App to convert Flash on iPhone hits App Store

Skyfire’s mobile browser, which fires up the company’s own servers to translate Flash video into HTML5, will soon hit Apple’s App Store, according to CNN.

Microsoft Giving Up On Silverlight, Joining HTML5 Party

We now have further confirmation that Microsoft is giving up on its Silverlight rich Internet application platform. Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s president in charge of server and tools, told ZDNet that the company is “shifting away” from Silverlight as a cross-platform development framework, and pushing the HTML5 web standard instead.

There’s been plenty of evidence to suggest this was the case. After all, with the launch of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft has fully embraced and touted many of HTML5′s features. But it doesn’t just stop there; Microsoft will be leveraging HTML5 for the latest version of its Bing search engine, and is using H.264-encoded HTML5 video in lieu of Silverlight Smooth Streaming for delivery of live video on its Xbox 360 game console.

Microsoft will continue to develop and lean on Silverlight, especially for application development on its recently launched Windows Phone 7 operating system for mobile devices. However, Muglia told ZDNet, “HTML is the only true cross-platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”

That Microsoft would align itself with Apple, especially in the embrace of a web standard, might seem peculiar to some. After all, the two software makers have been battling for decades in the PC space, and now are bumping heads in mobile as Microsoft tries to offer up a compelling alternative to Apple’s iPhone.

But it also makes sense that Microsoft would begin de-emphasizing Silverlight as a cross-platform development platform. Despite some of the advances Microsoft was able to push with its development, including HTTP and adaptive bit rate streaming, it wasn’t able to dethrone Flash as the de facto rich Internet application and video platform on the web. And with the emergence of HTML5, it was no longer a matter of playing second fiddle to Adobe, but lagging behind a web standard that was also being rapidly adopted.

To see what Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch has to say about adoption of HTML5 and its positioning against Flash, come see him speak at NewTeeVee Live on November 10 in San Francisco.

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Watch Out, Big Cable: Xbox Live Now Bigger Than Comcast

Microsoft is making a play to get its users watching more video through its Xbox 360 game console, and could soon pose a clear threat to cable operators. Unlike big cable, it’s actually gaining subscribers who are eager to watch video services available through the service.

Microsoft has sold more than 42 million game consoles worldwide, but the more impressive stat is that its Xbox Live subscription service now has more than 25 million users. That’s more subscribers than Comcast, which earlier this week, reported its subscriber count had actually decreased by 275,000 over the most recent quarter, ending at less than 23 million for the first time in years. While many Xbox Live subscribers are clearly international, with the service available in 26 countries, Microsoft clearly has some scale and a huge audience it could leverage.

After all, it’s one thing to have a lot of subscribers to your gaming network — and many Xbox owners only sign up for the service for multi-user gaming — but Xbox Live users are increasingly turning to the service to watch live and on-demand video. According to Microsoft, users spends an average of 40 hours a week on the service, and over the past year, the amount of time those users have spent watching TV and movie content has grown 157 percent. Not just that, but Xbox already makes more money from media sales than through its Xbox Live subscription revenues.

The console currently has video content from its Zune marketplace, Netflix and ESPN3, and early next year, will also have video content from the Hulu Plus subscription service. That range of content has 42 percent of Xbox Live subscribers watching an hour of TV and movie content on average per day, or 30 hours of video per month.

So far, Xbox has played nice with pay TV providers, and some of its features are only available if you’re a subscriber to cable or IPTV services. The ESPN3 service, for instance, only works if your ISP has struck an affiliate deal with ESPN; that means Comcast and Time Warner Cable subscribers will have access to ESPN video on the Xbox, but customers of some smaller ISPs may not. Microsoft has also been working with AT&T to allow U-verse subscribers to use their Xbox 360 consoles as digital set-top boxes, instead of leasing one from the pay TV provider.

The day could come when Xbox might think about using its massive audience to roll out its own pay TV service, and that day may come sooner than you think. Earlier this year, Microsoft was reportedly in talks with former News Corp. President Peter Chernin to create an Xbox-only TV network. At the same time, based on its audience numbers alone, it wouldn’t be unheard of for Microsoft to approach existing cable networks about cutting out the cable providers and offering up distribution directly through Xbox Live.

Want to know if the Xbox 360 can help you cancel your cable now? Check out the second episode of our new show, Cord Cutters, in which Janko reviews the game console’s possibilities as a cord cutting device.

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Where to Watch the World Series Online

UPDATE Hey Cablevision subscribers! Don’t want to miss the World Series while your cable provider battles it out with Fox over retransmission fees for broadcasting the games? Have no fear, because you can catch the games online, and — if you have an iPhone or iPad — on your mobile device as well.

