Vudu does Wikipedia

Microsoft's WebTV service proved pretty conclusively that the masses don't want to surf the Web on their TVs. They want to watch videos, not browse for bargains on Craigslist. Technologies that integrate Web content into TV programming, on the other hand, seem much more promising. Vudu, which delivers movies on demand through the Internet to TV sets, is launching one example today, adding content streamed from Wikipedia to its program guide. 

It's a pretty simple idea. When Vudu users steer their TV sets to one of Vudu's "movie details" screens, they see a brief description of the film in question along with links to more information about the cast, reviews and similar titles. Today, Vudu is adding a new link that will take viewers to the relevant page in Wikipedia. 

There's some technological niftiness involved -- for example, the links inside the Wikipedia pages will be live, enabling people to navigate around the site as if they were using a browser. And any reference in Wikipedia to an actor, director or movie that's in Vudu's database will include links to movies in the Vudu service.

The addition of Wikipedia content is a baby step in the direction of integrated Web content, but it shows off one of the advantages of Vudu streaming its user interface to devices, rather than having it baked into the set-top box. That approach enables the company to update the features of its software in a way that's consistent across all devices, whether they are dedicated Vudu set-tops or multi-purpose devices running Vudu's software. Umm, but there's a catch -- this feature will reach the multi-purpose devices today, but the Vudu set-tops will have to wait for it.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Roku's open TV platform

Roku's $99 set-top box made its debut last year as a tool for watching Netflix's online movie streams on a television set. It later added access to Amazon's video-on-demand service and Major League Baseball's online game broadcasts. Today it announced the latest step in its evolution into a more versatile device: a "channel store" of optional video sources for users to add to their boxes.

The store is an open platform, Roku says, providing a route to the TV set for any online video programmer willing to use Roku's software development kit. That's a promising development for content providers looking to bypass cable and satellite operators. Unfortunately, the first 10 channels available through the Roku store do not include Hulu, TV.com, Sling.com or any other source of network TV shows. Instead, they consist of a handful of sites with original online video, such as Revision3; Pandora's customized music webcasts; and sites for posting and sharing photos and home videos, such as Flickr. All are free to use and easy to add to the box's regular channel lineup, although some require viewers to register.

The biggest shortcoming is the lack of a search engine or program guide that would make it easy to browse across all the channels simultaneously. Users have to scroll through what's available channel by channel, which can be tedious.

Viewers looking for something to replace their cable TV won't find it from Roku -- at least not yet. What they'll find is a broader selection of content, a convenient way to display on TV the personal photos and videos they've stored online, and the promise of more to come.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Sezmi says hello to Los Angeles

Angelenos unhappy with the cable or satellite TV offerings in their neighborhoods will have a new, much less expensive option today: Sezmi, a novel combination of over-the-air broadcasting and broadband programming. The company is launching a trial run here in anticipation of a much broader rollout by March, providing free equipment and service for about three months to those who participate. (You can sign up at Sezmi's website.) Even after the free trial ends, the price will be far below competing pay TV services: just under $5 a month for local broadcasts, Internet channels and access to pay-per-view services, and an additional $20 a month for more than 100 cable TV networks. Sezmi has some issues -- some popular cable networks aren't on board, at least not yet, and its selection of Web programming is far too limited -- but it also offers some innovations that push TV service in the direction viewers want it to go.

Clicker's guide to the unlimited-channel universe

One testament to the popularity of online video is the growing number of sites that serve as Internet program guides, helping people sort through the billions of available items to find something they might like to watch. The latest, Clicker, has its official launch at 10:30 this morning (it had been conducting an invitation-only trial since mid-September). Unlike most of the other guides, which direct users to videos available on their own sites, Clicker exists to help people find programming around the Web, including such sources as Hulu, YouTube or Revision3. And it directs users to legal content only, eschewing bootlegs and snippets posted on user-generated sites in favor of full-length content from the most convenient source. The goal, said CEO Jim Lanzone, is to be "the TV Guide for the next generation of television, whatever that evolves into."

