesn’t include Sony and Starz’ stuff, but it does include a lot more content from Disney, including the studio’s direct-to-video deals, along with a selection of classics like “Dumbo” that will be available immediately.

Since the Starz deal fell through, Netflix has been arguing that the loss wasn’t that big a deal, since it has increasingly become a place to watch TV shows instead of movies; it’s also been playing up its upcoming foray into original productions, like “House of Cards.” And CEO Reed Hastings repeatedly said that while he liked having the Disney and Sony movies, they didn’t account for a whole lot of streaming hours.

So Hastings and company may have to do a bit of finessing here: They need to convince Wall Street that they’re happy to get this stuff, but that they weren’t buying it at any price. And, crucially, that the new titles will help bring in new subscribers and hang on to existing ones, so that Netflix can afford its steadily increasing content tab.

Netflix Inks Deal for First-Run Disney Films

Kristin Jones — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:01:40 +0000

Netflix Inc. has inked an agreement with Walt Disney Co. that will make first-run Disney films available to its subscribers in a pay-TV window. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Under the multi-year licensing agreement, Netflix will be the sole U.S. subscription-TV service for first-run Disney films, beginning with Disney’s 2016 theatrical releases.

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After Initial Delay, Hulu Plus Now Operational on Nintendo Wii U

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:37:49 +0000

The Nintendo Wii U launched on Sunday, despite missing a few promised features, like YouTube and Amazon Instant Video. Today, one of those apps, Hulu Plus, is going live on the device. Hulu Plus will allow Wii U owners to simultaneously watch TV on their big screen while looking up more information about the TV shows on the console’s tablet controller. The app also will allow shows to be watched on the controller while the TV is being used for something else. In her review of the console, AllThingsD’s Katie Boehret ran into some frustrations.

Icahn vs. Hastings: The Fight for the Future of Netflix

Greg Bensinger and Anupreeta Das — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:00:28 +0000

Corporate raider Carl Icahn called Netflix Inc. Chief Executive Reed Hastings on Halloween with a message that no executive wants to hear: His company was about to be put in play.

During the brief call, Mr. Icahn told Mr. Hastings that he stood to become one of Netflix’s largest shareholders after acquiring a nearly 10 percent stake. The two agreed to meet in New York.

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What Eight Million Livestreams Really Means

Peter Kafka — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:00:07 +0000

That crazy leap that Felix Baumgartner made was astonishing.

And if you’re interested in the future of Web video, YouTube’s ability to serve up eight million livestreams at the same time is a really big deal, too.

As I noted yesterday, that number blows away YouTube’s previous peak of 500,000 concurrent streams, which it hit this summer during the Olympics, as well as last year during the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

So it doesn’t take much imagination to envision YouTube doing this kind of stuff, at this scale, on a regular basis. Which would mean the Web finally has a chance to rival TV when it comes to serving up live events with huge audiences — one of TV’s last remaining advantages over the Internet.

That won’t happen anytime soon, though. Death-defying jumps from outer space aside, there are only a few live events that millions of people want to watch at the same time. Basically, a handful of award shows like the Oscars, and big-time sports.

Even if YouTube wanted to pay up to get its hands on that programming, it’s going to have to wait, because the TV guys have the rights locked up for a long time. The next set of NFL deals, for instance, won’t be available for a decade.

But YouTube is still going to be an important platform for live stuff. It’s just that you probably won’t see most of it, unless you’re in a very particular niche.

Here’s some of the stuff YouTube has streamed live in the last year or so:

A concert from Psy, the “Gangnam style” guy
A concert from AKB48, a Japanese girl group
A bunch of EDM shows (that’s “DJs playing music for big crowds,” for the rest of us)
A concert by Jay-Z at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn
A World of Warcraft launch event, which featured gamers playing Mists of Pandaria around the world
A bunch of solar and lunar eclipses

None of these shows drew more than a couple-hundred-thousand concurrent viewers, which would make them the equivalent of a poorly rated cable TV show.

