Around 158 million U.S. Internet users watched more than 21 billion videos last month, both of which are all-time highs for the online video world. Google/YouTube sites got 120,852 unique viewers, with an average of 74.1 videos per viewer, according to ComScore latest numbers.

Talking about numbers, video analytics firm Visible Measures just updated its “100 Million Views Club”, which tracks the top virals of all time.


YouTube Will Better Monetize Viral Videos

YouTube has another idea to better monetize viral videos. Videos that are detected as accumulating a large number of views quickly will be added, with their creator’s permission, to a limited form of the YouTube partner revenue sharing program.

This program was only available to creators with an established body of popular content. This has helped the company avoid lawsuits and sign on media partners.


Animoto.com Adds Video Feature

Animoto.com online service has launched a new feature that allows to include videos in its animated slideshows. Animoto’s competitors is basically turning photos into videos.

That is possible because it does all its processing up in the cloud, rather than within Flash (like Slide does).

Animoto is limiting clips to 10 seconds for paid users and 5 seconds for free users.


Channels.com “Your Web Video DVR”

Channels.com is trying to position itself as “your web video DVR”, and for that, it has launched an app that lets users subscribe video via RSS feeds.

This service organizes feeds that exist in the cloud; it does not record anything.

Channels.com reports that it includes 160+ shows.

For now, this service is focused on building traffic, optimizing the user experience and seeing how the video landscape unfolds. A key part of building its distribution and use is by encouraging video providers to place a Channels.com “chicklet” on their site, so video can be instantly added to user’s playlist.


Nokia Plan Linux-based Phone

Nokia announced this week it will sell in October its first high-end smart phone –the N900, priced at $700- based on open source Linux based software. “I’m sure this will help us in the market situation with the iPhone,” said a Nokia’s VP.

Doing so, Nokia is moving away from Symbian, described by some analysts as “aged”. Nokia is seeking a more “PC-like experience,” allowing users to run dozens of application windows at the same time.


A Five Million Of Infected “Zombie” Army Of Computers Still Alive

A malicious program discovered in November called Conficker is exposing a serious weakness in the world’s Internet infrastructure.

This program used flaws in Windows to co-opt machines and link them and link them into a virtual computer than can be commanded remotely. It creates a ‘zombie’ army, that can be used to generate vast amounts of spam, steal information and passwords, deliver fake anti-virus warnings to persuade users to pay their removal by credit card, or even to monitor or disable an enemy country computers.

Despite anti-virus software, now more than five million so-called zombies –government, business and home computers in more than 200 countries- is under its control.

Network of infected computers, or botnets, have been used to temporarily cripple Tweeter and Facebook.

Conficker exact origin and performance is unknown so far. New, more intricate versions of the program have been distributed.

Anti-virus companies and government agencies are working together trying to find ways to kill Conficker.

Video watching is now more popular than social networking on the Internet, according to a Pew survey. While 62 percent of American Internet users watch online video, some 46 percent of those surveyed said they were active on social networking sites.

Certainly people spend bulk of time on Facebook, but more people watch YouTube video and other video sites.


RealPlayer SP Enables Sharing and Portability of Downloaded Web Videos

Real Networks has launched a polished version of its new player, RealPlayer SP (The “SP” stands for “social” and “portable”). This version enables sharing and portability of downloaded web videos.

Since the launching, on June 24th, it’s been used to download more than 22 million videos


HSN Launches A “Multichannel Experience” New iPhone App

Home Shopping Network (HSN) announced this month an app for the iPhone that streams live video. The HSN Shop App lets users browse and shop the network’s catalog of more than 35,000 items. This shop has also an interactive “Shake2Shop” to pull up a random product by shaking the iPhone.

With this app, users have the ability to view HSN live programming, throughout the U.S.

“The launch creates the e-commerce industry’s first live-video ‘3-screen experience’, enabling consumers to browse and the network’s 35,000-plus array of products from home or on the go,” says HSN.