Roku multiplies [UPDATED]

Roku introduced the first set-top box for streaming Netflix movies to the TV set a year and a half ago, and the little $100 device was an instant hit -- as was Netflix's streaming service. Since then, the company has expanded the box's capabilities a bit, adding support for high-definition video and the ability to stream movies from Amazon.com and baseball games from MLB.TV. But all that appears to be table dressing for what Roku plans to do in the near future.

This morning, the company added two variations on the Roku Digital Video Player (now called the Roku HD) to the mix: an $80 standard-definition box, which is designed for smaller or older screens, and the $130 Roku HD-XR, which adds 802.11n capabilities and a USB port. The latter isn't enabled yet, but it suggests that the player will be able to support movie download services such as Roxio's CinemaNow -- a nice solution for people who want better picture quality than their broadband connections currently support. 

I've been playing with an HD-XR on loan from Roku, and like its predecessor it's a breeze to set up -- remarkably so, considering that it's a networked device. The picture quality was very good for Netflix and Amazon, although I was disappointed to find that my 5 mbps broadband connection from AT&T wasn't fast enough to handle either source's high-def streams. The most intriguing thing was the promise of a "Channel Store" where users can go to add more sources of online video. The player's start-up guide gives instructions for using the store, but it's not yet enabled. The company says it will add the store "later this fall" as an automatic update to all its units, but it provided no details about the contents.

Company executives have talked in the past about their ambition to provide a platform for all manner of online video. Unlike some other set-tops, the Roku players support Adobe's Flash video format, which Hulu and many other sources of video online use. Of course, Hulu's owners have been notoriously reluctant to support Internet-on-TV technology for fear of harming the cable TV companies that figure prominently in their business models. But there's intense interest among tech companies in providing a bridge from the Net to the TV, so it's going to happen with or without the networks' support. For example, DivX and Rovi, two software developers with broad partnerships among consumer electronics manufacturers,  also are positioning themselves to provide a platform for online video in set-tops and TVs, as are Boxee, Apple and Microsoft.

One other quick point: I fully expect telephone companies to partner with a set-top maker like Roku. Nothing made me want to upgrade to an even higher tier of DSL more than seeing the admonition on screen that I couldn't play the HD version of an Amazon movie. AT&T and Verizon might not be keenly motivated to team with Roku, given that they're trying to sell their own versions of cable TV, but there are hundreds of other smaller telcos that don't have that kind of conflict. That's fertile ground not just for video-on-demand players like Roku and ZillionTV, but also full-blown cable replacements such as Sezmi, which is expected to begin deploying in Los Angeles soon.

Updated, 10:20 p.m. Oct. 28: Roku informed me that a software bug may have prevented me from watching streams in high definition the first time I used the device. As it happens, the company was right -- having left the box on for a while, it now streams in HD (wirelessly, connected to an 802.11g router) without a flinch. And the picture quality is quite good, although my less-than-acute vision makes me a charitable audience when it comes to HD images.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow his intermittent Twitter stream: @jcahealey.

Five ways to become the next video star

Internet funny guy Mike Polk. Credit: Break Media.

So you want to be a video star?

If you performed at a real-life comedy club in Los Angeles in the last three months, you could have been spotted by Mike Polk, a producer for Break.com who was scouting for fresh talent. Instead of clicking through countless YouTube videos to find someone, Polk decided to venture into (gulp!) the real world and hit a few live stand-up shows.

Based in Beverly Hills, Break.com gets about 70 million unique visitors a month, mostly guys 18 to 34 years old, making it one of the leading humor sites out there. Partly owned by Lionsgate Entertainment, the site serves up video game trailers, photos and short Web videos about cream cheese as deodorant pranks and Hummers on a rampage. You know, guy stuff.

Polk, whose background is in creating viral videos including a video promoting tourism in Cleveland that got 1.6 million hits, has been combing L.A.'s comedy clubs for Break.com's next comedic star.

What was he looking for? And how are those traits different for online video personalities? In a recent interview, Polk gave us, in his own words, five criteria for online video stardom: 

1) Immediacy: There has to be something that grabs you right off the bat. The Internet is flooded with people who can get your attention quickly. We're looking for people who can be funny in a very short period of time.

2) Eye-catching thumbnail portrait: It's not about being attractive. It's about having presence and charisma. But online, you have to convey that on a picture about the size of a postage stamp. Thumbnails are incredibly important.

