YouTube turns eight years old today, reminding each of us in some odd way how young or old we really are. Remember, the company launched back in 2005, the same year that Michael Jackson was found not guilty of child molestation, and Lance Armstrong was winning his seventh Tours De France, and Arrested Development was still on the air.

A lot has changed since then, but YouTube’s growth remains strong as ever. YouTube announced that its community now uploads more than 100 hours of video to the platform every minute. Minute. That’s the equivalent of four days worth of video every sixty seconds.

But of course, the supply makes sense when you consider the demand. YouTube claims that more than one billion people across the world come to YouTube for content each month, which comes out to nearly one in every two people who have access to the internet.

Here’s a little perspective on growth: Two years ago, YouTube revealed that users were uploading 48 hours of video each minute, and last year it had grown to 72 hours. Eight years in, YouTube is still a growing platform, while Facebook may be slipping amongst younger and fresher social niche applications.

Meanwhile, YouTube opens up new possibilities for startups who want to leverage its massive, active user base and content library. Telecast, in particular, comes to mind, as the betaworks company helps makes all those billions of videos discoverable and curated on mobile devices.

Here’s what YouTube had to say about it, in the official blog post:

And so, on our eighth birthday, we’d like to thank you for making YouTube the special place that it is. For showing us how video can create connections, transcend borders and make a difference. For clicking these links even if you aren’t sure what they’ll be, but you trust us. In short, thanks for making us better in big ways and small ones, too. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Well, that was fast: Just about a week ago, Microsoft released a YouTube app for its Windows Phone 8 platform. And today, YouTube is telling Microsoft remove it, saying that the app violates its terms of service.

YouTube Director of Global Platform Partnerships Francisco Varela sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Todd Brix, GM of Windows Phone Apps, demanding that the his company take down the Microsoft-authored app. The letter claims that the application allows users to download videos from YouTube, while also stripping ads from the videos that it displays. It also shows videos that have been restricted from playback on certain platforms — like when a major media company doesn’t give YouTube the right to display videos on mobile phones or tablets.

All of those actions violate YouTube’s Terms of Service and API Terms of Service, which has led it to ask Microsoft to disable existing downloads. The app is also confusing to users because it uses YouTube branding and trademarks despite being created by a third party, the company claims. Due to all of this, YouTube says it’s giving Microsoft a week, until Wednesday, May 22, to withdraw the application.

YouTube says more than a million channels earn revenue through its partner program, including thousands which make more than six figures a year. The letter argues that Microsoft’s app strips them of the ability to monetize on the Windows Phone 8 app. It also violates their ability to decide where and how their content is displayed on which devices.

For its part, Microsoft made the unprecedented decision to author an app on its own after YouTube refused to devote any of its resources to supporting Windows Phone devices with an approved native app. But YouTube points to its own HTML5 standard web experience as an alternative for users with devices running the Microsoft mobile operating system.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

YouTube’s live offering took a big step forward today, with the announcement that access to the feature will soon be available to a large number of its partners. While YouTube Live was previously only available to a handful of handpicked channels and partners, the feature will now be rolled out to any YouTube channel in good standing with more than 1,000 subscribers.

The opening up of YouTube Live to more creators comes two years after it first announced the feature. But it also is being rolled out after YouTube has had some serious stress testing on the product, including live streaming of the 2012 Olympics and the big Red Bull dude-jumping-from-space thing.

Now open to more users, the ability to stream live video could change the way that YouTube creators communicate with audiences, as they’re finally able to step beyond the current on-demand paradigm of uploading videos to the site. Now, they’ll be able to schedule live events and launch impromptu live streams to be shared with their subscribers.

To determine eligibility, creators should check their Account Features page for an “Enable” button to sign up for Live. YouTube creators who qualify will get live transcoding in the cloud and the ability to stream multiple camera angles.

YouTube, meanwhile, will take care of all the hard work on the back end to get those live streams to as many devices as possible. YouTube uses adaptive bit-rate streaming to power the feature, giving viewers access to the high-quality video available, regardless of whether they’re watching on a PC, mobile phone or tablet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google is ramping up to deliver a streaming music service, which could debut as early as tomorrow at the I/O keynote, sources have told The Verge. The report has since been picked up by other publications, including The New York Times, which confirms that this is indeed the case according to its own unnamed sources, “people briefed on the plans.”

That Google would be working on a streaming, Spotify-style music service should surprise exactly no one. It’s been the elephant in the room among the major purveyors of digital music, including Apple, Amazon and Google ever since Spotify and competitors like Rdio emerged and started picking up steam and adding users.