This app supports Apple’s HTTP adaptive streaming, which reduces buffering and other interruptions to create a great viewing experience and diminish latency.

Another interesting iPhone 3GS app is Qik. Although, it can’t stream live video (like Ustream), you can record first, then automatically upload it to the Qik site. This app only works over Wi-Fi for now.


Chinese Video Site Allows Uploaders To Charge For Access To Content

Chinese video site 56.com launched an initiative that allows people uploading video to charge viewers for access to content. 56.com takes a 10 percent cut of sales, with the remaining 90 percent going to the users.

Even after a user pays for a video, it can be viewed for only 15 days, after which they must pay again for another 15 days’ worth of viewing.

Google has bought On2 Technologies, owner of VP6 video code, in a stock-for-stock transaction worth $106.5 million. Analysts think that Google is preparing to make a video infrastructure play.

In the last two years, the online video industry has largely chosen H.264 as VP6 successor. However, VP6 is already installed on computers everywhere, and now with Google managing its licensing –everybody, including Adobe, is paying licensing fees to On2-, the format could come back into power, maybe at no cost.

Another contender, the open-source video compression format of choice, OGG Theora, which is being pushed by Mozilla, has not won industry confidence.

It means that Google, with its Chrome browser, and soon OS, can play a big role. Google is one of the leaders of the new HTML 5 standard, which handles video natively and could eliminate the need for Flash and Silverlight-type plug-ins.

In terms of browser landscape, Microsoft has Internet Explorer and its video technology in Silverlight. Apple has Safari and QuickTime. Google, which already runs the biggest video site on the web in YouTube, has a relationship with Mozilla, and people speculated that could build Theora support into its Chrome browser.

With On2 acquisition, Google shows up who is theal driver on the Internet.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if Google open-sources On2 itself. By pushing ON2’s code Google can shape the future of web video.


YouTube for Kids

ZuiTube.com is a new kid-friendly video destination site, whose 60,000 clips have been approved for child viewing by a network of 200 parents and teachers.
ZuiTube monitors, search and play activity through its service to determine what kids are interested in, and they match them with what is appropriate.

The videos are pulled from YouTube using its API. It means that ZuiTube is dependent on YouTube. If a video gets taken from there, Kidzui no longer has access to it.


YouTube’s ‘Promoted Videos’ Will Appear on Partner Watch Pages

YouTube announces that they will include videos from paying advertisers, and will share revenue from the ads with the video page’s content owner, as Google does with AdSense.

Those promoted videos will only be shown on pages where the site has a revenue sharing partnership with the content producer. YouTube says views of partner videos have tripled in the last year, and it is no monetizing hundreds of millions of video views per week.

Previously, Promoted Videos only appeared next to search results and occasionally on the YouTube homepage.

Twitter has unveiled, along with its new redesigned home page, Twitter 101, a series of Web pages and a downloadable slide show that explain how businesses can use it. There are also some case studies like JetBlue and Dell, among many others.

Twitter 101 says that its service is for building relationships and listening to and responding and float ideas in real time.

Twitter will likely introduce a bundle of paid services later this year for businesses. These tools will alow companies to verify their accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

For many supersmall businesses with no ad budget the free microblogging service has become their sole means of marketing. It is easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. In addition, some of them use TweetDeck, a web application that helps people to manage their Twitter messages.


Delve Networks Partners with Akamai… Live Many Other Competitor

Video management platform Delve Networks announced this week a non-exclusive partnership with Akamai in which the two companies will combine forces to provide turn-key-high-quality video services to video publishers. Problem is the many other companies have similar agreements with Akamai CDN leading company.

Among them there are KickApps, VMIX, Multicast, Onstream Media, Vbrick and KIT Digital. Akamai explains: “We have value-added relationships with a lot of these companies”.

Funniest thing is that Akamai offers also its own Stream OS video platform from its Nine Systems acquisition.


