All posts tagged ‘YouTube’

Netflix instant accounts for 20 percent of all non-mobile internet use during prime time in the United States, according to a new study.

Streaming media — real-time entertainment — accounts for 43% of peak period traffic in the U.S., according to Sandvine, which helps ISPs manage their networks and thus has access to buckets of information about usage patterns.

But Netflix alone accounts for nearly half of that between 8 and 10 p.m., and that usage comes from only 1.8 percent of the service’s subscribers.

“Per-user, Netflix is the heaviest user of downstream bandwidth in North America: the average fixed access Netflix connection is 1 megabit per second,” Sandvine said in reply to an e-mail question. “On mobile networks, per user, only Slingbox (at almost 800 kbps) is heavier than Netflix (~125 kbps).”

Streaming video is the most bandwidth-intensive use of the internet, but there are plenty of other choices — starting with YouTube. So the dominance of Netflix, which only offers “studio” fare, would seem to indicate that there is an enormous appetite for profession programming delivered from the cloud.

Good news for Hulu, Amazon Unbox and even YouTube, should its movie rentals service gain traction. Better news for the content creators, assuming they can come up with a killer streaming revenue model and as if they needed any more proof that on-demand, internet delivery is the future. Bad news for cable and satellite — protestations by CEO Reed Hastings notwithstanding.

But Hastings does see that streaming is the engine for Netflix now. “In fact, by every measure, we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers DVD-by-mail,” Hastings said in conjunction with the company’s earnings report Wednesday [pdf]. “At the same time, the introduction of our streaming offering in Canada in late September has provided us with very encouraging signs regarding the potential for the Netflix service internationally.”

The study is the eighth Sandvine has published since 2002.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Apple’s Next Media Frontier Will Be Streaming Video
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• Netflix Movie Streaming Suffers Serious Loss in Quality, Say Roku …
• Netflix Eyes iPhone for Movie, TV Streaming
• First Look: YouTube’s Live Streaming Platform
• Review: Roku Netflix Set Top Box Is Just Shy of Totally Amazing …
• TV ‘Anywhere’: AT&T Relents on iPhone 3G Slingbox
• Netflix Everywhere: Sorry Cable, You’re History

The first program to appear YouTube's new live video streaming platform was RocketBoom, at 11am ET on Monday. The test continues until Tuesday.

Google’s YouTube began testing live video streams on Monday, starting with four partners: Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

This live streaming alpha test — an extension of YouTube’s previous live streaming efforts that will run throughout Monday and Tuesday — marks, for internet-accustomed viewers, a return to pre-TiVo television guides that required you to tune in at a certain time in order to watch a particular show.

Broadcasters need only a computer, an internet connection and webcam or USB/Firewire-connected digital video camera to participate, technically speaking. However, during this week’s test, only the four launch partners’ shows will be included. “Eventually, depending on how the launch works, we’ll roll out the [live streaming] platform for all partners,” YouTube spokesman Chris Dale told Wired.com. But already, the potential for a live, two-way video platform is clear.

“According to industry research from ComScore, over the past year, viewers watching live-streaming content grew nearly 650 percent to 1.4 billion minutes,” said HowCast CEO and co-founder Jason Liebman in a statement, whose company will broadcast live tutorials using the platform. “Clearly viewers are growing more comfortable with and interested in live content broadcasts.”

This time around, the ‘tube will watch you too.

The biggest difference between the traditional television and Google’s offering (aside from the fact that the video travels over the internet rather than over a dedicated cable or satellite connection) is that viewers can point the camera at themselves, to appear on the video page in a live video comments section, according to YouTube. They can also have their say in a scrolling chat feed on the right side of the screen, which only appears during the live broadcast.

On one side of the equation, this gives broadcasters on a shoestring budget the same ability to broadcast live that the big news networks have.

But the other side — allowing viewers to interact live via webcam and chat in the same browser where they’re watching a show, rather than commenting on the web on one device while watching television on another — is perhaps more important breakthrough. It allows users to suggest story ideas, prod a live host into asking an interviewee a follow-up question, call out inaccurate facts, and otherwise enhance a broadcast with their opinions, all in real time.

