Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’
Stacey Higginbotham
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Thursday, June 18, 2009 |
7:33 AM PT |
The protests in Iran that have come in the wake of the country’s June 13 election results, which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, have showcased the rise of social media like Twitter, Facebook and even cell phone video taken in the streets and uploaded onto YouTube. Arbor Networks, a company that provides security and deep packet inspection equipment to ISPs, has taken a look at the implications of the conflict — not at the social media level, but at the packet level — and found that Iran’s web censorship is different from those of other regimes.
Whiles some governments block certain web sites with a heavy hand or cut off web access entirely, Iran has taken a far more subtle approach. The state-owned Data Communication Company of Iran (or DCI), which acts as the gateway for all Internet traffic entering or leaving the country, has slowed web access down to a crawl. The assumption is that DCI dialed back the bandwidth in order to better inspect which content and packets needed to be censored. Instead of viewing the packets through a fire hose, they turned the pipe into a garden hose so that equipment can sift through the packets and let legitimate traffic through. Continue »
Stacey Higginbotham
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Thursday, June 11, 2009 |
7:39 AM PT |
BT, the largest broadband provider in the UK, has said it plans to charge video content providers for the amount of bandwidth they consume on BT’s network, according to a story in Thursday’s Financial Times. The paper quotes John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer business, saying, “We can’t give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect.”
BT last week was caught throttling connections to the BBC iPlayer to less than 1 megabyte per second between the hours of 5:00 p.m. and midnight for subscribers of its 8 Mbps service. That’s permitted under its terms of service, but it looks like BT wants more — from content providers like YouTube or Hulu. I don’t blame it. In any competitive market, subscribers would flee such prohibitive limits once they realized what was happening, leaving BT with lowered revenue. It would need to make that up somehow. Continue »
Dan Rayburn
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Friday, May 29, 2009 |
12:01 AM PT |
Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen a lot of new content offerings announced by companies like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube as they look to directly target the living room via entertainment devices. Indeed, the adoption rate of hardware devices like the Xbox 360, PS3, TiVo, Roku, VUDU, Apple TV and broadband-enabled Blu-ray players and TV sets will be crucial in determining if content owners can make money delivering video to the TV.
But despite all these new offerings, that content still only reaches a few million customers, a number largely unchanged from this time last year. Such low adoption rates in the face of so much effort leads me to think that while the market of delivering content to the TV will grow, it is unlikely to do so at the rate that many in this industry would like to believe. In fact I don’t think we’ll see these devices having a combined impact in any measurable way for at least another 3-4 years.
Here is a breakdown on the number of devices on the market and some data on the volume of content being consumed on them: Continue »
Chris Albrecht
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Friday, May 15, 2009 |
12:13 PM PT |
Googlers probably can’t wait for this week to end. After a rash of problems with search, GMail and Blogger — now YouTube has gone on the fritz (Update: YouTube search is back up and working). What’s got to smart even worse is that the problem is just with YouTube’s search; videos have so far been playing just fine. A YouTube spokesperson contacted NewTeeVee, writing: “We’re aware some users are having trouble searching on YouTube. We’re looking into it, and we’ll update everyone soon.” As always, the Twitterati are all over the issue, tweeting about the #youtubefail.
Om Malik
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Thursday, March 19, 2009 |
9:52 AM PT |
Somebody somewhere in the Adobe offices must be getting pretty nervous. Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, an also-ran competitor to Flash, suddenly got a YouTube boost. Liz reports that YouTube will carry live video of March Madness, thanks to its partnership with CBS — and it’s using Silverlight to offer the video. YouTube, being a web monster, is a true king-maker, and the college basketball tournament broadcasts could prove to be a much-needed shot in the arm for Microsoft and its Silverlight technology.
Chris Albrecht
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Thursday, March 12, 2009 |
10:57 AM PT |
Hulu celebrates the one-year anniversary of its public launch today, and it’s getting social by adding Facebook and MySpace functionality. Many skeptics (*cough* Om *cough*) originally dismissed the joint venture between FOX and NBC as something that couldn’t work, but over the last year Hulu’s premium content service has turned one-time critics into champions, and it’s now the No. 2 video site behind YouTube.
Past might not be prologue for the content provider, however. The online video world is vastly different now than it was when Hulu launched. Hulu may be a victim of its own success, as the premium content era it helped usher in is adopted by the competition. With media companies and cable cos getting into long-form video online, we at NewTeeVee ask the question: Do we need Hulu anymore?
Jose Fermoso
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Friday, January 9, 2009 |
5:16 PM PT |
The poor economy dominated the scene at CES this year, and it led highly anxious exhibitors to highlight lower prices for gadgets like netbooks, cell phones, and A/V devices. The jittery economy is pushing consumers to look for value, and aggressive price points are the best way to coax them into spending their limited stash of cash. That said, lower prices don’t mean less interesting features. Almost all the relevant devices unveiled this year offer efficient, web-convergent services. Continue »
Stacey Higginbotham
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Tuesday, January 6, 2009 |
9:33 AM PT |
Israel’s strikes into Gaza continue apace, and news stories are pointing out that the conflict is being fought online as well — Twitter, YouTube and hacking web sites are playing a role, as ways to get information out of the country and dispense propaganda. There’s no need to drop pamphlets when you can post video of soldiers destroying a government building on YouTube or send threatening texts. The delivery mechanism is new, but propaganda isn’t.
Neither are the efforts to take out the delivery mechanism and means of communications. However, with Hamas using the same technology as citizens, the scope of such destruction is much wider. On Sunday, Palestinian mobile operator Paltel said that 90 percent of its infrastrucutre in Gaza was down, potentially cutting off communications via cell phone. Warning that the Gaza strip could be “disconnected from the outside world,” Paltel issued a statement that read: Continue »
Om Malik
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Monday, December 22, 2008 |
9:59 PM PT |
Amazing! I have been watching the spat between Google’s YouTube and Warner Music Group play out in the media — both online and in its offline variants. The bottom line of this corporate he said she said is that there are no more music videos that feature Warner artists such as Madonna. And a lot of it is two parties crying over spilt milk.
Warner complains it doesn’t make any money from Google, even though music videos are extremely popular on YouTube and are major drivers of traffic to the site. According to The New York Times, Warner made $639 million in digital revenues for fiscal year 2008, of which less than 1 percent (or less than $6.39 million) came from YouTube. Another Fellow music labels might soon follow Warner’s suit and try and renegotiate with YouTube or opt out all together. Continue »
Liz Gannes
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008 |
9:01 PM PT |
The 2008 election and online video have had a lot of special moments together: The CNN-YouTube primary debates. Obama Girl. Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can.” Saturday Night Live’s “Fey-lin” skits. And even though those examples might lean to the left, online video isn’t just a liberal thing. Both the Obama and McCain campaigns have active YouTube accounts, and in September, the McCain account had nearly three times as many average views per video as its rival’s. And no fewer than nine outlets offered live online video of the presidential debates.
But those were simply viral videos and two-hour events coming straight from the official debate stream. For election night, the fun starts early and could continue all night. There will be red and blue states to call, voter fraud to police, polling lines to record, partisan parties to tune into, and pundits, pundits, pundits. For those who want more detail, perspective or partisanship than TV broadcasts offer — or for the election-obsessive looking to build a multi-platform election night command center — we’ve sniffed out a few of the election night options to choose from. Continue Reading..
Image credit: CNN. This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.
