Has anything blown your mind lately?

If not, it’s time you check out Kutiman’s Thru You – an Internet album of music videos completely made out of remixed YouTube footage.

Kutiman takes YouTube footage of people giving gear demos and doing their music thing, and then turns them completely inside out, recontextualizing them and turning them into compelling tracks.

Check out I’m New above, and then check out the source videos below to get a better idea of the scope of Kutiman’s slice and dice vision.

Let me know what you think of Kutiman’s video remixing in the comments!

PodPress, a WordPress plugin that adds features for podasters, has been updated to 8.8.1, removing compatibility issues with recent versions of WordPress, according to its developer:

Version 8.8.1 is temporary maintenance release to make podPress compatible with the post revisions feature introduced in WordPress 2.6. If somebody is interested in maintaining podPress while the main developers are out or in submitting a patch, please email Andrew on admin [at] laptoptips.ca.

You can download PodPress via the WordPress plugin directory.

ZillionTV has announced a new “personalized television” Internet television service.

Through agreements with Hollywood studios and TV networks, ZillionTV plans to offer an extensive array of entertainment content; targeted and addressable advertising; and, television commerce, letting you make purchases through your television.

The ZillionTV Service, currently in its Beta phase, will offer instant, subscription-free access to entertainment content from Hollywood studios and TV networks, tapping the libraries of Disney, 20th Century Fox Television, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. Digital Distribution. All content is offered on-demand and delivered directly to the television set via a common high-speed Internet connection.

Users will pay a one-time, initial service activation fee to receive the ZillionTV Device and motion-sensing ZillionTV Remote control.

Missing from ZillionTV’s announcement is any discussion of user-generated content and indie content. The Internet audience has clearly shown their interest in long-tail content, making YouTube, by far, the most popular Internet video destination. This is likely to be a stumbling block to adoption.

More details below.

Updating a story we first told you about in January, wireless memory card maker Eye-Fi today announced the release of two new wireless SD memory cards that will upload videos directly from a digital camera to a computer and the Web. In addition to automatic photo uploads, the next generation Eye-Fi cards can deliver users’ video clips to YouTube or Flickr.

“The magic of Eye-Fi’s new cards is that they work with the camera you already own to capture photos – and now videos – and send them directly to the Web for sharing,” said Jef Holove, CEO for Eye-Fi. “Your memories will upload in the background for instant sharing – all by simply turning on your camera.”

The 4GB Eye-Fi Share Video and Eye-Fi Explore Video cards can upload photos and videos directly to one of more than 25 online photo sharing and social networking sites. The Eye-Fi Explore Video card automatically geotags photos and videos with location information about where the image was captured, and offers hotspot access at more than 10,000 Wi-Fi locations for photo and video uploads away from home.

The next generation Eye-Fi cards are available for pre-order at www.eye.fi for an MSRP of $79 (4GB Eye-Fi Share Video) and $99 (4GB Eye-Fi Explore Video). The cards will be available in bricks-and-mortar stores later this month.

Friday, Eye-Fi will release a new iPhone application that allows Eye-Fi users to store and share all their photos, from both iPhone and a digital camera, into the same organized computer folder and to one of 25 online photo sharing Web sites. iPhone users who own an Eye-Fi card can download the free application from Apple’s App Store.

Tech industry and consumer research firm Parks Associates have published a new report that explains that on-demand video libraries and custom widgets will drive adoption of “connected television experiences” — that is, Internet TV.

The research firm’s new white paper, “From Boob Tube to YouTube: Consumers and TV“, points to strong interest among U.S. broadband households in getting Internet content via their television. In particular, 33% of U.S. broadband-using households are interested in widgets, and almost 50% are interested in “premium Web content,” including TV shows and movies, through a connected set-top box.

Parks Associates explain that broadband households are “growing accustomed to viewing video off the Internet.” They predict that demand for Web content will grow, and those desires will influence their consumer electronic purchases — and their decisions about choosing TV/internet service providers.

The researchers also found that “consumers respond favorably to enhanced interactive features and are willing to pay – either on the price of a television or as an additional subscription cost – for certain features.” The TV/Internet service providers, and the hardware manufacturers who jump early on this growth in demand will benefit greatly, “creating new value out of the television.”

photo: “new” vista television, massdistraction

Digital measurement service comScore today released January 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, showing that U.S. Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos during that month. These figures represent an increase of 4 percent over December 2008. YouTube led the growth charge, accounting for 91 percent of the incremental January-versus-December gain in the number of videos viewed. Perhaps most notable in this monthly report, YouTube surpassed 100 million U.S. viewers for the first time.

With 6.4 billion videos, viewed by 102 million U.S. online video viewers, in January 2009, Google-related websites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property. That equals 43 percent online video market share. More than 99 percent of the Google video viewings came from their YouTube.com property. Two out of every three online video viewers utilized the Google sites.

Fox Interactive Media, parent corporation of MySpace.com, ranked a rather distant second with 552 million videos watched by 62.1 million U.S. viewers (3.7 percent). Yahoo! Sites with 374 million videos (2.5 percent) and Viacom Digital with 288 million (1.9 percent).  Megavideo climbed 15 percent (103 million videos) in January to nab a top ten ranking for the first time.