3) Versatility: There's a one-man-band nature of Internet videos. You have to be able to incorporate music, work your own camera and know how to edit video. There are so many comics who don't know how to do any of this.

4) Original persona: You need a concept of what you want to do and how you want to get that across. It has to be unique and original.

5) Likability: We want someone people would want to approach, someone who's not already a star or full of himself. He has to be able to laugh at himself.

There's one other criterion that Polk did not explicitly mention. But it's all here in Break.com's recruiting video. (Hint: You might want to bring an athletic cup to your audition.)

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

New adventures in pay walls

Disconcerting news, Hulu users: Broadcasting and Cable reports that new board member (and News Corp. Deputy Chairman) Chase Carey says Hulu must start charging for at least some of its content. The change could come as soon as next year, he told B&C's Claire Atkinson, although he also said that the pay wall might be limited only to special or advance programming. Said Carey, "Hulu concurs with that, it needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business." (Hat tip to Gizmodo and TV Week.)

This isn't a huge surprise; my colleagues Dawn Chmielewski and Meg James reported back in May that Hulu was considering tiers of programming -- some free and some paid -- to attract some cable networks that had been reluctant to share content with the site. (They explored the idea further earlier this month, in the wake of Comcast's talks to buy Hulu co-founder NBC Universal.) But it reflects how eager broadcasters are to collect money from distributors to supplement what they take in from advertisers. And if the fees were limited to programming that wasn't otherwise available online, or to features that Hulu hadn't previously offered, then they wouldn't seem inherently unreasonable. That doesn't mean people would pay them, of course -- they have plenty of other ways to be entertained online for free. But at least Hulu could make the case for the fees with a straight face.

Meanwhile, out in Long Island, Newsday -- a tabloid that Cablevision bought last year from the struggling Tribune Co. for $650 million -- announced that it would charge non-subscribers $5 a week to read the paper online. Pricey! But the paper will be free to Cablevision's broadband subscribers too. Given that Cablevision says 75% of the Long Island market subscribes to Newsday or its broadband service, if not both, there aren't many local readers left to alienate. Still, you have to wonder why any company thinks it can increase the price of a product without increasing its value to customers. Oh, wait -- Cablevision is a cable company.... Never mind.

(Full disclosure: Tribune Co. owns the Los Angeles Times.)

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Comcast, 1Cast and Boxee

Two seemingly unrelated announcements this week illustrate the intensifying pressure on cable TV's business model. Comcast announced this week that it would make more cable-TV programming available free through the Internet by the end of the year but only to people who get broadband and cable service from Comcast.

According to PaidContent.org, the additional programming includes fare from HBO, TNT and TBS, which have kept most of their shows off of Hulu and other online TV sites. The move might dissuade a subset of Comcast's customers from dumping cable in favor of free online TV but won't charm the ones who get their broadband from a phone company.

Granted, the masses still prefer to get their TV shows from cable and satellite operators rather than Hulu because they bring it to the TV, not the PC. But the momentum behind free online TV is unmistakable -- there are new devices, such as Netgear's Digital Entertainer Live, that make it easy to bring online video to the big screen in the living room, older devices such as the Roku Video Player with ever-expanding capabilities and services including Hulu and Netflix that are continually expanding their libraries of free content. 

So here's the second announcement. 1Cast, a self-styled Hulu for news videos, unveiled a new partnership with Boxee, a program that provides a user interface for online video streams that's optimized for a TV set. The deal adds an important element to Boxee's entertainment-heavy lineup, while giving 1Cast a route to TV screens.

1Cast's approach is novel for an online news aggregator -- it strikes revenue-sharing deals with networks, rather than just monetizing the feeds that are freely available online. CEO Anthony Bontrager said his company gets clips directly from the networks in "near real time" -- typically within minutes of their appearance on air. Visitors to the 1Cast site can browse through thumbnails of the most recently added clips, or they can use the site's search function to gather all the clips related to a given topic. They also can create virtual newscasts on the topics of their choice that are dynamically updated whenever new material arrives. Or they can watch what other users have been watching or saving.

