First Legal Streaming S...

Lately, we’ve been seeing more and more big television events come with an online streaming counterpart. Sporting and televised events are showing up online with increasing frequency, with the 2010 Olympics seeming to be one of the first big global events where both viewers and media publicly recognized the power and potential of carrying an event like that online. This year, for the first time in history, the Super Bowl is being shown online, for free. And it’s completely legal. I was going to say “in a brilliant move by the NFL,” but this should be default. Showing an enormously popular event like the Super Bowl online should not be a “brilliant” move. It should just be second nature. But, wishful thinking aside, the NFL and NBC both wanted to give home viewers options to watch the big game on the Web, without having to rub elbows with the riff raff at a local sports bar. Interestingly, leading up to the game, over the course of the last week, the Feds began seizing domain names owned by popular sports streaming sites, like Firstrowsports.tv, Firstrowsports.com and Soccertvlive.net, etc. You can read more at TorrentFreak here . Obviously, that action was taken in the name of freedom and preventing piracy, but it’s also in part to protecting the fairly sizable interests of the NFL and NBC. In spite of that ignominious beginning, especially in light of SOPA and all the controversy lately over seizures like MegaUpload, the streaming online experience tonight during the Super Bowl was pretty amazing. Pre-game coverage started at 2pm on NBCSports.com, with streaming capabilities featuring the ability to pause and rewind, embedded live streams from Twitter and Facebook, and four different camera angles to boot. While that in and of itself is exciting, the 2012 Super Bowl streaming experience itself left a lot to be desired. The actual banner ads, the online ads being served on NBCSports.com, weren’t particularly offensive, or a pain in the ass. But, the problem is that most people watch the Super Bowl in groups, not as individuals, and most choose to do so through a projector, or streaming the Web onto their TV or a big screen. In addition, many people watch the Super Bowl strictly for ads or for the halftime show, which, in spite of the ads finding a way to be disappointing each and every year, is a spectacle year in, year out — without fail. Even if the music is awful. For streaming viewers looking to watch ads in realtime, there was a tab which they could mouse over to watch all the ads after they aired, but the commercials were not shown during the breaks in the online broadcast, when they were actually supposed to air. Streaming viewers who chose not to pick their own commercials just got an enormous eyeful of the same ads, repeating ad nauseam. Airing on television, live on the boob tube, were the full slate of “creative” ads, from each and every brand; however, airing live on the Web was a loop of GE, Budweiser, and Samsung commercials, punctuated annoyingly by Rainn Wilson, who just became increasingly annoying. The one bonus: Both the Chevy commercial and the Samsung commercial aired online before they did on TV, so streamers got a sneak peek. I realize I may be complaining about small inconveniences, when really I should be celebrating the fact that the Super Bowl was streaming online, legally, for free, but … For those looking to watch the halftime show, expecting to see Madonna and company, all they got was an endless interview shot in a hallway. Personally, it didn’t completely ruin my Super Bowl experience to be deprived of Madonna’s performance, but it certainly seems that NBC swung and missed on that one. Strike two. Furthermore, if you are an American living abroad or wanted to watch the biggest football game of the year, NBC only offered limited options, as the network’s broadcast rights didn’t extend internationally. Sure, increasingly, big sporting events are moving online , but significant limitations endure. The Super Bowl will air on CBS next year, and CBS might as well get started now if it’s going to provide a legitimate alternative. Including the halftime show in coverage online will be significant, as will providing viewing for international football fans and Americans living abroad. While there was a lot of great functionality, and the quality of the broadcast was pretty good (depending on your Internet connection), and it was very cool to be able to switch between camera views. The future is clearly here, but sometimes it looks blurry in Silverlight. That being said, NBC definitely has a grin from ear to ear. The game was fantastic, it went down to the last minute, and The Voice still gets to air in primetime on both coasts. The Super Bowl also proved that spending millions on commercials still can’t buy you creativity, even though geeks were very excited about that Best Buy commercial.

At Least Yahoo’s User E...

Yahoo’s fourth quarter results are as underwhelming as most people expected: earnings were at $0.24 a share from $1.17 billion in revenue. But some of the brightest spots, beyond new chief executive Scott Thompson now taking the helm , are the engagement numbers. Take a look at the slide below, from the company’s earnings deck . Worldwide unique visits to both Yahoo-branded sites and to Yahoo properties were up by 12%. Since this data is from comScore , I pulled the measurement firms’ latest numbers to provide a little more detail. They show that Yahoo staged a minor visitor recovery over the last three months of the year in the US, ending with nearly 176 million monthly uniques. Worldwide, it did so through November, but then dropped slightly last month to end at nearly 692 million uniques. (ComScore graphs below, US first and world second.) Page views, meanwhile, were mixed, based on the data provided by Yahoo. The “Communications & communities” category, which includes Mail, Groups, Flickr and a hodgepodge of other products, fell by 13%, the biggest drop in two years. Search declined 4%, the worst quarter since Q2 of 2010. Media, which includes the Homepage, the mobile web apps, News, Sports, Finance, and other content sites, was the gainer. It continued to build on single-digit gains, with a 7% increase in the past quarter. Media also continued a streak of growth in minutes that started in the third quarter of last year. Communications also has seen very large gains in minutes, which appear to be from its new Mail rollout. The company has some more color on the content effort, via the earnings call today. The so-called “Tentpoles and Anchors” (aka the “Mixed Metaphor”) strategy. The company focused on covering big events like the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the British Royal Wedding. It’s planning to build on that in 2012 with coverage of the US elections and the Olympics. It also hired more editorial staffers last year, added the ABC News content partnership. Yahoo Screens for destinations now includes 14 new shows. One in six Americans online watched one of these videos in December. It also extended Yahoo Publishing to more than 136 sites, added its social bar to news and other content sites, and added a new mail platform to 80% of global users, and created new iPad experiences.

