According to Steven Musil of CNet, YouTube may be getting into the paid subscription game:
YouTube reportedly could launch its paid subscription service for some of its specialist video channels as early as this week.
The a la carte service, which could involve as many as 50 video channels, would allow single channel subscriptions for as little as $1.99 a month, people familiar with the plan tell The Financial Times. YouTube confirmed to CNET in February that it was developing such a service but did not indicate when it would be ready for subscribers.
A paid content platform could give the Google-owned video site another revenue stream while allowing channel operators to finance different content production, such as TV shows and movies, a source said.
6 billion — yes, billion — which is the number of hours of video YouTube users watch each and every month. From the YouTube blog:
We recently announced that YouTube hit an incredible milestone of 1 billion unique monthly visitors, connecting 15 percent of the planet to the videos they love. And those global fan communities are watching more than 6 billion hours of video each month on YouTube; almost an hour a month for every person on Earth and 50 percent more this year than last.
Speaking of milestones, online video service YouTube has hit a rather big number. As USA Todayreports:
YouTube says more than 1 billion people are now visiting its online video site each month to watch everything from zany clips of cute kittens to sobering scenes of social unrest around the world.
YouTube has always been popular, but a billion people a month is quite the achievement. It also highlights the major shift in viewing habits, with more and more people turning to online video — especially on mobile devices — for entertainment and information. Keeping up with this consumer migration will require a smart path forward from both providers and the government. As our own Jamal Simmons wrote yesterday:
As media companies look for new ways to deliver content directly to mobile devices, wireless companies and the FCC should find new ways to provide the broadband capacity for consumers to enjoy these choices. It is critical that we have a regulatory environment that encourages innovation like freeing up spectrum and exploring the transition to all-IP networks which holds great promise for satisfying consumer broadband demand.
At Talking Points Memo, Carl Franzen reports on a new effort from YouTube to protect protesters from hardline governments:
Many video subjects have become recognizable viral video sensations thanks to YouTube. But YouTube itself wants to allow some video subjets the ability to remain anonymous, too, if they choose: On Wednesday, the Google-owned online video hub launched a new “face blurring” video editing tool specifically for this purpose.
The tool allows video creators to upload their footage as before, but now they have the option, with the click of a button, to have YouTube’s software automatically detect and blur all of the human faces in their video files.
The tool is currently being refined, but given how much YouTube — and all social media — has been used in protests around the world, it could turn out to be a very big thing.
Jake Coyle of the Associated Press (via The Huffington Post) highlights a new report from Pew that finds streaming service YouTube is graduating from goofy videos to a source for news:
[Pew’s report] found that while viewership for TV news still easily outpaces those consuming news on YouTube, the video-sharing site is a growing digital environment where professional journalism mingles with citizen content.
“There’s a new form of video journalism on this platform,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “It’s a form in which the relationship between news organizations and citizens is more dynamic and more multiverse than we’ve seen in most other platforms before.”
Today, YouTube streams billions of hours of content each year. But it was just seven years ago — April 23, 2005, at 8:27 pm, to be exact — that the first video was posted. As you can see, it wasn’t very exciting.
Via Read Write Web (and everywhere else, really), comes the story of the 68-year-old bus monitor bullied by a pack of middle schoolers, the YouTube video that became a viral sensation, and the close to $200,000 kind souls on the Internet have raised to send the bullied woman on the vacation of a lifetime.
72, as in the total hours of video the world is uploading to YouTube every second. As GigaOm’s Janko Roettgers points out, that’s a staggering 50% increase over just last year.
This month six years ago, a little video website called YouTube was launched. To mark the occasion, the company has released some rather startling numbers. From the official YouTube blog:
Today, more than 48 hours (two days worth) of video are uploaded to the site every minute, a 37% increase over the last six months and 100% over last year.
48 hours worth of content uploaded every minute of every day. Wow. Also amazing:
The other great birthday present? Your views. We’re amazed that over this last weekend, you drove YouTube past the 3 billion views a day mark, a 50% increase over last year. That’s the equivalent of nearly half the world’s population watching a YouTube video each day, or every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos a day.
YouTube may have launched a number of careers, but that doesn’t mean uploading a video of your performance will turn into a sure thing. As Ryan Lawler of GigaOm reports, new numbers from YouTube show that a whopping 70% of videos on the site barely get noticed:
YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010, according to its press stats page. If we believe that user behavior hasn’t changed dramatically in the past four months, that means that about 30 percent of its video assets contributed about 693 billion views last year, while the remaining 7 billion of its plays came from 70 percent of its video assets.
How big is online video getting? Well, one of the biggest players in the game, YouTube, is expected to hit $1.3 billion in revenue this year, according to numbers from Citi (via GigaOm).
With the civic unrest having spread from Egypt to Libya, Libyan authorities have cracked down on access to the Internet. But as GigaOm’s Janko Roettgers reports, captured video of violence against Libyan protesters is still making it to the rest of the world:
Many videos documenting the violence in Libya nonetheless find their way to YouTube. A Google spokesperson said on Tuesday that more than 9500 videos tagged “Libya” have been uploaded to the video site in the week since the beginning of the uprising.
That’s how many hours of video content is now uploaded to YouTube every minute — yes, every minute — according to official numbers released yesterday.
Meanwhile, new data from industry analyst comScore shows that Internet users in the U.S. watched an average of 15.1 hours of online video last month. That’s roughly 30 minutes of online watching each day.
With Google TV set to launch later this fall, the search giant is reportedly trying to sign up some major content for a YouTube “on demand” TV and movie rental service.
This isn’t the first time Google has tried to take on the likes of iTunes and Amazon with YouTube, but as Light Reading reports, this time they’re expected to throw some major search engine weight behind it.
New numbers released put together by comScore show that online video continues grow by leaps and bounds, with 34 billion videos watched by people in the U.S. in the month of May alone. Leading the charge was YouTube, with Hulu coming in second at 1.2 billion streams.
Speaking of Hulu, the popular site owned by major networks like NBC and FOX, will reportedly begin testing a subscription service beginning this month. From the Wall Street Journal:
The service would initially be a “preview,” available only to invited users, said the people briefed on the matter. Those users would pay a monthly fee of around $10 for access to additional content on top of Hulu’s free offerings, and also get the ability to watch Hulu on Apple Inc.‘s iPad and possibly other devices, said one of these people.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg is reporting that one of those possible “other devices” could be Sony’s Playstation 3 console. Microsoft’s rival XBox 360 console has also been rumored.
YouTube isn’t just for videos of cats playing keyboards and stupid stunts gone awry. It also gives you the chance to witness great moments in humanity that you would otherwise miss — like this tear-inducing video of an eight month boy having his cochlear implant turned on for the first time while his mother holds him. Enjoy.
To crack down on what they view as sacrilegious content, the government of Pakistan has blocked access to both YouTube and Facebook. From the Huffington Post:
The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority did not point to specific material on YouTube that prompted it to block the site, only citing “growing sacrilegious contents.” The government acted against both Facebook and YouTube after it failed to persuade the websites to remove the “derogatory material,” the regulatory body said in a statement.
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