Other interesting bits from the comScore report include:

• 76.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average U.S. online video viewer watched 356 minutes of video (approximately 6 hours) in January 2009, up 15 percent over the previous month.
• 100.9 million U.S. viewers watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (62.6 videos per viewer).
• 54.1 million U.S. viewers watched 473 million videos on MySpace.com (8.7 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes, up a wee bit from 3.2 minutes/video in December 2008.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Megavideo was 24.9 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

Podcasting is going mainstream, at least according to eMarketer:

Podcasting has evolved from an odd, funky blogging experiment into a broad medium with mainstream trappings. Today, the vast majority of the top-rated podcasts come from recognizable media entities that are using podcasts to expand their existing radio, TV, cable or satellite audiences.

They peg the podcast audience at 9% of Internet users now, and are predicting the audience to nearly double, to 17%, within five years.

Podcasting & eCommerce

eMarketer also notes a relationship between podcasting and online shopping:

US online buyers who purchase mostly online showed an even greater propensity to listen to podcasts.

50% of mostly online buyers in a PriceGrabber.com survey said they listened to podcasts—a far greater number than comparable percentages of Internet users or consumers as a whole.

eMarketer’s research suggests that podcasting has evolved from a niche channel to a mainstream one.

The podcast audience also deserves special attention from online marketers, because it appears that the podcast audience is more likely to shop online than Internet users or consumers as a whole.

What do you think? Is podcasting now mainstream?

Paul Graham has published an interesting post that looks at Why TV Lost, arguing that the Internet, especially sites like Facebook, have “killed TV”.

He highlights four reasons for this:

• The Internet is an open platform. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds.
• Moore’s Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth.
• Piracy. Users prefer it not just because it’s free, but because it’s more convenient. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen.
• Social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it’s social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer.

While Graham’s case is certainly interesting, it’s got two significant flaws:

• People are watching more TV than ever – we reported last month that the Internet is turning us into mouse potatoes. People aren’t just moving their viewing to the Internet, they are watching more video on all platforms than ever before.
• User generated media changes the economics of media – television’s traditional economic model is based on scarcity, and getting as many people as possible to watch expensive content. User-generated media means that the Internet offers practically infinite content options, and indie media producers, working from their bedrooms, garages and backyards, now challenge mainstream media for views and page views.

What do you think? Is television as we know it dead? If so, did Facebook kill it, or is television a victim of podcasts & Youtube?

Update: Rocketboom’s Andrew Baron offers his thoughts on this.

Image: gelund

YouTube has announced that it’s looking for video bloggers to discuss some of the little-used features of the site, and that it plans to feature some of these user-generated video:

Every week we release new tools, or enhancements to current ones, to help you make better videos, connect with one another, and understand your audience. We tell you about them in this blog, but now we want to take it up a notch and ask you to (puppy-dog eyes) adopt a feature.

It’s not to say that the features on the list below are unloved or unlovable; it’s just that we believe that many of you could help spread the word more broadly about their usefulness — and, more important, in a way that’s fun to watch.

They are looking for videos that discuss these features, and other less-known features:

• AudioSwap (use tags: audioswap, adoptafeature)
• Country and Language Options (use tags: countrypulldown, adoptafeature)
• Insight (use tags: insight, adoptafeature)
• Playlists (use tags: playlists, adoptafeature)
• Quick Capture (use tags: quickcapture, adoptafeature)
• Subscriptions (use tags: subscriptions, adoptafeature)

YouTube says that they plan to track which videos are the most effective at promoting site feature and will feature the most effective videos on the site’s home page and help center.

Amazon has released a new Kindle iPhone App (App Store link) that expands the reach of the Kindle platform to Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod touch.

Description:

Kindle for iPhone allows Apple iPhone and iPod touch owners to read Kindle books using a simple, easy-to-use interface. You can shop for hundreds of thousands of books at www.amazon.com/kindlestore, and wirelessly transfer the books to your iPhone or iPod touch.

With Kindle for iPhone, you can:

• Buy a Kindle book from your Mac, PC, or iPhone using a Web browser and wirelessly transfer the books to your iPhone
• Read first chapters of any book for free before you buy
• Download the Kindle books you already own for free — they are automatically backed up on Amazon.com
• Adjust the text size, add bookmarks, and view the annotations you created on your Kindle device

Kindle for iPhone also includes Whispersync, which lets you switch back and forth between your Kindle device and Kindle for iPhone while keeping your bookmarks and reading location synchronized between devices.

While Amazon’s announcement makes the Kindle platform a lot more interesting, it doesn’t address the Achilles’ heel of the Kindle: it’s a relatively boring, closed system that doesn’t embrace Internet content.

The Kindle app also has a lot of usability problems:

• It’s useless without an Amazon account,;
• It doesn’t let you browse for new content; and
• It doesn’t even include a free book to help you get started.

On the iPhone, the Kindle app faces a lot of competition – ebooks are already the fastest growing category of app in the iTunes store. Google lets iPhone users read ebooks via an iPhone-compatible site. And other ebook readers, like Stanza, are already well established on the iPhone.

What do you think of Kindle on the iPhone? Does it help make the Kindle platform relevant, or is it just another speedbump on the road to a more open ereading future?

via WSJ