The latest figures show just how far the industry has come in adopting the H.264 video format as the de facto standard for video encoding. The share of videos encoded in H.264 has risen from just 10 percent in January 2010, to 80 percent less than two years later.

Much of that change can be attributed to the introduction of the iPad and other connected devices, most of which support H.264 hardware acceleration. In May 2010, not long after the initial launch of the iPad, MeFeedia reported that just 26 percent of videos were encoded in H.264.

via 4 out of 5 videos are encoded in H.264 — Online Video News.

While I see advantages to its approach, I still give the technology a thumbs down overall. UltraViolet will improve over time, but I doubt it will improve enough to change my overall assessment. For now, it remains too complicated, cumbersome, and buggy.

via Bugs & Fixes: No green light for UltraViolet | Macworld.

But let’s face it, your Silverlight system was hardly delivering more than a scant trickle of income, so now you’re free to join us and see what the future of video product sales are really all about.

While the companies who embraced Silverlight scramble desperately to find a replacement, our clients are happily going about their business, having made the smart decision to go with the world’s one truly obsolescence-proof platform, MOD Machine.

We welcome the ex-Silverlighters with open arms!

Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release | The Verge.

On Sept. 30, 2011 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) posted a notice on the Federal Register—Deduction for Qualified Film and Television Production Costs—that lists details of the film production tax deductions, which were already in use, but which became permanent Sept. 29.

The notice contains final regulations relating to deductions for the costs of producing qualified film and television productions, the IRS says. Those “final regulations reflect changes to the law made by the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 and the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, and affect persons that produce film and television productions within the United States.”

The temporary tax deductions were enacted by Congress “to promote film and television production in the United States,” and a film or television production is qualified for the deductions “if 75 percent of the total compensation” for the production is for services performed in the United States by actors, directors, producers and other production personnel, the notice says.

In addition, the notice says qualified film or television company owners can “deduct production costs paid, or incurred” by the owner of a production in the taxable year the costs are paid or incurred, in lieu of capitalizing the costs and recovering them through depreciation allowances, if the aggregate production costs do not exceed $15 million ($20 million if a significant amount of the aggregate production costs are paid or incurred in certain designated areas) for each qualifying production.”

The final regulations use the term “pre-amendment production” to distinguish productions that are subject to the maximum aggregate production costs limit listed in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 and modified by the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, and are subject to the maximum production costs deduction limit in the Tax Extenders and Alternative Minimum Tax Relief Act of 2008. Several provisions of the final regulations are specific to pre-amendment productions and are designated accordingly, the notice says.

via GovernmentVideo: Tax Breaks For Some Film, TV Productions Are Made Permanent.

Unfortunately, some video publishers went with Flash or Silverlight solutions to deliver premium video content, or worse, spent hundreds of thousands developing their own systems. Not only have they been suffering through the disadvantages of poor streaming performance with more than 1 out of 4 customers, the inability to view offline, the inability to deliver auxiliary materials, and the stubborn truth that people generally will not pay for video delivered on the web, today they have received disastrous news: that the system they built will soon go the way of the VHS tape.

We do genuinely feel sorry for anyone who based their digital video delivery on Flash or Silverlight. We do wish they would have come to us first. Millions of dollars and untold time and effort have gone down the drain. But if they come to us now we can probably salvage some of the effort and thought they put in when we build them a customized experience in MOD Machine. And the silver lining to this is, in MOD Machine, they will find far better sales outlook as customers commonly check out with hundreds of dollars of downloads in their cart in our platform.

Here’s an excerpt from the article (emphasis mine):

Though it has been hard, we have been trying to avoid reporting on rumors about the death of Silverlight for quite some time. As in all things, rumors tend to be exaggerated or out-right false. A good example of this is the idea that Web Forms has entered maintenance mode and would never be updated to HTML5. Unfortunately the end of Silverlight is no rumor; if Microsoft doesn’t change course it, as well as Flash and other plugin technologies, will be effectively unusable when Windows 8 is released.

On September 14th just before 6 pm Steven Sinofsky and Dean Hachamovitch announced that the Metro-style browser in Windows 8 does not support plug-ins. The Metro-style browser is the full screen, chromeless implementation of Internet Explorer that most people are expected to use with Windows 8. While the Metro user interface has extensive touch functionality, it is designed to be the primary UI for all devices with a screen of 1024×768 or larger even when using a mouse and keyboard. The “desktop” mode is still available, but it is being positioned as something that is only to be used by legacy programs and a few complex applications such as Photoshop and Visual Studio.

According to Steven Sinofsky:

This post is about a big change in Metro style IE, which is the plug-in free experience. In Windows 8, IE 10 is available as a Metro style app and as a desktop app. The desktop app continues to fully support all plug-ins and extensions.

Dean Hachamovitch adds,

For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free. The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web.

This means no Flash, no QuickTime, no PDF readers, and no Silverlight.

via InfoQ: Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins in Metro IE.

