YouTube turns eight, reveals over 100 hours of video being uploaded every minute

YouTube has revealed that over 100 hours of video are now being uploaded to the world's most popular video-sharing site.

The company shared this information via a blog post celebrating eight years of existence of the web site that started in May 2005, and was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in November 2006.

Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That's almost one out of every two people on the Internet.

The impressive stat comes barely a couple of months after YouTube revealed it had reached one billion monthly users. "If YouTube were a country, we'd be the third largest in the world after China and India," the company had said at the time.

More recently, YouTube had launched paid channels, in a move that puts it in direct competition with services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. The company released a list of some 50 channels which will be part of the program. Subscription rates go as high as $7.99 per month.

"Every channel has a 14-day free trial, and many offer discounted yearly rates," a YouTube blog post said.

The new paid channels include Acorn TV, which offers British TV programs at $4.99 per month; National Geographic Kids, at $2.99 a month or $30 a year; and PrimeZone Sports, at $2.99 per month. Other channels offer programming from UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), Comedy.tv, and iAmplify Fitness. A children's channel from Sesame Street is coming soon.

YouTube analytics provider Tubular raises $2.5 million in funding

YouTube analytics provider Tubular raises $2.5 million in funding
Tubular, a small San Francisco start-up that provides analytics for YouTube content creators, has raised $2.5 million in venture capital in the latest sign of how far the business ecosystem has evolved around the Google-owned video repository.
YouTube was once known as Wild West of online video, but over the past two years Google has focused on raising the quality of YouTube content through a series of direct investments and the cultivation of third-party "networks".
The result is a cluster of small studios, mostly based in Los Angeles, that acts like a digital Hollywood, pumping out slick YouTube hits.
With the ultimate goal of hosting enough high-quality content to lure big-spending advertisers to YouTube, Google doled out more than $100 million last year in grants to its networks and bedroom stars.
In May Google led a group of investors who poured $35 million into Machinima, a leading network, to stoke growth in the YouTube industry.
That market has now grown to the point that it can support its own start-ups, says Tubular's founder Rob Gabel.
Competition
As more semi-professional and professional YouTube creators enter the sector, with increasing competition among them, there is a growing need for analytical services.
Tubular is one such service, allowing customers to monitor and measure when videos get the most views and comments, or the sources of referred traffic.
The software includes a dashboard that displays the real-time analytics, which are generated by tapping into a stream of data provided by YouTube.
"If YouTube is a multibillion-dollar market, then that's billions of dollars going out to content creators who can then invest that again," said Gabel, a former Machinima employee.
"On every platform, from Google to Facebook to Twitter, people have turned to third parties' helpful tools."
At a high level, the pie is large and continuing to grow rapidly. Former Citi analyst Mark Mahaney estimates that YouTube will bring Google a total of $3.6 billion in 2012.
Rich Heitzmann, a co-founder of FirstMark Capital, which led Tubular's latest funding round, said that Google is far from wringing out all of the potential revenue from YouTube.
"We think the ecosystem is at least the size of Facebook's, considering it has a billion users and if you consider the time spent on YouTube," Heitzmann said.
"The advertising opportunities are there, and yet the ecosystem hasn't evolved technologically."
Sustainable business
Other investors in Tubular's first tranche of equity financing included High Line Venture Partners, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures and Bedrocket Media Ventures.
Still, Gabel is betting that he can create a long-term, sustainable business on YouTube's platform at a time when some Silicon Valley companies are wary of building on the backs of larger companies.
Twitter, for instance, courted controversy this year when it made a business decision to shut off its firehose of data for a number of popular third-party developers to drive more visitors to its own site.
Allen DeBevoise, the CEO of Machinima who is also a Tubular investor, said that YouTube has reason to foster its independent developers rather than squash them.
"It's a thriving and fast-moving ecosystem now," he said. "But a lot of players are needed to make it all work."
Though Gabel acknowledges that the YouTube industry's rapid expansion is no guarantee of success, he has high hopes.
"Everything is a bit of gamble," he said, "but I feel good gambling on YouTube and online video."
© Thomson Reuters 2012

