YouTube

YouTube announced today its biggest news partner yet for original TV quality content with the addition of the new Reuters TV channel. The channel adds to the almost 100 partner channels including WSJ, TED, WWE, Pitchfork TV, Vice, SB Nation, Machinima, and many more.

The programming will include 10 news, analysis, and commentary channels in a unique style that is “suited for Internet programming and does not mimic traditional TV.” Reuters Global Head of Programming Dan Colarusso said the following regarding the announcement:

“This deal with YouTube gives Reuters a way to showcase our collection of talented journalists and compelling video from around the world. It will offer unique insights and images that other media companies simply can’t match.”

The new content will be available through the redesigned Reuters TV YouTube channel, but it will also be made available on Reuters.com. A description of all of the new programming from the press release is listed below:

Expand
Expanding
Close

YouTube's latest interface that displays video channels upfront versus individual uploads.

The New Yorker’s John Seabrook recently interviewed YouTube’s Global Head of Content Robert Kyncl about the video-sharing service’s future and extensively detailed how YouTube is targeting a $300 billion chunk of the television industry through increased viewership, enhanced content, connected devices, and niche audiences.

Niches, as The New Yorker illustrated, are the future of television. The iconic industry started with just three networks decades ago, and it now features hundreds of cable channels each serving a niche—news, sports, food, weather, music, and more.

“People went from broad to narrow,” said Kyncl to The New Yorker. “And we think they will continue to go that way—spend more and more time in the niches—because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness.”

The downside to niches, as Kyncl explained, is cost. Apparently, it is expensive to program niche channels when factoring in various technical costs and the practicality of filling a 24/7 loop. However, with the advent of the Internet, niches are in high-demand, costs are lower than ever, and accessibility is at an all-time high…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Marvell could not quite wait for Consumer Electronics Show 2012 to spill the beans this on its huge GoogleTV win. The ARM-based processor company will have its Armada 1500 chipset at the heart of upcoming GoogleTV 2.0 solutions.

Most of the processor details are below, but the big news is that Google is going with low cost/low heat ARM processors for its next-generation set top boxes rather than Intel, who dropped out of the set top box market.  With Marvell, Google should be able to compete on price with Roku, AppleTV and the other players in the market, and more importantly, it should be able to persuade TV manufacturers to include the low cost chips into hardware designs.

Marvell boasts that the Armada 1500 does 1080P 3D, as well as Flash – even though Adobe’s long-term plans outside of the desktop market are murky at best.

It does not appear that Google will build its own devices (although, the image above makes for interesting conversation), but it will continue to OEM out Google software. In a statement, Mario Queiroz, VP, Product Management Google TV said: “The Google and Marvell teams have been working closely together to bring our combined software and chipset technologies to market to grow the Google TV ecosystem of manufacturers and devices. Marvell-powered Google TV solutions will enable powerful products to be brought to market at attractive prices.”

Eric Schmidt recently said Google hopes to have GoogleTV embedded in the majority of SmartTVs by the summer of 2012, so this is a very aggressive rollout plan.  We expect to hear much more at CES, where most consumer electronics companies release product plans for the upcoming year.

Another interesting tidbit: GoogleTV appears to be fully underneath its YouTube wing with media contacts listed for YouTube press people. The full press release is available below.
Expand
Expanding
Close

YouTube launched a neat video discovery experiment this afternoon called YouTube Slam. Slam is a little game that allows you to vote between videos in a wide-range of topics, including Comedy, Cute, Music, Bizarre and Dance. The video with the most Slams earns a spot on the leaderboard each week.

YouTube Slam also has a game aspect to it: users will earn more points as they predict crowd favorites. This is a cool time waster that you should check out.

Expand
Expanding
Close

We told you yesterday about a Google search easter egg for the Christmas, and today we discovered another fun way Google has decided to celebrate the holidays. When visiting YouTube, there is currently a snowflake icon next to the resizing and resolution options on the video player. Click it and your video will snow! Your mouse will even interact with the snowflakes as they fall. It will also snow in the YouTube search results when searching for “let it snow”.

