The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘youtube’

Earlier today, several previously sealed legal documents in the longstanding copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube by Viacom were made public. In conjunction with the public release of those documents, YouTube’s chief counsel Zahavah Levine wrote a blog post which reads more like a summary of a legal brief.

In it, Levine outlines YouTube’s main defense against Viacom’s allegations, including the fact that Viacom “secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there.” Levine also notes that “Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube,” suggesting that the current $1 billion lawsuit is its attempt to cash in on YouTube years after the fact.

Here is the key passage from the blog post:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

In other words, while Viacom’s lawyers were issuing takedown notices, its marketers were putting clips up on YouTube to promote Viacom movies and TV shows. You’ve got to wonder what the judge will make of that evidence.

Ever wanted to tell the world how much you love BMW, Coca-Cola, and any of the other biggest brand names on Earth? Here’s your chance: MyBrandz is a new community site that looks to let people talk about their favorite brands with other users, allowing them to share their favorite products, photos, and more. You may remember MyBrandz as the company that convinced a guy to tattoo the YouTube logo to his arm a few months back.

My initial reaction to the site was that it was a bit bizarre — is there really an audience of people who want to talk about how much they love these multibillion dollar corporations (many of which couldn’t give a hoot about their customers)? And then I remembered the throngs of die-hard Apple fans that police internet forums, and the Ferrari store in downtown San Francisco that sells $200+ leather jackets emblazoned with the classic logo. Yeah, there’s definitely an audience for this.

Once you’ve browsed to the fan page of the company you like, you can share notes, photos, video, and links with like-minded fans. To help boost engagement, the site is currently running a promotion that invites users to ‘own their brand’ — the top user for a given brand site will win a free stock certificate. The site is happy to point out that “a Google share is worth more than $600 and an Apple share over $200″, but doesn’t go out of its way to say that the top user on Playboy’s fan page can expect a windfall of $3.58.

The site has some nice touches, like a scrolling wall of logos to help you quickly build out a roster of your favorite brands, and a graph that plots the ranking of brands based on their market value and popularity. But, as with most social sites, it’s going to face a chicken-and-egg problem. And many of these brands have already spawned their own communities and forums — it’s going to be hard to get those to migrate to MyBrandz.

Brand fans may also want to check out Logorama, the brand-studded animated short that just won an Oscar.

One of the three points I laid out as TiVo’s keys to survival was to partner with more content providers. And just like that, Virigin Media announced it will be offering TiVo set-top boxes to its 3.8 million subscribers sometime this year. This move, along with the Conax partnership , makes TiVo a major player in the European DVR market.

The rest is here: 
TiVo will be offered by Virgin Media in UK later this year

We featured a so-called leaked video showing MW2 ’s upcoming map pack last week but had no idea when players will get access to the new maps. Activision finally came clean, though, and announced that the DLC will hit PCs first on March 30, with consoles getting it sometime afterwards. Oh, and yeah, it will be named Stimulus Package just like the rumor stated, which is a kind of appropriate name, actually.

See the original post:
Modern Warfare 2 DLC map pack coming to PC March 30, Xbox and PS3 shortly after

Thanks to some last-minute heroics, Cablevision customers here in the Northeast were able to watch the Oscars last night , which aired on WABC, the local ABC affiliate. Cynics have suggested that’s because WABC wasn’t prepared, no matter how cavalier its previous rhetoric, to give up the night’s ratings (and ad dollars) because it wanted to eek out a few more pennies from Cablevision. (WABC had wanted extra money from Cablevision per subscriber, sorta like that Fox-Time Warner Cable feud from a few weeks ago.) But until both sides came to an agreement, people were freaking out: how are we going to watch the Oscars?! Will it be on YouTube ?

View original post here:
Cablevision subscribers: You do know that broadcast TV, like WABC, is totally free, right? You just need an indoor antenna.

There’s a new Modern Warfare 2 map pack coming this Spring, kids. The map pack , possible dubbed Stimulus Package, comes with five maps, with two of them being classic COD4 maps. Curious what they’re going to look like?

See the original post here: 
A video preview MW2’s upcoming map pack leaks out way early

Google Trends is a great tool to get an overview on terms people are searching for with the largest search engine in the world. It also shows interesting trends. And something is definitely going on with searches for a few large social networks using Google.

At some point in mid January, a group of sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare saw a huge drop in number of searches for their domains. Now, to be clear, these are only searches for the .com names, for example, “facebook.com” and “youtube.com” and not just the terms “facebook” and “youtube” themselves. Still, across the board, traffic had been rising for these .com domains and then at the same time all dropped off a cliff.

One might think this has to do with the China situation (Google warned it might have to pull out of China after saying it would remove previous restraints on searches). But drilling down into the data shows that while the searches from China did take a big fall, they did as well from other countries around the world too.

