The ArtLab

Before video became the big thing in online content, there was music. And music was pirated far and wide by users of the original Napster and its successors. Defenders of piracy often claimed (and still claim) that this activity allowed new and independent artists to get exposure, skipping traditional distribution.

And while some artists may have been lucky enough to get exposure this way, it doesn't seem to have lead to an explosion in the profitability of the "Long Tail" (our previous thoughts on the Long Tail are here) or the number of indie artists jumping into the "Short Head." Indie artists need something more.

Today we're witnessing the next generation of attempts at marketing independent artists - making their music accessible, flexible and profitable. One of the more valiant efforts is indie911.

It starts out pretty straightforward: artists can register at the site, create a custom page for themselves, and start uploading their music and video to stream through the site's player. In a day or two, if the artist desires, the content is approved for sale, starting at the industry-standard rate of 99 cents for music tracks, $1.99 for video.

But one way indie911 sets itself apart is with the "hoooka" player, which is a high-functioning widget. Each artist or fan can create his own hoooka, complete with customizable skins and colors, which will showcase the music (accompanied by photo slideshows, if they like) and video they've identified as their favorites, as well as other media they've been checking out lately.

The widget operates not only at the indie911 site but anywhere: on your website, your blog, your social networks (like MySpace), or anywhere embedding is allowed. Interestingly, fans looking at that hoooka on those different websites can all chat with each other in real time and post comments about what they're watching and hearing.

And while artists can put up their content for free--and indie911 will help promote that content online--the site offers many avenues for monetizing content. The most straightforward is that if the artist has chosen to put his content up for sale, then when fans see or hear it, they can buy the non-restricted digital file in two clicks--every hoooka is a "digital store-front".

When other people view the hoooka you've set up, and they decide to buy content through it, you get a cut: 70% goes to the artist, 10% goes to the hoooka creator, and 20% goes to indie911. So if the music is purchased through the artist's own hoooka, the artist gets a full 80%.

For the artist, these are among the best rates in the business either way, but now fans have an extra incentive to try out independent works, find the good stuff and, in effect, do some of the retail groundwork to promote the artist.

indie911's current members are doing just that, although finding the artists that appeal to them is somewhat hampered by the lack of a solid search or auto-recommendation function.  While you can browse manually by genre, your best bet is to look for artists who cite influence by mainstream artists you already like.

In addition to retail through the hoooka, indie911 offers free opt-in digital distribution to outlets like iTunes, amazon.com, Rhapsody and yes, the new aboveboard Napster. And artists get 95% of all income indie911 receives from their songs that way. Also available for free through indie911 are opportunities for licensing songs for use in other media like movies, TV and video games, which can bring in licensing fees and royalties.

Now, artists can only post three tracks for sale under the free package, so if they want to put more songs out there, they pay a fairly low rate ($29.99/year, which can be recouped in just 38 direct downloads) to sell an unlimited number of songs.

And all of this is non-exclusive: artists can post their work at indie911 and retain all rights to their work, and go on selling their work anywhere else they please. It's hard to see why any indie artist wouldn't want to opt in, at very least to the free package: it's all upside.

If an artist really wants to take their career to the next level, indie911 offers a set of more expensive promotional options like radio distribution and marketing. So indie911 really does offer a full range of means for independent artists to promote themselves and make a bit of money along the way.

Whether or not any given indie artist will make it, indie911 won't fail for lack of trying; and according to the site, they've succeeded so far at attracting more than 140,000 music and video titles from 30,000-plus artists and labels, and they've given everyone else a reason to participate. It would be nice to see that Long Tail come to something, so check it out and spread the word.

Fancast wants to be your online one-stop shop for everything from the silver screen to the small screen. It has tens of thousands of free videos, but there's even more under the surface, holding it together and making it even more useful.

The first thing Fancast invites you to do as you enter the site is to watch some of their many free videos, including (as you can see) full TV episodes, movies and trailers. This alone is a pretty impressive library: full episodes of 460 programs from 52 TV networks, and just as many full-length movies.

