Search your streaming videos now!
Posted on November 2, 2011 by Budi Putra in Entertainment
Problem: You wanted to watch a film, but you need to check whether the online streaming is available on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime. Solution: You need a website that combines those services in one location, so you can easily search it. Product: There is a new service for this: Can I Stream It?
The service doesn’t just check on streaming movies online. There are four categories: streaming, rental, purchase or DVD/Blue-ray.
The streaming option will ping Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. The rental and purchase option will pull data from iTunes and Amazon OnDemand. For physical DVDs and Blu-ray discs, you’ll be directed to Amazon.
That’s an awesome service for fans of home entertainment. Good job, Urban Pixels!
[Source: CBSNews]
Think of online videos, baby
Posted on September 27, 2011 by Budi Putra in Entertainment
Amazon and Netflix recently won large content licensing deals: Amazon signs agreement with FOX; Netflix inks DreamWorks deal.
What does it mean?
The deal…was “game-changing” and represented a bet that viewers would soon no longer make distinctions between content streamed on the Internet or through cable.
Dear startup people: If you wanted to develop something, please think about video for online outlets. You can create short movies, documentaries, variety shows, podcast videos, etc. — then license them to some online video publishers. They are hungry for this kind of contents, trust me.
Instead of putting up your videos on YouTube with limited model of monetizations (please keep in mind that YouTube is more like platform service rather than content publisher), content licensing with Hulu, Netflix or Viki –to name a few– would be a compelling business model for you.
One of my new roles: Consultant for ViKi
Posted on June 29, 2011 by Budi Putra in Entertainment, Media
While preparing my upcoming blog project, as I blogged recently: I am now helping some startup companies to address Indonesian market. One of them is ViKi, the 2011 Crunchies Award winner and SXSW Accelerator Top 3 Finalist.
Problem: You want to watch foreign-language movies and TV shows on the Web.
But! You only know English.
Solution: ViKi, a site that shows videos from around the world and provides captions in 100 different languages. ~Peter Kafka of All Things D
Founded in 2008 and based in Palo Alto and Singapore, ViKi is a community-powered site that allows anyone to discover world TV and movies in their own language, thanks to its crowd-sourcing translation platform. Their community has contributed over 125 million subtitles in 157 languages!
The site, previously known as ViiKii, leverages the power of its translator community to both subtitle and share their love of world TV and movies–from Japanese Anime to Spanish Novelas to Korean dramas to Egyptian movies to Bollywood and other genres–with new audiences. Translators subtitle shows into their native languages under a Creative Commons license agreement, via ViKi’s integrated and systematic platform, which includes revision history and user-generated edits.
Hence the name, Viki –”Vi” for video and “Ki” for Wiki.
For movie fans, Viki is a great destinations where they can discover and enjoy their favorite movies and catch-up their favorite celebrities’ news and stories. If they discovered some highly recommended movies and dramas, but it still doesn’t have a certain of foreign language subtitles, they can start to translate or engage their network’s friends for some help.
I met Razmig Hovaghimian, co-founder and CEO, co-founders Jiwon Moon and Changseong Ho a few weeks ago in Singapore and really impressed with their efforts to have thousands of hours of licensed videos from around the world; and their crowd-sourcing translation platforms really helps community to contribute translation and subtitling. Hovaghimian, who worked at NBC Universal on digital strategy, asked me to help the company to develop and explore contents for Indonesian market –and then, for the rest of Southeast Asian markets.
I finally took the offer and challenge since I believe that video is the next big thing. Plenty of online publishers and local portals are struggling to find great as well as affordable contents for their sites. Creating original contents like video is extremely expensive; and licensing videos like movies, dramas, music clips and news from around the globe of course requires more resources. Having translations/subtitling for foreign audiences is another headache.
What does Viki means for the entertainment and digital world?
Bruce Upbin of Forbes writes
“I think Viki’s real power is as a content pipe sending shows to bigger players that it has unlocked from behind the language barrier. Five hundred million people now have broadband in the world. What do they have to watch online that they can understand? The Hollywood stuff in English may be good but it is severely limited. Eighty-five percent of the world’s TV and film production dollars are spent on non-U.S. content. More than 80% of the so-called formats, or localized versions of popular shows, are for non-U.S. shows. These shows are not in English.”
Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch says
The Web is so powerful today and the valuations are so high, because it is a billion-person-audience and growing. But more of them speak Chinese than English, and critical masses are developing around Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Bahasa Indonesian and other languages. The problem will only get worse as opportunity on the Web grows. Good translation can be incredibly expensive and just slapping Google translate on content isn’t going to be the answer.
