Do we need to #saveyoutube?

Ever since YouTube embarked on its ambitious plan to bring more TV-quality content on its site by giving content producers a reported $100 million in advances and rolling out an ambitious redesign, there has been talk whether this will hurt small-time producers. Some content creators have actually taken issue with the site’s new design. Others have alleged new algorithms rolled out this spring are hurting their views, and a few even started a #saveyoutube Twitter campaign this week.

For its part, YouTube has said that recent changes have overall been positive for creators. “Net daily subscriptions are up 50% since January and watch time has been increasing in the past 2 months,” the YouTube team wrote in a blog post in response to the #saveyoutube campaign a few days ago.

So when I caught up with DeFranco during a phone call this week, I wanted to know what he thought about the whole controversy: With YouTube becoming more professional, are people left behind? “I don’t think this is hurting people that aren’t part of it,” he told me with respect to the new channel initiative, and added: “Most of these troubles that people are seeing right now are normal YouTube troubles.” YouTube content creators always had to be flexible enough to adjust to changes on the site, he explained.

Time to found a new network

So is all well in YouTube land? Not exactly. “Smaller YouTubers need to evolve, because it is a very toxic world out there,” DeFranco told me. It’s hard for up-and-coming producers to get noticed at all, he said. And when they finally catch a lucky break and one of their videos goes viral, they’re bound to get offers of help from all the wrong places.

DeFranco is particularly critical of networks and third-party service providers that promise YouTube producers the big breakthrough but do not deliver. “You see all these people with their services, which for the most part take advantage (of content creators),” he complained.

He’s heard the tale of people being fed up with networks that tied them up with long-term contracts all too often – and has started to think about alternatives: “How do we bring up the next batch of YouTubers without hurting them? Without taking advantage of them?” The answer: Phil DeFranco is going to start his own network on YouTube.

Give artists an audience, and money

He didn’t share many details on how this network is going to look like, and instead only said that it would be fairer than many of the efforts that are out there already. But if you want to get an idea of its spirit, you may have to look no further than to a show that Sourcefed is scheduled to launch in two months.

The show will focus exclusively on music, art and other forms of creativity, with the goal of establishing direct connections between artists and their audience. One example: DeFranco’s team will capture the making of a mural via stop-motion animation, then turn it into a short clip and also sell prints of the artwork on YouTube itself. The idea is to give artists a big boost for their audience, but also offer them a chance to actually make money with their art.

In other words: DeFranco wants others to benefit from his massive audience as well. “We are in a really fortunate situation to fix things that are broken,” he told me.

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This new visual focus goes along with Google focusing more on social photo sharing – in fact, I wrote earlier this week that photos have become a kind of “secret weapon” in Google’s competition with Facebook and others. “We wanted to make sure that the content is the hero,” Google’s Bradley Horowitz said at the Google+ photographers conference in reference to the new app design this week, where he also called photos “the life-blood” of Google+.

Interesting about this visual refresh was that the company decided to roll it out on iOS first. I asked a company spokesperson today whether there are any significant differences between the Android and the OS app, and was told that the ability to start Hangouts is unique to the Android experience.

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These kinds of costly cease-and-desist campaings against file sharers aren’t uncommon in Germany; hundreds of thousands of Internet users have been targeted by music labels, porn studios and others with similar demands in recent years, netting rights holders millions. Unusual about this case is that Iron Sky is a crowdsourced and crowd-financed movie, produced by people who made names for themselves with Creative Commons-licensed content that could be freely downloaded and reshared.

Iron Sky is a science fiction comedy, depicting a world in which the Nazis fled to the moon at the end of World War 2. It’s director Timo Vuorensola and its visual effects producer Samuli Torssonen previously rose to fame when they released the Star Trek parody Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning in 2005. That movie was offered for free online and clocked three million downloads within three months. The filmmakers have also in the past  lambasted old media for their take on piracy. In a blog post from 2009, Vuorensola wrote: “Piracy in its current, most common form – the digital download – is not a crime.”

His current German distributor, Polyband, seems to disagree. The company has hired local law office Sasse & Partners, which has in the past sent out similar letters on behalf of German record companies, according to a local law blogger.