Justin.tv Aims For Maximum Market Adoption of its Live Platform

Justin.tv has released a free API for live video. Developers can customize Justin.tv’s video player and build applications on top of its platform.

Stickam and Ustream are offering their API as a paid white-label service. Another competitor, Livestream is about to release it.

Apps already built on the Justin.tv platform include Camtweet.com, which is an easy integration of live video and Twitter.

Kaltura.com announced this week a self-hosted version of its open-source online video platform., called Kaltura Community Edition. “The new product, available for free download at Kaltura.org, allows any site owner or web developer to integrate highly customizable video and interactive rich-media funcionalities, including video management, publishing, uploading, importing, syndicating, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising”. This “Community Edition” is a free version under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.

Analyst say that it is surprising that the competitive white-label video companities let Kaltura claim this open-source angle.

According to Kaltura, “online video is one of the hottest and fastest-growing markets. Rich media is being adopted and integrated into a growing number of websites, web-platforms, and web-services across all industries, including media and entertainment, enterprise, education, healthcare, government, defense and more. Until now publishers and developers who wanted to integrate advanced rich media capabilities had only two options – to develop rich-media functionalities in-house from scratch, or to subscribe to hosted services provided by one of the many proprietary SaaS video vendors. While in-house development is very time-consuming and not cost-effective, the latter 'outsourced' alternative has proven to be less secure, too pricy, and insufficiently flexible and extendible.

Today's release of Kaltura's Community Edition breaks this build-vs.-buy conundrum by allowing publishers and enterprises for the first time to build upon and extend on an existing robust platform to fully customize, integrate, and deploy their own self-hosted solution, on their own servers, behind their own firewalls – and completely for free. Publishers who do so also have the option to subscribe to Kaltura's paid services, which include support and maintenance services, professional development services, and the most cost-effective ancillary digital services in the market, including video streaming, hosting, delivery, syndication, advertising, and search-engine-optimization”.

Community Edition is multi-platform and runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and “soon on leading cloud computing platforms” (Amazon S3?). The software contains many APIs and reference applications in PHP, Ruby, .Net, and Java, as well as off-the-shelf pre-integrated extensions to leading web platforms, such as WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, MindTouch, Moodle, ELGG and others.

Kaltura's business model is based on providing commercial services on top of the free platform such as support and maintenance packages, streaming (a SaaS solution), professional development services, hosting, back up and other digital services like delivery, syndication, advertising, and search-engine-optimization.


24 Video Companies Get Venture Funding in 2009

In the first half of 2008 there have been 24 venture funding for U.S.-based video-related companies., $135 M in total, compared to $348 M in the same period of 2008. This is according Dow Jones VentureSource.

Some funding are Invodo (white-label video), TubeMogul (video distribution and analytics), FreeWheel Media (rights management), OVGuide.com (video aggregation and search) and The Filter (recommendation engine).

Interactive video platforms are getting momentum among advertisers. The ability to immediately sell products seen in video content goes beyond straight-up advertisements and product placements.

To that end, startup Clikthrough has just raised $1 million for its interactive clickable video efforts. This interactive video platform allows content owner to associate video with specific products and places and then push that content out.

Now they have 39 music videos up on its site to showcase. For example it highlights the shirt Kelly Clarkson wears, or the hotel she’s in, so the viewer can learn more about it or purchase it.


“YouTube Will Be Very Profitable”

Google CFO said YouTube will be “very profitable” in the “not too distant future”. The site’s monetized views have “more than tripled in the past year”. “We’re now monetizing billions of views of partner videos every month.”.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he is “very pleased” with the site’s money-making trajectory.

As areas for revenue growth, YouTube points out featured videos on search, the YouTube home page masthead, pre-rolls and long-form content.

Google believes that potential for revenue from advertising will do nothing but grow and cost of delivering online services will do nothing but fall. That’s why it keeps giving away more and more services that used to cost money.


Cellphone Clients Are Treated Miserabily In The U.S.

