23 Musings

Excellent bit of viral video which is guaranteed to get eyeballs to help get the message across!

From www.dothetest.com.

According to viral marketing specialist Go Viral.

1. Cadbury - Gorilla Drummer, launched online in August; agency: Fallon. Views on YouTube 5M+
   
   
   
2. Smirnoff - Green Tea Partay, launched online in August; agency: JWT, New York. Views on YouTube 3.4M
   
   
   
3. Ray-Ban - Catch Sunglasses, launched online in May; agency, Cutwater. Views on YouTube 3.2M
   
   
   
4. Blendtec - Will it Blend? launched online in July. Views on YouTube for the whole Will It Blend series 20M+, iPhone version scored 2.7M views
   
   
   
5. Lynx/Axe – Bom chicka wah wah, launched online in May; agency BBH, Copenhagen. Views on YouTube 2.6M
   
   

All fantastic examples of creativity and viralness being used to gain massive brand exposure!

Online travel agent Lastminute.com has added a new media search engine to their website. The search powered by Pixsy allows users to search for images and content for destinations they may be thinking of buying on Lastminute.com.

Pixsy is a really good search aggregator for images and video so complements the Lastminute.com offering of holiday and travel products perfectly. It's currently not particularly well integrated, it only offers a link to search the entire site for the words you searched for. I'd expect this integration to get much tighter so that relevant offers are interspersed amongst the images and videos with much more upsell functionality.

Still, a good step for Lastminute, it broadens their offering of inspirational imagery and gives them more content with little effort.

Great video which really gets the point across about information and the changes in the way we use, access and store it.

At long last Google has announced the launch of some technology on YouTube which aims to protect copyright holders. Called YouTube Video Identification, the system does what Google has been promising to do since June, giving content owners the power to block copyrighted clips as they're uploaded to the popular video-sharing service.

Of course, Google's post on their blog avoids the mention of 'blocking' content and focuses instead on how publishers can 'manage' their content 'proactively'. They also mention all the other steps they have taken to allow content to be managed on YouTube:

• Our strict repeat-infringer policy, which has been in place since our launch, terminates accounts of repeat infringers based on DMCA notices.
• We take a unique "hash" of every video removed for copyright infringement and block re-upload of that exact video file prospectively.
• We require a 10-minute limit on the length of content uploaded to the site.
• We provide content owners with an electronic notification and takedown tool, to help them more easily identify their material and notify us to take it down with the click of a mouse.
• We also publish copyright tips for users in plain English and clear, prominent messaging at the time of user upload.

Great propaganda guys... Here's the details from the YouTube site. Will this be enough to fend off the copyright subpoenas? I think it probably will. This kind of proactive filtering approach is exactly what was needed to secure YouTube from the lawyers. Hopefully Google will continue to evolve this technology and stay ahead of the game with it, so securing YouTube's future and allowing them to focus on the more important issues of monetising the video sharing site.

Google has just announced a new layer for Google Earth which features geotagged videos from YouTube. It's great! As a frequent traveler and someone who works in the travel industry this is just what I need to discover new destinations.

I'm hoping that Google open up an API to YouTubes geotagging so we can integrate videos into our Google Maps implementation as well.

And while on that subject, what would be really useful would be if YouTube could add categories to it's videos (such as travel), having access to those sorts of categories through API's would make a lot of businesses much more willing to integrate YouTube content into their web offering (as you can avoid more of the dross).

Google has announced the launch of their Adsense units for embedded videos.

By embedding certain YouTube clips into your website you can now have advertising units displayed via Adsense. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your site content.

When you place a video unit on your website, you'll earn revenue from two types of ad formats: companion ads, which sit above your video content within the player and can be either text or image-based, and text overlay ads, which appear in the bottom 20% of the video content area. Ads on video units can be paid on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impression basis.

Sounds good for anyone with a high traffic website or portal, earning potential could be quite high if you place the right videos on your site.

I love The Onion, and here once again they've hit the nail on the proverbial head with this video showing how they (the media) respond to users comments. Really makes sense if you've ever run a blog, social network or user generated content based site.

Creating a visual search engine that can find video (or images) of people is a bit like the holy grail (highly desirable but tricky to get your hands on). Now along comes a company called Viewdle, who are one of the start-ups at the Techcrunch 40 event at the moment. Viewdle quote themselves as a 'facial recognition powered digital media platform for easily indexing, searching & monetizing video assets'. Quite a powerful thing if they get it working right. Perhaps YouTube should buy them (seeing as Google have yet to make real use of Neven Vision technology).

Viewdle comes out of Reuters Labs and there's a demo up and running which looks pretty cool. It shows how many times someone appears in clips and how long they feature (demo link here for Angelina Jolie). I'm hoping that as it comes from Reuters it should stack up commercially as I'm sure they'll have used this on their own archives.

YouTube have today released their long awaited inVideo advertising functionality.

Now, when you watch a video, about 10 seconds in a small overlay appears in the bottom of the clip. Click that overlay and it will expand and play the video ad over the top of the clip you were watching. The original clip pauses and restarts when the ad finishes.

I don't know how widely these appear on videos as I haven't managed to find one yet but Mashable has screenshots. Mashable make a good point that YouTube have managed to come up with something that meets all the commercial needs of themselves and advertisers without impinging on the viewing experience of users too much. That said, there are some reports of video playback becoming 'choppy' for those who don't have much processing power in their PC's.

Ads will be sold on a CPM basis at approx $20. This makes them a very good alternative to traditional banners and quite possibly a better buy. Targeting is the one thing I need more info on before I'd be buying any, I'd need to know how you target certain videos so as to attract the right users. For example, as a travel business can I target videos which are about destinations or will I appear randomly anywhere in the YouTube network? Testing showed a click through rate of 5 to 10 times that of traditional banners so if they continue that kind of uptake they will be extremely powerful tools for marketers!

