no flash video found

Ho Hum! YouTube's game of cat and mouse with BienneSoft (maker of the World's most popular YouTube downloading software) continues. On October 21st YouTube again altered the code on their site to disable the download tool.
Check out my previous blogs on the subject to understand the politics of this!
It took BienneSoft's software engineers just two days to respond and rush out a new version (2.5.3)which they claim gets round YouTube's new defences.
It's interesting to watch the battle between the World's most popular video sharing site and BienneSoft. How will it all end?

So just why are thousands of people unable to download YouTube videos? To understand the politics of YouTube, you have to understand the economics of YouTube.

YouTube is one of the planet's most popular websites. It ranks fourth according to Alexa (the top three are Google, Yahoo & Facebook). So how much profit do you think this hugely successful website makes? $100 million a year? $50 million? or $10 million?

Actually it's none of these. Believe it or not, YouTube doesn't make any profit at all. It loses money.

I've been asked by a number of people to recommend different YouTube video download tools. Since I haven't tried them all out, I can't really give an answer. However I have come across the following website which has a comprehensive list of the tools available.
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/10/download-youtube-videos/comment-page-1/...
I don't know which of the tools listed on this site works best, nor which ones have been disabled by YouTube/re-activated by their writers. So I guess it's a question of trial and error and experimenting.

BienneSoft's software engineers have been burning the midnight oil and have now published a revised version of their YouTube Downloader (version 2.5). The updated version gets around the code YouTube were using to disable it. In other words the World's most popular free downloader is up and running again.

How will YouTube react? What will YouTube's next move be?

Watch this space.

Graham Majin is Head of Video Marketing and Video Production at Kent video production company Kersh Media KWIKVID. http://www.video-podcasts.org.uk

OK, the plot is thickening. It's not a global, cyber terrorist attack and it's not a mix up over video frame sizes. YouTube has deliberately started to disable software that enables people to download its video for free; hence the "no flash video found" error message.

Why? Well why do you think? To "monetize" it's enormous video libary.

Yesterday YouTube quietly announced a pilot in the US to start charging 99 cents to download one of its videos. (Take a look at my guesstimate below of how many people are downloading on a daily basis - it's quite a lot of 99 cents isn't it!)

Hands up if you use YouTube? Wow, that's a lot of hands! According to Comscore, US YouTube users alone down-loaded 14.8 billion online videos during March 2009 an increase of 4% on December's record figures. Their survey found there are now well over 100 million Youtube users per month and it's growing.
But how many of us are downloading video from YouTube as well as watching it? No-one knows, but if one in ten users also download, then that's half a billion daily downloads, 20 million downloads an hour, 3,400 downloads a second. Or it was until today.