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comScore: YouTube Serving Over 100 Million Streams Per Day
Google must be sitting pretty today. According to a report by comScore Media Metrix, YouTube streamed almost 3 billion videos back in July, a quarter of them to users in the United States. YouTube served on average 100 million video streams per day in July, and was visited by more than 63 million people over the age of 15. The findings made YouTube the 17th most visited site in July, and indicate that it was streaming on average far more than 100 million per day when it was purchased by Google on Monday.

“Our daily streaming data show that YouTube.com first surpassed the 100 million threshold on July 17th, which coincides with YouTube’s own announcement that they had reached this impressive mark,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni in a statement. “Our streaming data covering more recent months will be published shortly, and will show that YouTube’s streaming total now far surpasses 100 million per day.”

comScore’s Video Metrix division measures several forms of online video including Flash, which is used by YouTube, RealPlayer, Windows Media, QuickTime, and Divx. It measures streaming video only and excludes paid DRM’d content, viewing of offline video, and video downloaded via peer-to-peer networks. comScore’s measurements include video that was viewed on the YouTube site as well as video that was viewed on third-party sites, but hosted by YouTube.

Tamago Launches Peer-to-Peer eCommerce SystemPosted on Monday, October 16 @ 10:49:35 CDT by xtv

DI - Dave comment - check out Izimi
Tamago launched peer-to-peer commerce system allowing people to sell every type of digital media directly from their computers to customers all over the world. People who publish music, videos, photos, e-books, etc. earn royalties, while buyers earn commissions for distributing media to others.

San Francisco, CA, USA, October 16, 2006 — “We believe everyone should make money,” said Joel Floyd, CEO of Tamago. When someone buys a song, a picture, or other digital media, Tamago pays the members, whose computers deliver the data, directly to the buyer. This eliminates the need for central server farms. “In Tamago’s new world, customers are not just consumers, but distributors also,” said Gary Feierbach, COO of Tamago.

Tamago was built for both publisher and customer ease of use. When someone publishes their work they set the royalty amount they want to receive for each sale. In turn, buyers automatically become distributors and receive a commission on any media their own computer delivers. Tamago also protects an artists’ name and copyright by preventing it from being re-published and stolen, while giving customers freedom to use the material for any personal use.
“This system will bring out the artist in everyone,” Joel enthuses. “We charge nothing to publish and it takes less than 5 minutes. All the barriers are gone so everything from the popular to the very esoteric can find an audience.”

Tamago requires a PC running Windows 2000 or XP or an Intel based Apple Computer running Parallels Desktop or Boot Camp from Apple Computer.

About Tamago Inc.:Tamago’s innovative technology connects people around the world allowing them to buy, sell, and distribute digital media between each other. Founded in 2005 by Sony Music Executive Joel Floyd, Tamago today is the only Peer-to-Peer eCommerce market. Tamago’s technology provides publishing businesses of all sizes the chance to reach global markets using an ordinary computer, while involving and rewarding users in the distribution process. Tamago is headquartered in San Francisco.

YouTube can avoid ‘Napster’s fate’Internet law professor Michael Geist argues that YouTube will avoid the fate of the original Napster.

YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65bn
Two companies launched by 20-somethings burst onto the public scene and provide instant access to a seemingly unlimited array of popular content. Within months, they become household names with tens of millions of devoted followers.
Emboldened by dreams of striking deals with entertainment companies that will assure future growth, investors quickly rush in, setting aside lingering copyright concerns to offer financial backing.

The similarities between Napster and YouTube seemingly end there. Napster, the poster-child for online music file sharing, failed to convince the record industry to licence its content after taking the Internet by storm in 1999.

It was soon after that it was sued out of existence, resurfacing as a struggling fee-based music service. YouTube, the site that in 2006 became synonymous with online video sharing, was purchased last week by Google for US$1.65bn.

Lost amid discussion of YouTube’s staggering price tag was the fact that hours before confirming the sale, Google and YouTube signed a series of licensing agreements with some of their harshest critics.