ViKi has an interesting, open-source-like solution for video, that could have implications for other kinds of content online too. It acquires the rights to a TV show or movie, and puts it on one of its channels and within the first 24 hours an organized, volunteer community has subtitled the content into twenty languages. In another 24 hours, there’s another 20-languages of subtitles. The company has played more than 1 billion streams of video and its community has subtitled more than 100 million words into 143 languages since its 2008 inception.
If you are a big fan of a movie or drama, you can start contributing translations and subtitling for ViKi; If you know an interesting movie or show that you think the content fits with ViKi, please drop us a line.
If you are a content publisher that need more great contents for your sites or digital media; If you are a movie director/producer that has a great movie and you want the world to see, talk to me now! :-)
Some related sources on Viki:
- e27 – Singapore-based Viki raises 4.3 million in Series A funding
- Campaign Asia – Industry Heavyweights Discuss Digital Matters in Singapore
- World IT Show – The Future Of TV
- SXSW – ViKi SXSW Accelerator Top 3 Finalist
- MIP TV Blog – The Power Of Crowdsourced Subtitling
- Bloter – Web 2.0 Success Story
- METRO – A Global Hub For Video Distribution
- TechCrunch – ViKi Wins Best International Start-up at Crunchies
- Forbes – ViKi Unlocks The Other 85% Of Television
- Los Angeles Times – ViKi: Making online video speak in tongues
- Scobleizer – A Talk With CEO of ViKi
- National Public Radio (NPR) – Startup Viki Uses Web, Volunteers To Subtitle Films
- PaidContent – Multilingual Video Site ViKi Raises $4.3 Million
- JoongAng Daily / International Herald Tribune – Viki brings a host of subtitled films to the Web
- EIN News – DLD Conference Presents Its Selection of 20 Startups
- TechCrunch – ViKi Raises $4.3 Million from VC All-Stars to Translate the World’s Video
- All Things D – ViKi Raises Millions for Web Video From Around the World
Justin Bieber loses YouTube crown!
Posted on April 19, 2011 by Budi Putra in Entertainment, Media, Tech
This is a great sample how a video service like YouTube could turned someone from zero to hero. From nobody to somebody.
These two young performers –Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black– got noticed since their Youtube videos went viral and gained the limelights. Lady Gaga is even third most popular on this context!
The fact that Bieber has a real talent, while Black not, that’s another story. But you got the point, right?
Dan Whitworth writes:
Justin Bieber has lost his King of YouTube crown to Rebecca Black. The Canadian super star’s YouTube channel regularly tops the monthly most viewed chart.
But the 17-year-old has been pushed into second place thanks to Rebecca’s song Friday, according to new figures from Famecount.com.
Many critics have described her heavily auto-tuned track as the worst ever but it’s helped her YouTube channel reach 112 million views.
[via BBC]
Google shuts down Google Video
Posted on April 18, 2011 by Budi Putra in Entertainment, Media
Google is shutting down the video service, telling that all Google Video contents will no longer be available for playback later this month. Actually, Google stopped accepting uploads to Google video in May 2009.
Google asked users to move their contents over to YouTube. Users can also download the video –and store it locally– since there is a download button available on the video status page recently.
PCMag writes:
It’s not much of a surprise that Google has opted to wind things down with Google Video, considering Google owns YouTube, which according to comScore’s January figures, is the number one online video content property with 144.1 million unique viewers per month. Google launched Google Video in 2005, and purchased YouTube the following year.
Top 5 viral YouTube videos from Indonesia!
Posted on April 5, 2011 by Budi Putra in Entertainment, Media, People
Check-out Indonesia’s top five viral YouTube videos in the last two years following the recent one: the hilarious police officer from Gorontalo!
The hilarious Norman Kamaru
Gorontalo Police Mobile Brigade’s First Brigadier Norman Kamaru recorded a session of himself dancing and doing a lip-sync of an Indian song, in the middle of his job. The video went viral, and his senior police officers commented negatively to the video. Debate sparks, as people don’t think Norman should be punished.
The poisonous snail Shinta & Jojo
Mid-2010, Shinta and Jojo of near-Bandung Cimahi, West Java, became famous because of their video doing lip-sync of a song “Keong Racun” (literally means poisonous snail). The cuteness of Shinta Nurmansyah and Jovita Adityasari on the video made them nationally known. They even have starred several TV ads!
