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from India Insight:
iStream plans to become next Netflix for India
If you are an Indian sports buff, but were stuck in the office during the Euro Cup or the India-Sri Lanka cricket series, chances are the live streaming of the matches you caught on your computer or smartphone was from iStream.com.
A video streaming site that started off as a regional partner for YouTube and Dailymotion, iStream bagged the exclusive Internet streaming rights for two of the most-watched sports events in the country.
But regional content is the site's forte -- news, television shows and movies mainly in southern Indian languages Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, but also in Hindi and English. It has some 60-65 Indian television channels as content partners, and is in talks with U.S.- based production houses such as FremantleMedia Ltd, which owns "American Idol", and UK-based "Big Brother" maker Endemol and ITV for content rights.
But iStream.com plans to go one step further: produce its own shows. "If there’s scope for an 'America's Got Talent' or a 'MasterChef' sort of program in India, we'll definitely look at having an online version of that," said co-founder Radhakrishnan Ramachandran, who goes by Radha.
from MediaFile:
African Web video service Iroko raises more funds, targets cable TV
A store in Nairobi, Kenya selling Nollywood movies (Photo: Reuters)
Iroko Partners, an online distributor of African movies and music, has raised another $2 million in its latest round of funding from a Swedish venture capital group as it seeks to take the service to cable and satellite TV partners in the U.S. and Europe.
The Lagos, Nigeria-based company raised the funds from Sweden's Kinnevik, an early investor in Groupon Inc. Iroko previously raised $8 million from U.S.-based hedge fund Tiger Global in April as investors in emerging markets seek to tap into one of the fastest growing movie businesses in the world.
Kinnevik investments head, Henrik Persson, said his firm, which has invested in African telecoms, sees tremendous opportunity in African media and online services. "It has very low penetration and we see a really strong growth trend. He added: "A part of our investment philosophy is that we think that the perceived risk is higher than the real risk in this market..what people see as a lack of opportunity is a lack of supply."
from MediaFile:
Video streaming, file sharing — bad for network security, good for security business
Palo Alto Networks, the network security company, that modernized the firewall with its web application inspection took a look at what people do at work by analyzing Internet traffic in over 2,000 organizations.
Seems a lot of people watch videos.
In fact, Palo Alto's semi-annual application usage and risk report says the bandwidth used by streaming video more than tripled to 13 percent from 4 percent in December 2011.
from Alison Frankel:
2nd Circ. to Internet (and YouTube): You can’t knowingly infringe
I was surprised back in June 2010 when U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton of federal court in Manhattan granted summary judgment to YouTube and Google in a pair of copyright infringement actions by Viacom and soccer's Premier League. The case record, after all, was replete with email evidence suggesting that YouTube executives salted their site with videos they knew were illegal, even after they'd received notice that the videos infringed copyrights. YouTube, meanwhile, had alleged that Viacom secretly uploaded its own videos to the site to entrap YouTube. Either way, it seemed to me that the factual allegations demanded an airing, but Stanton instead ruled that YouTube was protected under the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because (among other things), it had insufficient knowledge of specifically infringing material. The decision was regarded as a boon to Internet content-sharing sites and a powerful endorsement of the DMCA's safe harbor protection.
Too powerful, according to a two-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. On Thursday, Judges Jose Cabranes and Debra Ann Livingston agreed with Stanton that to get past the safe harbor provision, plaintiffs must show a defendant has "actual knowledge or awareness of specific infringing activity." But they said that a reasonable jury in this case could find YouTube had such knowledge. The judges pointed in particular to YouTube officials' emails about Viacom and Premier League-owned content, and said a reasonable juror could conclude from that evidence that YouTube "was at least aware of facts or circumstances from which specific infringing activity was apparent." As Jon Stempel reported for Reuters, the appellate panel remanded the case to Stanton to determine whether YouTube knew infringing material was posted on the site.
from Tales from the Trail:
Herman Cain’s bizarre bunny-shooting video
Former pizza magnate Herman Cain has been out of the presidential race for months, but don’t tell him that. Cain, who held the lead among Republican candidates before a series of sexual harassment allegations surfaced – admittedly, well before a single vote was cast – continues to seek relevance by pumping out campaign-like material on his web site and various social media outlets.
On Monday, a new Cain Solutions spot under the current umbrella of “Sick of Stimulus” drew the ire of animal lovers and was briefly pulled from the website YouTube.
from Anthony De Rosa:
Open source politics: Reddit drafts “The Freedom of Internet Act”
Reddit users have taken it upon themselves to draft legislation in place of SOPA and PIPA, unsatisfied with Washington politicians, who seem to have shown a willful ignorance of how the Internet actually works. Using a Google Doc open for anyone to help write and edit, they've come up with a draft version of "The Freedom of Internet Act"
The act addresses some basic tenets they've set forth. Note that these proclamations are subject to change as this is a living document and only reflect the content at the time of this publication:
from MediaFile:
Tech wrap: New RIM CEO says no drastic change needed
RIM's new CEO Thorsten Heins, who joined RIM in 2007 and previously served as a chief operating officer, said during a conference call that he would hone the current strategy rather than abandon it. "I don't think that there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving ... but this is not a seismic change," Heins said. RIM's U.S.-traded shares tumbled as investors wondered whether Heins could reverse the BlackBerry maker's decline, closing the day down 8.5 percent.
The founder of file-sharing website Megaupload was ordered to be held in custody by a New Zealand court, as he denied charges of Internet piracy and money laundering and said authorities were trying to portray the blackest picture of him. U.S. authorities want to extradite Kim Dotcom, a German national also known as Kim Schmitz, on charges he masterminded a scheme that made more than $175 million in a few short years by copying and distributing music, movies and other copyrighted content without authorization. Megaupload's lawyer has said the company simply offered online storage.
from MediaFile:
Hear RIM’s new CEO. Then speak your mind.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUFwhpcrCTw&feature=player_detailpage[/youtube]
For many BlackBerry users and smartphone industry pundits, this Youtube video was their first close-up look at new Research in Motion CEO Thorsten Heins.
from MediaFile:
Tech wrap: Nokia throne in Samsung’s sights
Samsung CEO Choi Gee-sung told reporters in Las Vegas the company overtook Nokia in handset revenue terms in its latest reported quarter and was confident of topping the Finnish group in shipments this year. Samsung's bullish forecast is in line with some analysts, including Royal Bank of Scotland, but on average analysts have expected Nokia to keep its lead on the market. According to the latest polls by Reuters, Nokia was expected to sell 418 million phones in 2011, versus Samsung's 320 million, the gap narrowing this year to 388 million versus 359 million.
Google made changes to its search engine, combining content posted by users of Google's social network Google+ and pic sharing site Picassa with regular search results. Links shared by a Google+ user's connections are given more weight and will show up in Web search results with a person icon beside them, VentureBeat's Jolie 'Odell writes. The changes increase Google+'s prominence online, which is lagging behind Facebook in total number of users.
from MediaFile:
Samsung takes the Sony media route with ex-AOL, ex-YouTube hire
Samsung Galaxy tablets (Photo: Reuters)
Samsung, the South Korean consumer electronics giant, has spent most of the last two decades eating the lunch of rival Japanese electronics giant, Sony. While Sony has had struggled with all types of existential debates and attacks at home and abroad including, the global hacker attack of its online network, Samsung has gone from strength to strength in setting the electronics agenda with its cutting edge TVs, phones and tablets.
A lot of Samsung's success could be put down to be its focus on the basics: making great mass market products and not getting distracted with creating or distributing content. By contrast, Sony not only owns the world's second largest music company and a major Hollywood studio but also a video games business.
