Yahoo was in talks to buy as much as 75 percent of Dailymotion, with an option to buy the remaining 25 percent at a later date. The deal would have valued Dailymotion at around $300 million — but it wasn’t meant to be: Regulators resisted the idea that Dailymotion would be owned by an American company, and wanted to restrict Yahoo’s ownership to 50 percent. Yahoo declined.

This puts an end to what would have been Yahoo’s first major acquisition since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO last July, and it would also have been the company’s first major attempt to compete with YouTube since it shut down its own video hosting service in 2010.

So where is Yahoo going to look next to boost its online video business? Here are a few ideas:

Blip: Blip is one of the few remaining independent U.S. video platforms, and the service has undergone an ambitious transition from a catch-all for online video to a platform for premium serialized content — the kind of stuff advertisers like. This could be a good match for Yahoo, which has eyeballs, but needs inventory to place ads against.

Ustream: The one area in which YouTube is still vulnerable is live video. Granted, the Google-owned video service has been offering live streaming to select partners for some time. But it’s live video section is a mess, and the only bright spots have been large live events. Ustream could help Yahoo to get a headstart in live video, while at the same time providing the company with a site that already offers offers hosting for recorded videos as well.

PPLive: The Chinese video market is huge, with billions tuning in every month. It’s also not exactly profitable, which has led to consolidation, and could help Yahoo to buy one of the country’s many video providers on the cheap. Standalone video properties like PPLive and Xunlei are the most likely targets, and could help Yahoo to build a video business across Asia and beyond. Of course, there’s that whole China thing, but Mayer has proven that she’s not afraid of unpopular decisions.

Flickr: The Yahoo-owned image hosting site has enjoyed a bit of a comeback in recent months. And guess what: Flickr has been offering video hosting for five years already. Video has been a bit of an afterthought for Flickr, but Yahoo could certainly change that if it wanted to. The advantage of this approach would be that all the resources are already part of Yahoo — and historically, integrating acquisitions has been one of the things that Yahoo has struggled with a lot.

Who do you think Yahoo should buy instead of Dailymotion? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

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First, a quick recap: Last Sunday, the world of science fiction honored some of its best authors with the Hugo Awards. Thousands of people tuned in via a live webcast on Ustream, watching author Neil Gaiman deliver an acceptance speech, until the webcast was suddenly yanked offline and replaced with a copyright infringement notice. Annalee Newitz first covered the incident over at IO9, and goes into a lot more detail about it, but let’s just say: People weren’t very happy.

Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable responded the following day with a blog post, which basically blamed copyright infringement filters from content recognition specialist Vobile for the mishap. Hunstable’s post read, in part:

“(The take-down) occurred because our 3rd party automated infringement system, Vobile, detected content in the stream that it deemed to be copyrighted. Vobile is a system that rights holders upload their content for review on many video sites around the web. The video clips shown prior to Neil’s speech automatically triggered the 3rd party system at the behest of the copyright holder.”

Hunstable also claimed that Ustream’s team wasn’t able to restore the feed in time for the awards ceremony, even though it “almost immediately noticed a flood of livid Twitter messages.” He went on to say that Ustream has suspended the use of Vobile until it can recalibrate the filters’ settings.

Turns out, Vobile has a very different view of the incident. Here’s what Wang had to say via email:

“Vobile was shocked when it learned of the Hugo Award incident for the first time in the media, as no contact was made by Ustream through Vobile’s 24/7 customer support, or through any other direct channel, at any point during or after the webcast.”

He added:

“Vobile technology was not at the root of the problem. Our content identification system provides customers with accurate information. Each customer must decide for itself what it does with that information.”

He went on to say that Vobile would be willing to work with Ustream to investigate the incident further.

At this point, the back-and-forth may sound like a silly blame game, especially since the damage has already been done. But there is a bigger point here: An increasing number of video services find it necessary to use automated filters to protect themselves against lawsuits.

Unfortunately, those filters don’t know a thing about copyright exceptions, which are at the core of many of these disputes, but also key to parodies, news coverage and many other forms of journalistic and artistic expression. And if the video sites like Ustream don’t account for this, then they might as well give up on fair use altogether.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  Newtown grafitti.

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Ustream officially announced a few days ago that it has hired David Thompson, who previously served as the Chief Marketing Officer of Webex, as its new SVP of marketing, and Thompson told me during a phone conversation last week that Ustream has seen the number broadcasters who pay for the site’s Pro Broadcasting services increase by 170 percent from June 2011 to June 2012.

Subscriber revenue grew 290 percent during that time, the company announced Wednesday, and pay-per-view subscription revenue has increased 300 percent.

