If you've logged into YouTube today, you may have noticed that the embedded video player looks wider. That's because it is. In a blog post, YouTube announced it has widened the width of the page to 960 pixels in response to customer feedback, but that might only be part of the story.According to reports, YouTube is looking to offer feature films by as early as next month and has already convinced one major Hollywood movie studio to jump on board. By upgrading its video player to support widescreen content, YouTube puts itself in a better position to pitch its service...
Kyte, the popular video streaming platform, announced a new product tonight: branded mobile web destinations. These new sites will allow brands to easily create and monetize their own video-enabled sites for mobile devices. As we reported earlier this year, Kyte is slowly moving away from user-generated content and is focusing on large brands and content producers instead. Among the launch partners for the new branded mobile sites are two Interscope recording artists: Lady Gaga and the All-American Rejects. Sponsor These new brand-specific mobile sites are now also available for all of Kyte's partners. One of the most interesting aspects of...
According to a report by Wired's Meghan Keane, YouTube is testing stereo sound as a default option for videos and is also offering very high quality HD versions of a small selection of clips. We weren't able to find a lot of videos that were encoded in the 720p HD format, but it is important to note that this is different from the 'watch in high quality' option YouTube already offers, which only features a resolution of 480x360 and which doesn't look half as good as the 720p option. It would not surprise us if Google was adding these options...
Mininova, one of the leading BitTorrent sites, is testing a new technology which allows content producers to include subtle ads in their videos. By providing more opportunities to monetize free content, Mininova hopes to attract even more premium publishers. The new advertising technology, Hyper MP, inserts small clickable ads into the corner of the screen. Aside from the ads, there are no limitations to the video content. Hyper MP is currently being tested on an amateur feature length comedy titled “Battle Therapy”. Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that Hyper MP is a great alternative to pre and post-roll ads. If...
As Internet media continues to emerge as a source that more and more people turn to for up to the minute news, the pressure for larger media outlets to compete with smaller content producers like bloggers, falls squarely on the shoulders of journalists. When reporting that traditionally relies on well researched facts fails to keep pace with the arena of opinion that makes up much of the online space, necessity sometimes means that the boundary separating the two be obscured. This dilemma not only forces journalists to rethink these rules, but requires that the audience be more aware of...
Barack Obama beat John McCain by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a hearty margin in the electoral college. But what about the online video vote, where it all comes down to the number of views? There the margin was somewhere in between, with Obama pulling in nearly 900 million views compared to McCain’s 550 million. That’s according to divinity Metrics, a video analytics startup that measures the spread of videos for marketers and content producers. CEO Rajeev Kadam noted that Obama’s video view lead was built up, in part, by the long Democratic primary race, where he...
No, seriously, you don’t. Let me tell you a story. I was wandering the halls of Friendfeed (think a giant forum of Social Media geeks) and I came across an interesting post. Someone really wanted to get into blogging, but they couldn’t come up with an idea that could hold their interest for long enough to do it. It’s a story I hear a lot — the writer can come up with about ten points that they need to write about, ten perfect posts that they want to see etched onto the Internet forever, but once those posts are...
A few months ago, we wrote about Meebo's attempts at monetizing its service through advertising. At that time, Meebo was looking into interactive ads like quizzes and polls, as well as long-form video. Today, Meebo's CEO and co-founder Seth Sternberg wrote a bit more about the company's experience in bringing advertising to Meebo and its efforts to implement interesting ads without alienating its users. Sponsor VideoEgg It does look like Meebo is indeed trying to implement some of its earlier ideas about what advertising on the site would look like. Meebo already features a number of ads on its site...
Google is in the content production business. Those of us that sit on our duff and ponder important matters such as these had generally already concluded that, but when I mentioned this as a creeping factor we should all keep on our radars when the Google Knol launched, a lot of the response in the blogosphere used rebuttals like “so what?” and “you’re crazy!”. The fact is that the reality of Google no longer being in the business of simply monetizing and organizing the world’s information is here now, and we’re going to need to start thinking in terms...
