As we approach the end of 2007, we naturally reflect on the last year and look to the next year.  2007 saw the continued rise of video on the Internet still, to a large extent, powered by YouTube.  Created in 2005 and making international prominence in 2006 following its sale to Google for $1.65 billion in stock.  This year plugincinema's Ana and Tom gave a talk about why YouTube became so successful at the Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube Conference (you can see the video here ) – but it seems to us that for similar reasons to why YouTube made it, that YouTube is an intermediate stage of the development of online films.  2008 will see a number of new sites, with new ideas and new technology emerging on the Internet.  There are many challengers to YouTube's dominance, and we would like to share a few with you;

blinkx.com - This is the company that makes advanced video technology such as searching within video content and clicking on object within a video file (you can see the commercial potentials of this!).  They recently also setup a video portal that searches the Internet for content by category.  So far it does not allow users to upload content, but who knows what the future holds!

Stage6.com – A video sharing site from DivX, the video compression codec people.  It allows the upload of high-definition footage, can be (depending on the source footage) amazing size and quality streamed footage and has mode advanced user tagging of content.

blip.tv – Good quality site geared more for regular series than random one-offs.  Has some great features such as better license conditions for uploaded content and ad share revenue.
metacafe.com - Like blip.tv, this site share content with the users.  It promotes this angle heavily as you can see which video producers were the top earners each week.

VideoHybrid – A classic net-centric concept; using the power of users.  On this site users can request films or TV they would like to see, then other users are encouraged to find video streams of the requests.  Amazingly this site features full-length films to be streamed!  The technology seems very rough around the edges and copyright issues are up- in the air, but its a great idea nonetheless.

Here at plugincinema we have chronicled the rite of alternatives to the cinema and TV as platforms for showing films; and that rise has been dramatic. However, we've never lost our love of cinemas – the popcorn, the big screen and surround sound! So we were charmed to learn that research backs up the vibe you get in the cinema ;

"...new research suggests that the presence of other people may enhance our movie-watching experiences. Over the course of the film, movie-watchers influence one another and gradually synchronize their emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant's evaluation of the overall experience -- the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie....In a series of experiments, the researchers had participants watch a video clip. Some of the participants watched alone, some with other people whose expressions could not be seen due to the presence of a partition, and some with other people whose expressions could be seen...While assessments did not line up by second--people liked or disliked specific scenes in the film according to their own tastes-- the researchers found that people watching a film together appeared to evaluate the film within the same broad mood, generally tracking up or generally tracking down.”

Very interesting, and should be of note to cinema owners and those who run film-festivals; what ever the Internet throws at you, if you get people together, you've got a Unique-Selling-Point! (USP) This is an interesting finding and reminded us of the 'illegal' cinema found underground in the Paris catacombs ;

"In 2004, police found the remnants of an underground cinema in the Paris catacombs. It had been used by a group called Perforating Mexicans, who hijacked public spaces for art. They left behind a note, which asked its finders: 'Don't try to find us.' Underground, when truly underground, goes deep. Checking Perforated Mexicans' film schedule, I expected to find snuff, graphic porn, or at the very least cock-fighting, but discovered instead a cinephile's dream: the Japanese animation Ghost in the Shell, Coppola's Rumble Fish, and David Lynch's Eraserhead. In other words, this underground experience was less about the actual films shown, and more the radicalism of illegal cinema itself.”

Clandestine popcorn! Another USP? This 'group illegal vibe' is also harnessed by the idea of 'guerrilla screenings', made possible by using accessible digital technologies such as laptops and digital projectors, the curators pick an outdoor spot, such as a park or abandoned building and simply set up a cinema (see example ). The future may be digital; but nobody said it had to be alone...

 Part of the hidden system of the two new DVD formats has been the copy protection systems, or Digital Rights Management (DRM).  DRM is the name for systems that enable distributors of media to set, via technological means, the way the media will be used, e.g. what device it can be played on, if it can be copied and so on. DRM can be both hardware, software or a mixture of both.   It is estimated that millions of dollars in research went into both Blu-Ray and HD DVD to ensure their DRM was hack-proof - only to have it cracked within a day of each format's release.  Blu-Ray, however, had an ace up it's sleeve; an added additional layer of DRM protection called BD+ , unfortunately for Sony, that has now been hacked as well .  So is all this energy poured into DRM worth it?  DRM now finds itself under attack again, not from hackers this time, but from economics, here one writer argues ;

"...for a new business model to make sense, it needs to provide more value. Providing more value than people can get elsewhere is the reason why a business model succeeds....DRM is fundamentally opposed to this concept. It is not increasing value for the consumer in any way, but about limiting it...[it] holds back that value and prevents it from being realized. It shrinks the pie -- and no successful business models come out of providing less value and shrinking the overall pie. Fundamentally, DRM cannot create a successful new business model. It can only contain one."

The experience of customers would seem to support this view, for example, people who brought videos with DRM, only to be locked out .  It also seems that some media companies are getting wise to the general dissatisfaction with DRM; the iTunes store originally sold music with DRM, then offered music without but with an increased price tag, and now offers both DRM and non-DRM music at the same price .

Wired reports that NBC Universal and News Corporation are in the process of creating a rival to the web film giant, Google's YouTube. The new system, called Hulu, has a few extra features that YouTube but differs in the main in that users can't upload their own videos. The site relies on existing media companies for its content and is designed more to what they term, 'premium content' and seems to be more akin to bringing TV to the net. The content library there to be streamed to users come from the sites two creator corporations and partners AOL, Yahoo, Comcast and MSN.