Google’s time limit for user-submitted videos uploaded to YouTube is well established, and known by almost everyone these days. Ten minutes. That’s it. No more. 

Have twenty minutes or more of highlights from that Little League baseball game you want to share with the family via the video hosting website? It ain’t happening. 

At least not in one whole shot. Long-form podcasts? Nien!

And we all know why that cutoff point was established some time ago. To combat piracy and copyright violations and whatnot. 

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What is YouTube for? We all know it is there as a means for ordinary people to make and upload clips for other people to watch, but is the underlying motivation of the site?

Is it there purely as an entertainment portal for funny and viral video clips; or as a portal for media companies to upload clips from TV shows and music videos to draw consumers in to being fans of their product?

Or, as Wael Abbas was using the site for, is it a way of getting alleged civil rights abuse footage out to the wider world?

Suspended For Rights Abuse Videos

Last week, Wael claimed he had his account suspended by YouTube, and the graphic images, and video clips he had posted showing police brutality, purported voting irregularities and anti-government demonstrations became inaccessible.

The suspension caused uproar amongst civil rights campaigners and activists who were upset that YouTube was seemingly banning the site from being used as a portal to expose abuse claims.

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After last month’s announcement that DixX support was coming to the Sony PS3 games console, there was speculation that the same would be happening on the Microsoft Xbox 360 soon.

It now seems that in the latest dashboard update, there was the inclusion of limited DivX support, although it’s not 100% functional, and Microsoft tried to call the files anything but DivX.

The Xbox Team’s official blog announced:

“[The Xbox 360] now supports files encoded using MPEG-4 Part 2, Simple and Advanced Simple Profile, [which are] often referred to as Xvid or DivX video files”

This is sure to be great news for the millions of Xbox 360 owners, as it increases the library of media content they can now have access to through their trusty consoles.

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Adobe hasn’t always been a favourite company of ours, especially after the recent PDF overlay advertising plan with the folks at Yahoo! Mail.

But sometimes they things which even we can’t complain about, and now we will celebrate the company for doing something rather wonderful.

No, we haven’t gone bipolar. We’re still well in control of our senses. We just really, really like what we heard yesterday coming out of the San Jose-based company’s PR department.

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Back in September, we covered the launch of MyStrands.tv, the music video accompaniment to MyStrands, a social music network.

At the time, we compared it to other video sharing site, and said that it was the equivalent of YouTube just for music lovers.

Now it’s safe to say the company (we presume it’s past the “startup” stage) is doing quite well for itself. It boasts a steady and sizable usership. It’s introduced quite a few compelling features over the last twelve months or so. And it’s still pushing pretty strong.

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Today saw a survey which produced the interesting yet thoroughly predictable result that there is now an overwhelming demand for fast and high-quality digital downloads of feature-length films.

The website Broadbandchoices.co.uk conducted the survey, and it was further reported by the BBC. 

So, why interesting? And why predictable?

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A ComScore report has further confirmed what we all suspected, that Google YouTube completely dominates the online video market.

The report covered September 2007, and looked at which sites people used to view videos on, as well as other ongoing trends in the Internet video market.

YouTube Completely Dominant

Google sites, which basically means YouTube, account for nearly 30% of videos viewed on the Internet. The next nearest competitors are Fox and Yahoo! with just over 4% each.

YouTube’s dominance can clearly be seen by looking at the statistics. Over 70 million people viewed more than 2.5 billion videos on the site, and that was just in September.

The full table can be viewed here.

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