Search Results for: youtube

Apple's divorce from Google is nearly complete: say goodbye to the native YouTube app. The change came within iOS 6 Beta 4 which released to testers on Monday. The reasons for the move are unclear: little was said other than the license to carry YouTube in iOS had expired.

Monday's news follows Apple's decision to dump Google Maps in favor of its own in-house solution. As competition heated up in the smartphone sector and Google's Android gained more market share, the two companies have begun to distance themselves from one another.

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If you are living in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Bhutan, Cambodia, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Iran, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, or Vietnam and want to watch the London Olympics today I’m told your only choice is YouTube.  Ten events are available at any time through the International Olympic Committee (IOC) YouTube channel.

Of course 60 live channels are available in the USA through youtube.com/nbcolympics, but I think the international story is more compelling by far because it brings live competition to places where it was never available before.

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YouTube is a great source of music videos and with the large number of privately filmed videos it is a great resource for tracking down live performances by your favorite band or artist. When you are at your computer, there is nothing to stop you from visiting YouTube whenever you want so you can listen to your favorite songs whenever you want, but RipTunes is a free utility that enables you to convert videos into MP3 files that you can add to your offline music library. It's legit software, too, unlike scammers' video-to-mp3 converter security researcher Cameron Camp wrote about earlier today.

In many regards this is not out of the ordinary, but the way things have been implemented here make RipTunes more than worthy of mentioning. The app itself can be used to search YouTube without the need to visit the site itself, and as you search for artists and bands, you can start a musically tour of discovery as related or similar artists are suggested to you.

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Want to access the music tracks of YouTube.com videos on your iPod but don’t want to pay? You’re not alone. Recently, a crop of websites have popped up offering to convert the audio from videos to .mp3 files that you can then download at no charge. Sounds great, right? The catch: scammers are trying to capture the popular click traffic and redirect users to scam websites, where you might get more than you bargained for, in the form of free malware and other unpleasantness as a bonus.

Recently, we hosted a “cyber boot camp”, teaching high school students to attack and defend networks. One of our presenters, John Moffat, who often delivers security awareness seminars to teenagers and stresses the dangers of the “free” Internet, referenced this scam in his presentation. While Mr. Moffat doesn’t claim to be a malware expert, he knows a scam when he sees one, and does his best to help others avoid falling prey.

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In a few weeks I’ll launch a YouTube channel where you’ll be able to see lots of shows readers have asked about, including Startup America and even that lost second season of NerdTV. YouTube, as the largest video streaming service anywhere, is the absolute best place for me. But YouTube isn’t the future of TV.

I know this because TV is a business and this channel I’m launching is a business and I’ve spent the last several weeks talking to investors and running the numbers every which way. I’ve spent many hours with my friend Bob Peck looking at the economics of YouTube and my unequivocal conclusion is that while YouTube is great, it isn’t TV.

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The major software update to Google TV, which has been expected for several months, has finally been deemed ready for user consumption, and will be rolling out to Sony's Google TV devices next week, and Logitech's Google TV-powered Revue set top box "soon thereafter." The update brings Android apps to Google TV, fixes the YouTube interface, overhauls the general flow of the user interface.

This update corrects some of the aspects of Google TV that made it feel like a false start. The core idea behind Google TV was both tempting and impressive; The power of unified Google search for live TV content and streaming, web-based content remains an impressive feature. However, the execution of this idea didn't make consumers stand up and applaud.

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Today, around the globe, people are, sadly, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In posting my remembrance, I got to thinking how much has changed technologically and how much circumstances could have been different that day if the resources we take for granted now were available then.

Advanced communications technology of the day was the cell phone, which people trapped in the Twin Towers used to reach family and friends. The cell phone helped warn passengers of United Airlines 93 about the other hijackings. The heroes of that flight sacrificed their lives to save many others. That couldn't have been possible without the cell phone. But what if the people living in 2001 could have used social services widely available today to warn others or offer dramatic, first-hand accounts, photos and videos of events as they unfolded. The historical record -- and tribute to the lives lost that tragic day -- would be much different.