Companies such as Universal, who only weeks earlier had mused publicly about suing YouTube, agreed to the very revenue sharing arrangements that eluded Napster.

The YouTube deal may foreshadow a reversal, with the industry at long last ready to embrace the remarkable commercial potential of the internet

Google buys YouTube

While some media companies, including Time Warner, speculated publicly late last week about possible lawsuits, it is worth examining why YouTube appears to be succeeding where Napster failed.

At least three possibilities come to mind.

First, the differences in legal status of Napster and YouTube may have contributed to the different approach.

Napster’s peer-to-peer model raised the spectre of contributory copyright infringement, whereas YouTube’s Web-based distribution of user-generated content - much of which does not infringe copyright - likely qualifies for legal protection under US copyright law.
Legal status is unlikely to provide the complete explanation, however.

Though the legal risk associated with the two services may differ, viewed from the perspective of a content owner whose work is being infringed, there are clear parallels given that both services represent new distribution models not easily subject to copyright owner control.
The website features lots of home-made video…

Second, some may argue that YouTube complements existing copyright owner business models since it provides a torrent of free publicity without cannibalizing other revenue streams.
In contrast, the recording industry maintains that P2P file sharing is directly competitive with its own online offerings.

This argument also falters under closer examination. There are a growing number of online services that sell episodes or clips of television programs, placing YouTube in a competitive position for at least some of the content found on the site.

Seven years after Napster’s debut, the world views the value of Internet-based distribution through a much different lens
Moreover, there is reason to doubt that P2P is a significant competitive threat given that there are many other likely explanations for the downturn of some record labels including retail price pressures, declining catalogue sales due to lack of availability, and competition from DVD sales.
The best explanation may well be that seven years after Napster’s debut, the world views the value of Internet-based distribution through a much different lens.

In 1999, Internet distribution focused on the use of law and technology to control content and dictate terms of use.

That control has proven notoriously elusive with consumer backlash against technological and legal controls and emergence of highly efficient user-based distribution models.
Lots of copyright information is on YouTube but some is now being taken downFurthermore, it is internet advertising revenues - not internet controls - that today hold the promise of billions of dollars in revenue.

Indeed, the Internet economics of 2006 have shifted so dramatically that later this fall the recording industry is planning to launch SpiralFrog in North America, an ad-supported music download service that offers free music downloads (albeit with restrictive technological limitations).

Given these changes, what is the likelihood that a new licensed P2P model will come to the fore in the near future? Better than you might think.

There are several such initiatives currently underway, the most advanced of which appears to be Noank.

The brainchild of Terry Fisher, a Harvard law professor, the system is billed as a “digital media exchange” and is expected to launch in China sometime next year.
Once operational, it will enable ten million Chinese university students to freely download music and movies with no technological restrictions.

The service will be funded by a mandatory student fee (similar to a student activity fee), with 85 percent of the proceeds distributed to participating artists and content owners.
Fisher estimates that the service will generate US$200 million per year from these fees alone, with additional advertising revenue possibly doubling that figure.

Having made significant progress in China, Fisher has identified Canada as the project’s next target with private discussions already underway with rights holders, telecommunications companies, and record labels.

During the height of Napster, experts estimated that even a five-dollar monthly fee would have generated billions in additional revenue for the content industries, yet those companies chose instead to sue the P2P services along with thousands of their users.

The YouTube deal may foreshadow a reversal, with the industry at long last ready to embrace the remarkable commercial potential of the internet.

OA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6055830.stm

Wikipedia founder plans rivalBy Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published in FT Online 16th Oct 2006

One of the founders of Wikipedia is days away from launching a rival to the collaborative internet encyclopaedia, in an attempt to bring a more orderly approach to organising knowledge online.

Wikipedia – which is available to be written and edited by anyone on the internet – is one of the most visible successes of mass collaboration on the web, with many of its 1.4m articles appearing high in search results.

