YouTube Brings Movie Rentals To the UK.

YouTube Movie Rentals http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
YouTube, following USA and Canada, now has brought the movie rental service to the UK. Already popular, Youtube movies now features over a thousand feature films and keeps on growing.
YouTube signed deals with Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Universal and Lionsgate among others and UK Broadcasters also make their broadcasts, programs available on Youtube.
Youtube.com/movies

Google Cloud Making It Greener, GMail, YouTube Is Keeping Our World Cooler.

Google has over the years has helped more than 4 Million business to bring their enterprise email to GMail, otherwise cloudify their email services. Just taking these business email services to account, after a bit of simple computing, it is evident that small business are wasting much more energy than necessary by hosting own email.
Smaller the business, higher the energy (KWh per user) spent on hosting the own email servers. These could go high as 175KWh or more. If the business decided to host the email with GMail (with their own domain name etc) this energy usage can drop drastically, to less than 2.2 KWh per user.
While large business with about 10,000 users could bring down the energy usage (7.6 KWh per user) it is still more than what GMail uses.
Google has published a paper, Google’s Green Computing:Efficiency at Scale (PDF), that explains the energy saving using the GMail cloud services.
Just to compare, if you are delivering videos over the sneaker net;

You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.

Our small company, with less than 10 users, used to host our own email server(s) but now all our email is is hosted with GMail. In addition to direct energy saving, we are saving much more energy spent on maintaining the servers and on top of it, energy and time spent on SPAM and Virus protection, DOS protection, and script kiddies handling among other things. The only servers that we run today are our DNS servers (two tiny little plugcomputer). Even those could go away, if Google can provide us with DNS services!

Gmail: It’s cooler in the cloud - Official Gmail Blog
also on Green Blog

Youtube, VEVO Lead And Facebook Becomes #3 Video Site In The USA.

Youtube, VEVO Lead Facebook In Video viewership http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in July with 158.1 million unique viewers, while VEVO ranked second with 62.1 million.

Boasted by 51.5 membership, Facebook has become the the third most popular video site in USA, according to Comscore. The social network surpassed Yahoo, Viacom and Microsoft to become the third largest video site in terms of unique viewers.

July also made other records, like Total viewing sessions, which reached all-time high, nearly 6.9 billion. Google was in the forefront again with Google Sites crossing the 3 billion mark to account for more than 40 percent of all viewing sessions online.

The average viewer, you and me, enjoyed 18.5 hours of online video during July, with 5.9 hours on Google Sites and 3.4 hours at Hulu streaming down content to become the top two providers.

2011 Copa America Tournament Live On You Tube!

2011 Copa America Tournament http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
If you are a soccer fan, I am sure you are interested in Copa America, which comes around every four years, just like the world cup. Usually the Copa America is streamed to about 50 countries but now, thanks to YouTube, the whole world will be able to experience the tournament live.

"Streamed to more than 50 countries around the world, the 2011 Copa America - the South American national soccer tournament that comes around every 4 years - will be broadcast live from Argentina on YouTube, July 1 - 24. Arguably the most important global sporting event of the year, the 2011 Copa will feature the 10 South American national teams and two guest teams, Mexico and Costa Rica, battling for continental soccer supremacy."

youtube.com/copaamerica,

Youtube Live Streaming Under Test

I have seen a few a few Live events on Youtube like "Hope for Haiti Now" in January this year and President Obama's Address to Congress last year.
I was not unhappy watching both the events and I got what I wanted. There may have been more but above are the ones I remember.
But Youtube is about to change all that, in what seems to be a forerunner to an upcoming feature, it has entered into a new testing stage. Today and tomorrow, YouTube live streaming will be testing starting at 8:00 a.m. PT, we will begin a limited trial of a new live streaming platform in conjunction with four of our partners: Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood. (You can try these and more from the above control panel)

This new platform integrates live streaming directly into YouTube channels; all broadcasters need is a webcam or external USB/FireWire camera. Included in the test is a “Live Comments” module which lets you engage with the broadcaster and the broader YouTube community." said Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, and Christopher Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager

YouTube Blog: Testing, testing...YouTube begins trial of new live streaming platform

Citizen Journalism At Work!The YouTube News Feed!

