Creative Commons

The Creative Commons licensing system has been around since 2002 and allowed content creators to easily license their works on the Internet. There are six different Creative Commons licenses available, ranging from Attribution Alone to Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike. All of which make various demands of those using the licensed works.

Creative Commons has been used extensively on photographs, with Flickr now hosting almost 200 million images licensed under the system. But video hasn’t really made the most of the Creative Commons licensing system. At least until now.

CC-By-3.0 On YouTube

When you upload a video to YouTube at the moment it is automatically assigned the Standard YouTube License, but from now on uploaders will have the opportunity to assign it the CC-By-3.0 license, which allows a user to share and remix the content as long as attribution is given. And this even applies to commercial use.

YouTube video creators can now also use more than 10,000 clips which the site has obtained through partnerships with C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera, and others. these can be incorporated into a work by using the YouTube Video Editor. All the newly created clips licensed under CC will also be added to the pot as time goes on.

YouTube has sought to make things as simple as possible, so attribution is automatically given, and just the one type of Creative Commons license is available. At least for now.

Conclusions

I’ve made use of Creative Commons licenses before, both when using images on websites and when uploading my own photos to Flickr. It can be confusing but thankfully YouTube has seen to it that the hard work has all but been removed from the equation.

With the sheer amount of video uploaded and viewed on YouTube this should help Creative Commons become standard in the world of online video.

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YouTube Videos

YouTube currently gets more than 35 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute of every day. Which is more than I can possibly conceive of. You’d think that would be enough to sate Google’s desire to remain as the number one online video destination, but apparently not.

Keen to help out those people who haven’t got access to any kind of camera – whether it be a Webcam, video camera, or smartphone – and those who don’t feel comfortable showing their faces on the Web, YouTube has teamed with three third-party apps.

These apps – collectively known as YouTube Create – all allow you to create a video for free with nothing other than the tools provided.

Camera Not Required

The three apps now integrated into YouTube are GoAnimate, which offers all the elements required to make simple animations, Xtranormal, which turns your script into a CG animation, and Stupeflix Video Maker, which turns your digital content into a unique video.

I took a look at all three options and eventually plumped to create a video using GoAnimate. The simple yet effective result of which can be seen embedded below:-

I know it’s not very good, but the fact it only took me around 10 minutes to create (having played around with the tools for around an hour beforehand) is surely impressive, even if I say so myself. And I chose just one setting and the most basic of set-ups. Suffice to say there is a lot more that can be done.

Even the talking didn’t require any external hardware or software on my part, as a clever text-to-voice tool doing all the work. You can also upload audio clips and/or speak into a microphone to give your characters voices.

The other two apps are demonstrated in this YouTube Blog post from December 2010.

Conclusions

The great thing is how these apps bring everyone the opportunity to create a video for YouTube, as long as they have access to the Web and a YouTube account. And I’ve got a feeling this is just the tip of the iceberg, with a lot more promised for the future.

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YouTube UGC

User-Generated Content (UGC) is an integral part of YouTube. Hell, it makes up the vast majority of the content on the site, though the amount of more professional content from YouTube Partners has started to increase of late.

The problem for YouTube is the quality isn’t always there when it comes to UGC, especially now that many people shoot video on mobile devices which are also capable of doing a multitude of other things. Then there is the size of these videos to consider, as the bandwidth costs for hosting this kind of content must cost YouTube a (not so) small fortune.

Thankfully YouTube has found a solution.

Green Parrot Pictures

Green Parrot Pictures is a company currently based in Dublin, Ireland which YouTube has now acquired. Founder Anil Kokaram and his team will soon be heading over to California to continue the work they have been doing on the Emerald Isle.

What Green Parrot Pictures’ digital video technology offers is an improvement in video quality while at the same time less bandwidth. Which is clearly a compelling duality for YouTube to possess, hence the acquisition.

As YouTube itself explains in a blog post:

“Some of YouTube’s most popular or moving videos are shot using low-quality mobile phones and video cameras. Take, for example, videos of recent protests in Libya. Although emotionally captivating, they can be jerky, blurry or unsteady. What if there was a technology that could improve the quality of such videos — sharpening the image, reducing visual noise and rendering a higher-quality, steadier video — all while your video is simply being uploaded to the site? You can imagine how excited we were when we discovered a small, ambitious company based in Ireland that can do exactly this … Their technology helps make videos look better while at the same time using less bandwidth and improving playback speed.

Conclusions

The terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, and it’s not clear exactly how YouTube will use the newly acquired company or the technology it has inherited along with it. It could be as simple as an automated process at the time of uploading, or an optional extra for those who want to use it.

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Netflix’ Changing Business

Things are changing for Netflix, partly forced, partly by choice. A business built on the idea of delivering DVDs to customers by mail is now evolving into one built, and growing, on the idea of streaming content to customers via the Internet.

Netflix’ increase in publicizing and populating ‘Watch Instantly’ has seen the number of customers signing up to the service growing, and revenue growing as a result. Obviously. There is, however, a consequence to this: more money being spent on streaming content.

Acquiring Content Costs Money

It’s hardly a revelation that acquiring content costs money, but quite how much it costs is a little surprising.

Its latest earnings report for Q2 2010 (ending June 30) shows that Netflix has considerably upped the amount of money it’s spending on content for the streaming part of its service.

In the last quarter alone, Netflix spent $66 million on streaming content, up from just $9 million spent during the same period last year. For the first six months of 2010 Netflix spent $116 million, up from $31 million on a year before.

On the flip side, Netflix spent $24 million on DVDs in the last quarter, down from $43 million on a year before. The cost of sending DVDs to customers increased to offset this reduction in the cost of purchasing content.

The good thing for Netflix is that the increased spending on streaming content has persuaded more people to sign up for the subscription service, which includes DVD rentals and access to ‘Watch Instantly’.

Conclusions

Netflix‘ future is definitely in streaming content. And it knows it. The good thing is Netflix is leading the way in what is set to become the norm for more companies. So it’ll be a great thing for Netflix to succeed.

[Via NewTeeVee]

YouTube

YouTube is, and has been for a long time, the biggest and most-popular online video site. It has a full range of videos, from long, professionally-produced clips, to a lot of user-generated content.

The site is now five-years-old, and celebrated its birthday by hitting the two-billion video views a day milestone. However, one thing that’s been missing from the site is a video editor, apart from the short-lived YouTube Remixer from a few years ago.

2007’s YouTube Remixer was a Flash video editor based on Adobe Premiere Express. It was quickly discontinued after users complained it was slow and buggy. So YouTube has gone back to the drawing board.

YouTube Video Editor

Google is pushing for cloud-based services to become the norm. Google Docs offers office applications in the cloud, Picnik offers photo editing in the cloud, and now the YouTube video editor brings simple editing into the cloud as well.

Make no mistake, this isn’t going to compete with video editing software suites such as Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro, but that’s not the intent. Instead, YouTube is trying to make it easier for normal users to be able to do simple video editing on the fly.

The YouTube video editor has a simple and intuitive UI which operates by dragging and dropping videos and segments of video to create a new clip. Trimming videos to give them new start and stop points is easy, as is adding a title, tags, and metadata.

There’s also the option to add music from Google’s AudioSwap library. Overall, it’s simple and effective, and could help non-geeks improve the quality of video they upload to YouTube.

Conclusions

The YouTube video editor could prove to be very useful, particularly for YouTube users uploading video clips to the site via mobile devices such as smartphones and the Apple iPad.

Cloud-based services aren’t perfect, or suited to every product. But on this occasion I think it’s a good fit.

[Via Google Operating System]

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TubeMaster++ is software for capturing video files to your computer and converting them to different video or audio formats. It includes a video and music search feature as well.

What is TubeMaster

TubeMaster++, available for PC, Linux and Mac, is a free downloadable video conversion software that includes search engines for video and audio.  Goofy name, but an impressive variety of features for a free product.

It can capture multimedia files from your internet browser, or you can drag and import files you want to convert. Files can be saved on your PC or converted to other video or audio formats (such as AVI, MPEG, MP3, MP4, IPod, PSP, etc.)

Giving it a Spin…

I downloaded TubeMaster and gave it a try, and was impressed by how well this worked. The software is built around three primary components: media capture/conversion, video search and MP3 search. The audio/video search features in an of themselves are impressive features.

The media capture allows you to click and drag in media that you’d like to convert, while the video and MP3 search features offer robust search engines for finding video and audio. I was impressed by the speed this software returned results for my queries.

Running Some Video Conversion

I was able to use TubeMaster++ to convert films to different formats, then preview them with TubeMaster++. From my own observation, these all converted without a hitch and played fine for me.

TubeMaster++ can convert a number of files at the same time, and lets you preview the video in a smaller popup window in the application.

Video Searches

The Video Search feature is a decent one, and offers basically a no-frills search engine that can perform a global video search across a number of different sources (e.g. YouTube, DailyMotion, and dozens of others) and presents the results back on the screen.

The video results display the video title, length, category and even the source. Scrolling through the results and making a selection, you can then kick off any video which launches in your default browser.

Music Searching too

The Music Search also works in much the same way as the Video Search, and a few of the searches that I ran brought back a number of results.

Once you’ve found a song that you want, you can select the download option to bring it into the TubeMaster++ tool for conversion.

What Reviews Say About the TubeMaster

Most of the reviews that I found for TubeMaster++ were favorable. Freewaregenius noted some of the positives of this software, including how it can be launched independently wihout having to install itself as an extension of your browser.

CNET’s editors were a little more harsh, pointing out some issues with the interface and application instability. They also noted, and I’d agree, that the documentation/tutorials could have been a little more comprehensive.

TubeMaster++

• TubeMaster++
• TubeMaster++ Features

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Any Video Converter is Freeware that allows you to convert video clips of various format into numerous video output formats.

What Any Video Converter Does

As far as freeware goes, Any Video Converter (AVC) does a decent job of quickly converting video files between different formats. From my own tests the conversion results were satisfactory.

In addition to just conversion, the software can also clip segments and merge or sort them to make new movie clips, in addition to trimming frame sizes of videos.

Install and Getting Started

Download and install when quickly, and one of the nice things about AVC is that, as freeware, I wasn’t bombarded with ads as soon as the application started. In fact, it started right up and I could go right to work selecting a file and converting it.

Having started the app on my desktop, I was impressed that the converter had no problems running even with other apps running on my PC at the same time. I selected a VOB format file and opened this, then selected ‘Convert’.

AVC went to work with the conversion, and after a few minutes had rendered a new conversion of the file. I experimented with different format conversions and each of them seemed fine for me.

The Professional Version

While working with AVC, I learned that if you want to rip DVD movies, or need additional output formats, such as iPod, Zune, PSP, etc, that I would need to upgrade to the Professional Version. But considering that there are many free options, this is fine with me.

AVC can convert video formats such as:

• avi
• asf
• mov
• rm
• rmvb
• flv
• mkv
• mpg
• 3gp
• m4v
• vob

YouTube videos can be imported and converted as well.

Output formats include:

• avi
• mp4
• wmv
• swf
• flv
• mkv
• mpeg-1 and mpeg-2
• mpg (PAL or NTSC)
• mp3
• wma
• ogg
• aac
• wave
• m4a

Video Example of the Any Video Converter in Action

Any Video Converter

• Any Video Converter
• Any Video Converter – Reviews and Feedback

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SuperTinTin is webcam recording software for Skype that records both audio and video from Skype calls and emails.

What is SuperTinTin?

SuperTintin is a webcam recording application for Skype. SuperTintin can record audio and video streams for all kinds of Skype calls and voicemails. The program requires Skype 3.0 or higher.

As an aside, ‘SuperTinTin’ is sort of a goofy name (for some reason it makes me think of a 1960’s TV dog with super powers…)

Features of SuperTinTin

SuperTinTin works with both the audio and video features of Skype. You can record both audio and video from calls and voice mails, with the ability to record and playback as well.

It also captures original media data, insuring that no data is lost. Since it isn’t a screen-capture recorder, the video quality isn’t affected from opening, closing or changing the size of Skype windows while recording.

How to Get Started with SuperTinTin

SuperTinTin is available for download from a number of places online such as CNET. Available as shareware for a (meager) 5-minute recording trial, it’s $24.95 if you want to purchase it.

I downloaded, installed it, and toyed around with the software on my PC. It’s very simplistic in its design, with options for recording and playback, and the ability to open the recent file folder in explorer. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but to it’s credit it was a fast install and ran quickly.

Reviews and Feedback about SuperTinTin

There were only a couple reviews on CNet, both of which seemed unimpressed with the audio recording of SuperTinTin.

Softsea listed out a number of helpful features about the SuperTinTin, such as the fact that you can browse other web pages or videos during the recording, meaning that you can minimize the MSN/Skype/Yahoo Messenger window while its recording.

Buy SuperTinTin & More info

• More info on the SuperTinTin website.

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A Growing Sector

The lifecasting and citizen journalism sectors are both growing in popularity and importance.

Services such as Ustream, Justin.tv, and Livestream allow ordinary people the opportunity to broadcast, well, whatever they want to, within reason.

And with everyone owning a mobile phone, and new models coming complete with built-in video cameras capable of shooting good quality video, citizen journalists a growing band who can no longer be ignored.

iPhone, iPod Cameras

Apple added video cameras to its latest models of iPhone and iPod Nano, and clearly sees the worth of giving its customers a way of shooting video.

The company saw this as a way of competing in an emerging market currently led by Flip with its compact camcorders.

However, there’s no point giving people the chance to shoot video wherever they are without giving them the tools both to stream the video live to the Web and share it with a wider audience.

Live Streaming Apps

Last week saw Apple approve two live-streaming video apps for the iPhone. Apple decided to drop its restrictions on the feature and both Ustream and Knocking Live Video apps are now available from the App Store.

So, in effect, everyone who has an iPhone 3GS now has the capability of shooting video and streaming it live to the Web.

Apple’s Future

This could be the start of a big plan for Apple to place online video at the core of its business. Steve Jobs isn’t one to miss a chance to get in on a new trend at the ground level, and that would seem to be the idea.

And Apple does, of course, have the perfect software in iTunes to immediately become a big player.

[Via Wired]

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YouTube & Upwards

YouTube in particular, and online video in general, is fast becoming a means of gaining fame, popularity, and wealth. We’ve seen the people behind certain viral video hits make a mint from their content creation.

Lauren Luke started off uploading short make-up tips on YouTube and is now an in-demand make-up artist. And Lucas Cruikshank has already made a load of money for his ever-popular Fred shorts and is currently involved in making a movie based on the petulant man/boy.

However, the story of how Federico Alvarez landed a huge Hollywood deal beats those hands down.

Ataque de Panico!

This is Ataque de Panico!, or Panic Attack in English. It’s a short film of just 4:49 minutes length, and around a minute less than that once the credits are removed.

It was made by Federico Alvarez, a relative unknown filmmaker even in his native Uruguay, on a budget of just $500. It shows the invasion of Montevideo by giant robots and flying ships, which starts through the eyes of a child and ends with total destruction.

Hollywood Calling

The video was uploaded to YouTube and spread around the Web like wildfire. And it wasn’t long before a host of the biggest names in Hollywood came calling to offer Alvarez a deal to bring his vision and skills to the big screen.

Alvarez ended up agreeing a deal with Mandate Pictures after a phone conversation with director Sam Raimi, eschewing even meeting with the likes of Dreamworks, Fox, Warner, and The Weinstein Company in the process.

Now, Alvarez has been handed a $30 million budget to make his film (not a longer version of Panic Attack but still involving big robots), a $1 million director’s fee, and new apartments and cars in L.A. for him and his girlfriend. And all for producing a five-minute short and uploading it to YouTube.

Conclusions

This story reads like a work of fiction, surely being too dreamlike to be real. But the likes of Variety, FilmJunk, and SlashFilm are carrying the story, proving it’s actually happened in the way being reported.

This is a stunning victory for YouTube and online video. It’s changed the lives of a few people and means Hollywood adds a new (possibly visionary) filmmaker to its midst. And if the movie ends up being as good as Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 then moviegoers will also benefit.

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