And that makes sense: Since the Internet has trained us to watch anything we want, whenever we want to, why do we have to watch when everyone else does? (A semi-secret about the live video streaming that news sites like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal* and the Huffington Post do, for instance: Almost all the viewing comes after the fact, via on-demand clips.)

On the other hand, as YouTube proved conclusively yesterday, it can now mount this stuff without breaking a sweat. Now it’s basically a plug-and-play option for any grown-up company that wants to do business with Google. And YouTube is going to make it increasingly available to the rest of us, too.

That’s the result of a year of around-the-clock work by a couple-dozen YouTube engineers, to prep the video site for the Olympics in July.

YouTube software engineering director Jason Gaedtke,who oversaw that effort, says the livestreams the company put out during the Olympics were seven times better than the standard video-on-demand stuff YouTube puts out everyday. His team is now applying the lessons it learned from that effort, and using it to upgrade YouTube’s video more broadly.

So, yes. If someone else wants to grab the world’s attention by breaking the sound barrier aided only by gravity, you’ll be able to watch it alongside a global audience of millions.

But the future of live video on YouTube is probably going to look like something else: You and several thousand other people, watching something most of the world doesn’t care about.

And that can be thrilling in its own way.

*The Journal is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

Can We Go Again? Baumgartner Safe on Earth After Highest Jump Ever.

Arik Hesseldahl — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 19:01:05 +0000

Felix Baumgartner has done it. In a combination of crazy, genius and courage, the Austrian daredevil set a bunch of world records, including highest manned balloon flight, highest jump, and possibly the first human to break the sound barrier in freefall, though we’re still waiting on confirmation of that.

Update at 2:30 PM PDT: So word has just come that Baumgartner did indeed break the sound barrier. By the numbers, his top speed was Mach 1.24 — or 833.9 miles per hour. He fell from 128,100 feet above sea level. So that makes it official: Baumgartner is the first human being to break the sound barrier without being in some kind of vehicle.

One record Baumgartner appeared to miss, by a good 17 seconds or so, was that of the longest freefall. That record will stay in the hands of Joe Kittinger, who, in 1960, was the last one to attempt this sort of jump, during which he fell for four minutes and 36 seconds.

Baumgartner is now safely on the ground. He and his sponsors, Red Bull and YouTube, set another record: As my colleague Peter Kafka noticed earlier today, they set a record for the most livestreams served up to the world for a single event.

The stream is still going, and well after the jump itself, still had 1.3 million people watching. The next big event is the post-jump press conference. After that will be the video taken from the camera mounted on Baumgartner’s pressure suit, so you can see the jump from his perspective, and then endless mixes and remixes set to music.

There was a moment there where I was waiting for something seemingly trivial to hold up the jump, and I briefly wondered what might happen if Baumgartner suddenly lost his balance and fell from the capsule before he was ready to go.

It reminded me of Bob Einstein’s old Super Dave Osborne comedy sketches from John Byner’s “Bizarre” TV show in the early 1980s. I added one of the better ones below the livestream, which you can watch while you’re waiting for the press conference to start.

Update: Now that the livestream has ended, here’s a 90-second highlight video of the mission.

Jon Stewart vs. Bill O'Reilly, Live on the Web: Pretty Good, if You Could See It

Peter Kafka — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 03:15:28 +0000

So. The Jon Stewart-Bill O’Reilly face-off went about exactly as planned: Two extremely adept political entertainers delivered a show that was much more entertaining than anything we ever see from actual politicians.

Except for this one problem: Lots of people who wanted to see the show, which was available only over the Web, couldn’t watch.

The Rumble 2012 Web site seemed unable to process orders for many customers — the show charged $5 a head — and some of those who did get through reported other technical problems.

What happened? The only word from the “Rumble 2012″ production team was a tweet blaming “overwhelming demand.” But that shouldn’t fly in 2012.

Due 2 overwhelming demand, our servers have been overloaded. We apologize for any inconvenience and we’re working to resolve the issue.

— The Rumble 2012 (@therumble2012) October 7, 2012

The Rumble 2012 Web site, meanwhile, doesn’t indicate that anything is amiss. Instead it promises that you should be able to see a replay of the show “shortly.” It’s been saying that for more than 90 minutes. [Update: As of now -- 11:19 pm ET -- the site's streaming option still doesn't work, but I seem to be able to download the show as an MP4.]

