Xbox 360 owners already have access to some full length movies and television shows via Xbox Live, but now a deal has been done which will see original programming being launched on the service.

Xbox Live is Microsoft’s Web platform, exclusively available to Xbox 360 owners. Of the 18 million people who own the current generation console, 10 million have signed up for the service.

The service currently offers various different for sale, either by use of a credit card or redeeming points for participating in various Xbox Live activities.

Many games, including user created ones are available, as well as films like Saw and The Departed, and full episodes of TV shows such as South Park.

Original Programming On Way

Now, from a deal struck between Microsoft and Hollywood producer and talent agent Peter Safran, original programming will now also be heading on to Xbox Live.

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A recent post on the Last100 blog (part of the Read/Write Web network) written by Guinevere Orvis, an interactive producer with the CBC, talks about how the Canadian television network has chosen to distribute one of its shows using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. 

The idea apparently started after she read about the Norwegian state broadcaster doing the same thing with a travel show.

It’s nice to know that our national broadcaster is open to new ideas, and from the sounds of Norway’s experience, it should be one that they consider repeating. 

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Up until today, people who uploaded videos to YouTube could only get limited statistics and information about the people who were viewing that content.

This included number of viewers, viewers ratings, and the number of comments left on that video. Now, through a new feature called YouTube Insight, content creators can get a whole lot more detailed stats than that.

YouTube Insight

YouTube Insight is free, and available to anyone with a YouTube account who uploads a video to the site, allowing them to view a diverse range of facts and videos about their audience.

These include how often any particular video is viewed from different geographical location, and how long it takes for a video to become popular or even go viral.

Content creators will basically have at their fingertips the means to accurately determine which part of the world is interested in their video, and how that affects popularity worldwide.

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With most of the big players in the Web TV and streaming video industry being based in North America, read Google, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo!, it’s easy to forget this is a worldwide phenomenon.

We already know that the amount of Internet traffic heading to online video sites in the US is rising rapidly, and the business model is slowly but surely getting worked out.

Now we learn that traffic in the UK is also rising at a massive rate, with the latest statistics showing a rise of 178% in online traffic being targeted at video sites in Britain over the last year.

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Over the last couple of weeks, we shared our four part interview series with Dr. Gerry Purdy, VP and Chief Analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

In Part 1, we explored the future transcoding market, and the impact mobile video will have on transcoding and the challenges that await this year.

In Part 2, we discussed the impact that the Apple iPhone and YouTube have had on the mobile user experience, as well as the complexities of mass video distribution.

In Part 3, we discussed the global growth of mobile video, the impact of unlimited data plans on the mobile video market, and regulatory constraints on the market.

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Justin.tv, the lifecasting network which enables the most ordinary of people to become the star of their own Web TV shows, has reached its first birthday.

To celebrate, the company has published its first year statistics, and they make for impressive reading, with 87,331,037 page views in the last twelve months.

But, are they telling the full story, or giving a skewed vision of how well the network, and web television companies other than YouTube are doing?

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The last time we spoke about Joost here on Web TV Wire, it was to talk about its possible demise.

Many bloggers and industry analysts claimed at the time that it would be dead within a year.

I ended that article by concluding that Joost would probably be around beyond 2008, but for it to happen, some major changes would have to take place to the service.

And we could be in luck…

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