Young Adults Hit Online Video Sites

"Did you see the new video on YouTube?"

If you heard that question a lot last year, there's a reason.

Nearly half of Internet users surveyed in December 2007 said they had visited a video-sharing site such as YouTube, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

That's up from the year before when one-third of Internet users said they had visited such sites.

"The fact that younger Internet users are far more likely to be regular visitors to video-sharing sites points to a fork in the road,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer.

YouTube usage generally increased in 2007, according to Harris Interactive data released at the same time as the Pew study.

But while many Internet users have dipped their toes into the video-sharing pool, a solid majority of YouTube users surveyed still said they had visited only once or a few times.

The Pew study also captured demographics for active video-sharing site users. As might be expected, they skewed younger.

"On the one hand, marketers looking to target the under-30 demographic can more reliably find them on these video sites.

"On the other hand, the door is open for big content providers—mainly the TV networks, both broadcast and cable—to bulk up their online offerings, both in quantity and quality," Hallerman said.

He also said that such counter programming could help attract the over-30 audience, which is accustomed to traditional TV content.

Such content could draw ad dollars from marketers who want online-video ad inventory that is consistently appropriate for marketing, as opposed to a lot of user-generated content found on video-sharing sites.

Link to eMarketer Article

Take LonelyGirl, Ship Her to the U.K., Add Brands

Result: 'KateModern,' Online Show That Invites Marketers to Get Into the Drama

"KateModern," an online drama from the makers of "LonelyGirl15," is already a whole cyber-generation ahead of predecessor Bree and friends

The London-based show (the title is a play on the name of one of the city's art galleries, the Tate Modern) fully exploits the commercial opportunities of the internet, unlike Kate's more reserved forerunner, who found fame without sponsors in what now seems like a quaint, old-fashioned, unbranded world.

Microsoft Corp., Disney's Buena Vista International, France Telecom's Orange, plus Procter & Gamble's Gillette, Pantene and Tampax brands were all launch partners for "KateModern."

Backlash against backlash
Hewlett-Packard and Paramount also have signed up as sponsorship partners since the series began July 24 -- all a big contrast from "LonelyGirl15's" Thanksgiving episode, when branded items on the table were turned to face away from the camera because the show's producers thought the audience would disapprove of commercialism. In fact, there was a backlash against the backlash -- people liked Bree and wanted to know what brands she consumed and where she bought her clothes.

Three weeks into the show, Microsoft extended its partnership with Bebo, the U.K. social-networking site that hosts "KateModern" and premieres each episode (it is also shown on YouTube and LG15.com). "KateModern" is now available on MSN in the U.K., and Windows Live instant messaging has been integrated into the Bebo site.

In the first three weeks, "KateModern," a drama about a troubled young art student and her three closest friends, has registered 3 million views and is building an audience quickly -- the first episode was seen by just 23,000 people.

Audiences play an integral role in influencing the plot, and all the characters have their own social-networking profiles where they respond to e-mails and messages. Like "LonelyGirl15," "KateModern" integrates puzzles and clues into the storyline.

"KateModern" is being hailed as a new and sophisticated way for marketers to reach consumers via the internet. The product placement, for example, doesn't take itself too seriously: Disney's new movie, "Hallam Foe," is integrated into the drama's plotline via a cardboard cut-out of the lead character. One of Kate's friends, Gavin, fools around with it in his office, pretending to be Jamie Bell, the film's star.

Product placement opportunity
Mr. Bell also appears in person in an episode where one of Kate's friends runs away from him in a pub. It has been the most-watched episode so far, with 200,000 views. This is particularly significant in a country where product placement is still banned from TV.

Bebo's international-sales director, Mark Charkin, said, "With 'KateModern' we are trying to create a lot of dimensions for brands to relate to consumers. We can use the natural interactivity that is taking place as long as we do it well and remain authentic. It feels like we are defining the future."

For example, Gavin also downloads a "Hallam Foe" skin to his profile on Bebo, talks about the film on his own blog and links to the film's profile page.

Mike Jefferies, operations director at Tribal DDB, London, sees even bigger implications for show's success. "I like the way brand owners have got onboard. ... It's so bite-size and right for the platform," he said.

Link to AdAge Article

YouTube to Start Selling Ads in Videos

By EMILY STEEL
August 22, 2007; Page B3

Nearly 10 months after Google Inc. agreed to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion, the video-sharing Web site is rolling out its first approach for selling ads within videos. The anticipated move, announced last night, answers speculation concerning Google's formula for mining revenue from the site and is expected to start to bring standardization to the growing ad market for Web video.

