'Sicko' down at YouTube, up at Google Video
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Blog: One of Google's units removes bootleg versions of documentary but copy remains at Google Video
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Internet search leader Google Inc   is in talks to buy popular Web video site YouTube Inc.  for close to $1.6 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on  Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
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YouTube turns two this month, which presents a fitting opportunity to decry it. The video-sharing Web site -- whose name has come to stand for every other such site on the Web -- has clearly emerged as the great new media drain catch, an uncurated museum of everything from dumb home movies to slick...
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By Jefferson Graham  LOS ANGELES -- Internet search giant Google is under fire from Hollywood, mostly about the many unlicensed clips available on its YouTube video-sharing site.
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The video-sharing site YouTube.com suffered an outage Tuesday, the same day a Web measurement company said the site had broken into its list of the Internet's top 50 for the first time. Few details on the outage were available.
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(InfoWorld) - YouTubeÂ furthered its attempts to offer legitimate footage on its video-sharing Web site this week by announcing deals that will provide users with music video and professional basketball content. On Tuesday, YouTube and Wind-up Records, a division of Wind-up Entertainment, said that a majority of Wind-up's music videos will be shown on the site. The arrangement also allows for the use of certain preselected music tracks in user-created videos. Artists signed to the label include Evanescence and Scott Strapp, who was the lead singer of the band Creed. As with its other media partners, a revenue-sharing model will give both companies money from the advertising sold on the pages that display Wind-up's content. This follows Monday's announcement that the National Basketball Association has teamed with YouTube to create an "NBA Channel" on the site. As of Monday, users can view league-approved NBA content on the channel. The material will come from NBA.com's own video selections and will include certain selected plays and behind-the-scenes footage. While users will still be allowed to upload NBA material to the site, the arrangement allows the league to call for the removal of some material. In the spirit of the user-generated content movement that is part of "Web 2.0," users can also submit videos of their basketball skills. Site visitors will judge the videos and the winners will be compiled and shown in a weekly highlight video. The profit-sharing arrangement also extends to this deal, according to the NBA. The moves are part of a larger effort YouTube has made to resolve intellectual-property disputes over copyright material users upload to the site. Copyright holders have demanded that YouTube remove the material, while in other situations, the video's owners and YouTube have reached agreements that allow content to remain on the site. YouTube, founded in 2005, began experiencing fallout from hosting copyright video around the timeÂ Google announced it was purchasing the siteÂ for $1.65 billion in October 2006. Earlier this month, YouTube complied withÂ a request from Viacom International to remove over 100,000 of its clips, including content from MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Comedy Central, and Paramount Pictures. In January, YouTube deleted clips from News Corp.'s Fox television division afterÂ the media company subpoenaed the site and asked for the content's removalÂ in addition to information on who posted the material. This came after a bout with a group of Japanese copyright holders in October that resulted inÂ the removal of approximately 30,000 clips. YouTube holds content deals with Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, CBS, Warner Music Group, NBC, and the National Hockey League. Â
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YouTube has removed clips  of Michael Moore&#39;s U.S. health-care expose &quot;Sicko&quot; that  appeared on the site during the weekend, two weeks before the  film&#39;s June 29 opening.
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By JESSE NOYES  Still fresh from a megamerger with Google, video-sharing site YouTube is planning to pass along some of its newfound wealth.
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YouTube announces nice international versions of its popular web video service.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has promised to give content makers control overÂ advertisements overlaid on video clipsÂ they post to its YouTube video sharing Web site. The company is seeking further feedback on the video advertising service as a rising number ofÂ YouTube users threaten to leave the siteÂ if the advertising feature is not improved. Only videos from content creators that have signed up for the advertising scheme, called InVideo, will host ads, leaving the majority of videos on YouTube free of the overlays, a Google spokesman said Friday. Advertisers will still be able to reach a large audience through YouTube videos even if the company only places ads in a small portion of videos. "And our users are not shy about telling us what they like and what they don't, so it behooves us to be careful," said Shashi Seth, YouTube Group Product Manager, in an e-mailed statement. YouTube launched the InVideo adsÂ on Wednesday. They start as an overlay on the bottom 20 percent of a video and people can click to watch the advertisement, or if not, the ad will simply disappear. Clicking on the overlay pauses the video, which resumes after the ad finishes. So far, responses to the new advertising system, posted on YouTube's blog, have been negative. People are passionate about the issue, with many threats to leave YouTube for other sites, such as Myspace.com or Break.com. "As a viewer of videos I don't want to see any of the content of the video covered up. I only had one video posted myself, which I have just removed. Bye!," writes user KPDover, in a comment. As of early Friday, the total number of comments had reached 669, with many repeats, but still a substantial increase to the 132 comments posted Thursday at around the same time. YouTube hopes it can change people's minds about InVideo ads, and sees them as a way to generate revenue for the site without being too intrusive. They are designed to interfere as little as possible with viewing and be relevant to the video. Warner Media, part of Time Warner, is one company that has signed up to allow overlays to be used on its music videos, and some of the ads are for other Warner music. Still, YouTube users complain that 20 percent is a huge amount of space on the small video screens, enough to detract from the viewing experience. YouTube plans to continue on with the InVideo overlays, and hopes "to make the ads an important part of the advertising model for online video," said Aaron Zamost, from Google corporate communications. The InVideo ads users are seeing on YouTube videos are the result of two months of testing. The company