However, its openness has also drawn charges of unreliability and left it vulnerable to disputes between people with opposing views, particularly on politically sensitive topics.
The latest venture from Larry Sanger, who helped create Wikipedia in 2001, is intended to bring more order to this creative chaos by drawing on traditional measures of authority. Though still open to submissions from anyone, the power to authorise articles will be given to editors who can prove their expertise, as well as a group of volunteer “constables”, charged with keeping the peace between warring interests.

Accusing Wikipedia of failing to control its writers and editors, he said: “The latest articles don’t represent a consensus view – they tend to become what the most persistent ‘posters’ say.”
Mr Sanger said he had financial backing from an unidentified foundation for his new venture, while a web hosting company was providing its services free. He said he became frustrated with Wikipedia’s failure to build expertise into its editing process and left after its first year.
Since then, the encyclopedia’s other founder, Jimmy Wales, has taken some steps to bring more order to the Wikipedia approach, although he has avoided using authority figures such as editors.

Asked in an e-mail exchange how such disagreements should be resolved, Mr Wales replied: “With strong support for individual rights, and respect for reason.” His e-mail went on: “It is the fundamental responsibility of every individual to- think-, to- judge-, to-decide-. We must never abdicate that responsibility, not to the collective, not to Britannica, not to Wikipedia, not to anyone.”

Mr Sanger said volunteers would be able to become editors of his encyclopedia, called Citizendium, if they can show “minimum levels of qualification, based on real-world measures.”
This would be an “imperfect but effective” test based on “degrees, professional society memberships, things like that”.

Citizendium will be open “within the next few days” to a limited number of invited editors and members of the public who apply, and will be made generally available by the end of the year, said Mr Sanger.

It is likely to take Citizendium some time to prove whether it can create a better online encyclopedia. It will begin by simply taking over all of the existing entries from Wikipedia, then start the laborious job of having them filtered by expert editors – a job Mr Sanger called “a clean-out of the Augean stables”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
original article

Let the lawsuits begin.
The simmering legal questions surrounding video sites and their use of copyrighted material hit the courts for the first time late Monday with Universal Music Group (UMG) filing infringement suits against Grouper and Bolt.

Like YouTube, both sites allow users to upload and download videos from their sites. Sony Pictures Entertainment bought Grouper last summer for $65 million but was not named in the lawsuit.

UMG claims both Bolt and Grouper allow users to post unauthorized copyrighted materials to their video sites.

“User generated sites like Grouper and Bolt … cannot reasonably expect to build their business on the backs of our content and the hard work of our artists and songwriters without permission and without in any way compensating the content creators,” UMG said in a statement.
The lawsuits follow UMG’s licensing deal with YouTube earlier this month.

YouTube, acquired by Google for $1.65 billion on Oct. 9, also has licensing agreements with CBS and Sony BMG Music Entertainment. Prior to the YouTube acquisition, Google cut a licensing deal with Warner Music Group.

“[UMG] is committed to embracing innovative new ways to bring our music and videos to consumers, but ‘innovation’ that breaks the law and runs roughshod over the rights of content creators is not innovation at all,” UMG said in its statement.

Both Bolt and Grouper are expected to seek legal protection from infringement charges through the “safe harbor” provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The DMCA offers copyright infringement protection for Internet companies that promptly respond to take-down notices from content owners.

“In the ten years we’ve been in business, we have promptly complied with all requests from the RIAA and other organizations to remove any copyrighted content upon request,” the New York-based Bolt said in an e-mail to internetnews.com.

Bolt also posted a notice on its site stating, “We understand the love you have for your favorite musical artists, but Bolt respects the rights of copyright owners such as Universal Music and their artists, and we ask that you please do so as well by not uploading their videos to Bolt.”
Bolt also said it had not seen a copy of the lawsuit.

