The new video site MySpace plans to roll out tomorrow is a step in the right direction after months of losing ground to Facebook. Myspace is the second ranked online video portal despite lacking most of the web 2.0 features of YouTube, and opening up a video-centric site building upon the large user base of Myspace is a great idea.

That said, there is one area in which the idea falls short, the focus on professional content. MySpace success so far has been as a user generated content site and they should stay with their core competency. From The Times article today:

With MySpace TV, that professional material will be front and center, said Chris DeWolfe, MySpace’s co-founder and chief executive. “We haven’t really freshened up our video offering since we launched it,” Mr. DeWolfe said. “We wanted to highlight the fact that we have a video destination on the Web with all this great content that we’ve acquired.”

Above: YouTube (blue) vs. MySpace (brown) Reach over time. The best metric of video site popularity is search market share (below)

Also of note: YouTube controls 50% of all online video traffic (below)

Courtesy: Leann Prescott & Hitwise.

Videos on MySpace are posted to represent individuals and their friends. Profile viewing us a UGC experience, and MySpace has an opportunity to capitalize by creating a content hub for these user-generated videos. The professional content if it’s there should come from NewsCorp properties - and they have plenty of online destinations for that - not from additional acquired content like Sony Minisodes.

YouTube, has become a modern entertainment network, with a much broader range of content than MySpace, and more issues than a traditional network. MySpace should stick with what it’s good at - create a place where people can go to see their friends, and as video grows MySpace can facilitate and monetize their use of that medium.

Just feeling a bit snarky this morning and couldn’t let it go. Yesterday, rich media provider Pointroll, best know for their suite of expandable banners that included the Fat Boy, Towel Boy and Tom Boy, announced their latest product (not a new format-Boy), the AdPortal.

In the announcement, Pointroll said:

CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa., June 26 /PRNewswire/ — PointRoll, the leading provider of rich media technology solutions, today announced the launch of AdPortal, the first all-in-one rich media management platform built with advanced Web 2.0 capabilities. AdPortal is designed as a one-stop shop for marketers to create, publish and analyze high-impact, interactive rich media advertising campaigns.

Now I’m all for hyped up press releases. Hell, thats what they are for. But in the rich media advertising space, this is about as far as you could stretch a statement without calling it a flat out lie. First All-In-One rich media management platform? I know that Eyeblaster has been beaten up for a long time for being a revolving door of talent and egotistical executives, but their Rich Media Platform has been around since 2000.

Not knocking the effort. I’m surprised that Pointroll never really had a fully integrated suite like Eyeblaster’s, but the clients never seemed to mind. In fact, they generally liked the client service instead of the do-it-yourself model.

Good thing in the land of spin, smoke and mirrors, adding little qualifiers like “advanced Web 2.0 features” makes it all ok, and puts big smiles on executive faces. Worse still, taking a stab at your competitors in the headline of your press release is bad form. Even worser (thanks, Keith Olberman), is when you get it wrong.

PointRoll Still Innovating While Others Are Selling Out

If I recall correctly, Pointroll was the first to sell out. Didn’t they read their own boilerplate?

Pointroll, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI),

How quickly we forget about a mere $100 million in the new era of weekly multi-billion dollar deals.

In yesterday’s Online Video Insider, Undertone Network’s CEO, Mike Cassidy, asked, “Where is the Video Leadership?”

Good question, Mike. We’ve pondered the same question here at OVW. But lets not just point our fingers at Google and YouTube. While they may be the 800 pound gorilla that people reference when discussing online video, there are a number of companies that are stepping up and driving our industry in the right direction. And, of course, those who aren’t.

But since Mike raised the issue, we thought we’d tip our hats to those companies and organizations that are moving towards :15 pre-roll, despite the initial results of the OPA’s recent study, and to those that are spending the time and effort to conduct their own research into standards, best practices and general knowledge gathering.

We’re curious to see who steps up at this week’s OMMA Video Conference on Thursday.

