CBC and DivX Partner to Bring Premium International Content to Audiences Worldwide in the DivX Forma
March 15, 2007
SAN DIEGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–DivX, Inc. (NASDAQ:DIVX) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s national public broadcaster and one of its largest cultural institutions, today announced a partnership to bring premium international content to audiences around the world in the DivX® video format.
According to the licensing agreement, CBC has launched a channel on DivX Stage6–an online video sharing community site–featuring premium and promotional international content including an interview with singing sensation Josh Groban, reports from around the world from CBC’s flagship news program, CBC News: The National, along with entertainment, fashion and unique short films which will be added to the site weekly. To view the CBC channel on Stage6, visit www.stage6.com/CBC.
In addition to the CBC channel on Stage6, DivX has obtained the exclusive rights for Samsung Electronics Canada, a manufacturer of DivX Certified DVD players, to bundle more than 20 hours of footage from the CBC DVD “Torino 2006: Canada’s Quest for Success” with its new DVD recorder that will be available at major consumer electronics retailers across Canada in March. Programming includes every Canadian medal-winning performance in its entirety, extensive highlights of Opening and Closing Ceremonies, “Ciao! Torino” (CBC vignettes featuring people, places and culture of Torino), “Life After a Final,” as well as interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, bloopers and athlete bios.
DivX makes it easy to compress the file size of video content while maintaining high quality. The CBC content is encoded by DivX and protected by the company’s digital rights management (DRM) technology.
“We are pleased to license premium CBC content encoded in the high-quality, secure DivX format,” said Bob Kerr, Vice President of Business Development, CBC. By creating a channel on Stage6, we are able to reach a broader audience as our viewers re-live the excitement of their favorite CBC shows in a format compatible with millions of DivX Certified consumer electronics devices from major manufacturers.”
“CBC is not just a media company. They are truly a pioneer and share our goal of building a better media future,” said Kevin Hell, CXO, Partners & Licensing, at DivX, Inc. “With CBC, we have expanded our global reach by making premium content such as Josh Groban and the 2006 Olympic Winter Games more accessible to viewers worldwide.”
In addition to creating a high-quality viewing experience, DivX empowers consumers to take their favorite videos beyond the PC. Content in the DivX video format is easily transferred among an entire ecosystem of DivX Certified devices and platforms including DVD players, portable media players, in-car DVD players and more.
About the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
CBC/Radio-Canada is Canada’s national public broadcaster and one of its largest cultural institutions. With 28 services offered on Radio, Television, the internet, satellite radio, digital audio, as well as through its record and music distribution service and wireless WAP and SMS messaging services, CBC/Radio-Canada is available how, where, and when Canadians want.
Through this array of activities, CBC/Radio-Canada brings diverse regional and cultural perspectives into the daily lives of Canadians in English, French and eight aboriginal languages, in nine languages on its international Radio service, RCI, and in eight languages on its web-based radio service RCI viva, a service for recent and aspiring immigrants to Canada.
About Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2005 parent company sales of US$56.7 billion and net income of US$7.5 billion. Employing approximately 128,000 people in over 90 offices in 51 countries, the company consists of five main business units: Digital Appliance Business, Digital Media Business, LCD Business, Semiconductor Business and Telecommunication Network Business. Recognized as one of the fastest growing global brands, Samsung Electronics is a leading producer of digital TVs, memory chips, mobile phones, and TFT-LCDs. For more information, please visit www.samsung.com.
About DivX, Inc.
DivX creates products and services designed to improve the experience of media. Our first product offering was a video compression-decompression software library, or codec, which has been actively sought out and downloaded over 200 million times in the last four years, including over 60 million times during the last twelve months. We have since built on the success of our codec with other consumer software, including the DivX Player application, which is distributed from our website, www.divx.com. We also license our technologies to consumer hardware device manufacturers and certify their products to ensure the interoperable support of DivX-encoded content. In addition to technology licensing to consumer hardware device manufacturers, we currently generate revenue from software licensing, advertising and content distribution.
Forward-Looking Statements
Statements in this press release that are not strictly historical in nature constitute "forward-looking statements." Such statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding DivX’s visibility within the investment community. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause DivX’s actual results to be materially different from historical results or from any results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, the risk that customer use of DivX technology may not grow as anticipated, the risk that anticipated market opportunities may not materialize at expected levels, or at all, the risk that the Company’s activities may not result in the growth of profitable revenue, risks and uncertainties related to the maintenance and strength of the DivX brand; DivX’s ability to penetrate existing and new markets; the effects of competition; DivX’s dependence on its licensees and partners; the effect of intellectual property rights claims; and other factors discussed in the "Risk Factors" section of DivX’s quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on November 13, 2006. All forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. DivX is providing this information as of the date of this release and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Joost will launch in May for everyone
March 7, 2007
At the time of the first Parisian edition of living room AD Tech, dedicated to the marketing of the Internet, Eric Clémenceau, Vice President Publicité Europe of Joost, expressed itself publicly on the state of the platform of P2P TV.