When all of this happens through a Google TV set-top box — possibly with a connected webcam — the possibilities could explode. Google revealed last week that Chrome-powered Google TV set-top boxes, televisions and Blu-Ray players will go on sale this fall, with Android apps to be added in 2011, so we shouldn’t have to wait long until we can watch — and comment on — live YouTube streams on our big-screen televisions.

We noticed some video hiccups during the first program to appear on this new platform, RocketBoom. But the accompanying audio was never interrupted, adding continuity even when the video’s framerate dropped. Some viewers commented that they too had minor issues with the stream, possibly related to bandwidth issues. In addition, RocketBoom’s show didn’t have any live video comments, so it’s too early to say how those will perform.

This is a test. This is only a test. Had this been an actual launch of YouTube’s live streaming platform, more programming would presumably be available. For now, here’s the schedule indicating what’s on, and when — just like in the olden days:

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Eliot Van Buskirk and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

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• SXSW: YouTube Launches Partner Program for Indie Bands
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• Live Streaming (Sort of) Coming to YouTube
• YouTube Ventures Offline For First Live Event
• Wired 14.12: YouTube vs. Boob Tube

Google is reportedly in talks with the major movie studios to launch full-length video rentals on YouTube by year’s end.

YouTube has already experimented with film rentals, offering selections from the Sundance Festival earlier this year when it would not rule out the addition of Hollywood movies. And the site was reportedly in talks with the same studios around this time last year, so this does not come as much of a surprise, the Financial Times’ “scoop” notwithstanding (subscription required).

However, YouTube’s movie rental program currently focuses on independent filmmakers and music artists. The addition of mainstream, pay-per-view feature films to YouTube would represent a significant development, regardless of how long these reported talks have been ongoing (at least a year).

Most of us want to watch full-length films on our large, flatscreen televisions and — if we’re lucky — our surround sound speaker systems, which transform any living room into a private movie theater delightfully lacking in other people, their cellphones and their crinkly candy wrappers.

Google’s upcoming Android-powered set-top boxes would solve that problem. In addition to renting from Amazon, Netflix, and whatever other companies create an Android-based video rental service, users of that as-yet-unreleased box would be able to rent on-demand movies from YouTube too — possibly using the YouTube XL interface Google developed specifically for large screens. Also battling in this new living room war is Apple’s rumored iTV upgrade.

According to the FT’s sources, each movie rental will cost around $5 — the same price charged by cable and satellite companies for on-demand playback. In addition, they said, these films will stream rather than downloading to local hard drives, so you won’t be able to watch them without a decent internet connection.

Google spokesman Chris Dale told Wired.com, “we have nothing to announce at this time.”

Several other companies already offer a service along these lines, but Google has two things thing that Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and other players in the internet movie rental business lack: the most popular search engine in the world and the most popular video site in the world. Both would funnel customers into YouTube’s movie rental service.

“Google and YouTube are a global phenomenon with a hell of a lot of eyeballs -– more than any cable or satellite service,” one film executive reportedly told the FT. “They’ve talked about how many people they could steer to this … it’s a huge number.”

Google has been negotiating deals with the movie studios for at least a year now. But according to the FT’s sources the talks “have taken on a greater urgency” in light of Apple’s impending set-top box improvements, Google’s own set-top box plans and the increasing popularity of online film rentals. And the deeper context is the growing feasibility for consumers to “cut the cord” — dropping expensive, bundled cable/satellite subscriptions in favor of internet- and over-the-air-delivered signals.

The potential losers in all of this, obviously, are cable and satellite companies (assuming one takes the death of Blockbuster and other video stores as a given). There’s simply not much point in sending movies from satellite or over dedicated wires when they look just as good delivered by the same wire you use for e-mail.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Eliot Van Buskirk and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Networks Proving A Tough Sell for Google TV (Surprise)
• Report: Google Working With Intel, Sony on TV Project
• Boxee CEO: Google TV Could Boost or Crush Us
• Google, Dish Network Reportedly Test Android-Based Satellite TV
• YouTube Movie Rentals: Today Sundance, Tomorrow the World
• SXSW: Dynamo Takes on YouTube for Indie Film Rentals
• YouTube Angling to Offer Premium Movie Rentals

Photo courtesy of Flickr/The City Project

Google’s YouTube just reached more of the planet, with Wednesday’s release of native-language versions available for four more of the world’s languages, for a total of 28.

