However, navigating the breadth of choice now out there and filtering the available content is getting harder as a result. Enter Magma, which acts like a Billboard Hot 100 for online video.

Online Video Growth

Online video has grown, and continues to grow, in popularity and breadth of content. The choice of sites, portals, content, and video clips now available is breathtaking.

There are the long-form video destinations such as Hulu and the BBC iPlayer, and short-form video factories such as YouTube and Dailymotion. Between all of them the range of content available to your average viewer is simply astonishing. It would take years to watch it all.

Online Video Filter

As it gets harder for the discerning Internet user to filter out the chaff and only watch the wheat, ways of doing the filtering are going to become more and more important.

There are already ways of doing this. Our sister site, Web TV Hub offers a daily dose of the most timely and viral videos doing the rounds. Then there is Digg, which shows which videos are creating enough of a buzz to get featured on the site. Then there is, of course, word of mouth.

Magma – Online Video Charts

Magma is a new video portal that has been in private beta for the last few months. But this week has seen it opened up to the public for the first time.

Magma acts as a filter for online video from all across the Web. It organizes videos into charts based on the number of views, comments, related videos, and social media activity each receives.

You can see a Billboard-style Hot 100 from all corners of the Web or view the top videos on a number of different sites, including YouTube, Hulu, Facebook, and Twitter.

Magma – Other Features

If you sign up for a user account then there are additional features. Everyone has their own channel which they can add videos to, and you can see what other people are adding to theirs, adding a good sense of community.social networking to the whole thing.

Magma uses video embeds to enable you to watch the videos right from the site itself. Meaning you haven’t got to follow links to watch recommended content as you do with other social networking sites.

Conclusions

Magma is a brilliant yet simple idea which should aid most people’s video viewing habits. The one word of warning is how addictive it is – you’re suddenly faced with a mountain of content you know other people are enjoying. And that begs you to want to watch it too.

A host of media companies have launched a new push to force user generated content sites such as YouTube to tighten up their copyright controls.

Disney, CBS, NBC, and Fox, along with Microsoft, Veoh, and Dailymotion, have jointly issued a document they call “User Generated Content Principles.” 

In a nutshell, the guidelines call for sites hosting UGC to automatically block content that matches copyrighted material submitted by copyright owners to a back-end database.

Nothing New

These aren’t new proposals—the studios have been pressing for automated filtering on YouTube and the like for quote some time now. But the presentation of these proposals as a set of “principles” is new, and somewhat misleading.

Typically, we see voluntary guidelines issued by industry groups as a self-regulatory measure, to ensure best practices are followed in the absence of regulation. But here, it’s not self-regulation—the biggest names in the UGC business aren’t there. 

Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Yahoo are all noticeably absent from the video sharing services, as are a number of other channels for UGC, like blogs and other forums that allow the posting of media. Those who are present are those who would seek to regulate the business of others.

End Of Year Deadline

Another hint at the motivations behind this piece is the presence of a deadline—not normally something associated with a set of best practices. According to the document, UGC companies have to install content filtering systems by the end of this year:

3. UGC Services should use effective content identification technology (“Identification Technology”) with the goal of eliminating from their services all infringing user-uploaded audio and video …

To that end and to the extent they have not already done so, by the end of 2007, UGC Services should fully implement commercially reasonable Identification Technology that is highly effective, in relation to other technologies commercially available at the time of implementation, in achieving the goal of eliminating infringing content.

After this, there is a detailed explanation of exactly how the UGC company should be filtering content, and the practices it should use to interface with the content owners. 

Now look towards the end of the document, where it provides one of the few obligations of the content companies—not to sue a UGC company that has met these conditions and continued to update and refine its filtering systems.

If a UGC adheres to all of these [13 preceding] Principles in good faith, the Copyright Owner should not assert a claim of copyright infringement against such UGC Service with respect to infringing user-uploaded content that might remain on the UGC Service despite such adherence to these Principles.

Taken all together, this looks more like a list of demands accompanied by an implied threat of suit if they are not met.