In other words, it's the Internet's remix power brought to bear on the TV news industry. It's not for people who like having someone else decide what the most important developments of the day are or who the most credible speakers might be. Instead, it's for those who want to be their own news directors or tap the collective judgment of the crowd and who like the idea of being able to view multiple perspectives on the same story. 1Cast draws from more than a dozen sources, including CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, the BBC and MarketWatch. It's also expanding into entertainment news -- it just added clips from E! Entertainment and Style. What's in it for them? In addition to the shared revenue -- 1Cast adds post-roll advertising and some interactive overlays to the clips -- Bontrager said networks like the idea of getting their material in front of viewers who might otherwise be wedded to a competitor's channel. 

One interesting tidbit about 1Cast's users: The big screen doesn't appear to be as important to them as the mobile one. Bontrager said viewers typically spend 12 to 15 minutes watching 1Cast on a PC, but the average session time on mobile (iPhone or Android phones) is 36 minutes. Sure hope they're not watching while they drive. ...

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

ZillionTV gets a new CEO

TV-over-the-Internet start-up ZillionTV changed its leadership today, bringing in a new chief executive to take over for Mitch Berman. The new guy is Jack Lawrence, formerly head of North American operations for Hong Kong toy maker Corgi International. Berman is staying on as executive chairman, he said in an interview.

Start-ups frequently change CEOs in mid-stream, often because the person with the original vision isn't the one with the managerial chops to make it happen. Those are two different skills, after all. But the change at Zillion of Sunnyvale, Calif., is sure to raise eyebrows because of extensive recent layoffs that had one former-employee-turned-blogger suggesting that the company was on its last legs. (The blogger, Brandon Wirtz, offered a similarly dismal spin on the news about Lawrence.)

Berman said the switch in roles was his idea. He wanted to hand the reins to Lawrence -- a longtime veteran of the satellite, cable TV and telecommunications industry -- because the "constant running around and raising money" had been taking too great a toll on his quality of life and his company's momentum. Lawrence will take over the fundraising duties, leaving Berman to strike the deals with content providers, advertisers and commercial partners that are crucial to Zillion's survival.

Unfortunately, Zillion isn't disclosing much to reassure people about its prospects, at least not yet. Berman wouldn't say how much money the company had raised (although Multichannel News reported that Zillion had collected more than $18 million by the end of last year), who its distribution partners were, how many titles it had in its library or what content deals it had signed (granted, the company counts five Hollywood studios among its investors). As for the layoffs, Berman said the company has morphed from a technology developer into a media and marketing operation, and so there was no work left for some employees to do.

He said more confidence-building announcements were soon to come. The company launched last month in communities where it doesn't have an ISP partner, offering the service to anyone who agrees to pay the one-time equipment fee of $99. But Berman wouldn't say where those were, nor did he disclose how many customers had signed up. So there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical about Zillion. Nevertheless, I'm paying attention to the company because I'm intrigued by its business model. Offering a subscription-free twist on online video-on-demand, Zillion says its customers will be able to buy, rent or watch movie and TV programming for free in exchange for viewing personalized commercials. It's not exactly a replacement for cable TV, nor is it a gateway to all the video riches the Web has to offer. And the most innovative aspect of the business model -- free viewing with targeted ads -- still has to be proven before Zillion is likely to get the studios' most compelling content. Yet its user interface is great, and the picture quality it demonstrated this year was impressive. So stay tuned.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

From the Net to the TV screen, with help from Netgear [UPDATED]

What I want most in life, aside from world peace and Jack Nicholson's Lakers tickets, is an inexpensive gadget that can bring the rich world of online video to my TV set.

Netgear's Digital Entertainer Live (aka the EVA2000) isn't that device. But it comes tantalizingly close -- close enough, perhaps, to satisfy the needs of some avid online video fans. It also brings into focus the technical and design problems that need to be solved before the living room TV can be as friendly to Internet video as the PC in the den.

The company gave a preview of the device at January's Consumer Electronics Show, positioning it as an inexpensive yet versatile link between the Web and the TV screen. By the time it started selling the EVA2000 in mid-September, however, Netgear had pared back its capabilities a bit. The box could still connect directly to YouTube and numerous other online video sites. But to access Hulu, Netflix and a handful of other popular outlets ...