The new tongues are Croatian, Filipino, Serbian and Slovak. Hebrew was on the list at one point too, but its right-to-left orientation presents a formidable localization challenge. YouTube hopes to add as many as 12 more localized versions by the end of 2010 — part of a major trend since the then-English-only site expanded to Europe and Japan in 2007, and one which YouTube apparently intends to continue, as shown by the arrow pointing up and to the right on the chart above.

These 28 officially supported languages are accompanied by YouTube’s script translator, which can toggle video captions between a total of 50 languages. In addition to encouraging more uploaders and downloaders around the world to participate with  instructions and navigational elements in their own languages, localization has the side effect of giving YouTube an easy way to block content that’s against the law only in certain countries, such as Germany’s laws against Nazi content.

Localization also lets record labels make a music video available only in countries where advertising rates are high, and ads can be depended upon to sell. For example, videos on Vevo.com, a partnership between the major labels and YouTube, only appear in the U.S. and Canada. (Some of those videos appear in those countries on YouTube, according to Vevo; the company promised in January to launch Vevo in more countries before the end of 2010 but has yet to do so.)

For Google and YouTube, though, embracing the languages of the world is more about making a growing number of people feel at home on the site than controlling where videos appear.

“By opening YouTube up to include more languages we make the YouTube experience and our vast library of videos more accessible to those who want to explore it,” YouTube product manager Brian Truong told Wired.com. “The challenge is, our site has well over a quarter million words and translating this many words can take a lot of time. YouTube has always been about fostering greater cultural understanding and appreciation for how interconnected the world is. Every time we roll out support for a new language, we open YouTube up to more people, people like my mother, who speaks only Chinese. Seeing my mother on YouTube enthusiastically sharing with me videos she discovered on the site brings home the impact the work we do here can have on so many.”

It’s commendable, in a way, that as other forces of globalization and the internet devalue less-common languages, Google has money to spend on localizing a service this populist — even in countries where music videos won’t play, and some content is censored after being flagged by that country’s users. In many languages, YouTube could be the only video-sharing horse in town, so to speak, or at most one of a few.

Google needs one thing more than anything else, and that is to grow. Maybe it’s running out of the speakers of the 24 languages for which it already had local versions, so it has no other choice than but to grow outwards in addition to upwards.

Regardless of the reason, YouTube’s growing fluency brings more people into the global conversation — whether through political statements or dancing panda bears.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Eliot Van Buskirk and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• YouTube Redesigned With Films, User Uploads in Mind
• SXSW: YouTube Launches Partner Program for Indie Bands
• YouTube Movie Rentals: Today Sundance, Tomorrow the World
• 5-Year-Old YouTube Tops Networks’ Primetime With 2 Billion Views
• SXSW: Dynamo Takes on YouTube for Indie Film Rentals
• YouTube’s ‘Leanback’ Wants to Friend Your Television Remote

The mobile version of Google’s video-sharing website received an upgrade Thursday. The new m.youtube.com has a bunch of new features, including high-quality video playback in the browser using HTML5.

Surf to YouTube’s mobile site with any modern mobile with a browser that supports HTML5’s <video> tag (works great on iPhones, iPads and Android phones) and you’ll notice that when you click on a video thumbnail, the video loads inside a new browser-based player.

The old site on an iPhone used to launch the YouTube native app, taking you out of the browser. In fact, the first time you visit the site on an iPhone, you’ll be prompted to “install” a bookmark on your home screen. This is likely a step to move people away from the YouTube iPhone app and toward the web-based app.

The switch to an HTML5-based mobile experience comes only a week after YouTube published a public memo stating several places where HTML5 falls short when compared to Flash for delivering video. But Flash currently isn’t an option on mobiles. So, while HTML5-based video playback may not be YouTube’s first choice on the desktop (even though the company has been experimenting with it), it makes perfect sense on mobiles.

The whole mobile YouTube site has been optimized for the small screen, and the experience on the phone is now much tighter. For one, the video quality is markedly better, and the web-app’s interface has been updated to look like a native app, with big, touchscreen-friendly button icons.

