In order to simplify their users lives, YouTube recently introduced a new feature known as YouTube Leanback. As the name obviously suggests, this feature allows users to lean back and enjoy videos with a minimal amount of maneuvering.

YouTube Leanback

To use this facility, users will initially have to feed in certain details, like settings and preferences. They also have to feed 8in the required content, from the subscriptions. They can also access videos which their friends are sharing on Facebook if their YouTube and Facebook accounts are connected.

Once this is done, videos of the user’s interest will start playing as soon as the user opens the site. It is also possible to watch things like news and other entertainment programmes.

To select the required video, the user has to use the scroll keys on the keyboard, thus obliterating the need for the mouse. Each time the user navigates to the button he requires, he has also to click the ‘Enter’ key. The space bar of the keyboard functions as the ‘Pause’ and ‘Play’ key.

Unfortunately, the YouTube Leanback feature does not provide any keys with which to control the volume of the video. For that, one needs to use the controls on the system or the speakers.

Other than that one missing feature, watching videos with the YouTube Leanback feature has become similar to watching TV as one can easily use a wireless keyboard to navigate with. YouTube refers to this as the ’10 foot experience’.

Watching a stream of videos on YouTube Leanback

The most surprising thing about YouTube Leanback is that it eliminates the need for users to search, which goes against all of Google’s business principles!

In fact, as of now, YouTube Mobile receives over 100 million video playbacks daily, which is about the same number of playbacks, which YouTube.com used to get in 2006 when they joined Google.

When YouTube Mobile was launched in 2007, it had only about 1,000 videos available on the mobile site. There were also several limitations in the site, mobile browsers and the hardware then available, thus preventing the YouTube Mobile from being as good as the YouTube.com experience.

YouTube has, however, been working hard to constantly update and improve their mobile site to provide better features tot heir users.

They have recently updated the site yet again, making it much faster than before. The new interface also has more touch friendly features. It also now has most of the features and functionality available on YouTube.com such as search query suggestions, the ability to create playlists etc. It also allows users to put in marks such as ‘favourites’ ‘like’ ‘unlike’ etc. directly from the mobile handset.

YouTube also intends to henceforth update YouTube Mobile every time they update YouTube.com.

These features have only been launched in English for now, but other languages should follow shortly.

“I Gotta Feeling” was released by the band in the beginning of June last year, was at the top of the charts for 2 weeks and then continued to remain in the top 40 for a total of 33 weeks.

The Black Eyed Peas also hold the record for the maximum number of downloads by a single group – a total of 3.3 million, in the U.K.

Martin Talbot, Managing Director of The Official UK Charts Company, says that this is a very significant milestone. While the industry started recognising the importance of downloads as far back as 2005, by counting them as part of the singles charts, this is the first time that a song has actually been legally downloaded so many times.

Initially, downloads were counted only after a CD was made physically available in shops. One year later, the rules were changed, and downloads started getting counted even without a CD release.

Now, 98% of all singles’ sales are through downloads. However, according to record company executives, the easy availability of downloads is only adding to the problem of online piracy, which results in the loss of millions of pounds of revenue to the record companies every year.

While this might be mixed news to the record company, it definitely marks a continued change in the way the U.K. public consumes media. Digital definitely seems to be the way forward. The record companies need to catch up with the rest of the business world and start building a more digital media friendly business model.

YouTube Video Editor

When logged in users start the online video editor, they see a collection of their recent videos in a panel on the left. The user can then select a video and add it to the timeline to edit it.

Editing videos on YouTube does not allow users to do anything fancy. The service simply enables combining different videos that have already been uploaded to create a new, longer mashup video, trimming the beginning, middle or end of any video to make it shorter or changing the video’s soundtrack.

Original video soundtrack can be replaced with any audio sample in Google’s Audio Swap library. An advantage of this feature could be that it might prevent users from inadvertantly violating copyright law.

Other minor advantages include giving users the ability to create new videos without bothering about file formats and eliminating the need to install any special software for basic video editing functions.

Windows Movie Maker, a programme that ships for free with most Windows systems, already includes all of these features and a lot more. The problem with Windows Movie Maker is simply that most users don’t know about its existence or its capabilities.

The best thing about YouTube’s video editor is just the fact that it allows editing within the cloud, on the same site, rather than requiring users to modify content offline.

Creating a mash-up on YouTube Video Editor

Google TV

The biggest single announcement at Google I/O was probably the launch of Google TV, which is an open platform built on Android and meant to run on the Google Chrome browser.

Google TV will enable users to access the shows they want to, when they want to, on their television screens. Google TV features integrated search to allow users to find relevant content across channel listings, DVR, and the Internet, as well as a picture-in-picture layout to access multiple windows simultaneously. With this service, Google undoubtedly has its eyes set on the $70 billion U.S. TV advertising market. Google TV enabled devices will go on sale in autumn 2010.

www.google.com/tv

Clicker TV

Google also introduced Clicker TV, which is basically a TV guide that allows users to find programmes by scrolling through the options with a remote control or arrow keys on a keyboard. The Clicker TV website can work on any browser and will be a free service in the U.S.

Android 2.2 (Froyo)

Android 2.2, which has been nicknamed Froyo (from Frozen Yoghurt), was also announced at the event. The new version of the platform will be much faster, will have new enterprise features such as Exchange calendar synchronisation and will include portable hotspot functionality, the ability for apps to participate in device messaging and data backup and will support Adobe Flash.

Google Wave

Google Wave has been brought out of beta and is now available to everyone. It is supposed to now be much faster and easier to use than before.

Chrome Web Store

The Chrome Web Store is scheduled for launch later this year and will be an open marketplace for Web apps. Google Chrome and the Chrome Web Store will support installable web apps. Applications from the Chrome Web Store will allow users to install their favorite web apps. An installed web app could be separated visually from other tabs, could integrate better with the operating system and could be granted increased permissions.

chrome.google.com/webstore

Storage for Developers

Google Storage for Developers, a new service also announced at the I/O event, is a RESTful cloud service built on Google’s storage and networking infrastructure. With the API, developers can connect their applications to reliable cloud-based storage that is replicated across several U.S. data centres. This service is being previewed with only a few developers initially.

According to Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal, the new search service will run on set-top boxes and will allow users to search for TV shows and Web content, including YouTube videos.

Dish Network, which is currently the second largest satellite TV provider in the U.S., will allow Google to offer TV searches of a very high quality to its viewers. In return, Google will be able to drive more advertising revenues as subscribers are bound to see its display ads while conducting searches.

The service will make use of some features from Google’s Android Operating System. New set-top boxes will have to be loaded with Google software and Dish Network subscribers will be able to search content and even create their own show line up or playlist using a keyboard.

The service is already being tested by families of Google employees.

Studies have shown that more and more users are interested in viewing online content on their large-screen TV sets. Some companies like Apple, Yahoo! and Microsoft already offer similar services.

One hurdle that Google will have to overcome is that users will need new set-top boxes, and they may not want to spend money on them. Google will have to devise some enticing offers to encourage users to get a new set-top boxes.

