IPL comes to You Tube

This week seems to be verging on a watershed for sports coverage.

Firstly we get rumour that Sky are going to be forced to lower their charges for sporting events to other broadcasters.

Now today You Tube that they are to show Indian Premier League cricket.

Coverage is due to start in March and Google will split revenues from the sponsorship rights with the IPL.

Whether this comes to the UK is still in the open.Setanta held the TV and internet rights to the competition in the UK .

You Tube footage of the Haitian earthquake

Here is some raw footage from You Tube on the Haitan earthquake

You Tube to the fore as Iran burns

The latest demonstrations in Iran are resulting in deaths tragically.

For some of the best round ups of the latest using social media especially You Tube-I heartily recommend Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish which is trawling the site for the latest You Tube videos and have been live blogging since Saturday night



In this one,a protestor raises a black helmet, a few protestors hold what appear to be photos of a bloody victim, and a protestor waves a green flag of victory.

In this video clip,as Khatami speaks, the thugs from the coup regime surround the meeting hall and chaos erupts.



And in this one,more clashes from the streets yesterday

Social media to the fore in St Peter's Basilica

Social media once again to the fore this Xmas morning as You Tube provides some raw footage of the Pope as aawoman jumped the barriers in St. Peter's Basilica and knocked down Pope Benedict XVI as he walked down the main aisle to begin Christmas Eve Mass on Thursday.

Boyle tops the You Tube charts

I really am not sure what this says about our society but Susan Boyle was the most popular You Tube video of 2009.

With over 120 million views her Britain's got talent audition finished a full 80 million above the second most watched,an American kid reflecting on his visit to the dentist.

As they said after the audition..."you weren't expecting that where you?

Source-Media Guardian

A novel use for You Tube

HM customs and excise plan to use the video sharing site to fight illegal overseas bank deposits.

According to New Age media,it will produce a video

to urge savers to declare their offshore accounts or face prosecution.In a two-minute video titled New Disclosure Opportunity which launches todaym Dave Hartnett, the government body’s Permanent Secretary for Tax, calls for full disclosure of offshore accounts and an end to “fiddling your tax”.

You Tube now has the chance to become a VOD destination

Great news that channel 4 have announced that they have signed a deal with You Tube to to make hundreds of its homegrown shows available on demand.

The Independent reports that

the broadcaster's original, commissioned programmes will be added to the site in the coming months, plus 3,000 hours of archived shows.
Programmes will be seen in full and free-of-charge, but the service will be supported by advertising.

The deal now means that as Paid Content say

So YouTube now has one of the four key UK broadcasters’ names to wave in negotiations with the other four, a real platform from which to negotiate for content that would make it a real TV VOD destination.

New software to help You Tube build a revenue model

YouTube appears to be mastering the art of turning video piracy into revenue for itself and its partners. reports the New York Times this morning.

The big issue of how to turn this very successful enterprise into a profit making concern has baffled business minds for a long time.

With companies starting to request that You Tube take down the unauthorised clips from its site,it looked as thouigh nearly a third of its content could be lost.

However a deal

that will make it easier for many media companies to upload new content into YouTube’s reference library of copyrighted audio and video

is set to be announced

YouTube said it reached agreements with Harmonic, Telestream and Digital Rapids, three little-known companies whose software helps to convert video and audio content into the digital files that allow media companies to transmit shows on broadcast television, cable, the Internet and mobile phones.
By tapping directly into the systems of these companies, YouTube said it would be able to identify clips almost immediately after a program or live event. The system will also reduce the number of steps media companies must take to get their reference files, often called fingerprints, into YouTube’s system.

Why you couldn't charge for Susan Boyle

Staying on the subject of paying for online content,Jon Bernstein writing at journalism.co.uk looks at the problem of micropayments at ITV.

Their recent experience of the multi viewed Susan Boyle which whisked its way around the globe on You Tube,prompted Michael Grade to say that

“We are working on it and watch this space, but we’re all going to crack it, either when the advertising market recovers or a combination of advertising and micropayments which is 50p a time or 25p a time to watch it.
We may move in time, in the medium term, to micropayments, the same way you pay for stuff on your mobile phone. I think we can make that work extremely well.”

However Bernstein argues that it simply won't work describing the Boyle experience as persihable goods that people won't pay for

Quality drama may have a shelf-life and an audience willing to pay for it, but a water cooler moment from reality TV? Not likely.

and that

Micropayments only work if you control distribution which of course using the Susan Boyle analogy,you wouldn't

Now the Morman's accept You Tube

Maybe You Tube's contribution to the information revolution has finally reached its peak when the Mormon's embrace it.

This report from the Utah Herald

BYU students now have access to Dramatic Chipmunk, Laughing Baby, Chocolate Rain and all the rest of YouTube.
YouTube has long been blocked on campus because administrators felt it contained too much questionable content. With the change, however, BYU will tacitly accept the distribution, on its own network, of all the YouTube content it once felt was inappropriate.

adding that

The policy was reconsidered in part because of professors who want access to YouTube in classrooms.
"The overwhelming factor was the educational information and materials that are increasingly becoming available," Jenkins said. "I think there's no other way but to provide all of it."

Ht-Huffington Post

A responsibilty on You Tube over Iran

I picked up Jeff Jarvis' tweet on the subject of Iran

YouTube knows which videos come from Iran. It should be curating & featuring those videos. It has a news responsibility in the ecosystem

which he further explains in another tweet

@ascheurer Responsibility meaning what YouTube can - by its position and knowledge - add.