Resembling a popular ad model cropping up on a number of other video sites, YouTube's new format is a semitransparent ad that appears on the bottom 20% of the video. The ad shows up after a video plays for 15 seconds, and disappears up to 10 seconds later if the viewer doesn't click on it. Viewers can either click to close the ad right away or to watch the commercial. If a viewer chooses to watch the ad, the main video pauses until the commercial stops.

During a video from Ford Models Inc. about how to create an evening hairstyle, an animated ad promoting Time Warner Inc. unit New Line Cinema's film "Hairspray" pops onto the bottom fifth of the video player. When viewers click on the ad, the Ford Models video pauses and a trailer for the film appears. Viewers can click on a link that takes them to the "Hairspray" Web site.

YouTube, a subsidiary of Mountain View, Calif., Internet company Google, plans to sell these ads only on videos from its select content partners, whose original videos include professionally produced clips and user-generated content. The partners will earn a share of the ad revenue. The system is similar to Google's AdSense network, which matches ads to the content of a network of Web sites, and gives those sites a cut of the profits. YouTube, of San Bruno, Calif., has established revenue-sharing deals with more than 50 partners, including Ford Models and Warner Music Group Corp. YouTube declined to say what percentage of videos on its site comes from its content partners.

YouTube started testing its in-video ad format in June and July on more than 200 videos from 20 content providers, and found that 75% of viewers watched the entire ad. The ads had five to 10 times greater click-through rates than standard display ads that appear on Web sites, YouTube said. Other ad models are in the works. In the past month, BMW AG has started testing in-video ads on YouTube. Before the German luxury-car maker commits significant ad dollars, it needs to see how the results compare with other forms of online-video advertising and how users respond, says Rinku Mahbubani, interactive-media supervisor at GSD&M, the ad agency representing BMW.

While YouTube's announcement could pave the way for more ad dollars to go into online video, marketing executives say a number of hurdles remain. Right now, producing advertising for Web video is a logistical headache. If an advertiser wants its ads to run on two different video networks, it usually has to negotiate deals and create different ads for each of the different sites. Marketers also are hesitant to advertise during unpredictable user-generated content, which makes up a large portion of videos on these sites. YouTube says that ads will appear only during "brand friendly" videos, and that marketers have the ability to target their ads to specific genres.

One format advertisers won't see on You Tube is the "pre-roll" ad, the video ads that viewers must watch before viewing a clip. With 55.1 million unique visitors who spent an average of 49 minutes and 59 seconds on the site during July, YouTube is the most popular online video site, according to Nielsen/NetRatings NetView. YouTube has spent months testing different ad formats to figure out which models wouldn't alienate its viewers. It found that viewers abandon videos that include pre-roll ads at a rate of more than 70%, so it ditched pre-roll commercials.

Link to WSJ Article

Music publishers join YouTube lawsuit

NEW YORK - A group of music publishing companies said Monday it is joining a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google Inc.'s video-sharing site YouTube.

The National Music Publishers' Association said it was joining the lawsuit out of concern that many songwriters weren't receiving proper compensation when their music appeared on YouTube videos.

The lawsuit also includes as plaintiffs The Football Association Premier League and Viacom Inc., a media company that owns MTV, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central.

The plaintiffs say YouTube is breaking the law by hosting video clips that they hold the copyrights to. However, YouTube says it's complying with the law by immediately taking down any clips found to be violating copyrights after receiving notification.

David Israelite, chief executive of the NMPA, said in a statement that the music publishers' group was "very concerned about YouTube's approach to copyright."

The lawsuits have been combined for trial purposes into one case being heard by U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton in New York.

Music publishing companies administer the copyrights of songwriters and composers and collect the royalties that are due to them.