According to Mahaney’s estimates, YouTube will generate about $945 million this year, of which $614 million will be net revenue or profit. He further expects that the largest online video site will continue to grow and will generate over $1.1 billion next year, of which over $700 million will be net profit.

Mahaney explains that he has arrived at these figures by applying the same revenue-to-page view ratio on the stats available for YouTube that fellow video sharing site, MySpace, uses.

Patrick Walker, who is a director of video partnerships for Google and YouTube, also believes that YouTube is doing pretty well for itself. According to him, the fact that YouTube has the ability to make lots of users see its ads makes the site inherently very profitable. Also, the fact that they help to sell a lot of CDs and DVDs is very helpful to build a marketing case for YouTube.

Google, as usual, has not yet made any official comment on the matter.

With the help of this new feature, users can search for keywords in the Closed Captions that are available with videos. In essence, this means that Hulu viewers can now search for particular scenes in a movie or television show that comes with closed captions.

Captions Search results include a preview of the section of the video containing the keyword, which can be seen by hovering over the segment featuring the search term. One can also see that clip in full size by clicking on the search result’s text.

Hulu Captions Search is currently avalaible in Hulu Labs or through the “Captions” tab on any video that has been provided with closed captions.

Another interesting feature of Captions Search is the heat map. This feature provides a graphical representation of the viewer interest generated during various stages of the show. A large range of viewer behaviours have been assessed to generate this graph, and it appears at the top of the video. This heat map can also be used to navigate directly to a particular captioned section of the show.

The features are still in the beta phase, but are likely to go live pretty soon.

Preview of Captions Search on Hulu

Captions will be automatically generated through the voice recognition algorithm that is used on Google Voice. The technology is known as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology and can be pretty accurate for some cases.

In many cases, though, the automatic captions result in some rather funny output, even for videos by Google’s own employees. This could lead to some very confused users if they relied solely on automated captions!

Funny Automated Captions On YouTube

In order to use automated captions, a user has must click on the upward arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the video control bar and click on ‘Transcribe Audio’ from the captions (CC) menu.

It is also be possible to translate the captions into several languages.

While this will greatly improve YouTube’s accessibility and benefit people who have difficulties hearing, the translation facility will also help people who do not understand the original language used in the video.

Another feature that is being simultaneously introduced is auto-timing for subtitles. If all the words used in the video are provided in a text file, Google will automatically associate the timing of each caption alongside the video timeline.

In other words, the text of the video will be transcribed. This transcript can obviously be indexed and crawled, thus helping users with search engine optimisation of video content.

The new captioning features will therefore eventually allow users to search for a video based on keywords used in the video script.

The automatic caption feature is already available on most educational and Google-owned channels. Automatic timing is now available on all newly uploaded videos on YouTube.

Believe it or not, this is already happening!

Video ad loading in a magazine

The first video ads in the print media were published last month in an American magazine, Entertainment Weekly.

A full-page cardboard insert was placed within the magazine containing a small screen, which advertised the diet drink Pepsi Max, and also had trailers of shows on the U.S. television network, CBS. As if that is not sufficient, the insert also contained built-in speakers for the user to listen to the ads.

This amazing feat has been achieved by inserting a small chip in the cardboard page within the magazine. The chip gets activated automatically when the concerned page is opened. It works in a manner similar to a singing greeting card.

The screen is about the size of a mobile phone’s display screen, contains rechargeable batteries and can carry up to 40 minutes of content.

While the invention is quite interesting to say the least, some users do not like it as it makes the magazine quite bulky and the cardboard insert makes it impossible to fold the magazine. It also makes it quite difficult to flick through the pages of the magazine.

Another drawback is that once the page is opened, it takes several seconds for the video to load and start, which could result in users losing interest.

Copies of the magazine have been sent out to several subscribers in New York and Los Angeles.

Americhip, the company that manufactures these screens, has estimated that each screen would cost about $20. The novelty of this medium, though, could easily justify the additional advertiser expense.

Oonce this form of advertising gains greater acceptance, it could drive the manufacturing costs down, but could also result in user apathy or even frustration at technology turning a quiet few minutes spent reading a magazine into a noisy, flashy flurry of images.

Talks are still reported to be in extremely early stages, so there is no date set as yet for starting the service. In fact, it may never even materialize.

Apple’s iTunes Store, which has such a service in place, charges users $3.95 per movie. It is expected that YouTube would be looking at a similar figure.

If the deal does come through, it will be a first for YouTube, in that it will be the first time that they will charge their viewers to access content.

In spite of being one of the most popular websites, YouTube has never been financially successful. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has admitted that the site has not lived up to its revenue expectations. Last April, he had said that YouTube would try out various ways of monetisation, including micropayments and subscription models.

YouTube even started allowing ad sales on videos from big media companies, on a revenue sharing basis with the producers, in an attempt to capitalise on the TV ad budgets that already are allocated for these companies.

If talks with some of Hollywood’s studios do succeed, YouTube will start earning some revenue through this new channel.

Discussions were started with Warner Bros. The two companies had reached an agreement in the past to allow clips from Warner Bros. TV shows to feature on YouTube, but so far they have not allowed airing of full episodes on the site.

YouTube is also in talks with Sony, Lion’s Gate and MGM. Though Walt Disney and Fox, who are very particular about their copyrights, have not yet come to the discussion table.

Paramount Movies has raised objections to YouTube’s proposals. This was to be expected as Paramount’s parent company, Viacom, is involved in a law suit against Google. The suit which is on its way to trial, for $1 billion in damages, is based on Viacom’s allegation that Google allowed the viewing of pirated TV shows and other material on YouTube. If YouTube hopes to deal with them in the near future, Google will have to come to an amicable settlement with Viacom first.

While the studios have not been too concerned about pirated TV shows, movies are a different matter altogether.

However, the studios could also be interested in forging a deal with YouTube as DVD sales have dropped quite significantly in recent months and such a deal could be one way of making up for the losses thus incurred.

It so happened that Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz from Minnesota, who were due to be united in holy matrimony, wanted to have an unusual wedding party.

They decided that the bride, the groom and all of their bridesmaids and best men should dance to the song ‘Forever’ by Chris Brown in the church. This unusual entrance was video taped and put up on YouTube, where it has become wildly popular.

So far, the “Forver wedding video” has been viewed by more than 12 million viewers, in just over a week, making it the most viewed and most discussed video on YouTube, globally.

Rather than pull the video, or sue Google for copyright infringement, Chris Brown’s record company allowed the music to be used and InVideo Ads were placed to make it possible for users to buy the song from Amazon or iTunes.

A lot of users have responded positively to this offer, earning YouTube, Amazon and Apple a good amount of money.

The record company, Sony, and Chris Brown have also made a pretty penny, not to mention the badly needed positive publicity for Chris Brown that they have earned by not suing the couple for copyright infringement (a first for the music industry?).