I was used to wait for the news hour to catch the news, in the mornings and in the evenings. Then I turned to sources like Google News, NYT Online and as such to feed my news needs. I was happy because I could catch up with the news from anywhere.
Yet there was something missing. One can read news as much as one wants but it is never the same as seeing the news.
Well here comes the solution, CitizenTube, the YouTube team will be working with the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to track news as it breaks on YouTube. This will be a stream of breaking news from YouTube, uploaded by everyone from every walks of life.
The feed is on CitizenTube, and the YouTube team actually invites you to join in feeding the feed, become a Citizen Journalist:

if you’ve uploaded breaking news videos, please tweet them to us (@citizentube), and include as much context as you’re able to give. And we’d love to hear your feedback about this project in the comments sections of CitizenTube. Our goal with this news feed is to learn more about the news ecosystem on YouTube -- and who better to teach us than people like you.

YouTube Blog: The YouTube News Feed: What’s happening now?

Share Youtube Videos On Blogger And Google Buzz, easily

Share Youtube Videos On Blogger And Google Buzz http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
Youtube has made some sitewide changes and now they have added Blogger and Google Buzz to the Share button.
Once you press the share button, you will see an offering like in the image above and in case of blooger, selecting Blogger will automatically create a new post with the video. Of course you need to be logged in to the Blogger. Google Buzz is not much different.

Communicating Tool Of Our Era, YouTube ANd You Feed 140,000 Children School Lunch.

When I saw the "Can a Billion Views feed Billion People", I did not think, it could. But in anycase, our family sent a few dollars in that direction, because due to our nature of travelling the world, and our own country, we have seen what hunger could do and does.
It is so pathetic that we let 1 billion fellow human beings live with hunger.
But I am happy to see that we live among people who donated enough to feed 140,000 school through United Nations World Food Program. But please do not stop here, we need a better solution and some of you good people will think of one.

It is heartening to see the YouTube community step up and help. We often forget about the billion people who go to bed hungry. If every web user does a little, we can achieve a lot. Said Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski, WFP's Head of Online Communications.

YouTube Blog: Thanks YouTube! 140,000 Children Have Lunch Because of You

Billion Views A Day On YouTube

There are many a communications mediums that we all touch and use everyday.
I have been let me say forced on to youtube to watch videos, real technical information posted by my peers and colleagues. Yes I also watch other videos as well but that is on iPhone, when I am really bored, which does not happen very often.
Yet people from all works of life find reasons to visit YouTube and view videos they like love or made.
Even though I did not understand the value proposition, when Google acquired YouTube, now I really get the picture.
It is a billion opportunities to influance a billion people, a day!
Really super work YouTube, Congratulations.
YouTube Blog: Y,000,000,000uTube  snapvoip.blogspot.com/

President Obama's Address to Congress And The Nation, Live on YouTube Today

I remember early days of YouTube and at that time never thought it will come to be the force it is today.
But the long road have paved many a paths and today we will see President Obama's Address to Congress live at 8:00PM (ET) today. The President will present the health care reform plan.
So tune into the While House channel, whatever the means, mobile or regular computer.

YouTube RealTime, Virally Social Video Watching

YouTube RealTime
TechCrunch is reporting about "YouTube RealTime" which is said to allow users to see which of their friends are currently online, the videos they’re watching, and comments they’ve left. Updates will be shown in a persistent toolbar, which means that users will be able to see them no matter where they are on the site.
Ok time to leave friendsfeed, opps got to wait a while, this is being tested on limited basis.
TechCrunch

Tags: YouTube RealTime, youtube, friendsfeed

Twitter YouTube And Many More Improvements.

Youtube on twitter
Like everyone and everything else, now you can twit your youtube and shear them via twitter. But I think I like the other changes more.
Specially the YouTube EDU which is a volunteer project by youtubers who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities. I really think it is a great idea.
* Upload Progress Bar: an upload progress bar that lets you know the status of your upload.

* Simpler HD Parameter: (HD), and a URL parameter (hd=1) for sharing HD links.

* Tweet Tweet: yes as we said share

* Mobile Improvements: mobile landing page, better upload flow from phone to YT.
And a whole lot more. You can read about them on the YT Blog

Tags: youtube, twitter, mobile computing

Gmail Labs Add YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and Yelp previews

http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
Gmail Labs has a few preview features added to GMail. They are YouTube videos, Picasa images, Flickr images, and Yelp reviews. You can preview all the above in your Gmail before opening up the picture or the video.
I noticed that Flickr, a competing photo service to Picasa lying next to each other. I think it is clever thinking in the part og GMail team. But if you think you have something that GMail should preview, follow the link below to inform GMail crew.

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and Yelp previews

Tags: Gmail Labs, youtube, Picasa, Flickr, yelp