There are many things that are broken, unfair and anticompetitive in the American cellphone industry that Congress should investigate and fix, according to the last column of David Pogue in the New York Times.
Let’s list them:

- The price of a text message are gone to 20 cents, from 10, in two years. All four big U.S. carriers raised their fees at the same time.
- In the U.S. you are double billed: when you place a call and answer one, and also when you send a text message and when you get one. (In Europe you are billed once).
- You are charged an astonishing $1.50 to $5 a minute when calling overseas.
A good suggestion is using Skype Out or Google Voice, which is 2 cents a minute when calling China.
- The voice mail 15-second instructions messages. David Pogues writes about it:

“To page this person, press 5.” Page this person! Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize this was 1980. “When you have finished recording, you may hang up.” Oh, really!? So glad you mentioned that! I would have stayed on the line forever! And then when I call in for messages, I’m held up for 15 more second. “To listen to your messages, press 1. “Why else would I be calling!?

Verizon, with 70 million customers, makes $850 million a year with those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.

Right now, the cell carriers spend about $6 billion a year on advertising, and clients are treated miserabily. “Persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress”, says Pogue.


Apps That Can Make YouTube Even Better

Some software developers are releasing apps that can make YouTube even better. Desktube and iDesktop.tv are among them.

Desktube is an Adobe Air-based application that runs YouTube without launchig a browser. It adds a social-networking feel to YouTube, letting you video chat with up to three friends while you all watch YouTube videos. Also you can update your Facebook or use Twitter.

iDesktop.tv is a browser-based Web 2.0 application. Among some cool features, you can easily resize video windows by dragging the corner. Also you can watch multiple videos at once, and download videos and save them for offline viewing.

NewTeeVee describes in detail both apps.

Several years after the first version was released, the open-source video and audio player VLC has finally turned version 1.0.0. And it is getting good critics among video experts, and, as you can imagine, a great acceptance on the open-source community: 3 million downloads three days after been released.

It runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and is capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac ...), as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

It can also be used as a media converter or a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6.

This major release introduces many new features, new formats and new codecs to the VLC multimedia framework, and fixes a very high number of bugs that were present in the 0.9.x or 0.8.6 versions.

It can be downloaded from here.

The VLC project only lives with volunteers.


Qik Gets Another $5.5 Million from Venture Capitalists

Despite not being able to broadcast through the iPhone, Qik has secured another $5.5 million in funding. Quest Venture Partners and CampVentures led the round, along with several unnamed investors.

This Redwood City-headquartered start-up had previously raised $4 million in funding through angel investors including Salesforce.com founder Mark Benioff and Internet poster boy Mark Andreessen.

Competitors include Kyte and Bambuser.


Screenjelly: Scnakable Screencasts

The owner company of ScreenToaster has launched Screenjelly, “a sort of snackable screencasting service”, as NewTeeVee.com describes it.

Screenjelly is a browser-based tool that lets users create short recordings of what’s happening on their computer screens and instantly share them via Twitter, Facebook, email and other social media outlets.

This is what their creators say:

“Screenjelly differentiates from Screentoaster, which is for producing a tutorial or demo meant to be hosted on a blog or web site. Screenjelly focuses on the communication/sharing aspect, not on the ‘production’ aspect, and its interface is simpler and designed for that. Main use cases are sharing software tips, bugs, or anything on your screen that would take too long to describe via text.”

See a sample here.


Blogs and websites, not email or search, drive video views

Blogs and websites with embedded video and links, but not email referrals or search, are the single largest referrer of video views, according to TubeMogul.

Twitter has unveiled, along with its new redesigned home page, Twitter 101, a series of Web pages and a downloadable slide show that explain how businesses can use it. There are also some case studies like JetBlue and Dell, among many others.

Twitter 101 says that its service is for building relationships and listening to and responding and float ideas in real time.