It’s also interesting to see the contrast between this agreement not to sue and the introduction of the piece, which explicitly says that the “principles” don’t mean they won’t sue you anyway:

While we may differ in our interpretation of relevant laws, we do not mean to resolve those differences in these Principles, which are not intended to be and should not be construed as a concession or waiver with respect to any legal or policy position or as creating any legally binding rights or obligations.

The document also continually refers to the “elimination of all infringing content,” despite an early admission that there can be no perfect system. Of course, as has been pointed out before, a perfect system would block all infringing content and allow all lawful content. 

False Positives Over False Negatives

While it’s nice to see the content industries admit that this is impossible, it looks like they’re entirely willing to favor false positives over false negatives. If they are continually trying to eliminate all infringing content, imperfectly, then what allowances do they make for fair use? 

None that I can find in the document. Aside from making mention of the doctrine’s existence and the need to “allow” it, no provisions or incentives to preserve users’ fair use rights make an appearance. 

The only specific user-oriented provision merely recites the fact that users have the right to counter-notice if their material is improperly taken down—an obligation already built in to the DMCA.

In a way, this merely reflects the priorities of the parties issuing this document—five of the largest content companies in the world (and one of their subsidiaries), a couple of UGC startups, and Microsoft. 

Smaller companies are more susceptible to pressure from litigation threats from media giants, and are likely willing to accede to demands like these to assure investors that capital won’t be lost to Hollywood litigation.

Veoh is likely under dual pressure, given both its connections with Time Warner and its history of litigation with Universal. Microsoft is something of the odd one out, but given the minuscule market share of Soapbox, what have they got to lose but risk?

No Mention Of The Users

Another big party to the user-generated content revolution is missing from this document—the user. As drawn up by Hollywood and a few cowed tech sites, the principles are all about what is convenient or desirable for those particular parties. 

The lack of attention paid to fair use, or any procedures relating to users (there’s a similarly brief mention of counter-notification that’s already required under the DMCA), it’s clear that this document was created more to stake out a policy position than to provide a real way forward.

So why should we care about this document, if it’s merely the same old story, framed differently? For the same reason that Google’s recent caving is a cause for concern. 

By framing these asks as principles, the content industry seeks to change the norms around the debate, and make filtering seem like an obligation. After all, if Google and Microsoft are doing it, why aren’t you?

Sherwin Siy is a contributing author discussing matters relating to the broadband video and IPTV industry. His work can be found on Public Knowledge. Post has Some Rights Reserved.

The company was once a news maker solely for its hand in the illicit proliferation of copyrighted content, but has in recent months (or is it years?) made great headway to cast the image of its former self aside and put its best, non-illegal foot forward.

It’s achieved this by using its records of viewer numbers, among other figures, to attract legitimate licensing deals and to secure very significant sums of funding.

This new version of Skype adds videos from the video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Metacafe to Skype and will establish an exclusive channel. This will allow Skype users to share videos from Dailymotion’s Mood Channels.

Dailymotion, an online video sharing site boasting 4.7 million users per day, is reinforcing its goal to bring superior video content to new devices and broader audiences by launching an iPhone compatible version of the site.

The new site, which you can find at http://iphone.dailymotion.com/, features a simplified interface and Quicktime-compatible encoding – both features designed specifically to give a high-quality viewing experience to iPhone’s Safari web brower.

One cool feature is the ability to perform keyword searches for videos. The results are returned as thumbnail images with a play icon that can be directly tapped on the iPhone’s touch screen, launching the video in full screen mode.

Dailymotion claims to have 20,000 new videos uploaded everyday and is in the top 50 websites worldwide (based on traffic count) according to Alexa. In France, Dailymotion’s native country, the site ranks number 8.

[Press Release]

DailyMotion, the Paris-based video hub, has struck a deal to license programming from production company, RDF USA. It is one of the first partnerships the site has entered into, in an attempt to supplement its masses of user-generated content.

Creating shows specifically for an Internet audience is also new ground for RDF USA – best known for supplying TV shows such as ABC’s Shaq’s Big Challenge.

Max Benator, head of RDF USA’s digital division said of DailyMotion:

“It’s really exciting because they have amazing traffic. It’s been untapped by the entertainment community, so we see this as a great opportunity to be one of the first producers to get access to those eyeballs.”

