video

Sony veers away from video sharing

YouTube's dominance in video sharing has prompted Sony to take a new approach to the sector.

Grouper, the video-sharing site acquired by Sony last August for $65 million, announced on Monday that it is dropping its name and changing its business plan. Grouper from here on out will be known as Crackle.

"User-generated video is dead to us," declared Josh Felser, Grouper's founder who is now Crackle's president. "We are definitely leaving video sharing and focusing on emerging talent."

In the past, visitors to Grouper could post videos to the site and eventually … Read more

Michael Rosenblum launches new initiative for citizen journalism

If you visit ctzn.tv, you won't find anything beyond the company logo. But according to an e-mail I received from Ken Krushel, the president of CitizeNews, ctzn.tv will soon become a portal aggregating "the very best work of the very best video journalists in the world" while providing compensation for its content creators and developing itself as an agency for content distribution networks yet to be announced. Ctzn.tv expects to launch in August.

Prior to starting CitizeNews, Ken Krushel developed Proteus and worked as an executive for NBC. Alongside Krushel, controversial video visionary Michael Rosenblum will work to bring ctzn.tv to life. Rosenblum is best known for coining the term VJ (video journalist) and teaching the principles he developed to television stations large and small. His approach has completely changed the way local San Francisco station KRON gathers news, and these techniques have been adopted most recently by the Travel Channel.… Read more

Camfrog: First Look

If you're a social creature, Camfrog is a megapopular internationally-trafficked chat site that seamlessly integrates video and text chat, the Web 2.0 version of the old "party lines" that people used to call in to.

The schmoozing features include regular quizzes, as well as guitar instruction and deaf-specific chats, among others. Watch this First Look at Camfrog video to see if it's your kind of party.

Google hack creates peer-to-peer network

A video posted to YouTube in April offers a primer on how to use Google to pilfer music and video files in less time than it takes to download them from a peer-to-peer service.

"I'll be teaching you how to use Google as your own peer-to-peer network," said Jimmy Ruska at the beginning of the clip. Ruska is the 21-year-old who posted the video, according to a report in The Financial Times.

The how-to video focuses on what is known as an "index of" search and shows users how to direct Google's search engine … Read more

Watchdog group flags top pirated films on Google Video

Forget Joost, CinemaNow, NewCo., or any of the other companies scurrying to distribute movies and TV shows online. The company offering the best material on the Web right now may be Google Video.

Of course, many of the films and shows found there are bootlegs posted to the site in violation of copyright law. As first reported by CNET News.com, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) a non-profit group that advocates for integrity and fair play in the public sector, has been reviewing copyright violations at YouTube and Google Video.

On Tuesday, the NLPC issued a new top 50 list … Read more

E3 2007 preview

In years past, E3--the Electronic Entertainment Expo--involved as many as 50,000 members of the video game industry descending on the Los Angeles Convention Center in early May. This year, the show--now dubbed the "E3 Media & Business Summit"--has been radically downsized, rescheduled to July, and moved out to Santa Monica.

With all of the gaming consoles now effectively old news, the show doesn't quite have the air of anticipation as it did the last few years, when gamers were scrambling to get a glimpse of the then-unreleased Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii. Still, … Read more

Share your videos in several places at once: HeySpread

HeySpread is a new service from the folks at Particles (creators of HeyWatch and HeyCast) that lets users upload a single video to multiple video-hosting providers. Just pick the video you want to upload from your hard drive, and HeySpread will pull up a listing of various video hosts. All you need is log-in information for each of them, and the file will automatically get sent out to each, assuming you've got the correct credentials.

HeySpread works with YouTube, Google, and MySpace Video, along with DailyMotion, Blip.TV, and four others. In my testing with five of the nine … Read more

How TiVo and Amazon are working to eradicate disc media

It has been my theory for a little while that sometime in the near future, we are going to see the downfall of physical discs for watching movies. A lot of companies are moving towards a downloadable model. Most notably, Apple sells downloadable movies through its iTunes store and even pipes them through to its own set-top box. Microsoft also sells movies through its Video Marketplace on the Xbox 360 in both standard and high definition.

In March of this year, TiVo decided it wanted to jump into the game. It was a really logical move since it has a … Read more

E3 2007: What's on deck for the PS3?

Sony launched a pre-emptive strike on the E3 grapevine with its announcement yesterday that it's cutting the price of the 60GB PlayStation 3 to $500, and offering a new 80GB model for $600 in August. But what else does the company have up its sleeve for the show? There are still at least a couple of unanswered questions offering grist for the rumor mill:

rumble-enabled Sixaxis controller: Sony has already shot down rumors that the 80GB PS3 will come bundled with a new rumble-ready Sixaxis controller. (Of course, the company was denying rumors of a PS3 price cut as … Read more