TelcoTV: Blip.tv says add mediaRSS to STBs

The second keynote today included Blip.tv founder Michael Hudack, who had some interesting ideas on merging Internet TV services with IPTV ones. Viral videos break down into three categories: 1) Lots of repurposed copyrighted material 2) Friends and family clips 3) Episodic content We all know about the copyrighted content floating around, it’s been an active discussion ever since Google acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion. The video content posted online just to share with family members, is an unsurprising form, but I’m surprised Blip considers it pervasive and important enough to include on his list of three content forms. The third form: episodic content like that on traditional TV, is “a little farther to the left” than other content in terms of where it sits on “the long tail” because its format makes it a little closer to mainstream and a bit more popular. Hudack said he had just returned from the Vloggies, a show for video bloggers and other Internet video content, and he heard that some of these niche, episodic shows had upwards of 1 million viewers, which means some of them are reaching more people than MSNBC, he said. Hudack said TV needs to go in a direction where there is no editorial oversight of a viewers’ choices, whatsoever, services may point to it, but no one should be dictating what should and should not be watched. Despite all this, Hudack said the Internet TV viewing experience is “terrible, just terrible” and even thinks video is best viewed on the television. Watching a screen with an equivalent 320x240 resolution, while leaning forward at your desk, is obviously not ideal. Hudack wants to get that content onto the TV screen, and thinks telcos are the ones to do it. Hudack also suggested that SPs add an open subscription functionality in the STB to allow mediaRSS like Blip.tv. TiVo recently teamed up with Yahoo to allow a somewhat similar functionality.