Josh Felser, co-founder and CEO of Grouper, said in a statement issued through Sony, “The lawsuit is without merit and we expect to prevail. Our Web site is protected by federal law and we’re vigilant about taking down copyrighted content when we’re properly notified.”
Jim DeLong, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation and director of the Center for the Study of Digital Property, said there are two possible theories behind the lawsuits.
“The first would be that they are not complying with the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA,” he said. “The second would be that under the Grokster decision, they are encouraging infringement.”

In June of 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the peer-to-peer file-sharing company Grokster violated U.S. copyright law by openly encouraging users to download copyrighted music files.
“We welcome an open dialogue with Universal to resolve our situation amicably and bring Universal Music to our more than 5 million monthly unique users,” Bolt said in its statement.
Bolt said the YouTube-Google merger and the licensing partnerships that grew out of the deal “demonstrate that viable models exist to enable our creative users to enjoy and play with copyrighted content.”

original article here, ByRoy Mark

Replicated from The wall Street Journal Online, 18th Oct 2006

Google Inc.’s $1.65 billion purchase of video-sharing site YouTube catapults the search giant into the lead spot in the fast-growing online video market. It also creates a big, deep-pocketed target for aggrieved copyright owners. Will Google’s acquisition of YouTube turn the search giant into the biggest legal target on the Internet?

While much of the content on YouTube consists of home-shot video, the site also contains copyright material that users upload without permission. Critics say Google could be exposing itself to liability for copyright violations. YouTube already faces one lawsuit related to this issue. YouTube says it removes any videos with infringing content when notified and is rolling out a new system to automatically detect such material. YouTube and Google have also signed deals with some media and entertainment companies to license their content and head off any additional litigation.

Will YouTube turn Google into the biggest legal target on the Internet? Can Google use its heft to create a legitimate video-sharing service? The Wall Street Journal Online invited Harvard law professor John Palfrey to discuss the issue with economist Stan Liebowitz. Both have debated copyright issues before: They filed legal briefs (on opposite sides) in the Supreme Court’s landmark Grokster decision.

Their conversation on Google and YouTube, carried out by email, is here

I remember as a kid we had this big yellow round bin under the kitchen sink. In it used to go anything from our house that we’d used, finished, broke, consumed the contents of, or just got bored of. In fact, the only things that escaped the yellow bin in the kitchen were those that were too big to fit, so passed directly to the tin steel by the back gate, Do NOT pass go, do not collect £200.

Then came the 80’s, I was in my teens, and these weird people started to conserve things, and recycle things: fuel, power, bottles, plastic tubs, and newspapers. We looked down on them as strange oddities of the ‘modern’ world. Hell, why ration yourself when there was plenty to go around? And why go to the trouble of taking your junk to somewhere for recycling when you could just consume it and chuck out the waste?

Well, we’re all a little wiser now. Isn’t it strange that new ideas often seem like oddities - off-the-wall inventions by a few weirdos – then later gain widespread acceptance.

Now, it’s accepted that life goes in cycles, and the lessons of one generation are forgotten, only to be magically ‘discovered’ by the next, slightly changed and updated to suit the modern world. The same must happen with our digital resources. OK, so now I may sound like one of those crazy wierdos, shouting about conserving our IT resources!!! After all, why bother when we can just go out and spend a few more bucks on a bit more storage, a bit more bandwidth, and a bit more processing power. Now where have I heard a similar cry before. I must be crazier still when you consider that the price of all these is dropping almost daily. So why even be concerned?

But that’s the point, it’s not a cost issue at all – I don’t care if companies want to spend all their investors’ cash on hardware, instead of delivering valuable and profitable products. At least I don’t care as long as it’s not my company! The real point is this: believe it or not bandwidth is becoming scarcer. With recent bandwidth shaping moves by many of the major ISPs, it’s not only becoming scarcer, but its also becoming more expensive, impacting profitability and wasting our cash resources. Sure, we can make bigger pipes, but that only puts off the problem, we also need to use what’s there sensibly. If we use what we have efficiently we’ll have a better, leaner, and more profitable business, and investors generally like that.

