Tag Archives | YouTube

YouTube Wins Viacom Case

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 23, 2010 at 5:18 pm

A U.S. District Court Judge has ruled in favor of Google and against Viacom in the latter’s lawsuit over copyrighted videos on YouTube. Seems that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act–a law which usually seems to work in favor of copyright owners–absolves Google of blame for unauthorized uploading of videos as long as it deletes specific examples it knows about.

I’m not reflexively anti-giant media company, but it was tough to side with Viacom in this case. It says it plans to appeal, so it’s not over just yet.

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YouTube Turns Five

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 17, 2010 at 8:58 am

YouTube is celebrating its fifth birthday–and the fact that it now streams two billion videos a day. (Just thinking about it, it’s disorienting to remember that we lived without it, and its rivals, a mere half-decade ago.)

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YouTube Opens Up Rental Store

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 23, 2010 at 11:11 am

The streaming rental industry is getting ever more crowded, and now it’s going to have to make room for at least one more. YouTube has seemingly launched an streaming rental service, offering movies and television shows for anywhere from 99 cents to $3.99. Content would be viewable in a 48-hour window following purchase.

While most of the content available appears to be from independent, small studio and Bollywood sources, I spotted several Lionsgate movies in the list. Recent hit Precious and Brothers are currently being featured, and the service had a few catalog titles, including the Saw movies and 3:10 to Yuma.

Television show content does not appear to come from any major American network. YouTube has not officially announced this service as of yet, and it may just be that the weak offering here could be a result of this merely not being ready for prime time.

YouTube had previously experimented at the beginning of the year with $5 rentals of Sundance titles. The offering did not do so well, likely making the site much more than $10,000 or so in rental fees.

As I mentioned earlier, any offering from YouTube runs into the reality of a small yet increasingly crowded market. If the service wants to be successful, it’s going to have to ramp up its offerings quickly, as Netflix is currently king in this space. That said, the extreme popularity of YouTube itself works in the service’s favor.

We’ll have to watch this in the coming months to see the site’s next moves, and if it begins to strike hardware deals to bring the service off the computer screen and into the living room. After all, who wants to sit in front of a computer screen for two hours to watch a movie?

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YouTube Streamlines Itself

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 31, 2010 at 10:48 am

Back in January, YouTube started letting users opt-in to a new streamlined interface. It’s now happy enough with the results that it’s rolling out its new video page to everybody. I attended a press briefing at YouTube headquarters this morning at which company executives showed off the revisions, explained the thinking behind them, and said that all users should see them show up by 7pm PT tonight.

The execs told us that there are two types of YouTube users: casual ones who just want to watch a video, and dedicated fans who comment, create subscriptions, and otherwise dig into the site’s features. The new design tries to satisfy both groups, to turn the casual users into fans, and generally make watching lots and lots of videos so easy and addictive that everybody spends more time on the site.

At first glance, the new look doesn’t look all that new: The site’s essentially YouTubiness is intact, and there’s still a lot to do. But over the past few years, YouTube has added new features at a fast clip, and they’ve usually been crammed in wherever there was some white space on the page to spare. Goal one of the new interface was to simplify: It’s got many fewer links and less use of borders, gray shading, and other trim that isn’t completely necessary.

Some stuff has been moved around, too: The details on the uploader are now above the video rather than to its right. YouTube says that makes them more prominent, and also lets the site devote all the space to the right of the video player to other videos the visitor might want to watch, such as related videos, music-video mixes, and subscriptions (which now follow you around the site).

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YouTube and Viacom Duke It Out

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 19, 2010 at 7:08 am

Am I the only one who finds the current public squabble between YouTube and Viacom a tad unseemly? The opening briefs in Viacom’s copyright suit against YouTube were made public yesterday, and YouTube used the occasion as reason to post an item by its chief counsel accusing Viacom of secretly uploading its stuff “for years,” going out of its way to make it look pirated. Viacom has responded with a brief statement saying that YouTube’s founders thought their site needed to “steal” content to prosper; it doesn’t deny YouTube’s charges, but says they’re a red herring.

I’m not a judge, a lawyer, or an intellectual-property expert; neither are most of the folks who the YouTube and Viacom items are aimed at. That said, Mike Masnick of Techdirt has a good pro-YouTube analysis. And he links to the Hollwood Reporter’s coverage, which sides with Viacom.

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YouTube Tries Out a New Look

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 21, 2010 at 11:02 am

Has YouTube ever done a truly sweeping redesign? If so, I don’t remember it. Mostly, I think of the scads of features the site has added–many of which are useful, but all of which have led to a cluttered experience.

Today, YouTube is launching a major makeover of its video playback page, based on feedback from users. For the moment, it’s not replacing the old one–it’s an opt-in feature which you can get by going here. The company says the plan is to get further feedback from users and tweak it further before it becomes the default interface

The major goals were to reduce the amount of wordage and graphics that weren’t completely necessary; to make the most popular features easier to find; and to keep the emphasis on the video being viewed (which could be either hilarious or sobering) rather than the interface. Even the site’s “Broadcast Yourself” slogan is gone in the interest of streamlining.

Also gone in the new version: star ratings. (Instead, you give a video a “Love It” or (“Thumbs Down”) rating. All in all, the site looks much more like a product of its parent company, Google.

Here’s the new look:

And here’s the older, busier version:

The company says that for this first version of its new look, it tried to err on the side of taking things away and removing labels–even the comments no longer have a header explaining that they’re comments. If they get feedback that any of the changes went too far, they may backtrack a bit.

YouTube hasn’t completely redone the other important part of the site–search results–but it is experimenting with a new format that leaves the video you’ve been watching onscreen in a smaller window when you search for something new:

It’s going to take a while for me to get used to some of the changes–like the information about the video’s uploader moving from the right-hand side and being split up into chunks above and below the video–but overall, this looks like good stuff. It’s certainly less claustrophobic than the old version.

If you check it out, let us know what you think.

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YouTube Does HTML5

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 20, 2010 at 6:17 pm

YouTube, the Web’s biggest video destination, has started supporting the Web’s newest way to watch video: HTML5, the nascent standard that includes video features that eliminate the need for Flash or other plug-ins. It’s so nascent that YouTube’s experimental implementation only works in Chrome and Safari, but if you use either of those browsers and are intrigued by the idea of Flash-free video, check it out.

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