Iron Sky has been heavily relying on crowdsourcing for animation, modeling and other parts of the movie making process, and €1 million of the movie’s €7.5 million budget have been contributed by fans. However, the film makers are relying on traditional distributors to actually get the movie in the theaters, and that apparently has resulted in a number of problems.

Iron Sky’s British distributor initially intended to only show the movie in theaters for a single day and then immediately take it to DVD. This strategy was opposed by the film makers themselves, who wrote on their blog: “What they are doing is basically stabbing us in the back.” The duo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit threats in Germany, but one can imagine that they’re not too happy about threatening their fans with lawsuits either.

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FT.com took the step after negotiations about in-app subscriptions broke down over Apple’s demands to take a hefty cut of the subscription fees. “We felt that the terms that Apple were offering were detrimental… to our business,” explained Grimshaw. Asked whether he lost a big promotional opportunity by leaving the iTunes store, he replied: “I don’t need Apple to tell the world the Financial Times is here. We’ve been here for 120 years.” He added that iOS apps don’t seem to be working for publishers, as they’re not bringing in enough revenue. Said Grimshaw: “I’m not sure it’s all that it’s cracked up to be.”

Grimshaw also shared some experiences with taking FT.com behind a paywall, which has been largely a success for the publisher, with now 285,000 people paying for access to the site. He said the biggest challenge early on wasn’t to find the right price point as much as to find the right mindset within the company: “Publishers are used to being B2B operators. We didn’t know our customers.”

Grimshaw was joined on the panel by Piano Media CEO Tomas Bella, whose company is operating a joint-industry payment platform that gives paying customers access to paid content across a wide variety of sites. Piano started off in Slovakia, but wants to be in a total of five markets by the end of the year. Bella said that his company’s approach works particularly well for smaller publishers who don’t offer as much value to their readers as a big entity like FT.com. “The system was created to lower the barrier to payment,” he explained.

Keep up with the discussion at paidContent 2012 via livestream (registration required) and #pc2012 on Twitter.

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DISHWorld, as the service is called, will offer a number of international packages that bundle Brazilian, Arabic, Hindi and other foreign language content. Bundles go for as little as $5 a month, and all the way up to $44.99, but customers have to mix and match bundles to spend at least $19.99 per month.

Some of the bundles simply offer foreign news stations, while others include movie channels and music TV. Among the networks included in the various bundles are Sony Entertainment Television India, Al Jazeera, Willow Cricket and BBC Arabic. Viewers have access to live TV and can catch up on any of the shows that aired within the last 48 hours on any of the networks they subscribe to.

A press release also hinted at additional offerings targeting other expats in the future, and it suggested that Roku decided against becoming its own operator, partnering with Dish instead:

“Additionally, Roku selected Dish to manage the launch and expansion of future foreign language channels and content on the Roku platform.”

The partnership is a big deal for Roku; the set-top-box has been offering subscription access to a number of foreign channels and packages for some time. But in most cases, these are sold separately by smaller companies, some of which reside outside of the U.S.. Having Dish as a trusted brand to manage and promote these kinds of subscriptions could give Roku a big boost.

But it’s also a remarkable deal for the pay TV world in general. Over the last few months, there have been many rumors that one of the big pay TV providers would eventually decide to go online and target Internet users located outside of its local market with streaming-only packages — an idea that folks in the industry have been dubbing a virtual cable company. Today, this kind of virtual pay TV future became reality — for folks speaking Hindi, Arabic or any other of the targeted languages, anyway.

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Check out my entire video interview with Trey Ratcliff, or continue reading below:

Ratcliff isn’t alone in his use of Google+. Photographers in particular have embraced the social network with enthusiasm, making use of the way it presents photos within news feeds and the integrated lightbox that makes it easy to browse entire galleries. This has led to not only grassroots-organized Google+ photo walks — meet ups of like-minded photographers who go out in the field and take photos together — but also a Google+ specific conference that is bringing amateur and professional photographers to San Francisco this week. “It’s exploded,” said conference organizer Scott Kelby about photographs flocking to Google+. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Google has obviously been paying attention to this. You only have to look to the recent revamp of the Google+ iOS app, which now puts a much bigger emphasis on photos, to see where things are going for Google+.