There are also new features that aren’t in the YouTube iPhone app. The library is easier to navigate, the search box suggests results as you type, videos can be bookmarked like web pages, and favorites and the new “like”-style ratings have been added.

This article originally appeared on Webmonkey.com, Wired’s site for all things web development, browsers, and web apps. For more from Webmonkey, follow the links at the end of the article.

Continue Reading “YouTube Launches New HTML5 Mobile Site” »

YouTube Leanback already knows I love the YouTube video of Stereolab playing 'French Disko' on live TV, so it serves it up -- no searching or keyboard required (link below).

Google didn’t mention set-top boxes in Wednesday night’s announcement of YouTube Leanback, a beta version of the site designed to be viewed passively — as in couch potato — rather than actively — as in computer nerd. But clearly, YouTube has your TV set in mind with this high-definition version of the service, designed for use with any remote control.

The YouTube Leanback beta works with a regular QWERTY computer keyboard, but other than the search function, the interface uses only five buttons: the arrow keys and the enter key. You may not even find yourself wanting to search the service at all, because it links up with your YouTube subscriptions and videos your friends have recently shared on Facebook, in addition to a wide selection of categories, in which case those five buttons are all you need to use it.

The television remote, that quintessential component of the lean-back viewing experience, includes the same five buttons, of course. This YouTube Leanback Beta works with your computer now, but when it emerges from beta it could provide the backbone of a Google TV version for couch potatoes who want to keep their cable or satellite provider and use the same remote. YouTube and Dish Networks were reportedly testing an Android-based satellite television set-top box earlier this year.

As online video tries to stake its claim in the living room — and with a library and dedicated suppliers no broadcaster can rival — YouTube is wise to re-position itself as the most interactive, comprehensive television channel around, serving up content to the same audience who stocks it with cost-free videos, in the place where they still tend to watch the most.

Google has been down this road to the television set before, with YouTube XL. But this slicker version would make even more sense in conjunction with a regular remote, paving the way for potential partnerships with cable and satellite television companies — assuming they can learn to see it as a valuable add-on, rather than a threat to their bread-and-butter long-form programs. YouTube Leanback would also present a natural interface for Google’s own television set-top box.

Incidentally, YouTube Leanback runs on Adobe Flash, which is good news for Adobe following Apple’s rejection of the technology (but bad news for iPad owners who’d like to check out Leanback).

Speaking of which, YouTube made another YouTube announcement last night, unveiling a new HTML5 mobile version of the service that essentially turns the Apple iPhone into a Google Android phone where m.youtube.com is concerned. Google’s television set-top box can use an Android phone as a remote control, so this is a sign that it might work with an iPhone OS device as a remote too.

Back to Google TV, which would work with a television remote. Now, the question now is: Which cable or satellite company will be brave enough to integrate it into their set-top box?

Stereolab’s “French Disko” — “live” on Channel 4

See Also:

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• Google Introduces Google TV, New Android OS
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• Report: Google Working With Intel, Sony on TV Project
• 7 Ways to Watch Web Video Without Google TV
• YouTube: HTML5 Video Is No Match for Flash
• SXSW: YouTube Launches Partner Program for Indie Bands
• YouTube Movie Rentals: Today Sundance, Tomorrow the World
• Google, Dish Network Reportedly Test Android-Based Satellite TV
• Stereolab’s Tim Gane on Music, Business and Chemical Chords
• Poll: Which Stereolab Is Better?

YouTube has some bad news for those of you hoping the site would soon ditch Flash in favor of HTML5 video tags: It isn’t going to happen any time soon.

That’s message from the YouTube developer blog which cites half-a-dozen areas where Flash trumps HTML5 and explains why “the <video> tag does not currently meet all the needs of a site like YouTube.”

The emerging HTML5 standard, which is quickly being adopted by browser manufacturers and developers, offers native video-playback and animation tools that don’t require Adobe’s Flash plug-in. However, while HTML5 handles the basics of video, it lacks many of the extra features that sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Hulu currently offer through Flash-based video players.

To switch to pure HTML5 video would mean YouTube would have to give up features like live streaming, dynamic video quality control and the ability to allow users to jump to specific points in a video.

