Dish is introducing a standalone subscription TV service with its new DISHWorld package of international channels to roll out on the Roku streaming box.
“DISHWorld is made up of a series of international video channels and makes them available on Roku for as little as $19.99 a month. The service allows Dish to take a bunch of content that doesn’t usually have a huge audience, and doesn’t cost a whole helluva lot to license, and make it available to niche audiences,” details TechCrunch.
The official Roku blog explains that DISHWorld has more than 50 international channels to offer, including: Arabic channels, Hindi channels, seven popular channels from Pakistan and four from Bangladesh, among others.
This begs the question: Will Dish, or another service, be able to introduce a streaming service that provides more popular, less niche channels for subscription?
TechCrunch thinks not, saying: “Think about it — these are networks that Dish spends very little to license, and it’s charging $20 a month. There’s probably no way that it could introduce a service of the content that most people watch and make it economically viable.”
Google+ is ready to take on Flickr and Instagram by offering photo sharing with real-life meetups and its Google+ mobile app.
The Hangouts video chat is gaining in popularity, especially with photographers who share their work online and chat with fellow artists.
GigaOM interviewed photographer Trey Ratcliff this week at the Google+ Photographers Conference in San Francisco (the post includes the interview video).
For those pundits who have argued that Google+ is becoming a ghost town, it’s interesting to note that Ratcliff “is hosting Hangouts about photography, sharing his latest pictures with his more than two million followers, and meeting people all over the world for real-life events,” according to the article.
GigaOM cites the influence of Bradley Horowitz, VP of product management for Google +, who “studied image recognition at the MIT Media Lab and built a visual-information retrieval company” before overseeing the acquisition of Flickr while employed by Yahoo.
Horowitz is bringing his vision of social photography to Google+ and hinted during the San Francisco conference that photo processing is next.
According to the article: “’Today, the tools are too segmented,’ he said, summing up the discrepancy between an Instagram filter and a full-blown app like Photoshop. ‘Either they are toys, or they are for the pro.’ Google+ has some rudimentary online editing for photos built in, but Horowitz hinted at the possibility of extending these much further.”
On Thursday, Facebook announced its new Facebook Camera, an image-sharing app for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch.
According to Dirk Stoop, a product manager for photos at Facebook, the new app is faster than the current Facebook app for sharing photos on Apple’s iOS.
“We can basically show you more photos on the app, so we can make a more immersive experience around your photos. On the side of publishing these photos, Facebook Camera lets you upload much higher resolution photos at up to 2,048 by 2,048 pixels wide,” claims Stoop.
The app also provides photo filters and tools for cropping and straightening.
“It might seem strange for Facebook to release a camera application with built-in filters just weeks after announcing plans to buy Instagram, the social photo app. But Facebook Camera is aimed at a different audience,” explains The New York Times. “Instagram has 40 million users, while Facebook has 900 million. This leaves a large swath of people who are not on Instagram but are actively taking photos and uploading them to Facebook.”
Now that the stock has fallen following Facebook’s IPO, shareholders are suing the company and the underwriters of the IPO for hiding “severe and pronounced” reductions in Facebook’s revenue growth forecasts.
Mark Zuckerberg is listed as one of the defendants in the suit, which was filed in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday. A similar suit was filed against the company in California earlier this week.
“It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that while the company’s initial stock offering was a boon to the company and insiders, it’s been a costly disappointment for the general public,” suggests a Los Angeles Times editorial.
“Now, some investors are accusing the company and its bankers of playing the public for suckers, sharing pessimistic revenue projections with a few insiders but not average investors.”
Regulators are investigating whether investment bank and lead underwriter Morgan Stanley “selectively informed clients of an analyst’s negative report about the company before the stock started trading,” notes the article.
As reported earlier this week by ETCentric, tensions continue to mount in regards to controversy surrounding the Auto Hop feature of Dish Network’s new DVRs.
TV Networks are taking legal action against the ad-skipping feature. Fox, CBS and NBC also charge that Dish’s PrimeTime Anytime is an unauthorized video-on-demand service. PrimeTime Anytime automatically records prime time programming from ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and makes it available for eight days.
“Fox’s suit also singles out a third Dish technology for treading on the rights it has granted Amazon and iTunes to sell content online: the Sling Adapter, which allows subscribers to move content intended for their TVs to digital devices,” reports Variety.
In a related article, Broadcasting & Cable notes that Dish has filed its own suit against the four major broadcast networks for seeking to “stifle” its Auto Hop feature.
Dish explains that Auto Hop does not erase or delete commercials, but rather “allows consumers who are already time-shifting their television viewing to skip commercials more efficiently by automatically fast-forwarding through all the commercials at the touch of a button.”
The company believes Auto Hop is “a legitimate, legal DVR feature, and Dish is in full compliance with copyright law and its rebroadcast agreements with the major television networks.”