The other factor is processing power and storage. Once again, we can buy more, but that costs us cash for the hardware and cash for the resources to configure, deploy, service and maintain it. Why not use what we have better, more efficiently. We may have no choice, as User Generated Content and Social Networking sites flourish, they physically can’t keep up with resource demand.

That’s why I love Izimi so much. It uses true P2P to deliver its Social Networking and User Generated Content experience for users. That’s why our investors love it, because it’s actually a sustainable model which allows us to use investors’ cash more efficiently on developing a profitable product range, not just servicing the wasteful consumption of infrastructure. Instead of working like a client/server model with all content residing on our managed servers, users’ content remains and is managed on their own machines. So we save on unnecessary bandwidth which would otherwise be used twice: once to get content from them to us, and again from us to every person that views or downloads that content. And, the bandwidth requirement is shared by the peers in the network, instead of falling entirely at our feet. Plus, because we’re not rushing around trying to stay ahead of an exponentially growing resource demand, racking up ever growing numbers of servers and storage, our technology remains stable and maintenance costs low.

The P2P idea is not new, hell we didn’t invent P2P, and it has long been used for file sharing applications from Napster to Gnutella. What is new is its use in the SN and UGC spaces.

It’s common knowledge these days that we can’t endlessly consume our natural resources without a price. It should also be clear that we can’t consume our virtual resources without a price. At the moment it seems that many companies and their investors are prepared to pay the price, or just ignore it’s an issue (maybe while they wait for their early exit?). While everyone’s doing it the playing field remains level, but as Web 2.0 develops and matures we’ll see others like Izimi starting to gain real competitive advantage though more efficient use of their resources, as they direct otherwise wasted resources and cash to beating those in the old school.

[b]Deal only makes sense in fast-forward[/b]

By Richard Waters in San FranciscoPublished: October 10 2006 00:21 Last updated: October 10 2006 00:21

Even Google, it seems, is prepared to admit that the $1.65bn it has just agreed to pay for YouTube is in danger of being seen as a new high point in Silicon Valley’s latest bout of dotcom fever. “You can imagine it would be difficult to justify this on a stand-alone basis,” David Drummond, head of corporate development, said on Monday. It is only when you come to look at the future use that Google can make of YouTube’s audience, he suggested, that the deal starts to make sense.

On at least one measure, the high entry fee that Google is paying to take the leadership position in online video may not be as outlandish as it first appears. YouTube has about 35m unique visitors in the US. Add in its foreign audience, and the company probably streams short videos to some 50m people each month, according to Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research.
That is equivalent to about $32 for each visitor – a seemingly high price to pay given the scarcity of advertising on the YouTube site. However, a comparison with News Corp’s purchase last year of social networking site MySpace, another online deal that stretched traditional financial metrics, suggests that it falls broadly within the same range.Intermix Media, owner of MySpace, claimed 27m unique visitors when it agreed to the News Corp deal, putting the price paid per user at $22. Since then, valuations for successful online community sites have jumped – thanks in no small part to MySpace’s continued success inside News Corp. Provided it can generate advertising around YouTube’s online audience, a price of $32 per user could easily be justified “within a year or two”, says Josh Bernoff, another Forrester analyst.

That is still a big “if”. Success will depend on how well Google can apply three of its key assets to the YouTube audience and website. Potentially the most important is the Google advertising network. Speaking late last month, Chad Hurley, YouTube’s chief executive, brushed off the suggestion of an advertising deal with Google that would simply “plug” adverts collected by the Google system into YouTube’s website. Instead, he suggested that the video site needed to build its own advertising network to deliver the sort of branded advertising experience that Yahoo has created. On Monday, however, most observers agreed that the search engine giant stood a far better chance of building a successful business around YouTube’s early success than the upstart video site did on its own.

“I have no doubts about Google’s ability to monetise this [audience],” said Roger McNamee, a veteran Silicon Valley financier. “They can monetise anything that brings millions of people together.”