Link to Yahoo! News Article

East Side, West Side: Diageo Posts Smirnoff 'Tea Party' Sequel

A NEW SMIRNOFF "TEA PARTAY" video was posted on YouTube on Thursday, designed to pit a certain East Coast lifestyle against a cliché of the West Coast and raise awareness of Smirnoff's line of malt beverages. "Green Tea Partay" features "Boyz N The Hillz" in a satirical rap that responds to 2006's "Raw Tea Partay," which featured "Prep-Unit." The sequel centers on the West Coast's "green" lifestyle and introduces Diageo's Smirnoff Raw Tea Green Tea. The East Coast version, complete with pink and green Polo shirts, emphasized the refinement of old New England; the West Coast response features open shirts, no shirts and shell necklaces. While a bunch of white dudes posing as black gangstas was wickedly amusing in the East Coast preppie version, white L.A. dudes don't quite bridge the gap. In the new video, the dudes get massages, eat tofu chowder instead of clam, and surround themselves with sultry babes in bikinis--although in one shot, it looks as if East Coast Buffy has switched teams ("Turns out, she likes the green tea"). One scene paints the picture well. One of the Boyz, working out in a gym, raps, "I'm lookin' in my mirror for my daily affirmation, Skin still glowing from my microdermabrasion." Last year's rap video spoof, in which blue-blooded homies rapped about their high-living lives, debuted on Aug. 2 as well and raced around the Internet, garnering more than 3 million hits on YouTube as well as the Golden Lion at Cannes and the Award for Advertising Excellence by the Association of Independent Commercial Producers. Smirnoff's tea-flavored malt beverages come in lemon, raspberry and green tea. Norwalk, Conn.-based Diageo is the world's leading premium drinks business. Link to MediaPost Article

Yahoo to Revamp Video Site After Losing to YouTube

Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Yahoo! Inc., after losing out to Google Inc.'s YouTube, is revamping its video site by the end of the year to include more content from media companies and Internet users.

Music videos, movie trailers, television shows and sports highlights are among the features that will be available on the new site, Mike Folgner, Yahoo's general manager for video, said in an interview. Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site will also be adding video, he said.

``One of our strategies is to put video everywhere you are on the Internet,'' said Folgner, who joined the Sunnyvale, California-based company last year through Yahoo's acquisition of video site Jumpcut. ``We're going to build a much better destination for you to access all this different content.''

Yahoo wants to attract more visitors to its site at a time when more than 130 million Americans are viewing online video, based on ComScore Inc.'s May figures. Of the 8.36 billion streams viewed that month, Google, which acquired YouTube last year, accounted for 22 percent, Reston, Virginia-based ComScore said. Yahoo was third at 4.6 percent, behind News Corp.'s Fox pages, which includes social-networking site MySpace.

Shares of Yahoo, owner of the most-visited U.S. Web site, rose 11 cents to $23.36 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market and have dropped 8.5 percent this year. Shares of Mountain View, California-based Google slipped $1.93 to $511.01.

Yahoo has deals in place to use music videos from record companies including Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi SA, and EMI Group Plc, whose artists include Norah Jones and Radiohead, Folgner said. News services including the Associated Press and CNN will provide content along with sports leagues such as the National Football League and Major League Baseball.

``We already have a lot of these deals,'' Folgner said. ``We just don't service them in one place so you don't see them. We'll be able to drive a lot of traffic at this.''

Link to Bloomberg Article

KateModern

Hot on the heels of Michael Eisner’s successful short form episodic web series Prom Queen is a new online video series called KateModern. Created by the producers of LonelyGirl15 and hosted exclusively by social networking site Bebo (the top site in the category in the UK), KateModern is the next evolution of web video.

Similar in ways to ARGs, KateModern is an interactive storytelling platform. Making the webisode genre more experiential, the series is intended to engage the Bebo community beyond just watching a video. KateModern’s characters and plotlines have already been extended outside of the video medium and have been injected into quizzes, polls and comments within the Bebo site. Going forward, site visitors may see “Kate” upload a photo from her mobile phone relating to the story, and will be able to give feedback and clues, thus becoming involved in the story themselves---almost like a real time Choose Your Own Adventure.

With this interactive component, marketers are clamoring to get on board (six brands have signed on thus far). Bebo has two other shows debuting in the next few months, and if KateModern proves to be a hit, you can bet the competition for ad real estate will become fierce.
Link to TrendCentral Article

Google Lawyer: Copyright Protection For YouTube Video Almost Ready

GOOGLE WILL HAVE "UP, RUNNING, and effective"--hopefully in September--a new content-fingerprinting technology for YouTube that would resolve the entire copyright issue at the core of the Viacom copyright infringement lawsuit, attorney Philip Beck told the judge overseeing the case in New York on Friday.

"We believe it goes beyond any legal disputes," said Beck of the technology, during a preliminary hearing before U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton in Manhattan.

Viacom attorney Donald Verrilli, who characterized the lawsuit as "plain old-fashioned infringement," applauded the initiative but said it wouldn't be appeased by this promised cure-all. "We'd have been a lot happier if they'd put this in place when they launched," he said.

