Just last week Google introduced the phone Nexus One, primarily meant to compete against Apple’s iPhone which has dominated the U.S. smartphone market. It’s notable that both phones have introduced key mobile initiatives in their race placing an emphasis on mobile video.

So what does that do for our online video industry?

At a minimum this means the expansion of a video ready universe. The two companies’ considerable marketing spending will mean that more smartphones will be purchased and therefore the experience of watching mobile video will just keep getting better. For example, the Nexus One’s screen resolution (480×800) surpasses the iPhone’s (320×480), which only means Apple will need to up the ante even further with its next generation. The range of video applications is bound to increase with more players fighting it out in the field.

Moreover there is no oligopoly within the distributors in mobile video like there is with cable and satellite which means that there is more flexibility in how premium video can be distributed to smartphones. Mobile world used to be where everything had to be approved and carried by the wireless carrier. However, that’s quickly evolving to an open sphere where there are no gatekeepers for applications and services making it seem more like an online distribution than traditional video distribution.

Furthermore by having its own device and operating system, Google is optimizing the YouTube mobile experience. The Nexus One is an improved way to search, view and upload YouTube videos making YouTube an even more valuable partner in the mobile race.

It appears as though 2010 is once again confirming itself to be full of sizable opportunities for growth with a prediction that video is a going to continue to be an increasingly important part of the digital experience.

Not bad for the first month back, huh?

Recently, mobile video has been dominating industry news with definite promises of growth, expecting to generate roughly $16B in revenues worldwide by 2014. Similarly, “Mobile Video Services: A Five Year Global Market Forecast” states that mobile usage will rise by 135% over the next 5 years due to more people embracing mobile audio and video. Not to mention the number of users are vastly increasing worldwide – mobile subscribers in Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe are predicted to be 50% 3G converted up from 5% in 2008.

Cellphone displays are getting larger and more powerful making it obvious that video is going to continue expanding in both usage per person and amount that is available. With more companies beginning to offer flat rate mobile data plans, mobile video is more accessible to the general public assisting the growth of mobile data.

Is there a valid explanation for this fast paced increase? The recent stimulated mobile video growth most definitely ties into the launch of iPhone 3GS. Since the launch, YouTube has stated that mobile uploads have been soaring over the last six month with over a 1700% boost. The daily uploads alone have increased 400%…. YouTube believes that the growth is mostly due to more mobile phones with video capabilities on the market, which makes sense of course. If you provide people with advanced technology, they will use it.

By the looks of it, the mobile industry looks bright but what effect does that have on online video? Are we able to co-exist together or will one form of video eventually rule out the other?

In order to understand similar relationships better, I found a few quantitative case studies.  For example, in a relationship between those who listen to music with online streaming vs mobile phones,  the numbers indicate that when one goes up, the other goes down. This means there is only room for one of the above …

However, on the contrary the analysis for mobile video vs. online video streaming states that the two do not compete. In fact, not only do they not compete but they correlate strongly (on a coefficient of .57 to be exact). This is the unique role of video in digital progress and we are all right in the middle of it. People want more video, through more devices, in more places and times – the possibilities are unlimited. That’s definitely great news!

Imagine the opportunities available if mainstream consumers had the ability to access broadband video from the comfort of their own living room? Of course, I’m not only talking about the sheer “possibility” here. If that were the case most of us nerds who have already implemented such a system would be rushing to mass communicate instead of simply sharing ridiculous YouTube clips at our parties. No, not the possibility, I am talking about your mom and dad flicking on the tube, flipping to a central channel and then having the ability to easily integrate broadband T.V for their viewing pleasure.

Just think about that for a second, with the click of a button (or assistance from their far technologically superior child) Mom+Dad will have the wherewithal to tap into the vast array of Internet programming provided throughout the world. This is truly the brave new world of broadcasting, as the opportunities for business are endless.

The major networks will tremble no doubt, but they will eventually refocus and figure out a new way to monetize it as they always do. I mean nothing will replace the high production value of shows such as “Lost” or “House”, or news and mainstream sport, but the possibilities to transcend past these in terms of user generated content is truly past our comprehension.

Quickly, it will be made evident that the most interesting factor within this time will come in the form of a true renaissance for artists. A renaissance, which will allow the artist to use this medium to establish their work out of the sea of amateur and banality.

As the complete foundation of television and all media markets for that matter will shift towards a new paradigm of programming, these artists will provide a catalyst for change. Sounds eerily similar to what happened to the music industry doesn’t it? Intellectual property (IP) available at the touch of a finger with an infinite number of choices; all of them at the whim of the consumer’s interest. For certain the rights of the individual and their I.P will have to be examined, perhaps with an institution struck up to distribute royalties, but this of course in itself is an entirely different conversation.

Although dreaming about this era doesn’t usher it in with any more ferocity, this is not simply a pipedream. According to this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, we may not have to wait so long.

By this year’s demonstrations of all the Flat Panel monsters at CES  (with LG leading the way), the technology of outfitting T.V’s with Ethernet ports or wireless connection will undoubtedly become the next must have feature on HDTV’s. It is believed that over the next few years of HDTV manufacturing, high speed Broadband connectivity will not only become a selling point, but most certainly a standard.

