YouTube may be the most trafficked video site on the Internet. But until now, that hasn’t resulted in any serious cash being made. But that all looks set to change thanks to various new efforts.

We all knew YouTube was way overdue to be turned in to the moneymaking behemoth Google needs it to be to justify the $1.65 billion price tag. But the roll-out and variety of revenue schemes is quite surprising.

Banners and Post-rolls

We’ve already seen the YouTube homepage getting huge banner ads, with the advertisers paying a premium for such a high value Web destination. Some advertisers are even getting very imaginative with YouTube.

Post-roll adverts have also been rolled out to a selection of videos. And now we have the latest effort to make the site pay for itself: YouTube ‘Click To Buy’.

(more…)

Desperate Housewives Synopsis

Desperate Housewives is a drama-comedy show about the happenings of Wisteria Lane, the street where Mary Alice Young suddenly committed suicide. Now dead, she acts as the eyes and ears of fictional American town of Fairview, Eagle State and exposes her former neighbors’ dirty little secrets.

A few of them include Susan Mayer (played by Teri Hatcher) a divorced mother desperate for any love she can get and Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman) who does her best to raise her four crazy kids. Then there’s Bree Van De Kamp- a scarier Martha Stewart. And last but not least, Eva Longoria plays Gabrielle Solis- a retired model who has an affair with her teenage gardener.

Each episode usually contains narration by Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong) and slowly unfolds a new scandal or mystery. The show is supposedly the most popular show in its demographic worldwide, with an audience of nearly 120 million viewers.

Desperate Housewives first aired in October of 2004 on ABC and is currently on it’s 5th season.

• Watch Desperate Housewives on iTunes
• Watch On Demand at ABC.com (Latest Few Episodes & U.S Only)
• Watch Latest Episodes on Channel4.com (UK Only)
• Search for Desperate Housewives Episodes
• Find Desperate Housewives Torrents
• See if you can stream this on Netflix

(more…)

This US Presidential Election has utilised the Web like never before, with the candidates using social media and Internet sites to their own advantage in ways unknown to previous White House contenders.

This battle has also seen Web video used as a tool to push the candidate’s agendas, with sites such as YouTube full of campaign videos and videos of supporters of one candidate obliterating the other candidate.

The Presidential Debates

And now, with less than a month to go until the election is held, comes the big one – the presidential debates between Barack Obama and John McCain, which is available to watch online for free from a number of different sources.

For many, the concept of standards brings up images of starting from scratch, a competitive slow-down and endless development hours.

I imagine this is true for many in the online video industry – an industry where the battlefield is fierce and everyone is fervently trying to elbow ahead of their competitors.

However, this hesitation is unfounded and, in truth, short-sighted. Sure, there is huge growth and money to be made in web video now, but without a universal open standard for video platforms, it cannot reach its potential of becoming truly ubiquitous.

Aren’t We Giving Away the Cow for Free?

Developing standards begins as simply as defining what constitutes a video player and openly sharing that definition and source code with the public. Some might find the idea of allowing companies to develop their own custom players cannibalistic to the industry (why would they hire an online video platform provider if they can build it themselves?), but, in reality, the value of online video has little to do with the player.

With HD becoming the present rather than the future, set-top box producers are going to have to keep up with the technology to stay in the game. Luckily, Vudu is doing just that.

Vudu is a set-top box enabling the purchase and rental of full-length movies to a television using an Internet connection and peer-to-peer technology.

From HD To HDX

As with its rival, Apple TV, Vudu has been offering HD movies for a few months now. But the quality of HD downloads is not generally the same quality of HD movies on the Blu-ray or the (now defunct) HD DVD formats. Until now.

This week saw Vudu unveil what it calls HDX, and it’s a new format which means that content downloaded from the Web will now be 1080p, near-Blu-ray quality for the first time ever.

What’s more, movies rented in the new format will cost exactly the same as normal HD movies: $5.99 for new releases, and $3.99 for catalogue titles.

(more…)

What chance does Google have of successfully monetizing YouTube? The pundits say little to none, but the company is forging ahead with its efforts regardless.

Google’s efforts to monetize YouTube have been well documented over the past year, as CEO Eric Schmidt tries to make the site pay back some of the $1.65 billion his company paid for it.

Issues To Overcome

Making money on YouTube is a complicated affair. There are the obvious copyright issues to take in to account which means only about 4% of the total videos can be advertised on, and then there is the even bigger problem of what types of advert to use.

Some people think the chances of Google ever making its investment in YouTube back are so slim that it should just kill the site off now. But while that may be an extreme view, it’s certainly true that traffic doesn’t always equate to revenue.

Netflix has already revolutionised the DVD rental market, and its now attempting to do the same in the online streaming sector.

You hear nothing from a company for ages and then three stories come along at once. Today has seen Netflix add Starz Play movies to its Watch Now service, open up its API, and make a promise to Mac users.