Neither Spotify nor Rdio have come anywhere close to unseating the big guys in terms of users or music revenues, but that doesn’t mean that Apple and Google haven’t noticed the growing trend towards streaming. Juniper Research said recently that streamed music revenues will grow by more than 40 percent in 2013, rising to $1.7 billion by the end of the year. That’s still peanuts compared to the revenue Apple alone drives from iTunes music sales each year (it paid out $3.4 billion to record labels in 2012, which is after it takes its own cut).

The Google streaming service has been in development for a while now, according to rumors, but negotiations have now progressed to the point where it’s ready to launch, with all three major record labels signed up. There won’t be a free option, says the NYT, but instead there will be a paid subscription available at or around the going rate at competing services, or roughly $10 per month.

If true, this means Google’s negotiations with streaming services have progressed far faster and further than Apple’s, which reportedly hit a snag earlier this week. Both Apple and Google had previously raced to introduce cloud-based digital locker services for Google music, which allowed people to access tracks they’d previously purchased remotely from a variety of devices rather than stream tracks Spotify-style. That seemed like a sure precursor to a true streaming service, but labels were reportedly reluctant to go all-in on that model originally.

The strangest thing about this is that Google is reportedly still doing the YouTube-based streaming music service that had previously made the rounds, in addition to this new one, which will apparently operate alongside it. How these work, especially in terms of what they give users access to and for what cost, should provide an interesting look at how Google is looking at dividing its media business efforts.

We’ll likely find out tomorrow if this Google streaming thing is for real, live at the I/O keynote right here on TechCrunch.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Thank you, Newt Gingrich, for this YouTube gem; I think America needed a good laugh. Last week, the former Republican presidential front-runner and moon colony-enthusiast called upon the wisdom of the Internet to come up with a term for an Internet-connected phone, apparently not knowing that they are already called “smartphones”.

If we had told you that Newt Gingrich’s “multimedia production company” had made a YouTube video titled “We’re Really Puzzled”, it would have been too ridiculous to fabricate. We cannot make this up.

“You probably think it’s a cell phone,” said Gingrich. “But think about it, if it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cell phone…This device, is something new and different. I’ve been calling it a handheld computer.

It gets better: “So having failed for several days to come up with an adequate term for the device we call a “cell phone,” we want to open the discussion up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think we should name it, and we’ll feature the best ones in a future newsletter.”

The YouTube comments are priceless:

–”i reached out to laurent too. Issa is participating in Bloomberg’s march for immigration

–”Smartphone? How about smartphone. Oh hey, look, we already call it that.”

–”I suggest calling it a “horseless telephone.”

–”There’s a book on the shelf behind him titled “Social Marketing”. LOL”

Ironically, Gingrich made a rare bipartisan endorsement of the wonky open government book, Citizenville, from California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom. “Every single conservative in this country should read it,” said Gingrich. Citizenville is arguably the most thorough account of government technology to date, and, most importantly, mentions “smartphones” 16 times. I agree, every conservative should read it.

I will leave readers with a more sober and thoughtful idea to mull over: these people want to run our government?!?!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Power is a lot like real estate. It’s all about location, location, location.” — Frank Underwood, House of Cards

At this very moment, Mark Zuckerberg’s political lobby, FWD.us, is probably taken aback at how reviled it has become, both from the public and its own members. After all, there are countless political technology lobbies, including Facebook’s own Political Action Committee, which routinely offer Republican candidates campaign cash for quid pro quo political favor. So, why, after discovering FWD.us indirectly supporting the controversial Keystone Pipeline initiative, have would-be supporters flooded their Facebook page with scathing comments, and its A-list supporters, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk, ditched the group?

Unlike other lobbies, FWD.us burst on to the scene with a very public op-ed from its celebrity founder, promising to galvanize the latent civic passions of Silicon Vally’s netizens in a noble crusade to advance the knowledge society. While one hand extended towards grassroots supporters, the other reached into its wallet pocket and discretely doled out funds to controversial candidates.

There’s a reason most lobbies don’t bother with grassroots activism: communities don’t get excited about the kinds of soul-crushing moral compromise necessary in DC politics. So, when FWD.us rolled up with millions in hand claiming to be the voice of the technologists, those who felt misrepresented freaked out.

Even more confusing, when confronted, FWD.us chose to do something no other major organization in technology has done: it remained silent. Even the notoriously tight-lipped Apple holds a press conference after public uproar.