Verrilli said of Google's YouTube, "they have built a business on this infringement." It was YouTube's responsibility to track copyrighted material on its site from the beginning because they profit from the exchange.

Viacom acknowledged that it did not grasp--and had no feasible way of finding out--just how many of its copyrighted clips are stored within YouTube member's "private" areas, which are not accessible to the general public.

During Friday's scheduling conference, Beck stuck to Google's key argument that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "fair harbor" provisions protect it from copyright infringement.

Viacom is attempting to frame the case as a simple issue of infringement, Beck said, adding: "We think it's a little more complicated."

Along with Phil Beck of Bartlit Beck, Google also has on its team David Kramer of Wilson Sonsini. Beck is considered one of the nation's top trial lawyers, having represented now-President Bush in Florida during the 2000 election and pharmaceutical giant Merck during its Vioxx litigation.

In March, Viacom sued Google--which acquired YouTube last year--for copyright infringement "on a massive scale." The company had then asked YouTube to take down 100,000 of its clips.

Suits by music publisher Bourne and the Premier League, England's top soccer league, have been combined with the Viacom suit for trial purposes before Judge Stanton.

Case watchers can expect, according to Viacom's Verrilli: technical expert testimony; expert testimony with regard to business models; the availability of copyrighted work and copyrighted content filtering systems; and an exploration of the true scope of the alleged copyright infringement.

Link to MediaPost Article

YouTube Partners With Interscope To Find Next Rap Star

GOOGLE'S YOUTUBE IS SET TO launch its second sponsored music promotion, this time in conjunction with Universal's Interscope Records, to discover hip-hop's newest rising star.

When the YouTube OntheRise RAP Edition contest begins next Friday, users 18 and older are invited to submit a video featuring original lyrics and production, competing for a chance to record a single for Interscope's G-Unit and win a $10,000 gift card from Guitar Center.

Hip-hop artists 50 Cent, Common, and Polow Da Don will choose 20 finalists at the close of the contest on Aug. 17. On Aug. 29, the winners will be presented to the YouTube community for voting, and the grand prize winner will be unveiled in early September.

Banking on the success of last year's YouTube Underground contest an effort co-sponsored by Cingular and ABC, the OntheRise effort will have a total of three genre-specific installments. Hip-hop/rap is the first, with the OntheRise Rock promotion slated to launch in Q4.

While neither company gave details of the financials of the project, a rep from Interscope did confirm that YouTube's value as a medium to generate artist awareness and Web site traffic did factor into the equation. "It's a promotional trade," said Ravid Yosef, digital marketing, Interscope. "50 will receive promotion for his upcoming album both editorially, and through advertising."

In addition to the sponsored page on YouTube, Interscope plans to promote the contest both on its own Interscope.com and 50cent.com.

Link to MediaPost Article

Calling All Videos

Alex Gurevich loves to log on to YouTube to watch music videos and comedy sketches on breaks from work. But the 24-year-old entrepreneur from San Francisco fretted that he couldn't take the fun with him on his cellphone. Mr. Gurevich assumed that signing up for a mobile video service would require a "superexpensive" phone and more than $20 extra a month in fees.

So he was surprised to find in January a free new mobile video service -- called MyWaves -- that works with his basic Motorola Razr. Now he is glued to it, regularly attempting to amuse his friends with stand-up comedy clips and other videos he has transferred to his phone. "Why would I sign up for another service if I can get this for free?" he says.

MyWaves Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., is one of a flurry of start-ups offering new ways to access Internet videos on cellphones, hoping to overcome barriers that have prevented mobile video from taking off in the past.

For years, cellular carriers including Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. have offered licensed video content for cellphones, such as sports highlights, TV shows and music videos. But these services, which carry monthly subscription fees, offer limited content programmed by the carrier and usually work only on certain phones. Adoption has been slow.

Now, the new services are taking a different approach, allowing users to view a wider array of Internet video clips -- without locking themselves into a subscription and without purchasing a fancier phone. The services each operate slightly differently, but users can view online videos using any standard video-enabled phone. Videos can be wirelessly downloaded to a handset for viewing later, or sometimes streamed over cellular networks to be watched in real time.

Powered by Advertising

The quality of the content is rarely as crisp as users are accustomed to online, and viewing can be limited by the amount of storage on a phone. But the services are generally free, powered by advertising and independent of particular carriers. Some new offerings say they have attracted nearly a million users and are attracting tens of thousands more a day.