YouTube marks 2012 with 'Gangnam Style' mash up

YouTube has marked a year of viral video sensations with a "Gangnam Style" mash up of its top two songs of 2012, starring South Korean performer Psy and a horde of the video-sharing site's stars.
"Rewind YouTube Style 2012" approached 16 million views one day after its Tuesday release, paying homage to "Gangnam Style" and Canadian pop star Carly Rae Jepsen's smash "Call Me Maybe".
A tiny Psy next to the YouTube icon linked to the video that opens with the five members of Canadian band Walk off the Earth performing on a guitar, which Psy then smashes before introducing the parody of his own hit.
"Gangnam Style" is closing in on one billion hits after becoming the most viewed YouTube video of all time.
The four-minute video features dozens of cameos and visual gags, testing the limit of the viewer's awareness of YouTube culture and ability to understand all the references.
The Internet's own viral stars make an appearance include the "Sh-t Girls Say" actor Graydon Sheppard and YouTube personality Jenna Marbles.
Real news landmarks of 2012 play a prominent part, such as Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner's supersonic freefall from the edge of space and NASA's Mars Curiosity landing.
People watch more than four billion hours of video monthly at YouTube, according to the Google-owned service.
The "Gangnam Style" phenomenon refuses to lose any steam, with South Korean social networks awash with conspiracies that tie Psy's horse-riding dance with 16th century French seer Nostradamus and the December 21 apocalypse prophesied by the Mayans.

sam4sammy :: India getting more utilitarian, but education, entertainment still most searched on Google

Indian Internet users are now searching more for utilitarian services like banking, shopping and travel compared to entertainment in previous years, Google India on Tuesday said.
While unveiling its annual Zeitgeist list this year, Google India Vice-President and Managing Director (Sales and Operations) Rajan Anandan said, "utilitarian services drove search volumes".

"Google's 2012 Zeitgeist reflects data from 1.2 trillion searches in 146 languages globally. With 137 million users, India is the world's third largest Internet market and is a good barometer of trends in Indian society as a whole," Anandan told reporters New Delhi.

While results in 2011 reflected the emphasis on people and event related searches, Internet users in India are now starting to use the web for their personal needs - shopping, booking tickets and making informed decisions for their offline purchases, he added.

According to the Zeitgeist, IBPS (Institute of Banking Personnel Selection) led the top trending search list, followed by GATE Exams, Sunny Leone, 'Ek Tha Tiger' and 'Rowdy Rathore'.

An analysis of the top searched travel websites showed that while railways, airline tickets, and hotel booking sites were an obvious trend.

A bus booking portal redbus.in featured at number three in the list, marking a new trend in how Indians prefer to travel, Anandan said, adding that a huge chunk of search volumes were coming from mobile phones.

"With growing smartphone adoption, mobile searches continued to grow with over 70 million mobile Internet users.

We expect India's next 150-180 million Internet users will access the Internet through their mobile devices," he added.

This means that the information that these users will look for will need to be more local, he said.

The most searched terms on mobile phones in 2012 included songs, YouTube, ATMs, Cricinfo and IRCTC.

Another trend seen in the Zeitgeist is the shift in the user perception on purchasing gadgets, books, accessories and more online with Flipkart, Homeshop18 and Snapdeal topping the top searched shopping websites list.

Sensex topped the most searched event this year, followed by Vilasrao Deshmukh's death and Hurricane Sandy in the US.

In a separate list by YouTube, Google's video sharing portal, the most searched video was 'Brown Rang' by YoYo Honey Singh beating international topper PSY's Gangnam Style.

Google releases YouTube Capture app for iPhone

Google has released YouTube Capture app for iPhone in an attempt to plug a gaping hole in its existing YouTube app, which does not include the ability to upload videos.

Google released the YouTube app for iPhone back in September with support for discovering and watching videos, months after Apple announced its decision to drop the iOS-bundled YouTube app. Google later updated the app to add a native interface for iPad, iPhone 5 and include other features like AirPlay. Strangely, the app didn't include an option to upload videos to YouTube. This is where YouTube Capture comes in.

YouTube Capture is a pretty basic app that prompts users to sign-in upon launch. Users have the option to enable Camera Roll that allows the app to user the phone's Gallery for storing/ accessing videos, otherwise it maintains its own private library. The app lets you share videos simultaneously to YouTube, Google+, Facebook and Twitter. It comes with basic video enhancement options like colour correction and video stabilisation.

Other options in the app include Landscape lock (enabled by default), which won't let you start video recording unless you're in landscape mode and a Rotate to begin recording option (disabled by default). On the iPhone 4S, you can toggle the upload quality between 480p and 720p (HD) - this may differ from one model to the other.

Overall, it's a pretty decent offering from Google - albeit rather basic -  though as other recent iOS launches, it's not available as a native iPad app on launch day. We expect that to change soon enough.

YouTube Capture (iPhone, Free)