Ozzy Osbourne wants you to direct his next video, for the track I Don’t Wanna Stop from his upcoming album Black Rain. He’s offering prizes for the best music video, including a Sony HD video cam.

Here are the details:

Here’s what we’re looking for. Ozzy wants a video for his new single “I Don’t Wanna Stop”. He knows there are tons of talented fans and video directors out there that have what it takes to put it together. So that’s where you come in.

Ozzy and his band shot performance footage of the entire song on green screen from multiple camera angles. Footage is posted on this page for you to download. The director can download performance footage and then make your own video using your preferred type of video editing software.

Use all of your own footage, use some of the band’s, it’s all up to you, just use your imagination. And remember, it’s Ozzy, so make it fucking ROCK!

Apple today announced that Paul McCartney‚Äôs new album, Memory Almost Full, is now available for digital pre-order, and McCartney’s full catalog of 25 solo albums will be available for the first time digitally on iTunes later this month.

iTunes customers pre-ordering the 13 track album in the US will receive the Dance Tonight music video when the album is delivered and the single Ever Present Past, immediately upon pre-ordering the new album.

‚ÄúPaul McCartney is one of the greatest musicians of all time, and we’re extremely excited to offer his first digitally distributed album on iTunes,‚Äù said Steve Jobs, Apple‚Äôs CEO.

‚Äú‚ÄôMemory Almost Full‚Äô is a very personal album for me, and I’m thrilled to let fans experience it in a whole new way,‚Äù said Paul McCartney. ‚ÄúThere‚Äôs no better time to make this music available through iTunes.‚Äù

‚ÄúMemory Almost Full‚Äù, McCartney’s latest solo album, will be publicly available for purchase on June 5th, 2007 and represents the first global release by Hear Music, the newly formed record label from Starbucks Entertainment and Concord Music Group. iTunes customers in the US participating in the pre-sale will receive a free download of the music video for the album’s opening track “Dance Tonight” which stars Natalie Portman and was directed by acclaimed director Michel Gondry. Outside North America, iTunes customers who pre-order the album will get an exclusive acoustic version of the single ‚ÄúDance Tonight‚Äù.

MySpace today announced the launch of a new section within MySpace Video featuring premium content from top corporate news and lifestyle brands. MySpace Video will launch “branded channels” for National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, FOX’s IGN Entertainment, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, Studio411, VBS.tv, and Young Hollywood.

“The upcoming branded channel launch continues the growing momentum of MySpace Video,” said Jeff Berman, General Manager of Video and SVP of Public Affairs for MySpace. “We’re empowering our partners to customize their own video channels and use them as hubs to create a niche experience for users. Today’s announcement is a sign of things to come for MySpace Video.”

All branded channels will live inside MySpace Video and will contain varying video content offered by each respective partner. In response to user demand, the initial set of MySpace Video branded channels focuses on the categories of news and lifestyle.

Google has introduced a new podcast, the Google Developer Podcast. The podcast is hosted by Dick Wall and Carl Quinn, two Googlers that are part of the Java Posse podcast.

Topics covered will include:

• Interviews with Google engineers, discussing areas of their expertise
• New features, applications, and APIs that matter to developers
• Open source projects that they work on and/or care about at Google
• Projects that use Google’s APIs and applications in interesting ways
• News and events, including the Google Summer of Code.

You can preview the podcast below, or subscribe to it using this URL:

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/podcast

Apple updated its MacBook line today with faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 1GB of memory and larger hard drives in every model.

“The MacBook is a huge hit with customers, and is one of the reasons that Mac sales are growing three times faster than PC sales,” said Philip Schiller, Apple‚Äôs senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The new MacBook is faster, has even more memory and storage, and is an ideal notebook for customers‚Äô growing library of digital music, photos and movies.”

The one-inch thick MacBook comes in three models: white 2.0 GHz and 2.16 GHz MacBook models, and a black 2.16 GHz MacBook model. The MacBook includes a built-in iSight video camera for video chatting on-the-go with friends or family using iChat AV, recording a video podcast or iMovie using iLife ‘06, or taking fun snapshots with Photo Booth. The MacBook includes Apple’s MagSafe Power Adapter that magnetically connects the power cord to the MacBook and safely disconnects when under strain, and the latest generation of 802.11n wireless networking for up to five times the performance and twice the range of 802.11g.

At prices starting at $1,099 (less for students & teachers), MacBooks are an excellent option for podcasters. They come with iLife ‘06, featuring iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand and iWeb. iMovie and Garageband are two of the most popular apps for podcasters.