Californians haven’t been become jaded to the kinds of secrecy common for Wall Street banks and campaign SuperPACs. The unfazed backdoor dealings caricatured in Netflix’s (addicting) House of Cards series may work for lobbies based in our nation’s capitol, but Californians evidently won’t tolerate it in their backyard.

“I revised the parameters of my promise.” – Frank Underwood

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams tweeted a link to a scathing blog post from former Branch CEO, Josh Miller, explaining,

“In service of noble causes, FWD.us is employing questionable lobbying techniques, misleading supporters, and not being transparent about the underlying values and long-term intentions of the organization. More discouragingly, the leaders of the technology industry (and of FWD.us) have built their careers on bringing meaningful change to the world. They should be doing the same in Washington.”

FWD.us would-be grassroots supporters agree, “Will Fwd.us prostitute climate destruction & other values to get a few engineers hired & get immigration reform?”, wrote one commenter on their Facebook page.

Folks in San Francisco had a sense that FWD.us understood technologists’ natural aversion to Washington culture, “People in tech have often felt a cultural disconnect from the political process, which is a shame considering we are naturally idealistic,” went a press release of FWD.us’s launch last month.

True to their word, unlike any other lobby, they were building tools for grassroots activism, with the audacious aim of bottling the rare Internet flash mob protests that brought down the entertainment industry-funded, Stop Online Piracy Act, and helped smartphone taxi service, Uber, overcome the Washington DC regulators.

But, unlike Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is actually planning a social media campaign to push for Immigration reform, FWD.us’s grassroots promise is nowhere to be found.

“There’s a value in having secrets.” – Frank Underwood

Like many of us at TechCrunch, tech luminaries have been begging FWD.us for a hint of transparency, “It’d be easier to believe that FWD.us will be a positive force if we knew the full breadth of its agenda,” wrote popular blogger and entrepreneur, Anil Dash. Unfortunately, they refuse to talk to anyone. Even at our own Disrupt conference, Director Joe Green didn’t (or couldn’t) be interviewed, instead opting for a generic story about the value of immigration reform.

See, their strategy feels like patronizing, as though us overly-idealistic Californians can’t possible deal with the realities of DC politicking. As Dash concludes, not only can we handle the truth, we’re begging for a dose of reality, if it’s the best way forward,

“It’s already clear that with FWD.us, the tech industry is going to have to reckon with exactly how real the realpolitik is going to get. If we’re finally moving past our innocent, naive and idealistic lack of engagement with the actual dirty dealings of legislation, then let’s try to figure out how to do it without losing our souls.”

“Friends make the worst enemies.” – Frank Underwood

What have been the results?–near unanimous condemnation from every corner of Silicon Valley. Just last week, superstar innovator Elon Musk, made a very public departure, after a list of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, boycotted Facebook over FWD.us-funded ads that praised Republicans for supporting the Keystone pipeline (below)

Ironically, the group can’t post a single update on Facebook without being flooded with angry comments. Just 18 hours ago, after FWD.us posted about a congressional immigration hearing, 50% of the comments are about Keystone, “How can you justify completely selling out on he keystone pipeline in order to further your own immigration agenda? This is politics at its worst.”

In other words, FWD.us poisoned its only mechanism for grassroots activism: social media. Forget Twitter, forget Youtube, forget Tumblr. Every conceivable social platform permits open dialog, which has now become the bane of their existence.

A Way FWD (Pun Intended)

When we first wrote about FWD.us, the reader comments were largely positive. Most readers (including myself) were excited to see what a team of technology titans could accomplish. But, since then, the suspect secrecy is killing their trustworthiness.

Their calculation is clear: a win on immigration reform will absolve their sins. They’re wrong. Since they’ve chosen to mimic other lobbies, their accomplishments will be indistinguishable. So, each of their investors could just as easily fund a tech lobby employing the same tactics without the public heat.

Personally, I like the organization and its mission. We routinely advocate for many of the same issues and carry the voices of their partners. But, evidently, FWD.us underestimated just how little tolerance their supporters have for compromising the value of truthfulness.

I  understand the consequences of writing this piece: when Joe Green eventually does speak, it certainly won’t be with me. But, until then, I’ll leave them with one thought. If FWD.us is so committed to traditional DC politics, perhaps they should also take Frank Underwood’s advice on transparency, “There is no better way to overpower a trickle of doubt than a flood of naked truth.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While it would take you a million lifetimes to watch all the video on YouTube, the company relies on contributions from its amateur and professional partners to keep its content fresh. At the same time, its core business model revolves around providing advertisers with the ability to reach its billion-plus viewers. In turn, video creators rely (or want to rely) on a piece of that ad revenue to continue producing their content. The problem is, of course, that those ads are intrusive, annoying and, at the end of the day, its partners are finding that the revenue from those banners and clips isn’t growing nearly as fast as, say, the number of cat videos on YouTube.

