web video

Peter Kafka of AllThingsD writes: For the last three years, Netflix has accounted for a third of the Internet traffic zipping into North American homes every night.

But Web video competitors like Amazon, HBO and Hulu all say they’re seeing significant growth. So is anyone cutting into Netflix’s lead?

Sam Thielman of AdWeek writes: December 1995-January 1999
After seeing Trey Parker and Matt Stone's short Spirit of Christmas, TV exec Brian Graden commissions a second video he distributes to friends on VHS. The video—and Graden—help Parker and Stone land a development deal at Comedy Central that gives rise to South Park. Soon the video starts turning up in unexpected places, notably as an AVI file on the PlayStation game Tiger Woods ’99. From there, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to bulletin boards and burnable CDs.

January 1997
Macromedia acquires Jonathan Gay’s startup FutureSplash and shortens the name to Flash. It becomes the standard for Web video, though Microsoft and Apple continue to use proprietary formats. Competitor RealNetworks suffers. Adobe buys Macromedia in 2005.

At a panel at the Streaming Media East conference entitled "Handicapping and Reviewing YouTube's New Content Channels," several experts discussed the winners and losers of YouTube's recently rolled-out original content channels. Revealed Joshua Cohen, co-founder of Tubefilter, "You see this a lot with some of the YouTube original channels where lots of established entertainment and notable Hollywood celebrities and names who are coming over are coming over to the platform, are doing phenomenally poorly on it.

Facebook's former marketing director Randi Zuckerberg spoke at the UbiQ digital entertainment conference about monetizing online video. She said, "We’re probably a couple of years away from being able to monetize video en masse, but we’re seeing an interesting trend online where people are willing to pay for excellent content."

Read more here on C21Media.

Microsoft Advertising and Y&R New York turned to Gravity to create and produce an original, long-form web content piece promoting various Microsoft tools. The piece, which runs over four minutes in length, features online gaming personality Felicia Day.

How meta: a web series episode on web series. In this episode of Brian Solis' Revolution, Solis talks to new media pioneer Shira Lazar about the present and future of online video and how it builds upon the traditions of television.

Says Lazar, "“You have to bring value to the viewer…create broadcast quality content, but with the authenticity and interactivity of the social web."

Watch the episode below and read more here.

Forbes writes up the growing importance of Web videos in the world of international politics. They say, "Social video is now a key determinant in the race to political success. Those '3 AM in America' commercials took to the Web in 2008; now creative video assets are being designed, developed and distributed in earnest. They’re no longer also-rans, but fully loaded original content produced specifically to go viral on the political Web."

One of the big proponents of web video is CSI creator Anthony Zuiker, who has been at the center of upfronts from both Google and Yahoo! and is set to release web sci-fi movie Cybergeddon this fall.

There is no doubt that exploding watermelons, burning flames and water balloon fights look mesmirizingly awesome in slow-motion...and that's just in one of the 10 videos that Mashable has compiled. See some of the very best high-speed videography from around the web here.

With President Obama's just-released web documentary, "The Road We've Traveled" (found below), The New York Times reports on the unprecedented importance of web video in this year's presidential campaign. Says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign's digital director, "The importance of video is so new for campaigns, even relative to ’08. Now it’s in some ways the primary way our digital operation communicates with supporters. And increasingly it will be the primary way we communicate with undecided voters.”

Outrigger Media, a start-up web video sales company, is responsible for brokering the partnership between Tumi luggage and production company Zero Point Zero to create the new web series Road Bite TV. The new show goes behind-the-scenes of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain's TV shows No Reservations and The Layover.