But does that responsibility extend to getting the message correct.That in itself is an interesting concept.Does Twitter have that same responsibilty?

A problem for You Tube

A rather damming take on You Tube from Benjamin Wayne over at advertising age who reflects upon its future prospects.

I think that the real problem is that YouTube is taking all the stuff that's good that they can monetize, and they've already monetized that stuff. If you look at the way in which content is growing on YouTube, the user-generated novelty content and the copyright-infringement stuff is growing much faster than the content they can monetize. So whereas, with most businesses you'd say, well, over time it gets better, I think YouTube has a business where over time it continues to get worse, because the proportion of content you can't monetize continues to outstrip the portion of content that you can.

ht-Adrian Monck

Why advertiser are only interested in half of You Tube

More than half the users of sites such as You Tube are considered too poor to be of interest to potential advertisers.

Owen Thomas explores the economics of the global village over at Gawker and says that

The real problem is that it's not worth it for companies to build datacenters close to their overseas users — so they leave them with balky videos and slow-loading photographs. MySpace is even trialing a low-bandwidth version of its profile pages in India.

However according to Owen the real irony is

The same financiers who are balking at paying for third-worlders' bandwidth bills encouraged this international growth. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch famously pushed Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's recently fired CEO, to expand the site to 15 countries a year after buying it. Venture capitalists encouraged startups to grow all over the world, lest overseas copycats get entrenched in their home markets.

The power of old media is waning. But it is still the only way for making a star.

We are hearing a lot about how the power of You Tube and the Web has got Susan Boyle inot the position where she has seemingly taken over on both sides of the Atlantic.

Is this the power of the Web?

Not necessarily says Chris Dillow writing at his Stumbling and Mumbling Blog

Ms Boyle has become an overnight star in the US - something not achieved by many British singers even with huge record company backing. It’s tempting to say this shows the power of the web; that Youtube clip has gone viral.
But in another sense, it shows the impotence of the web. The web did sweet FA to bring Susan Boyle to initial public attention. Instead, she got her break through very old media - a TV talent show. and adds that

the power of old media is waning. But it is still the only way for making a star.

The indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable-will You Tube survive?

Apparently You Tube is doomed.

Benjamin Wayne writing at the Silicon Valley insider believes that it

has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise; and Icarus-like, wings melting; is spiraling back to earth.

The buisness model he argues that would see more and better rates for online advertising is flawed whereas

the videos YouTube is already monetizing represent the best content available, with diminishing returns as they reach deeper and deeper into a repository rife with copyright violation, the indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable

And this is the main problem summed up

far more user-generated content than professional content makes its way onto the site, which means that while costs grow linearly, non-monetizable content is growing geometrically as compared against the monetizable content that YouTube really wants and needs to survive. This means less and less of YouTube’s library will be revenue-contributing, while the costs of delivering that library will continue to grow.

Why Chinese censorship can backfire

China is once again meddling in the internet firewall this time blocking You Tube.

The measure follows the release of video footage of the aftermath of last years riots in Lhasa which shows dissidents being handcuffed and clubbed by Chinese police.

The measure appears to be backfiring on the Chinese.

As Austin Ramzy writes at Swampland,whilst watching the video

I was uncertain about the accuracy of the images. While the initial beatings seemed real, it was hard to make a call about hospital footage of the man with the horrific wounds. How many people, after all, know what rotted flesh looks like?

So all the Chinese have done is given the footage greater publicity than it may have merited.

posts about what sites are blocked or unblocked can attract huge amounts of web traffic.

You can access the video here-make up your own mind

You Tube to provide Olympic coverage

Via Huffington Post

Great news that YOU Tube is to provide coverage of the Olympics to countries across Africa,the Middle East and Asia which have not got an exclusive online digital providers

The content can be found on www.youtube.com/beijing2008

If you are in the UK where obviously the Beeb have got that coverage then you will find the channel blocked

Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), a wholly owned subsidiary of the IOC, will produce regularly updated Olympic content. The package will include highlights, news and daily clips of the competitions, available throughout the 17-day period of the Games.

Video shows attempts of Doctors to save lives in a power blackout

Global voices tells the story of the harrowing latest use of video.

Two doctors in the Al Matrya teaching hospital in Egypt shot video which has been posted to You Tube of their unsuccessful battles to keep 4 babies and two adults alive when a power blackout.

This is an extract from their blog

Last week Al Matrya educational hospital had seen a tragedy on the 22nd of May 2008 when a power outage took place , yes Power 8 outage took place for two hours leading to the dramatic death of 4 babies in the neonatal intensive care.
You must know before this outage on the 22nd of May , the hospital witnessed an another outage from three weeks before for 5 minutes and you must know that the back up electric generators did not work !!
More important you must know that the administration of that hospital in Cairo that follows the ministry of health knew that. You must know that the administration of that hospital faked the time of death of those infants three hours before the outage so it would escape the legal accountability !!

More evidence of the influence of new media on American politics

Is political debate catching on amongst youngsters using new media,at least in the States?


The New York Times reports that a speach given by Barack Obama.his

videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address


,ignored by most of the mainstream press has according to the paper

on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.

In essence says the article

they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one

The power of You Tube and Barack Obama

Barack Obama's speech last week in Philadelphia has attracted over 3.2m viewers and 6000 comments.

Two things strike a chord.First of all,the sheer power of the medium,three million people watch a 45min political speech.

Secondly the power of the man and the message.Maybe politics is changing in America.