Although exciting, the alarm of the future evokes many questions. One of the most paramount being; how will users access this information? Though the technology is strongly compelling, without a reliable user-friendly interface, the advent of the mainstream is nothing past a whisper. For mom and dad to really pick it up, we all know it has to be simple straight forward and for a lack of a better word Google-esque (In terms of style and ease)

The problem here is we really don’t know who will arise as the granddaddy of interfaces and even if one will become the standard. Will there be a centralized Hub of some sort that rises above other competitors to become the de facto interface? Or will content generated by parties stay centralized to there own material? As the questions of the future wait to be answered with certain uncertainty one aspect remains clear. Broadband T.V is coming and you better get ready for it!

-Reid

How do they do it? Well without getting too geeky on you…

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find a normal YouTube channel below Nintendo’s fake YouTube interface. They’ve recreated a mock YouTube interface in a huge flash animation nested in an iframe 1500 pixels tall (all the way down to where the normal channel stuff starts). Some of the links and buttons work (e.g. links to other Nintendo videos, subscription button, playback controls), but they’re all done manually – none of the fake YouTube elements draw on the real YouTube. The view count, for example, seems to be stuck at 2,752,987 (but even if it moved, Nintendo would be the one keeping track).

Can you do this on your own partner channel?

Unlikely. It seems that Nintendo has been granted special privileges for this one. Normal YouTube channels are restricted to a banner measuring 875px by 150px. If you dig into the code, those banners are in a div whose class is “profile-banner-box”. But that div doesn’t appear anywhere on the Experience Wii channel, instead replaced by the 875px by 1500px iframe & flash video.

Frankly, I’m a little surprised YouTube was ok with it. While the gag is clever and lighthearted, most sites like YouTube have pretty strict rules about imitation. Strictly speaking, the ad deceives users – even once the joke is obvious, most users would still believe that the viewcount is a real viewcount, the related videos are true YouTube-generated related videos, etc.

But props to YouTube for overlooking what ultimately isn’t that big a deal and letting Nintendo have some fun.

-Nick

Hot Spots lets you drill down into your video’s timeline, giving you an unprecedented look at how audiences feel about each moment of your content.

The data is based on:

1. Users abandoning a video before it’s finished playing
2. Users fastforwarding past a section
3. Users rewinding to re-watch a section

But the nice thing about the graph is that it isn’t just a display of viewers over time. Instead, the graph is based on an average for videos around the same length as yours. This makes things a little more relevant because without it, everyone’s graphs would have some kind of general downslope (no video is watched all the way through all the time). With an average-adjusted graph, you can see whether your dropoff rate is the best you could hope for or if it’s worse than normal.

What would be really cool though is if the Hot Spots data for a video was publicly available (right now, you can only see data on your own videos). It could provide an incredibly valuable pool of research data not just for advertisers, but for anyone involved in visual communication. It’s like a 20-million-person focus group.

Google is going to take over the world.

-Nick

Much of the development of hypervideo so far has been driven by advertising, but YouTube’s annotation feature seems to deliberately thwart it. Only internal YouTube links are allowed at this point – links to other videos, channels, or search results.

Veeple, another up-and-coming service, expands beyond YouTube’s internal links to offer more flexibility in terms of link style and destination. More like VideoClix, Veeple lets you use objects in your scene as links to any URL. Veeple CEO Scott Broomfield puts it this way in an ABC interview:

If you’re on your computer with your mouse and with your keyboard, you’re interactive. But the video experience today is passive, and so what we do is we blend the two together.

The active/passive distinction is one that comes up a lot in discussions of online video. Video is one of the toughest mediums to adapt to the interactive, dynamic model of the web; particularly if you’re shooting live subjects, there’s a certain amount of spatial and temporal predetermination that you just can’t play with on the fly. YouTube’s annotations are certainly interesting as a way to make video a lean-forward rather than a lean-back experience. But they still have the flavour of a choose-your-own-adventure novel: an interesting gimmick, to be sure; but also stretching the limits of a medium to the point of clumsiness (when reading one, you realise how completely books lack the hyperlinking features of the web).

Is the technology about to evolve? Are we on that crest where the paperback choose-your-own-adventure novel is injected with the magic of hypertext? I think it’s going to take a completely new UI experience than what we’re used to, which is still primarily organized around the concept of the ‘page’. Maybe we’ll find it somewhere in the intersection between YouTube’s page-based print ancestry and Joost’s cable/satellite/PVR-like interface? Maybe a dash of PicLens or even (shudder) Second Life?

-Nick

UPDATE: YouTube now supports annotations in embedded players (initially, annotations only worked on the YouTube site itself).

The latest figures from Adobe put the H.264-enabled version (9.0.115) at 62% penetration for the US and Canada as of March. This is probably into the 80s by now, as the 99.4% of users with Flash 6+ get prompted to auto-update when they encounter Flash 9 content. There’s little reason to hold off from distributing in H.264 at this point: very few users will have trouble viewing it and the quality boost and/or bandwidth savings are significant.

My favourite example of this new potential is Italian compressor Fabio Sonnati’s February blog post where he shows off a 1080p Sigur Ros clip that he encoded at 500kbps (that’s Fabio there on the left lookin’ sexy). Now, 500kbps is a decent bitrate for sub-SD web video: 480×270, for example. Fabio’s video is 1920×1080. The result is pretty stunning. And although Sonnati is a true master of the delicate art of compression, and the content of the video makes things easy on him (extremely low motion, slow pans, etc), this is very exciting stuff for media producers.

-Nick