The second asset that Google hopes to apply to YouTube is its search technology. If the company’s mission is to organise all the world’s information, then the masses of user-generated videos starting to find their way online represent an important source of raw material for the search engine company, according to Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder.“Search is a very difficult problem,” said Mr MacNamee, particularly when it comes to identifying videos by image recognition, a technology that could eventually play a big role in helping users sift through YouTube’s vast library.

Third, Google has already built a global network that should be able to deliver YouTube’s video streams far more effectively, and at lower cost, than it has been able to do itself. Google has already identified 20-30 ways that it can bring these three capabilities to bear on YouTube to reap the synergies to make sense of the high price tag, said Mr Schmidt. “We don’t lack for ideas.”

Google’s calculations, however, are based on some big assumptions – most importantly, that YouTube can keep and continue to expand its online audience, and that it can continue to act as a magnet for an ever-growing array of online video. Both of those assumptions could be in danger if established media companies decide they do not want their copyrighted material to appear on YouTube. If Google takes a stricter line on copyright enforcement – as many observers now expect – that could strip YouTube of much of its content.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Billionaire investor and dot-com veteran Mark Cuban had harsh words on Thursday for YouTube, the online site that lets people share video clips, saying only a “moron” would purchase the wildly popular start-up.

Cuban, co-founder of HDNet and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, also said YouTube would eventually be “sued into oblivion” because of copyright violations.”They are just breaking the law,” Cuban told a group of advertisers in New York. “The only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue.”YouTube, based in San Mateo, California, specializes in serving up short videos created by everyday people. Its popularity, with more than 100 million video showings daily, has spurred speculation the firm will be sold or taken public.But YouTube has also come under scrutiny because users often post copyrighted material, including music videos produced by well-established artists.YouTube company representatives were not immediately available to respond to Cuban’s comments.

Cuban said “anyone who buys that (YouTube) is a moron” because of potential lawsuits from copyright violations.

“GOING TO BE TOASTED”"There is a reason they haven’t yet gone public, they haven’t sold. It’s because they are going to be toasted,” said Cuban, who has sold start-ups to Yahoo Inc. and CompuServe.YouTube, which has nearly one-third of the U.S. Web video audience, three times that of Google Inc., or twice that of News Corp’s MySpace, has been working on signing licensing deals with music companies and TV networks to ensure they are paid when users view their content.

This month YouTube unveiled its first deal to distribute music videos legally from a major music company by agreeing a deal with Warner Music Group, home to pop stars James Blunt and Madonna.In other remarks, meanwhile, the often-controversial Cuban also told advertisers that the reach of YouTube is limited, particularly when it comes to user-generated videos.”User-generated content is not going away,” he said. “But do you want your advertising dollars spent on a video of Aunt Jenny watching her niece tap dance?”"Somebody puts up something really good and you get, what, 60,000 viewers?” Cuban added during the event at Advertising Week in New York.YouTube now offers advertising through banner ads, promotions and sponsorships. It has said it plans to roll out a range of different advertising options over the coming year.

It’s that social networking thing again
3 has released figures for its self-generated mobile content services such as See-Me TV that it says mirror the social networking boom on the internet.

The operator (sorry, mobile media company) says that there have been 100,000 uploads to See Me TV, which makes users cash according to the number of viewings they generate, earning its users £250,000 in total. Its Kink Kommunity, has 50,000 paying subscribers, 3 says, at a daily rate of 20p or a monthly fee of £1.49. Most of the users are choosing the monthly sub option. Of the 50,000 users 15,000 are “older users”, 3 says. That’s anyone over 30, by the way. Ouch.

Graeme Oxby , 3’s Marketing Director, said, “Social networking sites are massive on the internet and we’re bringing that model to mobile to create new communities over the 3 network. Clearly it’s working, with over 350,000 messages between kinksters every day - this is already a vibrant community in just two months. User-generated services are driving the development of new revenue streams over mobile in a whole range of ways.”