The MacBook also comes with the latest release of the world’s most advanced operating system, Mac OS X version 10.4.9 Tiger, including Safari, Mail, iCal, iChat AV, Front Row and Photo Booth.

Pricing & Availability

adap.tv, an digital video advertising platform, today announced its public launch and a strategic partnership with Metacafe, one of the world’s largest video Web sites. The company’s technology is designed to not only analyze video content and determine the most relevant ad, but also to adapt in real time to viewer behavior, thereby increasing the success rates for publishers and advertisers.

The system analyzes each video, extracting an “understanding” of its context using metadata, speech recognition, and video interconnectivity information. Once the video has been analyzed, machine learning algorithms make rapid decisions about which ads to serve, analyzing user behavior in real time to improve the relevancy of ad placement.

The future of Internet television belongs to free video podcasts and ad-supported video downloads, according to a new report by Forrester Research. Forrester estimates that paid video downloads will peak in 2007, generating $279 million in revenue, up from $98 million last year. Beyond 2007, advertising models will drive the online video market.

Despite the interest in selling video downloads from companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart, only nine percent of online adults have ever paid to download a movie or TV show. Forrester’s analysis suggests that, while there’s a niche of media junkies willing to spend heavily on such content, they do not represent the vanguard of a rush by mainstream consumers. Without mainstream viewers joining the party, the video download market will not grow fast enough to support the ambitions of all the companies involved.

“The paid video download market in its current evolutionary state will soon become extinct, despite the fast growth and the millions being spent today,” said Forrester’s James McQuivey. “Television and cable networks will shift the bulk of paid downloading to ad-supported streams where they have control of ads and effective audience measurement. The movie studios, whose content only makes up a fraction of today‚Äôs paid downloads, will put their weight behind subscription models that imitate premium cable channel services.”

Rocketboom’s Andrew Michael Baron has an interesting post at his personal site about the huge interest in creating Internet video platforms. Baron name checks Open Media Network, Current.tv, Akimbo, AT&T Homezone, Brightcove, Innertube and others, asking “Why are these always going wrong or why are they not going better?”

There are some good reasons why, and Baron lists ten of them:

Ten Reasons Why Internet Video Platforms Fail:

1. Insubstantial library of content
2. Poor bit rates
3. Lack of innovation (clone platform)
4. No share in content ownership rights
5. No exclusivity of content distribution
6. Lack of spark/spirit for a centralized community
7. Need for users to d/l proprietary software
8. Awkward interface design
9. Overly excessive emphasis on rights protection
10. Lack of technological foresight & audience expectations

An underlying issue that Internet media networks have to overcome is that technology is driving the cost of producing & distributing Internet video down to almost nothing. This means that there’s little to tie content producers, like Baron, to any video platform.

What Baron doesn’t address is why some Internet video platforms, like YouTube, succeed. YouTube dominates Internet video, despite having many of the problems Baron cites (poor bit rates, no exclusivity of content distribution, awkward interface design.)

YouTube’s success in capturing people’s attention demonstrates that, while there are many ways for an Internet video platform to fail, there’s still tremendous opportunity for video platforms to succeed.

Media Rights Technologies and BlueBeat.com, developers of digital rights management software, have issued cease and desist letters to Microsoft, Adobe, Real Networks and Apple for failing to implement the companies’ DRM technology in Windows Vista, Adobe’s Flash Player, Real Player and Apple’s iTunes and iPod.

The companies are using an unusual interpretation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to make their case. The DMCA, signed into law by President Clinton in 1998, makes prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology that is designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or which protects the rights of copyright owners. According to the firms, mere avoidance of an effective copyright protection solution is a violation of the DMCA.

MRT and BlueBeat have developed a technological measure which can be used to control access to copyrighted material. The product, the X1 SeCure Recording Control, has been tested by the industry’s standards bodies, the RIAA and IFPI, and can be used to make stream ripping difficult.

MRT asserts that, because Apple, Microsoft, Real and Adobe have produced billions of products without the use of MRT’s technologies, they are in violation of the DMCA. According to MRT, “Failure to comply with this demand could result in a federal court injunction to any of the above named parties to cease production or sale of their products and/or the imposition of statutory damages of at least $200 to $2500 for each product distributed or sold.”

“Together these four companies are responsible for 98 percent of the media players in the marketplace; CNN, NPR, Clear Channel, MySpace Yahoo and YouTube all use these infringing devices to distribute copyrighted works,” states MRT CEO Hank Risan. “We will hold the responsible parties accountable. The time of suing John Doe is over.”