Fox disagrees: “We were given no choice but to file suit against one of our largest distributors, Dish Network, because of their surprising move to market a product with the clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem. Their wrongheaded decision requires us to take swift action in order to aggressively defend the future of free, over-the-air television.”
Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, has officially announced his support of usage-based pricing for broadband services.
“Usage-based” refers to a tiered-fee model that allots more bandwidth to users who are willing to pay extra.
Speaking at the NCTA Cable Show in Boston on Tuesday, Genachowski said that tiered pricing could help spur industry innovation and competition.
“Public interest groups and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings have criticized the practice, saying users will be punished for watching streaming video services, for example, that tip them over their monthly limits,” reports The Washington Post. “Hastings has also cried foul over how Comcast isn’t counting video use of its own XFinity services against data plans.”
Comcast recently announced it would begin usage-based pricing on a trial basis.
“Business model innovation is very important,” Genachowski said. “There was a point of view a couple years ago that there was only one permissible pricing model for broadband. I didn’t agree.”
Alcatel-Lucent announced Tuesday that the new 7950 XRS Internet router is capable of delivering 16 terabits of data per second. “That’s about 2.5 million HD video streams every tick of the second hand,” notes CNN.
This makes the router five times faster and 66 percent more power efficient than the current industry leaders.
The 7950 XRS has been intelligently programmed to treat traffic according to the type of page. The router allocates power based on the content of the page, shifting more bandwidth to video traffic while only increasing bandwidth to regular Web pages when a user clicks a link.
The product marks Alcatel-Lucent’s debut in the core router market, which has traditionally been dominated by Cisco and Juniper.
Core routing represents a $4 billion a year industry, and Alcatel-Lucent stands in good position to pick up a decent market share, even if it is not an industry high on turnover.
“Service providers know us now, and they trust us,” says Basil Alwan, president of IP networks for Alcatel-Lucent. The company hopes that this familiarity may help convince the likes of AT&T, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to consider switching to the new router.
Social video start-up Mixin helps users mix personal comments with online videos and share the content via social graphs online.
“It allows people to start customizing and sharing videos within minutes on either a partner site or on mixin.com,” explains VentureBeat. “You can add comments or a number of icons. The sharing is compatible with Facebook’s privacy settings so that users’ comments are only seen by their intended audience.”
The company has announced initial distribution partners. AnyClip and Viumbe, for example, will integrate the tech into their players.
More than 200,000 users tested Mixin during its live beta mode over the past month.
Rivals include Chill, Frequency, Socialcam, and Viddy, but CEO Jon Goldman believes that “Mixin tries to be more consumer-friendly with easier authoring capability,” notes VentureBeat.
“Most online video is all about searching and algorithms with some minor social features tacked on,” adds Goldman. “Mixin’s technology starts with social interaction as the foundation so that videos serve as a way to connect friends and increase sharing. The customization, commenting and posting to Facebook allows users to add their personal stamp and humor to the videos they love.”
Adobe has unveiled Primetime Simulcast, in addition to other enhancements to Project Primetime, its video platform for delivery of ad-supported TV viewing across connected devices.
“Primetime Simulcast will support apps across Apple iOS and Android devices and within major computer browsers,” reports Multichannel News. “The new service complements Adobe’s Primetime Highlights, introduced earlier this year, which lets broadcasters convert live streaming to short, ad-supported video clips.”
Adobe demonstrated Primetime Simulcast at the NCTA Cable Show in Boston this week.
“Primetime with full integration of all major components will be available in late 2012 with support for Windows, Mac OS, Apple iOS, Google Android, Samsung Smart TVs and other platforms,” notes the article. “Components of Primetime will continue to be available as separate, individual products.”
Adobe also introduced Adobe Media Server 5 and its Adobe Access 4 DRM solution.
Video chat service ooVoo has announced new product upgrades, including a new app for Facebook that allows for 12-way video chatting.
“The company, whose name represents two sets of eyes looking at each other, lets users access video chat rooms from the iPhone and Android phone over Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G LTE as well as via Web and desktop apps,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
An upgrade to the company’s iPad app also includes the 12-way video chat feature, and allows users to view four video streams at once.
“One of the most convenient aspects of this service over, say, Skype or Facetime, is that users can invite people by sending them a user-specific ooVoo link, so friends can participate without having to download the application,” explains the article.
The service offers the ability to record and upload video chats to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, free of charge.
Currently, ooVoo has 46 million users worldwide, 60 percent of which are under the age of 25.
Global File Systems, a subsidiary of Kazaa owner Brilliant Digital Entertainment, is selling software that replaces links to pirated content with links to legitimate content that users can purchase.
“And soon, a version of the same technology could be used by ISPs to inject their own advertisements into search results — a capability that is sure to raise the ire of proponents of network neutrality,” reports Ars Technica.
The software, Global File Registry (which advertises with the tagline “What goes up can come down”), is derived from Truenames, a file identification technology that was once part of Kazaa.