Recently launched MyWaves offers hundreds of thousands of videos from a wide range of sources. Its online library, organized by "channels," includes clips acquired through arrangements with content providers, culled from available podcasts or provided by users themselves. People can access videos through a free application they download to their phones.

New York-based Cellfish Media LLC recently launched a new mobile entertainment site that allows users to transfer videos and other media, such as ringtones, to their phones from their computers. The service offers some 10,000 clips, including user-generated videos; content from partners, including, soon, NBC Universal; music videos; and original Cellfish series, like a soap opera involving sock puppets. Users upload videos to an online account, known as a locker. Then to retrieve the video, they can log into a mobile Web page. The video service is largely free, but some premium content like music videos carries a fee of up to $2.50.

3Guppies Inc. of Seattle doesn't provide content, but rather enables cellphone users to access online videos that they find themselves online. Users can send a video to their phones directly from the page where it resides, by downloading some software to their computers' Internet browser. Or they can upload videos to an online account, prompting the service to send a text message to a cellphone containing a link to the video.

3Guppies -- which doesn't offer streaming -- transmits videos that are available in a variety of popular digital formats. The service doesn't work with content that media companies protect with proprietary software, such as longer-form TV shows and movies.

The Small Screen

These new services are part of a broad sweep of mobile companies trying to get consumers to translate their fanaticism for online video watching to smaller screens. Popular video sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube have been branching into mobile by creating condensed mobile Web sites and preloading versions of their services on popular handsets like Apple Inc.'s iPhone. Carriers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. have also been wooing customers with services that offer features like live TV.

But still the services haven't caught on. Of the nearly seven million users who watch mobile video or TV from their phones every month, the vast majority watch clips sent to them from family or friends, rather than video prepackaged by a carrier, according to research firm M:Metrics Inc. Overall just 3.6% of U.S. cellphone users subscribed to a mobile video service in the first quarter of 2007, up from 1.6% in the year-earlier period, according to market researcher Telephia Inc.

The new services are trying to open up the mobile video market by targeting a broader range of phones -- at a time when more than 70% of new handsets come with a built-in video player. Instead of charging monthly fees, all three plan to start offering mobile advertising, such as small text ads in the bottom of text-messages or sponsored content from brands.

Consumers are also voicing concerns about storage. Higher-end cellphones increasingly come with up to 64 megabytes of memory and slots that can accommodate more. But many new phones still come with just four or so megabytes, which may accommodate only a few several-minute-long clips.

Limits of Streaming

Streaming video, which is viewed in real time rather than downloaded and stored for later, can be an option -- but only in areas where the network speeds are fast enough. "The experience just isn't really there and there is too much lag time," says Ben Bajarin, a digital media analyst for market-research firm Creative Strategies in Campbell, Calif. But he says that consumption of mobile video content will continue to rise, particularly as media companies create more content designed to entertain users for a few minutes at a time.

Many of the new companies envision themselves as technology -- not content -- companies and are starting to enable users to transfer other media to their phone like music and phones in the same way they can transfer video.

"We don't want to be perceived just as a catalog," says Cellfish Media's CEO Fabrice Sergent, who says the company's goal is to become a mobile version of iTunes. "The idea is really to create a seamless experience from the PC to the phone and from the phone to the PC."

Link to Wall Street Journal Article

The Boat Is About to Rock (Again) in Internet Video

By BRAD STONE

DMITRY SHAPIRO brings an unlikely gadget into meetings these days: a TV remote control.

As chief executive of Veoh Networks, an Internet video company based in San Diego, Mr. Shapiro uses the remote to navigate the company’s new software program, VeohTV, on his laptop. The software acts like a Web browser but displays only Internet video, presenting full-length television shows and popular clips from the Web’s largest video sites, like NBC.com and YouTube. It lists those videos in a program guide and plays them in a small window or across the entire screen.

The product, now in a private testing phase, will be available to the public later this year. It has the potential to be a popular and practical way to watch online video. But like a long line of other innovative high-tech tools, VeohTV could also threaten and alienate traditional media companies and even cause some of Veoh’s Internet rivals to consider legal remedies.

For the last two years, Veoh Networks has operated a video-hosting Web site, Veoh.com. The site works much the way YouTube does, with a few notable exceptions. The company does not impose any time limits on the length of videos and does not use digital fingerprinting technology to filter out copyrighted material. That has led to some rights holders to complain that Veoh has fallen behind in protecting intellectual property.