First and foremost, digital learning is for everyone, everywhere. It’s not something designed for “those children” or one specific slice of the population. It’s not something that a group of parents support in theory but for whom in practicality it doesn’t matter. It’s not just for charters or districts. And even more fundamentally, it’s not just for private schools or for public schools. It cuts across all of these categories.

In technology terms, it’s akin to the “killer app”–that core thing that everyone has to have.

And as such, that makes it more potent because all families will ultimately be invested in having it.

Even as digital learning has been critical to the early successes of KIPP Empower’s blended-learning school in Los Angeles, Calif.,–where 92 percent of its students are on the free-and-reduced program—it’s also been hugely popular and successful in the relatively well off Los Altos School District in California, where schools there have implemented the Khan Academy and seen its students soar. Some of the 5th graders in the district have successfully attacked the daunting concepts of trigonometry—and even calculus—with remarkable success.

As Salman Khan noted to me, when parents in neighboring suburban districts realize their children are falling behind the Los Altos students if their children don’t have access to a digital learning system that personalizes education for their children, you don’t think they’ll be knocking down doors and demanding it, too?

And that’s what makes it different. A strong majority of already-active parents over time will demand a digital learning-powered system that disrupts the classroom as we’ve known it.

via Why ‘Soccer Moms’ Matter for Digital Learning – Michael – Disrupting Class – Forbes.

A Note from HyperHip Media, Inc.

Our goal is to provide in-depth instruction utilizing the best authors, producers and artists available. We pride ourselves in the eclectic and esoteric nature of our subject matter. It gives us great pleasure to provide material which is decidedly non-mainstream while still providing value-intensive material for the student.

Our philosophy is to make learning immediate, direct and fun! Even non-students will appreciate the performance ability of our instructors. While many of our titles provide years of learning material, students are encouraged to proceed at their own personal speed. Often, our instruction is sequential in nature, allowing the student to build upon their knowledge as they progress through the titles.

You can download their catalog here.

MeFeedia reports that H.264 is currently the dominate native video format and continues to be broadly adopted.

H.264 continues to grow with the rise of modern browsers & the massive growth in mobile (mostly iOS & Android).

WebM currently accounts for < 2% of total videos in their index, however, this could change with YouTube recently announcing it was transcoding all of its index into WebM.

via HTML5 Video Available on the Web – June 2011 Update.

You can download their catalog here.

More Information about LearningZoneXpress

Learning ZoneXpress is a growing, national company based in Owatonna, Minnesota, that designs, creates and delivers educational resources to teach life-skills to children. The company’s visually engaging DVDs, videos, posters, games, incentives and Power Point presentations communicate life-shaping messages for children and adults in memorable ways. Medical offices, public health programs such as WIC, families, as well as schools, libraries, other community facilities turn to Learning ZoneXpress for teaching tools. Over the past 13 years, Learning ZoneXpress has received 20 international Telly Awards, recognizing excellence in video, advertising and film production.

Recently listed as one of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America by Inc. Magazine, Learning ZoneXpress, was founded 1997 by Melanie Nelson. Nelson has worked in the education market for 27 years. After teaching seventh through 12th grade family and consumer sciences in Owatonna, she began developing and broadly distributing educational tools on vital topics including nutrition, child development, family living, character development, wellness, career direction and financial management.

Nelson and a team of skilled professionals create more than 100 new products each year. Last year, while the recession peaked, sales of Learning ZoneXpress grew by 11 percent. Already in 2010, revenues are up 12 percent year over year. In 2007, Nelson was named a finalist for Ernst and Young’s prestigious Entrepreneur of the Year Award. In 2009, Learning ZoneXpress received a grant from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce’s Grow Minnesota! initiative, funded by the Pohlad Family Foundation to bolster promising private companies. The company is using the grant to investigate expanding its business to the consumer market.

The cornerstone of Learning ZoneXpress’ success has been health and nutrition education. The company leads in creating and delivering resources for family and consumer science audiences nationally, and is currently developing additional educational health and nutrition products for the pre-adult audience.

Learning ZoneXpress is an important community booster, as well. The company employs a local workforce that packages and ships each product by hand to ensure quality. Learning ZoneXpress gives back to communities, too, including leading the charge to coordinate a $75,000 makeover to the Glennville/Emmons School Cafeteria in Southern Minnesota. The makeover, dubbed the “Cafeteria Makeover Challenge,” markedly improved nutrition. It was completed in conjunction with the Minnesota School Nutrition Association in the summer of 2009.

“All of that [buying movies, in digital or DVD form, and viewing them with ease across a range of devices, managing their collections and interacting with others] can be done with the easy ability to rent or buy with just clicks–not doing anything else–while having a credit card on file,” said Martin. “I think that’s something that doesn’t exist today.“

Aha! He doesn’t know about MOD Machine!

Read the whole article here:
via Time Warner aims to boost movie buys with flixster – MarketWatch.