Balakam Makes Searching for Live Video and Audio Easy

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Sponsored-Articles/Balakam-Makes-Searching-for-Live-Video-and-Audio-Easy-87203.aspx

[Note: This sponsored interview was recorded at Streaming Media West 2012.] 

Creating live online events is a hot topic for broadcasters and other companies right now, but how to people find those events? What's needed is a simple search engine that focuses on live streams. What's needed is Balakam.

During a red carpet interview at the recent Streaming Media West show in Los Angeles, Balakam's CMO Daria Golyanina explained what makes her company's search tools unique and useful.

"Balakam actually uses almost the same search algorithm as traditional search engines do," said Golyanina. "But it has a very important benefit, a very important so to say thing that differentiates it from any other solution on the market: It can easily sort live media from recorded ones. It is really very critical when, for example, you're in the middle of your favorite baseball team game and you want to find it here and now and so the time becomes critical and you do not want to browse through a lot of irrelevant information on the Web so looking for live stream but bumping into a lot of text, graphic, and a lot of irrelevant information."

It sounds great when searching for local content, but can Balakam search for foreign streams, too? Can it bring a world of live events to the browser? Yes, it can.

"Another important benefit is its boundless searching area—our search engine browses the whole web so the searching area is global," Golyanina added. "We can find stream from any part of the world, from any part of the World Wide Web. So I think it's really unique for the streaming media world and that is why we can say that Balakam is a unique solution on the market."

To learn more about Balakam and what it delivers, watch the full interview below.

http://bcove.me/emf1yek6

YouTube prepares its second YouTube Channels push, 60% of content partners to lose funding.

YouTube introduced professional channels — an initiative to add original content to the Web’s top video site — back in December 2011, after an investment of $100 million; but the fresh money will only be seen by 30 to 40 percent of its 100 plus channel partners, which were recruited to make the service more TV-like and competitive against video-on-demand (VoD) services.

The money is, as it was last year, not a free lunch since it is essentially an upfront payment of one year of advertising revenues. Each producer must earn the money back via ads attached to their content before they can make additional revenue from the service. For example, $1 million comes it at 50 million views on a $20 CPM (cost per mil/thousand) – fairly high stakes.

Netflix recently announced Q3 revenues of $905 million and the US firm expects to make $400 million of operating income this year after covering its global operating expenses. Amazon, which owns UK Netflix competitor LoveFilm, is also in the game and is trialing an $8 per month subscription for its Prime service.

http://goo.gl/xZQAT

Image via http://goo.gl/GBOQ2

Netflix Has Plenty of Competitors, and None of Them Are Close.

Sandvine says that during the Web’s primetime hours, Netflix accounts for 33 percent of “downstream” traffic in North America, and it’s higher than it was in the spring of 2011, before Netflix raised its prices and lost some of its best-known movies.

YouTube accounts for 15 percent of Web use, but that site is almost entirely free. Netflix’s paid competitors generate much smaller numbers: Amazon is at 1.8 percent, Hulu is at 1.1 percent and HBO Go comes in at 0.5 percent. Bear in mind that Sandvine is tracking the flow of data via broadband pipes, which means it is tracking usage — and file size – instead of reach. Netflix, for instance, has about 25 million subscribers worldwide, while YouTube boasts some 800 million monthly visitors.

http://goo.gl/cIpqN

Source: Sandvine