All Things Digital

Thirteen hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. And, according to YouTube founder Chad Hurley, that figure will grow exponentially until online video broadcasting becomes as ubiquitous as toilet cats on YouTube.

“Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call,” Hurley wrote in an, ahem, “visionary” post to Google’s blog celebrating the company’s tenth anniversary. “This new video content will be available on any screen–in your your living room, or on your device in your pocket. … In 10 years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.”

And YouTube will have even more video content to fail to monetize!

Well, presumably Google (GOOG) will have figured out a way to turn YouTube into a profitable business by 2018. Hurley best hope so, because YouTube’s rumored $1 million-a-day bandwidth bills are a bit steep, even for Google.

“Earth’s Biggest Bookstore” in the late 1990s, Amazon is today Earth’s Biggest Magazine, Music, Video, Electronics, Apparel and Accessories Store. And soon it may well be earth’s biggest wine store, as well. Now that winery-to-consumer shipping is legal in 45 states, Amazon is getting into the wine business.

Unfazed by a market littered with the shattered remains of previous online wine retailers, Amazon (AMZN) is expected to begin selling by early October. Which is great news for direct-to-consumer wine sellers, who are certain to benefit from Amazon’s support. “Amazon isn’t the first company to sell wine over the Internet, but they have a lot of pull in the online market as the world’s largest online retailer,” Terry Hall of The Napa Valley Vintners Association told the E-Commerce Times. “That’s the exciting part. Consumers will get access to all those wines. It gives consumers a greater choice in what they can purchase, and gives wineries another venue to get their products out to consumers.”

As in search, in Web video Google is the one to beat.

Americans viewed some 11 billion videos during July, and they watched most of them on Google sites, according to the latest metrics from comScore. Of the more than 11.4 billion videos viewed in the month, nearly 44 percent were seen on Google (GOOG) properties. And 98 percent of those were viewed on YouTube, which continues to dominate the online video space. The remaining 55.9 percent was split among nine properties led by Fox Interactive Media and MySpace (NWS), which ranked a very distant second to Google, with just 3.9 percent of videos viewed. None of the remaining eight sites even cracked three percent.

So who’s watching all this video?

Answer: nearly 142 million U.S. Internet users–almost 75 percent of Americans with Internet access. On average they spent 235 minutes watching video in July. And they rarely spent more than 2.9 minutes on any one video, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. “Dramatic Chipmunk” is just five seconds long, and I’m told it’s the greatest video on the Internet.

Looks like Google has a new club with which to smite Viacom and the $1 billion lawsuit it’s brought against YouTube. A federal judge has ruled that online video-hosting site Veoh is not guilty of copyright infringement for material uploaded by users in a case that has marked similarities to Viacom’s against Google and YouTube. IO Group, whose videos had been uploaded without permission to Veoh, claimed that the company was liable for those infringing videos. Specifically, it argued that Veoh, because it transcodes those videos to Flash before hosting them, does not qualify for the safe harbor provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would otherwise have shielded it from liability as long it removed infringing material when alerted by a copyright holder.

The judge disagreed. And his reasons for doing so will undoubtedly come into play in the Viacom case and others as well. “Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users,” the judge wrote. “Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the third-party software. … But Veoh does not itself actively participate or supervise the uploading of files. Nor does it preview or select the files before the upload is completed. Instead, video files are uploaded through an automated process which is initiated entirely at the volition of Veoh’s users.”

Google (GOOG) was understandably quite pleased with the ruling: “It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights,” Zahavah Levine, YouTube’s chief counsel,” said in a statement.

Viacom (VIA) was equally displeased, understandably. “Even if the Veoh decision were to be considered by other courts, that case does nothing to change the fact that YouTube is a business built on infringement that has failed to take reasonable measures to respect the rights of creators and content owners,” the company said in a statement. “Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement–conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA.”

Given the option to pull copyrighted material posted to YouTube without their permission or to monetize it with YouTube’s new Content ID system, some 90 percent of copyright owners are choosing the latter. Since it was first announced, Content ID–which allows rights owners to block an infringing clip, leave it be or grant YouTube permission to sell ads against it–has won some impressive partners, including such media companies as CBS, Universal Music and Electronic Arts. (Obviously, there are some very notable exceptions).

And those who’ve decided to participate have good reason for signing on, as YouTube Product Manager David King points out in a post to the Official Google Blog. “… Our Video ID partners are seeing claimed content more than double their number of views, against which we can run ads,” King writes. “This means that if a partner has, say, 10,000 views of its content, leaving up videos claimed by our system will lead to an average additional 10,000 views of that same content. We call this “partner uplift,” and for some partners we’ve seen uplift as high as 9000 percent.”

At this point, the “partner uplift” to which King refers hasn’t generated much revenue. But it may have created something far more important: a paradigm shift. “We don’t want to condone people taking our intellectual property and using it without our permission,” Curt Marvis, the president of digital media at Lionsgate Entertainment, recently told the New York Times. “But we also don’t like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content. For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it.”