More Adobe news. They've announced that they are going to bring in support for H.264, the video compression portion of the MPEG 4 standard.

A beta version of the Flash player codenamed Moviestar apparently, is available at the Adobe Labs here.

Great stuff! Being able to create HD for integration in websites is going to be huge, can't wait to see YouTube vids of people falling over in high def!

Some insights into the upcoming YouTube saving copyright filtering technology have been posted on the NY Times technology blog here. The text is a transcript from a session of the Viacom court case and is of one of Google's lawyers trying to explain how the video signature fingerprinting technology will work.

It's all as expected but makes for interesting reading.

A good post from Pete Cashmore on his Mashable blog here. Pete's spotted, and disseminated, what instantly becomes obvious the moment you get onto the MySpaceTV site (launched today). It looks very similar to YouTube!

I'm sure MySpaceTV will be hugely successful amongst the MySpace community, but how successful it will be outside of that will depend largely on the content that MySpace can get onto it's player. It's going to need to use it's relationships with media owners (NBC/News Corp anyone) to get prime content on it's site if it stands a chance of competing. And that's only competing on copyrighted content, how will it fair on user generated content?

As I said, they've got the social networking bonus of MySpace to play on, and you can bet that the player becomes the only video player allowed on MySpace, so they'll get UGC from there. But will it have the pull to attract the guys who are making amateur films etc as those are the ones who have embraced YouTube so completely.

I don't think this will kill YouTube to be honest. I think the connotations of being associated with MySpace won't help, it's my opinion that MySpace needs to adapt to survive beyond being a playground for teens and they currently show no desire to make that shift.

It looks like MySpaceTV has been launched as a YouTube killer, but I don't think it will cut it without a killer gameplan as well!

Steve Chen (one of the founders of YouTube) has posted on the Google Blog to clear up the details of the video id (read copyright protection) software they are trialling.

He again confirms the use of Audible Magic for helping identify the audio content of music partners like Warner Music, Sony BMG, and Universal. And goes on to describe the video system as one that extracts key visual aspects of uploaded videos and compares that information against reference material provided by copyright holders.

His post is in response to the press and blog stories about the video technology.

Finally an announcement from YouTube that they will be testing video fingerprinting technology soon. This comes hot on the heels of their tests with Audible Magics audio identification software so it sounds like they may implement them both.

Apparently tests are going to begin with Time Warner and Walt Disney, so if they can get it right for these two media behemoths then hopefully that should satisfy the other media companies.

The technology should be available in approx a month for testing. I would imagine it'll be rushed out as soon as they can to stop the incoming waves of lawsuits.

Google has created a new advert format for its YouTube video sharing website.

Google revealed on Friday that broadcasters and other content producers are working with Google on 30-second "pre-roll" ads to appear before content is viewed on YouTube.

The ads will start appearing next year, and revenue will be shared between YouTube and the broadcaster.

A Google spokesman said that 2008 will see "real money coming in" from video advertising.

Google has announced yet another purchase (when will they stop!), this time a they've bought the video conferencing software of a company called Marratech.

It's not at all clear what their intention is with this tool, all they say is that it will allow Googlers (does that mean Google employees or users) to use from-the-desktop video conferencing whenever there's an internet connection.

The smart money however is on this eventually becoming part of the online office suite. It could add a lot of value as a standalone browser based conferencing tool, but even more if integrated into the collaboration aspects of the new presentation tool and docs & spreadsheets!


On the same day, Google have announced another massive leap in profit and growth. In the past year they've had a 69% increase in profits, mostly down to their immense advertising revenue!!

Apparently Google is very near to launching a filtering service that would prevent copyright content from being uploaded to YouTube, CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday.

The new system, which he called Claim Your Content, will automatically identify copyright material so that it can be removed. Judging from that it would seem copyright owners will have to go to YouTube to register and stake their claim to the content before it is removed, if I'm correct in that assertion that may not be enough for copyright owners.

Schmidt said that they are 'very close' to turning the functionality on...

Autonomy, the firm who make excellent search and data mining products have announced a new extension to their video search and management tool Virage. Virage Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection, or ACID for short, enables copyright owners such as broadcasters, production houses and publishers to maintain control of their Intellectual Property by automating the detection of illegal distribution of copyrighted material on the Internet.

Autonomy say: Using Autonomy's unique Meaning-Based Computing, which includes patented image and audio analysis technology, and powered by the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), ACID offers a fast, accurate and scalable method of detecting breaches of copyright, wherever they are located and whatever format they are in. By automatically detecting any rich media that infringes an organization's copyright, Virage ACID eliminates the need for content owners to spend hours trawling through video sharing websites, or manually scanning p2p file contents.

This is perfect for media owners, this will actually watch the video footage for you and report back on whether it breaches your copyright or not. I'd imagine it's going to act as a software agent that you can send off to scour the web for video that may be in breach. Takes me back to the days of Autonomys' search agents symbolised by the dog (long time ago).

A very timely release if you ask me, and it's bound to get some take up with the current hype around video copyright. Autonomys' technology is already in use by the video search engine Blinkx. Perhaps YouTube should get Autonomy onboard to help negate their own failure to provide copyright protection?

Google have replied to Viacoms lawsuit and their lawyers letter to the press with their own letter to the editor in the Washington Post. Glad to see they don't labour the point and make valid comments regarding DMCA safe harbour.

Still doesn't see them out of the woods I reckon, there will be many more lawsuits in the lifetime of YouTube and these things can have a habit of dragging on and dirtying reputations.