If you’re away from the TV (say, at work) and still jonesing for a little March Madness, you can get highlights from the tournament teams over at Sports Illustrated’s FilmRoom (Duke, above). Once again the app is powered by Gotuit, and it offers a convenient interface for selecting just the teams you want to see - by team name, seeding, conference, or status in the tournament (to be updated throughout the games). You can also embed clips in your own site.

Unfortunately the March Madness version of FilmRoom doesn’t show off some of Gotuit’s best functionality… Last year’s NFL Draft version of FilmRoom, for example, let users access individual player highlight reels and search within videos for specific plays. I’d like to be able to find blocks, dunks, steals and game-winning shots. Also, at least for now, there isn’t video on every March Madness team. American tops the team list alphabetically, but there’s no video available yet. My brother stormed the court at AU’s Patriot Conference tournament win. Where’s SI’s AU love? Hopefully there will be video up soon.

AT&T’s John Stankey presented to investors earlier this week - among the things he talked about are upgrades coming this year to the U-verse IPTV service. New features seem to roughly track with what Dave reported last June. Whole-home DVR is scheduled for the second half of 2008, though Stankey mentioned “mid-year” so the guess is it’ll roll out in Q3. Looks like additional streams are coming too - two HD and two SD. And apparently AT&T will be introducing pair bonding before the end of the year. Pair bonding should extend the reach of the operator’s DSL network and increase speeds for households within the 3,000-foot range of AT&T’s copper loop.

A quick refresher… Akimbo produced set-top boxes that allowed one to subscribe to a basic tier of Internet-delivered content on demand, in addition to upselling premium content. Oh yeah, the boxes had upfront hardware fees too. Basically, to get the good stuff you had to pay three times. And obviously that business model didn’t work out for them. Beyond marketing their own (and RCA’s) Akimbo stand-alone hardware, they’ve also provided content for AT&T Homezone and even dabbled in PC-based video delivery. And now their latest initiative is powering other site’s video offerings:

Akimbo™, the Silicon Valley company that was first in Internet video delivery, is now first to develop a complete Internet VOD solution for content providers’ own websites. The Akimbo solution has a comprehensive advertising system and supports multiple business models including ad-supported, transactional, subscription, download-to-own, download-to-burn, pay-per-minute, gift cards, account credits and more. The first content provider to utilize this revolutionary new solution is MavTV, a multi-platform programming venture targeting male viewers.

Given the screenshot, I wonder if they launched a day too early… That QA test video costs 99 cents! Having said that, this service might provide a variety of new players access to the web video arena without the burden of rolling their own solution.

ABC and Cox Communications have announced a new VOD service that will let cable subscribers watch primetime network shows any time they want. The catch? No fast forwarding through commercials.

This project seems similar in approach to Time Warner’s network-DVR applications, Start Over and Look Back: It gives consumers more control over access to content, but less control over the ads they’d likely prefer to skip. ABC and Cox actually announced the application last May, but it appears they’ve now run field tests and are ready to launch.

Between new on-demand ad technologies and the un-skippable commercials in content streamed over the Internet, advertisers are fighting back against several years of falling TV revenues. Not that they ever should have been worried. There’s always been alternatives such as product placement and, with the move to digital television, it’s always been clear we’d be hitting the reset button on the TV advertising model.

DVRs gave us a free lunch for a while, but advertisers are finding other ways to make us pick up the tab.

Looks like DivX has given up on Stage6 - it’s just too costly to operate… While they didn’t lay out exactly what those expenses are, in addition to the obvious bandwidth and hosting requirements of video, I assume policing content and the potential lawsuits (or costly licensing deals) were factors.

[...] the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. [...] we tried really hard to find a way to keep Stage6 alive, either as its own private entity or by selling it to another company. Ultimately neither of those two scenarios was possible, and we made the hard decision to turn the lights off and cease operation of the service.

Stage6 closes this Thursday, February 28th. Unfortunately, for the same reasons, it’s likely we’ll see more of this… acquisitions (such as Revver and Maven) and shuttering of web video properties.

Chris Albrecht on NewTeeVee posted an interesting analysis last week on Yahoo’s difficulty integrating its video properties and services on the Web. While Yahoo has re-launched its video section, it hasn’t managed to highlight all the things you can with video using Yahoo’s services. Specifically Albrecht points to the fact that there’s no link to Yahoo content that complements a movie trailer shown on the new video page, and the fact that there’s almost no reference (just a tiny link at the bottom) to Yahoo’s Jumpcut video editing application, which would dovetail nicely with the video-uploading app featured at the new Yahoo Video.

I’ll add to Albrecht’s list by mentioning that there’s no link to Yahoo Go TV. Go TV is designed to bring video from Yahoo to your television, and seems like a natural fit with the Yahoo Video site. Of course, Dave predicted the demise of Go TV over a year ago, and since it’s still hanging on only in beta, maybe it’s being left online by Yahoo higher-ups only to die a slow death. (Also, where’s My Channel? - debuted at CES 2007 and shown bottom right above)

In any case, the point about Yahoo not being able to consolidate its assets into a single compelling video platform is valid. And it’s a problem many other companies face as well. I always hear how well positioned Sony is given the combination of its movie studio and CE business, and yet the two divisions of the company seem to operate worlds away from each other.

Yahoo does have a lot of goodies in its war chest, but if it can’t sell the value of its treasure as a whole to consumers, then spinning off pieces of it or selling out to Microsoft may be Yahoo’s only options.

Ah, the Ojo Video Phone. Engadget posted the rumor that the phone and service have now gone kaput. And I can confirm it. After two plus years, the Ojo in my living room has finally reached the end of its run.

Because I work for Motorola, I became the proud owner of two Ojos back in late 2005. This was right before Motorola gave up on the product and turned it back over to WorldGate, its original manufacturer. I was the coveted demographic for the video phone, a new parent and daughter of new grandparents, all with broadband connections. And despite a few hiccups here and there, we would have made a fantastic case study. Until last week, we used the Ojos regularly. My two-year-old has literally grown up seeing her grandparents on the phone every few days. Now it looks like we’ll have to default to webcams, a sorry substitute.

So why didn’t the Ojo survive? There are many, many reasons.

1. No interoperability. You could only talk to an Ojo from another Ojo.
2. An original retail price of $1,600 for a pair of Ojos, plus a monthly fee. (Price came way down later on)
3. Timing. As widespread as broadband is, there are still quite a few grandparents without it or without the tech savvy to do more with a broadband connection than check email. Maybe in five more years.
4. Routers. It was virtually impossible to make the Ojo compatible with every router on the market, which means a lot of customers could not get their Ojos to work at all without another new piece of hardware.
5. Wired connection. The Ojo only worked with an Ethernet line, and while being tethered wasn’t a big deal (you could still move the Ojo around for different perspectives), finding a place to put the Ojo within Ethernet reach was. We ran an Ethernet cord up from our basement, through a vent to our living room.

Some time soon I believe video will become an expected, add-on feature for all of our phones. And then we’ll probably hook them into our TVs for big-screen display. And then we’ll be able to interact with the video, marking up our screens like any WebEx presentation. And more, and more, and more. It’s all coming.

Just not for the Ojo.