Outfits such as Brightcove, Sorensen Media’s 360 and Ooyala charge companies a monthly fee to ensure that their videos will play both on the Web and on mobile devices such as Apple’s iPhone and new iPad touch-screen tablet. They serve a range of businesses with heavy video demands: media companies, restaurants, hotels, travel agencies and more.

Adobe dominates online video with its Flash software, used for some 75% of Web video. But Apple doesn’t like Flash and promotes alternatives, including a Web standard called HTML5. Videos that use Flash won’t play at all on Apple’s mobile devices.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an essay in late April detailing his criticisms, calling Flash an outdated format that’s a battery drain for mobile devices and prone to crashing. Adobe responded by calling Apple’s claims a “smokescreen.”

The war of words over the future of online video has been “really great for business,” says Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s senior vice president of marketing.

Dan Rayburn, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, says the battle has taken its toll on media companies. It’s time-consuming and costly to re-encode a video library “just so it can be seen on the iPad,” he says.

Still, Whatcott says there’s so much interest in the iPad, “Our customers want their sites to be seen by everyone now, not later.”

Video site Viddler, which charges $100 monthly for its “pro” service to companies such as Sony and Engadget, on Tuesday made available a new video player that works with iPads and iPhones.

“This whole thing swept us off our feet,” says Viddler President Robert Sandie. “We knew the iPad was coming, and despite what Apple said, we thought by now it would work things out with Adobe and support Flash.”

“Now it’s clear,” adds Sandie. “There is not going to be Flash on the iPad.”

(Viddler also has video sharing for consumers, but only business customers will get to use the HTML5 player at first, Sandie says. He’ll open it to other Viddler users in the future, he says.)

Apple has sold 1 million iPads, which may sound like a drop in the bucket compared with the huge footprint of the Web. But it has also distributed more than 50 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices and is such a huge factor on the cool meter that many companies feel they have no choice but to adapt to its preferences.

There are free methods for getting video onto websites without using Flash, but the process can be complicated.

If you have the coding skills, you can mark up the Web page yourself, adding the HTML5 video tags.

Coding gets tricky

But here’s where it can get tricky. Apple’s Safari and Google‘s Chrome browsers support HTML5; Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer does not. So the coding must be written in a way that can detect the browser and play the video accordingly.

YouTube, the world’s most popular video site, can show your videos on both the Web and mobile platforms and doesn’t cost a dime. You simply upload the video to YouTube. Your viewers can watch it at youtube.com, or you can copy and paste a code and put on your website to have it viewed there.

But YouTube’s videos are in lower resolution than competitors’. And some businesses may balk at having a YouTube logo across their video, which is standard in the YouTube player.

One free solution that lets you remove such branding comes from video site Blip.tv. But there are a few catches. First, you have to be in show business, somehow.

Blip.tv is geared toward independent Web video show producers willing to split revenue from advertising, which Blip sells. (Not everyone is required to include ads in the video. You can choose to be ad-free.)

To get your video for your business on Blip, you’ll need to put in a little extra effort. A restaurant, for instance, willing to do “a weekly cooking show that happens to feature the restaurant,” would work, says Justin Day, Blip’s chief technology officer.

The second catch is that you can’t just throw up any video file. You have to process the video (using a program such as Apple’s QuickTime Pro, or most video-editing software) into an iPad/iPhone-friendly format. Or, you could pay $7 monthly to be a “pro” user, and Blip will do the conversion for you.

Meanwhile, Adobe isn’t sitting idle. In coming weeks, the first major Flash Player for mobile phones will be released for Google’s Nexus One, as an over-the-air update. Adobe says other handset manufacturers, including Research In Motion‘s BlackBerry and Palm, will be adding Flash to their phones this year and next.

Source: USA Today

The company said the new product allows users to optimize their paysites for mobile viewing with one click to a submit button.

“Elevated X CMS does it all and updates your mobile site automatically including your tours,” the company said.

