Disney and YouTube make a video deal

Disney Interactive Media and YouTube, a division of Google, will spend a combined $10 million to $15 million on original video series; those shorts will be produced by Disney and distributed on a co-branded channel on Disney.com and YouTube. The channel will also include amateur video culled from the torrent uploaded to YouTube daily.

The Disney-YouTube partnership follows YouTube’s announcement late last month that it planned to create dozens of channels featuring comedians, sports stars, musicians and other entertainers. It is also offering cash advances to prospective producers that totaled more than $100 million, according to people with knowledge of the plan but who were not authorized to speak publicly. The investments in the channels reflect Google’s belief that the Internet is the third phase of the television business, after network TV (with a few channels) and cable TV (with hundreds).

Source: The New York Times.

The future will be (auto)captioned

YouTube has turned on the ability to add full closed captions to videos. This will not only allow videos to appeal more directly to foreign audiences, but will give YouTube excellent data for searching videos and targeting ads to them.

Quoting the official YouTube blog:

Making video easily accessible is something we're working hard to address at YouTube. One of the first steps we took was the development of a caption feature in 2008. In November of last year we released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners. Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages -- all in just a couple of clicks.

U2ube

Millions of people are thought to have watched the U2's show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. on Sunday, October 25th -- the first concert to be streamed in its entirety live on the video sharing website YouTube.

LA Times reports: "U2's live broadcast Sunday night of the Pasadena stop on its 360 Tour generated 10 million streams across seven continents, according to a YouTube spokesman. What's more, since being archived on YouTube on Monday, the concert has tallied more than 1 million streams."

Watch the rebroadcast now on YouTube.

YouTube's content identification

Digital Rapids -- leading provider of tools and solutions for bringing television, film and web content to wider audiences -- announced that the company is working with YouTube to integrate support for Content ID, YouTube's content identification and management system, directly into Digital Rapids' award-winning range of media production and repurposing systems.

YouTube's content identification tools compare existing and incoming user-uploaded videos, identifying the ownership of such content and taking the action specified by the owner's usage policies. Content owners can choose to block user-uploaded content, permit it on YouTube while simply tracking usage data, or monetize the uploaded media by running advertising against it.

YouTube 3D experiments

TechCrunch reports that YouTube is currently experimenting with 3D videos. To have a demonstration click on this link, then you will be able to see a video and to select the "3D viewing style" you prefer.

YouTube blocked in China

The New York Times reported that, according to Google, YouTube video-sharing Web site had been blocked in China. The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a "particular video".

Silverlight 3 Beta

Microsoft Silverlight 3 Beta was unveiled at MIX09. New features include:

• Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) Smooth Streaming. IIS Media Services (formerly IIS Media Pack), an integrated HTTP media delivery platform, features Smooth Streaming which dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file delivered to Silverlight based on local bandwidth and CPU conditions.
• More format choice. In addition to native support for VC-1/WMA, Silverlight 3 now offers users native support for MPEG-4-based H.264/AAC Audio, enabling content distributors to deliver high-quality content to a wide variety of computers and devices.
• True HD playback in full-screen. Leveraging graphics processor unit (GPU) hardware acceleration, Silverlight experiences can now be delivered in true full-screen HD (720p+).
• Extensible media format support. With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support beyond the native codecs.
• Industry leading content protection. Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady Content Protection enables protected in-browser experiences using AES encryption or Windows Media DRM.

It is interesting to know that YouTube is now using Silverlight for live video and audio streaming, as you can see here.

YouTube to host MGM films

Reuters reports that YouTube has just signed an agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to host full-length television shows and films from MGM's archives.

Just a few days ago YouTube surpassed Yahoo! becoming world's #2 search engine and today IMDB reports that YouTube will produce its first online show, to be presented on Nov. 22 and streamed internationally via a dedicated channel on the website.