Flickr, MIT and Google+

Trey Ratcliff’s photos on Google+

One of the reasons photos are starting to play such a big role for Google+ is Bradley Horowitz, the VP of product management for the social network. Horowitz studied image recognition at the MIT Media Lab and built a visual-information retrieval company. He went on to work for Yahoo, where he met Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr. The duo challenged his views on image processing when he told them about the problems computers have in making sense of photos, Horowitz recalled during a keynote on Tuesday morning, “They looked at me quizzically and said, ‘Why don’t you just ask people?’”

Horowitz described this simple question as a turning point for his career. Looking at the way Flickr used tags and other social features to organize information, he realized social engineering was much more capable than algorithms alone. “This field of social computing really lit up inside of me,” he said. Horowitz eventually oversaw the acquisition of Flickr through Yahoo, and at the time told me in a conversation that his goal was the Flickrization of the entire company.

Yahoo eventually decided to go down another route, and lately, people have been asking themselves how the company managed to kill Flickr – if not the site, then definitely the spirit of the service. Now it looks like Horowitz wants to bring some of that spirit to Google.

Google’s answer to Instagram

Of course, others are trying to leverage the inherent social nature of photography as well. Facebook’s users are uploading 250 million photos every day to the site, and yet it decided to spend a billion dollars for social photo-sharing service Instagram. Om made a good argument recently that this acquisition was all about mobile photo sharing, something that Facebook hasn’t been as good at.

And Google+? It has built photo sharing into the core of its mobile apps, allowing users to automatically upload each and every photo to the cloud. Presenting these photos better on your mobile, as it has done with the iOS app, is an important first step. But Horowitz already hinted at the next step on Tuesday: photo processing. “Today, the tools are too segmented,” he said, summing up the discrepancy between an Instagram filter and a full-blown app like Photoshop. “Either they are toys, or they are for the pro.” Google+ has some rudimentary online editing for photos built in, but Horowitz hinted at the possibility of extending these much further.

Making sense of all of your sensors

Another challenge is making sense of all the photos that are uploaded every day. The instant upload functionality of the Google+ mobile apps makes no distinction between your best shots and those your phone unknowingly takes in your pocket. Horowitz said that eventually, services should take into account all kinds of sensual information to figure out which photos matter most — including the fact that our heart jumps when we shoot something that really touches us. “I’m constantly giving signal that is lost, that could be captured to find those moments that are meaningful, that are special,” he said.

Horowitz prefaced these remarks by saying that this isn’t about concrete Google projects but about ways he would personally improve photography. But then he assured his audience, “We have the tools at Google to deal with this information overload problem.”

Cameras that measure your heart rate to tell Google which photos matter — that may sound like science fiction. But so did an idea like Google’s Project Glass just a few months ago. If anything it’s clear Google is taking photos very seriously. And photographers like Ratcliff embracing Google+ could be a first sign of this strategy starting to pay off.

Image of SLR camera courtesy of Flickr user BotheredByBees

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The deal, which was announced Tuesday morning, gives The Echo Nest access to discography information about more than two million artists and 430,000 record labels. Many of these hail from the world of electronic music, but Discogs also lists rare and unreleased singles from stars like Kanye West and obscure remixes of classics from bands like Depeche Mode.

Discogs users have in many cases been using the site to catalog their entire collections, or to put part of those collections up for sale. And since every little difference matters to a collector, you’ll often find dozens of different versions of a single album. It basically doesn’t get more detailed than this. “Discogs is an amazing resource that has been around for a long time,” The Echo Nest’s co-founder and CTO Brian Whitman told me during a phone call this week.

The Echo Nest uses this data to improve listening recommendations it delivers to Spotify, iHeartradio, MOG, Vevo and others. The company has been aggregating data from music blogs for around seven years now, and later added Facebook, Twitter and other sources to the mix. The Echo Nest has more than five billion unique data points, Whitman told me, and has essentially become the big data resource of record for the digital music space. Around 340 applications use Echo Nest data to help their customers find new music and learn more about the music they’re listening to.

