Streaming Video Blog

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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Why were so many people in the technology world wrong about Hulu? It was an idea that seemed like a relic of the worst excesses of the dot-com era: a portal for content run by a joint venture of media companies. Could any venture have more going against it?

Portals, of course, are passé in a world where search engines point people to content spread all over the Web. Who needs professional content when users make their own? And if there is anything more clueless than a big media company, the Silicon Valley wisdom goes, it is a joint venture of several media companies bound to undercut one another with crossed agendas.

Yet Hulu, founded in March 2007, is triumphant when most other video sites have languished.

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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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Mobile video streaming service Qik has just announced a new Push API at today’s Realtime CrunchUp in Redwood City. The new API, which is currently in private beta, offers a firehose of new Qik content that will allow developers to immediately update their apps with new Qik videos as they come in. Depending on the app, users will now be able to specify which Qik users, tags, or locations they’d like to follow and immediately get an update once a video matching that criteria goes live.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Having been a step behind in the race to pipe entertainment from the Internet to TV screens, struggling video rental-chain Blockbuster Inc. is counting on a new partnership with Samsung Electronics America Inc. to regain ground on rival Netflix Inc.

In an alliance announced Tuesday, Samsung’s next generation of high-definition TVs will include a built-in feature that will enable people to rent the latest DVD releases from Blockbuster with the press of a button on the remote control.

The Blockbuster rentals, expected to be priced from $1.99 to $3.99 apiece for a 24-hour viewing opportunity, will be piped over high-speed Internet connections. Samsung’s HDTVs will begin offering Blockbuster’s on-demand service this fall.

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CBS on Tuesday said it would offer TV shows through Comcast’s online service, joining Home Box Office and Cinemax in the cable TV provider’s “TV Everywhere” initiative.

Comcast plans to begin testing its on-demand service with about 5,000 U.S. customers in the coming weeks. The streaming movie and TV service will only be available to Comcast subscribers.

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CBS pushed out a streaming video player for iPhones and touchy iPods, with smooth navigation of all the content available on TV.com, including for the first time impressive full-length episodes of some—but not most—shows.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fans of HBO shows such as the ‘Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’ can now watch them online if they are Comcast Corp subscribers, in the latest move by the cable TV industry to make TV programs available on the Web.

Both Comcast and HBO parent Time Warner Inc are leading the U.S. TV industry with initiatives called On Demand Online and TV Everywhere designed to help cable and satellite TV providers authenticate paying subscribers who choose to watch shows on the Web.

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One of the more overlooked features of the new iPhone 3.0 is support for a new open standard for live video streaming over HTTP, which promises to open up standards-based video broadcasting to a wide audience while giving mobile users an optimized picture as they roam between WiFi and mobile networks.

At the March unveiling of iPhone 3.0, Apple only dropped a subtle hint about new streaming video features in the new operating system (literally limited to writing “streaming video” on the slide of other features, below), leaving out any details about how it would work and not even mentioning the feature in any detail in the presentation.

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