Category: Announcements

Revision3 Announces IPTV Insights Research Initiative

October 31st, 2011 at 03:18 by Rob DeMillo in Announcements, Data Insights

Revision3 has been providing viewers with quality programming since 2005, and since that time we’ve seen our viewers increase at a crazy rate. What’s changed the most over the intervening 6 years, though, has been how you folks have been watching our stuff. You guys used to just grab our stuff from our website and whatever RSS feed catcher you were using…then you started in on bittorrents… then (in quick succession) mobile phones, and Roku players, and Boxee…and GoogleTV… and connected TVs… and your TV and… heck, you can even find our stuff on the back-of-the-seat video players on Virgin America flights… So, although few things are certain in life, one things definitely is: you guys are hungry for our content, and you want to see if everywhere you can… so, we try to make that possible.

By the end of 2010, Revision3 had collected data from viewer information from all corners of the earth and on a wild variety of screens – but we hadn’t gotten our data story together, until now. Looking over what had collected on our hard drives allowed us to understand that Revision3 was now in a unique position to examine viewing trends and habits in the internet TV space. While maintaining our viewers anonymity, we are able to mine our aggregated data with the aim of coming to a better understanding of how everyone out there is consuming, what they are interested in, and where they may be going. In this way, we’re not only able to serve our audience better, but come to an understanding of where IPTV in general is going.

This month, Revision3 is launching the first in a series of white papers that attempts to make some sort of sense of our mountain of data. We’re calling this initiative IPTV Insights Research, and we want to share our results. In an industry that is growing and moving forward as fast as ours, it makes sense that we share what we are seeing with the rest of the community. The first of these papers focuses on the movement of Revision3′s audience from the online space to “over-the-top” devices, such as Roku players and mobile devices. It’s a good read, and shows some interesting growth.

Keep your eye on our IPTV Research page for further looks into Revision3′s brain…

-Rob DeMillo Revision3 CTO


Diggnation Retirement

October 3rd, 2011 at 11:42 by David Prager in Announcements, Shows

Diggnation

It is with pride and a heavy heart that we announce today that Diggnation will tape its final weekly episode at the end of 2011, closing out an epic 340 episode run.

After close to 7 years of sitting on a couch each week, drinking copious amounts of different types of beverages while discussing the top tech stories submitted to and voted on by the community at digg.com, Kevin and Alex have decided to retire their weekly series to focus on the next phase of their careers.

When Diggnation began on July 1st, 2005, the online video landscape was in its early stage and Diggnation was one of the first weekly web series to build a substantial and passionate audience. Diggnation has been a cornerstone of Revision3 and undeniably played a key role in establishing the new generation of Internet television. The show has typified the power of authentic host driven content as an extremely effective business model in supporting the artists and businesses behind original web video series’. Diggnation received support from some major brands over the past 6+ years including; Ford, Go Daddy, Netflix, Anheuser-Busch, Squarespace, Verizon, Coors Light, EA, Klondike, Adidas, NHTSA, HP and HTC to name a few.

Diggnation was the 2nd show to debut on Revision3 (representing the longest running series on the network) and also did multiple shows before live audiences of up to five thousand people in five different countries. When the show began, Revision3 had about a million viewers per month. Today, Revision3 is proud to have a growing audience of more than 80 million monthly views.

Alex Albrecht will continue to appear on Revision3 as co-host of the popular Totally Rad Show. He is also in development on a number of new series that will be launching starting in the next few months. Kevin Rose will also continue to appear on Revision3 programming on Foundation, the series he launched earlier this year featuring thought-provoking interviews with well-known entrepreneurs and company founders.

Though they are closing down the weekly show, I’m sure the pull of the couch will be a hard one to ignore so stay tuned as we may see some reunion live shows in the future.

Additionally, Revision3 will be reviving a series called “The Revision3 Gazette” that will feature a slew of topics ranging from behind the scenes of other Revision3 productions, to discussions from Revision3 hosts on current events and cultural happenings as they relate to Revision3 and its shows. Kevin and Alex may appear on The Gazette from time to time as well.

Also, let’s not forget about Hippie Glenn. Our favorite goofy editor and cameraman will continue contributing to various Revision3 productions from time to time, including regular contributions to the Gazette with a sub-series called “Toasted Donut”.

Please stay tuned for further updates regarding the final regular schedule for the last 3 months of Diggnation as well as the grand finale show scheduled to record at the end of the year in front of a live audience.

And, of course, the archived versions of all 340 episodes will remain available for viewing and downloading.

We want to thank Kevin and Alex for all their hard work over the past 6+ years. It’s been a great run for Diggnation and we look forward to working with them both on the next phase.

Finally, we want to sincerely thank all of you, our loyal viewers, for sharing this experience with us over the years. Your viewership, feedback and interaction helped shape the show and we couldn’t have done it without you!