Ustream also announced Wednesday that company co-founder Brad Hunstable has been named permanent CEO. Hunstable jumped in as interim CEO after his co-founder Jon Ham left in November to launch a new startup.

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“News Alert: #Ustream is inaccessible due to a large scale DDOS attack targeting Russian opposition channels on Ustream.”

The company wasn’t immediately available for additional details. Ustream said via Twitter that it was able to restore services around 6:30am PT, but at the time of writing, some parts remain unavailable.

A Bambuser spokesperson told us via email that the attack against its site started in the early morning hours, adding:

“What we can see is that we are receiving a lot of unusual traffic with lots of small distributed requests which is different to what we normally see. It’s extremely hard to know who is behind a distributed attack like this, nor do we want to speculate about it at this point.”

It looks like Livestream and Justin.tv weren’t affected by the attack. DDOS attacks are regularly used to suppress opposing views and critical citizen journalism, but these attacks tend to be directed against smaller blogs or dedicated opposition websites. Bambuser told us that this marks the first time its site has been victim of a DDOS attack.

This is a developing story, check back for updates.

Update (7:57am PT): We just received the following status update from Bambuser: “We are up since an hour -after being down for almost 4hrs. It’s still heavy load of traffic (requests) but our tech team managed to block parts of it and minimize the effect of the DDOS attack.  ”

Update 2 (9:55am PT): Ustream sent us a more detailed account of the attack, which seems to be ongoing. It apparently started at 5:30am PT and specifically targeted a Russian channel. Most requests originated from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Iran, coming from thousands of individual IP addresses. Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable added: “This is the third DDOS attack in the last few months, specifically targeting Russian citizen journalists on Ustream. This is a actively managed attack of a scale we have never seen that continues to change and iterate as we counter.”

Update 3 (10:57am PT): : Ustream told us that its services are “almost back to 100 percent.”

Update 4 (5:20pm): Ustream has launched its Russian localization ahead of schedule in response to the attack, a spokesperson told us via email: “In light of today’s DDOS attack on Ustream and citizen journalists covering the Russian protests, Ustream has accelerated the development and launch of the Russian language translation and localization feature to help translate the site and empower the voices of those being muted.”

Disclosure: GigaOM has a business relationship with Livestream for delivering its conference content.

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Alsayeed and some of his friends had located their camera on a rooftop in the Homs neighborhood of Babaamr, according to Bambuser. Very graphic footage of his body has since shown up on YouTube, and Bambuser relayed one of his latest messages on its blog. It reads, in part:

“Babaamr is facing a genocide right now. I will never forgive you for your silence. You all have just give us your words but we need actions.”

Live streaming was an essential tool in the Arab spring, but has also been under constant attack by the embattled regimes. Last week, Bambuser reported that its site had been blocked by Syria. Ustream and Livestream told us that they hadn’t seen any interference from the Syrian regime so far.

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According to data from Quantcast, Taboola has reach of more than 110 million unique visitors a month. Of those viewers, more than 65 million are in the U.S. alone. As a result, Taboola generates more than 300 million recommendations every day, CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me by email.

While Taboola, which provides a widget for recommended videos, has traditionally been used by news publishers like the New York Times who are trying to expand their available video inventory and advertising revenues, it’s been tapped by two new partners in the live streaming vertical. Ustream and Major League Gaming now both make Taboola recommendations available to their viewers.

With the move to provide recommendations for live streaming viewers, Taboola has had to add capabilities beyond just the contextual targeting that it typically uses to match up video recommendations for users. Because videos are live, the recommendations engine doesn’t have as much data to go on. So Taboola is providing recommendations based on behavioral targeting while viewers are watching live streams.

Outside of the live video market, Taboola has also added new partners. Those include BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, Food Network, The Hollywood Reporter, Daily Caller, Ask Men and Gannett’s Navy Times. With some of those publishers, the Taboola video widget is on every page of their websites.

As publishers try to expand their use of video, they need ways to highlight the content that they’ve produced. Taboola can not only provide recommendations, but can also expand the amount of video available to viewers by recommending those from other publishers and sharing revenues between them.

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Brad Hunstable shows off Ustream's Honeycomb app

Updated. So now we know why Ustream has been busy raising new funding from Korea Telecom and existing investors DCM and Softbank, and possibly why former CEO John Ham recently stepped down: The company collected less than half of the $75 million funding round it announced in early 2010, according to an SEC filing released Friday. [Hat tip to Business Insider.]

A quick recap: Last February, Ustream raised a strategic funding round led by Japanese mobile phone and Internet operator Softbank that altogether was worth up to $75 million. Softbank put in $20 million in an initial investment, taking a 13.7 percent stake in Ustream that valued the company at around $150 million. Softbank had 18 months to invest up to $55 million more, which would have given it a majority stake in the live streaming company.

