YouTube has given video awards to 12 videos. The categories are Adorable, Comedy, Commentary, Creative, Eyewitness, Inspirational, Instructional, Music, Politics, Series, Short Film, and Sports. The winners get bragging rights, a trophy and an invitation to an event later this year, presumably an awards ceremony.
Which one do you like best?
And the winners are:
Adorable: Laughing Baby
Comedy: Potter Puppet Pals in “The Mysterious Ticking Noise”
Commentary: LonelyGirl15 is Dead!
Creative: The Original Human TETRIS Performance by Guillaume Reymond
Eyewitness: Battle at Kruger
Inspirational: Blind Painter
Instructional: How to solve a Rubik’s Cube (Part One)
Music: “Chocolate Rain” Original Song by Tay Zonday
YouTube announced the launch of YouTube Everywhere. This opens up YouTube services and functionality to be used on every website or application that wants to integrate with YouTube and use its services. You can set it up so that your users can upload videos to YouTube and never leave your site. You can retrieve your user’s videos and play them on your site, with a player that you get to brand. You can add/edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc).
This move means that anyone can build a YouTube like capability into their website or application and take advantage of YouTube’s full capabilities and you can do it for free. This is an amazing tool kit that will allow people to build all kinds of interesting applications. All of this will be great to see.
There are also a number of other big implications:
It increases rate at which GooTube will become the central repository for video content on the web.
Google will become the largest content delivery network we’ve ever seen. This is bad news for the other players in video distribution business, such as Britecove or Maven Networks.
And it could be bad news for players such as Akamai, if Google gets way ahead and opens up its content delivery network further.
GooTube will collect enormous amounts of data about what’s happening with video everywhere on the net and that will be really valuable to advertisers.
Everything everywhere will speed up a lot, and that means publishers and developers better figure out how they compete in that world.
Flash/Adobe just increased in value as this will increase the dominance of Flash even further.
Here’s the video version of the release:
Leave a comment with other implications or applications you would like to see people build with this.
Kevin Bromber, CEO & Founder of NowLive, met with me at Digital Hollywood to tell me about NowLive, a social broadcasting service that lets you run your own multimedia TV channel. And it wasn’t the usual interview as NowLive was in the middle of broadcasting live from Digital Hollywood, so we did the interview and it was broadcasted live. Chey Bell, host of Outside Voice, was the host at the time so she and I had a good conversation afterwards. I will post that half of the conversation on another podcast post.
NowLive is a social broadcasting network that lets anyone create a live, interactive talk shows, take callers, share media, syndicate podcasts, and more. NowLive empowers you to connect any time with peers, fans, friends, and new and interesting people. Communicate and promote the things that matter to you most! Who uses NowLive? Celebrities! Join Adrianne Curry, Christopher Knight, Bobbi Billard, Christine Dolce (ForBiddeN), Somaya Reece, and more! Bloggers (sport, political, travel, fashion, music…) – take your blog to the next level and host a weekly call in show at your blog site. MySpacers: create an interactive party line with all your friends. As one of our members said, “It’s like MySpace on Crack”. Bands: Start an international live concert from your garage. YahooGroups: add live teleconferencing to the group. Fantasy Sport: Have the commissioner of your league host a weekly get together so teams can negotiate real time trades and brag about last weeks standings. Businesses: invite your customers to an online Q&A session; Friends & Family! – this is a great way for your friends or family to share great conversation and experiences from different locations, all within a rich-media environment.
[tags]Digital Hollywood, NowLive, social broadcasting, social media, online video, Kevin Bromber, Chey Bell[/tags]
The British Monarchy have created a channel on YouTube. Queen Elizabeth ll’s Christmas day video will now be available on YouTube at the Royal Channel. It will be interesting to see how long it takes other world leaders to realize that they have a direct channel to the people via the internet. Who needs CNN when you can have your own channel.
[tags]YouTube, Queen Elizabeth, Royal Channel, online video[/tags]
Some of the writers see the opportunity that the strike is creating for online video ventures. They are drafting business plans and meeting with venture capitalist’s like Accel Partners.
Some of the writers who are drafting business plans said that if the strike had lasted only a week, they would have just gone back to work. But now they’ve had time to plot strategy — and to realize that a prolonged strike with reruns and reality shows filling the airwaves might allow them to grab a wandering audience.
“The companies are pushing us into the embrace of people that are going to cut them out of the loop,” marveled one show runner who is tracking the start-up trend but not participating.
“We are one Connecticut hedge-fund checkbook, one Silicon Valley server farm and two creators away from having channels on YouTube, where the studios don’t own anything.