Twitter will likely introduce a bundle of paid services later this year for businesses. These tools will alow companies to verify their accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

For many supersmall businesses with no ad budget the free microblogging service has become their sole means of marketing. It is easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. In addition, some of them use TweetDeck, a web application that helps people to manage their Twitter messages.


Delve Networks Partners with Akamai… Like Many Other Competitor

Video management platform Delve Networks announced this week a non-exclusive partnership with Akamai in which the two companies will combine forces to provide turn-key-high-quality video services to video publishers. Problem is the many other companies have similar agreements with Akamai CDN leading company.

Among them there are KickApps, VMIX, Multicast, Onstream Media, Vbrick and KIT Digital. Akamai explains: “We have value-added relationships with a lot of these companies”.

Funniest thing is that Akamai offers also its own Stream OS video platform from its Nine Systems acquisition.


Justin.tv Aims For Maximum Market Adoption of its Live Platform

Justin.tv has released a free API for live video. Developers can customize Justin.tv’s video player and build applications on top of its platform.

Stickam and Ustream are offering their API as a paid white-label service. Another competitor, Livestream is about to release it.

Apps already built on the Justin.tv platform include Camtweet.com, which is an easy integration of live video and Twitter.

Video watching is now more popular than social networking on the Internet, according to a Pew survey. While 62 percent of American Internet users watch online video, some 46 percent of those surveyed said they were active on social networking sites.

Certainly people spend bulk of time on Facebook, but more people watch YouTube video and other video sites.


RealPlayer SP Enables Sharing and Portability of Downloaded Web Videos

Real Networks has launched a polished version of its new player, RealPlayer SP (The “SP” stands for “social” and “portable”). This version enables sharing and portability of downloaded web videos.

Since the launching, on June 24th, it’s been used to download more than 22 million videos


HSN Launches A “Multichannel Experience” New iPhone App

Home Shopping Network (HSN) announced this month an app for the iPhone that streams live video. The HSN Shop App lets users browse and shop the network’s catalog of more than 35,000 items. This shop has also an interactive “Shake2Shop” to pull up a random product by shaking the iPhone.

With this app, users have the ability to view HSN live programming, throughout the U.S.

“The launch creates the e-commerce industry’s first live-video ‘3-screen experience’, enabling consumers to browse and the network’s 35,000-plus array of products from home or on the go,” says HSN.

This app supports Apple’s HTTP adaptive streaming, which reduces buffering and other interruptions to create a great viewing experience and diminish latency.

Another interesting iPhone 3GS app is Qik. Although, it can’t stream live video (like Ustream), you can record first, then automatically upload it to the Qik site. This app only works over Wi-Fi for now.


Chinese Video Site Allows Uploaders To Charge For Access To Content

Chinese video site 56.com launched an initiative that allows people uploading video to charge viewers for access to content. 56.com takes a 10 percent cut of sales, with the remaining 90 percent going to the users.

Even after a user pays for a video, it can be viewed for only 15 days, after which they must pay again for another 15 days’ worth of viewing.

Google has bought On2 Technologies, owner of VP6 video code, in a stock-for-stock transaction worth $106.5 million. Analysts think that Google is preparing to make a video infrastructure play.

In the last two years, the online video industry has largely chosen H.264 as VP6 successor. However, VP6 is already installed on computers everywhere, and now with Google managing its licensing –everybody, including Adobe, is paying licensing fees to On2-, the format could come back into power, maybe at no cost.

Another contender, the open-source video compression format of choice, OGG Theora, which is being pushed by Mozilla, has not won industry confidence.

It means that Google, with its Chrome browser, and soon OS, can play a big role. Google is one of the leaders of the new HTML 5 standard, which handles video natively and could eliminate the need for Flash and Silverlight-type plug-ins.

In terms of browser landscape, Microsoft has Internet Explorer and its video technology in Silverlight. Apple has Safari and QuickTime. Google, which already runs the biggest video site on the web in YouTube, has a relationship with Mozilla, and people speculated that could build Theora support into its Chrome browser.