The whole-world Udin
Udin Sedunia literally means whole-world Udin. “Udin” is a common nickname for people who have the “suffix -udin” on their names. Soaluddin of Selong, central Lombok, created a song which was recorded by his friend. The song makes fun of all names containing “udin”. The clip was hilarious because of Soaluddin’s expression and the lyrics. He then invited by a national TV to record the song.
Star Destroyers float above Kemang
Star Destroyers, Star Wars’ Imperial ships, floated above Kemang, South Jakarta, mid-July 2010. Not for real, of course. During his spare time, a video special effect artist created this video. After the video went viral, it went to some news sites. A news site even asked opinions from space and astronomy experts!
Smoking baby
Ardi Rizal, a toddler from Sumatra, became worldwide news because of his unusual habit, learnt from his father: smoking. Ardi was just 2 year old when the video of the news went viral around May 2010. The news raised concerns from the Ministry of Health, which helped the family to cure Ardi’s addiction to cigarettes.
Viikii.net: a Youtube of translated videos
Posted on August 26, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech
A friend of mine pointed out a cool site recently: Viikii.net –a sharing translation and subtitling platform for streaming video. Now everyone could help the world to understand and enjoy different language videos; just use the Viikii system and start translating and creating subtitles for that. Their community keeps growing and growing. A brilliant idea, right?
The Viikii blog writes:
ViiKii can be a break-through, imagine how you could watch all the fun videos out there in the world, ones you couldn’t even access cuz they were in all these different languages… you can practice language skills, or simply enjoy, and with all the other people doing the same, everyone’d get a step closer to ultimately understanding what goes on out there, and why. For this ‘dream come true,’ we need none other than YOUR help. Every single contribution you make to our ViiKii system, whether it’s just one word or sentence, will pave the way towards the realization of a grand cultural “Silk Road,” transmitting numerous local contents all over the world, beyond language barriers.
A writer of Web 2.0 Asia says:
The site’s reputation system makes translators do a good job, and after a quick spin I find the general quality of translation very good. The site has clean design and has all necessary features like sharing, embedding, comments, etc. You can call this a YouTube of translated videos.
You can contribute your translations skill now!
UPDATE: Its brand Viikii (Viikii.net) changed recently into Viki (Viki.com).
18 interesting firsts on the Internet
Posted on March 9, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech
Just discovered an interesting list, 18 first different things on the Internet [brief] history, thanks to the TechReaders site!
- The First Email: Ray Tomlinson sent first email and also made use of @ symbol in email addresses in 1971.
- The First Ever Domain Name: “symbolics.com” registered by computer manufacturer Symbolics (now obsolete) on 15th March 1985.
- The First SPAM Email Ever: Gary Thuerk sent spam email messages to 393 people on ARPANET on 3rd May 1978.
- The First Ever Mobile Phone with Internet Access Facility: Nokia 9000 Communicator (launched in 1996, Finland).
- The First Ever Website: Info.cern.ch which was launched in late 1990.
- The First Ever E-Commerce Website and Transaction: NetMarket that claims to process first ever secure transaction on the web on August 11, 1994.
- The First Ever Online Bank: Stanford Federal Credit Union that provides Online Internet Banking services to all of its customers in October, 1994.
- The First Ever Search Engine: WebCrawler.com which was launched in 1994.
- The First Ever Blog: Justin Halls is considered the first blogger who started a web diary in 1994. [The term webblog was introduced in 1997 which later led to “blog” in 1999].
- The First Ever Podcast: Dave Winer added audio content into the RSS feeds on January 11, 2001.
- The First Item Ever Sold on eBay: A broken laser pointer worth $14.83.
- The First Book Ever Sold on Amazon: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter [1995].
- The first edit on Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder when doing a test edit with text “Hello, World!”
- The First Ever Video on YouTube: “Me at the Zoo” video put by the the cofounder of YouTube Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005.
- The First Ever Message on Twitter: It was a demonstration message with text “just setting up my twttr” by the creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey on 21st March 2006.
- The First Ever Voice Chat Service: Rocket Messenger.
- The First Ever Website Hacked: Federal websites that included US Department of Justic, U.S. Air Force, CIA, and NASA in 1990.
- The First Ever Social Network Site: Friendster.com which was launched in 2002.
YouTube’s URL shortener: Youtu.be
Posted on December 22, 2009 by Budi Putra in Tech
OF COURSE, it’s just a matter of time. The most popular video sharing YouTube has introduced their own URL shortener: Youtu.be and will only work with YouTube videos. Welcome to the club!