If a film or show of interest is going to be on TV sometime soon, or is available on-demand through your cable service, Fancast keeps up-to-date TV listings and will tell you where and when you can catch it.

For movies and TV shows that aren't available for free - or to download content rather than rely on streaming video - there's the Fancast Store. There you can download-to-rent or own a variety of videos, with discounts for purchasing whole seasons of shows (including "season passes" for currently running seasons).

And if you come across a movie or show that you'd like to rent but prefer not to download, Fancast will direct you to Netflix and Blockbuster so you can put it in your mail-rental queue. If you'd rather buy the DVD or Blu-ray outright, the site offers the Amazon link to the product.

For movies that are currently in the theaters, Fancast will direct you to Fandango for local showtimes and tickets.

Think about all that: this one site offers you a flexible array of options to access safe, legal content, whether you want to catch it as it airs, get it delivered on-demand, download it to your computer, or receive it in the mail. You can rent or own. And for lots of the video you're looking for, you can watch it streaming right at the site, for free.

So no matter what you're looking for, Fancast is a portal to help you access it. But that's not apparent when you first visit the site. When you first arrive at the front page, there's scant evidence that Fancast has a vast, searchable, fairly easy-to-navigate database of information about the content, cast, crew, and even music of TV shows and movies. But Fancast does.

And if you register a profile at Fancast, then when you browse through shows, movies, cast and crew, you can start rating them and identifying your favorites. Using that information about your preferences--the more you provide, the better--the site makes recommendations for what you should be watching now on live TV, on-demand (including the free videos on Fancast), and in theaters. If you need a reminder when something is going to be on TV, you can just click the "Notify Me" button on its page and you'll get an email ahead of time.

The only content that isn't integrated with the rest of the site is Fancast's set of several blogs about the news and stars of TV and cinema; they're more of a front-page bonus to round out a site about video entertainment.

What Fancast delivers is a ton of content, tied together with an underlying database that helps you find and access the content you want, safely, legally, wherever it may be . . . and often free.

There's money to be made in getting people what they want: Fancast has managed to combine several different business models in one site, with the occasional ad, paid downloads, and tie-ins with other services all contributing. If that's what it takes to support a one-stop shop for viewers to browse, search for and access what they like, we're all for it.

Vuze, previously known as Azureus, is yet another great example of how a technology that has commonly been used for negative purposes can be harnessed and made safe for the benefit of content creators, distributors and consumers alike.

Recently we've discussed how peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has allowed some legitimate websites to lower distribution costs for digital media. Vuze uses a special kind of P2P protocol with which you may or may not already be fam

iliar, called BitTorrent, which allows users to download scattered pieces of a file from many fellow users at once.  While you do have to download the entire file before you can play it, this kind of distribution can be very fast and quite robust.

This alternative to streaming allows Vuze to specialize in high-quality, even high-definition (HD) content. Almost 15% of the tens of thousands of available videos are HD, and Vuze sets a fairly high standard of quality for the other 85% as well.

Because of the security and speed of this platform, Vuze doesn't just offer video: music and even computer games are also available for download.

To take advantage of this technology, you do have to download Vuze's own desktop application, which is both a downloader and media player. In addition, it can be used to browse Vuze's searchable directory of media, which is also available at the website.

Unlike many sites using this technology, Vuze controls which content makes it onto the network, which minimizes piracy and unsafe activity. Because the site is secure and isn't crowded with low-quality content, Vuze has been able to sign on 150 content partners, including a number of major studios and networks.

But it's not all left to them. If you own good, quality content, you can publish it for free through Vuze, and while you can always make it available to others at no cost, there's also the option (for video and games) to monetize your content so that users either view advertising or pay directly (at whatever price you set) to gain access. Either way, you get half of the revenue that Vuze collects (well, net revenue for the advertising option). It's quite a simple process.

It's simple: Vuze is all about quality. Consumers who have become accustomed to streaming video of dubious quality may not know what they're missing; Vuze can show them.

