Given its place as the number one Internet video destination, you’d think YouTube would put some promotion into their video awards and try to create some drama around them. Instead, they seem to treat the Awards as an afterthought.
Based on the latest stats from M:Metrics, the iPhone is delivering on its hype, radically changing what people are doing with the mobile Web.
Check out some of these figures:
The iPhone is already the most popular device for accessing news and information on the mobile Web, with 85 percent of iPhone users accessing news and information in the month of January.
30.9 percent of iPhone owners watched mobile TV or video, versus a 4.6 market average, and more than double the rate for all smartphone users.
30.4 percent of iPhone owners accessed YouTube, compared to 1 percent of all mobile phone users.
36 percent used Google Maps, compared to 2.6 percent of all mobile users.
Usage of social networking is also popular among iPhone users: 49.7 percent accessed a social networking site in January, nearly twelve times the market average.
Twenty percent of iPhone owners accessed Facebook, one of the first Web properties to customize its content for the iPhone, versus 1.5 percent of the total mobile market.
The iPhone offers a taste of the future; iPhone users are using the devices in all sorts of leading edge ways. It also shows how mobile users will use Internet media when they get capable devices and unlimited data plans.
“The iPhone has certainly delivered on its hype,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Beyond a doubt, this device is compelling consumers to interact with the mobile Web, delivering off-the-charts usage from everything to text messaging to mobile video.”
“While the demographics of iPhone users are very similar to all smartphone owners, the iPhone is outpacing other smartphones in driving mobile content consumption by a significant margin,” said Donovan. “In addition to the attributes of the device itself, another important factor to consider is the fact that all iPhones on AT&T are attached to an unlimited data plan. Our data shows that once the fear of surprise data charges is eliminated, mobile content consumption increases dramatically, regardless of device.”
YouTube has announced that it’s going “higher def”:
We’re making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you’ll find a greater percentage of the library is available to view in higher quality. This feature applies to all eligible videos uploaded from the YouTube community, and is not restricted to partner content, so everyone can enjoy this upgrade.
How do you watch higher quality videos? On your Account page you’re now able to choose “always show me higher quality when available” or “never show me higher quality.” We suggest you select “always show me…” only if you have a fast internet connection, otherwise you might find that videos don’t play as quickly or smoothly as you’re used to. Higher quality videos also have a link right below the video player which will allow you to select between the normal or higher quality settings.
YouTube is putting usability over image quality, though:
Our general philosophy is to make sure that as many people as possible can access YouTube and that videos start quickly and play smoothly. That’s one reason why you don’t see us racing to call this “Super Duper YouTube HD,” because most people don’t want to wait a long time for videos to play.
One-third of all Internet videos watched in the US were on YouTube, according to the latest research from comScore.
January 2008 data shows that YouTube.com accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. during the month. The total number of videos viewed in January was down slightly from the more than 10.1 billion viewed during a record-breaking December 2007.
Top Five Internet Video Sites:
Google Sites - 34.3% share of videos viewed. (YouTube.com accounted for more than 96 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.)
Fox Interactive - 6%
Yahoo! Sites - 3.2%
Microsoft Sites - 2%
Viacom - 2%
Other notable findings from January 2008 include:
More than three-quarters of the total U.S. Internet audience (75.7 percent) viewed online video.
78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com (41.4 videos per viewer).
49.4 million viewers watched 534 million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer).
The average online video duration was 2.9 minutes.
The average online video viewer consumed 70 videos.
YouTube today announced new features that turn YouTube into a platform for Internet video development:
We now provide a complete set of (CRUD) capabilities for uploading, managing, searching, and playing back user videos and metadata from the YouTube “cloud,” managed by us. We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos, and we provide open access to our sizable global audience, enabling you to generate traffic for your site, visibility for your brand, or support for your cause. Meanwhile, we provide full access to our substantial video library, enabling you to attract users and enhance the experience on your site. It’s all free, and it’s available to everyone, starting now.
This is implemented through a set of new APIs that let developers:
Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software
The move is a smart one for YouTube, because it turns the site from a destination into a platform. YouTube provided some examples of what this makes possible:
Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly into YouTube.
The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube.
Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube.
Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.
YouTube provides several resources to help you get started with the new video API’s:
Internet video site Hulu launches today, offering full-length episodes of more than 250 TV series, including Lost and The Simpsons, along with older hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In addition, Hulu will feature content from the Warner Bros Television Group, Lionsgate and from sports leagues.
According to the company, it has already attracted over five million viewers interested in catching up with long-form video online. With its library of older content, the site provides viewers a way for digging into the “long-tail” of television programming.
Even more important to the site’s long-term success is the fact that it launches with a mature advertising platform in place, and advertisers lined up to use it.
I’m still skeptical about Hulu’s ad implementation and navigation. The site’s top level navigation doesn’t give you any idea of the range of content hidden on the site, and browsing is equally clunky, with relies too much on Flash.
