Youtube Shortcuts

As in desktop video players, YouTube too allows you to control playback of videos using keyboard shortcuts. These are:

Play/Pause	Spacebar
Move forward by 10%	Right arrow key
Move backward by 10%	Left arrow key
Skip to 10%, 20%, 30% …. of playback time	Numpad 1,2,3 … 9
Move to beginning of video	Home
Move to end of video	End
Volume up	Up arrow key
Volume down	Down arrow key
Fullscreen	F (doesn't work anymore)
Exit fullscreen	Esc
Toggle closed captions	C
Increase/decrease caption font size	+/-
Change background of caption	B

YouTube now allowing users to skip video ads

A while back, popular video sharing site YouTube implemented pre-video advertisements as part of the Google AdWords suite. Some users have had mixed thoughts on the issue, especially when they want to quickly pull up a video then have to watch the ad. YouTube has just announced a new method of using pre-video ads called TrueView.

Integrated with Google AdWords, the announcement of TrueView came to the AdWords blog, stating that users now have the option to skip over pre-video advertisements. Viewers who live in the U.S and Canada are give the option in any video to skip an ad five seconds into it. Users in the UK are also able to use TrueView, however the amount of videos with which it can be used with appear to be limited.

Obviously, advertisers would not be pleased if that was the only change made, and this second feature is where TrueView derives its name.

Like the way Hulu allows the user to select advertisements relevant to them, TrueView will operate in the same way. When the advertisements are relevant, the chance of a user watching it drastically go up. In their early testing, YouTube has found, "view-through rates of 20-70%. A view-through rate measures how many viewers have opted-in to watch your ad - a valuable signal which you can use in connecting the right message with the right audience at the right time."

Delivering content more specified for the user is more likely to keep their interest and have them opt in to watch the full advertisement. Advertisers are now only charged for the full showing of the ad, or if it has been viewed or at least 30 seconds of, whichever amount of time is shorter between the two.

Advertiser GoPro which, "makes and sells the HD HERO line of wearable, gear-mountable HD cameras," has seen promising results, and their Director of Online Marketing, Lee Topar said in a statement:

We like how TrueView Video Ads give us the ability to target our audience, and gives viewers the choice to opt-in to watch our ads. Thus far, we’ve seen about a 40% view-through rate -- and since we only pay when potential customers actually watch a video, we have more control over our budget.

Other advertisers have seen similar numbers, showing about 40% of users who will sit through the entire ad. This concept was inspired by YouTube's experience with Promoted Videos, and has shown that when given the choice, users will tend to purposefully click on ads that are relevant to them. TrueView comes as a welcome change for both the users and advertisers of YouTube's video service.

Google Wins YouTube Copyright Case In Spain

Google says that it’s won a copyright infringement case in Spain over the uploading of copyrighted videos by YouTube users.

Telecinco, a Spanish broadcast TV channel, had argued that YouTube is responsible when its users upload videos that infringed on the channel’s copyrights. According to Google’s blog post about the legal decision:

The court rejected Telecinco’s claim, noting that YouTube offers content owners tools to remove copyright infringing content and this means that it is the responsibility of the copyright owner – not YouTube – to identify and tell YouTube when infringing content is on its website. This decision reaffirms European law which recognizes that content owners (not service providers like YouTube) are in the best position to know whether a specific work is authorised to be on an Internet hosting service and states that websites like YouTube have a responsibility to take down unauthorised material only when they are notified by the owner.

Despite those European laws, a German court recently found YouTube liable in a case involving users who uploaded copyrighted music videos. Google has said it will appeal that verdict.

YouTube still not profitable, but it's close

YouTube CEO, Eric Schmidt, told a French university today that Google's online video sharing website, YouTube, is getting close to being profitable.

According to Barrons.com, YouTube, five years old, hasn't made any profit since its launch. The giant online video sharing website generates more than two billion views a day from users all around the globe. Google purchased YouTube almost four years ago for $1.65 billion, a deficit it has yet to make back.

