We’ve all been there: fire up a clip from YouTube or a movie on Netflix and things start out great. But, then, after just a few moments, that LTE connection starts to give up the ghost and suddenly you’re faced with unbearable stutturing or a video that just dies mid stream. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications are looking to solve that conundrum with DASH, or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. The idea is actually surprisingly simple — files of different sizes and qualities will be available depending on signal strength and network load, and the stream will be able to seamlessly switch between them as these variables change. While this sounds like a win for both consumer and carriers, we’re sure there are a few of you out there who just want the highest quality possible, even if that means waiting forever for that HD clip of the all accordion cover of Take On Me to buffer. Full PR is after the break.

Continue reading DASH promises stutter free streaming video over LTE, hopes you don’t care about quality

DASH promises stutter free streaming video over LTE, hopes you don’t care about quality originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink SlashGear  |   | Email this | Comments
Engadget

Pixable, a photo viewing aggregation service, has won praise for the smart way it organizes photos and orders them by relevancy for users. Now, we’re seeing that users are catching on in a big way and have turned the iOS mobile app into a daily addiction.

The New York City company told me it recently eclipsed the 1 million download mark on iOS, with almost of all of the downloads happening in the last few months of last year. But while noteworthy, that’s something that a lot of apps are able to pull off. What’s really interesting to me is how sticky Pixable has become for users, who are engaging continuously at a pretty impressive rate.

Pixable says that its users are viewing 100 million photos a month and opening the app on average 11 times per month. Some 60 percent of those users are still active on the app since it launched in April while 60 percent of users also use the app on consecutive days.

The Pixable app primarily aggregates Facebook and Twitter pictures, with fuller support for Facebook right now. It organizes photos into various categories such as top of the day, week or month, new profile pics, most recent photos. Pixable also aggregates Instagram, Flickr, yFrog, Twitpic photos and YouTube and Vimeo videos within a user’s Twitter feeds.

Where Pixable shines is in how it uses machine learning and algorithms to process more than 70 signals, helping it to surface the most relevant pictures for users. It will try to measure the affinity between users and the strength of their relationships, taking into account things like common schools, or cities and how much they interact. It will also look at “likes” and comments to determine if it’s a picture that a user wouldn’t want to miss.

Inaki Berenguer, Pixable’s CEO and Co-Founder, said photos have changed from being a way for people to hold on to memories into a form of communication. It’s almost like email now, he said, with Pixable setting itself up as a smart mobile inbox for photos.

“Photos are about telling friends what you’re up to you or you see something funny or eat something and you take a picture. People are broadcasting all the time, but there’s too much noise. Pixable organizes all these photos and brings order to them and sense to chaos,” Berenguer told me.

Pixable, which raised .6 million in November, said it’s also introducing hashtags into the service, so users can tag photos to organize them for later viewing or they can use them like hashtags on Twitter, adding a layer of metadata to a picture. It has also added a mobile web version of the service.

In my earlier profile on Pixable, I wrote how I liked Pixable’s approach, helping people see the photos that matter to them. As we live more of our lives online and through social networks, we need ways to prioritize all this content and filter out a lot of the noise. Pixable still has more to do to more fully integrate pictures beyond Facebook and Twitter, but I like its initial start and so do its users.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

YouTube announced new milestones in the amount of video uploaded and viewed by its users Monday. With 4 billion video views daily and more than an hour of video uploaded every second, YouTube not only continues to grow, but its growth is actually accelerating. Here’s how YouTube did it – and what Silicon Valley can learn from it:

Be open

The beauty of YouTube, and its greatest strength, is that anyone and everyone can publish to the platform. There’s no hierarchy of decision makers reviewing scripts and greenlighting projects. There’s no need for an agent. And most importantly, there’s no cost involved with participating on the site. All anyone has to do to become a YouTube publisher is to upload a video to the site.

That’s why YouTube gets an hour’s worth of video uploaded to the site every second. And it’s why people keep coming back, despite the fact that YouTube doesn’t have much of the Hollywood content that can be found on Netflix or Hulu. YouTube is a democratic platform for distributing and consuming content. Its stars are discovered not by a studio exec, but elevated and popularized by its own users.

Be global

Another strength of YouTube is that it is available to users around the world, who are able to enjoy all the same content regardless of their location. Anyone with an Internet connection pretty much anywhere can watch the same videos that you and I enjoy. That’s important, especially as most YouTube views come from non-English speaking countries.

It’s also something that Hollywood has been bad at managing as the world has gone digital. Much of piracy occurs simply because digital copies of films or TV shows are available online long before they make it to international markets. By geofencing or geoblocking certain content, today’s media companies are missing out on an opportunity to reach audiences directly that are turning to piracy instead. By being global, YouTube is addressing the largest possible audience at all times.