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"Modern" is not a word I would have ever used to describe how YouTube looks. The user interface remains dated, even after several refinements. But that may change, and quite dramatically. Google is in process of changing YouTube's look and feel in startling and refreshing ways. How this new experience comes to market depends in part on how users respond to it.

Today, as part of the ongoing TestTube project, Google opened "Cosmic Panda", which is described as "a new experimental experience for videos, playlists and channels". Hot damn, this thing is smokin'! My initial reaction is simply "Wow!"

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Move over Billboard. "The times they are a-changin'." Today Google launched a music chart for videos -- the YouTube 100 -- that empowers Jack and Jane Wannabe to stand tall with the likes of Lady Gaga or, gasp, Justin Bieber. The chart tracks "song popularity in user-generated and professional music videos," Chris LaRosa, Google Music product manager, explains in a blog post.

YouTube is still mostly about user-generated content, and opening information -- and possibilities -- is fundamentally in keeping with Google corporate philosophy. So it's very appropriate that Google's music chart should include user-generated videos alongside those from popular, commercial musicians.

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Preventing what would have been a shutdown of the service, Yahoo said Wednesday that it had sold popular social bookmarking site Delicious to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The two entrepreneurs are returning to tech under their new venture called AVOS, based out of San Mateo, Calif.

Yahoo acquired Delicious in 2005, looking to integrate the service's social aspects into its own web offerings. However, amid increasing competition the company overall began to struggle, and last December Yahoo undertook a major restructuring, meaning the shuttering of several acquired brands.

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In an effort to stay ahead of current trends in digital content, YouTube is said to be preparing an online movie service

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Google said Tuesday that it had begun to transcode all new videos on YouTube to the WebM codec, an open source effort supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and others. The technology supports high-quality video using the HTML5 video tag, and is available for use under a royalty-free license.

The site has been at work transcoding YouTube videos in the catalog since Google first open-sourced the VP8 codec -- the basis for WebM -- in May of last year. Currently about 30 percent of all videos that make up about 99 percent of the views on YouTube have been transcoded, Google says.

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YouTube is set to overhaul its service in an effort to prepare itself for the rise of connected devices, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Similar content would be grouped into "channels," including fee-based ones that would feature up to 10 hours of original content a week.

Sources told the paper that this would be a significant investment, to the tune of at least $100 million. However with content increasingly being viewed off-website, the move seems aimed to protect YouTube's strong position in the streaming media sector. It could also offer the site a new revenue stream outside of the sale of advertising.

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I don't know how I missed this one: Google has taken iframe embedding out of beta and quietly made it the default choice. I noticed yesterday, when looking to embed a video here at Betanews. The default had been Adobe Flash with iframe embedding optional and labeled beta; where iframe was placed in the embed options there now is "use old embed code," meaning Flash. I've been embedding with the iframe code for months so Betanews readers using iPads or smartphones could watch embedded YouTube videos. Based on forum chatter, Google made the change as recently as four days ago.

Technically, the player isn't Flash-free. It's more like Flash is no longer required. Videos can stream in Flash or HTML5 video depending on the player detected. For reasons that don't make much sense from a consumer experience perspective, YouTube videos using the new embed code won't play on Safari without Flash installed (presumably other browsers, but I haven't yet tested). YouTube detects the browser and presents notice that Flash is necessary to play the video. It's not. YouTube is blocking HTML5 streamed content. Changing the browser's identification to "Mobile Safari -- iPad" solves the problem. But why is that necessary?

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When Google officially integrates its own Web services into Android and Chrome, the products usually work well and are always worth at least a look by users of those platforms. Yesterday, Google announced new official Chrome extensions for Calendar, Google Docs, and YouTube which offer new, but somewhat limited, first-party features to Chrome.

The Google Calendar extension lets users click add events to their Google Calendars from their Chrome toolbar. This extension works in a couple of ways: users can add events from scratch, or they can import event information presented in the hCalendar microformat or some of its derivitaves like hResume. So if an event on Facebook or Evite is compatible with the extension, a green plus sign will appear that users can click and automatically import the event data in their calendar.

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