Although YouTube might not be profitable just yet, Google said they are very pleased with it's trajectory and expect it to start being profitable very soon. Google said last year that YouTube came close to profitable, but since then, hasn't surpassed its operating costs - a cost that Google Inc. has absorbed.

Google's CFO Patrick Pichette said they do not comment on YouTube, so knowing exactly how much the company makes or spends on operating costs is unknown. It costs Apple an estimated $1 billion a year to maintain the iTunes store, and YouTube likely costs more to operate bandwidth wise. Google earned $6.82 billion in revenue in the Q2 of 2010.

Google wins YouTube copyright battle

A US federal judge sided with Google on Wednesday in a US$1 billion ($1.4 billion) copyright lawsuit filed by media company Viacom over YouTube videos, saying the service promptly removed illegal materials as required under federal law.

The ruling in the closely watched case further affirmed the protections offered to online service providers under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Viacom had alleged that YouTube, which Google bought for US$1.76 billion in 2006, built itself into the world's largest video-sharing site by promoting the unlicenced use of video taken from Viacom cable channels such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.

Facebook, eBay and Yahoo were among the Internet powerhouses that had rallied on Google's behalf in saying that the company should not be liable because the 1998 law offers immunity when service providers promptly remove illegal materials submitted by users once they are notified of a violation.

In his 30-page ruling, US District Judge Louis Stanton in New York said massive volumes of evidence submitted in the case had convinced him that YouTube did what it needed to do to fall under the "safe harbor" provisions of the copyright law.

In dismissing the lawsuit before a trial, Stanton noted that Viacom had spent several months accumulating about 100,000 videos violating its copyright and then sent a mass takedown notice on February 2, 2007.

By the next business day, Stanton said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them.

Stanton said there's no dispute that "when YouTube was given the (takedown) notices, it removed the material."

Viacom said it will appeal, calling the ruling "fundamentally flawed."

YouTube adds cloud-based video editor

YouTube launched a cloud-based simple video editor today, giving users basic functionality for editing their already uploaded videos.

The online editor isn't going to compete against desktop video editing programs like Final Cut Pro or anything, but allows you to trim, snip, splice together and audio swap videos you have already uploaded.

The online editor lets you make last minute adjustments directly on the website, without having to reupload the final edit again.  The drag-n-drop service lets you select any of your uploaded videos and merge them together to make one final video.  The editor also includes the entire YouTube audioswap library, but gives you a chance to preview the clip before adding it to the video, however, you can still only select one song per video.

Once you select ‘Publish' your video will automatically be processed by YouTube, so no need to sit and watch the upload progress bar.  Your video descriptions are also tagged with “I created this video at http://www.youtube.com/editor", which links to a users profile.

To test out the new YouTube editor, click here to try it out.

YouTube rolls out rental service

YouTube has quietly rolled out a rentals service that offers both movies and tv shows.  Costing between $.99 and $3.99 for 48 hours, the fee is paid with Google Checkout. By entering the 'pay for rental' market, Google is now in competitions with Netflix, Apple (iTunes) and Microsoft (Xbox Marketplace rentals).

According to ReadWriteWeb.com, it is expected that YouTube will make this announcement sometime today. This seems logical as why would YouTube open a store but not announce it publically. You can currently access the store at www.youtube.com/store.

With Hulu rumored to be entering the 'pay for market' too, it only makes sense to see YouTube follow a similar business model.  As users become more comfortable paying for digital only content, it's one step closer to the death of physical media.

YouTube: 24 Hours of Videos Uploaded Every 60 Seconds!

YouTube: Last year, YouTube announced 20 hours of video were uploaded every minute -- today an entire day’s worth of video is uploaded every minute!

Google execs found guilty of allowing video to be posted to YouTube

The BBC News is reporting that an Italian court has convicted three Google executives over footage showing a teenager with Down's Syndrome being bullied, which was posted to YouTube.

The Three Google executives were convicted of violating privacy laws over the footage. The execs were David Drummond, Senior Vice President, George De Los Reyes, ex financial executive and privacy Chief Peter Fleischer. The case is the first time a web company has been held criminally liable for user posted content and has raised serious concerns how internet platforms could continue to operate if the decision is held.