Searches for ‘chris brown forever’ over the past 90 days

While all of these beneficiaries have the young couple to thank for the unexpected bounty, the couple has not made a penny out of their own video. They were invited to appear on the Today Show in New York, along with all their guests. They are also using all this publicity to drive donations to the Sheila Wellstone Institute for violence prevention.

Hopefully this incident will be an eye-opener for video sites and music owners and show them that they can make money by other means than prosecuting consumers for sharing and downloading music.

The Forever Wedding Video

After a very encouraging opening on Friday, with collections of $14.4 million, the rest of the weekend turned out to be something of a damp squib by comparison. While Friday’s collections made observers predict a first weekend collection of around $50 million, the actual takings at the box office amounted to only about $30 million, which is a very big let down, and rather unusual.

Trade analysts and others from the field, are suggesting that the popular micro-blogging site Twitter caused the downfall of the movie. It is believed that reviews sent out on the social platform could have discouraged prospective viewers from going to see the movie.

While this may certainly be true to an extent, one needs to evaluate objectively why the tweets sent out were so largely negative in the first place.

Could it be possible that the movie was really not what the audiences may have expected, and therefore it did not do well?

The article on Time.com indicated that the second Transformers movie and Ice Age both performed very well during the same time frame, in spite of both being in their second week.

The trend for Bruno on Twitter, seen above, shows a definite spike on Saturday, with Bruno-related tweets accounting for 0.71% of all tweets, followed by a steady descent. The same pattern was seen a week earlier, for Transformers, albeit with a much higher peak – 2.13% of all tweets – followed by a sharper decline in discussions, as seen below.

Comparing Twitter streams for Bruno and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, both have equal numbers of positive and negative reviews today.

However, the real reason becomes more obvious when we compare the US and UK markets. Tweets from the UK are largely positive, which probably reflects its success at the UK box office – 2nd biggest opening ever for an 18+ movie – whereas tweets from the USA focus on the gay content and the sexual obscenities.

Cultural differences, especially rampant homophobia in the USA, are probably a big factor that could explain why the movie is faring poorly in the USA. Another factor could be that the movie is just plain bad. To be fair, though, it is certainly possible that the existance of Twitter allowed viewers who could not stomach the flamboyant homosexual fashion designer to spread their views faster than normally would have been possible.

Bing will now be used to power the new Quick Add feature on Hotmail. This essentially means that users can now search Bing from within Hotmail and add information from the search results directly into their email body.

Details about movie listings, images, videos, maps, restaurant reviews and many more info bytes can be searched and added directly into outgoing email messages, as can be seen in the example below:

The procedure to do this is actually quite simple.

The user first has to open up a new message page, by clicking on ‘New’. Then selects a category from the ‘Quick Add’ column, which can be found on the right hand side of the page. After that, users can select what sort of results they are looking for (image, video) and then search in the Bing search box. Bing returns the top 10 results within the same page. More results can be viewed in a new window. Lastly, clicking ‘Insert’ on the relevant result will add it in the message body where the cursor was placed.

One shortcoming of this facility is that it lists only a few search results. Those looking for more detailed search results, have to go over to Bing, and then it is not so easy to add the required result into the Hotmail message.

At present the Quick Add feature is available only in select locations like Australia, Canada, China, India and of course in the U.S. and U.K.

These pre-roll ads are run around TV shows and clips on their site.

To begin with they have tied up with their existing partners Channel 4, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic, ITN and Discovery Networks as reported in ‘The Guardian’.

The broadcasters who accept this scheme will be eligible for a revenue sharing partnership with YouTube. In the past these partners were earning revenue only from the display ads and in-video format.

Some advertisers such as Nissan, Renault, Warner Brothers, Match.com and Activision have already tied up with YouTube for this service, and Channel 4 was the first among them to run the pre-roll ads to promote the comedy ‘The Hangover’. The pre-roll ads will be run for 15 to 30 seconds, and will be run on a CPM basis.

According to Suveer Kothari, Head of YouTube U.K. YouTube has been trying to maintain a balance between the demands of their users who want free but entertaining and professional content on the web, against the demands of premium content owners, who obviously want to monetize their content on the one hand, and the demands of their advertisers who want more premium content to showcase their TV creative against on the other hand.

He believes this service will help them to attain that balance.

YouTube RealTime shows up as a bar on the bottom of all pages on the site for users who are logged in and participating in the beta test. Not only can participating users see which of their friends are online, but they can also see which videos those friends are watching, and what they think about the videos, based on the comments posted by those friends.

Screenshot of RalTime toolbar showing friends’ video views

The first button on the toolbar indicates that RealTime sharing is activated. The service can be turned off so that users share only videos they wish to. Adjacent to this is a button that is enabled when the user watches a video. Clicking on the button shows a list of other users viewing the same video.

An ‘Online Friends’ button shows a list of friends currently logged into YouTube. The last button, a little bell with a number beside it

During the closed testing period each user can invite up to 25 online friends to try RealTime and share their viewing experiences. While this limits the number of users who can trial the service, it is gradually expanding, as each invitee is given 25 invites to distribute further. Google had used a similar trial invitation system when Gmail was first launched.

A lot of YouTube users go to the site without any specific video in mind. They could be particularly interested in finding out what their friends are viewing and then sharing these videos with other friends. The added video views could generate more ad revenue for YouTube and its advertisers.

This is not the only change coming to YouTube. The video sharing site recently unveiled two new sections featuring full-length movies and TV shows and a limited number of users are also trialling a new channel layout.

Sample new channel layout on YouTube

According to the Google AdSense blog, the AdSense video unit, which enables publishers to show YouTube content and ads on their pages, on a revenue sharing basis, has not performed as well as it was expected to do, and Google will discontinue the service at the end of this month.

Publishers who wish to continue publishing video content from YouTube can do so directly through YouTube.com, but they will not earn any revenue for this.

Video ads will remain functional and will continue to appear on AdSense-enabled pages of publishers who enable the the image ads option.

Google will continue to accept ads from registered publishers until the end of this month (April). New publishers will no longer be able to incorporate video units on their sites.

While Google says they are taking this step to better focus on other opportunities, to help their publishers earn better, it seems suspiciously like yet another move to beat the recession.

Only last month Search Engine Round Table had pointed out that AdSense publishers were upset and complained on two separate AdSense forum threads that their sites were generating very little revenue from AdSense video units. Some of the comments posted on the AdSense forum were:

“My revenue is down more than 50%. There were people who were expecting to earn $200 in January and instead earned $80. I was expecting $1000-$2000 and earned a little over $80.”

“I had $67 in Content Host earnings (63,600 views/1000 clicks) and only $17 in YouTube earnings… sheesh”

One reason for this poor performance could be the current economy. Another could be the fact that it is difficult to target ads consistently based on videos.

It is relevant to note that Google is struggling to monetise YouTube, and this could be the first sign that Google is accepting the fact that it might never be as successful with video advertising as it is with search.

Director of video partnerships at YouTube, Patrick Walker, told the BBC that the two sides were still in talks but the terms of the agreement were priced at a rate that was not sustainable.