Be multiplatform

This is different from being global, and speaks more to targeting the wide proliferation of connected devices that have come into consumer’s hands than anything else. YouTube is seeking to make its content available on as many mobile and connected device platforms as possible, which will help its publishers reach audiences regardless of the platform they’re using.

That’s been another failing of today’s entertainment industry. On the studio side, there’s been no easy way to purchase movies that will work across devices until recently. While the UltraViolet initiative seeks to solve that problem, it still has a ways to go. And for the broadcast and cable TV networks, making shows available on new platforms means distributors generally having to secure new rights. That’s led to a hodgepodge of some networks and some shows being available on some devices, while others are not. Once again, the end result is that those publishers are limiting the addressable audience, at the same time that platforms like YouTube are enabling content to be viewed nearly everywhere.

Let’s not kill Hollywood, but offer something better

Some have suggested Silicon Valley should kill Hollywood. I think it’s naive to believe that technology companies can or should destroy the current entertainment industry. But at a time when the technology and media industries are grappling over the issue of piracy, the success of YouTube can be used as an example of how other technology companies could make something better.

After all, the advent of self-publishing tools like WordPress or Blogger hasn’t killed the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but has enabled a great number of independent blogs and technology news sites to also be influential in shaping the news. In the same way, YouTube is enabling video publishers to reach audiences at massive scale and creating a situation where in aggregate, those independents can rival the traditional Hollywood regime.

Being open, being global, and being multiplatform really just translates to being wherever the audience is. It’s about enabling viewers access to more content, not less — which is the real impetus behind YouTube’s accelerating growth. That could be a lesson to other tech companies seeking to offer an alternative to today’s entertainment offerings, or it could be used as a blueprint for some more innovative companies in the existing media regime. Take away the limits to accessing your content, and more likely than not you’ll find more people actually consuming it and more opportunity to monetize it.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes
• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising
• Connected Consumer Market Overview, Q2 2010

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

The White House joins Google+, invites you to Hangout originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Verge  |  The White House (Google+), The White House Blog  | Email this | Comments
Engadget

Here’s a quick data point from Google’s fourth quarter earnings call that could have massive implications for the way do video advertising: When talking about YouTube, Google SVP of ads Susan Wojcicki said that 60 percent of all video ads that appear on the site are TrueView ads. That means that when it serves up a video ad, more than half the time viewers can skip it and move on to the video before watching the entire ad.

The TrueView format, which launched a little more than a year ago, has quickly taken over as the dominant unit for video ads that appear on the site. With TrueView, ads generally play for about five seconds before viewers have the opportunity to skip them. The beauty of the TrueView ad is not only that viewers can ignore them, if they don’t find them relevant or appealing, but that advertisers don’t pay for skipped creative.

The incentive is then on advertisers to make good creative, and on YouTube to target the ads appropriately to increase engagement. So far, that appears to be working: Wojcicki said engagement ranges from 15 to 40 percent when viewers choose to actually watch an ad all the way through.

As a side note, CEO Larry Page noted that YouTube still had a lot of growth ahead and expected an increase in advertising on the site. But Page said that growth wouldn’t necessarily come at the expense of TV budgets, as advertisers generally weren’t shifting spend from other parts of their video budgets when committing to YouTube.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• How publishers must adapt to multiple content discovery options
• A clouded view of Google Music

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

While scouring Samsung’s booth at CES’s Digital Experience for that glorious 55-inch OLED set this evening, we came across a table full of new WiFi-enabled cameras and a camcorder. The logic behind the WiFi feature is that it enables direct access to Microsoft’s Sky Drive, E-Mail, PC Auto Backup, remote viewfinding and of course Facebook, Youtube, and Picasa right from your phone. The top of the line 9 WB850F — the F designation indicates it has WiFi — has a 16 megapixel BSI CMOS sensor, 21x optical zoom, 3-inch AMOLED display, shoots 1080p HD, and even has GPS with POI. The 16 megapixel 9 DV300F was also on hand with a 5x optical zoom, a 3-inch display and shoots 720p video. Samsung’s 14 megapixel 9 WB15F also sports a 3-inch AMOLED screen, and shoots in full HD with up to 18x optical zoom. The tied-for-least-expensive 9 ST200F still puts in a showing with a 16 megapixel shooter, 10x optical zoom while still capturing HD video at 720p. Samsung launched one HD camcorder, the 9 Q20 which packs 20x optical zoom, time lapse, and HD recording at 1080i @ 60fps. All of the cameras have a similar heft and are built with similar materials which should help narrow people’s purchase decisions to looking at what features they want and what’s affordable. On to the gallery!

Samsung’s WiFi-enabled cameras hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments
Engadget