At this point it’s worth noting that the production company credited for this event is something called Nox Solutions, which says it’s responsible for running Web sites for the likes of O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham. Perhaps if these guys try this again, they might want to work with YouTube, which was able to provide some 500,000 concurrent streams during the Olympics.

But to be fair, a quick Google search shows that lots of folks watched the show without much problem. I was one of them: I headed over to the site about 30 minutes in advance, handed over my credit card info and started streaming without a hitch at 8 pm Eastern. The site didn’t require me to provide any kind of password or log in, and the video quality was quite reasonable. And I have ordinary, frustrating/adequate Time Warner Cable broadband.

I will say this for the Rumble 2012 people: They seem to have done a good job at working with YouTube to prevent people from uploading clips from the show. Someone named “MISSUNIVERSEMEXICO” has put up a set of unwatchable screengrabs, but beyond that, this is the best I can offer. I assume it will go away shortly:

UPDATE: Here’s the whole thing, via a frustrated Roger Ebert:

How to Spend Saturday Night Without TV: Watch Jon Stewart and Jay-Z, Live on the Web

Peter Kafka — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:55:49 +0000

If you’re really going to cut the cord and make do without pay TV, you’re going to have give up certain stuff. Like lots of live programming.

But not this weekend. At 8 pm ET, you can watch Jon Stewart debate Bill O’Reilly, live from George Washington University. And as soon as that’s over, you can click over to YouTube, where Jay-Z is streaming the last show of his eight-night run at Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center.

Total cost: $5, which goes to Stewart and O’Reilly, who say they’ll give half their profits to charity. The Jay-Z show is gratis.

My only real beef is that it will be harder to get this stuff from your PC to your plasma than it ought to be. If you’re interested in doing so, you may still need some combination of cables and/or boxes, like Apple TV.

This kind of live Web programming used to be a big deal, but now it’s increasingly common. Part of that has to do with technical leaps the Web video business has made (more on that later), and part of it is that the cost/audience equation now makes sense: You can do these live events without losing money, and you may even make some.

My hunch is that we’re still a very long way from seeing any of the real tentpole live events — like awards shows and big sports events — move from TV over to Web-only streams. But Jon Stewart and Jay-Z aren’t exactly niche, either.

Netflix CEO Keeps Focus on Expansion, Price

Greg Bensinger — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 23:30:42 +0000

Netflix Inc. Chief Executive Reed Hastings is trying to prove that his streaming-video company isn’t in a state of arrested development.

Last year, Netflix lost subscribers and investor confidence with a debacle over a sharp subscription-price increase followed by flip-flopping on separating its DVD-by-mail business.

Mr. Hastings, 51 years old, has since forged ahead by striking content deals with the CW Network and Weinstein Co., among others, and dipping Netflix’s toes into original content creation.

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Nintendo Sets Sights on Living Room Entertainment With New TVii Service

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 23:43:46 +0000

Along with announcing the launch date and price for the Wii U, Nintendo unveiled TVii, a new application that streams video to the TV.

At an event in New York City, Nintendo’s North American President Reggie Fils-Aime said TVii will let Wii U owners in the U.S. and Canada access content across multiple providers, such as Netflix and Hulu.

But as with many streaming TV services for the home, it is more of a fancy remote control or elaborate directory than it is a replacement for how you watch TV and, more importantly, how you pay for it.

The service will be the most useful for those who continue to pay for cable or satellite TV, along with other on-demand services, making it comparable to what Microsoft’s Xbox provides today.

The Nintendo Wii U will cost $300 for the basic package, which includes one GamePad controller and 8 GB of memory. The deluxe edition comes with 32 GB of storage and the Nintendo Land videogame. The Wii U comes out Nov. 18 in the U.S., and both editions will have access to the TVii service for free.

Using the touchscreen on the GamePad controller, which looks a lot like a tablet computer, Nintendo TVii users can search or browse for content from across a variety of sources, including an existing TiVo account, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. It will also stream live content to the TV, but only if the user subscribes to cable or satellite TV services.