Other sites saw drops as well, but by far these large social sites saw the most pronounced drops that all seem to be aligned. Weirdly, google.com did not see any drop (though I’m not sure who uses Google to google google.com).

We’ve reached out to Google for some clarification or insight into this and will update when we hear back. The logical answer would seem to be that they switched something in mid-January that led to these huge drops in social site searches on Google, but who knows. Maybe we have a wild honey bee extinction situation going on here within Google.

Update: Google’s own Orkut.com also seeing a drop. As are several popular European social sites like Tuenti.com.

[via Mrinal]

Gossip mongers and sports fans alike are eagerly awaiting Tiger Woods’ press conference tomorrow morning, when he’ll confront the public and apologize for his string of affairs that tarnished both his image as a role model and his endorsement earnings. And, according to one source, you’ll be able to live stream it from the world’s most popular video portal: YouTube.

This is interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s going to get a lot of traffic, as many people will be at work and won’t be able to watch the conference from their TV sets. But it’s also another live video feed on YouTube, which historically has almost exclusively featured recorded content. Over the last year or so, YouTube has been experimenting more often with live feeds, with broadcasts including YouTube Live, numerous political debates and events including President Obama’s record-breaking inauguration, and more recently, earnings webcasts. But the Tiger Woods event, while certainly newsworthy, is a different beast. It’s related more to gossip and sports than it is to our nation’s future or Google news.

It could also be a sign of things to come.  YouTube doesn’t stream these events themselves (they’ve often relied on Akamai), but it’s apparent that they’re becoming more open to featuring live streams on the home page. And even though YouTube’s roots may lie in user-submitted videos, it seems foolish to push users to other video sites whenever they want to see a major event live.

The event starts at 8 AM PST. Other sites that will be streaming the event include Ustream and major news networks.

Update: It’s official, YouTube just announced it here.

The team behind the hot location-based service Foursquare took the time tonight to write a rare longer post about location privacy. Their basic stance: we take privacy very seriously and understand it. Also, that service Please Rob Me should shut up.

In fact, it seems the entire impetus behind Foursquare’s post was Please Rob Me, the mock service set up in an attempt to show the dangers of tweeting out Foursquare check-ins. We, along with several other sites, covered it yesterday. And while it’s hard to take that site itself seriously, it does raise some interesting points.

Yes, as Foursquare notes and Gawker wrote yesterday, it’s just as likely that a burglar knows your home is going to be empty from 9 to 5 when you’re at work (provided you have a 9 to 5 job, of course). But people also aren’t routinely sending out their home address to thousands of strangers as they might be doing if they have Foursquare hooked up to Twitter. And when you add that on top of all of the other stuff that people send out on Twitter that perhaps they shouldn’t (when mixed with location information, etc), things get interesting.

The point here is: does anyone really think Foursquare alone is going to lead to a rise in break-ins? No (I’m not saying that will never happen, but I don’t see it being an epidemic). The main point, as I saw it, is that tying a closed, symmetric network (Foursquare) to an open, asymmetric one (Twitter) is something that’s potentially troublesome for location-based services. But no one really seems to be talking about it.

What I mean by that is that on Foursquare, just like Facebook, you have to explicitly allow someone to follow you (and you follow them back in return). On Twitter, anyone can follow you without your permission (assuming you have an unlocked account). When you tweet out your Foursquare check-ins (some people even do this automatically), it essentially makes Foursquare an asymmetric network. And believe it or not, some people are doing that without really thinking about it. Or they’re doing it because it’s easier to gain friends/followers on an asymmetric network.

This is an issue that Facebook is undoubtedly thinking about right now as it considers how to enter the location playing field. As I said, right now, the network is largely symmetric, but recent changes are making it more asymmetric. And how they handle location information — with their 400 million+ users is going to be very interesting. And potentially, actually scary.

It’s been nearly two weeks since the Super Bowl, but the stats behind one of the world’s biggest media spectacles keep pouring in. YouTube has just written about the impact some of the Super Bowl ads have had on its site, offering rare insight into just how much attention those million-dollar advertising spots will get you.

During the days following the Super Bowl, YouTube reported an 18,000% spike in queries for “Snickers” (no doubt spurred by their ad featuring Betty White and Abe Vigoda). YouTube also says that mobile queries for Doritos rose by 5,000% (note that the Snickers stat was for YouTube’s entire property but Doritios was for mobile only  — it’s a bit strange that they aren’t giving an apples to apples comparison).

YouTube ran a week-long contest beginning on Super Bowl Sunday that invited users to choose their favorite ad using a special site called YouTube Ad Blitz, during which 2.9 million votes were cast (Doritos took the top spot).

YouTube mentions one other interesting stat: clicks on the site’s Promoted Videos, which allow users and brands to advertise their videos on the site, doubled over Super Bowl weekend.