Game One of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Texas Rangers kicks off at 7:30 PM Eastern, 4:30 Pacific tonight. And for the second year in a row, Major League Baseball fans will be able to tune into the game through Postseason.TV, a playoff add-on to its MLB.tv streaming video service.

For a one-time fee of $9.99, viewers can stream the games live online or through the MLB At Bat mobile app. In addition to live video, Postseason.TV also has all the same scores, highlights, stats and Gameday tracking as the MLB.tv service. That means that hardcore fans won’t have to miss a pitch as the Rangers’ Cliff Lee faces off against reigning Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum tonight.

While Postseason.TV has been available since the season ended, the availability of an online streaming service is even more pressing now that a blackout of Fox’s broadcast network in Cablevision households threatens to rob subscribers of their sports fix. Interestingly enough, while MLB had spent the last several weeks promoting Postseason.TV prominently on its homepage, those banners have been turned over to push users to “Watch the World Series on Fox,” and Postseason.TV has been relegated to a display ad below the fold. The league also sent out an email to subscribers promoting the Championship Series on the broadcast network.

But for some 3 million Cablevision subscribers, that’s not an option. Meaning that while Cablevision’s hometown Yankees have been knocked out of the playoffs, hardcore baseball fans may have to turn to the online streams to catch all the action.

Update: If you are a Cablevision customer and purchase Postseason.tv from MLB to stream the game, the cable company will refund your $10 purchase with a credit applied to next month’s bill.

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Apple Has Already Won the Flash-HTML5 War

A majority of web video is now HTML5-ready, according to new research from MeFeedia, showing that web standards — and Apple — are winning the day when it comes to how video is delivered and viewed online. The research shows that the amount of video viewable in an HTML5 video player has doubled in the last five months and now accounts for 54 percent of all video content online.

It’s important to note that HTML5 video is not replacing Flash video on the web, but augmenting it; most HTML5 videos today are available through a universal embed code that auto-detects the device requesting the video and serves up the appropriate version. That means for most of these videos, there are at least two versions — one Flash and one HTML5  – stored online.

It’s not only HTML5-ready web browsers that are pushing the envelope; it’s a multitude of mobile devices, which have caused publishers to rethink the formats for delivering online videos. The biggest proponent in the move to HTML5 video has been Apple, which refused to support Adobe’s Flash on its iOS devices — including the iPhone and iPad — meaning that publishers that wanted to have videos on those devices would have to turn to standards-based, in-browser delivery.

The launch of the iPad, in particular, has been instrumental in leading this change. Despite the iPhone being HTML5-only for years, the amount of video available through the nascent web standard in January was just 10 percent. But owing to the iPad’s larger screen real estate and its propensity to be used as a video consumption device, many more publishers were forced to jump on board. At the time it was launched, just one-quarter of web video was available in an HTML5 video player. Now it’s up to more than half of all web videos.

The iPad has been the biggest driver of HTML5 video, but all mobile devices should benefit from the change. Despite the fact that newer Android-based devices come with Flash pre-installed, theoretically giving them access to all the web’s video, our own tests have shown that it’s not always a great experience. In fact, sometimes it’s shockingly bad.

While launching the video in a separate Flash player might help, Flash is still a processor hog and mobile devices don’t really have the gigahertz, nor the spare battery power, to keep Flash happy. HTML5, which delivers video natively (without extra software) is leaner. That’s bad news for Adobe, which has been banking on embedding the Flash player into mobile and connected TV devices. But if a native HTML5 implementation is available for most videos online, it might be smarter for those videos to be delivered in HTML5 than in Flash. Why waste cycles and power if a device doesn’t need to?

It seems that even Adobe has conceded this point, recently rolling out an HTML5 video player widget that serves up standards-based video to devices that don’t support Flash. The widget works by trying to serve up HTML5 video, but defaults to Flash when the standard isn’t supported. With mobile viewing growing in importance, that delivery scenario may be the future for most web video, which leaves Adobe Flash hanging on by its fingernails (or rather, a widget).

To learn more about Adobe’s plans for HTML5, come see CTO Kevin Lynch at this year’s NewTeeVee Live on Nov. 10 in San Francisco.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Cameron Russell.

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StumbleUpon Wants to Be the Pandora of Web Video

StumbleUpon is trying hard to become the best way for users to find relevant and interesting videos online. With the addition of more full-length video content available through its StumbleUpon Video site, it could do just that, by becoming a recommendation engine for online video.

“I’ve never had a very good experience watching TV. It never learned what I like,” StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp said in a phone interview. The problem is that TV and most video sites on the web today are more or less a one-way experience: you go to a site, you find what you want to watch, and you leave. Once you’ve found something that interests you, you spend time with it. If you don’t have something of interest to replace it with, you click away.

StumbleUpon hopes to remedy that situation with a recommendation engine that offers up a steady stream of videos that users find interesting. Using an algorithm that takes into account your past interactions, community feedback and input from users that you like and follow, StumbleUpon is betting that it can provide a more compelling video experience online than one could find by turning on the TV or just going to one of the network video sites like ABC.com or CBS.com.

The idea that StumbleUpon is going to be a landing page for online videos might be a turn-off for some publishers; after all, most hope to keep users engaged and keep them on-site as long as possible, thereby increasing the number of in-stream and display ads they can serve. StumbleUpon’s pitch is that it doesn’t change anything in the embedded video stream, so partners can serve up whatever ads they want. Besides, viewers may come across a video recommended by their friends — or by the community — they might not have seen otherwise.

It’s not just short-form and user-generated video snacking that StumbleUpon hopes to enable; in addition to sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Metacafe, StumbleUpon has added videos from Hulu and TED to its database. As a result, users will now have more long-form videos recommended to them. That’s good news for users, but really good news for StumbleUpon, since the biggest thing missing today as a really killer video recommendation engine for all the web content out there.

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YouTube Hits 1 Billion Subscriptions: Here Are 7 Geeky Good Ones

YouTube crossed the 1 billion subscriptions mark today and if some of those aren’t yours – you’re missing out. Subscription to YouTube channels is a great way to make use of the service, especially on mobile devices.

Have you got some favorite YouTube subscriptions? I do, and I thought I’d share them here. If you’ve got some good ones to recommend to ReadWriteWeb readers let us know in comments so we can subscribe and watch them while exercising and folding laundry.

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Below you’ll find links to and descriptions of my favorite 7 channels on YouTube, along with the company’s new widget that makes it easy to subscribe with a click.

Talks @ Google

Famous authors and others come and speak to Google staff and the videos are run in this channel. Sometimes famous Googlers speak to each other. Good stuff, long videos. For example: Clay Shirky.

Gartner Videos

Garnter is the world’s biggest analyst firm and the company frequently posts interviews with big company execs at conferences. Depending on your perspective, these videos can be very valuable, or very boring with hints of interesting tidbits. Example: Yvonne Genovese Discusses Pattern Based Strategy

The Liam Show

Liam Kyle Sullivan loves shoes and I love him for it.

Lockergnome

Chris Pirillo’s Lockergnome is crazy prolific and not going to change your life – but it’s fun. It’s pretty remarkable how this tech geek has built a publishing empire that may have reached its pinnacle with nearly continuous live streaming video of hiself answering questions and talking about nerdly pursuits.

O’Reilly Media

Everyone’s favorite tech book publisher and event company publishes good videos from events and occasional webcasts. Great for a deep-dive into the most cutting edge web technology.

Porter Novelli

This big firm runs PR for SXSW and hosts all kinds of really interesting smaller technology events. Mobile social media and augmented reality have been recent topics.

Social Data Revolution

Andreas Weigend is a deep thinker about social data online and he scores great interviews on the topic. He’s got a PhD in Physics and was the Chief Scientist at Amazon.com through 2004. His videos are highly recommended.

Steve Gillmor

Steve Gillmor combines years of experience as a tech reporter with great access to leading engineers, executives and thinkers and a willingness to push the envelope far into what the future may (or may not) look like online. His YouTube channel is mostly filled with video of his hour-long weekly show the Gillmor Gang. There are plenty of perspectives not included, but if you’re interested in some of the most innovative perspectives in Silicon Valley, this is a great show to watch.

Those are 7 of my favorite YouTube channels to subscribe to. If This Week in VC and Mixergy had channels on YouTube, I’d subscribe to those there too (there’s still iTunes!).

Update: Leo Laport posts explains in comments below that only a fool’s list of geeky YouTube channels would neglect his Twit channel, so check that out. I would be willing to revise the list above and put Twit in place of the Liam Show, but only if Leo is willing to perform the Shoes song himself.

Andrew Warner also pointed out that Mixergy does have some short videos on YouTube as well.

What are your favorites? I think we all could use some more geeky suggestions.

Discuss

VLC Makes Its Way to the iPhone, iPod Touch

VLC has made its way fully onto iOS with this week’s release for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The open-source, multi-platform video player will allow Apple’s mobile device users to play a number of different video formats, from DiVX to AVI and more.

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This latest version of VLC works on the iPhone 4 and 3GS, as well as the iPod Touch 3rd and 4th generation. This version of VLC allows users a greater flexibility by providing support for more file types as well as allowing them to delete files directly from the app, rather than resorting to using iTunes on their computer.

The app first broke onto iOS in late September with an iPad app, surprising many. As we mentioned when the iPad app was approved, it seems that after Apple clarified its App Store guidelines, it moved to a more liberal policy.

9 to 5 Mac took a look at the app and offered up an early review of the features, which you can see below.

