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Content Tagged with goog + YouTube

The 10 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube could be a problem for Google’s infrastructure. Video files are fat and people don’t want to wait long once they press play, which means keeping them requires a trade-off between fast access and cheap storage. A range of companies are trying to address these sorts of storage problems through compression, caching and even Flash memory in the data center.

 But since you can’t cache everything, the recent study from Tubemogul, which shows that online videos get the most views in the first three days (with the peak demand occurring on Day Three), can help set caching policies. Dropping a video from the cache after 11 days would mean only half of the video’s viewers would be tormented with a slightly slower upload time.

There is no love lost between Google and Microsoft. Same holds true for Viacom. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft and Viacom have announced a deal that’s essentially You scratch my back and I scratch yours — and with about $500 million worth of scratching. Here is a precis of the news announcement:

What Microsoft Gets:

• Microsoft will get video from Viacom and all related properties like Comedy Central and it will be available on MSN and XBox 360. Microsoft already distributes a lot of content from Viacom.
• Microsoft will get casual games from Viacom.
• Microsoft’s Atlas will be the ad server for Viacom. Viacom will provide unsold display advertising inventory on its digital sites for Microsoft to sell and serve.

What Viacom Gets:

• Money. A lot of it. “Microsoft will buy advertising on Viacom broadcast and online networks over a five-year period and the companies will work together on promotions and sponsorships for MTV Networks and BET Networks award shows.”

Who is the winner? The five-year-deal is pegged at a base value of $500 million, though the two sides are not talking precise financial terms. I suspect it’s going to favor Viacom.

Viacom doesn’t have to spend anything and at the same time it is getting advertising dollars and more distribution for their content. I get a feeling that, going forward, this is going to become a template deal for all large media companies with content assets. For them it’s a green light to pillage Microsoft’s overflowing coffers.

Deals like this will increase the pressure on Google to do similar ones with other content providers, mostly to thwart Microsoft’s advertising ambitions.

This morning, between fielding phone calls, answering emails and writing blog posts, I have been watching TV, a lot of TV…on Hulu, the new online video portal backed by NBC (GE), News Corp. (NWS) and $100 million in funding from Providence Equity Partners.

Before I go any further, a mea culpa: I mocked the service, and its backers, all through the summer. From the moment I learned about the new company, I was skeptical. And now, after spending three hours or so on the service, I am ready to eat crow. And not just any crow, but rotten, six-month-old crow: I have never been more wrong.

Now to my first impressions: This is an awesome service, one that worked flawlessly on my Macbook Pro and ThinkPad T61 without a hitch. The quality of the video shows is good enough to enjoy without straining the eyes, and even in the full-screen mode, the Flash video looks pretty amazing.

As Liz had noted yesterday, the site is clean, sparse and well laid out, taking a cue from the on-the-air (old TV) roots of its parents. And I can use this service to catch up on all the episodes of “Scrubs” I’ve missed.

Hulu doesn’t seem like a YouTube (GOOG) competitor. (This is yet another thing I was wrong about.) What it really is trying to do is time shift — and place shift — television on a massive scale. It’s basically an attempt to counterbalance the tight control that cable and satellite networks have over distribution.

It’s the kind of service that should scare startups trying to develop their own distribution platforms, such as Joost. It is also the kind of service, if it can attract enough viewers, that could succeed in relegating YouTube and others like YouTube to the “user-generated content” world, at least in the U.S. market. The social media features alone, such as sharing, are good enough to get Hulu some traction. I loved the ease with which you can create short, embeddable clips from full-length TV episodes, and the slider-based clip-and-share feature is pretty awesome.

Hulu has a long way to go before it can claim an audience as large as YouTube’s, and no one knows how much pressure it will face from its distribution partners, such as the cable companies. There are already rumblings about the draconian terms of service, and it’s unfortunate that its big media parents are restricting the site to web-based streaming and expiration dates for fresh episodes of new shows. But I think that when the beta becomes publicly available, you are going to be pleasantly surprised. For once, I am happy to be wrong.