Nintendo said TVii will support any cable or satellite provider.

When searching for content, users can browse by channel or for recommendations that may be provided by Nintendo or by friends. Once a show starts playing on the TV, the GamePad can then be used to view auxiliary information about the content from Wikipedia or IMDb.com, for example. Additionally, short video segments, or thumbnails, can be viewed from the device, which can be shared with friends via Twitter, Facebook or the Wii U’s social network called Miiverse. The best example for this service was for sports programming, where users could check out stats on the players and then comment on what’s happening in the game.

The service will also have access to free content, such as YouTube.

Nintendo said TVii was developed in close collaboration with i.TV, which distributes a popular TV directory app on iTunes.

Samsung's Smart TV Isn't as Smart as It Thinks It Is

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 01:03:32 +0000

More and more people are using their big, flat-panel TVs to watch Internet video, view photos, play music and casual games, and access apps, social media and Web sites. The trouble is, this is primarily being done via plugged-in PCs, or add-on boxes like Apple TV, Microsoft’s Xbox and Roku players. They use separate remotes and are accessed via separate inputs on the TV.

[ See post to watch video ]

Lots of people have been counting on Apple to unify standard TV with these apps and Internet content in a simple, elegant device. The company is working on it, but the major TV makers aren’t waiting. They are offering Internet-connected “smart TVs.” Their pitch is that you can switch between, or even combine on one screen, regular TV and Internet content, without adding extra devices and remotes, or switching inputs.

I decided to check in on the state of the smart TV by living for a few days with the latest version from Samsung. While competitors like LG, Sony and others also offer smart TVs, I chose Samsung for two reasons. First, it’s a powerhouse across the world of digital devices that run apps. Second, this year it introduced to its smart TVs a new kind of touch-based remote and a concept called Smart Interaction, which uses a camera and microphones built into the TV to support voice control, gesture control and facial recognition.

The Smart Hub with apps

I installed the smallest top-of-the-line Samsung LED model with these new features, the 46-inch ES8000. It costs about $2,000, after rebates.

My verdict is mixed. The Samsung Smart TV worked well for some functions, like watching standard cable TV, conducting Skype conversations with the camera and mics, and watching streaming television and movies via services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus and MLB.TV. I appreciated not having to switch inputs and remotes. I also liked the companion apps for the TV Samsung makes available for Android devices and for the iPhone and iPad, which act as remotes or can beam content onto the TV without an adapter.

But I found the new Smart Interaction — voice, gesture and facial recognition — unreliable and awkward. Many of the key apps, including Facebook, Twitter and the Web browser, seemed crude and hard to use without a keyboard, which Samsung sells for about $100. The Smart Touch Remote was disappointing. I focused my testing on the Smart Interaction, the new remote and the latest version of the Smart Hub, Samsung’s built-in interface for apps and Web content. I wasn’t evaluating the ES8000 as a standard TV, though it handled regular TV just fine.

Setup was easy. The TV easily hooked up to my cable box and linked to my home Wi-Fi quickly and reliably.

Smart Interaction

The Samsung ES8000 allows you to control many functions, like turning the TV on or off or launching apps, by saying “Hi, TV” then speaking a command. You can do this with the TV’s built-in mics, located with the camera in a small module atop the TV, or via a mic built into the Smart Touch Remote. When you say the trigger phrase, a list of possible voice commands appears at the bottom of the screen.

It was disappointing. In many cases, my commands were ignored, interpreted inaccurately, or had to be repeated several times — even in a quiet room and within the recommended distance. I could only get the TV to turn on via voice once in a dozen tries.

Gestures were similarly frustrating. You’re supposed to enable them by just waving your hand toward the camera, but this often failed. When it didn’t, I found using gestures to navigate among apps on the Smart Hub screen to be cumbersome. The exception was “Angry Birds.” It worked well with gestures.

Face recognition — mostly used as an alternate to a password for logging into Samsung’s Internet services — failed for me utterly, even when I left my chair and squatted with my face lined perfectly up to the camera just a few feet away.

