Posted by Lina Giraldo on Monday Nov 23, 2009 Under Uncategorized
The future of television has been changing drastically in the past few years. Social Networks and Online TV are changing the behavior of the users and even the networks are changing their old traditional business models. The new generations are using online content more and more and online shopping is a very natural behavior. Online/TV commerce is a great opportunity for the networks, as Joshua Danovitz, VP and international general manager at TiVo says :
“It’s got to be an easy type of Amazon solution where you’ve already got the delivery address and payment information online with one click purchase enabled,”
Sun Microsystems might be approaching this with the introduction of Java TV. It is designed to work with new digital televisions bringing the ability of the one click purchase directly from an ad. It doesn’t support all the versions of Java. Currently it only works with Java ME (Micro Edition) and does not support Blue Ray Java (BD-J)
We think the idea is great because it has a lot of potential. For example we could create applets (called Xlets) that with one click of your remote control you could buy directly from the ad that is being shown.
Posted by Jason Rosado on Thursday Nov 12, 2009 Under Uncategorized
An interesting article here in the NY Times about how new manufacturers are integrating internet access into their newest releases of their television sets, which allows for streaming directly from Netflix (or other streaming video sites) without the need for a black box in the middle…
“The trend is that such Internet connections will rapidly become standard. According to research analysts at NPD, 12 percent of flat-panel sets sold in September in the United States had networking capabilities, up from less than 1 percent a year ago. There are now Internet-ready models from LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony and Vizio.”
Posted by Richard Ting on Tuesday Nov 10, 2009 Under Social TV
The variation of Yahoo widgets designed specifically for TVs debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show last January. Not to be confused with its PC-centric incarnation, the TV-only widget feature will be available on certain HDTVs from LG, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio shipping this year. The first widget-equipped sets to hit store shelves are members of Samsung’s UNB7000 series, and this hands-on review was performed on a UN46B7000–although we expect the widget experience to be similar across brands.
Posted by Eyal Ohana on Monday Nov 9, 2009 Under Uncategorized
For this week’s blog post, we were asked to identify inspirational instances that allow users to “chat and watch.” Team Melo came across these gems.
Disney, everyone’s favorite fairy tale content provider, is testing a “watch-chat” application in conjunction with Lycos, Inc. “The feature lets groups of up to 10 people set up “screening rooms” to watch the episode on laptops and write a running commentary that will appear on one side of the screen. Each screening room host can pause, rewind and fast-forward video while they watch.” The article doesn’t illustrate the actual technology utilized (whether it’s all embedded within the same app or whether it utilizes mobile devices, in conjunction). Check out the article here (http://www.reuters.com/article/televisionNews/idUSN2129837920070324)
Whereas, VH1 is focusing on leveraging mobile devices in conjunction with the application. VH1 is utilizing the technology provided by Mobui Corp with their hit reality show “I Love Money 2.” Check out the article here (http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/television/2741.html)
“viewers use their mobile phone to chat in real time with friends, fans and celebrities while watching TV programming… The strategy is to really tap into the personal involvement, enthusiasm and energy level that the audience has with reality TV shows… This is a two-way channel of mobile communication that didn’t exist before…
Audience members can set up their own chat rooms and invite friends and other fans to join. They can also set up their own profile, select an avatar, and create and manage friend and group lists.”
Team Melo reserves the right to remain silent as to our opinions on the quality of the reality show content, but certainly worth checking out from a technology perspective.
Posted by Oscar Von Hauske on Monday Nov 9, 2009 Under Uncategorized
Netflix released an app for Xbox a couple of months ago, basically you can watch all the movies in your “watch instantly” queue on your XBox.
The interface is very simple, you can scroll up and down to see different genres and your queue, you scroll left and right to see movies and tv shows, the items in the genres fields are populated by recommendations from Netflix (usually accurate) and the “Instant queue” is populated by the user through Netflix’s website.
We think it’s a very interesting feature, and Netflix has a growing number of streaming movies and TV shows, it’s one of the most interesting ways we’ve seen of getting content into a television through available hardware like the XBox.
Posted by Richard Ting on Monday Nov 2, 2009 Under Video Aggregation
[quoted from ReadWriteWeb]
“When it comes to video discovery, the thrill of the hunt is only really fun when you’re viewing more good than bad. You could scour your feeds for entertainment, but the fodder you’ll file through is enough to feel like work. Tomorrow is a Friday, and we all know that you’re going to mentally check out from your desk at about 1pm. With ReadWriteWeb’s list of easy video aggregation services you can spend the afternoon curating your corporate videos, scouring for media clips or sharing amusing videos with friends.”
Posted by Josh on Monday Nov 2, 2009 Under Uncategorized
Justin TV just announced the release of its open API which will be
free for developers and will allow them to dig deeper into the
Justin.tv technology and infrastructure. The API will give developers
the ability to customize and play with the live video player, live
broadcaster, live chat and user data and archive video data. The
Justin.tv API is actually made up of two API’s: the Rest API and the
Flash Integration API. The Rest API was built to collect information
about already existing Justin.tv live streams. The Flash Integration
API includes the live player and the broadcaster, and lets you use
these components inside of your own applications. The Justin.tv API
requests data calls be made in json format, so you can use the api
directly from javascript. Also, Justin.tv has released a
Twitter-integrated streamer as open source, so developers can learn
from the code. Here are a few examples of what has been created with
the API.
-A group chat application that allows an arbitrary number of
broadcasts to be displayed on a single page as people join
-An automated event widget that can be embedded anywhere–once you
setup an event the widget shows a countdown timer, automatically
switches to a live video broadcast and then creates and displays a
highlight clip after the event ends
Posted by Oscar Von Hauske on Monday Nov 2, 2009 Under Uncategorized
vuNow is a piece of hardware that allows consumers to watch digital content on a television, it’s similar to Roku, AppleTV etc. What makes VuNow interesting is that it pulls content from many different sources including Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, CNN, ESPN, and a very long lit of websites which you can find here:
http://www.vunow.com
It also streams content from live channels around the world, and it’s even making it’s way into audio receivers..
OpenTV’s main business involves the sale of set-top-box operating systems and software, predominantly OpenTV Core, it’s digital TV middleware, which has an API for enabling iTV application development independent of hardware. The API allows generic deployments as physical hardware is treated as independent from broadcast network features.
OpenTV’s software provides solutions for HD, Personal Video Recording (DVR), Videos On Demand, and the ability to develop flexible UI. It also provides the infrastructure for the company to manage and deploy its services. Lastly, OpenTV EclipsePlus in collaboration with Time Warner allos for ad inventory management and interactive advertising