The contract calls for RDF to produce eight programme concepts for short form viewing on DailyMotion over the next year. Comedy, drama and even political content are so far being considered.

Today’s agreement reflects the changing dynamics of Internet video swinging towards more professional content. This new production deal will help to keep Daily Motion biting on the heels of video giant YouTube.

[Via Yahoo! News]

But just because a site is busy does not mean that people necessarily like it more than a site which is less busy. But how could you see how much people actually like a site?

Use Del.icio.us to compare popularity

Well you could check how many times people have bookmarked all the pages from a site (not just the homepage) in Del.icio.us. People will only tend to bookmark something if they find it interesting.

It is pretty much impossible to find out how many Del.icio.us bookmarks a website has. You would have to search for every single page of that website in Del.icio.us and add then together all the bookmarks. Can you imagine doing that for a site like YouTube?

Well I thought of a way to cheat! That is by simply checking how many backlinks a website has from Delicious to the website in question. I did this by just using the following query in Yahoo:

linkdomain:youtube.com site:del.icio.us

That query returns 46,000 backlinks from Del.icio.us to pages on YouTube. Compare that to its competitor MetaCafe.com which only has 2,560 backlinks from Del.icio.us.

It is safe to say that the more backlinks from Del.icio.us, the more bookmarks in Del.icio.us, and hence the more people like the site.

I crunched some numbers and found that often the number of backlinks was 1/10th of the actual number Del.icio.us bookmarks (but that’s a very rough estimate). So now you have a very easy way to estimate Del.icio.us bookmarks by just multiplying the number of backlinks by 10.

To get an idea of how well a site is liked you also need to measure the number of Del.icio.us bookmarks against the traffic of a website. I’ve just simply compared it against Alexa Rank in the table below.

Popularity of ten video sites compared using Del.icio.us bookmarks and Alexa Traffic Rank:

• As you can see YouTube.com is immensely popular compared to its closest competitors MetaCafe and DailyMotion.
• Joost stands out as a website which is already proving popular compared to sites with similar traffic.
• Flurl.com stands out as a very busy site which few people actually bookmark, indicating people just visit in passing and it lacks a solid community.

I think the number of Del.icio.us bookmarks definately helps to point out the sites that have a more loyal community, compared to websites where people just visit it in passing.

- The benefits of search engine optimization should always be more Search Engine traffic.
- Lots of SEO Software is available to assist in your seo job.
- A search engine is a complex computer algorithm that hunts out and organizes information on the web.
- Network marketing involves the interaction between individual business owners to provide business support.
- Social Media Marketing might be the best method of Blog Marketing for new blogs to generate big amounts of traffic for your blog.

• YouTube
• Blip.tv
• VideoEgg
• MetaCafe
• Dailymotion
• Veoh
• Google Video
• Grouper
• Jumpcut
• Eyespot
• MSN SoapBox
• MySpace Video
• AOL Uncut Video

So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick look to see just how popular these video sharing sites really are, and how their popularity compares.

I’ve just done this quickly using Alexa rank, its not the most accurate, but its the best we’ve got really. Here are the results:

It is is no surprize to see that YouTube is at the top, but it is particularly to see how closely tied DailyMotion.com and MetaCafe.com are.

Unfortunately Google Video, AOL Uncut, MySpace video or MSN soapbox could not be represented as Alexa does not give results for subdomains (e.g video.google.com), but just the main domain.

The growth of the top 5

The graph below compares the growth of the 5 most popular sites sitting at the video sharing table. The graph covers the past three years.

As you can see MetaCafe has not seen any growth for a number of months and meanwhile DailyMotion has shot up from behind to become a serious contender in the video sharing wars, most likely because it became a bit of a haven for pirated videos.

Am I missing out any of the big video sharing players here that have an Alexa rank higher than 50,000?

- Through File Sharing Pirate Videos have become very popular.
- If you read Photoshop tutorials it will help you learn how to use this program more efficiently.
- You might have to go with a P2P sharing software program that costs a little bit of money to find the videos you wanted.
- Learn about the search engine that searches the entire World Wide Web for the answers you are seeking.