Full-length movies can be uploaded as VOB, AVI, MOV, WMV, MPG, MP4 or FLV files and then converted to mobile-compatible formats.

The product also provides the option for CMS to automatically watermark and cut the videos into clips as well as watermark photos and crop photo thumbnails for galleries. “Just check a few boxes and the CMS batch encodes all your videos into MP4 and 3GP,” the company said.

The CMS also automatically cuts the videos into clips for fast mobile downloading and viewing, takes a screen capture and creates a preview thumbnail to represent each clip.

It also creates larger-size videos for iPhone, iPod, Palm, Blackberry and larger devices, and creates smaller size videos for Nokia, Motorola and smaller devices.

The company pointed out that with one-click updates are published to mobile tours and members areas automatically. “Give your paysite members access to the mobile version or charge for it separately, let visitors and members click a link to toggle between viewing the standard and mobile version of a site. Use the included mobile device detection HTML page to automatically redirect your mobile traffic.”

Elevated X co-owner and CEO AJ Hall said, “It’s exciting to see more and more of our users take advantage of the mobile market. We’ve been adding new features and streamlining the software to make it as quick and easy as possible for our users to offer mobile versions.The result is a solution that requires zero work on the part of a site owner or webmaster to offer truly mobile sites.”

The software has no setup fee and can be licensed for $50 per month for use on an unlimited number of sites.

For a limited time, new Elevated X CMS customers will get six months of free mobile.

Visit 1ClicktoMobile for more information.

Via: Xbiz

According to the company, the Total Hentai mobile feeds provide webmasters worldwide with hundreds of exclusive Japanese Hentai movies to serve members using smart phones such as iPhone, Droid, Palm, BlackBerry and other mobile devices to access their member sites.

“For webmasters worldwide who want to integrate great exclusive Japanese animation into their mobile site offerings, SexEntertain is the only source,” said RJ, co-owner of SexEntertain.

“We continue to expand the size and range of the Total Hentai streaming library to help adult webmasters worldwide improve their member conversion and retention ratios. Hentai is wildly popular and converts like crazy and these great Total Hentai Mobile Feeds are perfect for webmasters wanting to make their members happy,” RJ said.

The company adds as with the other Total Hentai feeds powered by SexEntertain, the Total Hentai mobile feed series combines extreme exclusive hardcore uncensored Japanese Hentai movies from the Anime Erotica, Anime 18, Critical Mass and Adult Source Media Libraries.

SexEntertain says it has organized the Total Hentai mobile feeds to match the kinky Hentai content including Hentai Magic, SciFi Hentai, Titanic Toon Tities, Hentai Dolls, Hot and Horny Babes, Naughty Nurses & Willing Maids, Tied Up Tarts and Total Hentai Movies.

Source: Xbiz

GoodVibes.com is optimized for the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android and also streams videos.

GoodVibes.com includes thousands of movies for download and purchase, including the Pleasure-Ed explicit sex education line, featuring the latest release “The Official Guide to Fellatio.”

“Your mobile device is on you, it’s always on, it’s personal, it’s private, and our new mobile web site will help you pass the time wonderfully the next time you are stuck in line at the bank or grocery store,” Good Vibrations’ COO Jackie Strano said. “Featuring some of our best selling products, our new optimized mobile site will make it extremely easy for that shopper who is on the go and who needs convenience, privacy, and streamlined search and check out.”

Source: Xbiz

According to the report, men between the ages of 35-44 were among the early users.

The report said people with higher earning power were probably the first to buy the iPad and that the first Yahoo network iPad users were 94 percent more likely to be affluent consumers with solid wealth and strong incomes than typical U.S. Yahoo users.

In analyzing what iPad users are looking at on Yahoo’s network, the company also found higher-than-average usage for Flickr, with Finance, News, and Sports also seeing heavy interest.

Though the iPad has only been available for purchase in the U.S. market, the report observed that ten percent of IP traffic is coming form Europe and Asia Pacific, suggesting that a relatively significant percentage of iPads are making it out of the U.S.