If it is clearly a project today which concentrates in him all the aspects of television 2.0, it is well Joost: vidéos nonlinear and linear in the long term, contained Community hyper thematized, services. Joost (ex-Venice Project) is a platform of television to the free request on PC, characterized by a distribution through the networks high flow thanks to a tpeer-to-peer technology inherited from Kazaa and Skype.
With nearly 80.000 beta testers, Joost continues his rise in load and will be opened soon to the general public. Official launching will happen in May. Eric Clémenceau is former President of Turner Broadcasting France. It is thus a man of TV and a large professional of the advertising market.
Vice President Publicité of Joost develops initially the economic advantages of technology P2P TV compared to the streaming. He explains then why Joost is true media. He insists on the security of the video contents. These contents will be only produced by professionals. Strong marks like MTV (Viacom group) and CNN will be distributed on the platform. One will also find there new entering, as editors of chain of television, like the producers Endemol and Gong the specialist in the manga.
The Europe owner of Joost details his economic model, based on a division of incomes with the editors of chains. To 90% it will be free contents financed by publicity, but there could be in the long term paying contents around events as the World cup. As on Internet, publicity will be interactive, measurable and targeted according to the profiles of the users and the types of programs. The screens pub, which will not be zappables contrary to TiVo, should not exceed 3 minutes per hour of television looked on the computer.
At the time of the meeting of questions/answers with the room, the VP Europe of Joost explained the difference between its platform and the TiVo terminals sold in the United States. On Joost, the report/ratio with publicity is different since it acts with non-linear television. Eric Clémenceau explains the position of Joost on the contents premium vis-a-vis the cable and with the satellite, as well as the advantage of the interactivity with the programs. He announces also the arrival of chains live TV, therefore linear, from here a few months according to the agreements with the diffusers.
And do you believe yourselves in the future of this type of interactive television on computer, with possibility of chatter between televiewers and to comment on the programs with texts? Which are the questions which you would like to put to Eric Clémenceau, Vice President Publicité Europe of Joost?
Source: http://www.tech.youvox.fr
Encode360 2.0 beta 6a1 is now available
March 3, 2007
Dan wrote:
"
It’s been a while coming… 
Please note guys, that this is an alpha release. This means it’s fresh off the development press and is probably riddled with bugs - particularly after such a large amount of changes. Use it at your own risk. It’s a work-in-progress and is not supposed to be incredibly stable yet.
A few caveats:
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All of the encoding functions have been moved into a seperate class. Longterm, it makes the app more flexible and keeps the code more manageable. Shortterm, it introduces a whole heap of problems. For instance, if an encode dies for some reason, you’ll get an error, but after clicking ok, the rest of the app doesn’t exactly come back to life. This is because of the way errors are being… well, not properly returned from the encoder functions to the app. I plan to sort this out soon. but it’s a lot of work!!! :\
Might not work on x64. Sorry, welcome to alpha build land.
Those protected memory errors are wrecking my head. Seems to be caused by an access violation in ffdshow - have no idea why tho… I can’t debug to save my life.
I’m very tired, irritable and cranky. Not so much a caveat about the app, I just needed an outlet to moan…
Some thoughts for the future:
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Name change? Not just for 360 anymore but also Zune. I’ve regularly used the app to re-encode internally produced vids to WMV.
Remove "Folder Monitoring" completely and instead, expand out the command-line support dramatically. Folder monitoring is horribly complicating the code. If cmdline support is improved, it’d be dead easy to throw together a quick VBS that sits in the background and fires up Enc360 as required.
Maybe *Maybe* Switch from WME to FFMpeg? Would save on having to install *any* codecs or WME, since FFMpeg basically handles them all, and would fix a LOT of the existing problems (and probably cause all new ones!) . Could probably put together a replacement Encoder class as a wrapper for FFMpeg… Or maybe this has already been done?
Beta 6 Changelog:
Added
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FLV Support
WMV Support. So you can re-encode WMV’s at different bitrates and AR’s
Changed
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MASSIVE internal re-write. I had been putting this off for a while, but eventually I had to do it. I’ve compartmentalised all of the Encoder code into a separate class and re-written huge segments. This has eliminated a HUGE amount of the codebase, and made it a lot more flexible.
Disabled .NET x86 directive. This means it’s probably not going to run on x64 hardware right now. But someone should be able to re-compile the source with WME9-x64 and snap up the x64 interops. Dunno if it’s possible to make the app entirely platform independant.
Much improved Aspect Ratio handling for videos with non-square pixel videos (thanks to Zen)
Debug information no longer polluted with repeated Progress indicators every second
Updated MediaInfo to 0.7.4.5 (resulting in a number of knock-on bug fixes) in Encode360
Protected Memory error now specifically says it’s a codec issue. This isn’t necessarily true (99% it is tho), but hey! It’s a whole new error message for people to report And hopefully will get people to investigate codecs prior to reporting the problem.