While YouTube claims to be “excited about the HTML5 effort and <video> tag,” the post makes it pretty clear that HTML5 isn’t going to take over the site any time soon. The video-streaming site Hulu has previously said the same thing: HTML5 lacks the extra features Flash enables.

YouTube has been running an experimental HTML5 version of the site for more than a year, and it remains an opt-in choice for those who want to avoid Flash. The site also continues to serve raw H.264 videos to mobile devices like the iPad, but don’t expect the main browser version of YouTube to make the same changes.

The YouTube developer blog lists several things Flash can do that HTML5 video tags cannot:

Continue Reading “YouTube: HTML5 Video Is No Match for Flash” »

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) — Pakistan has blocked the popular video sharing website YouTube indefinitely in a bid to contain “blasphemous” material, officials said on Thursday.

The blockade came after the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) directed Internet service providers to stop access to social network site Facebook indefinitely on Wednesday because of an online competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad.

Any representation of the Prophet Mohammad is deemed un-Islamic and blasphemous by Muslims.

Wahaj-us-Siraj, the CEO of Nayatel, an Internet service provider, said the PTA issued an order late on Wednesday seeking an “immediate” block of YouTube.

“It was a serious instruction as they wanted us to do it quickly and let them know after that,” he told Reuters.

YouTube was also blocked in the Muslim country in 2007 for about a year for what it called un-Islamic videos.

A Foreign Office spokesman condemned the publication of caricatures of the Muslim prophet on Facebook and urged countries to “address the issue” which he said was an “extremely sensitive and emotional matter for Muslims.”

“Such malicious and insulting attacks hurt the sentiments of Muslims around the world and can not be accepted under the garb of freedom of expression,” the spokesman, Abdul Basit, told a weekly briefing.

America’s Funniest Home Videos may have pioneered the YouTube concept, but as the site reaches the five-year mark, its audience size is no laughing matter. YouTube’s viewership now exceeds that of all three networks combined during their “primetime” evening time slot, with more than 2 billion views per day, Google announced Sunday.

Granted, YouTube’s numbers come from worldwide views, while ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast their primetime channels within the United States. But this is a significant milestone nonetheless, and hints at an eventual tipping point when the internet could become the world’s dominant video-delivery system, Mark Cuban’s predictions aside.

Google also trumpeted some other key stats: People upload over a day’s worth of video to YouTube every minute; the average user spends only 15 minutes a day on the site, which YouTube would like to increase in part by renting full-length films; and YouTube has broadcast live sports to more than 200 countries.

To celebrate its fifth birthday, YouTube asks the site’s users to upload videos of how the site has affected their lives, some of which will appear on a specially curated channel. In addition, celebrities including Conan O’Brien — whose best next career move might be to become official curator of YouTube — marked the occasion by posting a playlist consisting of their favorite videos (view his above).

Should the networks really be worried about being overtaken by YouTube? Yes and no. They own their content, YouTube has professed a wish to lengthen viewing times. Licensing currently-airing full-length network television shows (in addition to the older shows they currently license) would be a great way to do that. And the networks are in a more favorable negotiating position than the record labels were when they made similar deals, due to Hulu (ABC and NBC) and CBS.com already attracting large audiences for that content.

Perhaps a more serious threat to the networks is that YouTube is changing our viewing behavior, and that our viewing habits on the computer will soon migrate to the living room.

Plenty of set-top boxes already play high-definition and even 3-D YouTube videos on a television set. When Google unveils its next-generation set-top box, possibly as soon as Wednesday’s I/O Conference, in partnership with DishNetwork, Intel and/or Sony, YouTube will assume an even greater presence on the television. Even if the networks continue to hold back their full episodes of new shows from on YouTube, users could come to prefer a higher percentage of direct-to-internet content on their televisions.

As paidContent founder and editor Rafat Ali tweeted Monday morning, Conan O’Brien seems “a lot funnier on the internets” than he did on network television, and O’Brien recently joked with a roomful of Google employees about a world without television networks. Who knows, five years from now, O’Brien could be hosting his own show on YouTube, rather than fretting about his terminated NBC contract.

