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:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer Market Overview, Q2 2010
• Connected Consumer Wrap-up: Q1 2009
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

A staff of two dozen – or no operations at all?

“Do we have a China strategy? The answer is no.” Brightcove President & COO David Mendels

Ask Brightcove about China, and you’ll get a rather tight-lipped answer. “We don’t have significant operations in China,” I was told a few weeks ago by Brightcove President and COO David Mendels, who added: “We never made a decision to enter China as a market.” Mendels wasn’t very keen on talking about the subject at all, but to his credit, answered some of my questions anyway. His key point: There is no story about Brightcove in China. “Do we have a China strategy? The answer is no,” he told me.

That may be true today, but Brightcove’s past dealings in China were a lot less black and white. The company had a significant R&D staff in the country starting in 2006, which I’ve been told by someone with knowledge of the operation consisted of up to two dozen people. It tried to hire additional staff as late as March 2010 – only to shut down its entire operation in Beijing and completely pull out of China by the end of that same year. Most of the Chinese staff was let go at that time, and only a few made the transition to Brightcove’s corporate headquarter in Cambridge. (Medels and a Brightcove spokesperson didn’t want to comment on the company’s R&D efforts in the country.)

So why did Brightcove leave China? The company apparently told its Chinese staff that it wasn’t able to grow the team fast enough – but that seems an unlikely reason, given that many other U.S. companies maintain successful R&D operations in the country. The decision may at least in part been motivated by Brightcove wanting to take things further and sign up Chinese clients – only to realize that China is a tough market for outsiders.

China’s unique challenges

Mendels talked a little bit about this during our conversation as well. “It’s an interesting place,” he said, without specifically referring to anything Brightcove has done in the country. And he cautioned: “It’s a tricky place to do business in.”

That’s especially true for anyone in the online video space. China has a complicated regulatory environment for online video companies, which forces them to get multiple licenses for things that don’t require any dealings with the government at all in most other countries. Want to stream videos from a website to a desktop? Then you need to become licensed as an online video platform. Want to deliver the same video over the same network to a set-top box? That makes you a TV network, which means you need a different license.

Adding to this are unique infrastructure challenges. China’s Internet population is growing rapidly, but most users access the network with comparably slow connections, which is why local players oftentimes optimize streams for 500 Kbps to 1 Mbps. Servicing Chinese clients requires to adapt to these challenges, which can take time. Brightcove may have felt that it didn’t have this time, especially as it was trying to ramp up its internatinal business elsewhere, and prepared for an IPO.

Brightcove’s team is still there

The irony of Brightcove leaving China is that its former staff is now proving the company wrong: Most of Brightcove’s employees have since been hired by Video-TX, a local video platform provider that openly references its Brightcove heritage on its website.

The company, which received a strategic investment from the Chinese CDN Chinacache soon after Brightcove left the country, has been offering Chinese customers what Brightcove could have offered – and was able to sign up a number of high-profile clients including the Shanghai Media Group, the large newspaper China Daily and state TV network CNTV. I’ve been told that there is no ill will against the former employer amongst the team, but there is an acute sense that this could have been done by Brightcove as well. Said one person involved in both efforts: “We didn’t set out to build our own company. We set out to build Brightcove China.”

This isn’t to say that Brightcove made a terrible mistake leaving China. Rather, Brightcove’s adventure in China goes to prove that the country can be a lot more nuanced than it is perceived in the U.S. Stories about U.S. companies doing business in China often fall into two categories: Either, they describe a gold-rush-like opportunity – or a repressive regime that companies should avoid entirely. Brightcove’s experience is much closer to the actual experience many have when doing business in China: It’s a complicated market that requires a long-term commitment – and not everyone has the stomach to stick around.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines
• Connected Consumer Market Overview, Q2 2010
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration

The game starts at 6:23pm PT / 9:23pm ET, which gives you just enough time to check out our definitive list of NCAA Championship sites and apps below:

• CBSSports.com will stream the game free on its website, and CBS will be showing it on TV.
• iPhone and iPad users can tune in via the NCAA March Madness iOS app. Accessing the live stream will cost users $3.99, and users can pay for their subscription right in the app, or log in with their credentials if they have previously registered elsewhere.
• The NCAA March Madness Android app for selected Android phones is available on Google Play, formerly known as the Android Market, and you’ll be able to pay for your $3.99 subscription necessary to watch the game from within the app as well.
• Slacker provides a free live audio feed of the game via its iOS, Android and Blackberry apps.
• Snappy TV is powering social sharing of game highlights within the NCAA’s March Madness Flash player. The company is aggregating user-generated clips as well as the most tweeted messages about each game on the NCAA’s Facebook page.
• PlayUp teamed up with NCAA legends Al Horford and Brandon Knight, making it possible to chat with them and other fans in  Hangouts during the game.
• ConnecTV brings real-time stats synchronized to what’s happening on TV to your iPad, Mac or PC.
• GetGlue has a special sticker for users who check into the game tonight.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

Blip's site still lists numerous distribution partners, but come May, more than half of these will be gone.