Meanwhile, Apple has announced that it will begin an international roll-out of the iPad in nine new countries later this month. Those countries include Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The company also said it is rolling out its iBooks iPad application and iBookstore in many of these countries during launch May 28.

Pre-orders begin May 10.

Source: Xbiz

The clips include full scenes from some of Pink Visual’s most popular movies.

Company representatives say winners will also receive download to own and streaming movies from SugarDVD.com.

“It was really cool to work with SugarDVD on this contest,” Pink Visual’s Kim Kysar said. “We love to give cool porn laden prizes to our customers while being able to work with a good biz partner too. Who wouldn’t enjoy the surprise of winning a cool gadget that keeps your porn viewing private and portable?”

Five winners will be selected from the entries received through the end of May. The give aways were aimed at highlighting Pink Visual’s mobile porn products along with SugarDVD’s expanding range of video on demand services.

“Pink Visual is a great studio with a fantastic aesthetic and sensibility that our customers love,” said Justin, content manager for SugarDVD. “It was fun to pair up with them for this give away. The Pink Visual video clips look really good on the Touch players.”

For more information go to SugarDVD.com.

The Club Jenna Mobile Feeds provide webmasters worldwide with exclusive Club Jenna content to serve members using smart phones to access their member sites.

SexEntertain says the Club Jenna Mobile Feed series combines edgy and artful designs, exceptional streaming and ultra premium content for iPhone, Droid, Palm, Blackeberry and other mobile devices.

In addition to stars like Jenna Jameson, Club Jenna Mobile feeds also feature products for Sofia Rossi, Roxy Jezel, Lela Star, Krystal Steal, Jesse Capelli, Chanel St. James, Brea Bennett and Ashton Moore.

“For Webmasters worldwide who want to integrate the power of the Playboy and Club Jenna brands, the great exclusive mobile content featuring Jenna Jameson and the other famous Club Jenna Stars SexEntertain is the only source,” SexEntertain co-owner RJ said.

“We continue to expand the size and range of the Club Jenna streaming video library to help adult webmasters worldwide improve their member conversion and retention ratios. Guys worldwide love Jenna Jameson, Playboy and Club Jenna and these great Club Jenna Mobile Feeds are perfect to webmasters wanting to make their members happy!” he said.

Via: Xbiz

Spankmo has partnered with Jamdown Productions of Kingstown, Jamaica to launch JamDown.mobi and JaFreakBoys.mobi.

The company says JamDown.mobi features hot and hung Jamaican guys while JaFreakBoys.mobi was specially created for the controversial gay Jamaican videos, produced under the banner of Goldmine Entertainment and features hardcore action between hot young Jamaican men wearing masks to protect their identities.

The two new sites work with all the popular mobile handsets including the iPad and Android handsets and are available to any mobile surfer on any operator worldwide.

The company says both sites are now live on the SpankBucks CCBill affiliate program, so mobile webmasters can earn great revenue shares on this unique niche content.

Via: Xbiz

The company says it gives adult marketers a way to bypass the censorship of the Apple iTunes store.

“We find the IPhone to be an excellent platform for developing porn apps,” said Mark Cave, director of business development. “What would take several weeks do to develop in Android, can be done much quicker and easier with the iPhone. The iPhone, in our own personal opinion, is the ultimate porn platform. We find it quite easy to develop web apps for the iPhone… much easier than Andriod.”

Cave added that the company’s services make it easier for adult marketers to reach the high demand mobile market.

“These apps are not ‘native’ apps,” Cave said. “Rather, they are a ‘web app,’ and as such, require client and server code in order to work. For that reason, these apps have to be hosted on our servers … they are not like a typical app, which can be distributed independently. But, they work. The marketer simply links to the web app hosted on our server and the user can save the icon to their mobile browser. It works much like a native app. But it is a web app. The net result, however, is the same.”

Source: Xbiz

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

Source: Apple.com