In case you missed the other ways Google is celebrating, try typing “Christmas,” “Hanukkah,” or “let it snow” into Google search. You can even call Santa in Gmail. Yesterday the Android team released this Christmas-themed Ice Cream Sandwich advertisement to wish the Android community Happy Holidays.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmnkYyHQqNs]

Google today said its YouTube site hit a trillion playbacks in 2011 – that’s a 1,000,000,000,000 view counts for you, or about 140 views for every person on the earth. In a post over at the official YouTube blog, the company invited folks to “see what the world watched on YouTube in 2011 with YouTube Rewind”, available at www.youtube.com/rewind.

It’s an interactive timeline of this year’s most popular videos and events. As you can imagine, kitten videos, dog clips and videos of cute babies (iPad toddlers, anyone?) are again amongst the most-viewed clips not put out by big music companies. And what’s the biggest YouTube video of the year?

Rebecca Black, of course, an American pop singer who also dominated Google’s annual list of the fastest-growing search queries. Her music video is followed by this cute dog clip, then the Jack Sparrow music video (featuring Michael Bolton).

In the “most watched videos from major music labels globally” category, Pitbull’s On The Floor was by the most popular music video, although their Give Me Everything (featuring Ne-Yo, Afrojack and Nayer) and Rain Over Me (featuring Marc Anthony) were pretty popular as well. In fact, those three music videos accrued over four hundred million views.

The majority of YouTube clips that have managed to clock insane view counts throughout the year come from YouTube’s VEVO channel, dedicated to music videos (VEVO is a joint venture among Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Abu Dhabi Media.

Go past the break for a handy list of the most popular YouTube videos of 2011 across several categories.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0]

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2WJxCH9whI]

Google is in full holiday swing (what, you haven’t heard?). They just posted, on YouTube, a rap video that was put together by its employees, also know as Googlers. It is intended to “help St. Nick with his big flight this year.”

The song was written and produced by “all Google employees,” and some of them are featured in the clip. The video’s composition is credited to Ranidu, a Google business systems integrator and musician. The video was produced with the help of Google’s friends at Seedwell.

Matt Kane, a Google Content and User Education Specialist and hip-hop enthusiast did lyrics, and we have included them below.

By the way, Apple is helping Santa run errands with Siri in its new iPhone 4S commercial.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D52bdmsMtYI]

In October we reported that Google was in the process of investing approximately $100 million into funding original TV quality content for YouTube. Major media companies like Warner Bros and News Corp were in talks with the company to provide the content, which would appear on “dozens of free channels with professional-grade shows” sometime in 2012. Ahead of those plans, Academdy Award winner Ron Howard is getting set to debut his new film, When You Find Me, on YouTube this Friday at 12:00 p.m. EST.

The film’s storyline is inspired by a selection of photos Howard selected from a contest held by Canon. He took eight photos from the nearly 100,000 to choose from and shot the entire thing using Canon gear. The film will continue being available to stream until Monday, December 19 (trailer above), and will eventually land in film festivals next year. Below you can see the eight winning photos that inspired different aspects of the film such as “Setting”, “Character”, “Relationship, “Goal”, etc. The film will most likely be available here, when it becomes available tomorrow.

We already knew that Google has been making a serious push into beefing up the content offerings on YouTube from Hollywood studios and the film industry as a whole. In May they announced plans to add 3,000 Hollywood movies to YouTube as rentals, and in September the WSJ reported Google was spending $100-$200 million on licensing more premium content. Just last month YouTube begun rolling out move rentals from Pixar, Disney, and DreamWorks.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[slideshow]

After all the wait, we’ve finally gotten definitive word from Verizon: The LTE Galaxy Nexus, which will be the first ICS phone sold in the US, will go on sale tomorrow for $299 with a two year service plan from Verizon.

Furthermore, the hold up was in fact the 4.0.2 update which we told you about hours ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdD8s0jFJYo&feature=youtu.be&hd=1

Full press release follows:
Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EzmdP4AKMI#!]

Friendly, amusing, relevant, focused on product features but without offending either camp (Samsung, we’re looking at you). Love the cheap tune, BTW.

