Posts Tagged ‘Youtube’
YouTube has a new video editor that lets you create videos using excerpts from the videos you’ve already uploaded. You can also add a music file from the AudioSwap library, but YouTube mentions that it might display ads if you use some of the audio files.
In 2007, YouTube launched a more advanced Flash-based video editor called YouTube Remixer, but it was discontinued. The service was based on Adobe Premiere Expressand, despite offering features like transitions, captions, adding images, it was slow and buggy.
Here are some videos created using YouTube’s new video editor.
“Today, I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube,” CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley wrote.
“Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we’ve started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we’ve brought more shows and movies to the site.”
What YouTube still does not do, apparently, is earn a profit, despite its immense popularity. Google has admitted the $1.65 billion it paid for YouTube in 2006 was “a premium.” CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted in July as saying he expected YouTube would become profitable at some point.
My take: Lots of time is wasted with silly people tricks and other worthless YouTube content, but it has also become a repository of video content that would otherwise be impossible to find. YouTube also lives up to its promise to provide a place where anyone can upload video and make it available to anyone who wants to watch it.
While YouTube may be the planet’s largest sinkhole for people’s time, it is not without redeeming value. However, if you want entertainment, try Hulu instead.
Watch out, Hollywood — another threat to your profits appears to be setting sail and headed in your direction. A site called The Video Bay aims to make pirated TV shows and Hollywood movies available in hi-def quality for streaming through your Web browser — no hefty downloads required. The site, reportedly in development by the people behind the controversial site The Pirate Bay, is aiming to compete with Hulu and YouTube. As far as I can tell, the new venture isn’t bothering with any cumbersome legal issues such as copyrights and content licences.
The Video Bay is currently in an early pre-testing mode and when visited earlier today failed to play videos and audios seemingly available for streaming. From what I can tell The Video Bay is merely an experimental playground. No final launch date is set.
Given the legal battles The Pirate Bay has been through earlier this year, the future of The Video Bay doesn’t look good. Back in April when the legal battle between Hollywood studios and The Pirate bay was unfolding, I was writing that sites like TPB are like weeds: when you try to kill one, they grow back even stronger. Despite$3.8 million in damages owed to Hollywood, The Video Bay could pose an even stronger alternative to peer-to-peer pirating that requires downloading content to your PC. The Video Bay, where users stream content through a browser, would lower the technical bar significantly for viewing pirated content. Pirates wouldn’t have to mess with video formats, players, and converting ISO images to video files. But the big “if” here is whether The Video Bay can evolve past its current incarnation, which is about as functional as a car with square wheels.
While Hollywood is bracing themselves for The Video Bay, the people behind the site are publicly stating that The Video Bay is “subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly.”
Should Hollywood take this emerging threat seriously? You bet.
Glitch is another in a recent string of service hiccups that have plagued Google-owned sites.
YouTube users today were reporting service outages and delays with the popular video site. On Twitter, dozens of users complained that they couldn’t connect to YouTube, or that they couldn’t watch videos once they were on the site.
The problems appear to have started in the early afternoon, U.S. Pacific Time. In some cases, videos would load but only after a minute or longer delay. Some users saw this Google Server error when they tried to access the site:
On Twitter, the complaints lasted about an hour. User “S Sometimes” tweeted a common gripe: “YouTube is going SO SLOW! I feel like I have dial-up interwebz again. GRRRR.”
Google confirmed the outage, which lasted an hour or so. Google says the outage lasted only ten minutes. By around 1:30 p.m. (U.S. Pacific) YouTube appeared to be back to normal, based on feedback from users in California, Massachusetts, and the United Kingdom.
The YouTube glitch is yet another in a recent string of service hiccups that have plagued Google-owned sites, including outages and slowdowns that hit Google Search, Google News, and Google Apps in mid-May.