Ajax Girl

Since YouTube heralded the era of user-uploaded videos, media corporations have been fighting a hopeless battle to regain control of their content, sending out endless waves of DMCA notices in a vain attempt to take down countless clips scattered across the web. In the last year sites like Hulu have made progress - it’s finally possible to legally embed of a clip of The Office in your blog, but publishers continue to lose out on millions of video clips that weren’t upload with permission.

Now MySpace - a site that once seemed the antithesis of innovation - has implemented an exciting new ad platform called Auditude that may change the way content owners treat uploaded video entirely. The new platform will automatically identify any uploaded video clips from a number of shows produced by MTV Networks (including my personal favorite “The Daily Show”), and will display an overlay when the clip is played that shows which episode the clip originally came from, its original air-date, and links to online stores where users can buy the entire episode.

In the past it has been nearly impossible to effectively monetize user-uploaded videos because they are typically tagged with such informative titles as “REally cool!” and “hilarious”. The Auditude platform ignores this information, relying solely on fingerprints taken from the clip’s audio and video data. These fingerprints are matched to prints in Auditude’s massive database, which spans over 250 million videos and 4 years of television content, all sorted by show and airdate.

Even more impressive: Auditude can fingerprint a portion of a video that is only a few seconds long and identify which show it was originally taken from. Once the clip is identified Auditude will overlay an ad within the video, allowing publishers to monetize their content even when it was uploaded by someone without permission and without any legible tagging information.

MySpace will be implementing the system with initial support for content from MTV Networks, with shows including The Colbert Report, Punk’d, and Sarah Silverman. So every time you post a clip of Jon Stewart ripping on the presidential candidates, someone is going to get paid, and users won’t have to deal with the often-clunky proprietary video players offered by each network. And instead of trying to prevent these clips from making it onto MySpace in the first place, content owners will want users to upload as many as possible.

Unfortunately, this may prove difficult: after years of being told not to upload these videos, users will probably take a while to warm up to the idea. But if it catches on (and it probably will), expect to see content owners flock to form partnerships with MySpace - there isn’t currently another video platform out there that is able to identify and monetize content this effectively. We’ll probably also see the Auditude platform implemented elsewhere as other sites try to catch up.

Last year YouTube launched a similar service called Video ID that gives publishers the option of either taking down illegal content or placing ads on it.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/20r80_79QFU/

So much of this long protracted struggle for political change has rubbed off on the tech community. In the partisan windup to this long election process, we’ve become almost inured to the fact that as much as things will continue to be the same, already the “choice” between the two candidates has produced one sure thing. That is, either of the two candidates represents fundamental change from the status quo, no matter how much you want to differentiate further.

So it is with the shift to the Cloud. Whether you’re betting on Google, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or less obviously Apple, IBM, Oracle, or Cisco, the sure thing is that Web services has gone main stream. If this is a horse race at the vendor level, it’s about each company’s ability to harness its innate strengths and migrate its weaknesses. Put another way, the battle is within, not between.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/EVyfLSbIc-A/

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/pjh1kv8QUP4/

Wanna go to this week’s Dreamforce conference but don’t have $1,200 bucks to spare for a full three-day pass? TechCrunch scored 100 one-day passes at $99 each (these are exclusive for TechCrunch readers—you cannot get a one-day pass anywhere else). These will let you attend the conference any one day (November 3rd, 4th, or 5th), see all the keynotes that day (Marc Benioff, Michael Dell, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Google Enterprise’s Dave Girouard), check out the booths and schmooze at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. And if you go on Monday, you can catch the Foo Fighters.

Anyone interested should call Dreamforce ‘08 Registration Headquarters at 888.382.7112 and reference the “$99 Tech Crunch Day Pass.” The promotion code you need to give is: DAYTCB99

Dreamforce is Salesforce.com’s conference for customers and app partners. It is a showcase of cloud computing on the Salesforce.com platform. If you are interested in cloud computing, this is where you want to go to get a lay of the land and see where enterprise IT is headed. (And, no, Techcrunch isn’t making a dime off this).

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/iEHsCo8kNis/