Youtube

Twitter and YouTube users’ disgust has drawn swift attention to the appalling racist behaviour of a woman on a Croydon tram today. In a video called My Tram Experience a woman with her son on her lap is shown swearing and insulting fellow passengers. She shouts at them: ‘My Britain is f--- all now,’ and ‘Go back to Nicaragua, or wherever you come from.’

Social media helped the matter to come to the attention of police who arrested the woman today.

Before his future prospects were boosted by the death of Osama bin Laden, the US President was already in a good mood. His speech to Whitehouse correspondents last week was one of the best he has made. Watch, enjoy.

For the second year running, YouTube is offering aspiring journalists the chance to win big money - and more importantly, the chance to work on a journalism project with the Pulitzer Center. For the first round of the Project Report competition, entrants are required to submit a video package based on a day in the life of a person they feel should be brought to the world's attention. The deadline is February 28.

She was waiting for a train and was day dreaming for a moment. That was when she noticed the pram, with her baby inside, was slowly rolling towards the edge of the platform. It’s a moment of sheer horror. She lurches forward, but can’t reach the pram as it topples over the edge onto the tracks below. A moment later the train arrives; crunching into the pram and breaking it into pieces.

It happened in Australia two weeks ago. But because the incident was captured on CCTV and the video posted on YouTube; millions of people around the World have already watched the drama unfold.

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!)