But those funds never came.

The SEC filing indicates Ustream brought in about $33 million of the $75 million that it hoped to raise from Softbank, and Softbank never took a controlling stake in the firm. Instead, the startup announced a $10 million investment from Korea Telecom and an agreement to launch Ustream Korea as part of its Ustream Asia joint venture. Later, DCM and Softbank put another $6 million into Ustream and former CEO Ham stepped down.

Assuming the Korea Telecom and following DCM/Softbank investments are separate from Ustream’s $33 million Series B round, the company has raised a total of about $62 million. That’s not too shabby, but it’s far from the “more than $100 million” that continues to be quoted as Ustream’s total funding raised to date. It also answers the question of why Ustream needed to raise more cash just a year after the Softbank funding was announced: It didn’t burn through $75 million; it just never received the bulk of those funds.

The SEC filing also indicates a softening of Softbank’s strategic interest in Ustream. After all, rather than invest another $55 million of its own cash to take control of the live streaming startup, Softbank pursued a strategy of bringing in an additional shareholder to fund expansion instead. So what does Softbank know that we don’t?

Ustream did not respond to a request for comment by the time of this writing. We’ll update if we hear back from the company.

Update: Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable confirmed that its total funding to date is about $62 million, and gave some more background on the funding plans. He said that the primary reason for bringing on Korea Telecom was to have a strategic local partner on board, in the same way that Softbank is providing local support in Japan.

“We have the capital we need,” Hunstable said. As for its relationship with Softbank and the joint venture around Ustream Japan: “We continue to have big plans for Ustream Japan… It’s taking off and continues to grow month-over-month.”

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Sure, online video has played a role in U.S. politics long before the current wave of protestors began when people started camping out on Wall Street. There was the Macaca moment in 2006, and there were various attempts by YouTube as well as major TV networks to utilize online video in political discussions. And with people like Glenn Beck and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, there are now popular pundits on both side of the political spectrum online. But actual news coverage has nonetheless been dominated by mainstream media organizations.

America’s Egypt moment

That’s not true in other countries. The Arab spring relied largely on this kind of coverage, with people in Lybia recording sometimes horrific footage of military crack-downs with their phones and then smuggling it out of the country to upload it from Egyptian Internet cafes. The work of citizen journalists has been essential for these conflicts, because media is often barred from reporting on the scene.

The same can’t exactly be said for the U.S., where journalists by and large can report freely from protests. However, mainstream media are increasingly facing a different problem, which has never been as apparent as during the Occupy protests: It can only extend itself so much, and be at so many places at the same time. There are hundreds of Occupy protests all over the U.S.. No one could anticipate that a relatively small protest at the University of California at Davis would become a world-wide news event, which is why none of the big broadcasters were on the scene.

For the Occupy protesters themselves, on the other hand, and citizen reporters largely sympathetic to their cause, it’s natural to capture every single moment on video. Watch the footage from the UC Davis campus again, and you’ll see that there are dozens of folks recording everything with Flip cameras, cell phones and even iPads. Whenever something newsworthy happens at any of the hundreds of Occupy protests around the country, you can be sure that footage of it will show up on YouTube only a few hours later. “Since September 17, 47,000 videos tagged with the keyword “occupy” have been posted in the News and Politics category, with a total 73 million views,” a YouTube spokesperson told me today.

A cable show from a cell phone

Many of these citizen journalists are already taking the next step, streaming everything online in real time. Livestream’s CEO Max Haot told me that his site now features 123 live streaming channels from global Occupy protests, clocking more that two billion viewer minutes altogether. 150,000 people watched various streams live when the New York police cleared the encampment in Zuccotti Park last week, he added. Ustream’s PR and marketing manager Tony Riggins told me that the site has seen more than half a million views across its Occupy live streams, and a spokesperson for mobile live streaming startup Bambuser said that it has seen 30 percent more traffic ever since the Occupy protests started.

In the sea of live streams, a few key videographers have been emerging. One of them is Tim Pool, whose TheOther99 live stream has been featured by Time Magazine and who has been called “a perfect example” for citizen journalism by Jay Rosen.

The other is Spencer Mills, also known by his Twitter handle OakFoSho, who has been covering the events in Oakland. Mills started with a live stream with less than ten viewers, but his talent for being in the right place at the right time and his infectious opinionated-man-on-the-street style have helped him to find an audience of tens of thousands.

30,000 watched when he documented the night after Oakland’s general strike when police engaged for hours with protesters, and thousands tune in when Mills reports from the somewhat lengthy and much less eventful “general assembly” proceedings of the Oakland protesters. “We are essentially a small cable show from a cell phone,” said Mills during a recent event with the local Oakland Tribune newspaper.