But ultimately, the rights owners are. And now that YouTube has more than 70 million monthly unique viewers and a parent company well-practiced in hardball negotiating tactics, it seems they have little choice but to align themselves with the site. Which is ironic, in a way. Because this is exactly the scenario that Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has been describing since the media behemoth filed its $1 billion copyright infringement suit over video clips on YouTube. Dauman has long maintained that Google’s (GOOG) strategy has been to defy copyright owners long enough to dominate the online video space and bend the content industry to its will. And, indeed, Google seems to have done exactly that.

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban once said, “Only a moron would buy YouTube.” Who’s the moron now?

T-Mobile will soon become the first carrier to offer a phone based on Google’s (GOOG) Android mobile platform. Well, that’s the rumor, anyway. Manufactured by HTC (HTC), the handset is said to feature a touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera and a full five-row keyboard just like the one seen in that YouTube video that’s been making the rounds (see below). It supports 3G connectivity, and, according to those who’ve allegedly seen it, the device is clearly intended to compete against Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, but is “big and bulky” in comparison.

The T-Mobile (DT) handset is expected to price out at $150 and arrive at market in September, as Digital Daily noted in June.

Flash content on the Web may be slow-loading and occasionally nonintuitive, but at least now it’s searchable.

Adobe (ADBE) has conceived of a way for search engines to index Flash content, even pre-existing Flash content, without the need for developer intervention. It’s made content encoded in the Flash file format (SWF), which was previously undiscoverable to search engines, discoverable–and it’s given Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) the tools necessary to discover it.

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, explained: “We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.”

Google will begin doing that today; Yahoo, whenever it manages. A big change for both companies, especially Google, which has long advised Webmasters concerned about their PageRank to use Flash sparingly. “In general, search engines are text based,” the company explains in its “Creating a Google-friendly site” FAQ. “This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.”

Today that changes. And now, developers can use Flash to their hearts’ content, without mucking about with workarounds to ensure the dynamic content it makes possible is properly indexed and ranked.

“We feel that we have recreated the mass media.” That’s how Google’s Kim Malone Scott, in a moment of Zuckerbergian modesty, described the company’s video syndication service that will debut this fall and, shortly thereafter, transform online content distribution.

Working with Seth MacFarlane, creator of the “Family Guy” animated series, Google (GOOG) will in September begin distributing “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” a series of digital shorts
to be embedded on Web sites as free, ad-supported streams.
About two minutes in length, the shorts–which MacFarlane describes as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier”–will be syndicated through Google’s AdSense advertising system, which will target them at MacFarlane-friendly segments of the Web. Some will be accompanied by standard pre- or post-roll ads, some by “brought to you by” tags, and others by original commercials created by MacFarlane.

The shorts are essentially like little Assisted Ad Delivery Devices, intelligently targeting advertisements at those receptive to viewing them. “We believe the revenue could be formidable,” said Karl Austen, a lawyer who worked on the deal. “What is exciting is that this is a way to monetize the Internet immediately. Instead of creating a Web site and hoping Seth’s fans find it, we are going to push the content to where people are already at.”

Telekinesis was a great little iPhone remote–while it lasted. But come July 11, its days may be numbered. Hidden away in the latest developer build of iTunes 7.7 is a new Apple-designed remote control application for iPhone and iPod Touch users that navigates tracks on Macs and Windows PCs from any of Apple’s current handhelds.

“Use iTunes 7.7 to sync music, video and more with iPhone 3G, and download applications from the iTunes Store exclusively designed for iPhone and iPod Touch with software version 2.0 or later,” the iTunes installer Read Me document explains. “Also use the new Remote application for iPhone or iPod Touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your home–a free download from the App Store.”

Sounds like a slick little application. Even slicker if Apple (AAPL) finally decides to add “multi-zone” support to AirTunes so we can stream different music to different speakers throughout our homes.

[Image Credit: InventorSpot]

“What has become of the Sony known for its technology,” Japanese Economy, Trade and Industry Minister and former Sony employee Akira Amari asked in October of 2006. “I hope it will solve its problems soon to quickly recover its brand image reputed for technological prowess.”

If Amari can recall when that was Sony’s image, he has a good memory. Because Sony (SNE) lost its dominant position in consumer electronics to rivals in Japan, South Korea and the U.S. long ago and has yet to regain it.

But it will soon, according to company CEO Howard Stringer, who announced today a new growth strategy designed to re-establish its global supremacy. Stringer’s plan: to peddle software and video-downloading services, not just hardware. And to bind them together over the Internet. “Our mission is simply to be the leading global provider of networked consumer electronics and entertainment,” Stringer said at a news conference.

To that end, Sony will soon announce a movie download service for its PlayStation 3 game console. And this fall it will begin broadcasting films and television shows directly to its Bravia TVs via the Internet. And if all goes according to plan, 90% of Sony’s devices will wirelessly connect to the Net by March 2011. Perhaps even Rolly, Sony’s dancing iPod killer …

Said Stringer, “This is not your father’s Sony.“

Hope not. Because my father’s Sony is Apple (AAPL).