DAVE.TV

Filed in archive Internet TV on May 1, 2006

In my opinion, Broadband TV stations must start out assuming that the bare minimum value that they provide must improve upon BitTorrent or else they will soon be history. Why? Because BitTorrent accounts for 35% to 50% of all web traffic and, whether anyone wants to admit it, many people turn to it for video.

But it BitTorrent has a number of downside characteristics - not the least of which is that most video is likely pirated and considered illegal. I have come across three companies that seam to embrace the efficient P2P nature of BitTorrent's technology, yet improve upon it and seek to mainstream it into a legal, profit-making exercise.

So, today I will point out a small company that has no formal funding (beyond the founders) called DAVE.TV.

DAVE.TV says it exists for the purpose of "Facilitating the Connection between Producers and Consumers of Digital Media in a way that benefits everyone." The company has built a peer-to-peer distribution network that it says can deliver IPTV programs - as streaming media or as downloadable files - to viewers via just about any IP connection. "We don't build the physical network, but we have a virtual network that spans all the physical networks out there," says Kenneth Lipscomb, Dave.tv's founder.

That IP destination might be the DAVE media center, a portable device, or the company's HDTV-capable set-top, the Xport, which features Ethernet jacks and wireless connectivity and can play videos from itself, a networked source such as a PC, or from the Internet.

While DAVE.TV expects to make revenue from advertising (doesn't everyone?), it is the company's lineage that first caught my attention. The CEO is Rex Wong who sold his company called Applied Semantics to Google in 2003 for $102 million, claiming today that it is the foundation to Google AdSense.

Om Malik says his big idea is something like this...

imagine if a computer could identify when somebody said "shampoo" or "burger" across millions of videos, and you could insert a text ad for Prell or Wendy's along with a clickable logo graphic next to the video when those words are spoken...We will be using the same technology used by Homeland Security to monitor [telephone] chatter. Audio keywording will allow us to contextually figure out where to sell ads and to place more than just pre- and post-roll ads.

A video advertising network that can place advertising within context is an interesting idea even though I have doubts about using the script's verbiage to determine that context.

Sean Carton thinks that "DAVE.TV's functionality is pretty cool, but it also seems as though it'd be fairly easy to spoof if video creators wanted to do some odd things with associating their video with certain keywords. Even if they didn't want to pull any funny business with the system, the problem remains."