Check out my video interview with Mills, or continue reading below:

From the fitness studio to the news room?

Mills is currently jumping back and forth between his day job at an Oakland fitness studio and long nights of live streaming from various Bay Area Occupy events. He’s constantly tweeting, and is often following leads on Twitter to where the action is. “Twitter is almost the front channel for me,” he said, explaining that his tweets often get even more attention than his live stream.

These days, Mills can be seen at Bay Area protests carrying a LiveU backpack, which features six cellular modems and a battery rig that guarantees hours of uninterrupted live streaming. These backpacks can cost up to $3500 per day to rent, but Mills got his for free from Ustream, which also sent similar equipment to Pool in New York. “What we are seeing is citizen journalism at its purest form,” the company’s PR and marketing manager Tony Riggins told me via email. “This is what Ustream was made for.”

Mills himself is now looking into ways to financially support his video work and go live full time. He’s open to cooperations with traditional media outlets, but doesn’t want to give up on his blend of what he calls autonomous guerilla journalism. “We want it to be live and unfiltered,” he explained.

Sometimes a star, sometimes a target

This raw quality of the footage is what makes the new citizen video reporters emerging as part of the Occupy protests so engaging, but it also comes with some risks to the folks behind the cameras. Police officers have on more than one occasion taken actions against citizen reporters, with the most egregious incident being the rubber bullet shooting of a San Francisco-based videographer a few weeks ago. “You feel like a target if you are out there and you don’t have a press badge on,” said Mills when I asked him whether he’s treated differently than accredited press.

However, the omnipresence of video phones could also eventually lead to more civilized protests and crowd control. Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera tweeted this weekend that after the Davis incident, police officers should always behave as if they’re in a YouTube video that’s picked up by mainstream media. Mills agreed with that sentiment, encouraging others to shoot video in critical situations as well, if only to prevent police officers from following the UC Davis example: “You are the one that makes them think twice.”

Update: Ustream told us late Monday that it has now seen more than 1.1 million views across its 700 Occupy channels, clocking a total of 422,752 viewing hours since the beginning of the protests in September.

Disclosure: GigaOM has a business relationship with Livestream for streaming its conferences.

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First, Ustream has landed $6 million in fresh funding from two existing investors, DCM and Softbank. This adds onto the $10 million Ustream garnered last month from Korea Telecom to establish a joint venture in Seoul. But relatively, the new $6 million is a drop in the bucket for the company, which to date has raised more than $100 million in venture capital.

Ustream co-founder John Ham has left the CEO post

Secondly, Ustream Co-Founder John Ham has stepped down from his role as CEO of the company. In a press release, Ustream indicated Ham is leaving to “return to his entrepreneurial roots” — and TechCrunch reported earlier today that he is soon to launch a new startup. Ham will continue to serve as Ustream’s chairman.

That means Ustream is currently on the hunt for a new CEO. Ustream Co-Founder Brad Hunstable will occupy the CEO position on an interim basis as the executive search is conducted, the company says.

At five years old, Ustream is practically an old-timer in the world of online video, so the company is ripe for a shakeup of some sort. Hunstable said in a recent interview with GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler that Ustream is aware of mounting competition from both fledgling startups as well as tech industry giants such as YouTube, saying, “We know what everyone’s doing because, you know, only the paranoid survive. But you can’t be frozen by fear.” The executive level shuffling shows that Ustream is indeed not afraid to change — how it will all work out for the company, of course, remains to be seen.

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DaCast offers a self-serve offering for broadcasters who want freedom and flexibility in serving up live streams of their videos, with a pay-as-you-go model without any contracts or monthly commitments. DaCast’s solution offers everything a broadcaster might want from such a platform, including an integrated player, Facebook embedding, transcoding, analytics and a merchant account for monetization. The idea is that if you make live streaming easy to do and inexpensive to set up, it’ll become more practical for broadcasters to take advantage of the platform.

One key to DaCast’s streaming-as-a-service business model is that broadcasters only pay for the amount of video that’s actually delivered, rather than paying a monthly license fee to use its platform. As a result, it offers an alternative to expensive video platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala.

DaCast also provides more flexibility for first-time broadcasters than some free live streaming platforms like Ustream or Livestream. Stephane Roulland, CEO of DaCast, said in a phone interview that the platform is not only easy to use, but gives broadcasters the ability to monetize their live streams, either through subscriptions, pay-per-view options or the ability to add their own advertising to their streams.

DaCast, which has offices in Paris and San Francisco, believes that’s a message that resonates with customers, and so far has signed up more than 3,500 broadcasters to use its self-serve platform. The company currently has 11 full-time employees and has raised $1.6 million in funding to date, but is looking to add more with a Series A round of financing.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Esparta Palma.

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