At present, UK users who try to view music videos on YouTube just see an error message saying “This video is not available in your country.”

Google claims the PRS asked YouTube to pay a far higher amount than before, and executives at YouTube think this rate is not feasible. Walker says “YouTube cannot be expected to engage in a business in which it loses money every time a music video is played”.

The online video giant also blames the PRS for lack of transparency as they refuse to specify which songs would be included in the said license.

Steve Porter, head of PRS, on the other hand, says he is shocked and outraged by YouTube’s decision in the middle of discussions. He says that YouTube’s decision punishes British consumers and song writers. PRS says YouTube wants to pay significantly less than at present to music writers in spite of growth in their viewership.

While both sides are hurling allegations at each other, the Music Publishers Association has urged YouTube to reconsider their decision.

Other sites like Pandora.com and MySpace U.K. have also run into trouble getting licenses in the U.K. recently. YouTube, however, calims to have very strong relationships with 3 out of 4 major record labels and several independent ones. They say they will continue to seek partnerships that will benefit music publishers, music labels and artists.

The music industry remains one of the few major vertical that has managed to continue to operate as it did before the dot.com era, and continues to show much resistance to change. The advent of mp3.com and the ongoing drop in CD sales don’t seem to deter them or push them to change their business model.

Users may start uploading videos illegally if they are not allowed access to them legally. If that happens all parties would be the losers.

The current generation of youth are growing up on digital music, and seem to be accustomed to paying nothing for digital services and products such as digital music. Most of them don’t even think twice about the implication that music piracy is akin to theft.

If record companies continue to dig their heels in the sand and not give up their current business model, they are likely to fall spectacularly in the future, as artists find other ways to reach audiences and listeners find cost-effective means to hear their favourite singers without making record labels richer in the process.

The offensive video is a 3-minute mobile phone video, which had been posted on YouTube in 2006. In this video, a boy with Down’s syndrome was being teased by his classmates in Turin.

People found this video objectionable and complained about it, following which Google responded by deleting it quickly. The prosecutors, however, felt that that was not enough, as the video should never have been allowed to be displayed.

The executives involved are David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, George Reyes, former Chief Financial Officer, Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel for Google and Arvind Desikan, previous head of Google Video Europe.

The trial is being held in Milan and the executives may face up to 3 years in jail if found guilty. If that happens, it will not only mean that henceforth privacy laws will have to be taken very seriously, but it could also force a change in the way YouTube functions in Italy and the rest of Europe.

A thorny issue that will have to be reconsidered, as a result of a ruling against the Google executives in this case, will be whether or not Internet companies should screen content submitted by individuals before it is published.

In the United States, copyright laws so far do not punish online services if they respond quickly to complaints. Europe too has similar laws, but they are unclear about applicability to young people and certain private information.

If Google and its executives are held responsible for this video it will have very wide-ranging implications.

Google has said that their sympathies lie with the victim and his family, and they are happy the culprits have been identified due to their video and punished . However prosecuting Google would be like prosecuting mail services for hate mail. Also, holding Google responsible for content posted on their site is an attack on a free and open Internet and hence they will vigorously defend their employees.

The New york Times reports that the first hearing lasted only about five minutes and none of the defendants were present. The next hearing is scheduled for February 18.

For a long time now, YouTube has been engaged in a tussle of sorts with big media companies. These companies feel that YouTube’s policy of allowing users to upload content produced by the media houses is a violation of copyright laws.

Given the fact that YouTube is the most popular online video site, media owners are better off being on YouTube’s side rather than getting into a legal battle with them. However, some companies like Viacom have sued YouTube in the past.

TechCrunch reports that a new proposal from YouTube will allow these content providers to sell ads on YouTube, alongside their own videos. Content owners will obviously be given a share of the revenue thus earned, which should please them and may even induce them to change loyalties from other sites such as Hulu and TV.com, which they currently patronise.

According to Ars Technica, a few companies such as CBS already have such a deal with the Google subsidiary, but it could now be expanded to include others.

YouTube will gain from this arrangement as they will be able to better monetise their content and earn higher revenues than they have been able to do so far. It will also increase their share of media content received from big media partners, which is only 4% at present.

Last but not the least, users who upload various videos including content from larger media companies on YouTube will no longer have to worry about the videos being removed for fear of copyright violations.

It is expected that this service will be launched by the end of the first quarter of 2009.

One of the first event videos to feature this service, was Barack Obama’s speech when he was sworn in as the 44^th President of the U.S.A. Users who visited the Change.Gov channel on YouTube were allowed to play as well as download the proceedings of the day, from a “click to download” link on the bottom left hand corner of the video.

Obama at the Lincoln Memorial

At present, the service only allows downloads from YouTube but not from videos embedded on other sites. This could change in the future though.

By officially allowing downloads from the site, YouTube will be able to further fortify their position in the video-sharing market. This facility will, of course, be free of charge.

In the last few weeks, the subsidiary of Google has gained in importance as Google’s own online video portal Google Video has announced that they will stop accepting new uploads.

Google is also trying to further augment their income through the video-sharing site, and in order to achieve this they have just launched a series of revamped home page ads and will also expand the library of videos available to download. Last month YouTube had also launched a new High Definition section on their site.

The decision to allow downloads of their videos will give a lot of portability to YouTube, or in other words, users will be able to access these videos on all types of screens including computers, televisions and portable media players, even in the absence of an Internet connection.

A few months ago, Google relocated some of their engineers from Phoenix-Arizona, to other places. Now another 70 employees from Austin-Texas, Trondheim in Norway and Lulea in Sweden are being asked to do the same. The reason behind this is to have fewer but better-coordinated engineering sites, which would help reduce overhead costs, while retaining the quality and efficiency of their services.

Another major step being taken by Google is to reduce the number of new recruits. Initially, they ended all the contracts they had with the outside sources that provided recruiting services to them. Now, however, they have gone a step further and decided to reduce the size of their recruiting department by as many as 100 people. The logic is, of course, that since they will be recruiting fewer people for quite some time, they will require less people to do so. However, the management is hopeful that most of these staff members will be reassigned to other appropriate jobs within the organisation itself.

While Google had laid off 300 employees of their subsidiary, DoubleClick, last year, the Times points out that this is the first time their own employees are being made redundant.

Google has also announced that they will discontinue some services that have not been doing too well or have been replaced by better apps. Amongst them are Jaiku, Dodgeball, Catalog Search, Google Notebook and uploads for Google Video.

Another indication of their cost cutting efforts is the fact that instead of the $1,000 bonus that employees get as a gift every year, this time they were just given a new T-Mobile G1 mobile phone.

Though these measures are relatively minor compared to the layoffs at Yahoo! and other tech companies in recent month, it is certainly bad news that the one company most experts thought would sail through the reecession unscathed is already trimming its workforce.

The worst is probably yet to come. Among other technology firms, Motorola has announced 4,000 job cuts, while there are unconfirmed rumors about the possibility of 15,000 layoffs at Microsoft.