We recently got a look at Cisco's Telepresence, a teleconferencing service that allows multiple users in multiple locations to have real-time face-to-face interactions. It's a very cool solution that allows businesses, their clients, or even just individuals to take part in high-def video, spatial audio conferences around a virtual conference table from anywhere in the world. There's a really good demonstration of the technology in this video on YouTube.

For people who remember the days of traveling around the world to meet with clients, colleagues, or business partners, this is really mind-blowing technology. But like a lot of the great new services and applications that are made possible by high-speed broadband Internet connections, fully realizing the benefits of something like Telepresence--or even a lower-budget alternative like a PC webcam and microphone--will depend on the ability to manage network traffic to avoid things like latency, jitter, and delays in data transmission.

It's one thing to experience a delay in a video stream when you're sharing a home movie of your cat doing something cute on YouTube. But when you're bringing together business associates in locations around the world for a negotiation, a meeting, or a training seminar--or more importantly, if you're a doctor monitoring a patient in a remote location--you definitely want a stable, reliable transmission. And that takes a reasonable degree of network management.

It's easy to argue against prioritizing some content over others, and for a lot of applications, best effort delivery makes sense--e-mails, Web pages, and non-streaming downloads, for example. But for streaming high definition content--whether it's for a Telepresence meeting, a remote surgery, a VoIP call, or even just a high-def stream of the Muppet Movie to your television--"best effort" just isn't always good enough.

UPDATE

Wall Street and Tech points out that Wachovia spent $1.5 million on Telepresence, but they say they've already made their money back in less than two years.

The firm has set up five telepresence studios -- conference rooms tricked out with Cisco equipment such as cameras, microphones and a large flat-screen, wall-mounted monitor -- two in Charlotte and one each in Richmond, St. Louis and San Antonio. Each cost slightly less than $300,000 to set up, but the audio and video quality, which I observed first-hand in an interview via telepresence last night, is excellent.  ...

Just by having executives use telepresence instead of traveling to certain meetings, Wachovia is saving $70,000 per month in travel expenses. The firm is starting to use telepresence for staff meetings across locations, particularly since the firm's latest studio is a CTS 3200 model, a larger room that seats up to 18 people in front of three 65-inch high-definition plasma displays.

...not to mention the reduced environmental impact.

Lots of TV networks have some online presence, and many of those have taken steps toward putting an appreciable amount of their regular video on their sites. Some have tried to develop complementary content so as to offer something special to keep viewers' attention.

But in terms of the breadth and sheer amount of content, and the evident attention paid to creating a tight online operation, there aren't many that match the ambition of MTV.com.

It's startling. For those of us who are old enough to remember, but young enough to have been paying attention, MTV gradually transformed from Music Television to Reality TV. MTV.com brings them both together, and adds a bunch on for good measure.

MTV didn't skimp on the "M." They advertise that they currently have more than 16,000 music videos--real, official videos--in their easily searchable database, which puts them in a league of their own. But that's just the flashy part; even a casual perusal of their pages shows an uncommon attention to detail. It all links together: music videos linking to lyrics, artist pages linking to photos and news about the artist, live performances, discography, and the link to the artist's website. You can even see what other videos the director has done.

That's saying nothing of the several dozen MTV Radio online stations, set up through a Rhapsody player. Rhapsody also invites users to buy songs from their MP3 store: if you like what you're hearing anywhere on the site, you can click the omnipresent Rhapsody link on the page and it will take you to search for what that artist has to offer.

They pull you in with free content, and if you want it "To Go," it's available for a small price. That, the MTV Shop, and the occasional ad are the only really visible ways that MTV is capitalizing on all that quality content.

MTV isn't just about the professionally produced content, either: it allows users to upload their own videos of live shows, as well as photos and text. And if the material is good, it might end up on the blog for the uploads section of the site (You R Here) or even on TV.

And that's only one of the five music-specific blogs run by MTV. They also have a newsroom blog as well as a blog for movies, another for comic book movies specifically (really), and one for video games. And the blogs aren't just tokens; they're all very frequently updated and they get the first shot at content from time to time (like newly released movie posters, or exclusive interviews).

Of course, that rule especially applies to the blog they run for their own (reality) TV shows. And MTV has individual pages and video for an obscene number of shows and specials. They have a page dedicated just to music from their TV shows. And they have mobile content for some of their most popular shows.

Then, MTV takes it a step further and holds it all together with a social network (as of this writing, the MTV community has over 570,000 people). Users can set up a simple profile which serves them on different parts of the site in different ways, like uploading content or joining a community.

All of this, along with a bunch of other content I can't possibly cover in a blog post, shows impressive attention to detail and a commitment to the online space as an integral part of their overall strategy and business model. It's a bold foray onto the web for an established content provider/creator. We're fans.

Several websites are advertising themselves as online television networks, and several television networks have made much of their content available on their websites. Let's take a look at a site that's trying most straightforwardly to bring the home cable experience to the internet: TidalTV.

What sets TidalTV apart is just how badly they want to be the on-your-monitor version of regular TV. The most notable feature upon entering the site is the digital-cable-like channel guide, complete with programming schedules for every channel.

In truth, the channel guide is superfluous, since everything is available on demand. Although you can certainly just tune into a channel and let it play like TV, you can also move forward or backward at any time, or even go to shows that aren't on the current schedule, by clicking any of the category tabs at the top of the screen.

Since TidalTV is all about professional, branded content, their depth and variety are entirely dependent on their partnerships with official content providers. TidalTV is relatively new, just in open beta at the moment, but it has partnerships with 57 of these providers. Unlike many sites, several of Tidal's partnerships are news sources like CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, or even the Weather Channel - another aspect of TidalTV bringing it closer to regular TV.

And like most sites, yes, TidalTV does have short, marked commercial breaks during each show.

TidalTV aims to keep loading times very low, to allow for quick channel-flipping and to keep the experience more TV-like. As a result, the video isn't premium quality. It's just supposed to be easy, uncomplicated, and user-friendly: no need to download any extra software, no social network profiles or recommendations or ratings. You just go to the site and it starts playing. You change the channel, and maybe you look for on-demand content. That's all there is to TidalTV.

There's usually a big market for user-friendliness and simplicity, if it's done right. Whether TidalTV can pull it off in a market with many competitors, time will tell.

One of the great pleasures of new distribution technologies is the ever-greater variety of content they make available.  Not only can the people with obscure and eclectic tastes find quality content much more easily, but other consumers can develop an appreciation for such things.  The long tail of content is more accessible for everybody.

This week we're reviewing a site that's aiming to be, for video, synonymous with "niche": it's called Babelgum.

Babelgum brings to the internet a dedicated platform for independent, yet professionally produced, video. That's right, they have standards: they require a decent video and audio quality, they confirm that all videos are done by professionals.

Babelgum is aiming for the content that lies between the familiar networks and the roughest of the emerging talent. Babelgum is an online video site for the next generation of creators.

Instead of mainstream entertainment content, Babelgum carries content from film festivals and independent films of all kinds (including music videos).  For these Babelgum offers awards - not for the bald purposes of a talent search but to highlight good work. It carries sports you probably won't catch on your TV, and various networks with niche appeal, with a particular specialization in content with themes of social and environmental issues - hence the "green bubble" logo and the extensive use of green throughout the site. 

Incidentally, the Babelgum name is relevant, too: "Babel" for the scriptural Babel composed of the united people of the world, speaking one tongue and proud enough to build the Tower to the heavens; and "gum" for the "social glue" holding us together.

All of this content is launched through a downloaded player which is typically kept at full-screen. At that size, the video is very decent albeit slightly below broadcast quality. And the player has all kinds of little tools around the edge of the video that fade away during regular playback, bringing the full range of the site's tools onto one screen: video settings, personal profiles, widgets, a channel guide, and more.

Users can create their own "smart channels" as a couple of other sites have attempted, this one using tags (so if you enjoy a motorcycle race, Babelgum looks for other videos labeled with motorcycle, motorsports, racing, etc.) in addition to personal favorites and ratings. Users can also create and join "communities" based around similar videos, although Babelgum's quality standards sometimes leave it with insufficient content to sustain many unique communities.

That said, there's enough variety of obscure content that new users will find some things to enjoy that they've never seen before. And as Babelgum builds up more content over time, that's bound to enrich the experience.

Why aren't there a bunch of other Babelgum-like sites out there? Until recently, hosting a range of niche content was prohibitively expensive; but Babelgum boasts its own peer-to-peer (P2P) backbone to lower the cost of distribution (see our post on P2P).  The ability to do this helped them create a viable business model.

Babelgum preserves the experience--and the low, low cost of $Free--by using rather unobtrusive advertising: rather than regular commercial breaks that other sites have, Babelgum's ads skirt around the edge of the screen and allow the video to continue. The ads can be distracting (it is advertising, after all), but they don't monopolize your attention or create a mandatory break in the action.

The result is, new and relatively low-profile creators get to strut their stuff without being crowded by blockbusters.  Consumers get a one-stop outlet for fairly high-quality independent content. That's Babelgum.

This week, we're taking a look at a website that's trying to bridge the computer/living room divide - from "the tube" to "the series of tubes": this week's Arts+Labs review is for ABC. 

As with all TV networks, bridging the divide means putting their existing content on the web. ABC's video player handles that task quite well. ABC showed up early in the race to get mainstream content onto the web, and their playback quality has been exemplary from the beginning.

The quality changes during playback to account for your system performance, but even the standard resolution video holds up well when expanded to full screen. If you have the proper setup (especially a high-speed connection), the quality climbs right to the top.

As for quantity, ABC is showing full episodes for 17 of its 24 primetime and late-night shows - 23 total, if you don't count Scrubs, which ABC acquired for the show's upcoming eighth season. Episodes for nine of those programs can be viewed in HD.

These numbers are lower than those for the other major networks, but a big part of the reason for that is ABC's near-total reliance on hour-long shows--and Dancing with the Stars, which occupies two and a half hours of prime time each week. Another reason is that ABC doesn't stream full episodes of its daytime programming online.

To complement their programming, ABC has made moves toward something all of the networks are attempting to some degree: keeping viewers connected to their favorite shows even when they aren't in front of the television.

To that end, ABC has created individual pages for 28 of its shows. These 28 shows account for almost all of the 31 message boards they've set up, and 13 of those account for most of the 20 blogs run by ABC. The website even includes podcasts for several of the shows, as well as some show-themed games and widgets.

It doesn't end at the web, either. ABC wants you to connect through your mobile, too: fans of both primetime and daytime shows can sign up for text alerts, and various shows have ringtones and wallpaper available.

Again, this is all clearly designed to reach out for viewers even when their favorite show isn't on - keep them connected to fellow enthusiasts, provide them with extra material surrounding the show, perhaps give the viewer some input (voting on reality show contestants, for example) and otherwise frequently draw their attention back to the show. Involved viewers are repeat viewers.

Having top quality content is a significant advantage for sites such as ABC, and they have the quality content because they have a clear business model that protects the creators and the viewers.  By making its content easily accessible online, ABC is making their creative content even more valuable for consumers.

"It's not just about taking television and repurposing it on the internet. It's about discovery, it's about community, it's about interactivity. There is entertainment in the community." - Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, on the future of online video.

This week, we review a site that's testing Michael Eisner's argument that the future of online video is in discovery, community and interactivity - with an emphasis on discovery. It's called Crackle.

Crackle is more tightly focused than Veoh or YouTube, and seems to like it that way. Crackle advertises that they're all about emerging talent, but there's also a bit of established talent trying original, new things to draw you in.

For example, comedian Penn Jillette (the talking half of Penn & Teller, and recent contestant on Dancing With the Stars) was given a set of high-def video cameras and told to rant into them whenever the urge strikes him, yielding a series of short videos called Penn Says.

Crackle features original web series of every genre, each regularly producing short episodes, along with a mix of short films. And the overwhelming majority of these videos are created by the emerging talent they're talking about.

The straightforward purpose of Crackle is to attract this new talent and build new content with it. The site, which is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, has run a dozen contests since summer 2007 in animation, short films, standup and sketch comedy.