Rewrote most of the PreProcessing Script stuff so they could be componentised (generally not just one file). This will require new PPS’s, but saves on downloading MKVToolNix or OGMTools (or others in future). Extract to the same folder as Encode360 so they have their own subfolders. ie C:\Encode360\MKV (with all associated files)
New versions downloadable here:
MKV Subtitles
OGM Subtitles
Fixed
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Framerate "Double" error could occur if not using English as your Locale Settings (thanks to Zen)
Certain audio streams returned an invalid sampling rate which caused Encode360 to bomb out
Invalid duration times in a number of container formats, ie, MKV, OGM (which led to a host of other problems)
Dan
"
1st report are that this version is really a big improvement over the previous one. Download and have fun! Great work Dan!
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Will Joost allow fast forward over content you are watching
March 3, 2007
1st, let me say that I would like to be able to fast forward through content that has been buffered on my system after I start playback. This is assuming that there is some buffering of the content taking place. Right now Joost won’t let you do this unless you already watched that particular section of the content… (like if you close the application and open it later. When you do this Joost start playback of the previous clip at the beginning but will allow you to fast forward to where you left it.)
Now, why this might be doable or maybe not doable… because content providers won’t allow it and to generate enough advertisement revenue to be profitable.
I read somewhere that Joost is going to pay content provider 5$ per view. There is got to be a rule by which a viewer must have watched more than half the total length of the content for it to be added to the number of viewing.
For Joost to stay in business it has to get money from somewhere to pay content provider. Here comes targeted advertisement. Joost will want to make sure that they make enough money from the displayed advertisement during the half duration of the content to ensure profitability if the half mark is what make or break an add to the total view count for that content.
If this was their business model then I doubt that Joost will allow fast forwarding.
There might be some hope if, for content to count toward a view, someone has to spend half of the duration of that content in watching it in real time. So if the content last 60 minutes and I fast forward through 25 minutes of it, my total real time watch time would be 35 minutes. During those 35 minutes Joost can subject me to enough advertisement to pay for the 1 view of that particular content.
On the other hand if I was to fast forward through 45 minutes of the content then Joost would not count it as 1 view and could possibly still make some money if I was subject to watch 1 advertisement.
Make sense? So there might be some hope if this is the business model Joost if after.
What do ou think?
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Joost OSX beta, quite interesting indeed
March 1, 2007
OK, after many weeks of trying to get a beta invitation I finally manage to receive one today! How did I got it? I monitored the technoraty for post about Joost that advertised available token and applied on a few of those. Use the following link to do it as well:
http://technorati.com/posts/tag/joost?language=en
Within an hour I was testing the Joost beta software version 0.8.1.
My first impression of Joost was wow, this is a nice TV application. OK, I forgot to tell you that I am testing the Mac version of the client… so this may influence some of my experiences… keep this in mind while reading my post.
The interface is nice looking and make very good use of transparency. It feel a little bit strange at first when compared to something like Microsoft MCE 2005 but you quickly get use to it.
In the current beta there is no out of the box support for the standard iMac remote used with Frontrow. I am sure this will get addressed in subsequent releases.
The GUI has some glitches. For example the text scroll feature does not quite perfectly work just yet. Here is an example of the issue:
This will certainly get addressed in future beta releases.
Now, what about the video quality? Well, since this is beta software I will not be too hard and will just say that it look like low bit rate video (something like MPEG1). There many many macro blocks artifacts all over and many micro pauses while the video play on the screen. The micro pause appear to be related to HD access of buffered content and not to content delivery itself. This will probably be fixed in the future. I hope the video quality can be improved upon by the time Joost goes live.
The video quality is more than likely not representative (I sincerelly hope) of the final product. Other internet video sites like stage6.com offer much better video quality at a fast delivery rate using DIVX compression. Maybe Joost has not yet settled on their encoding technology and will eventually move to a highly efficient video codec like DIVX while requiring minimal CPU to decode the actual video.
Update: I have found that the video quality is dependent on the source material. There is in fact a video about Snakes that look stunning. I wish all the Joost content would be this good! I would say that this one video is as good looking as what you will find on Stage6!
Joost is also signing deals with many content provider to offer diversified TV entertainment to it’s users. The one I currently know about are:
- Viacom: Content from Paramount movies, MTV, Comedy Central, and CBS
- Beggars Banquet Group and record label: offering videos documentaries and concerts (no link with my site ;-))
- i-Concerts: feature approximately 20 hours of i-concerts programming that will be refreshed regularly. The content will cover all genres of music and include performances from artists such as Bob Marley, New York Dolls, B.B. King and Andrea Bocelli, as well as multi-artist live shows such as London Live (aka The Album Chart Show). The i-concerts channel will also serve as a showcase for the wider i-concerts catalogue that is already available extensively on a series of IPTV and VOD platforms across Europe.
- JumpTV: owns the rights to 270 TV stations in 70 countries.
- VOY: deliver VOY-branded channels through the Joost video-on-demand service.
As you can see there will be content for everyone in there.
I will keep you posted on my testing!
Digg this up or discuss this on Digg!
I will send invites to those who ask if I get some one day! I will use the Digg comments section to send invites.
If you can’t wait for a ticket try joostswap.
joost