While YouTube is an extremely popular video site, and continues to grow by the minute – 13 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube every minute – it can be quite a daunting task for people to find the video they are interested in, as YouTube has quite a mammoth collection.

In order for content owners to build up viewer numbers and fan following as well as to help users find the right video, YouTube now lets content providers promote their videos, thus making it simpler for users to find them.

They have introduced a new advertising program, called YouTube Sponsored Videos. This new service will enable brands and content owners to reach those who are interested in their video content, irrespective of whether they are a big and famous company, or new-comers looking to build a reputation.

YouTube Sponsored Videos

An automated tool allows video creators to decide where they want to place their videos. They can then make bids through an online auction process, similar to the one used by Google Adwords, and also specify a daily budget.

AdWords ad ranking principles will be applied on YouTube too, so that a combination of the ads maximum cost per click bid and the ad Quality Score will determine where the ad gets positioned.

When an interested user searches for videos, the appropriate videos will be shown, along with the regular YouTube search results, under the heading ‘Sponsored Videos’ on a pay per click basis.

This service is still in an experimental stage and further changes will be made as required, based on feedback Google receives from users.

Sponsored Videos on YouTube are available only in the U.S. at present, but will be introduced in other countries at some point in the future.

YouTube is estimated to be the second largest search destination in the USA and the UK. Given the volume of searches this implies, and the success that Google has seen by monetising their main search service, it is but natural that Google would apply the same formula to YouTube. If advertisers and react favourably to this service, it could solve Google’s long-standing dilemma of how to capitalise their acquisition of YouTube.

When they discontinued the mobile video service, a spokesperson for 3 had said, “Mobile advertising remains an important part of our strategy. This change has created a great opportunity for a new supplier and we’ll be looking at options over the coming months.”

They now appear to have fulfilled that promise. 3 has now tied up with Mobix, which will deliver real-time in-video advertising, and 4^th Screen Advertising, which will be their sales partner, to restart their mobile video service before the end of the year.

The 3 million subscribers of 3 will now be able to receive personalised advertising from various brands, with the option of demographic targeting and frequency capping.

3 UK will begin with news, weather updates and movie reviews, and follow it up later with comedy music and cartoons. 3′s earlier entertainment and information services, mobile games, and full length music downloads will of course continue.

Videos will range from being free to costing up to 50 pence each, depending on the length and type.

3 UK’s Head of Portal Advertising, Neil Andrews says, “By allowing people access to video content at a consumer friendly price we can offer brands a potentially massive target audience.”

Mark Slade, Managing Director of 4^th Screen Advertising says, “Pre-roll video advertising is highly targeted, enabling campaigns to be far more effective, whilst reaching the right customer demographic at a time that suits.”

Read the full 3 UK official press release

Not only that, but they are now at the number two position in the market, next only to YouTube. They have beaten their other competitors, Fox (MySpace), MSN and Nickelodeon, who had all been ahead of Yahoo just a month ago, in August 2008.

The number of unique viewers visiting Yahoo has also gone up by 10 million, and now stands at 29.9 million.

YouTube is of course far far ahead of Yahoo, not only in the total number of video streams they run (5.3 billion), but also in the number of unique viewers they have (81.9 million). Also their business has increased in the month of September 2008 by 592 million video streams, which by itself is considerably more than double of Yahoo!’s total video streams in the same month.

In spite of this great difference in numbers between YouTube and Yahoo, it is possible that Yahoo may catch up with YouTube, faster than expected, where monetization is concerned, which is after all the bottom line for any business. The reason for this is that Yahoo can display ads alongside many more of its videos than YouTube. It has been estimated that currently, YouTube monetizes only about 4% of their videos according to The Wall Street Journal.

Another good news for Yahoo, is that while they saw a considerable jump in business in September, their other competitors, Fox, MSN and Nickelodeon actually saw a dip in their business.

Apart from good contextual placement, Yahoo!’s program “Primetime In No Time” is one of the major reasons for their progress. It allows viewers to see a synopsis

Of any of their favorite TV programs which they may have missed. This show alone has generated 100 million streams in September. Also the fan mash-up of the Shakira blockbuster “Hips don’t lie” has generated a lot of interest for a long time now.

Interest in the current economic crisis on Yahoo Finance, and information regarding the U.S. Presidential elections on Yahoo News is also growing and should grow stronger in October.

In order to do this, however, they have requested their users to help out by flagging videos that they feel are inappropriate and violate the Community Guidelines laid down by YouTube.

To enable users to do this, YouTube has a system where users can flag a video and mark it as offensive due to a number of reasons that can be picked from a pull-down menu, which has various categories such as, “Harmful dangerous acts”, “Sexual Content”, “Spam” etc. Users can then mark the category under which a particular video falls, and YouTube will review it and take appropriate action.

Previously, one of the categories was titled “Minors Fighting”, but now, YouTube has changed the name to “Youth Violence” in the hope that this term will have a more serious connotation, and will be more noticeable to users. They feel that the flag, “Minors Fighting” was not being used enough, even though there are plenty of such videos posted online.

Once a user has flagged a video under this category, it will be YouTube’s responsibility to review the video and discontinue it if they feel it is necessary to do so.

The reason YouTube is asking for active audience participation in the censorship process, is because the subject is too vast for them to handle alone. It is estimated that about 13 hours of video are uploaded on this site every minute, thus making it a mammoth task to monitor, and hence they want their clients to act as a “first line of defense” and do their bit to help YouTube in keeping out inappropriate content.

A similar tool was available earlier on iGoogle. The new service, called GAudi, is presently in beta and can be accessed within Google Labs.

http://labs.google.com/gaudi

Google Audio Indexing works in conjunction with YouTube. The tool will catalog all the words that are spoken in a particular audio or video clip. This data will then be entered into a database, which users can then search for the audio or video content they require, in much the same manner as they use search engines for text based material. GAudi will provide a whole list of results, based on the keyword entered.

To start with, GAudi will only index and catalogue politically-based audio and videos.
If a user is not interested in watching the whole video, after having located it through GAudi, it will be possible for to directly reach the particular portion that is of interest, by clicking on the play buttons alongside the particular search result that is of interest.

So far Google has not provided any information regarding their future plans for GAudi. That has not stopped some users from conjuring up innovative methods to use the tool,as can be seen below:

In the past, individual video results occupied the place of an antire search listing, and were  accompanied by a title, a short, one-line snippet pulled from the YouTube page for that video, the duration and average user ratings for the video, as can be seen alongside. This is still the predominant listing format for most universal search results.

However, some searches seem to now yield a single result with two videos placed side-by-side, as seen in the screenshot below. Both the videos are still pulled from YouTube, and both are accompanied by a short title, but are without any description snippet or ratings information and instead just contain information about the duration of the video.

While both videos in the screenshot above do seem equally relevant to the query, that does not seem to be the sole influencing factor for such a layout of the results, as the two videos in the first example shown above-right are also equally relevant in fact, but are still listed one below the other.