Roo Media continues to revamp, modify, enhance, just about anything it can to turn itself around. Today they announced the addition of three veteran media pros to their top ranks.

Bert Solivan, formerly a Senior Vice President at FOX News, has been named Executive Vice President and General Manager of ROO Media. Paula Balzer, former Chief Marketing Officer at Clear Channel Entertainment, has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer. Rick Gell, co-founder of one of the world’s largest private film archives, which was acquired by Bill Gates’ Corbis Corporation, has been appointed Chief Content Officer.

Roo has been focused on the B-to-B and enterprise space, leaving them mostly out of the ad revenue game. Expect the new brass to make some significant deals rather quickly to put a band-aid on the bleeding.

Roo’s stock (RGRP.OB) has been on a downward trajectory since reaching $4.49 in February. A string of weak earnings announcements and lack of any huge publisher deals has kept the the stock price under $3 since mid-April. OVW sources are optimistic about its turnaround, however. We’ll keep watching.

Also see:

Bleeding Continues at ROO

ROO Takes in Another $25mil

MTVU & ROO: Good for College Papers?

Apple is hiring brand ambassadors at retail stores to hype the iPhone release this Friday. Unless your idea of fun is standing in a mob of yuppie/teenagers it may be wise to steer clear.

Client:
Apple Store - Boston
New York, NY (2 Store Locations)

Event / Name of Promotion:
Field Manager and Brand Ambassador needed

Dates / Times:
Boston, MA
Friday June 29th: 4pm - 8p
Looking for one field manager and one BA. Must be friendly, professional and courteous!

Field Manager:
- Receive shipment of T-Shirts and Company Literature
- Distribute T-Shirts and Materials to team
- Supervise Team function during event
$25 per hour

Brand Ambassadors:
- Wear T-Shirts provided by Client
- Distribute Company Materials/Literature as directed
$20 per hour

Attire: must wear jeans and sneakers, a branded t-shirt will be provided.

The past month has seen lots of discussion of online video search. Companies are finding new ways to provide more relevant video search results beyond metadata - and using this to contextually target ads. Below is a rundown of the major players in video search, their technology and competitive advantage.

• Blinkx - The company has indexed more than 12 million hours of video and is in the news today for launching their contextual ad serving platform called AdHoc. Similar to EveryZing, the company uses speech recognition and like Truveo, and they power video search for a number of content-rich sites. But Blinkx claims to have a more advanced video analytics technology which “literally watches and listens” to the content to determine video content.
• CastTV - Still in beta, uses web-crawlers to find episode summaries from other web sources.
• Digitalsmiths - Their InScene digital indexing solution was used primarily by studios to catalog their massive content libraries. Today they unveiled VideoSense which contextually targets ads based on their technology of extracting metadata from broadband video.
• EveryZing - Formerly podzinger, the company uses speech recognition to more accurately catalog the content of audio and video, and tags the video based on the text so that users can click on a particular word surrounding their search phrase and begin the video there.
• Google - Always have to include GOOG in every online media discussion - they have smart people and smart technology but video search is one place in which they have fallen behind. A Google video search is strongly biased for Google videos - and the other companies on this list offer more comprehensive search options for video outside the Googisphere. They have been working on Video ID primarily for finding copyright violations. This will likely be used for improved search but it’s likely that they expand by buyout to expand their capabilities.
• Pixsy - A lot of what these guys do is private website image and video search, but the company has grown to become a large content aggregator and is increasingly becoming a distributor of aggregated content through the use of branded widgets and RSS to deliver relevant rich media content across the web.
• Truveo - The company owned by AOL received lots of attention last week after news that they were nearing 40 million unique viewers a month. Truveo powers video search for some of the major content producers online (including my company CSTV). Their Visual Crawler technology goes beyond the traditional metadata to determine visual characteristics of a site outside what a traditional web crawler could find. This provides search results most can’t match and more contextually accurate results.

