video-sharing

Short clips have always been YouTube's bread and butter, but with the company struggling to generate revenue, the Web's No. 1 video-sharing site is experimenting with long-form videos.

YouTube has for a long time allowed several videographers with a YouTube director's account to post videos longer than the standard 10-minute maximum allowed on the site.

But the company now seems more serious about offering long-form videos more widely. During the Los Angeles Film Festival this week, YouTube began pitching independent directors about showcasing their work on the site, according to a story published Wednesday at the Web … Read more

Flickr announced today that they now support video sharing to go along with their popular photo sharing services. The option is only available to "Pro" accounts, however, so those using the service on the free level will not have the option. Adding video support not only encourages the upgrade to the pro account, but it also takes an obvious swipe at YouTube.

Says the announcement on the Flickr Blog, "If you're a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream...90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary … Read more

Higher resolutions or not, YouTube still tweaks the quality of its videos for users depending on what kind of connection they've got. So how about a workaround to make sure you're getting the best of the best? Bayme of the VideoHelp.com forums seems to have found a way to tweak the URL of some videos to force YouTube to serve you the version with the highest resolution. The good news? It's easy as pie. The bad news? It's not going to work on all your videos, and it's not noticeably better

To give it … Read more

Video-sharing site Veoh, which is backed by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, is rumored to be looking for $40 million in new investments, according to Silicon Alley Insider. The company has hired Bear Stearns to raise the funds, which would give Veoh a valuation of $150 million, according to the report.

If it raises the cash, Veoh would have a war chest of more than $80 million to compete with video rivals YouTube and Joost, among others. Its investors include Goldman Sachs, Spark Capital, and Shelter Capital Partners. Other backers include Tom Freston and Jonathan Dolgen, former executives at Viacom, … Read more

Divx's pet video hosting project Stage6 will be discontinuing operations Thursday, Feburary 28. The service let users put up their Divx-encoded videos and make them available in high quality for other users to watch and comment on. Already uploads have been discontinued, and the site will simply cease to exist on Thursday--taking all the user videos with it.

Tom Huntington, the Divx employee who posted the closure announcement on the company blog, wrote the service was simply costing the company too much money:

As Stage6 grew quickly and dramatically (accompanied by an explosion of other sites delivering high quality … Read more

If you've ever wanted to run a bunch of video widgets on your desktop, there's a new service for you called uvLayer. It's a tiny Adobe AIR application that lets you search, view, and organize Web video clips on your desktop and share them with others. The videos come courtesy of YouTube and Truveo--the AOL-owned video search tool.

What sets uvLayer appart from basic Web video browsing are its sharing features which are robust. The application lets you cobble together a instant-messanger-like friends list and drag and drop any video you think they would enjoy. If they're using the application, your shared video will simply show up on their desktop like a new e-mail would in your in-box. Likewise, you can simply hop over to see what they're watching if they're online.

For bookmarking addicts, uvLayer also lets you share entire sets full of Web videos via URL. If your recipient has the application installed, their screen will simply fill up with your video picks, complete with your original groupings. You can then syndicate these Webtops to both your uvLayer buddies, and your Facebook friends who will be able to view it right in the Facebook application.

The entire uvLayer experience is very reminiscent of OS X's Dashboard for widgets, as you can flip each item around and get access to some of the metadata like the rating and any user comments. It's very flashy. In fact, if you're running the latest version of OS X, then uvLayer might not be that interesting considering you can rip out nearly any Web video and put it on your Dashboard using Safari's Web clips feature.

I'm not sold on the value of watching videos in a virtual desktop environment. While convenient, I think there's a ton of added value to the community of users where the video's hosted. Admittedly when a video hits the front page of Digg or Fark, the user comments from those sites are usually much more entertaining, but the same can't be said when you're passing it along to a just handful of people.

I've embedded a live version of uvLayer after the break (taken from Ryan Stewart's first look over at his blog on ZDNet). Be sure to check out its stacking feature, which lets you group together several videos at once by drawing a box around them with your mouse.… Read more

YouTube may be the best-known mainstream video-hosting site on the Web, but it's certainly not winning any awards for the visual quality of its content. YouTube's creators have said higher-resolution videos are on the way, but until then, there are a handful of other services that do a much better job at making your uploaded video look a little less Webby.

There's another problem at hand: size. Video files are big, and a lot of the most popular services place tedious size restrictions. Those restrictions mean that you are either going to have to compress your video through third-party software before uploading or make smaller, lower-quality source recordings to begin with.

We've handpicked four services that have pretty lenient size limits and that don't force you to download software clients just to graduate up to the higher caps. To be fair, we're also comparing all four to the YouTube status quo.

So here's the deal. We took a source video of just less than 2 minutes at full VGA quality at 30 frames per second. It came off a recent-model Canon digital camera that saved it as an approximately 200MB AVI file. Your results for source material may vary, but based on the popularity charts on Flickr, Canons rule the roost both overall and in the point-and-shoot camera category, so we felt that it was a good control.

It's worth noting that Casio has several models of digital cameras with "YouTube capture" modes, though these are simply recording video in MPEG-4 H.264 at smaller resolutions, which takes up less space. You can accomplish a similar feat, albeit using a different video codec, if your camera has a "compact" or "e-mail ready" video-capturing mode.… Read more

Internet-based copyright infringement is pretty much the only way people can keep track of TV and movies from abroad in Beijing. It's hard to even find legal DVDs, and if there aren't even illegal DVDs to buy, it's often trivially easy to find entire movies on Youku or Tudou.

Yesterday, a Chinese public-security ministry official asked for international help in copyright enforcement, noting that many infringers use Web sites hosted outside Chinese jurisdiction.

"Copyright infringements, by their very nature, are international crimes. To effectively curb such activities, (we) need enhanced international cooperation on law enforcement," … Read more

I've been playing around with a pretty cool service this afternoon called SeeToo. It's targeted toward people who want to share a private video with someone else but don't want the rest of the world to see it or for it to sit on some server farm out of their control. Unlike other services that have played around with the idea of multiple users watching the same video at the same time (see Lycos Mix, YouTube Streams, and Meebo's rooms) SeeToo handles video links like one-time conference sessions. You can only get in if the video … Read more