Even the guy conducting Samsung’s online tutorials for Smart Interaction (at http://bit.ly/PYs1Dr) suffered some embarrassing failures in a video series called, ironically, “Keep It Simple.”

Smart Touch Remote

The Smart Touch Remote

I had better luck with the Smart Remote, which attempts to get rid of the typical plethora of buttons by using a touch pad. But I found this touch pad to be much less responsive than the best laptop touch pads. I sometimes grabbed for the standard remote that comes with the TV and preferred using Samsung’s Smart Remote app on my iPhone. It was responsive and performed the same functions.

Also, typing in things like passwords, search terms, tweets and Web addresses, was clumsy with either remote, and inconsistent, as it is on many TV-based apps. You have to peck out letters on an on-screen keyboard. The iPhone (and Android) remote app often was better, because it was smoother, and the phone’s keyboard could be used in some cases.

Smart Hub

This screen, separate from the main TV display, contains the ES8000 apps and Internet functions. It isn’t new, but has been improved. It contains some Samsung-based apps, like a family-photo and chat program, a kids’ game and learning app, and a fitness app for exercise videos and charts of results. You also can download third-party apps from a built-in store containing 784 choices, of which about 70 percent are free.

The Smart Hub screen features a small window that shows the TV program you were watching. But if it gets annoying, it can’t be turned off. There also is a feature called Social TV, which wraps a large TV window with a small display of your social network feeds. The feeds aren’t filtered to focus on whatever show you’re watching.

There are Facebook and Twitter apps, but they seemed stripped down. For instance, in Twitter, I wasn’t able to click on a link in a tweet and have it appear in the Web browser. As noted, the best-performing apps were those that mimicked TV, such as Netflix. I also liked a Samsung app called SwipeIt, which lets you take a picture or video from a phone or tablet and with a swiping gesture, make it appear on the TV. It worked perfectly on a Samsung tablet and an iPhone.

There are flashes of a great future merging regular TV and the Web on the Samsung Smart TV. But it needs work.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

How Jessie J Won the Olympics

Peter Kafka — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 22:05:27 +0000

More data in the wake of the London Olympics, this time from Google.

The search giant has some fun if not totally surprising factoids about search: Americans spent a lot of time Googling Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte; Brits looked for Usain Bolt and Jessica Ennis; the volume of gymnastics searches was nearly double that of the Beijing games, etc.

One performer who saw a big Google spike that may surprise you: British singer Jessie J, who got to sing (?) three numbers during the closing ceremonies, generated more than any other artist.* Number two: Beady Eye, who Google tells me is made up of Oasis remnants. Who knew?

You want stats about digital business? Alas, less here than you would like. Google, which powered NBC’s video streams via YouTube, more or less repeats NBC’s stats, though it says it will have more to say about its non-NBC streams in a bit.

Google does say, however, that research shows that lots of people watched the games online, quite often in addition to watching it on TV. Good fodder here for the burgeoning “second screen” industry:

More than ever, people experienced the Games not just via the TV broadcast, but on desktops, mobile phones and tablets. Through research panels conducted in partnership with NBC in the U.S., we learned a bit more about how played out:
Mobile makes a strong showing: Many viewers turned to one or more “second screens” beyond TV to keep updated on the Olympics—nearly half of those who did (44 percent) did so via a mobile phone or tablet.
Power viewers: Second-screen viewing didn’t seem to diminish participants’ interest in watching the games on TV…in fact, it increased it. People who followed the Games on TV plus one other screen watched 52 percent more Olympics on TV than those who didn’t; people who followed on two additional screens spent more than twice as much time (105 percent) with TV. And people who watched live streams of events online watched 66 percent more Olympics on television than people who followed exclusively on TV.
Synchronized usage: Overall, nearly 56 percent of people who followed the Games on TV and at least one other screen did so simultaneously. These simultaneous viewers also watched TV for 67 percent longer than those who only watched TV.

*Best Jessie J summary I’ve read (Disclosure: This is the only thing I’ve read about Jessie J) comes from the excellent Maura Johnston.