From the YouTube description:

The iPhone 4S owner learns the hard way that its new camera can’t hold up to some of the killer camera features on the T-Mobile HTC Amaze 4G such as BurstShot, SmartShot panorama and SweepShot.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=W-ajXnrpkio]

We already gave you an early look and detailed some of the changes included in the major YouTube UI overhaul a couple weeks ago, and now Google has finally made things official. On top of a completely redesigned homepage with gray background and brand new layout, the update also brings improved channel integration for both users and content providers including new channel templates. The major focus, however, is Google+ integration with new sharing and filtering options based on your Google+ account preferences.

Another addition included in the update is the official launch of TrueView, the advertising model that allows users to skip an ad after five seconds or select from one of three pre-roll ads. It also allows advertisers to pay only for users who don’t skip their ads. However, traditional ad formats will still be available in addition to TrueView.

YouTube has had no problem staying relevant amid a growing number of competitive content providers, especially in the mobile space. As of today, YouTube is reporting around 400 million views a day on mobile, up 3x year/year (13% of the service’s daily views which gets approx. 800M uniques a month). The rollout is happening today, so you should be seeing the redesign anytime now.

Expand
Expanding
Close

In a move that should make producers and video enthusiasts jump with joy, Google has finally rolled out an improved analytics feature on YouTube, allowing anyone to retrieve detailed reports and see who is watching their videos. The new capability goes beyond the existing Insight feature, which provides only basic analytics.

According to a post at the official YouTube blog, some of the features include a quick overview of how your videos have been doing in terms of view count, more detailed statistics, audience builders that let you discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions and audience retention, basically the ability to see “how far viewers are watching through your video”.

You can filter reports by a number of criteria, see line charts, download reports and analyze key metrics in different ways. The new tools should help anyone, especially YouTube’s content partners that share ad revenue with Google, make the most of their videos. The new Analytics feature will be released to everyone on a modern browser over the course of the day, Google said. More information is available in a support document here.

Expand
Expanding
Close

A new San Francisco based start-up called Switchcam combines YouTube videos from concerts, political events, and more to stitch together one video with multiple angles from the event. The service uses YouTube videos, which are turned into a seamless video. Above, I was watching a concert from My Morning Jacket where two camera angles were used. While Switchcam will automatically switch between the angles, you can also do it manually. The service works very seamlessly.

The service goes beyond two angles however, and can also have a set list to the left of the video. Right now the service has a vast majority of concerts, which seems to just be curated by the staff. The product is currently in beta, but is launching soon the company says on their blog. Presumably when it launches, Switchcam will allow its users to do the stitching instead of the staff. Check out their full list of events.

This is an awesome use of the large amount of videos YouTube offers. You may remember the music video service called Rokker we showed you a few months ago. Hopefully we continue to see products like these roll out in the future.

Google last month announced that its software powering the Logitech Revue set-top box and Sony’s networked television sets (and soon Samsung’s) will be updated with Android 3.1 Honeycomb code and new features. Today, the first in a series of several software updates is rolling out to Google TV devices, bringing with it enhanced experience for YouTube and Photos apps.

Per the official blog post, the new YouTube app  now lets you watch the videos you’ve subscribed to and access your playlists, favorites and the Watch Later queue. It is also possible to add videos to your own channel from your Google TV.

As for the Photos app, you get the new Discover feature, basically a pretty screen saver that animates a collage of all your photos sourced from your Picasa or Flickr accounts. Like the shuffle feature on the iPod shuffle, Discover is a great way to enjoy your long forgotten photos.

Sony’s Google TVs have already received this update, but it’s still pending for Logitech’s Revue box, which has yet to receive a Honeycomb firmware update.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buSd7zODi6A]

Expand
Expanding
Close

We reported a couple weeks back that Disney and Google were partnering to bring Disney content to YouTube, and today the first of that content is beginning to roll out with movies from Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks available for rent at youtube.com/movies (U.S. and Canada).

Adding to the thousands of Hollywood titles already available for rent through YouTube, the company will roll out hundreds of Disney titles in the weeks to come, with a handful of titles available today including Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, Cars 2, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. As always you’ll have 48 hours to view the rentals which range from $1.99 for older titles to $4.99 for newer releases.

