Whether the success of video sharing website YouTube is pleasing to you or not, it looks like the money could soon be filtering down the chain.

Jawed Karim set YouTube up along with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in 2005, and got mighty rich when Google purchased the site a year later.

Now he has teamed with two other angel investors, Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois, to bring his next idea to life.

He is launching Youniversity, an early stage angel investment collective.

Since co-founding YouTube in 2005 along with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, Steve Chen has seen his site go from a small avenue of the World World Web to a Google owned subsidiary which accounts for a third of all video viewed on the Internet.

So naturally, he’s a positive kind of guy, even when it comes to some of the problems associated with having over 10 hours of footage uploaded to the site every minute.

Unsavoury Clips

In recent months, YouTube has been accused of being responsible for a number of undesirable clips making their way on the Internet for all and sundry to view.

These include videos of people being bullied, and happy slapped, rape, and gratuitous violence. There is also the ongoing threat of porn finding its way through the filters.

So the question is: Should YouTube start vetting videos before they get uploaded to the site? The Sydney Morning Herald put this question to Steve Chen, and his response may surprise some.

The Internet hasn’t been good for the movie or music industry, at least in terms of providing a new way for the distribution of content which takes away the need for traditional companies.

But does that excuse the movie industry starting to spy on what we do with our Internet connections, and share with others across our network?

Here, Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge looks at the issues surrounding a speech given by Dan Glickman, the chairman of the MPAA:

Glickman’s Spying Is No Game

Hollywood for years has had a fascination with spies. Some are action spies, like the various incarnations of Bond, James Bond, or cerebral spies like Alec Guinness’ masterfully subtle George Smiley. 

All sorts of people have played TV spies, from Robert Culp and Bill Cosby to Patrick McGoohan, Robert Goulet and the fabulous Lady Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.

There have been spies who watch and listen to us without our knowledge. Gene Hackman had a creepy turn as the telephone eavesdropper (technically not a spy, although he spied) in “The Conversation” in 1974. 

Ten years ago Will Smith’s “Enemy of the State” played off of the then-paranoid “fantasy”, now a reality, of the all-hearing National Security Agency (NSA). The current crop of Bourne films shows a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the technical capability to listen and see anything and anyone at any time.

It wouldn’t be an issue if Hollywood’s fascination with monitoring our words and images was confined to fiction. But over the past couple of months, the fourth wall has been broken and Hollywood is now setting itself up to play a new spy game for real. 

In our four part interview series with Dr. Gerry Purdy, VP and Chief Analyst with Frost & Sullivan, we are discussing different elements of the mobile video market.

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.

Last week saw Google announce two new elements in its YouTube arsenal: the all singing, all dancing, all new API, and the fact that YouTube will be coming to a Tivo near you very soon.

Personally, I’m much more excited about the API release.

YouTube videos aren’t that great to watch on my computer screen. In fact they get worse when you try and make them larger. Why would I want to torture myself by viewing them on my huge DLP TV monitor? No, the API is where the buzz is right now.

A Flickr video service to compliment and work alongside the brilliant photo sharing service has been rumoured for what seems like years now.

Indeed it actually is years, with CNet’s Dan Farber claiming to have first heard talk of it way back in December 2005. In May 2007, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield said users would be able to upload videos soon.

So it’s about time the service actually got up and running, which according to the latest whispers, it’s finally going to in April. I assume they mean 2008, but we can’t be sure.

Over the last 30 years, capturing memories on film has gone from being a rarity to something that everyone does on a regular basis.

If the popularity of sites like YouTube tell us one thing, it’s how popular, and populist, capturing and sharing ordinary events on camera has become.

One of the main problems associated with that sheer amount of footage which is taken though, is once a new format, or way of filming emerges, what then becomes of your old footage?