Google jumps into the TV business with Fiber

Amazing how quickly the television space is changing. As Google unveiled its new one-gigabit-per-second fiber service in Kansas City today, it made a surprise announcement: residents will be able to sign up for a new Google Fiber TV service with a respectable list of channels out of the gate, tablet viewing, searchable programming, a HD DVR (up to 500 hours and 8 shows at once) and a free Google Nexus tablet thrown in to use as a remote control.

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Brightcove’s Zencoder Purchase Could Be The First Step In Its Transition To A Freemium Model

Brightcove announced its first acquisition as a public company today, with plans to acquire cloud encoding startup Zencoder for $30 million. And while the purchase will add a small amount of incremental revenue, the bigger strategic bet for Brightcove could be around making its video offerings more flexible and extensible, and hooking developers with more of a freemium business model.

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Google unveils ultrafast Internet/TV in Kansas City | Reuters

“Google Inc made its foray into the market for bundled Internet and television services on Thursday, promising access speeds more than 100 times faster than those of traditional U.S. cable and telecommunications companies.

 

Google Fiber’s ultra high-speed connections and television offerings are aimed at surpassing those of current providers, allowing users to search live channels, Netflix, YouTube, recorded shows and tens of thousands of hours of on-demand programming.”

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Streaming the Olympics: How the BBC and Adobe do it – GigaOm

“U.K. sports fans will get 24 live streams of the action once the Olympic Games unfold in London this weekend. The BBC is relying on Adobe to deliver these streams, and the company is using it as a big test case for its new Project Primetime.

 

Here’s how this will look on the ground: The BBC is providing Adobe will broadcast-quality MPEG-2 feeds of the games, which the company will repackage on the fly for different devices and use cases. Adobe will use both its own HTTP Dynamic streaming (HDS) as well as Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming. For the BBC, this means that it can provide adaptive streaming for a variety of devices, with bit rates automatically adapting to bandwidth constraints without the need for a video stream to restart and rebuffer.”

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Online Video Ads Hit a Record: 11 Billion Spots Streamed in June – ReadWriteWeb

“It’s official: Online video advertising is a force to be reckoned with. More than 11 billion ads streamed over the Web in June, amounting to 25% of all video content viewed.

 

That online video ad traffic, as reported by comScore, translated to 4.6 billion minutes watched by 180 million Internet users in the United States. The average duration of an online ad was four seconds”

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@Brightcove Acquires Zencoder « Zencoder Cloud Encoding Blog

“Today, Brightcove entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zencoder. Zencoder will continue to operate as an independent service, but we will do so as a part of Brightcove.

 

We are really excited about this, and hope you will be too, for the reasons outlined below. In summary, Brightcove is a complementary company in the video space who believes in our developer focus, is committed to standalone API-based services, and will keep Zencoder operating largely as you see it today – only better, and with more resources behind us.”

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