While YouTube has already signed up Warner Brothers, Sony, and Universal to provide content, the addition of Disney films sees Google buddying up with one of Apple’s closest allies. Apple has a close relationship with Disney, to say the least. Other than iTunes previously being one of the biggest online portals to Disney content, the company was also the first to back movies on iTunes and became even closer connected with Apple as the acquisition of Pixar saw Steve Jobs become the largest individual shareholder at Disney.  More recently, Disney CEO Bob Iger joined Apple’s board after restructuring named former board member Arthur D. Levinson Chairman. This major push of Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks content to YouTube could prove to be one less reason to pick iTunes over Google’s content services.
Expand
Expanding
Close

There have been rumors that Google is testing a new redesign for YouTube. While we’re not sure if it’s rolling out to everyone today, we’re starting to get reports from Canada and elsewhere that the redesign is live. As you can see from the screenshots above and below, these are some quite significant changes including a new customized homepage that is essentially a news feed of trending content and your subscriptions and channels. A new sidebar on the left lets you manage and track all of your subscriptions, channels, and trending content, while Google+ integration lets you view and filter content recommended by people in your Circles.

You’ll also notice the new gray background, while the YouTube logo in the upper left now takes you to YouTube.com/guide.  In the image below you can see new resizing UI gives three buttons, one for your normal view,the second for an expanded widescreen view, and the third for full-screen. The rest of the site obviously gets a redesign in line with everything you see on the homepage. The screenshots below pretty much speak for themselves.

YouTube has also begun adding support for 1080p playback, native full-screen mode, annotations and captioning to the HTML5 video player  (via Electronista). More screenshots after the break showing the full redesign.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google has announced on their Commerce Blog this evening that they are now rolling Google Checkout into Wallet. Since Checkout’s focus was to simplify online checkouts, Wallet will now be rolling out to more places over the web including the Android Market, Google+ Games, YouTube, and even more Google sites.

Since both products have a similar goal, to simplify purchasing items, it makes sense for Google to roll the products together. For current Commerce users they will be able to setup a Wallet account when logging again, while merchants won’t have to make any changes. Wallet looks like its ready to roll for this Holiday season.

Expand
Expanding
Close

A new web service called Rokker.fm uses YouTube’s vast music library to stream music to users for free. The service is very sleek (still in beta), and reminds us of Spotify and Grooveshark. Since it uses YouTube, Rokker also displays the video in a tiny spot in the bottom right of the page.

If you’re interested in buying the song you’re listening to, you can purchase it through an Amazon link on the website. Rokker also gives you the ability to signup for an account and manage playlists. Here’s to Google not blocking it!

Rokker.fm also plans to release both a Mac and iOS app to Apple’s App Store. Check out screenshots of the apps after the break:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google is looking into offering a paid cable subscription model WSJ reported today. The move would put Google at competition with cable providers, and bring new technology to the Google TV. In September, Google brought on former cable-TV executive, Jeremy Stern, to look into adding the subscription model to the platform.

The report says that Google has already begun talking to Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Discovery Communications — but no final decisions have been made. Besides Google TV, Google also has the opportunity to incorporate cable streaming into YouTube, but that is not on the table right now says the report. Google’s fiber network would help with the delivery of the content, which is expected to roll out in Kansas in 2012. We look forward to seeing this story develop.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y7pE9UTTfy4]

GoogleTV updates should be happening any second now.  We’ve just got the following email from Google:
Expand
Expanding
Close

YouTube announced on their blog yesterday that they plan on adding more well-known content creators to the video platform in the coming weeks. YouTube’s efforts are to make the website more like a TV network, bringing in well-known personalities from fields outside of the internet.

Today we’re announcing that even more talented creators and original entertainment will soon join YouTube’s existing channel lineup, including channels created by well-known personalities and content producers from the TV, film, music, news, and sports fields, as well as some of the most innovative up-and-coming media companies in the world and some of YouTube’s own existing partners. These channels will have something for everyone, whether you’re a mom, a comedy fan, a sports nut, a music lover or a pop-culture maven.

The channels YouTube hopes to provide will appeal to everyone, as they state above. YouTube says they’re doing this to “broaden their range of entertainment”. The new channels will be due out in the coming weeks.