Hulu’s ad implementation is equally clunky - showing you long, poorly targeted ads and forcing you to grab a mouse and click to continue watching the show.
The site does a great job delivering the shows, though. I caught up with much of season 3 of Lost via the site, and the video has the best I’ve seen for streaming HD. This, along with the fact that it’s lined up an impressive range of content, should give the site a chance at taking on YouTube.
A scandal has broken out over the fact that the most-viewed video of all time on YouTube, Evolution of Dance, has been beaten by a fan video for the song Music is My Hot Hot Sex.
A lot of people are crying foul - not just because the Hot Hot Sex video is so bad, but because YouTube’s stats suggest that many of the video’s views may have been generated by spambots.
“There’s still a possibility that this torrent of traffic is coming from a legitimate external source, but it seems increasingly unlikely,” they concluded. “It’s either a bug or some form of cheating.”
ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has a different view, suggesting that the clip is “a defining video for the current era online - the heady days and American flavored story of “well, golly look at that” user generated content are over.”
While Kirkpatrick acknowledges suspicions around the video’s ranking, he suggests that globalization may be a factor in the Hot Hot Sex video’s popularity.
“YouTube now gets a majority of its viewer ship from outside the U.S. so it only makes sense that the #1 video of all time isn’t from the U.S. There are now three of the 20 all time most viewed videos on YouTube with non-English titles,” notes Kirkpatrick. “Non-native English speakers and other languages are an essential part of US culture and English titled videos are of course viewed substantially outside of the US - but the growing internationalization of the site can’t help but increase the prominence of non-English videos. The victory of Hot Hot Sex is a strong signal of the global reach of YouTube.”
“After Andy Baio called ‘bulls**t’ on CANSEI DE DER SEX Music is My Hot Hot Sex, there’s been renewed interest in stats-gaming on YouTube,” notes Jackson. “The video is still online at 91,195,785 views and counting, but it’s no longer listed as the most viewed all time”
Is Google The Real Culprit Behind The YouTube Sex Scandal?
While these explanations are all plausible, there’s another, simpler explanation: Google may be responsible for the success of Hot Hot Sex.
The LA Times has published an article by thirtysomething creator Marshall Herskovitz that responds to criticism of his show quarterlife, which was hyped beforehand as the first television-quality production for the Web.
Despite the show’s poor performance, Herskovitz thinks quarterlife is not just successful, but a hit, and challenges the coverage it has received from Podcasting News, the LA Times and others:
IT was a surreal moment when I learned of the “demise” of my online series “quarterlife” on the front page of Tuesday’s L.A. Times. Mark Twain notwithstanding, reports of said demise are not only premature but laughable.
To be fair, the paper printed a correction the next day, but the error didn’t happen by accident. The headline referred to the Big Picture column by Patrick Goldstein in that day’s Calendar section, and while Patrick didn’t write that headline or the one on latimes.com [” ‘Quarterlife’ Gets a Web Smackdown”], both reflect the sentiments in Patrick’s piece.
Goldstein — whom I like, by the way, and think is a very smart writer — put forth the thesis that “quarterlife” represents a “culture clash” between old and new media, wherein two old media types — Ed Zwick and myself — had “arrogantly” blundered into the new media world with the message that we could do it better, and as a result had received an astonishingly negative response online.
He described charts Podcasting News published about our performance on YouTube as looking “like a graph of Ron Paul’s delegate count” and quoted PN’s claim that we were getting fewer views than “sleeping kitties, graffiti videos or even a clip of Sims in labor.” With no other performance figures cited in the article, one was left to assume that “quarterlife” had in fact tanked on the Internet.
Video blogger Sarah Meyers (Pop 17) caught up with Steve Chen, one of YouTube’s founders, recently, and got a scoop on YouTube live video.
The company plans to have a YouTube live video streaming service this year:
“We’ll do it this year,” said Chen. “Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.”
While there are a variety of services that offer live Internet video streaming, none has yet managed to drive mainstream adoption. A YouTube offering could change that overnight.
InformationWeek reports that the US Central Intelligence Agency is watching YouTube - and they’re not just trying to figure out the lyrics to Chocolate Rain on their lunch break.
Spies under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) are looking on YouTube for intelligence; according to the report, spies have become major consumers of social media.
“We’re looking at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,” said Doug Naquin, director of the DNI Open Source Center (OSC).
The CIA’s intelligence gathering isn’t limited to YouTube, though.
“We’re looking at chat rooms and things that didn’t exist five years ago, and trying to stay ahead. We have groups looking at what they call ‘Citizens Media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet.”
YouTube today announced the winners in its 2007 YouTube Video Awards, which seem to have come and gone again this year with a whimper, not a bang.
Based on the latest stats from 
Internet video site 
The LA Times has published an article by thirtysomething creator Marshall Herskovitz that responds to criticism of his show quarterlife, which was hyped beforehand as the first television-quality production for the Web.
