In spite of iTunes becoming a video channel, the Google/YouTube merger last year and Apple’s anticipated introduction of an IPTV device at MacWorld in January, I don’t think we’re close to the end of the web video revolution. For instance the much anticipated Venice Project from Kazaa and Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis has finally entered public beta. This is a new P2P (peer to peer) solution that according to this post on Techcrunch is “a desktop client, not browserware. It’s only available for Windows machines, and the minimum requirements are a 600 MHz machine with 512 MB of RAM. That’s well below what any new PC has under the hood, but it will still keep out millions of users with older machines. And, of course, Mac users.” Ooops, web video done almost right.
Another web video solution that leverages BitTorent P2P technology technology, called Azureus, has a cross-platform java client that runs in the browser, and offers several content channels like Zudeo with programming from the BBC among others content providers. And there’s still more P2P video on the way from the likes of Gridfold that’s working to bring the P2P solution popularized by Chinese web video company Kumool to the US market. So many choices, so little time.
Why the sudden interest in blogging about web video? It’s actually not sudden at all, rather it’s one of the reasons I put my career as producer/director on hold and got involved in the Internet in the first place. From the time I learned about TCP/IP and talked with the senior engineers at McDonnell Douglas’ network operations center way back in the pre-Mosaic days I saw that the video-Internet convergence that’s defined 2006 was on the way, and I wanted to be there.
Though it’s taken a while I think that vision is finally on the way to fruition, with disruptive implications for studios, broadcasters, cable channels, home video companies, as well as educational video library owners like Discovery’s United Streaming, Scholastic’s Weston Woods and SSI’s Sunburst Visual Media.
Ready? Lights, camera… action!
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