David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google spoke to the BBC and said he was "outraged" by the decision. "I intend to vigorously appeal this dangerous ruling. It sets a chilling precedent," he said.

The video itself was uploaded by four school students who were later expelled from their school in Turin, Italy. The bullies were also convicted in a youth court. Google's lawyers argued that the company could not be held responsible for content uploaded to the service and that pre-screening all YouTube content was impossible. Over 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

In a company blog posting on Wednesday, Matt Sucherman, Google VP and Deputy General Counsel of Europe said it was "outrageous" that the employees faced trial at all. "We are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming."

The three Google executives received six month suspended sentences after being found guilty of violating Italian privacy laws. An appeal court is expected to hear the case later this year. A Google spokesperson confirmed "we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision."

YouTube will kill Internet Explorer 6 support on March 13

Ars Technica, whose readers must still use IE 6, has taken a screen shot showing the warning as posted on YouTube that clearly shows that they will be dropping support for IE 6.  The move is a big step forward towards the removal of support for IE 6 as the outdated browser has been a thorn in the side of many developers.

While it is important for major companies to move away from coding for IE 6, the biggest hurdle will be getting the corporate world to adopt a modern browser.  Until then, the browser will unfortunately survive in the internet ecosystem.

YouTube launches experimental HTML5 supported video player

A while back, YouTube released a demo of a video player based on HTML5. The demo was popular, and since then, the company posted a blog regarding a "pre-spring cleaning effort," which led users to let YouTube know that they wanted more content based on the update to the markup language. Google's given that the thumbs up, and announced today that an experimental version of an HTML5-supported video player is available.

The announcement blog post (found here) revealed the changes, though at the same time, the limitations were also listed; the HTML5 player doesn't support videos that have advertisements, annotations or captions, and it's obviously only compatible with browsers that support the new web standard as well as h.264 encoded video. That means that if you're using Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer with Google's ChromeFrame, you're in luck; anything else, too bad. While this sounds restricting, you have to keep in mind that it's still relatively new technology and that companies catch up pretty quickly when they need to.

If you'd like to try a video that uses the new HTML5 video tag, visit YouTube's demo page. Be warned though, as YouTube stated that this will enable HTML5 video for your browser, provided that you meet all the aforementioned criteria. Additionally, if you've enabled other experimental projects with YouTube, you may not get the HTML5 player working correctly. You can manage your enabled or disabled experiments over at TestTube, should you need to. Let us know how it goes!

YouTube Gets Short(er) Links, Too

Almost in the immediate wake of Google's announcing short URLs (goo.gl) and Facebook experimenting with fb.me links, YouTube has made a gesture toward shorter web addresses, as well.

Today, the video site announced it's launching youtu.be links. They're not as short as the super-brief URLs users might see from bit.ly or is.gd because each one contains a unique ID for the video it links to. But this extra bit of information makes the URLs more useful for developers, too.

While the resulting URLs aren't significantly shorter than a regular YouTube link, users will have the added benefit of knowing exactly what kind of content they're being redirected to, which isn't always the case with many shortened URLs.

Also, with the video ID as part of the short URL, writes YouTube Engineering Manager Vijay Karunamurthy, "developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly or track how a video is spreading in real time."

End users can shorten links manually simply by putting the video ID (the part of the YouTube URL that comes after the equals sign and before the ampersand, if there is one) after http://youtu.be/. For example, "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acVM7_rWw4" is the regular URL of an interview we did over the summer with a great startup advisor in Boulder, CO. The short version of that link would be "http://youtu.be/1acVM7_rWw4".

Or, for those copy-and-paste-averse folks among us, links will be automatically shortened when broadcast thought the site's sharing mechanisms.

YouTube Tightens Links with Facebook

Now when your Facebook friends embed YouTube photos on their pages, those photos will show up on your YouTube home page. (And this is a good thing?)