Spotify, for example, uses data from The Echo Nest to power its Spotify radio, a feature the music service launched in March to compete with non-interactive offerings like Pandora. Speaking of Pandora: The service has a very different take on music recommendation, relying heavily on experts to classify tunes based on its own music DNA taxonomy. “It’s great what they do, but they can’t scale,” argued Whitman, adding that Pandora only offers around a million tracks. The Echo Nest on the other hand has information about more than 30 million tunes.

So what’s next for The Echo Nest? Whitman told me that the company’s next big challenge is social. Using Facebook and Twitter to gauge which records people are talking about is one thing; utilizing all this data to deliver personalized music recommendations is a whole different challenge.

Of course, once you have figured out to make sense of all that data, you could just as well use it to recommend movies, books or video games – but Whitman said his team of 40 wasn’t interested in expanding its focus at all. “We are a music company, we are never gonna make movies,” he said.

The Echo Nest is based in Somerville, MA and has raised a total of $8.3 million in funding.

Image courtesy of Flickr user BGSU University Libraries.

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A customized version of the Plex Google TV app surfaced on Google Play a few days ago, and the Plex team added a few words of explanation after some of its users were confused by the fact that this new app isn’t compatible with any of the Google TV devices currently available. The new app description now reads:

“This application is ONLY available for download on late model 2012 Sony Internet TVs.”

The Plex team confirmed that this app will in fact be pre-installed on Sony’s next-generation Google TV devices when asked about the listing, but wasn’t available to provide any further details at this point. Sony announced at CES that it will ship a Blu-ray player and a set-top-box with Google TV on board this summer in the U.S. and several other countries. New reports indicate that the devices will go on sale in Europe in September.

Getting selected as a pre-installed app on Sony’s new devices is a big deal for Plex, which currently has between 10,000 and 50,000 active Google TV users, according to publicly available Google Play data. But Sony should benefit from this partnership as well. Most notably, Plex allows Sony to add media sharing to its devices, making it possible for Sony Google TV owners to access each others’ photo collections as well as share music and videos through the MyPlex service.

Plex has been on a tear ever since early last year, rolling out apps for the iPad and various Android-based tablets as well as Google TV and the Roku. Recently, it also added support for DLNA devices. Check out our video reviewing Plex on Roku below:

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The amount of video uploaded to YouTube has increased steadily over the last few years. In early 2007, users were uploading six hours of video every minute to the site. By January of 2009, that number had grown to 15 hours. By March of 2010, the total reached 24 hours, only to go up to 35 hours by November of that year.

YouTube officially launched in May of 2005, but the first video was actually uploaded on April 23 2005. It shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, and is still available on the site. Check it out below:

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Mahemoff, who is a self-professed podcast fan, told me via email that his biggest motivation was the high barrier of entry for prospective listeners. “Getting into podcasts has been too hard for too long,” he said. Player.fm has only been up for a few days, but early observations led him to believe that most people would rather have an option to play individual podcasts on demand than subscribe to them via iTunes or any other podcast software. That’s why Player.fm puts a big emphasis on cross-platform web playback. From the site’s FAQ:

Player FM runs nicely in most modern smartphone and tablet browsers, including iPhones, iPads, and many Android devices… In most cases, you can switch to another app and the track will keep playing. On iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, you can also control playback on the lock-screen, just like with iTunes.

Player FM currently allows users to browse a curated directory and listen as well as subscribe to various podcasts. Each user’s subscriptions are aggregated in one single, personal feed, which can easily be shared with others as well. Mahemoff told me that he wants to add additional social features as well as the ability to review and curate podcasts. “Knowing what to listen to has always been a barrier with podcasts and I hope Player FM can improve the situation,” he told me.

But making podcasts more accessible is only one side of the coin for Mahemoff. He also wants to to help enhance the podcast standards to add options for micropayments through services like Flattr. This would make it possible for listeners to tip a podcaster with the click of a button.

Speaking of revenue: Mahemoff is also evaluating options to bring advertising to Player FM, but he believes that ad formats haven’t adapted to the world of podcasting yet. “In podcasts, everyone hears the same ad, no matter who they are or where they’re listening, and publishers cannot track effectiveness,” he told me, adding: “There’s a real opportunity to make ads more useful to listeners and more efficient for publishers. And if it supports more spoken-word content, that’s good by me!”

Image courtesy of Flickr user  zigazou76.

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