Articles about Video

The battle for online streaming supremacy is heating up, after Amazon announced that Prime subscribers can now download videos for offline viewing.

The move stands in stark contrast to the position taken by rival content provider Netflix, which has consistently stated that offline content is not on its agenda.

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Under a new program designed to protect children from seeing adult content, YouTube and VEVO have announced new age ratings for music videos in the UK.

It is the first initiative of its kind, which will block videos that show inappropriate content. Musicians like Miley Cyrus, Rihanna and Robin Thicke have irked parents with the lack of clothing and rather provocative music videos released on the web.

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Yahoo is making a first step in the messaging world, with the launch of LiveText for iOS and Android. The app will be available in North America and Europe, following a brief test in Hong Kong and Taiwan last month.

The messaging app is similar to Snapchat, with an image or video and superimposed text. When video streaming is unavailable, LiveText will offer a text only option. Interestingly, the video will be silent, meaning no audio playback between the two recipients.

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Six major US film studios, and Sky UK have been charged by the EU on the basis of unfair restriction of content across the European Union.

Competition chief Margrethe Vestager said that the European consumers want to watch the pay-TV channels of their choice regardless of their location in the EU. But according to their investigation, the film studios cannot restrict the content because of the licensing agreements. They believe that these studios might be in breach of the EU competition rules.

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Twitch.TV is the most popular platform for professional and casual gamers to livestream, but it has always run slower than the competition. This is partly due to Twitch’s server support, but also due to the Flash video player it built being a clunky mess for users on slow connections.

This has been worked on over the years, but retaining Flash support is starting to become a burden for Twitch.TV, so much so the company has announced HTML5 and JavaScript support will be coming in the next few months.

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Netflix has had another excellent quarter, announcing 3.3 million new subscribers in the past three months. The company’s revenue continues to grow with £1.05 billion this quarter, but investment in originals and advertising is taking a bite out of the profit, with only £16 million reported this quarter.

Even with the profit issue, Netflix’s stock went soaring once again. The video streaming service has managed an 100 percent rise in stock price in six months, and announced in the financial report a seven-to-one split in revenue, bringing the price back down to $100 (£64).

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Social giant Facebook has been in talks with music labels for the past few months, although nobody is quite sure what the company is planning.

Reports say Facebook has met with Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, three of the big music licensing labels. Since this doesn’t seem to involve indie labels, we can assume it isn’t a music streaming deal, but instead a licensing and content protection deal.

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A wise man once said our phones started getting bigger when we realized we could watch porn on them. If you had the slightest doubt in your mind about these wise words, then the latest research from Juniper should put it to rest.

According to that research, each "each smartphone user (who access adult content) is expected to watch an average of 348 videos this year". That means, more than 136 billion porn videos will be watched this year alone. But don’t worry, it will grow. By 2020, estimates say that number will hit 193 billion, which is a growth of almost 55 percent.

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Google has been steadily updating YouTube to run high frame-rate (HFR) video, and the silky smooth 60 frames per second is coming to YouTube's iOS and Android mobile apps this month.

HFR was originally added to YouTube in October last year, allowing video game channels to stream videos at 720p 60fps or 1080p 60fps. The difference in the frame rate was quite astounding, compared to frame rate difference in a video game.

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Netflix wants to reach 70 million subscribers by the end of 2015, adding an additional 13 million in 12 months. The ambitious goal follows several launches in Western Europe and South America, alongside Netflix’s saturation in the United States.

In January, Netflix reported 57 million subscribers in an investor’s call. Most of the subscribers, a large 43 million, are based in the US. The second largest region is the United Kingdom, where Netflix has five million subscribers.

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The season finale of Game of Thrones managed to break piracy records once again, despite HBO clamping down on pirates in Canada and the UK.

An estimated 1.5 million downloads of the tenth episode happened during the first eight hours, with a further five million since. It is expected to rise to over 10 million by the end of the week, as latecomers catch up.

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Videos that automatically play when they appear on screen are making their way to Twitter. Taking the lead from Facebook, the microblogging service is introducing the feature to reduce the need to click in order to watch a video.

It's something that will be loved and loathed in just about equal measure -- and if you fall into the latter camp, you'll be pleased to hear that it's possible to revert to the old click-to-play method. Twitter thinks that autoplay will help to ensure that you miss fewer videos about breaking news, but it remains to be seen just how popular it proves.

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Video streaming service Netflix has announced another price increase to its monthly subscription, now costing £7.49 per month to watch House of Cards, Better Call Saul and other favorites in the UK.

The price increase is the second in the company’s history. It bumped the price up from the original £5.99 to £6.99 two years ago, following an expansion in Netflix Originals.

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You might assume that Netflix, the world’s most popular video streaming service, would put out a fierce condemnation of online piracy, but CEO Reed Hastings is taking a much more accepting stance.

Speaking ahead of his company’s launch in Spain in October, Hastings indicated that piracy creates a market receptive to watching content online -- a necessity for his businesses to succeed.

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Facebook has announced that its new addition to Messenger, namely video calling, has now rolled out across the globe.

The video calling capability was bolted on to Messenger on both iOS and Android at the end of last month, but obviously rolling it out to every market worldwide takes some time.

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