"'Online Television' news" 

It's no secret that most of the biggest online video advertisers are
simply finding another place to run their 15- and 30-second TV ads.
They do this because there often is no budget for new online creative,
and the online buy is just an extension of what they're already doing
on TV.

But what if you could change those ads and make them interactive and
customized -- on the cheap? That's the promise of Israeli startup
Eyeview Digital, which, after more than three years in development, is
starting to implement its technology for advertisers such as Johnson &
Johnson and Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Here's how it works: Eyeview's technology allows advertisers to
customize video ads in real time, targeting different demographics and
geographies with various creative. So for example, a retailer could
customize for the weather, a movie studio for a local megaplex, a
local auto dealer for different local markets.

Eyeview charges on a cost-per-thousand basis, a percentage of the
total cost of the media buy (around 10%). CEO Oren Harnevo -- brother
of Ran Harnevo, CEO of another video startup acquired by AOL, 5min --
says the technology works in online video, mobile and, theoretically,
on TV, provided the video can be delivered over an IP network. So far
the company has distribution deals with AOL (natch), AdapTV, TidalTV
and Collective Media.

Mr. Harnevo said when he started developing the tech, he was most
interested in merging his two career interests: computer science and
film. "I always wanted to combine the two," he said. "The basis of
technology is, how do we use computer science to make media better?"
The ad application was the opportunity he saw in the marketplace.

Eyeview has raised $6 million over three years from Google exec
chairman Eric Schmidt's investment vehicle Innovation Endeavors, as
well as Lightspeed Partners and Gemini Israel Funds. The company has
15 developers in Israel and an office of several sales execs in New
York.

# posted by andrew newton at 5:10 PM 0 comments

HBO Go, the pay cable channel's Web service, doesn't formally launch
on the iPad until Monday. But no need to wait: You can download it now
at iTunes.

As advertised, the free app is a mirror of HBO's existing broadband
service: It lets the channel's subscribers stream a very deep catalog
of HBO's shows and movies, on demand, via both Wi-Fi and wireless
networks.

It will also work on Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as 20
phones running Google's Android; it won't work on tablets running
Google's newest Honeycomb OS, though. (Demo video from BTIG's Rich
Greenfield at the bottom of this post)

The two catches:

The service is available to most cable customers, with the exception
of Time Warner Cable and Cablevision subscribers. Time Warner Cable
says it's working on a deal; Cablevision won't comment.
It's a very deep catalog–1,400 titles, including the complete run of
great series like "The Sopranos" and "The Wire"–but it will still have
gaps that could frustrate HBO's most avid users. I'd like to try David
Simon's "Treme" again, for instance, but I can't get last season's
episodes; just the new ones that started airing last week.
Some of you will bemoan the fact that you have to be a cable
subscriber to get this–there's no broadband-only option, a la Netflix
and Hulu Plus. But that's the point: Parent company Time Warner is
completely wedded to the cable industry and wants to build as many
incentives as it can to keep you there, too.

Still, this stuff is lightyears ahead of where the cable business was
just a couple years ago, where paying subscribers had no way to get
these shows except on their TVs, or by buying it again on DVD or
iTunes.

And if you really are a dedicated cord-cutter, and a patient one, you
may eventually get your way: I can imagine a scenario where HBO does
offer this stuff directly to consumers, and if it happens within a few
years, I won't be completely shocked.

# posted by andrew newton at 1:35 PM 0 comments

Ever heard of Dropship? It's an open-source project that "enables
arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts."
Dropbox hopes you haven't; they tried to squelch it this week, and
even accidentally reported that it was subject to a DMCA takedown
notice, with predictably futile results. I'm mostly sympathetic: I'm a
huge fan of their service, Dropship was a clear violation of their
terms, and for obvious reasons they don't want to turn into an
anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Unfortunately, they
accidentally built a system which enabled just that.

How about Sony's PlayStation Network? Of course you have. It was so
thoroughly hacked this week that Sony had to shut it down
indefinitely. Did you also know that Sony's PS3 firmware is
effectively wide open, because they made a hilariously stupid security
mistake? Did you know that that's probably how PSN got hacked, and
that it raised the spectre of the hacker(s) taking over every
connected PlayStation 3 in the world and turning them into by far the
biggest botnet in history? That probably wasn't what Sony had in mind,
but they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.

How about the new Google Docs Android app? Came out this week, and
it's pretty great. Among its many features is the ability to take a
picture of an image with text and have that text automatically OCRed
and turned into a document. Can't wait 'til they integrate Google
Translate into that, too, and recapitulate last year's hot app World
Lens. But I bet book publishers are pretty unhappy. Not long ago, if
you wanted to scan a book you had to actually build a scanner, or buy
a copy and turn every page. Now would-be book pirates can just
crowdsource 10 people to go to bookstores and take 20 pictures each,
et voila: 400 scanned pages in Google Docs. Easier book piracy
probably isn't what Google had in mind, but they accidentally built a
system which enables just that.

This was also the week that people who keep remotely controllable
Internet-enabled camera/microphone/GPSes on them at all times
expressed outraged surprise when they learned their privacy is at
risk. The panopticon probably isn't what the mobile industry had in
mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that.

What do these all have in common? The unexpected results of connecting
client devices to the cloud. (Yeah, I don't really like the term
either, but it's better than the alternatives.) People talk about
"moving to the cloud," as if we haven't already. The heavy lifting may
happen on the server farms (when they're up) but every connected
computer, phone, and game console already serves as a computing
cloud's eye, ear, and tentacle.

Emergent properties. Unintended consequences. Get used to 'em. My
favourite Douglas Adams books are the Dirk Gently novels, in which the
protagonist makes use of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all
things" to solve crimes in hilariously unexpected ways. Now we're
literally building that interconnectedness into (nearly) all things.
So we shouldn't be too surprised to find ourselves moving into a Dirk
Gently future, in which off-kilter left-field ricochet consequences
happen at an ever-increasing rate. You can bet that those cited above
are just the beginning — and that there's a lot of money to be made in
seeing them before they happen.

# posted by andrew newton at 1:09 PM 0 comments