Posted 11/02/09 at 03:44:44 PM by Bart Salisbury

You got to hand it to Google, they are one for novel ideas. And, in this case, perhaps an idea that makes sense. Piracy is a tough thing to combat. A lot of effort goes into anti-piracy efforts, and little benefit seems to emerge. Rather than copyright owners fight with Google’s YouTube over the posting of their material, Google is proposing they try to make a buck from it instead.

Google’s proposition is quite simple. Making use of a ‘fingerprinting’ system Google has developed (Audio ID and Video ID), copyright owners could tag and track their content on YouTube. The content identification system, already in use on YouTube, allows to see where and how often their material is viewed. Rights holders could use the system to block their content, or they could take a small cut of YouTube’s advertising revenue, based on the how much viewing statistics.

It would seem like a win-win situation. Copyrights holders would have to take responsibility for their content on YouTube, making sure it is properly tagged for tracking, and blocking what they see fit. YouTube would be relieved of the burden of lawsuits by copyright holders, and would be better situated to generate advertising revenue that is currently shying away from the site because of its legal issues. Both sides would get to wet their beaks in a bigger pot of advertising revenue. And YouTubers will be still free to watch all their favorite, currently tainted, copyrighted material.

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Posted 10/29/09 at 03:40:50 PM by Bart Salisbury

Maybe it’s something to freak out about, then maybe it’s not. The New York Times is reporting that YouTube will be phasing out its own accounts and requiring its members to use a Google login.

Freaky? Yeah, says the Times. Each social networking service develops its own culture. When culture boundaries are breeched, as when Flicker mingled its vital essence with that of Yahoo, Flicker diehards freaked-out--the reason they were at Flicker was because they didn’t want to be at Yahoo. Would the same be true for YouTube users?

Possibly, but we may never know. The Times later corrected itself. Only those YouTubers who have a Google account associated with their YouTube account will be affected. And only to the extent they’d have to use their Google password. They can still use either their YouTube or Google username. If you don’t have a Google account associated with your YouTube account, then nothing happens, so there’s no reason to freak out. Basically, only those who have already co-mingled their vital essence will be affected, and they probably don’t care.

For the record, the Times “apologizes[s] for getting the story wrong.” Some solace, I suppose, to those who had gone off the deep end after reading the initial report.

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Posted 10/16/09 at 03:23:20 PM by Bart Salisbury

For some unknown reason YouTube has decided to make possible real-time searches of comments. Seriously? Comments are the thing you avoid on YouTube, expressing either gross immaturity or venting some real, and ofttimes inappropriately placed, anger. If there is a good thing about YouTube comments is we’re subjected only to a few of them--and they are easily ignored.

So why do this? Marshall Kirkpatrick, of ReadWriteWeb, suggests that companies might find it useful--to track the things that people are saying about them or their products.

After reading some of searched comments I’m not so sure companies would want to know what people are saying. Not the people posting on YouTube anyway. Give it a try. Type in any innocuous term. Count down how many entries until you read something obscene or vulgar (or worse). In my few searches I didn’t get past the top five.

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Posted 10/13/09 at 07:41:28 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Western Digital has announced the second iteration of its TV connected media player. The new WD TV Live HD takes all that was awesome about the old, and adds some new tricks. The box still has wide codec support for playing files from USB drives, but it now also streams content from Youtube, Pandora, and Flickr. Users can also connect network drives to the new version to view files.

The WD TV Live HD, as the name would suggest, outputs 1080P HD video via a HDMI 1.3 port. Composite and component are also available. If you need to get video off that USB drive and on to your TV, the WD TVs provide an attractive alternative to media center PCs. The new WD TV device has an MSRP of $149.99.

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Posted 10/09/09 at 04:26:51 PM by Bart Salisbury

One billion views a day? That’s a whole lot of the Evolution of Dance, Susan Boyle, and Tron Guy. But it all depends on who’s doing the counting. Officially, according to comScore, YouTube in August had surpassed 10 billion views which, no matter how you slice it, is a whole lot of views. Miguel Helft, of The New York Times Bits blog, notes that this total is only for the United States. If foreign views are tallied it is estimated that the 10 billion number would double. While that leaves YouTube a bit short of the 30 billion that 1 billion a day would produce, it still beats the pants off of second place Microsoft, which played a mere 547 million videos during the same period.

Where does the 1 billion views a day number come from? YouTube itself. In a YouTube blog titled “Y,000,000,000uTube”, Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube, claims YouTube is now the “burger kings of media,” serving up well over a billion views a day. Hurley also notes that the nature of YouTube is changing: “As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site.”

For a bit of perspective on all this 1 billion views a day equates to 11,574 YouTube videos started up each second of the day. That’s a whole lot of bandwidth!

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Posted 10/07/09 at 04:00:54 PM by Bart Salisbury

It appears that Google/YouTube’s Sgt. Shultz defense in it’s $1 billion copyright infringement case with Viacom might not fly. Apparently YouTube did know something as newly disclosed YouTube e-mails indicate that YouTube’s own managers knew and discussed the existence of unauthorized content on the site, and further did some of the uploading themselves. Oops!

Google’s key point of protection against Viacom’s action is the requirement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) that it was unaware of the uploading or existence of copyrighted material on its site, and when notified of such expeditiously act to remove it. Viacom and others have long been suspicious of Google’s “I know nothing” defense, and with the disclosure of these emails appear vindicated.

The revelation hasn’t left YouTube completely defenseless. It appears that Viacom’s employees were partly responsible for uploading Viacom’s copyrighted content onto YouTube. YouTube argues that if Viacom is doing the uploading how is it possible for YouTube to distinguish which material is kosher, and which isn’t. Viacom counters with The Wizard of Oz defense: “never mind that man behind the curtain,” maintaining that doesn’t really matter. It’s appears only a matter of time before the Chewbacca defense is trotted out.

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Posted 10/06/09 at 09:11:05 AM by Paul Lilly

The future of YouTube could be left in your hands, as well as anyone else who participates in the video sharing site's user research surveys.

The latest user experience study asked YouTube users to depict their ideal YouTube layout using printed-out features glued to magnets. Most of the participants said they "just want to watch" and that an ideal layout would consist of little more than a player and a title. But a smaller group -- mostly consisting of those who upload videos -- craved a far busier design brimming with social features, comments, descriptions, and more.

This is where you come in.

"Sometimes having users come into labs is not enough, though; we want to understand how users use YouTube in their context, in their living room, with their laptop on their lap, sprawled out on the couch," YouTube wrote in its blog. "In this case we might have field studies where we interview users in their homes."

You can take a short user survey here, and if you're interested in participating in any upcoming research, YouTube has a form you can fill out here

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Posted 09/20/09 at 06:06:35 PM by Justin Kerr

The headline “Hulu is going subscription” has been making headlines around the net recently, but as usual, some of these claims are somewhat exaggerated. New Corps. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker indicated that Hulu may indeed one day have a subscription based service, but “no decisions have been made yet”. Inside sources have indicated that Hulu is already beta testing subscription based video services internally, but that this is merely an attempt to hammer out the technical details.

The challenge for Hulu at this point is to successfully find a strategy for transitioning to a paid business model, especially when its popularity was largely fueled by the simple fact that it was the best legal way to get free access to TV shows. Experimenting with new business models isn’t surprising, it’s even healthy, but where it leads is anyone guess. Hulu is also in a great position to watch and learn as Google attempts to implement its paid content. Adding paid offerings to a free online video service may or may not take off, but at least they appear to be letting someone else take the lead.

Either way it doesn’t sound like Hulu will be going subscription anytime soon, but at least it shows they are still dedicated to the future of the service.

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