Streaming Video Blog

As expected, Comcast announced its buyout of NBC this morning, and we have a few details of interest to Engadget readers and fans of rom-coms alike. Essentially, Comcast now owns 51 percent of NBC-Universal to GE’s 49 percent and will manage the entity — leveraging the newly acquired content with their infrastructure. On an investor call (reported by All Things Digital) a short time ago, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts emphasized that the company bought “a bunch of profitable cable channels” and “some theme parks, too” (we think that last part was a joke). Not so funny, of course, is the film studio that’s seen better years and the broadcast network that’s been described elsewhere as “faltering.” When asked about TV Everywhere andHulu, Comcast COO Steve Burke notes that “NBC has been careful not to put too much cable content on the Internet. We think that’s a smart strategy… We think that going forward, you’re going to continue to have free broadcast stuff on Hulu, and cable stuff on TV Everywhere.” As for rumors of Hulu Premium? “That’s certainly not in the cards.” Web-based TV fanatics will be pleased to note that Roberts appears to be in your court: “We love Hulu and have no intent to crush it like a bug.” That’s all well and good, but as we know nothing’s final until the government has its say: the FCC, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Justice Department are all sure to have strongly held opinions on the matter.

More here – >

nivision’s agreement with Google to bring television content toYouTube may not seem all that important on the surface, but in reality, this is actually a pretty big deal for everyone who watches TV online.

Univision will host current, full-length programming on YouTube — something mainstream networks such as CBS and NBC don’t do. That means you’ll get shows like “El Gordo Y La Flaca” and “Despierta America.” In a statement, YouTube called the deal one of the site’s “most comprehensive partnerships for full-length content to date.”

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Four tools for finding video content:

• jinni
• Clerkdogs
• Toobla
• Nanocrowd

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Now on every video player on Hulu’s site, you’ll see a new Continuous Play bar under the video player. On the far right is a dropdown that shows what playlist of videos Continuous Play is working from. For now, there are three primary types of playlists.

• One is Your Queue, mentioned earlier.
• The next class is Collections, which have always been part of our site, but which now play continuously.
• The last type of playlist is more of whichever title you’re watching.

More here –>

The folks at video broadcasting service Livestream have a new tool out for Twiter users called Twitcam that lets anyone with a Twitter account start streaming their own show, complete with live chat.

Each page the service creates gets its own URL, which users can come back to at any point and watch once the live streaming portion of the show is over.

As for the chat, it’s all handled via tweets. Anytime someone replies to one of your tweets where the link to the show is included, the app counts it as a reply. It then aggregates these in one place, so everyone who is watching your show can see the entire conversation. It’s not exactly the best way to handle it, since sometimes it’s nice to have some basic text chatter that doesn’t fill up your Twitter stream with stray tweets, but it’s done in a way that keeps everything tightly-organized.

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IEEE announced today that the first standard in a project to synchronize audio and video communications has moved to sponsor ballot.

IEEE P802.1Qav™, “IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks—Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks – Amendment: Forwarding and Queuing Enhancements for Time-Sensitive Streams,” will improve streaming audio and video applications over bridged local-area networks (LANs) by providing performance guarantees that allow for time-sensitive traffic in a local area network and control delay, jitter, and packet loss for wired, wireless, and mixed wired/wireless L2 networks.

When completed, the standard will allow streaming audio, video and related content to be delivered with a very small and bounded delay. “Current proprietary networks are hard to configure and very expensive,” says Michael Johas Teener, Task Group Chair for the Audio Video Bridging (AVB) task group within the IEEE 802.1 Working Group. “Systems engineers want to use IEEE 802™ standards-based networks such as Ethernet and WiFi, but they also want a guarantee of low delay. They need a more self-configuring system, which the IEEE 802 AVB standards will provide without the need for time-consuming resource management.”

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With a new video showcase for iPhone or iPod Touch users, Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) is showing off how Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)’s variable bit-rate (VBR) streaming can create high-quality online video experiences, even on slow wireless connections.

Akamai’s support for VBR streaming comes as video publishers start to think more seriously about video on mobile devices — particularly the iPhone, which is grabbing an ever-increasing share of the mobile Internet usage. According to a white paper issued by Akamai, Apple products represent approximately 80 percent of worldwide WiFi requests by mobile devices.

Click here for more.

This is a test from my iPhone.