This strike will definitely have a negative impact on TV and accelerate the migration of viewers to the web. It seems like a great time for the writers to be starting online ventures. The talent is available and the tech investors see the opportunity.
Facebook director Jim Breyer, a partner at Silicon Valley venture firm Accel Partners, said he was weighing deals that would rely on Facebook’s platform. “It is likely we will make investments in Los Angeles screenwriter/content-oriented companies in 2008,” he said.
Some are going to take the risk and if they are successful it could turn into a stampede from the TV to the web.
Rex Wong, CEO of DAVE Networks, met with me at Digital Hollywood. DAVE Networks provides white label social networks. That means that DAVE Networks provides the infrastructure to power sites like America’s Funniest Home Videos, Stargate’s Community and Dave.TV. The users of the sites don’t see DAVE Networks, they see the customer’s brand. The customers get the benefits of offering a wide range of social community tools to their users.
The system provides the tools to deploy a custom social broadcast network, including
Self publishing
Video upload, download, rating, comments
Blog, video blog, moblog
DAVE points system
A modular player can be customized with your brand and embedded in user’s MySpace, blog or web page
User contests
Rex also told me about an exciting new project that DAVE Networks has launched called Next.TV. NEXT.TV, a competitor to the much hyped Joost, is a new Internet TV service that delivers over 50 channels of high quality TV content. NEXT.TV’s content is sponsored by advertisers so that you can get premium TV content for free.
NEXT.TV will be available initially in October 2007 on HP consumer notebooks. A version will also be available to the general public shortly thereafter for download of which you can sign up to be part of the Private Beta Program by signing up at www.next.tv.
[tags]DAVE Networks, Rex Wong, Next.TV, IPTV, online video, video, Digital Hollywood[/tags]
In a world where competition for attention is growing faster than ever and consumers get to skip the ads if they want, will advertisements as content save the day for advertisers? It’s not clear yet, but there is a growing body of evidence that it can and is being done by advertisers, both big and small.
The Wall Street Journal provided five case studies today of advertising as content, and all done by small companies.
1. Blendtec’s Will It Blend
Blendtec is in the blender business. One day the marketing guy sees the enginneering guy test blenders with chunks of wood. The net result is one of the most successful Ads as Content campaigns, Will It Blend.
Straight from the success of YouTube.com, Will It Blend has been known as an internet marketing sensation, viewed by more than 30 million people. Now for the first time ever, you can take home the glory, passion and power of Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson with his blending antics on the first 50 Will It Blend videos, including Will It Blend facts and behind the scenes footage.
Not only has it been successful as content they say sales of blenders have shot up 500%.
Here’s the video of one of my favorites Will It Blend: the iPhone edition.
2. MJ Safety Solutions Bullet Resistant Backpack
MJ Safety Solutions MyChildsPack is a bullet resistant back pack. The video is serious with lots of explosions and guns firing. YouTube reports that the video has been viewed just under 25,000 times at the time I write this. The company reports that it has sold over 1,000 of these backpacks at $175 each.
3. All Natural Maine Root’s Free Range Root Beer
In this video campaign, All Natural Main Root is marketing the fight against corporate root beer and of course their alternative: Free Range Root Beer. Sales have gone up from $500,000 to $3,000,000 year over year. Maine Root paid $20,000 for the campaign. Not a bad return from some viral videos.
FreeRangeRootBeer.com is dedicated to stopping corporate root beer “by any means necessary.†Non-violence is our modus operandi. We spread our message mostly through non-violent protests, but also use root beer “breakouts†to free root beer from their bondage in their inhumane storage facilities. We’re on a path of peace, love and organic root-based beverages.
Here’s the SugerCane Shuffle from the SugerCane Gang – fans of Maine Root.
4. Make Magazine’s Weekend Projects
Make Magazine takes a different approach. They not into comedy or even trying to sell you something. They provide How To videos that focus on things you can do over the weekend. Think of what Popular Mechanics or Popular Electronics could have been if they got the web. The other benefit for Make is that the videos have sponsors so they get to advertise their website and re-advertise someone else’s product at the same time. Is that like re-gifting?
5. Moe’s Southwest Grill
Moe’s Southwest Grill decided to get the customers to do the work. They held a contest for a “Burrito in Every Hand” campaign. The winner gets 2,860 vouchers good at Moe’s. They got 40 videos and over 200,000 visitors to the website set up for the campaign. They say sales have gone up, but no details and they expanded their email mailing list by over 200,000.
So there you have it. Some great, well maybe not great, content that deliver the goods as advertisements. There’s some good lessons for content producers in here and for advertisers as well. It’s time to think differently.