It is not clear at present how Google determines whether videos should be presented in this layout or another. It may be something to do with the currenct nature of the query or it may be that both videos score the exact same relevance points according to the Google algorithm and can therefore be clubbed together, even though they are varied in content and come from different useer accounts.

The use of the Olympic symbol upset the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which registered a complaint under the DMCA law, alleging copyright infringement under intellectual property rights.

What most likely upset the IOC was the transition of the Olympic rings into the handcuffs. While the Olympics have always been a platform to depict equal rights, freedom and sportsmanship, the handcuffs signify just the reverse.
In light of this complaint, YouTube was left with no choice but to remove the offending video from their site.

Supporters of Free Tibet have retaliated by criticising the IOC, stating that this is a case of unjustified censorship, as the video in question is absolutely legal and non-infringing.

The IOC, in reply, has stated that the video was taken down by ‘automated copyright protection software‘, which has been installed to prevent the illegal uploading of Olympic content.

The video, however, has already found its way to other sites, allowing users to continue viewing the clip:

Olympic rings turn into handcuffs. Click image to view the video.

Ensuring that the 2008 Olympic games do not turn into a political fiasco is in the best interests of the IOC and the Chinese government. They have both been working hard to squash any negative publicity around the events, rather unsuccessfully, and often to a ridiculous extent, such as by denying the presence of obviously high levels of pollution near the Olympic venues.

This new UPnP driven gadget makes it possible for users to interconnect their computers and the TV by storing movies, videos and images on the computer and then watching them on the big screen at their convenience.

Free and commercial software packages are available, to store such data on a hard drive and then watch it on television later. This will be yet another step by Google to combat the popularity of its rival Microsoft. This is their first product offering that goes up against the extremely popular Windows Media Player.

This device will contain technology to find and then send images and videos from the computer to UPnP compatible hardware. Google Media Server will use technology from Google Desktop, such as desktop gadgets, and Google Desktop Search to locate files.

Google loyalists will surely be enthralled by this new package. The setup only require Google Desktop on the PC and a UPnP enabled device such as a Sony PlayStation 3. More information can be found on the Google Gadgets web page:

Google Media Server

Independent video creators and media companies can now get statistics about the performance of their video such as the regions in which that particular video is most viewed, how often it was viewed each day since its publication and its relative popularity in the geographic region compared to other videos.

The comparative study of the popularity of a video as compared to other videos in a given time frame will allow content creators to find out where and when their video is most likely to be played and can also provide further details like the time taken for the video to rise in popularity and how long it stayed at the top.

According to the Official YouTube Blog, new features, including a specific breakdown on how a particular video was discovered by viewers, will be added soon.

Until now, the ‘About this video’ button provided very elementary statistics such as the viewer numbers for each video.  Through Insight, advertisers, publishers and ordinary end users will be able to find out a lot more about the response of the public to their videos and thus work to improve viewership and popularity.

A better understanding of what viewers want will of course be used by publishers to attract more users to their videos and YouTube branded pages, thereby resulting in increased income for Google.

Advertisers stand to gain as well. Studying viewer statistics will help YouTube advertisers to fine tune their content and the time of display and thus reach their target audience more effectively.
The Official Google Blog provides instructions on viewing Insight stats – “you can find currently available metrics by clicking the “About this Video” button under My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.”

The screenshot below show the search engine results page when a US-based user searches for a cell phone. On the right hand side, the Blackberry ad includes a + sign with a link saying “Watch demonstration”.

Clicking on the link drops down a small movie pane and a video starts automatically playing within the same page, not in a pop up window nor in a new layer.

The video quality is exceptional as is the sound. The technology used here seems to be similar to the video technology that powers YouTube. The video clip lasts 29 seconds.

The video ends with a button including a link to the landing page on the advertiser’s website. Clicking this link or the title of the ad takes users to the regular website, just like any other sponsored link does. The big difference, though, is the additional branding opportunity that including a video within the ad space offers.

This will revolutionise the search engine advertising industry, as advertisers will now need to think of even smarter and more creative ways to reach consumers. Large brands will benefit from this much more than small businesses, though, as SMEs will not typically have the budget to shoot good quality video commercials for their search listings.

Google has not currently provided any further information on the number of such video clips it will allow on a single search results page. Normally one would assume that they would cap this at a handful of advertisers, because having ten demos on a search results page might not lead to a great user experience.

Screenshot of video ad playing in the regular Google search results page

Flickr is a photo sharing site that was acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005. When YouTube was first launched, a lot of people thought it was similar to Flickr except for its video technology. Soon YouTube overtook Flickr in popularity, thanks to its superior video sharing capability. People started preferring YouTube to Flickr as broadband adoption increased and connection speeds improved.

Users like uploading their videos on YouTube. Yahoo! hopes the same behaviour will get users to upload their videos alongside their photographs. The company intended to introduce video to Flickr in May 2007, according to its co-founder Stewart Butterfield. This announcement was repeated in August 2007, but in typical Yahoo! fashion, they are too slow to change for the better and so far nothing has happened.

According to TechCrunch, one of the reasons for this tardiness could be that they are trying to figure out a way to make Flickr video different from other video sharing sites, such as YouTube, so that users can find some novelty in it.

Flickr video is not expected to replace Yahoo! Video. It will be a separate entity. Kakul Srivastav, director of product management at Flickr says “the audience for Flickr is different.” Flickr has always been a photo-sharing site. It has lost a lot of its clients to other video-enabled sites like YouTube and will have to provide something different to win back these customers.

Yahoo! might think they have found some solution and an announcement in this regard is expected soon. Employees at Yahoo! and Flickr are being very tight lipped about all this and are not admitting to anything in spite of the numerous rumors.

However, the general online public probably won’t care. Video on Flickr is destined to be just another feature on a popular photo-sharing site, rather than any competition to YouTube.

Over 26 versions of the leaked track made it onto YouTube. A whole lot more were uploaded to Daily Motion. File sharing sites also saw a host of uploads and downloads of the track. Most Madonna fans listed on Last.fm showed numerous instances of having listened to the track on their PCs.

Warner Music instantly issued a copyright claim getting the video removed from YouTube and DailyMotion almost as soon as users put it up. They were still not quick in enough for thousands of motivated fans of the Material Girl, who managed to download the video or song from one of the many online file sharing sites currently available.

As of the time of publishing this article, only one video of the track could still be found on DailyMotion. The track included the voice-over of the French DJ announcing the new single at the start.

Incidents such as this will undoubtedly provide the music industry ammunition in their upcoming fight against piracy – they are lobbying the UK government to pass laws that will make ISPs responsible for monitoring Internet access and banning users who repeatedly download files illegally.

Record labels, however, can’t deny the free publicity and excitement generated by such leaks, which might at times make it worthwhile to let the fans get early access to singles from their favourite artists, in the hope that the euphoria will also propel them to rush to the record stores when the CD is officially released.