Several major companies have already purchased the software including Skype, Level 3 Communications, and Google. And it is being marketed to ISPs in Australia, New Zealand and France.
Moreover, it is being given away to law enforcement customers for use in blocking access to child pornography sites.
Cable and satellite TV companies are opposing any move by the FCC to redefine online video distributors as multichannel video programming distributors.
“In a public comment period that ends in the coming weeks, the commission is asking whether the rules of multichannel distributors — like the right to carry certain popular channels and the responsibility to carry some less popular ones — should apply to new online distributors like Hulu and YouTube,” reports The New York Times.
“If it decides that they should, then more companies could stream TV shows to computers and smartphones, hastening an industry-wide shift to the Internet,” adds the article.
A simple change to the definition of multichannel distributor could have far-reaching effects, including a change to the way companies acquire programming, a shift in bundling practices that could potentially alter the cable model significantly, holding online services to traditional rules of retransmission consent, and more.
“We’re barely into the second inning of how video distribution will ultimately work,” said Will Richmond, editor of VideoNuze. “Broadband delivery is leveling the playing field for new, deep-pocketed, over-the-top entrants to disrupt the traditional pay TV model.”
One of the legal complaints filed by broadcasters claiming that the Aereo video service represents unfair competition has been dismissed by a federal judge in Manhattan. However, the copyright infringement claim will be heard next week.
“Aereo, whose backers include media mogul Barry Diller, in March began streaming local broadcast TV signals over the Internet to New York residents for $12 a month,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Major broadcasters sued to shut the service down, claiming copyright infringement and unfair competition.”
U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan, who ruled against the unfair competition claim, will hear arguments regarding broadcasters’ complaint that Aereo, which is not paying to license broadcast content, is doing so illegally.
“It’s disappointing. But we look forward to our day in court to prove that Aereo’s unauthorized streaming of our content constitutes copyright infringement,” said a Fox representative, a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
Attorneys are lining up to represent TV broadcasters in the very likely legal showdown with Dish Network over its Auto Hop feature, which allows viewers to watch programming via digital video recorders without any commercials.
“The parent companies of the four major broadcast networks — Fox Broadcasting, NBCUniversal, ABC/Disney Television Group and CBS Corp. — have begun consulting with major law firms with the expectation that litigation will be filed against Dish,” explains The Hollywood Reporter.
Dish CEO Charlie Ergen introduced Auto Hop to the network’s 14 million customers in March without telling any of the content providers about the skip function in advance.
It should be noted, however, that it remains unknown how many customers actually have the new DVRs that include the Auto Hop feature.
Dish continues to defend the feature. “The commercial zapping feature has to be activated; the recorded programs will still contain the ads if the button isn’t used. The feature also won’t allow the commercials to be skipped until at least 1 a.m. Eastern time the next day, and studies show that a significant amount of recorded programming is viewed the same night it airs,” reports The Huffington Post in a related article. “Dish has also supported broadcasters by paying significant rate increases for their content, said company spokesman Robert Toevs.”
Regardless, Fox and NBC have pulled ads for the Dish DVRs from their networks. Discovery CEO David Zaslav suggested that in order to compensate for lost ad revenue, Dish would need to raise prices for subscriptions. “If there isn’t going to be advertising, then there needs to be a lot higher subscriber fees,” he said.
There’s been a decision in the Oracle v. Google trial. It’s been determined that Android does not infringe Oracle patents.
“Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for Northern California exonerated the search giant following a trial that lasted three weeks, ruling that Google did not infringe on six claims in U.S. Patent RE38,104, along (with) two claims in U.S. Patent 6,061,520,” reports Engadget.
While the jury found that Android infringed copyrights with 37 Java APIs, a unanimous verdict was not reached in regards to whether it was covered under fair use. The jury also found that Google had infringed on one copyright count with the use of rangeCheck code. Judge Alsup is expected to rule on whether the SSO of the Java APIs can be copyrighted at all.
“Per the agreement that both teams struck last week, should Alsup find that the SSO is not covered under copyright law, Oracle will receive statutory damages from Google for the rangeCheck and test file usage, a maximum of $150,000 per infringement count,” reports The Verge in a related post. “Should he rule to the contrary, all three copyright infringement counts will be bundled together to be dealt with in a new trial or in an appeals court.”
Appeals are expected, based on the magnitude of the case. “Oracle presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java. We plan to continue to defend and uphold Java’s core write once run anywhere principle and ensure it is protected for the nine million Java developers and the community that depend on Java compatibility,” according to Oracle’s statement following the verdict.
Google’s official statement: “Today’s jury verdict that Android does not infringe Oracle’s patents was a victory not just for Google but the entire Android ecosystem.”
Dish is introducing a standalone subscription TV service with its new DISHWorld package of international channels to roll out on the Roku streaming box.