Video sharing site YouTube is expanding its integration with social networking services. The latest set of enhancement applies to Facebook users: now, when Facebook users’ friends embed a YouTube video on Facebook, that video will doggedly pursue you and appear on your own YouTube home page. YouTube says they’re testing the feature out right now, and one key is that users will have to stay connected to Facebook for the capability to work correctly. But that’s not a problem for many users who would never consider disconnecting from Facebook.

YouTube sees bringing videos users’ Facebook friends have embedded as a way to make YouTube home pages more relevant to their users. The YouTube home pages are intended to be a “zeitgeist” of what’s important to a user on YouTube at any moment: some of the videos features there are selected based on channels and viewing history, but YouTube feels that highlighting videos embedded by Facebook friends helps users be more social and connected to their friends.

Users will also be able to search for their friends using the home pages’ friend-finding module. Users can also disable YouTube sharing if they don’t want their YouTube actions syndicated out to their Facebook accounts.

According to YouTube, over 46 years of YouTube video are viewed by Facebook users every day.

YouTube Feather

Feather is a new feature from YouTube Labs. The goal is "to serve YouTube video watch pages with the lowest latency possible. It achieves this by severely limiting the features available to the viewer and making use of advanced web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser."

Chrome's dev tools show that the improvements are noticeable: the resources downloaded when you watch a video only have 52 KB, instead of 391 KB.

There are many missing features in the "feather" version: search suggestions, posting comments, viewing all the comments, rating videos, customizing the embedded player. Another issue is that the lite version is not available for all videos.

YouTube may start streaming TV shows, for a fee

Google currently airs some TV shows on YouTube but according to reports from All Things Digital the web giant could be ready to offer first-run shows for a fee.

All things digital sources insiders at Google who claim that "Google's video site has been trying to convince the TV industry to let it stream individual shows for a fee". Apple and Amazon both offer shows for download without commercials priced at $1.99 per episode. YouTube currently runs a small amount of TV shows that are advert supported and which stream through the browser.

It's not yet clear exactly what content YouTube would offer but in the UK Google recently began streaming full length Channel 4 TV shows. Neighbours and The Gadget Show, both popular amongst Brits are now also available on the current TV streaming service. The current service is supported by adverts.

If the YouTube streaming goes ahead then it could be big competition against sites like Hulu (only available in the US) that stream TV shows. It's rumoured that Hulu is considering a subscription based model too. The big problem for Google will be convincing the general public to cough up hard earned cash for web TV. In a digital age where it's all too easy to stream TV shows free from competing video sites or download them from peer to peer file sharing sites illegally it's not a tried and testing method having to pay to stream them.

YouTube to Add Support for IPv6

The underlying technology powering the Internet is going through a major overhaul as IPv6 is slowly replacing the aging IPv4, the most widely used networking protocol. The adoption rate has been slow but more and more companies are implementing the new protocol. Google is already one of the biggest adopters and is now working on introducing support to its hugely popular video site YouTube.

Implementing the new protocol isn't a big technical hurdle, Google says, but YouTube is one of the biggest and most heavily trafficked websites, so the company isn't setting any hard deadlines for the moment. "YouTube is the IPv6 team's number one priority right now," Erik Kline, IPv6 software engineer at Google, told NetworkWorld. "We haven't said anything about the timeframe for that yet."
Google's IPv6 team has already implemented the protocol for many of the company's online proprieties like its search engine, Alerts, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, News, Reader, Picasa, Maps and Wave. However, it's still pretty much a provisionary measure for now as few people access the sites through IPv6 at the moment largely due to the fact that the feature has been implemented by only a small number of ISPs.

"It's somewhere on the order of the 0.2% range of Google users have IPv6 access," Lorenzo Colitti, network engineer at Google, says. "Around 40% of that traffic is native. We've seen healthy growth in the last year." Google anticipates further growth down the line as more companies start offering support, both in devices and software but also at the ISP level.

IPv6 offers several advantages over IPv4 but the biggest reason why companies are starting to support it is because it offers a much larger number of possible IP addresses. This has become an issue lately as the number of IPv4 addresses available is running out while demand for them is going strong. Implementing IPv6 at a global level will solve the problem but for now most companies are delaying the switch.