Karl Bode at Broadband Reports broke the news this morning (now confirmed) that Comcast will institute a 250GB bandwidth cap starting on October 1st. Nobody likes a cap, but as far as they go, this one’s pretty generous. It’s also far from unprecedented. Time Warner Cable made a lot of (negative) news when it started trialing a 40GB cap earlier in the year. But some of the smaller cable operators have been capping or metering for years. CableOne, for example, limits downloads and uploads during the time period between Noon and Midnight. The base plan allows for 1.3GB downstream and 131MB upstream in a day, and if you exceed those caps, the operator will slow down your connection. Meanwhile Sunflower Broadband appears to offer only 1GB downstream per month in its base plan. On the other hand, you can add extra gigabytes for only a dollar each in advance or the operator will charge you two dollars after the fact.

The one bit of good news around the fact that the big cablecos are getting into the capping game is that at least now we’re having a discussion about what’s reasonable. For example, should network management include caps, or slowed access for heavy users during peak times, or both? (I know “neither” is the ideal answer, but it’s also impractical.)

(more…)

There’s been a distinct trend lately toward multi-screen views for online video applications. The Olympics Silverlight player included four screens for watching multiple events simultaneously. Verizon and the NFL are once again offering multiple camera angles for football games to online subscribers. And now Ars Technica reports on the latest from CoolIris and its browser plugin PicLens, which lays out search results visually, allowing users to scan across images and launch different video feeds from a single browser page.

The increasingly visual Web is a channel-surfer’s dream. (Though a cynical part of me wonders if we’re once again dumbing down the info-gathering process by eliminating the need to read anything…) The bandwidth implications, however, are a bit worrisome. From a consumer perspective, the more we see bandwidth caps and Internet slow-downs during heavy usage periods, the more applications like PicLens seem unrealistic for every-day use. It’s a never-ending battle. Internet bandwidth increases, and new heavy-bandwidth applications are introduced.

On a lighter note, check out the gallery of PicLens screenshots below. The app currently supports content from Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, SmugMug, Google, Yahoo, DeviantArt and Photobucket. I’m planning to download the full application and give it a real test run soon. Drop a comment if you’ve already tried it out.

The best thing about online video is getting to catch up on the stuff I missed on regular TV. Case in point: last night’s speech by Michelle Obama. Naturally the Dems have made a video of the speech available online, so I thought I’d track it down this morning. The experience was pretty cool: beautiful picture, no stuttering, links to other videos and the live event schedule. But there were several things that could have been better.

First some tips on the obvious stuff:

1. Don’t cut off the end of Michelle Obama’s speech in the middle of a sentence. This is not rocket-science video editing.
2. Please add a “close” button when the video is in full-screen mode. Don’t make me figure out I have to hit escape or at least Alt-Tab to get to a different open application. (This bugged me about Joost when I first tried it.)
3. If you’re going to have a collection of videos, make them all available in the on-demand video gallery instead of making recent highlights only accessible from a link on the front page.

Then there’s the less obvious stuff that would still make the online video experience better:

1. Give me a transcript (or link to one). I know that kind of defeats the purpose of online video, but sometimes I don’t have time to watch a whole speech. Give me the option of scanning the text too.
   
2. Create links to the speech from obvious places, like the regular DNC site. There is no direct link to Michelle Obama’s speech from the DNC’s front page, only from the front page of the DemConvention site.
3. Give me some video I can embed on my site. Don’t want to lose control of the messaging? Fine. Choose some good sound bites and just make those clips embeddable.

The DemConvention site is far from the only place to get online video of this week’s events, so many of the above nitpicks can be avoided by choosing another news source. Still, as the official online home of the event, I’d like to see the site make some video improvements. At least the obvious ones.

We’ve had years of talk about the battle for the digital living room, but increasingly the battle lines have been extended. The big entertainment technology companies want the living room and the entire mobile world. Yes, I know that’s an obvious statement when you look at the evolution of cell phones, but more important to this discussion is the recent boom in mobile Internet devices (MIDs).

There’s such a huge range of MIDs that’s it’s hard to narrow the definition down to a gadget’s primary function (or specific CPU). Some MIDs are slimmed down laptops, like the Lenovo IdeaPad Dave ordered or the acclaimed Asus Eee, some are souped-up media players, like the new Archos line, and some are, yes, cell phones, notably the iPhone.

So who is going to dive deep into the MID business next? Do I hear a vote for the content companies? It certainly wouldn’t surprise me. Disney tablets, ESPN portable scoreboards, mini CNN news screens. I can see them now…

Kaltura hit the online video scene with a TechCrunch People’s Choice award last year, and has since signed an impressive array of commercial partners and customers including Wikipedia, Pepsi, Coca-Cola Blasbeat, and MLB.com. On Friday Kaltura launched its first video plugin for WordPress, allowing WP bloggers to publish video, edit and remix content, and enable certain interactive features such as video and audio commenting.

I had the chance to sit down with Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel not that long ago and was impressed with some of his views on the market for video platforms. For example, he’s definitely aware that the business is becoming commoditized. (Certainly we’ve seen no shortage of players lately.) Instead of just signing as many new customers as possible, Yekutiel referenced three distinct strategies for winning market share: service scalability and the ability to keep costs down as business grows; adding big-name partners (like Wikimedia) that further Kaltura’s distribution opportunities; encouraging platform development in the open source community.

The open source factor is really what differentiates Kaltura, and its seemingly first-to market position with a commercial, open source platform gives it a neice leg up on competitors. The fact that Yekutiel is also realistic about what the online video business entails makes me optimistic about the company’s success. I anticipate a lot more news out of Kaltura before the end of the year.

The Olympics aren’t supposed to start until tomorrow, but they officially began online last Tuesday night. Take a trip over to the NBC Olympics site and you’ll see video of early soccer matches, including a full replay of the US women’s defeat at the hands of Norway. Except for the defeat itself, it’s a beautiful thing. Thanks in no small part to Limelight Networks.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I’ve recently started doing contract work for Limelight, a content delivery network (CDN) service provider. So take these thoughts with a few grains of salt. However, when I sat down to interview Limelight SVP Dave Hatfield, I wasn’t interested in Limelight, per se, but the bigger story around the Olympics. Limelight Networks is delivering all of the NBC Olympics video streams (Akamai is supporting delivery of static objects), and I figured the folks there would have some interesting insights into how NBC is going to pull off this monumental task: NBC intends to deliver 3,500 hours of coverage online including 2,200 hours of live streaming video. It’s literally mind-blowing, and certainly unprecedented. Here’s what I learned about how they plan to do it.

The Player

Before getting on the phone with Hatfield I checked out the early videos on the NBC Olympics site. The Microsoft Silverlight player is sweet. You can watch four video streams at once and turn on features like live text commentary. There is also no latency. Zero. Click to any point within a stream and the video instantly switches to that frame. I asked Hatfield about that lack of buffering and about the bandwidth demand created by allowing a single computer to access four streams at once. Regarding the latency, he talked about how the Limelight CDN is structured. The CDN plugs directly into the access networks of ISPs all over the globe, and Limelight’s private fiber network is used to transfer content at the speed of light between massive server hubs whenever necessary. It’s a great story, but the proof is in the application itself. Did I mention the zero latency? I’ll be curious to see how that holds up once the actual Games start.

Regarding the bandwidth, Hatfield didn’t seem to be the least bit concerned. The scale of the Olympics is new, but streamed events are becoming more common, each Web event tending to break the record set by the one before it. Unfortunately, we can’t predict how much bandwidth the four-window application will actually use because we don’t know what bit rate NBC is using on its videos. By using an adaptive bit rate, NBC can transfer video at whatever rate a viewer’s ISP can handle. But as far as I can tell NBC hasn’t disclosed the highest bit rate it’s using for the fastest connections.

(more…)

Cablevision has emerged victorious from its latest day in court. If it chooses, Cablevision now has the green light to start introducing Network DVR services. A court of appeals ruled yesterday that Network DVR does not violate copyright law, overturning a decision from March 2007 that pronounced the technology illegal.

The ruling should not be surprising. Despite serious opposition from the content moguls, new services have been eroding the barrier that was originally built up against Network DVR technology. Time Warner Cable started the momentum with the introduction of Start Over and Look Back, Cox and ABC introduced a similar VOD service to make primetime programming available any time, and outside the US operators have launched full-service Network DVR. The increasing adoption of traditional digital video recording and video-on-demand have also made Network DVR virtually inevitable. After all, what’s the practical difference if content is stored at home or on a service provider’s network?

The continuing evolution of living-room TV is fascinating from a number of technology angles. For example, we’re seeing more and more of a load placed on operator networks. The operators love the revenue opportunities of advanced services, but they’re less thrilled about the network upgrades required to make those services sustainable. With Network DVR and VOD we’re also looking at a living-room analog to cloud computing. What if the cloud goes offline? What service expectations should consumers have? Should there be TV SLAs?

We’re going to see a lot play out in the living room in the next few years. DVR and VOD services will continue to blend. Network DVR is a start.

Silicon Alley Insider noted an interesting tidbit this morning in Disney’s earnings. Apparently Internet revenue helped offset lower broadcast ad revenues last quarter for ABC, lending credence to the reasons behind the writers’ strike last season.

From the SEC filing:

Broadcasting revenues increased $7 million reflecting higher internet revenues, partially offset by lower advertising revenues at the owned television stations. The increase in internet revenues included Club Penguin which was acquired in the fourth quarter of the prior year. Revenues at the ABC Television Network were comparable to the prior year as the impact of lower ratings was offset by higher advertising rates and digital media revenues.

The implications of Disney’s admission are huge. Think of the impact on the advertising business, traditional network TV, cable and telecom video services, and even, potentially, national broadband policy. If the entertainment industry can make money off video on the Internet, suddenly there’s a good reason to push greater broadband access and higher broadband speeds. Money is a powerful incentive for change.