Updated. Web series distribution platform Blip has been quietly ditching a good chunk of its distribution partners, including a number of Smart TV platforms.

Blip severed ties with Boxee, PopBox, Samsung and Vizio at the end of February and will stop distributing its videos to TiVo, DivX TV and Sony in April. The company wasn’t available for comment when contacted for this article, but comments made to Blip’s own web series producers make it clear that there simply was no money to be made on any of these Smart TV platforms.

Blip used to compete squarely with YouTube as a host for all kinds of videos, but the site relaunched last year with a focus on serialized web content. A big part of that shift was a commitment to distribute and monetize shows across a multitude of platforms. Blip’s site still lists 20 distribution partners — but come May, less than half of these original partners will be left. The company explained these changes to video producers this way:

“In general, they fell into one of three categories: 1) The service is no longer of value to our producers; 2) the service never delivered value to our producers; or 3) few, if any producers, use the service.”

A big part of this was that Blip wasn’t able to successfully monetize its videos on most of the Smart TV platforms it is leaving. But even some of the partners that did run ads against Blip’s videos — namely Blinx, VodPod and MeFeedia — apparently didn’t provide enough of a return to warrant for Blip to stick around. The site will also stop distributing videos to Vimeo, but will keep YouTube and Google TV as distribution partners. Also still part of Blip’s distribution network are iTunes and Roku:

“We are exploring options with Apple and Roku. We think these are two areas of our current offering that we can improve upon greatly.”

Part of this may just be Blip trying to find its place in a changing online video ecosystem, where ad dollars are increasingly concentrating around a few big players. The company started a new, monetized partnership with AOL just this week, and has said it may add a few select additional distribution partners in the future.

But Blip’s move could also foreshadow a bigger trend: Dedicated set-top boxes for online video still have a relatively small user base. Some of the bigger CE makers may ship millions of units, but that doesn’t mean that TV viewers are actually engaging with their platforms, save for the occasional use of the embedded Netflix app. With that, Smart TV platform makers are caught in a bit of a bind: Without content, users won’t tune in — and without viewers, content providers don’t see enough value in their platforms.

Update: Blip’s Steve Woolf sent me the following comment via email in response to this story:

“We talked at great length about our distribution partners before making any decisions, and we’re very strong believers in the future of television distribution in all its forms. It’s one of the most exciting ways to deliver our shows to viewers, and it is obvious that it will play an important role in the future of original web series. As the article states, the activation and adoption rates on some platforms are still in the very early days. We’re going to focus on improving the experience of discovering Blip shows on the platforms that have the most viewers interested in watching them, and the ones that will deliver the most value back to producers in the form of audience and/or revenue.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

The show is going to be hosted by Beth Hoyt, and feature interviews with Hollywood stars and YouTube celebrities alike. Viewers will also get to see the premiere of videos from the 30 or so original web series that My Damn Channel is currently working on, and there will be some tie-in of comments from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. “It’s the spawn, the love child of television meets the Internet,” explained Barnett, again only half joking, during a phone call Tuesday.

My Damn Channel Live, as the show is going to be called, is part of YouTube’s new original channel line-up, and it’s a big deal for the video site: Comedy and entertainment formats have worked really well on YouTube, but it hasn’t quite cracked the code of successful live programming yet – which is one reason why the average YouTube viewer only spends 15 minutes a day on the site, and not hours as in front of the TV.

Barnett’s show, which is going to be broadcasted live every weekday at 1pm PT, will be 60 minutes long. Viewers will be able to catch up on archived episodes immediately afterwards, and My Damn Channel will also serve up sliced up clips for consumers who are still more attuned to watching short clips online. But the show isn’t just a big bet for YouTube; it’s also a huge deal for My Damn Channel, which will roll out a new website design just for the occasion. Barnett went as far as to call it “an entire relaunch of this company.”

When asked why the time is ripe for a format like this, Barnett credited two factors: Advertisers are increasingly willing to dole out big bucks for online video, and the audience is starting to raise their expectations beyond watching short viral videos. “The days of uploading a video, pushing out a couple of tweets and hoping that the video will go viral have largely ended,” he told me.

But despite all the lessons My Damn Channel has learned from the traditional TV world – Barnett calls it “stealing from HBO and Showtime” – viewers can still expect the show to look different from network comedy. “We started with the philosphy that you always could do more with less,” said Barnett, adding that this gives My Damn Channel “a punk-rock feel that just doesn’t exist in a three-letter media company.”

Update: A spokesperson for My Damn Channel sent us the following clarification: “The show will not be 60 minutes each day. Wednesday episodes will be 30 minutes, and Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday will be 10 minutes. Total of 70 minutes per week of live video.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

“The process of liquidating the company’s few remaining assets has now been completed. The cash proceeds, net of administration expenses, have been divided equally among all of the company’s creditors (each of which was unsecured), resulting in a recovery of approximately $0.018 per dollar owed to each creditor.”