“This is the first time that publishers have a meaningful way to take their content, be it in video, audio or image format, and put it on mobile”, says Scott Beaumont of Refresh Mobile.

The company, which has won Nokia’s Developer of the Year award for their Mobizines product, have developed an exciting range of new services designed to revolutionise mobile content publication. The new service launched this week brings video, audio and images embedded in RSS feeds to mobile devices.

Bringing Video To Mobile RSS Feeds

The Mippin service takes images embedded in RSS feeds, processes them separately and feeds them back in a format suitable to the mobile device. Videos embedded within RSS feeds get transcoded into 3gp format on the fly. High end devices can then stream that video content. Users with less sophisticated handsets would need to download videos to view them.

Videos are not actually transcoded by Mippin. The system identifies the user parameters and the video information. It then passes this on to BlueApple, who transcode and host the transcoded video. End users, however, do not see this process, and instead view the videos as if they were on the Mippin site itself.

Mippin has trumped the likes of Google, whose service FeedBurner does not currently deliver images, audio and video appropriately to mobile devices. Without Mippin the images and videos contained in an RSS feed will not work properly, and could cause problems loading the feed or even cause the mobile browser to crash if a user attempted to play the video in the feed, unless publishers created special mobile versions of every image, audio file and video stream.

Free Mobile Website Development

The next and even more exciting service from Refresh Mobile will be launched in the second week of March. This new service will provide publishers the tools needed to create a free-standing mobile website without the Mippin branding on it.

Mippin Maker, the new tool will allow a wide variety of publishers to take content from their current site, put it in an RSS feed and convert it into a mobile format in just 3 easy steps. According to Scott Beaumont of Refresh Mobile, “there are 120 million blogs with RSS feeds out there. Through the simple syndication all of these blogs are immediately open to all mobile devices. With the Mippin Maker publishers don’t need an incremental investment in mobile in order to get their content out there.”

While the Mippin Maker will not be suitable for mobile commerce sites, it could prove to be an invaluable tool for the scores of information sites currently online. A tool such as this one could bring us closer to wide-scale adoption of the mobile Internet, as more and more publishers will be able to easily bring their content to mobile, providing users the same wealth of information they are used to seeing on their PCs.

Screenshot of Mippin Maker

View Search Daily News On Mobile

Click the link above to view the mobile version of AccuraCast Search Daily News built via the the Mippin Maker, using the RSS feed from our site. Alternatively, you can view it on your mobile handset by visiting http://mippin.com/searchdailynews.

Various video advertising formats are currently available to advertisers, including pre-roll, post-roll, branded player, in-player banners and sponsored search ads. When Google first started testing in-player banners, which they call InVideo advertising, quite a few experts in the industry were surprised. Google themselves did not confirm whether InVideo ads would remain the norm for all their video advertising.

Yesterday’s announcement on the Inside AdSense blog not only announced the availability of video advertising to online video publishers via AdSense, but also confirmed that InVideo would be the format used for these ads. Even though the programme is currently in beta, this move can be seen as confirmation that Google’s testing of InVideo ads on YouTube has shown it to be the ideal video advertising format for them.
InVideo ads are shown during a video in the form of a relatively inobtrusive banner along the bottom of the video, like a text overlay. The payment for in video ads is on a CPM basis.

Google is also offering text overlay ads, which are contextually targeted to signals in a publisher’s videos and on the page where the video is posted. Payment for text overlay ads will on a CPC basis. This format will be unique to AdSense for video and AdSense video units.

AdSense for video will be available as of now only to publishers based in the United States with a minimum of one million video streams served per month, and will be in English to start with. The format will gradually be made available to smaller players. During the test phase advertisers like BMW, Universal Studios and Twentieth Century Fox etc. were invited to advertise on sites like BobVila.com, eHow, ExpertVillage, TheNewsRoom, Revver, blip.tv, and GodTube.

A video advertising solutions page has also been set up to help advertisers find out about how they can place InVideo ads on video sites in Google’s content network and on YouTube, and for publishers to learn more about all the options they have to monetise their video content as well as non-video content via video advertising.

Google Video Advertising Solutions

The New York Times reports that Google is running tests of video ads on their regular search results pages.

The relevant question here would be ‘how do users feel about it?’ Will regular Google search users welcome these ads as a sign of progress? Or will they feel imposed upon by Google, and think that these ads are creating a nuisance or a distraction from the once clean form that won Google favour with the masses.

Based on tests done in the past it seems that searchers should be quite receptive to these video ads. According to Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products and User-Experience, “With universal search, something is getting shaken up a bit on the bottom part of the page. The ads on the top part of the page should match.”

Video ads will soon appear on conventional search results pages, in a manner similar to the way maps are shown in sponsored links for localised searches. Initially the video will be included with the regular text ad via a small plus sign and a link prompting users to click to play the video. The ad will run only if the visitor clicks the plus button, thus giving users the option to see the ad only if they choose to do so. In the future Google intends to test the ads with a single still image from the video in addition to the plus sign and ‘click to play’ link.

According to Marissa Mayer, in the past all Google searches were based on text and therefore visual ads were not acceptable then, as they might have caused a distraction. But now that the results contain videos and images, text ads are not very effective as the eyes of the user automatically focus on the images.

With the progress in search engine technology it is only appropriate that the ads displayed should also be in a more advanced format. It should be noted that as far back as in May 2006, Google had planned to start a new service to place video ads on its websites. It was found that there was no dearth of advertisers to fill up the commercial space available online.

The video ads are currently available only to a very small group of advertisers and are being tested in an extremely small test group.

JuiceCaster’s MVS is the first application of its kind and it will be free! Anybody who has a mobile phone capable of viewing video can utilise this service. All one has to do is send an SMS message with the desired video name or keywords to ’84462′ in the USA. The search tool will reply back immediately with links to the queried video. The service works on almost all video-enabled mobile phones.

The Mobile Video Search engine is primeval in its search technology. It merely matches keywords to videos based on their metadata. It will, however, enable users worldwide to view all sorts of content – commercials, music, entertainment, documentaries etc. directly on their phones, prompting further development of the mobile Internet market. Students and  businessmen can now quickly and easily mobilize and share information by uploading their videos and tagging them appropriately.

MVS might not be extremely innovative but it will be a pathbreaker, leading to the creation of better mobile search applications combining wireless, video and search operations into one simple procedure. JuiceCaster will offer a free WAP and SMS version as well as paid Brew and Java versions for download.

Visit JuiceCaster

This week, Google have officially released the Video Identification tool for YouTube. In their words, “Video Identification is the next step in a long list of content policies and tools that we have provided copyright owners so that they can more easily identify their content and manage how it is made available on YouTube.”

Video Identification allows publishers to identify their content on YouTube. The tool is currently in beta. While improvements are promised to allow better identification of infringing materials, the task of recognising legal versus infringing material has been assigned to publishers, allowing Google to claim absolution from any liability in the future.

