Dispelling the notion that the technologically astute are typically fresh faced whipper snappers, a recent study from Advertising.com shows that this long held stereotype is certainly not true when it come to online video.

In fact according to the study, of the people that are currently using online video services regularly, 69 percent are in the 35 and up demographic and tend to favour online news video bulletins as opposed to YouTube clips.

And there was us thinking that online video services were exclusively for streamed pirate films and people falling off their skateboards (note - sarcasm). Still, it is interesting to see that the internet, in all of its facets, is still seen very much as the go-to resource for news and information first and entertainment second.

[Via Advertising.com]

YouTube has brokered a deal with the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society – Performing Right Society Alliance (MCPS-PRS Alliance forthwith) in order to legally endorse the use of recorded music on YouTube.

The MCPS and PRS currently collect royalties for 50,000 composers, songwriters and publishers and have entered into the deal with YouTube in order to further enforce DRM issues in what is essentially a bit of a copyright Wild-West.

The deal will see YouTube pay a blanket fee to the MCPS-PRS Alliance (ker-chiiiiing!) just as many radio and television broadcasters do. This will essentially make it legal for music to be used in amateurs’ videos, who don’t own the rights to broadcast the music.

The MCPS-PRS Alliance is said to be planning to distribute the fee it receives from YouTube among its members, according to how often certain pieces of music are played on the site. Good luck with keeping track of that.

[Via The Financial Times]

Until now, producing good quality opening titles, station breaks and incidental footage for your online video channel has required lots of time consuming work. More often than not, you will have had to purchase expensive DVD catalogues of stock video footage.

Well now there are an increasing number of online resources for helping you find free stock video footage for helping you produce online videos and channels. Here we will look at 9 of the best.

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We all know that there are plenty of pirate TV episodes being posted on websites like YouTube, and we all know that there are plenty of sites that like to collect these videos into a pirate TV directory - such as Peekvid and QuickSilverScreen.

I can’t really blame people for wanting to stick the finger to the greedy content owners like NBC by uploading a TV Show onto YouTube. After all buying TV Shows online is full of DRM and is often overpriced.

However, I do have a problem when pirates hide behind this cause and try to get rich off of other people’s content. That is outright stealing.

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How has the Internet changed public broadcasting, if at all? It’s a question we should look at as the popularity and accessibility of Internet based television channels and online video streaming increases exponentially.

Back in the twenties John Reith, the first general director of the BBC said that their most important mission was to “inform, educate and entertain”. 

If Mr. Reith had defined this mission today, would he said something else? Has the internet changed the main mission of a license funded public broadcaster?

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Although you may not have heard of it, Pyro.tv is a service comparable to VeohTV. It collects videos from around the web, and delivers them to its users as channels, similar to traditional television.

The bread-and-butter of the service lies in the ability for each user to create their own channels of their favourite videos, which can then be shared amongst others.

Now, Vibe Solutions Group, the company behind the service, has announced that the Pyro.TV video channel service has been integrated into the Facebook Platform. 

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NBC got a little greedy yesterday when it decided to drop its contract with iTunes to sell digital downloads of TV shows on iTunes (source: NYTimes.com).

NBC was requesting that iTunes introduce stricter piracy controls and higher pricing, something that Apple was unwilling to provide. Personally I already think that iTunes is already packed with far too much DRM and the prices for TV Shows are about as high as I’d be willing to pay.

The current contract that Apple has with NBC was to run up until December this year. However, Apple bit back and decided to cut this short and stop selling NBC TV Shows in September at the end of the current TV season.  

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