In an effort to provide its partners with an alternative revenue stream, YouTube announced today that it is officially launching a pilot program that enables its video stars to charge subscription fees for access to their channels. Subscriptions will start at $0.99/month, and every channel will be able to offer a 14-day free trial, along with discounted yearly rates.

In its announcement, YouTube cites Sesame Street, which will offer full episodes through its paid channel, and UFC offering fans the ability to watch classic fights as examples. For more, here’s the list of its 53-odd pilot channels.

As of today, users can subscribe to paid channels from their desktops and laptops and watch across devices, but going forward YouTube will look to add the ability to subscribe from any medium/device. On top of that, YouTube will begin a broader roll out of subscriptions in the next few weeks for “qualifying partners,” and from the looks of it, it will be adding a paid channel recommendation feed — just as it does now for free channels.

If you don’t have a YouTube channel, why should you care? Well, YouTube has been telegraphing this for awhile, but it’s really the first (official) sign that YouTube is beginning to tiptoe into the paid video market. Granted, the subscription model isn’t a new idea for YouTube, considering the company just announced in March that it will be launching a music subscription service later this year.

The goal is much the same: Give musicians/artists/creators an opportunity to make some money, while improving the user experience for listeners by potentially removing some of those obnoxious ads that start every video. Of course, in the case of both video and music, it’s much more likely that YouTube is going to stick with both.

Amateur content creators are going to be hesitant about erecting paywalls around their content. Most viewers are going to balk at the idea of buying a subscription to a YouTube channel, and there’s a question of whether or not they’d really be able to convert enough of their viewers to paid subscriptions to make it worth it. In the end, it’s the same issue newspapers and publishers have struggled with for years.

There’s also the fact that every video producer is already offering their content for free, although behind ads. Now you’re going to tell viewers that they have to pay for the same content they’ve been getting for free? Sure, that will work for your superfans, but as is the way with the “freemium” model, if you’re going to charge, the content behind the paywall better be, well, premium. I want to see “Extras,” exclusive content/footage, and so on.

Of course, as Peter Kafka pointed out this week, amateur video producers likely don’t have the resources to produce that exclusive or premium content.

Nonetheless, the company is going to use paid subscriptions in an attempt to attract new partners, new content creator and, we assume, more dollars — although YouTube doesn’t specify whether it will be taking a cut of subscriptions or not. YouTube is clearly aware of the success Hulu, Netflix, Vimeo and other video sites have been having with subscription and on-demand models, and it wants to become more attractive to film and TV networks, studios and producers.

But for now, YouTube can’t make the jump exclusively to subscriptions, because it needs those ad dollars that are keeping the whole thing afloat. It’s a tricky line to walk, no doubt, but YouTube certainly isn’t helping its user experience by setting up the potential to have both a paywall and ads in and around videos for the foreseeable future.

Just speaking for myself personally, I probably most frequently use YouTube for search (and a little discovery), particularly around music. In other words, I’ll have a song or an artist in mind, will do a YouTube search, which inevitably serves a couple or dozens of choices for the same song, artist or even subject. There’s a high likelihood that I have no idea which video I want or is best, which requires some perusing, so having a 10 second ad at the beginning of each video is really disruptive.

Maybe that’s a niche use case, but I suspect not. YouTube ads, while tolerable because we consciously or subconsciously recognize their role in keeping millions of cat videos afloat and online, are frustrating. Sure, Hulu has ads, too, and they aren’t much better. But at least in Hulu’s case, the viewer knows they’re watching a 30-minute or hour-long episode of television online, and regular old offline TV has already conditioned us to expect ads every 5 seconds. Unfortunately. But for a 2-minute clip of questionable quality? Come on.

So keeping ads, while slowly throwing up paywalls is just a bad idea. So the roll out of paid video will end up being incremental and almost just a show of good faith — to keep from ruffling feathers — while the ads just keep proliferating.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s been about nine months since Movieclips rebranded as ZEFR to provide content ID and monetization tools to publishers distributing or claiming their content on YouTube. Today, the startup is announcing its first big customers, signing up big-name music labels like UMG, Sony Music, and Ultra Music, as well as NASCAR.

For those who have forgotten, the ZEFR story goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a scrappy little startup called Movieclips. The startup, based in Los Angeles, was founded on the premise of licensing clips of movies and making them available through YouTube, allowing movie studios to monetize a vast quantity of long-tail content that was locked away in their vaults.

But that’s not all! Movieclips also built tools to help identify and monetize clips that fans had published. And it also determined best practices and created technology that would keep viewers engaged — like a post-roll video wall that displayed multiple related scenes that viewers could click through. It was an awesome use of technology, but Movieclips realized that it could use those same tools to help content providers in other segments — like music and sports — to cash in on the content they were making.

And so ZEFR was born. ZEFR was the rebranding of Movieclips, as the startup raised more money and started offering up content ID and monetization tools to others.

Now, after refining its technology and pitching to content owners across a wide range of verticals, it’s managed to get a number of major third-party content providers on board. The pitch is that ZEFR can not only find videos posted by users and help content owners monetize them, but it can also help them get the most out of their own channels as well.

For customers like NASCAR, that means using some of ZEFR’s homegrown channel management tools. For its Movieclips business, the startup used those tools to ensure best practices and improve search engine results, but stuff like the post-roll wall of videos can also keep viewers engaged with its customers’ content as well. For the music labels, partnering with ZEFR gives them the ability to let super-fans create and upload videos with their favorite artists, while also ensuring that the label (and the artist) get advertising revenue off those claimed videos.

Since being founded in 2009, ZEFR has raised nearly $30 million, which includes an $18.5 million round led by U.S. Venture Partners. Other investors include MK Capital, Shasta Ventures, SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, Richmond Park Partners, and Machinima CEO Allen DeBevoise.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Gangnam Style” was the first video to hit 1 billion views on YouTube, a milestone it reached last December. Though arguably less catchy, Psy’s followup video “Gentleman,” a unique blend of pounding beats and fart jokes rumored to be an elaborate commercial for Candy Crush Saga, is now also breaking records on YouTube. The video-sharing site announced that “Gentleman” has set the record for the most views ever in a single day with over 38 million hits on April 14 alone, making it one of the biggest online music video launches ever. To put the figures in perspective, “Gentleman” was seen 100 million times in less than 4 days worldwide, a milestone that took “Gangnam Style” nearly two months to achieve.

“Gentleman” also breaks the previous single-day record set by the now infamous KONY 2012 video in March 2012. The documentary, produced by Invisible Children, hit 31 million views on March 7, 2012.

According to YouTube, “Gentleman” became April’s top rising search on the site almost immediately after it launched, with global results peaking on April 14. It also debuted at number one on YouTube’s music chart, bumping “Gangnam Style” down to second place.

“Gangnam Style” made its YouTube debut on July 15 and knocked Justin Bieber’s “Baby” off of top place in November–a place “Baby” had held since its debut in February 2010. If “Gentleman” keeps going at its current pace, it represents another windfall for Psy. Google’s chief business officer Nikesh Arora revealed on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call that “Gangnam Style” had generated $8 million in revenue on YouTube alone, or an average of 0.65 cents every time someone plays the video. Since the creator of a YouTube video keeps about half of the money, that means Psy and his record company probably earned about $4 million from “Gangnam Style” alone.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There isn’t much to miss about old-school VHS tapes. They are fuzzy, show static, have bad audio, and are generally difficult to navigate around — remember having to hold down the button on the VCR to rewind your favorite movies?

Perhaps the only thing about VHS tapes worth reminiscing over was the feeling of opening that giant plastic VHS cover of my favorite Disney films.

Whether you miss VHS or say prayers of thanks that they’ve become obsolete, YouTube has given us a way to relive the fuzz all over again in celebration of the 57th anniversary of the first commercial video cassette recorder, the Ampex VRX-1000.

Here’s what YouTube said about it on Google+:

Not too long ago, the video tape was the media of choice for living rooms around the world. In celebration of the 57th birthday of the first commercial video cassette recorder, check out a fun VHS mode for the YouTube player to relive the magic feel of vintage video tapes.

“Tape mode” isn’t available across the whole of YouTube, but rather only on select videos. In fact, it actually took a little while to find one. It also helps to be in Chrome.

So if you happen to see a little VHS button on the bottom bar of YouTube today, go ahead and give it a try. Sure, the 1080p video you’re watching will instantly turn to shit. But when will you get the chance to watch fuzzy, static-plagued video again?

Maybe never.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch