November 30,2008
We added a page to explain how to watch and find the best movies available online
You can now find channels with the best new and old free movies using the mylivetime.com custom search engine.
So use our newest page when all you want is to watch movies for free
October 25,2008
Haven't written in a while as I have been super busy with ... stuff !
You can now follow new channels and cool new live and on demand videos using the mylivetime.com Twitter
Sept 21,2008
We have been getting a lot of traffic from users utilizing the 'Online Video Guide' custom search engine. The top search terms in the past month are:
weeds
hentai
free movies
step brothers
forgetting sarah marshall
hentai episode
hancock
entourage
nigeria movies
the dark knight
one tree hill
wild child
hancock movie
cruel intentions
All the best and please, please, please come back for more as we are working on getting you the latest and greatest channel guide on the planet.
Sept 9,2008
Is it fast? Yes
Is it stable? Yes
Can I watch video on the online video guide with it? Yes
Is it slick? Yes (well in a techie sort of way)
All the reasons in the world to use it but... Google tracks your browsing on Chrome, as explained in “Google's 'Chrome' to provide new trove of user data” .
The default settings are built in a way that the OmniBox (the search box on top of the browser)
Tags: Google Chrome omnibox, Google privacy, Google suggest, online video guide
suggests what to search for but at the same time collects browsing information and sends it back to Google, from a company that headlines its code of conduct with the “Don’t be evil” mantra I would expect a different or at least a less intrusive set of defaults.
A whole different reason not to use Chrome is lack of differentiation. When I build a product or try to reach an audience I highlight what’s different rather than what’s better, a slight change in tab behavior and better performance do not differ Chrome from the pack and drive users to change their current browser.
A word of caution, we will soon see a headline saying “50 million (or pick any number) downloads of Chrome in the first 10 days” – this is great but should not be confused by the actual number of people that use it, unfortunately Google can know exactly how many people use Chrome by following our browsing habits.
An update on the data retention policy can be found here
Online Video is all over the internet and spreading – no real news there! Finding and discovering it is what the problem is all about.
There are 5 ways to approach a solution to this huge problem:
- Online Video Guide – If you are reading this you are already well aware of what this guide can do, it is a hand-picked set of video channels that can be searched using a custom search engine and are categorized into different categories based on the content of each channel, the guide points into different channels/sites and does not point to specific videos.
- Online video library – This can be a library of videos of a certain kind for example: Wine Library TV or an actual library with online videos like the New York Public Library’s Video index (http://www.nypl.org/digital/).
- Video Aggregators – This is what Hulu, YouTube, MetaCafe and even 5min are all about. They are a site where video is uploaded to by users (and sometimes by the site owners) – that video can be watched from the site or embedded in other sites. These videos are also searchable by the video search engines.
- Video Search Engines – Google leads the pack with its Video search. This capability is the same as searching the rest of the web but the results are only videos (typically you can watch these videos without navigating to other sites).
- Make my video channel – WeShow.com is a good example of making your own channel, you cannot upload new videos on those sites but you can bunch up different videos from different aggregators into one ‘Channel’ and make it your own by customizing the tags/words and descriptions for each video.
The different methods bring to life many dilemmas and questions …
Which one is better? Which one serves which target audience? Which one helps the internet users?
How is this mess going to look like a year from now? Which one will survive the test of time?
In the coming posts I will try to answer some of these questions and mostly focus on how the online video environment is moving into its next phase.
Aug 29,2008
Live streaming is on the verge of taking off and I am not talking about the technology but rather about the content that is getting better every day.
I was expecting much more standard, scheduled live streaming from the Beijing Olympics but I guess the big US television networks did a great job in enforcing their broadcasting rights, still I would assume NBC would push for more live coverage on the internet backed by a schedule and means of planning to watch this event or another on the web.
It is a long path but the more live streaming sites we see out there the more I know we are headed in that direction.
These are the top 10 live video streaming sites in our online video guide:
Aug 19,2008
All of us in the online video guide love to travel and try to materialize that love as much as we can afford with the limited time and cash we have.
There is often a balance we try to manage between knowing too much about a place we are travelling to and therefore effecting the excitement of being somewhere for the first time and the need to not miss anything when we are out travelling somewhere.
Recently we tried to use the online video guide for our research so besides googling our destination we watch some videos about the experience we are going to have before we go on the trip, while we are on the trip to validate some detail or other and when we are back to share what we have seen with others.
As an example if you search for ‘Shanghai China travel’ in our custom search engine you get results from sites like:
travelvideo.tv
www.dailymotion.com/cluster/travel/
www.logoonline.com/travel/
www.travelistic.com/blog/tag/shanghai
At the end of the day we are able to better prepare for our travel all around the globe and to ensure that the trip we have been saving time and money for allows us to experience all we can do out there (and get some great bargains).
Some places we visited in the last 12 months:
New York City, Alaska, San Jose Costa Rica, Israel, Portland Oregon, Shanghai China, Sydney Australia, Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia & Ethiopia.
I have been looking into instruction videos on how to watch free movies and online video and I am really surprised by the lack of knowledge out there.
I picked three videos that run through the manual process of searching for free movies on the internet and the way I view it these are really what this online video guide is about as
it makes your life simpler when wanting to watch a specific channel and provides great focus in the ever growing world of online video to relevant sites and relevant results.
There are a growing number of live web events of many types: TV, Radio, Chat, Game, Auction, Webinar, etc. Emerging events on the internet include votes for a reality show, participating in presidential debates, watching live sports events online and participating in a live GMAT class online. The size and growth of the events are staggering, based on aForrester study the number of internet TV channels is expected to reach one million in 2011, according to Citrix the number of people using web conferencing services every month is 5 million and the estimated number of online radio listeners in the US alone is 120 million a month.
A recent survey conducted showed that over 75% of the survey participants are interested in live web event search and that they currently participate in variety of live event types. For example:
• ~30% view live sports events
• ~40% view live seminars (webinars)
• ~25% participate in Skypecasts
• ~20% listen to live earning conferences
There is a growing number of online web events with multiple types whether it is over 2000 live sports events on ESPN360 in next 12 months, 120m internet radio users in US each month, Discussions streamed live on MTV.com and MySpace.com between voters and the presidential candidates or 5 million web conference users a month and Internet TV ads worth $10bn by 2011.
These channels show up in the online video guide and are a part of the customized search engine in two ways, first they are some of the sites and make up the engine but in addition to that these sites are part of our refined results. By refining the results in the search page you can view results focused on the live video sites first and only than see the rest of the results.
Here are some examples to live channels in our guide:
*** http://www.justin.tv/ - Unique interactive site where you can chat live with video bloggers.
*** http://www.ustream.tv/ - Live interactive video platform with a variety of vlogging programs to choose from.
*** http://www.playcafe.com/ - PlayCafe.com is the online game show channel.
*** http://www.jumptv.com/ - JumpTV is the world's largest broadcaster of international and sports content over the Internet.
*** http://web.wcsn.com/index.jsp - World Championship Sports Network (WCSN) is the premier destination for fans of Olympic and lifestyle sports, delivering an immersive experience via exclusive live coverage of world class competitions, interaction with top athletes and in depth access to sports news and information year round.
*** http://www.cnn.com/video/ - Headline news video from CNN.
Next time I will discuss the Focus on the online video guide and the olympics.
Turns out the economic situation in the US and around the world is also affecting this online video guide – simply put more and more people are dropping their premium cable package or all their cable connection and are left without a feed into their TV.
At the same time everyone still wants to watch their favorite TV shows and episodes and be able to discuss them with others as well as enjoy them. The online video guide is positioned to help with this issue as you can search for “free movies”, “free TV shows” or just browse the relevant category. As we have a great subset of sites in place the results are extremely focused and targeted at anyone who is still hesitant about dropping their cable connection.
The above provides a great fallback option to anyone wanting to save up on their monthly cost and still enjoy what they like by watching online video for free.
Next time I will discuss the Focus on Live Online Video vs. on demand Video as a trend around an internet and a focus of the online video guide.
There is a lot of confusion that has to do with lack of knowledge around what the internet has to offer consumers who try to find free movies they can watch online. Given this confusion we are tuning our guide to be very extra useful in finding free movies that are available online. Using the custom search engine you can watch movies that are still in theaters as well as some movies that are out on DVD and movies that are classic oldies from the 70’s and the 60’s. These movies come in many formats (see the Video and Audio format list) and are provided in by many sites which you can find in the “Movies-TV” category of this guide. The best keywords to use in the custom search engine would be “free movies”, “new free movies” or “new movies”.
Apart from the main stream movies many of our users search for movies from around the world, some of latest searches point to Nigeria, Israel, India, Africa and Brazil. As the world goes through a communication evolution and revolution where everyone, everywhere at any time can find multiple types of media ranging from news to movies there is a growing need for a focused guide that can provide direction to where movies can be watched and used as a community to share the knowledge between avid movie watchers from around the globe. The best keywords to use in the custom search engine would be “Nigeria free movies”, “Israel new free movies” or “Brazil new movies”.
Moving into the future as we would probably still see the most viewed film & video companies that are out there today like The Walt Disney Company, News Corporation, YouTube-LLC, Time Warner, Nickelodeon Networks, Sony Corporation, MTV Networks Company, Fox Entertainment Group, Inc., National Football League, Viacom Inc. we will also see many more new channels on top of the existing 1700 channels in the online video and games guide coming from a wide range of new film & video companies that will create and distribute content.
As noted earlier the online video guide like many ideas started from a slightly different point of view as we really like the notion of live video and events on the web ranging from chats about different thoughts and ideas like ‘blog talk radio’ and including very cool ideas like ustream.tv and more. At the end of our decision making process we understood that if we really want to serve our audience we do not only need live events and videos but rather than that a full video guide that includes on demand as well as live videos.
Going through the above process we found out about many interesting live sites for sports, gambling, shopping, blogging and chatting. A favorite site of mine I use to date is jump.tv where you can get many on demand, free live and pay per view video channels. The sites is built as an online video guide for its specific set of channels and is really great for watching sports online when it is not on TV.
As we keep growing our online video guide we will make sure we focus on the full user experience to include live video channels and pages as well as on demand video pages.
The online video guide like many ideas started from a slightly different point of view and has been evolving since; we were looking to
be an online guide to show everything that is live on the web. I will talk a lot more about live on the web and how we can help you find
it in http://www.mylivetime.com but this will be in future articles and entries on this blog.
So given the above we decided to first build a channel\page guide – this is not a guide for specific videos but rather a way to help
you find channels that really matter to you and discover more video. We take a two phased approach to helping you discover content online:
1) Focused and customized search – Your search can only be as focused and accurate as the base you are searching from given that we collected
a unique set of sites and customized search engine technology from Google to provide the best means for you to find different categories of video
channels and pages.
2) Choosing the right categories – By creating the right set of categories and evolving those over time by using a dedicated editorial team we are able to create content
that is unique to anyone wanting to discover more video. One of the most exciting categories is
Anime after visiting a great show in the Vancouver Art Gallery last month (http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/)
about the history and current state of
Anime and following online Anime video and its evolution in the past 20 years we really wanted to have a
category about Anime online Video and be a great place to watch that Anime online video. We now have great Anime channel like
Anime Put,
Mangaspot and many more.
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