“I don’t know what television’s going to be five years from now. There’s a lot of people that think you’re just going to experience it all through your server, and people don’t even know how the business is going to change,” said O’Brien, who should know, as a longtime television host and writer-producer of the Simpsons.

“There might not be really network television as we know it — wouldn’t that be sweet.”

See Also:

• Report: Google Working With Intel, Sony on TV Project
• Report: Google Will Soon Unveil Android-for-Television
• Google, Dish Network Reportedly Test Android-Based Satellite TV …
• YouTube XL Coming Soon to the Boob Tube
• Wired 14.12: YouTube vs. Boob Tube

M.I.A.’s controversial “Born Free” video has not, it turns out, been deleted from Google’s YouTube site. The video still lives but has become nearly impossible to find, because of the combined efforts of disturbed users and YouTube’s content-monitoring staff.

The video, which you can view on YouTube to the right, shows military forces rounding up and executing red-headed children. Contrary to news reports that YouTube removed the violent video, the site simply put it behind an age-restricted click-through. That renders the video impossible to find unless you already know the URL.

At least one instance of the video was removed from YouTube and originally marked with a copyright-takedown notice (no longer online) that cited a request by XL Recordings, M.I.A.’s UK label, while UMG sells her music in the US. However, M.I.A. press manager Jennie Boddy told us, “YouTube took it off, not UMG.”

Copyright is not the issue here. Rather, it all has to do with YouTube’s 13-year-old-and-up users stumbling across a violent video in which one child is shot in the head at point-blank range and another is blown up, in graphic detail, by bombs.

YouTube’s head of communications (who declined to be named in accordance with Google corporate practice) told Wired.com that the site does not comment on the flagging or removal of individual videos, but she did point us to a 2008 blog post in which YouTube lays out its policy of burying videos in “‘Most Viewed,’ ‘Top Favorited,’ and other browse pages,” after enough users flag a given video as objectionable.

So why can’t anyone find this video using YouTube’s search function?

As it turns out, YouTube users do not have the ability themselves to to bury a video in search results, no matter how many times they flag something as objectionable. If YouTube’s crowdsourced objectionable-content-detection system alerts staff to a video that should probably be age-restricted, a Google staffer watches the video and decides whether to age-restrict it, which then buries the video in the search results. And Google confirmed that that is precisely what happened here.

“The demotion that happens [in browsable pages] is based on a number of signals, including user flagging activity potentially indicating that the video could be controversial,” said the YouTube spokeswoman. “For the more severe demotion, in terms of not showing up in search results, that’s actually only when a video has been reviewed and age-restricted. However many user flags, or a flagging campaign, could never lead to a video being taken off of search results. It would have to be somebody from the policy-enforcement team reviewing that video and saying ‘Yes, this is in fact not suitable for a general audience.’”

Given Google’s stance towards censorship of its own search engine by the Chinese government, one would hardly expect it to censor YouTube users. Indeed, Google’s policy represents a more open and nuanced approach than what Apple is doing with its App Store. There, presumably overworked employees decide whether to censor content before it even shows up in the store.

The notion that YouTube censored the video completely appears to have originated with the BBC, subsequently spreading to The New York Times (which later updated its article) and then to the rest of the web.

Even M.I.A. was confused, at one point tweeting, “FUCK UMG WHO WONT SHOW IT ON YOUTUBE! FOR THE U.S >>>>>>WATCH HERE http://miauk.com/,” following that up with “OK NOT UMG FAULT!”

It took a little digging, but now you know what really went on here: Google’s YouTube buried, but did not delete, the video for M.I.A.’s “Born Free.”

See Also:

• M.I.A. Blasts MTV for Censoring “Paper Planes” Video
• Apple App Store Bans Pulitzer-Winning Satirist for Satire
• Bad PR Forces Apple to Reconsider Banning Prize-Winning Satirist
• Apple Reverses, Allows App From Pulitzer-Winning Cartoonist
• Now Apple Bans Tiger Woods Satire App. Does Big Media Care?
• Hitler Downfall Videos Being Pulled From YouTube
• Redesigned YouTube Takes Aim at Boob Tube, Trolls (Updated)

Updated: UMG is not the parent company of XL Recordings; the former sells the new M.I.A. album in the US, the latter in the UK.