With On2 acquisition, Google shows up who is theal driver on the Internet.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if Google open-sources On2 itself. By pushing ON2’s code Google can shape the future of web video.


YouTube for Kids

ZuiTube.com is a new kid-friendly video destination site, whose 60,000 clips have been approved for child viewing by a network of 200 parents and teachers.
ZuiTube monitors, search and play activity through its service to determine what kids are interested in, and they match them with what is appropriate.

The videos are pulled from YouTube using its API. It means that ZuiTube is dependent on YouTube. If a video gets taken from there, Kidzui no longer has access to it.


YouTube’s ‘Promoted Videos’ Will Appear on Partner Watch Pages

YouTube announces that they will include videos from paying advertisers, and will share revenue from the ads with the video page’s content owner, as Google does with AdSense.

Those promoted videos will only be shown on pages where the site has a revenue sharing partnership with the content producer. YouTube says views of partner videos have tripled in the last year, and it is no monetizing hundreds of millions of video views per week.

Previously, Promoted Videos only appeared next to search results and occasionally on the YouTube homepage.

Around 158 million U.S. Internet users watched more than 21 billion videos last month, both of which are all-time highs for the online video world. Google/YouTube sites got 120,852 unique viewers, with an average of 74.1 videos per viewer, according to ComScore latest numbers.

Talking about numbers, video analytics firm Visible Measures just updated its “100 Million Views Club”, which tracks the top virals of all time.


YouTube Will Better Monetize Viral Videos

YouTube has another idea to better monetize viral videos. Videos that are detected as accumulating a large number of views quickly will be added, with their creator’s permission, to a limited form of the YouTube partner revenue sharing program.

This program was only available to creators with an established body of popular content. This has helped the company avoid lawsuits and sign on media partners.


Animoto.com Adds Video Feature

Animoto.com online service has launched a new feature that allows to include videos in its animated slideshows. Animoto’s competitors is basically turning photos into videos.

That is possible because it does all its processing up in the cloud, rather than within Flash (like Slide does).

Animoto is limiting clips to 10 seconds for paid users and 5 seconds for free users.


Channels.com “Your Web Video DVR”

Channels.com is trying to position itself as “your web video DVR”, and for that, it has launched an app that lets users subscribe video via RSS feeds.

This service organizes feeds that exist in the cloud; it does not record anything.

Channels.com reports that it includes 160+ shows.

For now, this service is focused on building traffic, optimizing the user experience and seeing how the video landscape unfolds. A key part of building its distribution and use is by encouraging video providers to place a Channels.com “chicklet” on their site, so video can be instantly added to user’s playlist.


Nokia Plan Linux-based Phone

Nokia announced this week it will sell in October its first high-end smart phone –the N900, priced at $700- based on open source Linux based software. “I’m sure this will help us in the market situation with the iPhone,” said a Nokia’s VP.

Doing so, Nokia is moving away from Symbian, described by some analysts as “aged”. Nokia is seeking a more “PC-like experience,” allowing users to run dozens of application windows at the same time.


A Five Million Of Infected “Zombie” Army Of Computers Still Alive

A malicious program discovered in November called Conficker is exposing a serious weakness in the world’s Internet infrastructure.

This program used flaws in Windows to co-opt machines and link them and link them into a virtual computer than can be commanded remotely. It creates a ‘zombie’ army, that can be used to generate vast amounts of spam, steal information and passwords, deliver fake anti-virus warnings to persuade users to pay their removal by credit card, or even to monitor or disable an enemy country computers.

Despite anti-virus software, now more than five million so-called zombies –government, business and home computers in more than 200 countries- is under its control.

Network of infected computers, or botnets, have been used to temporarily cripple Tweeter and Facebook.

Conficker exact origin and performance is unknown so far. New, more intricate versions of the program have been distributed.

Anti-virus companies and government agencies are working together trying to find ways to kill Conficker.