VLC 1.1.0 is available in the App Store.

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Do iPhone or Android Users Watch More Video? (And Other Video Trends)

Mobile video optimization firm Bytemobile has just released its most recent “Mobile Minute Metrics” report, a look at wireless users’ video consumption trends and behavior based on metrics from a cross-section of nearly 2 billion Bytemobile customers in 58 countries around the world.

According to the new report, which focuses on Q3 2010 mobile traffic, mobile operators are seeing “unprecedented” levels of mobile data traffic, an increase heavily impacted by increased demand for video. Some interesting stats were revealed, too – like whether it’s Android or iPhone users who watch more video, what sites get the most views and more.

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Bytemobile found that, on a per-user average, it’s iPhone users generating the most video traffic. 42% of total data traffic generated by the iPhone is video, while only 32% on Android is video.

The most popular and most watched videos are still those coming from user-generated content sites like YouTube and Google Video, which account for 48% of total network video traffic. The second-largest category of video is adult content, accounting for 30% of total traffic. Combined, these two categories – user-gen and adult – make up nearly 80% of total video traffic.

As in last quarter, users are still opting for lower-quality videos (240p) to minimize stalling and other bandwidth-related issues. HD video is currently requested a third less often than low-res video, but generates a similar amount of data traffic – 31% compared with 39%. This means that even a small increase in HD video consumption leads to a significantly greater increase in network traffic load, the report notes.

Not surprisingly, when network speeds increase, video traffic also increases. Case in point: Right now, wireless networks with slower end-to-end speeds only see an average of 39% of their total data traffic as video-generated, while faster networks see nearly 60%.

Video viewing peak hours are now no longer daytime, but evening – a shift that indicates a transition from business usage to residential, entertainment-based usage, says Bytemobile. Mobile data usage, however, occurs during all waking hours (9 a.m. to midnight), with traffic patterns that reflect the number of users on the network at any given time.

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Skype Debuts Its Half, Now It’s Facebook’s Turn to Integrate

We were excited last month to find out about the integration of Skype and Facebook. This morning, the feature is going live for all to see with the release of Skype 5.0.

The latest version comes with some cleaned up design features, built-in Facebook integration and the group video chat we’ve watched develop in the beta releases. For Skype, it’s improvement all around and all we can say now is that the ball is surely in Facebook’s court.

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Group Video Chat Goes Live

We got a quick tour of Skype 5.0 and the first thing Rick Osterloh, head of consumer product management, showed off was the group video chat feature. Allowing up to 10 people at once, the chat takes advantage of Skype’s high-quality audio and video. It offers some nifty features, like “dynamic view”, which highlights the person speaking by enlarging their video feed and shrinking everyone else. While group voice and text chat will be available for free, Skype plans on charging for group video chat in the near future.

A Clean-Cut Interface

The next big feature was the new “Skype Home”, which features a cleaned-up contacts list, recent contacts, and the Facebook integration.

As Osterloh called it, it’s a “nice central place for users to go.” The contacts list now shows users’ avatars next to their names and the recent contacts list shows just that, along with recent Skype transactions.

Here Comes Facebook

Now for the Facebook integration – it’s basically your Facebook feed pulled directly into Skype. You can "like" things and post comments, but anything beyond that – like viewing profiles, photos or events – opens separately in your browser.

Viewing your Facebook feed in Skype offers another advantage – for friends who include their phone number in their Facebook profile, you will see two buttons. One lets you call either their Skype number or their home/mobile phone, while the other allows you to send an SMS. If they have a Skype account linked to their Facebook account, a “+” will appear, letting you add them as a Skype contact.

Even better than the Facebook feed – because we really don’t see ourselves browsing Facebook in Skype – is the importing of your Facebook Phonebook. Suddenly, everyone you know on Facebook that lists a phone number will be easily contactable via Skype.

The Ball’s In Facebook’s Court

We were really hoping to see Skype integration on the Facebook website. Osterloh told us that they don’t have anything to announce there today, but we’re hoping to see the vice-versa integration in the near future.

So does this embody the endless potential we wrote about last month? Not really, but it’s a decent first step. What we’re really hoping to see from this partnership are Skype buttons on Facebook that launch Skype calls and SMS capabilities. Even more, we would love to see a Skype integration in the iPhone and Android apps. Imagine using Skype’s background capabilities for ever-present chat and free, quick Skype-to-Skype phone calls connected directly to your Facebook account. What about quick connections from Facebook to businesses as a part of its fledgling Places product?

While the Facebook integration in Skype is nice, it’s the other way around that we’re really excited to see…so what do you say, Facebook? Will we see on-site voice and video calling? SMS integration?

It would be pretty neat, is all we’re saying…

The latest version of Skype is now available for download.

Discuss