You know the viral “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years”? Well, what if Noah took a 4-second video of himself instead? And what if everyone else did, too? That’s kind of the effect you get from the new Robo.to TV service, a derivation of a product from Particle, a San Francisco-based web product shop.

Robo.to’s main function is simple–a place to post clips that are sort of a webcam status message, with no sound and a time limit of 4 seconds. You can use the GIF-like autoplaying video Robo.to creates for you as a sort of avatar that displays your most recent mood or location–or that’s the idea anyway, as compared with Seesmic (which doesn’t really do video anymore) or 12 seconds, which use video clips more conversationally.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

When you run a news site and you get your hands on a video that you know is going to be huge–potentially-breaking-your-site huge–what do you do? In two recent cases, companies turned to new video platform providers that promised they could handle the strain. And in both cases, they appear to have done just that.

Celeb mag Us Weekly last month gained possession of a video of Michael Jackson sustaining the burn injuries that would kick off his lifelong (and ostensibly life-ending) painkiller addiction.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Copyright law wasn’t written with today’s content consumption in mind. The way online video copyright functions is based on a reading of the 10-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act that equates video hosting sites with Internet service providers. That law provides a “safe harbor” for hosts who respond to copyright claims by taking down infringing content “expeditiously.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Independent developer Paul Yanez, who seems to make a game of adding functionality to web video platforms whether they like it or not, has built an Adobe AIR app for Joost called the Joost Media Player.

This is delightfully ironic for a number of reasons.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

With nearly 2,000 “friends” on Facebook, I should be a regular visitor to the site. I am not. Instead, I prefer to use Facebook’s mobile application on my iPhone to send messages, update my status, upload photos taken on the go and sometime even scroll through the news feed to see what my friends are up to. The ad- and clutter-free interface has fewer distractions and makes using Facebook a breeze.

Apparently, I am one of 25 million Facebook mobile users and one of four million who access the service on a daily basis. That’s a sizable portion of Facebook’s 150 million (and growing) registered users, and with them lies Facebook’s future. With the rise of superphones such as Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and Nokia’s (NOK) E71 and N96 devices, we are at the cusp of a new era in which the mobile and the wired Web converge. This convergence, when married to location-based services, would create a new real-time and highly contextual Internet experience.

Read the rest of this post

One way to think about online video is to consider how big a chunk it takes out of our daily lives. The amount of time U.S. Internet users spend watching video is up an impressive 40 percent year over year. Watchers tuned in for 273.1 minutes of online video in the month of November 2008, up from 195 minutes in November 2007, according to comScore (SCOR).

That’s not the only measure that went up. The number of videos viewed increased 34 percent, to 12.7 billion videos, up from 9.5 billion last November. But the number of video viewers is not growing quite as fast; it was up six percent, to 146 million from 138 million. Still, that’s stayed fairly constant since last year at about three-quarters of total U.S. Internet users (which is not in itself a fast-growing category).

Read the rest of this post

Ashton Kutcher’s practiced finesse and stage presence were completely out of place at the TechCrunch50 conference earlier this week, but his appearance was the talk of the show. Kutcher wasn’t in San Francisco to run a casting call for “Beauty and the Geek,” but to launch a Web video show focused on something about which he knows a fair amount: celebrity gossip. Celebrity spokespeople are a fact of life at this point, but celebrity tech founders? Like so many things, it’s a phenomenon that gets frothy every time there’s a bubble.

Read the rest of this post

Three online video start-up CEOs stepped down last week. The departures were for different reasons, but when you hear about them in the span of a few hours, as I did on Friday, they glom together. Herb Scannell of Next New Networks said his company would be better served by someone more Web-oriented; Mollie Spilman deferred to her co-founder to lead Tidal TV; and Bill Joll of On2 didn’t give a reason, though it’s worth noting that his company recently had to restate earnings due to “falsified” sales accounts.

Read the rest of this post

Bear with me for a minute, because I’m about to tell a long and self-involved tale. Ultimately I think it might say something interesting about platforms for television consumption, but of course that’ll be up to you to decide.

Before last fall, I barely had a television in my house and had only ever really watched TV shows over the last five years on DVD or iTunes. But then I started watching “Dancing With the Stars” through ABC.com’s downloadable player (the one that’s powered by Move Networks). I had personal connections to a few of the “celebrity” contestants–like our favorite web video hater Mark Cuban–and also wanted to use some of the software I was writing about. But let’s just say I went above and beyond just research.

Read the rest of this post

Wow, just when we question those EQAL guys’ reasoning for doing something dumb by pulling a hit series, they show they have something much more interesting up their sleeves. Wednesday at CBS’ upfront, a major partnership between the network and the just-funded start-up was announced.

Read the rest of this post

Seesmic is a video start-up I’ve shied away from writing about too often, because I’m not sure I really get it. But I figure if so many smart people think there’s something good going on here, I should keep an eye on what the company is doing. So last week we had founder and CEO Loïc Le Meur on the “GigaOM Show,” where I and co-host Joyce Kim got to ask him what’s the big idea.

Read the rest of this post

Now that professional writers are done protesting the Web, will they flock to it? In this quick video interview, Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America West, tells us which parts of the new WGA contract the Guild is happy about, what new Web ventures are coming down the pike (and whether they’ll stick around) and makes a case for the continuing value of writers.

Read the rest of this post

Troubled video site Revver was bought by Brad Greenspan’s LiveUniverse last night for a price “many multiples more” than the $500,000 to $1.5 million reported recently, according to a source close to the deal. Our source would not disclose the selling price, but said “I wouldn’t say anyone got rich, but everybody was happy.” Revver had raised $12.7 million from Comcast, Turner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Richards and William Randolph Hearst III. The Revver team will continue working under the new ownership.

Read the rest of this post

Yahoo is close to acquiring enterprise video start-up Maven Networks for between $160 million and $170 million, according to sources familiar with the deal. Maven provides video hosting and distribution services for Gannett, Hearst, Fox News, Sony BMG, the Financial Times, Univision, TV Guide and others.

Read the rest of this post

Will it be a MacBook Touch or an Apple TV Pro? And what’s all this about the Air? [Today] is the big Stevenote day at Macworld in San Francisco, and I’ll be there with an EVDO card and last year’s Mac laptop burning my thighs.

Read the rest of this post