Higher Video Quality for YouTube Arrives
YouTube appear to be rolling out an option allowing users to watch videos in higher quality than before (example).
Not all source videos uploaded will be high quality/definition (cell phone video etc), but it appears that when a high quality video is uploaded to YouTube several conversions are now being made. This allows users with fast internet connections to watch the high quality version.
Sites, such as Putfile, that have had high quality video streaming functionality (example) for over a year have now lost an edge over YouTube which previously swayed some users to register on their site rather than YouTube.
With YouTube providing free high quality video streaming, revenue sharing, groups, and various other features; the days of UGC video sites popping up quickly or established non-niche sites even surviving are surely numbered.
Yahoo Mail, a Cesspit of Spam
Need I say more? Yahoo mail doesn't seem to be able to filter out the spam very well at all. Perhaps Yahoo thinks that I might benefit from various drugs and a few Nigerian 419 scams.
If you're not using gmail yet then you should be. I have been using gmail for about a year now and have not had any spam get through to my inbox, nor have I had any emails incorrectly marked as spam.
Revver.com Sells To LiveUniverse
Revver has apparently sold to LiveUniverse (Brad Greenspan's operation) for less than $5m, at a considerable loss to investors.
"Online-video company Revver Inc., which has tried to stake out a niche by broadcasting only material that doesn't infringe on copyrights, has been sold to online-entertainment network LiveUniverse for less than $5 million, people familiar with the matter said.
The sale is a blow to Revver's investors, who had sunk $12.75 million into the Los Angeles company. The deal demonstrates the difficulty many online-video start-ups are having competing with Google Inc.'s YouTube."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120337555935275417.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Things are certainly tough in the online video world right now, and will only get tougher as Google continues to crush all competition.
Putfile Embedded Videos Deactivated
UPDATE Jan 17th 2008: The original embedded player has been restored and is now working again.
A lot of people have been messaging me about this, and I'm sorry to hear about it.
It seems as though ZVUE, in their infinite wisdom, have disabled the embedded videos on Putfile. They have been replaced with what looks like an embedded player, but clicking on it will take you to the Putfile site instead. If that is ok with you then thats great just leave the code as it is and people will be directed to the video on Putfile when they click it rather than viewing it on your site, myspace, ebay, or wherever you had embedded it.
I've not been working with ZVUE (who purchased Putfile) since the later part of last year, so if you would like to complain please open a support ticket or contact them through Zvue.com.
I'm sad to say, but it certainly is true, that Putfile simply doesn't measure up to the competition anymore. ZVUE seem to be focusing on adding music videos and redesigning (cluttering) the site rather than adding any much needed core features (ftp upload, upload progress bar, friends, groups, message boards).
If you're looking for a new video and/or photo host I've started using Flickr.com for photos and Dailymotion.com for videos both of which work really well.
Below is an example of the now defunct Putfile embedded player:
Here Comes Another Bubble
Jay sent me this video about another dot com bubble. I thought it was hilarious, so here I am sharing it with you.
Donating Spare CPU Cycles to Fold@Home
If, like me, you have various computers or servers which need to be online 24/7 but aren't always using their full CPU power then consider donating your spare CPU power to a collaborative computing project for the greater good of mankind, such as Folding@Home.
Folding@home is a distributed-computing project run by a team at Stanford University who are exploring how proteins fold and unfold in order to carry out their functions within the body. When these proteins fold or unfold incorrectly abnormalities and diseases, such as cancer, may occur. By simulating the folding of various proteins in billions of different ways researchers hope to learn more about such problems and how to rectify them.
The Folding@home client is available for both Windows and Linux, currently supporting single cores with the beta and next version out supporting multiple processing cores. I actually like the single core support as it means that I can have the fold@home process only maxing out one core and the other core left untouched for use by other server processes.
The picture below shows the usage on two different servers, the first being a dual core 3ghz server and the other being a single core 400mhz server. Note that as the process only utilizes IDLE cpu time, it won't battle with other processes for CPU time, it will only use as much CPU power that is not currently needed.
Sign up on the site to create your own username and/or team. The idea being that teams can compete against each other in providing the most cpu work time and users can compete within their teams. If you would like, feel free to join my team 95202.
You will need to judge for yourself but in my opinion it is probably not worth leaving a machine on solely for this purpose as the environmental impact would probably outweigh the benefits. This is of course a great thing to do if you already have servers that need to be online 24/7 but don't make full use of their cpu power.
JumpTV builds $49m .ppt, $1m CDN
BeetTV reports that JumpTV has invested $50 million in a proprietary content delivery network (CDN), because the existing CDNs "couldn't provide what they need".
Akamai is one of those existing CDNs. If you haven't dealt with Akamai before the bottom line is that you pay 10x what you would if you built your own solution, but even that wouldn't add up to $50m.
Jump TV state that they
"provides live streams of some 300 ethnic television shows from 75 nations. Expats, immigrants and foreign language speakers subscribe to the programming which is delivered to the PC. It is also a huge distributor of online sports streaming, providing some 200 sports programs from 30 nations. "
Wonderful, congratulations! But we could also say that Putfile (the site I created and sold) provides millions of video streams to every single internet enabled country on earth. Providing "300 ethnic television shows to 75 countries" doesn't mean that you are pushing masses of traffic (X gig/sec).
The graph below compares the reach (viewers) of Putfile vs. JumpTV.
The graph clearly shows that Putfile has 4x the reach of JumpTV. Putfile doesn't use a $50m CDN, nor a $500,000 CDN for that matter.
Out of interest I priced up a custom solution involving 10 gig/sec of bandwidth from 10 cities worldwide with 10tb of redundant data storage (about 10 times what would be required by an operation like JumpTV) just to see if I could get anywhere close to $50m.
Spec: 10 cities worldwide with 1 gig/sec premium bandwidth per city. 10 gigs/sec bandwidth with 10tb of replicated data.
Per Location:
- $20,000 colocation and bandwidth / month
- RAID 5 arrays, 10tb of fully redundant data storage. $30,000 one off cost
- Front end servers * 10 to connect to storage arrays $20,000 one off cost
- Database servers keep track of "where" data is replicated to $20,000.
- Programming $100,000 one off cost
Total cost per month: $200,000
One off hardware and software: $420,000
Cost of running for 1 year $2,820,000
I believe that the above quoted capacity is 10x what is needed, and that $282,000/year would be a more realistic running cost.
I propose that JumpTV actually purchased $49m worth of powerpoint presentations and $1m worth of CDN.