Good entertainment rises to the top through user ratings and a team of editors. Those who win get to pitch their and feature concepts and acts to various divisions of Sony, for a chance at working with other artists and Sony resources to make more content. Sony gets to pick the cream of the crop.

In the meantime, contestants and users are uploading a great deal of original content. And while users can search for that content, Crackle isn't inviting you to browse through it with big lists of the popular videos of the day. That's not the specialty of the site, and the unique mix of content created by this dynamic is the result of a deliberate change in business model that made Crackle...well, Crackle.

See, Crackle wasn't always like this. It started out as Grouper, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing application. Users created groups with other trusted users, and could trade an unlimited volume of files within those groups.

And while this did allow some people to trade documents, home videos and photos with their families and other trusted peers, like a number of other P2P applications, it had a great potential for abuse, as well.

But Grouper restyled itself in late 2005 as a user-generated video site, and was part of the wave of success of that business model. In 2006, Sony Pictures Entertainment acquired Grouper. Change was coming. But as the founder of Grouper told Variety in 2007, they had already been considering a transition to something a bit more boutique:

User-generated vid has its place on the Web, but "it's not a business for us," Felser said. "The content is rarely exclusive, and it's hard to monetize," he said, noting that advertisers demand far more certainty on the type of content before they'll spent big bucks on ad buys.

So with the help and guidance of Sony, Grouper traded in its business model yet again, this time into a multi-platform (mostly Sony platforms, like the PSP and Sony Bravia) video network with a purpose beyond competing for eyes on videos that other websites also carried. And thus it became Crackle.

So Crackle is trying something different than the Veohs and YouTubes. They're attracting new content, letting the cream rise to the top, and leveraging that talent to create even more new content. They're giving little-known artists a chance to get noticed and maybe even get some backing. And the result is a unique mix of original content for consumers to try out for free, on demand.

It's nice when everyone wins.

Veoh labels itself an "internet television network."  They may be selling themselves short.

On the one hand, Veoh offers a bevy of high-quality, legal content, most of which is under the "TV Shows" tab.  They carry full episodes and clips from several major networks, but also from many more obscure channels and even dozens of web series.  Since its creation, Veoh has vastly expanded its partnerships to give it a wide array of mainstream and independent content (including some clips in HD), so if you're looking for something that interests you, you'll find it without much fuss.

But Veoh does something very different from television. Veoh also has user-generated content, even pulling video from YouTube into its "videos" library.  On the one hand, this makes Veoh a very rich experience; on the other hand, even with flexible search options and a "family filter" to help users find what they want, you might still have to sift a bit to find exactly what you want within the videos section.

Combining these two models on one site makes Veoh more of a wide-ranging, on-demand service than a television network.  And Veoh exploits that fact with VeohTV (still in open beta), which not only takes the service to a full-screen out-of-browser experience, but expands on it with several useful features. 

• VeohTV allows you to store videos offline for later viewing, like a DVR, and create playlists if you like. 
  
• If you have S-video ports on your computer and TV set, you can bring VeohTV's broadcast quality service to your living room. 
  
• If you're away from your personal computer, you can use the Home Delivery feature from any other computer to browse for videos and "send" them to your home computer for download.
  
• Veoh and VeohTV don't rest entirely on direct content delivery.  Like a number of other sites we will be reviewing, they make something more out of the experience by tying it all together with a personal profile and a social network.   Having a profile allows the user to subscribe to various shows, channels and publishers, and it also empowers Veoh to make recommendations based on preferences, which are revealed by viewing habits and honed by the ratings system.  For the water-cooler aspect of TV culture, users can customize their profiles (limited though they may be), add widgets, find friends, and even keep up with what their friends are watching or see how friends rate the things they watch.
  

Veoh is uniquely able to broadcast lengthy, broadcast-quality video because it is partly powered by a proprietary person-to-person (P2P) distribution network, showing that P2P can be secure, safe and legitimate.  Ambitious, innovative sites like Veoh are making the online experience better for both users and artists.