It’s too bad the Wall Street Journal doesn’t understand what it writes about as I would have provided a link to the WSJ story, but it’s behind a walled garden. And I would have provided a link to to the Wall Street Journal video on makes a video go viral, but it had too many ads to make it bearable.
The journal should also get the news that viral is not only about getting a great funny, useful or how to video, its about working the system to get to the top of the most viewed video list. Here’s a link to TechCrunch’s Secrets to Viral Videos. Too bad there’s so much gaming and shady practices involved.
If you know of more case studies, let me know.
[tags]viral video, online video, advertising, ads as content[/tags]
ZML.com is positioning itself as the movie version of AllofMP3, a Russian service that provided downloadable music on the cheap. They claim over 1,500 movies, such as Transformers, Live Free or Die Hard, The Bourne Ulitimatum and lots of other big tiles with prices starting at $1.99. The service requires registration and a prepaid account using Visa or Mastercard. Downloads are billed against the prepaid account.
According to ZML, they have lots of hot movies that are playable on iPods and just about every device.
Over 1500 movies of premium DVD quality
Thousands of hot movies that you dare to watch. Movies are playable on various devices including iPod, PDA (HandHelds), PC, DVD & DivX players. Lowest prices on the web ever. Start downloading movies from $1.99 only! Absolutely no limits. You can download as much as you want with incredibly high speeds. No additional software required. Click on a link, download a movie and watch it on your favourite player.
Sounds good, but there’s a catch. The catch as reported by NewTeeVee
ZML.com isn’t licensed by any of the Hollywood studios. The site is selling hundreds of blockbusters anyway, referring to a collective licensing agreement with an obscure Russian rights holders agency.
And here are the details from ZML’s terms of service:
6 Copyrights
6.1 All materials presented on this site are available for the distribution over the Internet in accordance with the license of the Russian Organization for multimedia and Digital Systems (ROMS) and intended for personal use only. Further distribution, resale or broadcasting is strictly prohibited.
6.2 The Site remunerates the fees for every downloaded File in accordance with the license agreement.
6.3 All trade marks, trade names, company names, slogans, logos, and any other copyright items, which can be seen on the Site pages in various contexts, are the property of their respective owners. You have no right to copy, distribute or use them without written permission from the owners.
6.4 The Client has no right to download any Files from the Site if this violates the law of his country.
6.5 The Site Administration can not control actions of each Client therefore the Client is responsible for any illegitimate use of the Site’s materials or/and Services
Wow. This is a nightmare for Hollywood and another blow to the copyright. I’m sure there will be lawsuits filed, if they haven’t been filed already.
The problem is that this seems to be legal in Russia according to AllofMp3 who is reporting court room victories in their copyright infringement suit.
On 24 October a district court in Moscow has confirmed the “no copyright infringement†verdict.
Earlier this year, on 15 August 2007 AllofMP3.com was acquitted of all charges brought up by IFPI. Consequently the Federation filed a protest on behalf of the labels. This protest was declined last week. This time IFPI promised to go as far as the Supreme Court.
I wish the music industry and Hollywood good luck in protecting their copyrights. However, this is the sad, but unfortunately accurate reality of digital media. Movies, music, news all need new business models that allow content to flow openly AND money to be made by the creators of the content when it flows openly. There’s only way to fight blatant ripoffs like ZML in the long run, turn them into profit opportunities for the originators of the content.
YouTube has given video awards to 12 videos. The categories are Adorable, Comedy, Commentary, Creative, Eyewitness, Inspirational, Instructional, Music, Politics, Series, Short Film, and Sports. The winners get bragging rights, a trophy and an invitation to an event later this year, presumably an awards ceremony.
YouTube announced the launch of 
Kevin Bromber, CEO & Founder of 
Straight from the success of YouTube.com, Will It Blend has been known as an internet marketing sensation, viewed by more than 30 million people. Now for the first time ever, you can take home the glory, passion and power of Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson with his blending antics on the first 50 Will It Blend videos, including Will It Blend facts and behind the scenes footage.
FreeRangeRootBeer.com is dedicated to stopping corporate root beer “by any means necessary.†Non-violence is our modus operandi. We spread our message mostly through non-violent protests, but also use root beer “breakouts†to free root beer from their bondage in their inhumane storage facilities. We’re on a path of peace, love and organic root-based beverages.
Moe’s Southwest Grill decided to get the customers to do the work. They held a contest for a “Burrito in Every Hand” campaign. The winner gets 2,860 vouchers good at Moe’s. They got 40 videos and over 200,000 visitors to the website set up for the campaign. They say sales have gone up, but no details and they expanded their email mailing list by over 200,000.