“Next story…”

-David Prager (Co-Founder, Revision3/Producer, Diggnation)


Programming Update

September 2nd, 2011 at 09:48 by Jim Louderback in Announcements, Shows

We launched The Young Turks on Revision3 last year as a way to bring topical and political news, along with the talent of host Cenk Uygur, to our Revision3.com audience. And while it’s been a great honor having the show in our line-up, we’ve learned that the fit between Revision3.com and The Young Turks isn’t as strong as we’ve hoped.

The good news is that during the past year The Young Turks has continued to grow dramatically on YouTube and continued to expand on what was already a strong and robust viewer base. However, Cenk and his team, along with Revision3, have decided that it just doesn’t make sense to continue distributing on Revision3.com – thus the last episode will be published there on Sept. 15th.

For Youtube viewers of The Young Turks, nothing will change. Cenk and crew will continue to deliver their unique blend of informative and opinionated news and analysis each and every day. For those fans that have enjoyed watching across the Revision3.com network, fear not – you can continue to watch all that and more on their YouTube channel at: http://youtube.com/theyoungturks

We remain huge fans of Cenk and the Young Turks team and we look forward to finding new ways to collaborate with them in the future.

-Jim


New Challenger: A Brand New Show from Anthony Carboni

August 26th, 2011 at 08:00 by Ryan Vance in Announcements, Shows

To know Anthony Carboni is to like Anthony Carboni. To watch Anthony Carboni host a show is to love watching him host a show. What can I say, the guy’s a great host! It’s with great pleasure that today we announce Anthony’s brand-new show, New Challenger. This show is a great new take on the video game review genre.

As Anthony and I were kicking around a number of new ideas he had for a show, this one struck me as really fascinating. Allow a review….to be reviewed. The longer you work in media, the more you realize the power that reviewers and hosts have to influence thousands if not millions of their viewers and fans. There’s something to be said for, as a viewer, looking critically at reviews of any kind of art. It’s always in the eye of the beholder. In this case, every week, Anthony is letting his guest, review his review! It takes a lot for a reviewer to open themselves up for scrutiny and this is exactly what Anthony is doing. It’s going to make for some really fascinating conversation about the games, his reviews and the nature of reviews themselves.

This all sounds very heady, but I promise you it’s going to be a ton of fun. Carboni is one of the funniest guys I know and he’s going to bring all that humor to his conversations in the show. I know he has an amazing line-up of guests all set for the coming weeks. I’m really looking forward to seeing the ideas and conversations around games that come out of this show. I used to produce a show featuring game reviews (X-Play on G4) and I’m always fascinated to see the personality of the producer or reviewer come out in the reviews. Now, you’re going to see that viewpoint challenged (and sometimes agreed with) on a weekly basis. I think it’s going to make all of us view reviews a bit differently.

Please check out New Challenger here!


Wave Bye-Bye to the WMV Codec at Revision3, say Hello to MP4

August 11th, 2011 at 05:59 by Rob DeMillo in Announcements

At Revision3 we pride ourselves on getting our rich, wicked cool programming onto anything with a screen. (OK, maybe not those new-fangled refrigerators…yet!) This, of course, means that we support quite a few video formats (also known as codecs, which is short for COding/DECoding). When you start counting the distinct video codecs in existence (VP8, WMV, H.264, etc), however,  and then multiple that by the number of screen resolutions there are (1080i, 720p, 720i, 320×480, etc etc) and then multiple that by the number of bitrates needed to support mobile vs. wired internet vs. wifi… it’s…uh… a lot.

Supporting all of these codec and resolution offerings is a complex process, so every so often Revision does a little spring housecleaning. We look into who is really using them, which ones are popular, which aren’t,  how many of them are there, etc. The last time we did this was back in January, and Jim Louderback let everyone know. Well, it’s that time again.

We took a look at codecs across the board to find out what was the least popular – aside from a couple of odd little strays at the bottom (20 people watch Theora Ogg format from our archives over the last 90 days), it turns out that WMV is used by less than 2% of the population. After doing a bit of research, we discovered a couple of factoids:

  • at the resolutions we deliver, MP4 looks significantly better than WMVs
  • With two exceptions (noted below) all Microsoft enabled devices support MP4 natively, including Windows Phone 7
  • The two exceptions are the First and Second generation Zune devices…and even then, Zune Marketplace will take a MP4 file and transcode it to WMV before depositing it on those early Zunes
  • Removing WMV from our codec lineup decreases our total transcode time for our shows, and simplifies our encoding workflow – all of which allows us to get our programming to you sooner.

With all of that in mind, we felt it prudent to turn off WMV encodes and place MP4 in your favorite show feeds instead.

Again, we do not feel this will impact anyone unnecessarily. If anyone is having issues reading MP4 on their Microsoft powered devices, please contact us at support@revision3.com