During the VON show in San Jose, I spoke with a few companies in the Video Pavilion about their products. The Video Pavilion was this spot on the exhibit floor where companies were focusing on video, rather than VOIP products.

Here’s a short clip of Fan Rocket CEO Danny Kastner explaining, in his own unique way, what his company is all about.

P.S. You may know Danny Kastner as the guitar-playing guy from his appearance on the third season of the reality TV show, The Apprentice.

Over at ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog, they report on how the performance of smaller streaming media companies with user generated content, like Vimeo and Grouper, is sometimes better than the big companies.

Measurement company Keynote keeps track of stuff like this and studied 18 video sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Guba, Metacafe, Vimeo and Revver. Keynote found that the big firms, like YouTube has 100% availability of streams delivering them in 1.08 seconds.

Keynote also developed a scale dubbed “Stream Q” which is the combination of connect time and buffer time for these sites. It rates sites on their Stream Q’s for example to better rank them. Here are some other interesting findings for their research:

* 11 of 18 sites had 100 percent availability;
* Average availability was 97.49 percent. Worse availability was 43.4 percent.
* Average global Stream Q score was 4.09 seconds. In U.S. average score was 3.92 seconds.
* Metacafe was most consistent site. Dailymotion followed.

Check out the ZDNet blog for more specifics, including the Top 5 Overall Sites.

[Via Keynote Press Release]

On Tuesday, Veoh Networks announced it had finally officially launched its video sharing service, after a year of beta testing. Veoh is backed by Time Warner and The Tornante Company, an investment firm run by Michael Eisner, formerly from Disney.
Seems like Veoh is trying to go the legit route, but it isn’t without controversy.

In 2006, Veoh made lots of video bloggers angry because they crawled their web sites, downloaded their videos, transcoded them and hosted them on Veoh’s sites without anyone’s permission.

Veoh said that its video sharing service offers producers the option of either pay-per-view, pay-to-own, or subscription-based business lines.

Bonus: Read this story about the top 10 video sharing sites for more on Veoh and others.

Another Bonus: Here’s Veoh’s official blog.

[veoh] [video]

HandHeld Entertainment announced that it was acquiring Putfile.com, a U.K.-based company that hosts user-generated content, for $7.1 million.

The company now has more than 425,000 free and premium videos — including music videos, anime features, television shows, movies, and other programming — available on its network of websites.

[From Digital Media Wire]

Digital media research company Research and Markets said that the market for Internet movies will grow from an estimated $9.5 million this year to nearly $60 million by 2010.

The report says that the single biggest factor holding back Internet movie sales is “Hollywood’s reluctance to allow films to be sold over the web so that they can ultimately be viewed on TVs,” adding that existing technologies are “too complex for most consumers.”$9.5 million seems like a lot but there are lots of companies in movie downloading space today. They include old timers like Movielink, CinemaNow, and recent services like iTunes and Amazon’s Unbox.
Thing may change now that NetFlix is starting to deliver movies over the Internet. Also Tivo and Amazon announced that they were testing movie downloads from Amazon’s Unbox service delivered directly to Tivo DVRs. And let’s not forget Apple’s upcoming product, AppleTV, which will deliver movies and TV shows via iTunes to your TV set.
Currently, most downloadable movie sites, like CinemaNow or Movielink aren’t meant to be viewed on TV sets. This gap between the computer and TV is turning into the Grand Canyon.

Analysts call it “The Last 10 Feet”.

This PC to TV gap is shaping up to be one of the bigger stories of 2007. It’s not a technological gap–as evidenced by the Tivo/Amazon deal–but it’s a copyright issue. Hollywood still doesn’t want to make it easy to download content (movies or TV shows) and watch it on your TV.

Bonus: Check out my article on why AppleTV won’t beat Tivo.