Nevertheless, Veoh.com has been growing fast: it draws about 15 million visitors a month, up from 4.5 million in January. Veoh Networks is a private company and does not release financial data. YouTube, by contrast, gets more than 100 million visitors and serves up more than three billion video clips a month, according to several market research firms.

“It’s impossible to compete with YouTube as a video sharing site now,” said Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester Research. “Veoh is a good example of a company that decided to go off in a new direction.”

That direction is VeohTV. To support the new effort, the company raised about $26 million this summer from investors, including Time Warner; Goldman Sachs; Spark Capital, a venture capital firm in Boston; and the former Disney chairman Michael D. Eisner, who joined the Veoh board and counsels Mr. Shapiro, a 38-year-old, Russian-born engineer. The company introduced VeohTV as a beta product last month, making it available for testing to a group of invited users.

I found VeohTV to be easy to use. Once the software is downloaded to a computer, it offers an easy-to-navigate directory of 114 video channels, including listings for CBS, NBC, Fox and YouTube. On the NBC channel, there are dozens of episodes of “Heroes,” “30 Rock” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” On the Fox channel, there are several full-length episodes of the dramas “Bones” and “24.”

Those shows are free and available for streaming on the NBC and Fox sites. The VeohTV player, Mr. Shapiro said, is just giving them a new audience.

“There are full-length episodes at Fox.com, but many customers don’t know how to find them,” he said. “The Web browser is fine for short clips. But if you just want to sit back and watch video on the Web, this is what you will want to use.”

Major media companies, however, are more interested in protecting their copyrighted programs. Veoh does not ask for permission to play material from other Web sites, though Mr. Shapiro says he wants to strike advertising-sharing deals with content owners to ensure that shows appear in high-quality video. But Veoh does not think that it needs consent because VeohTV is doing nothing more than playing what is already online, including any commercials shown during the programs.

The networks may disagree. By only offering video, VeohTV omits all the other advertisements on the network sites. For example, people who watched an episode of “Heroes” on NBC.com last week also saw for 40 minutes a banner ad for McDonald’s on the same page. VeohTV users watching the same episode would not see the banner.

Rick Cotton, the executive vice president and general counsel of NBC Universal, said that streaming full-length television episodes drives traffic to other parts of NBC’s site and exposes users to the ads on it. And the right to play those shows is valuable, he said, pointing to the still-unnamed venture between NBC Universal and the News Corporation to create an online repository of their TV shows and movies. Sites like MySpace, AOL and MSN have already entered into commercial agreements to display the venture’s content.

“This material has value,” Mr. Cotton said. “The notion of taking it and generating traffic with it needs to be negotiated and needs to be done with the agreement of content owners.” That’s why NBC and the other major studios are keeping close tabs on VeohTV’s business model.

FOR some video content, VeohTV can act as a digital video recorder, turning a video stream — meant to be viewed on the Web — into a downloaded file on a user’s hard drive. VeohTV users can record a YouTube video, for example, even though YouTube, owned by Google, says its terms of service specify that videos uploaded to the site will only be streamed.

Other software, like the recently released RealPlayer 11, by RealNetworks, can turn streaming video into downloads as well. But according to Ricardo Reyes, a YouTube spokesman, VeohTV steers users away from its ads while violating YouTube’s contract with its users. Mr. Reyes says the company is watching Veoh carefully. In response, Mr. Shapiro says his software provides an easier way to do something that is already technically possible on YouTube.

Mr. Shapiro and his backers are aware their product will disrupt current business models. So have many technological innovations in the past, he argued, and Veoh hopes to build a large audience while courting large media companies. That creates an apparent contradiction that will be hard to resolve. Veoh maintains that it does not need permission to list and play other companies’ videos inside VeohTV. But it also wants to play nice.

“We are going to try to be friendly to content owners,” said Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital who serves on the Veoh board. “We are going to try to be the white-hat company.”

Link to The New York Times Article

YouTube Debuts In-Video Ad Unit

It seems Google's YouTube has debuted a new in-video style ad format. It's not pre-roll. It's not post roll. It's a transparent banner that appears on the bottom of the screen several seconds after beginning of the video which the user can either minimize or click on. If clicked, in the case of this example, the advertiser's video opens and plays within the same YouTube video window as the original content. Once the advertiser's video has played or if the close/minimize button is clicked, the original video commences playback right where it left off.

So it's a bit of a mashup between banner advertising and the standard :30 with a bit or user-controlled DVR-like behavior tossed it. It's certainly new. It's definitely different and we have to admit, we like it a lot.

Link to AdRants Article