YouTube, the social networking video sharing community, is said to be in discussions with Sony & Lions Gate Films to offer a Film & Movie Rental service through the YouTube portal.

YouTube, one of the internet’s visited websites, recently announced that it would be offering premium, professionally produced content onto its network in order to attract more users and increase advertising revenue. Last month, as part of an agreement, Time Warner, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim added older content to the YouTube Network. At present the majority of YouTube content is user generated or uploaded. The addition of paid content will see a dramatic change to the existing site, offering new sources of revenue and advertising opportunities.

“Google’s trying to find ways to better monetize this very good asset,” said Andy Miedler, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. “As long as the economics make sense, I certainly applaud them for trying to increase the revenue stream.”

Chris Dale, a YouTube spokesman, declined to comment on “rumors or speculation.”

“We hope to expand on both our great relationships with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer our community,” Dale said, without being more specific. The Wall Street Journal reported the story yesterday.

YouTube has also reported that it has come to a final settlement with PRS for Music and Music Videos will shortly be available to view in the UK once again. PRS requested a large royalty fee from YouTube for playing and distributing Music Videos and related content. YouTube announced that the Fee structure was too high and that advertising revenue would not fund such high charges.
After lengthy discussions with PRS, YouTube announced back in March that it would be blocking music content until a settlement could be made in regards to license fees. Nearly 6 months on and the service will finally be renewed.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Technorati Tags: internet, online films, online movies, seo, tech, technology, YouTube, youtube film rentals, youtube movie rentals, youtube movies, youtube music videos, youtube prs, youtube rentals

YouTube, the Google owned video sharing social network, announced on Tuesday that they will begin sharing advertising revenue with users who upload extremely popular, high profile clips and videos.

The YouTube partnership program will be extended to include individuals who are deemed eligible based on the number of views and the depth of sharing of their video content. The partnership program has until now allowed regular producers of videos to earn revenue from YouTube advertising. YouTube claim this can be Thousands of Dollars. Under the new system, if a video becomes popular, possible due to its viral nature, YouTube will email the user and invite them to “enable revenue sharing”. It is unclear as to exactly what YouTube will define as “Popular” but YouTube has acknowledged that they will only sell ads against the clip if the user agrees.

The new program will only be available in the US to start but will be rolled out to other regions. This new program is part of YouTube’s ongoing development of its revenue generating abilities.

“We think there’s tens of thousands more partners that we can generate through this content,” said Tom Pickett, director online sales at YouTube.

Article by Creative SEO

Technorati Tags: entertainment, Google, google youtube, internet, tech, technology, video, YouTube, youtube ads, youtube advertsing, youtube parner, youtube partnership program

Google has been busy updating its services this week, Google Maps, Adsense, YouTube, Google Reader and Google Books have all been updated as part of Google’s continued development. So the big question is, “What’s New?” Here’s a brief overview.

Google Maps has added Picasa photos to Street view. As long as the image has been Geo-tagged Google will include it in Street View.

“Millions of people already rely on Picasa Web Albums to share their photographs with friends and the internet community. Now, their public geo-tagged photos will help Google Maps users to get a better impression of a geographic place, especially for areas where we may not have any Panoramio photos,” Daniel Cotting, software engineer, Google Zurich, wrote on Google’s Lat Long Blog.


“We’ve selected these photos by looking for geo-tagged public images in Picasa Web Albums. We apply face detection to screen out images with identifiable individuals and image matching so that we’re including the most relevant photographs.”

Google AdSense is conducting email interviews to find out exactly what it’s publishers want. Google are obviously keen to understand more about the needs and requirements of their publishers in light of the new Bing Yahoo search deal. Bing and Yahoo pose a potential threat to Google and customer feedback will help Google to improve the service further. Adsense has also launched a Beta Category Filter system for English Language feed ads.

YouTube recently ran a 1,024 recipe multivariate experiment using Google’s Website Optimizer. The results were fantastic, a 15.7% increase in new account signup based on minor changes to the site layout and text.

Google Reader has introduced a new sharing option allowing you to share content with Twitter and Facebook.

Google books have added a Creative Commons license option for its partners, to protect published content.

Article by Creative SEO

Technorati Tags: adsense, blog, books, Google, google adsense, google books, google maps, google reader, internet, maps, news, reader, tech, technology, YouTube

A Facebook executive has confirmed that the recent downtime issues and Denial of Service Attacks on Facebook, LiveJournal, YouTube, Google and Blogger were all part of the Russia-Georgia crisis and were targeted at silencing one man from reporting.
A blogger, based in the Republic of Georgia, with username Cyxymu, was the victim of a simultaneous attack on the bloggers personal Social Networking accounts, according to Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly. The claim reinforces reports that social networking sites are being dragged into the Georgia-Russia crisis for allowing users to report on the issues.

Max Kelly told CNet. “It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Google, whose infrastructure protect its sites from being taken down by the recent activity are quoted as saying:
“We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.”

The internet is a portal for free speech and allows bloggers to share their opinions without restriction of content. Political propaganda and crisis information is freely available to view and publish on the internet without political censorship, but this obviously poses a threat to political activists. Are we seeing the start of a new wave of Cyber Warfare and will social networking sites need to offer more hardened security to protect against such attacks?

Article by Creative SEO – Search engine consultant

Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, crisis, denial of service attack, dos, facebook, Georgia, Google, livejournal, news, Russia, tech, technology, Twitter, YouTube

Google have today announced a new deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading video compression company that provides high quality video at high compression rates.

Google are committed to offering high quality, streaming video to both its Google Video users and its YouTube users. Google have talked about improving the quality of streaming video and adding further value to the user experience by providing more HD quality content.

High Quality streaming video is one of the many holy grails of the internet. Large file sizes and download rates restrict the existing technology from being available to every household, causing long and slow downloads and buffering. The higher the quality of the service, the faster the streaming and download times, the more likely web based video will integrate into consumer households.

If streaming web based video could potentially match High Definition quality television, with low file download sizes, let’s say HD at a minimum of 720p, more households would use the internet to watch and download content. This could potentially open a massive new market to Google for paid download and subscription based video and content through YouTube. The opportunity to provide advertising including video commercials at the beginning and end of content would potentially offer Google a very lucrative channel to resell advertising. Google have already signed a deal to provide Disney content on the YouTube network. As a user can you imagine being able to choose any film or video content and instantly watch and stream the content in real time at an HD quality directly to your home TV. No download time, no waiting, just click and watch. This same technology would help to improve mobile and handheld video content, providing mobile users with a greater array of streaming content without the need to download or buffer large files.

The deal with On2 outlines the importance of the technology and shows Google’s resolve to investigate the video compression further. The deal is subject to approval by On2 Technologies stockholders and the regulatory authorities.

The acquisition marks a clear commitment by Google to develop their existing video content, what Google have up there sleeves at this point in time no one knows, but as always it looks very exciting.

Visit Creative SEO for more fantastic articles

Technorati Tags: blog, Google, google video, internet, news, on2, on2 technology, seo, social networking, tech, YouTube