YouTube Video ID will give copyright owners the choice to block, promote or monetise their content. Copyright owners can monetise their content by partnering with Google to show ads alongside their videos. By providing this choice to content owners, Google is once again cleverly side-stepping any responsibility on their own part to identify and block videos that violate copyrights.

According to the company, “YouTube’s mission is to help the widest variety of people express themselves online.” If they can do that by providing the best user experience and keep the content producers happy at the same time, it can turn into a win-win situation for all concerned. “We’re carefully designing our new identification technologies so they do not impede the free and fast communication YouTube has enabled.” They add, “We think YouTube Video Identification will be a particularly useful and timely tool as we begin extending revenue-sharing and other opportunities to a wider audience.”

An official post on the Live Search Blog claims that Microsoft listened to feedback on the blog, analysed their search data and spoke to thousands of users in order to deliver a cutting edge search product. Their efforts were focused on reducing page load times, streamlining the look and feel, providing more high-interest content in the video, local, entertainment, shopping, and health verticals and relevance – improving the ranking algorithm, stop-word handling and auto-spell correction.

“With this update to Live Search, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to our 185 million consumers who use our service every month,” said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft. “With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time.”

Comparing the new Live Search with Ask.com’s brilliant new interface immediately brings to light how far behind Microsoft actually are:

Searching for the artist ‘Madonna’ on Live Search produces a page with a feature similar to the Google / Yahoo! OneBox. Searches for entertainers bring back a Celebrity xRank, up to 4 images and quick links to view videos, news and other snippets of relevant information. Clicking on the xRank links brings users to the following page:

Video search is a bit more impressive. Users can actually preview the results within the same window by simply moving the mouse over the image.

Generic product searches deliver a page with images of four products with average user ratings, the product names and price ranges below each item. Searches for specific products or brands result in a page with details such as user reviews at a glance, average user ratings, a product image, description and price range and a link to buy it on MSN Shopping.

Microsoft is open to feedback on the design of their new search results pages. Alongside each new feature a pair of links allows users to vote on whether they found it useful or not. The bottom of the page includes a link to provide feedback and search results that include semantic variations of the query include an option to search with only the exact query string.

Individual enhancements on the new Live Search might be very well thought out, but the experience does not yet give the effect of seamlessness that Google’s Universal Search or Ask.com currently give their users. Live Search still needs to master the ability to provide users a variety of relevant results within the page, rather than just the OneBox.

Viewer Demographics

31% of the viewers who stream content are young adults aged 18 to 34. 69% of their online video streaming occurs at least once a week. The surprising majority, 69% of online video viewers who responded to the survey were adults aged 35 and over. However, only 47% of them view streaming video more than once a week.
Over 95% of users stream video from their home computers. Only 4% view video at work, and 1% at school. This is significantly different from last years’ numbers and the percentage of users accessing social networking sites from work. This may be due to the inability to hear sound clips on the PC at work or while in school and increased awareness among employers who block video sites such as YouTube.

Popular Content Categories

The older demographic who now form the majority consumers of online video have boosted the popularity of news, movies and sports clips. Music videos are still the most popular category with young adults, but have fallen in overall popularity, as can be seen in the graph below:

The change in popularity of content categories could also be attributed to the greater variety of available content and increased user awareness of this content through ads on traditional media. For example, users find out about the availability of TV shows online through ads directing users to the shows micro-site on TV channel’s site at the end of the programme.

Online Video Activities

The most popular online video activity is forwarding a clip to a friend. Consumers who view more clips per week also tend to aid viral promotion by forwarding more videos to their friends. Much fewer consumers create video content to post online. Younger consumers tend to be more involved in both of these activities, especially in uploading videos, which is done by 15% of 18-34 year olds, but only 2% of users aged 35 and over, as can be seen in the graph below:

Video Advertising

The final part of the survey discussed advertising preferences. 94% of consumers indicated they would prefer to view video ads than to pay for content. However, 63% said they would prefer online ads to be shorter than TV ads. At present 35% abandon ads before completion.

As shown in the screenshot below, the video onebox has a sizeable presence over the organic search results. The OneBox features a photograph of the artist, links to the official artist website as well as albums, lyrics, photos and videos from Yahoo! Music. Users can listen to a selection of up to 3 tracks from the artist by clicking on the play button next to the track name, and it plays the song within the search results page itself.

Users can also click to view one of the 3 videos featured below the artist photograph. The video opens in a layer on the same page, without launching a new window, as shown in the screen capture below. When users close the video layer they get returned to the search results page, which remains darkened in the background while the video plays.

The new feature was first spotted by Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped. Interestingly, the new video onebox also provides a link in the bottom right of the box to the Yahoo! Audio search results for the artist, allowing Yahoo! to promote two services in one box.

Old-style video search results are still being shown in the UK. The same search, for artists Linkin Park, in the UK generated the results page shown below, with a much smaller OneBox result that allows users to click to play a video in a new window that essentially opens the Yahoo! Music page for that tune.

While this new feature is a marked improvement for Yahoo! search, it is not as sophisticated as Ask or Google’s universal search results format.

Digg the Blog, the official weblog of the highly popular social news sharing site announced the launch of their new homepage design this week. The redesigned includes the return of videos to the forefront, streamlined navigation, one-click burial of unpopular content and more customization.

The digg team also hint at the arrival of newer content such as images, which will have its own section on the site, alongside news, videos and podcasts. Digg Images is supposed to go live in October, followed by an improved comments system.

Returning videos to the digg homepage indicates the growing popularity of the usage of online video on all types of websites, above and beyond just the dedicated video sharing sites such as YouTube and DailyMotion.

According to Zachary Rodgers at the Clikz network, the new ad format has been in testing for several weeks. The new ad product consists of animated bars that obscure the bottom 20 percent of the video frame for a given clip. They initiate 15 seconds after the beginning of a clip, an interval YouTube selected because “it takes users 10 seconds to become acclimated to what they are watching,” according to Shiva Rajaraman, YouTube Product Manager.

YouTube has set a $20 CPM for InVideo ads. This includes the ad banner accompanied by a tiny in-player companion ad and an adjacent in-page unit. During the testing phase only a limited number of brands have been invited to advertise. They include Universal Studios, Twentieth Century Fox, BMW and about 15 others.

Ford Models, Warner Music Group and Roadrunner Records are some of the content producers invited to take part in InVideo during the test period. They will also receive a share of the revenues generated by InVideo Ads. The majority of content YouTube shared during a press briefing consisted of ads placed within music videos.

Interestingly, user 45n5 on YouTube posted a video showing the in-video ads back in the first week of July 2007.

Even though InVideo overlays are “80 percent transparent” and remain visible for approximately 10 seconds before shrinking to a small button that users can later click to view the marketing message again, the reaction from end users has been vehemntly negative.

Comments on videos featuring ads have ranged from “I’m not watching any YouTube videos that have ads in them.” to “We should go to other video sharing websites”.

However, this is just the initial reaction, and people are likely to learn to ignore these ads if they’re irrelevant, just like they currently ignore sponsored listings that aren’t relevant on the Google search results pages.