The email went on to state that any remaining service charges owed to customers won’t be paid out because processing the payment would cost more than the money left over. The law firm in charge of the liquidation process vowed to instead donate any money owed to Zediva’s subscribers to charity.

Zediva launched about a year ago with a unique proposition: The company offered to stream current-release DVD titles for $1.99 per movie – much less than customers would have to pay to VOD services like Amazon or iTunes. Zediva was able to achieve these low rates through a complex workaround: Instead of licensing the movies from Hollywood studios, it simply bought them on DVD, and then “rented” those DVDs to customers, who got to see a stream of the DVD as it played in one of Zediva’s many DVD players.

Hollywood took the company to court, and Zediva lost. The company agreed to pay the studios $1.8 million in damages and suspended its operations in August of 2011. Its website, which at the time stated that it hoped “to be back online soon,” has since been taken offline.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines

The new channel design, which has so far been available on an opt-in basis, comes with a new featured tab that can be customized to the needs of each publisher with a number of templates. Some of the default templates include a design optimized for bloggers with a lot of output, a network design that can highlight multiple channels on YouTube and even a live template that includes elements specific to a live video broadcast on YouTube.

YouTube rolled out an ambitious site relaunch in December that included a completely revamped homepage, which is meant to entice users to subscribe to channels rather than just watching single clips. The relaunch came about a month after YouTube announced its professional content initiative, which includes new channels from celebrities, YouTube personalities and major media organizations.

YouTube publishers have until Wednesday to familiarize themselves with the new channel design by switching back and forth between the new and the old layout. There are a few major changes publishers should be aware of in addition to the new featured tab:

• The new channel design won’t have any banner images anymore. Users can instead use the background image as a banner and add links to their own websites through an image map.
• Channels are now 970px wide, as opposed to the old width of 980px. This means that some publishers may have to adjust their background images.
• A new feed page aggregates more than just a user’s video uploads. It will also show which videos he likes and comments on and even include some info about activity on third-party sites.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

That’s right: Netflix has had live TV on its site ever since the start of the Starz deal — but you’re not alone if you’ve never heard of this feature. Customers were able to tune into the Starz Play live feed on a special section of the Netflix website, offering them access to whatever was airing on Starz at any given time, including original programming and movies not available as part of the Netflix catalog.

However, the feature was never fully developed; the Starz player was basically just an embedded version of what was available to Starz subscribers on the network’s website, and the implementation was severely lacking. Users had to have a Windows computer with Internet Explorer and Silverlight to access the feed. A version for other platforms was promised as early as 2008 but never materialized.

The live feed was also hidden on the site for a long time. A direct link apparently disappeared as part of the recent redesign. On Wednesday, Netflix completely removed the Starz live TV player in anticipation of the departure of Starz content.

So why did Netflix have access to live TV to begin with, and why did it not make a bigger deal out of it? A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment on the Starz Play live feed, but one can assume that live TV access was thrown in as part of the bundle five years ago. Netflix was able to secure rights to the Starz catalog for $30 million in 2008.

That’s a steal by today’s terms. But back then, both sides really didn’t have a good idea of how big of a business online video would be and how Netflix would be able to monetize it. It’s entirely possible that Netflix secured the rights to the live feed to have an option of venturing into live TV transmissions, only to later realize this wasn’t something its customers were interested in at all.

These days, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings hardly wastes any opportunity to tell the world all the things Netflix won’t do. In a recent presentation for potential new hires, he specifically pointed to live sports as a segment his company isn’t interested in, alongside Hulu-like catch-up TV for content that’s currently airing on TV and pay-per-view offerings. As of Wednesday, one could add live TV streaming to the list.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

From his Kickstarter project post:

“To start, I want to produce around three episodes a week for a year and take it from there. I want this to be fun and to last for a while. I figure that I will launch sometime at the end of March, near to the 6th anniversary of the original show. All of the funds raised here will go towards the production of the show – equipment, salaries for people that will help me, rent. I will find other ways to pay myself.”

Frank only produced his original show for a year and stopped posting episodes in 2007, but he clearly still has a lot of fans. His Kickstarter page showed pledges for more than $25,000 – or half of his original goal – just two hours after it went up.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

Chill launched topical collections of videos last week, allowing users to become curators around a certain topic, and co-founder Brian Norgard told me during a meeting in Los Angeles a few days ago that traffic has gone through the roof ever since.

Check out my interview with Norgard below:

Norgard told me that The Ultimate Steve Jobs Collection has been particularly popular; but the site has also seen a lot of long-tail activity for video collections around subjects like track and field or underwater cinematography that are curated by people devoted to the subject. “Everyone is an expert in something,” said Norgard.

Chill raised a $1.5 million round of funding last September. The company currently employs nine people and is located in West Hollywood.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration