A site that was once competition to the now-ubiquitous YouTube has been acquired by a Hollywood management company with plenty of YouTube stars under its name. Which is rather fitting.

A Little Metacafe Background

YouTube may now be ubiquitous and the one video site everybody on the Internet has heard of, but that wasn’t always the case. As hard as it is to imagine as things stand now, there was once a time when YouTube was just one of a host of sites that people headed to in order to upload videos.

Metacafe was one such site. Founded in 2003 with similar intentions to YouTube, it eventually ceded the UGC market to the Google-owned site and began focusing instead on professionally-produced content.

This has worked out to a point, but Metacafe is very much a niche site now. Traffic appears to be steadily falling, with the site claiming 12 million unique visitors a month at the last count.

The last time I wrote about Metacafe on WebTVWire was back in September 2010 when I noted that it has “now conceded defeat to YouTube,” but added that it’s “building vertical channels and nurturing content.”

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YouTube has nabbed the rights to show the London 2012 Olympic Games live on the site. Unfortunately only in the 64 countries in which the IOC failed to secure a deal with any of the local broadcasters.

Live Streaming Olympics

With 100 days to go until the London 2012 Olympics NBC took the wraps off its new website, giving enough time for the hype to build and visitor numbers to climb, or so it hopes. All events will be streamed live on the site for U.S. cable and satellite viewers. Which is an improvement over the diabolical situation of 2008.

Now, with 50 days to go, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced a deal that will see the whole of the London 2012 Olympics stream live on the Google-owned site. But only for those in certain countries across Africa and Asia.

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YouTube Live looks set to take off in a big way thanks to the introduction of monetization options. Content owners will now be able to make money from live-streaming content via pay-per-view or in-stream advertising.

YouTube Live

YouTube began experimenting with live-streaming several years ago. In 2008 co-founder Steve Chen signaled it was on its way, and over the next few years carefully controlled live-streaming events such as Indian Premier League cricket matches and a U2 concert were staged to test the technology.

In September 2010 testing began on the live platform with selected partners. A full launch then occurred in April 2011, but the number of partners was limited, with many content owners put off by the lack of monetization options open to them. But no longer.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water assume Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement was dead and buried, an appeals court brings it back to life once again. When will this madness end?!

Background

The background to this long and winding case in a nutshell: YouTube was born, thousands of clips were uploaded to the site, many of them infringing on copyrights. Google acquired YouTube, Viacom pulled its content, and then sued the search giant for $1 billion on 63,000 alleged copyright infringements. Let the fun and games begin.

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YouTube racks up over 19,000 episodes of Indian television shows, all available for free on the site. Which begs the question, if Indian media companies can offer content for free on YouTube, why not media companies from the rest of the world?

YouTube India

YouTube has announced its local Indian offerings has grown to encompass more than 19,000 separate episodes of more than 300 different shows. And the YouTube Shows page for those in India has been updated to make sorting this content easier.

Six different India-based languages are now supported on YouTube – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi – with content available in all. Broadcasters supplying the content include Sony Entertainment Television (SET), Colors, ImagineTV, Star India, and VikatanTV.

Those living outside India can still access this content by visiting youtube.com/shows/other-languages. This link also opens up possibilities for watching content in a range of languages foreign from your own.

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You can now watch full-length episodes of various Disney shows on YouTube, and even embed them on other sites around the Web. Assuming you’re in America and can actually find the content you are looking for.

Google and Disney

Google and Disney struck a deal at the end of last year which saw the two teaming up to create original programming for YouTube. Disney is one of the 100 partners bringing original content to the site via dedicated channels.

However, the deal also saw Disney movies being made available to rent through YouTube, and now full-length episodes of classic shows have also found their way on to the market-leading online video destination.

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Wait, what? There’s a music label executive who thinks the Internet is a force for good? Wonders will never cease. Unfortunately his viewpoint will not enable German music fans to watch music videos on YouTube anytime soon.

GEMA

In Germany GEMA handles the rights of copyright owners. Unfortunately its monopoly position means it has pushed for higher rates per performance. With music videos on YouTube the group asked Google to pay 16 cents per stream, and music videos have consequently not been available in Germany since March 2009.

From what I gather this is a lot higher than the rate set by other performance rights organizations around the world. Many of which Google is happy to work with to ensure music videos are playable and that everyone gets paid fairly.

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