2011

2011

Was it something Steve Jobs said? Less than a year after the Apple CEO's infamous dissing of Flash-based site and video delivery, HTML5 support has accelerated quickly. According to video tech firm MeFeedia's survey of 33,000 sources, the share of Web video available for HTML5 playback has gone from 10% in January 2010 to 63% in February. The big jump has to do with mainstream support by the major players like YouTube, DailyMotion and Blip TV. As the company shows in a blog post, only about a quarter of sites surveyed had HTML5 support as of last May, but that compatibility grew quickly over the summer so that 54% of video was compatible by October.

Full article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=146192&nid=124442

2011

Books have become one of the most interesting sources of online video in the past year or so. As we have noted in VidBlog before, the new phenomenon of the book trailer has produced some stunningly good and often funny work. It gave us Thomas Pynchon's voice, narrating the trailer for his Inherent Vice trailer.

It gave us a hilarious send-up of book culture from Gary Shteyngart that included cameos by Manhattan's literary lions.

And it gave us several videos from authors who spent their time eschewing the concept of a book trailer altogether.  No sense of humor.

One guy who does get the joke and has become a quiet hit online is Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles. He has created an ongoing series of videos that are less book reviews than they are funny takes on the cult of books.

Full article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=145749&nid=124272

2011

"I think we're at the beginning of a new era, a time of reconnection," says Ken Doctor, author of "Newsonomics" and an industry analyst who believes 2011 offers the newspaper industry another shot at succeeding in the digital world.

This is the year the paid content model will really be tested, he says. "By July 1, we will have six or seven dozen, pushing toward 100, tests of paid content in the United States and Europe." Mr Doctor was speaking at WAN-IFRA's 21st World Newspaper Advertising Conference, which took place in Malta from 24-25 February.

The New York Times' metered model, to be introduced shortly, will be watched by the industry with great interest. Mr Doctor described such models - which ask for payment from those who access many pages but leave occasional users with free access -  as "making peace with fly-by traffic."

Full article: http://www.editorsweblog.org/newspaper/2011/02/a_new_era_for_newspaper_companies.php

2011

That, says a team of Merrill Lynch analysts, is the hit it would take in Kindle book sales

The button circled at right on Amazon's (AMZN) popular Kindle app for the iPhone will have to be removed if the company wants to continue doing business in Apple's (AAPL) App Store. That's because it takes customers out of the store to Amazon's website, where readers have been buying books for nearly two years.

The prohibition against such links is one of the conditions Apple is imposing as part of a new policy announced last week -- along with a 30% cut in any so-called "In App" sales and a rule that prohibits third parties from passing that extra charge onto their customers.

Full article: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/23/apples-new-subscription-policy-could-cost-amazon-80-160-million-per-year/