Streaming Video Blog

Thanks to a partnership with streaming video firm Livestream, customers using Brightcove Inc. ’s online video platform will now be able to easily record and publish their live videos.

Using newly released Livestream APIs, the companies have developed a way for customers to feed their pre-recorded live video streams into the Brightcove video management system. Customers can also use any custom video players or templates that have been built through Brightcove for new live streams, ensuring the same user experience, whether a stream is live or on-demand.

Not only will customers be able to manage videos from Livestream like any other video asset, but the relationship will also allow them to use the same reporting, analytics, and monetization tools for those videos as for those that are directly uploaded into the Brightcove platform.

While most customers use Brightcove’s platform to manage and distribute on-demand video content, the partnership gives the company an easy way to attack the live video market. Previously any customers that wanted to feed live video into the Brightcove system needed to bring their own live encoding system to do so. Now they can simply feed into Livestream’s live video platform.

“Many of our customers are becoming more and more intrigued by the possibility of doing live streaming,” says Chris Johnston, Brightcove’s director of technology partnerships.

While the companies worked together on technical integration through Livestream’s APIs, there is not a sales or marketing aspect to this partnership — so customers that want to feed live channels into their Brightcove libraries will need to sign up for accounts with both companies.

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Online video streaming remains a tiny part of TV viewers’ media consumption, but Dave Poltrack, CBS’ research head, has noticed trends that could make premium broadband ads more valuable than broadcast spots. Taking a panoramic overview of viewing data from Nielsen, MRI and CBS’ own internal research, Poltrack see more older viewers starting to watch online video in greater numbers, suggesting that the form is becoming mainstream and that ad dollars should follow suit. He used the research to back up a presentation to the Television Critics Association in Pasadena this week (B&C has that story). We’ve got the full deck and have mined it for you to find the latest on valuing digital ads, viewer behavior online and more (View select slides here or download the full presentation):

—Valuing digital ads: At the center of the study was an attempt to figure out how to wring dollars from digital video. Right now, broadcast is by far still the most profitable, followed by DVRs and then online. Keep in mind that an average hour-long prime-time show has about 10 minutes of ads—or roughly twenty spots. About 95 percent of a program’s audience sees the ads live, so the average live viewer is exposed to 19.5 ads. DVR viewers tend to skip a little over one-half of the ad. A DVR video gets a significant amount of playback during a three-day window covered by Nielsen’s C3 DVR ratings. That means the network only gets revenue from 44 percent of the ads—the equivalent of just 8.8 ads. But streaming videos tend to include about two minutes of ads, and even though those have an exposure of practically 100 percent, online videos have ad value of just 4.0.

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Major League Baseball took another step in proving its technical superiority over the other three major sports leagues Wednesday, by connecting its wired MLB.TV subscription package with its At Bat iPhone application.

Beginning Wednesday, MLB will stream every single regular and postseason baseball game to fans via the $9.99 iPhone and iPod Touch application it initially released last year. Customers who already subscribe to MLB.TV and MLB.TV Premium packages–its online baseball viewing service–can now watch any game live from their phone or computer. The games will be streamed over the iPhone or iPod’s Wi-Fi connection or 3G network. Games can be paused and rewound while playing.

Just after the iPhone OS 3.0 update was released in June, MLB added the feature that any purchasers of the At Bat app would get one free streamed game per week chosen by MLB, no MLB.TV subscription required. It took a little over a month to add the MLB.TV package, which streams 15 live games at a time.

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Neflix is extending its subscription service for movies and television show to Apple’s iPhone platform, according to a widely-echoed MultiChannel News article. The new iPhone operating system (available for all versions of the hardware) follows an open video streaming standard, so developers like Netflix can develop apps for streaming video straight to the iPhone, where previously the only native video app was YouTube.

Other commentators have correctly pointed out that Apple and AT&T are unlikely to let Netflix stream movies over AT&T’s wireless cellphone network. They assume that any Netflix app for the iPhone would be restricted to WiFi, but that ignores a third possibility: an offline mode that obviates the need for a connection in order for movies to play.

Slacker’s Apple-approved app and Spotify’s possibly-to-be-approved app each include a caching feature that lets you listen to hours and hours of music while offline, with nary WiFi nor cellphone connection in range.

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