tried other methods of video advertising, including pre-roll video, but the in-video ads simply worked better. Videos that started with pre-roll advertisements were shut down 70 percent of the time, according to Google, while only 10 percent of in-video ads were abandoned. In addition, the number of people clicking to play an InVideo ad were 5 percent to 10 percent greater than the number of people clicking on a standard banner ad, the company says. The company uses software to match ads to videos, and can pinpoint an audience closely. For example, an advertiser could place an InVideo ad targeting 18-24 year old soccer fans in Los Angeles, to be played between 6pm to 11pm local time. The ads are placed by genre, demographic, time of day and geographic location. The technology behind YouTube's InVideo was all developed in house, but Zamost points out, the company never said it invented overlay technology. It did not. Time will tell if YouTube figures out a way to ensure its community grows accustomed to InVideo advertisements. Early on, YouTube rivals may have an opportunity to scoop up disaffected users. There are plenty of alternative video sharing Web sites on the Internet. But whether YouTube users like it or not, the company is committed to moving forward with InVideo ads. Â
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(InfoWorld) - GoogleÂ launched versions of its video sharing service YouTube in French and other languages on Tuesday. Localized versions now exist for Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. TheÂ French siteÂ features titles and help pages in French, and the top video is a welcome message from French rapper Kamini, who began promoting his brand of rural rap through YouTube's English-language site last November with a video clip entitled "Marly-Gomont". For now, the international sites draw on the same database of videos and rankings as the U.S. site, but in time Google plans to add country-specific video rankings and comments, it said Tuesday. Today, the French site displays French-language content and rankings previously posted to the main site. "The big thing for YouTube in 2007 is access," YouTube founder Chad Hurley said at a Google news conference in Paris on Tuesday. Hurley and his co-foundersÂ sold YouTube to GoogleÂ last October for $1.65 billion. "We have a goal to put YouTube on every screen, and we mean on mobile devices and in the living room. Right now it's restricted to your browser, to your PC, and we want you to be able to take that same content and bring it to your mobile phone and be able to watch it in your living room," Hurley said. Plans to reach those other screens are already under way: on May 30, Apple announced it will put YouTube in the living room by building support for it into a future software update for itsÂ AppleTV set-top box, while on Saturday YouTube launched a version of its site for mobile phones. However, it will require partnerships with mobile phone operators, and months or even years of work, before YouTube Mobile offers the same experience as the Web site offers PC users today, Hurley said. Over half of YouTube's traffic today comes from outside the U.S., Hurley said, and delivering localized versions of YouTube is a way for the company to capitalize on that. However, expanding internationally may expose YouTube to the kinds of censorship issues that Google has been experiencing in China. "I think a platform such as YouTube has to respect local laws and customs," YouTube founder Chad Hurley, adding that the company is developing ways to enable the fine-grained control of content required to do that. In preparation for the launch of the new sites, YouTube has already signed content partnerships with the British Broadcasting Corp.; French 24-hour news channel France 24; Spain's Antena 3 and Cuatro TV; RÃ¡dio e TelevisÃ£o de Portugal; the Dutch VPRO and NPO; European football clubs such as Chelsea FC, AC Milan, Barcelona FC, and Real Madrid, and nonprofit organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and MÃ©dÃ©cins du Monde, said Google. In the past, Google's cultural initiatives such asÂ Google Book SearchÂ have faced criticism -- from the head of the French National Library, Jean-NoÃ«l Jeanneney, among others -- for the way in which they encourage the dominance of U.S. values by making it easier to find cultural resources in English than in other languages. Linking with producers of local cultural content and making it easier to search that material may improve Google's image in some countries. That said, YouTube has proved popular in Europe despite only having an English-language interface until now. In France in April, its U.S. site had almost as many visitors as the French-language pages of local video sharing service DailyMotion, according to market researcher comScore,Â (DailyMotion also offers services in a number of other languages, including English, German, Russian, and Japanese.) One European language notably missing from the new crop of YouTube sites is German. YouTube is already the No. 1 video sharing site in Germany, according to Comscore, narrowly ahead of the German-language service MyVideo operated by MyVideo Broadband SRL of Bucharest, Romania. In Germany, it's more important to understand the German viewer's mind-set than their language, according to Anca-Alina Seghedi, CEO of MyVideo. "Most of the German users of video communities already speak English, at least sufficiently to navigate on an international web site. That means the language barrier is not the main decisive point for users to choose their favorite web sites," she said Friday. MyVideo may be better placed to understand Germans than YouTube, said Seghedi. "It is questionable whether they will be able to adapt to the German consumer tastes, which has been quite an important aspect of MyVideo's success in Germany." At Google's news conference on Tuesday, YouTube international manager Sakina Arsiwala said: "We have to talk to more people on the ground. We were not ready for Germany yet, from the product side or partnership side. We would love to be in Germany." (James Niccolai in Paris contributed to this report.) Â
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Internet search leader Google Inc is in talks to buy popular Web video site YouTube Inc. for close to $1.6 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
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Google and BSkyB in a video-sharing deal? Oh, the irony.
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YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google Inc., agreed to remove more than 100,000 clips produced by Viacom Inc. after they were posted without permission.
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Moviegoers interested in  seeing Michael Moore&#39;s U.S. health-care expose, &quot;Sicko,&quot; could  find it easily on YouTube this weekend.
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YouTube, one of the world's most popular Web sites, might be headed for a crash. At least one industry watcher is predicting crippling copyright-violation litigation coming from the entertainment industry.
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N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman has tried to offset low TV ratings by spearheading deals with YouTube.com and Google Video.