There are other companies involved, clearly a company like Yahoo! comes to mind; but these are the technology players combining search with innovative ad-serving and distribution techniques. As we move toward greater use of video-rich internet applications and away from text-based interfaces the holy grail of serving only the ads people really want to see is getting closer to reality.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike, Paul Kedrosky today ran down a similar list focused exclusively on companies that offer contextual ad-serving (as opposed to public-facing search technology) as their primary offering. And thanks to Mary over at Dabble, I’m sure they’re not the only deserving company left off the list so please continue adding below.

Lots going on in online media this week.

• Funny or Die will premiere a new video featuring Will Ferrell and 2 year old Pearl. The video will go live on funnyordie.com at 8PM EST. The site has grown through smart publicity and by creating a hub for Hollywood talent to post videos in a more controlled environment than YouTube.
  • “My ventures as an actor on the internet have been rewarding and spiritually fulfilling, but now I must look to broader challenges as I approach my 26^th month,” says Pearl. “I shall always reflect upon these days with much fondness, and also, I have no idea what I just said, and I want banana-nana and the upside down show.”

• Fox has paid a New York comic rock band called Guyz Nite to recut their popular Die Hard music video to promote the upcoming Live Free or Die Hard [via NYT].
  
  Lead singer Jim Marsh is no stranger to digital advertising - he works for interactive agency Deep Focus.
• On Tuesday Laura Allen (who is everywhere these days) and podcasting guru John C. Havens will speak at the NY Web 2.0 Meetup at Slate in NYC.
• On Wednesday the UGTV Summit will come to the Union Square Ballroom in New York.
• On Thursday is the OMMA Video Conference at the Crown Plaza Times Square.

A YouTube video of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami shaking hands with several women while on a trip to Italy in May has prompted conservative outcry. Khatami, a well-respected cleric who instituted moderate reforms as president and still has a wide following claims the video is doctored.

Above: Mohammad Khatami shakes hands with “unfamiliar women”

The New York Times today leads with a column on the crackdowns taking place in Iran. Conservave president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is using the Khatami video an example of Islamic impurity to bolster support for a regime that has taken a hard line against many of the freedoms opened up during Khatami’s time in government.

A longer clip of the video has received more than 70,000 views since it was posted in May. The internet has become a hotbed for propaganda, and can be used to launch very effective political attacks anonymously.

It’s only a matter of time before we see online swiftboating take place during the upcoming election in this country. Online video has made it easy to distribute a damaging message rapidly with little or no blowback on those making the attacks.

Net Neutrality has become one of those red-state blue-state issues. At Supernova2007 yesterday, John Kneuer who runs the NTIA got in a shouting match with attendees after making statements about the government’s intention to let the free market determine what is best for internet.

The Register quotes Kneuer as saying:

If there is a pro consumer benefit to open access and if consumers need and want that, the carrier that brings that to consumers will have a powerful need and advantage and bring competitive pressures on other access layer providers.

The government’s staying out of the debate would likely open the door to tiered levels of service by ISPs. This debate is far from over. It’s a divisive topic that quickly raises blood pressure of those with an opinion, but it’s not yet a fully mainstream debate. Will this become a political talking point?

Swarmcast this week launched Autobahn, an accelerator for iTunes which can speed download times by up to 90%, and is up to 30 times faster in high latency areas such as Australia. Swarmcast works with content providers like MLB to enhance streaming for high-bandwidth content.

The key to the technology is its use of a client-side plugin to make the download process smarter. Autobahn doesn’t utilize end-user upstream capacity via P2P file sharing the way networks like Bittorrent do (though it can and does for MLB Mosaic).

Instead Swarmcast does what it calls multi-source streaming - breaking up large files into smaller pieces and downloading multiple random packets simultaneously like a torrent network, but pulling the packets from Swarmcast and CDN servers rather than individual end-users. At the same time it takes the information it gets back from all users running Autobahn and uses Forward Error Correction to decrease packet loss and make data transfer more efficient.

The result is a product that has many of the advantages of P2P with few of the disadvantages - enabling higher bitrate streaming of live and on-demand content and a really fast download.