Ooyala Brings Free, Liv...

Tennis anyone? You have to love this. Realtime event coverage startup Livestream recently brought commercial-free, streaming coverage of New Year’s Eve in Times Square to the Web. If you caught more than a few minutes of network TV coverage of NYE, you would have been subjected to the ungodly number (and frequency) of ads. Livestream’s commercial-free coverage was a welcome respite. This morning, Ooyala , one of the biggest web video and analytics providers, is volleying back with some live coverage of its own. The startup has partnered with Tennis Australia (the governing body of tennis within Australia) to bring free live coverage of the first major tennis tournament of the year to people around the globe. Interested viewers can click over to Australianopen.com to watch live matches from all seven courts, along with special features, highlights, and interviews. According to the Ooyala team, Tennis Australia chose the startup because of its ability to quickly integrate its digital solutions with a capacity for potentially millions of viewers. (This follows ESPN’s recent announcement that Ooyala is now powering all video on ESPN.com .) Something else that’s kind of cool? This is the first time the Australian Open will be delivered online for free. However, unlike Livestream’s coverage of New Years Eve in Times Square, Ooyala’s live coverage will not be commercial-free. But, luckily, tennis fans won’t be headed for an onslaught of advertising, as Ooyala’s VP of Marketing, Allen Bush, told us that streams will have a 15-second preroll sponsored by Rolex — and are commercial-free thereafter. Live, online viewing was available during the most recent Olympics, and it seems this is yet another example that the world’s largest sporting events are following suit. Hopefully, this will continue. Ooyala and others are proving to big media that this kind of action is good for business — and, more importantly, fans. Now if they just orchestrate a Federer vs Nadal final … Watch the action here .

Surveillance

Your phone might be spying on you . The many cameras you pass every day can recognize your face . Facebook, despite its grudging concessions , still wants you to broadcast your personal life. “Eye in the sky” drones are already watching over borders ; next, they’ll patrol the Olympics . It won’t be long before police drones are omnipresent in the skies over every major city, and then every town. Welcome to the 21st century. Smile! You’re probably on TV. Especially if you live in the kind of repressive state that imprisons its citizens without trial. (You know, like America , if the US Senate has its way.) According to both Wikileaks and that well-known bastion of the left wing The Wall Street Journal , such regimes have been buying up Western-made high-tech surveillance systems like business travellers on unlimited expense accounts. To quote the former, “companies are making billions selling sophisticated tracking tools to government buyers, flouting export rules, and turning a blind eye to dictatorial regimes that abuse human rights.” Which kind of puts Facebook privacy violations in perspective, so I’m not going to bash Mark Zuckerberg, for once. The guy probably genuinely believes in the merits of a transparency society where everybody’s life is essentially on display all the time. Or even if he doesn’t, he figures that our ever-doubling tech level means we’re inevitably heading there anyways, so he may as well make a few dozen billion dollars from that sea change while he’s at it. Fair enough. But a transparent society can’t work if it’s built out of one-way glass. The powers that be are thrilled by the prospect of using all this new surveillance tech to keep an eye on the unruly masses, but they seem much less excited about its effect their own privacy. The Occupy movement (which, you may recall, I have mixed emotions about ) can cite a whole bunch of examples of protestors arrested or shot with rubber bullets for the sin of photographing police, and of the police expelling and restricting media from the evictions in NYC and LA .

Japan’s NHK To Broadcas...

If full HD resolution isn’t enough for you, then how about 16 times the resolution of full HD? Japan’s national public broadcasting organization NHK has been working on so-called Ultra HD technology for years , and now it’s ready for the first big test in public. NHK is planning public screenings of some events at the London Olympics next year in Ultra HD resolution (7,680×4,320 pixels) – not only in Japan, but also in the UK and the US. A first test of actually transmitting that amount of data internationally was completed back in March this year. The video embedded below doesn’t go into details as far as the public screenings are concerned, but it does deliver some interesting tidbits about Ultra-HD, for example the ability to produce surround sound with 22.2 channel audio: Video courtesy of Diginfo TV