Webware

There's been a lot of progress in the world of high definition in the last few days. HD DVD has fallen, and just yesterday, video host Dailymotion rolled out its new HD player. While every visitor of the site with a fast broadband connection has access to the new HD player, only two types of content providers can actually upload HD content to it. The first are the official content providers like movie studios and TV networks. The second, are motionmakers--Dailymotion's equivalent of YouTube's director program. Anyone can become a motionmaker; they just need to state what type of content they're going to be producing, and as a reward get unlimited file size and length.

The HD video in question is 720p, which looks absolutely fantastic when watched in its native resolution. HD videos can be embedded on third-party sites and will play in HD as long as the viewer has a good connection. Otherwise they'll simply play at a dialed-down quality.

I've embedded one below. If it's in HD, the little HD logo in to bottom will be lit up yellow, otherwise you're watching the lower quality version. Be sure to view it in full screen to see the details.

Related: YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do it better and Vimeo's going hi-def next week

MTV Networks announced Tuesday that it will distribute its video content across the Web through deals with a number of social-media sites and video portals: GoFish, Veoh, MeeVee, and Imeem. Through this initiative, users of the video sites will be able to view both short- and long-form content provided by MTV Network as well as embed them on blogs and social-networking sites.

The partnerships will start to go live over the next few weeks; representatives from Imeem, for example, said that MTV Networks video content will appear on the social network, which focuses on ad-supported streaming media, in February.

Jon Stewart: He's back from the writers' strike and invading the series of tubes.

(Credit: MTV Networks)

MTV Networks, a division of Viacom, operates a total of 145 television channels and 300 Web sites across the world, but is best known for pop culture-oriented brands like MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and Spike TV.

Tuesday's partnership announcements add to existing Web syndication deals with AOL, Bebo, Fancast, Joost, and MSN. Additionally, some MTV Networks programs already have extensive content available on their own sites; last year, the Comedy Central programs The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and later South Park became fully available on the Web in a library of ad-supported clips.

The company's decision to syndicate its content to select partner sites across the Web comes at a time when many other big media players are choosing to do the same thing. NBC and News Corp. joined forces to create Hulu, which has both a central portal as well as syndication partners. Rival CBS, meanwhile, has amassed its own set of video syndication outlets.

For all these content creators, it's a way to make sure that their video can circulate online with advertising support. MTV Networks' parent company, Viacom, still has a $1 billion lawsuit standing against the Google-owned YouTube for allegedly facilitating the distribution of pirated video. And two of MTV Networks' new syndication outlets, Veoh and Dailymotion, are partners in the antipiracy coalition announced in October designed to combat infringing content--a coalition from which Google is notably absent.

Updated 12:30 p.m. PT

A coalition of major media and technology companies that notably does not include Google appears to be getting serious about copyright on the Internet.

A who's who of media companies--CBS, News Corp.'s Fox Entertainment Group, NBC Universal, Viacom, and Disney--as well as Microsoft and the News Corp.-owned MySpace, along with video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Veoh Networks released a set of guidelines Thursday designed to halt online piracy.

Notably absent from the list is Google, which unveiled filtering technology for its YouTube video-sharing site on Monday. Sources familiar with the coalition plan say Google was involved in the talks at one point, but backed out shortly before making its own announcement. Disney and Microsoft initiated the effort, multiple sources said.

"Initially Disney reached out directly to us," Veoh Networks CEO Steve Mitgang said in an interview with CNET News.com.

In response to questions, Google released a statement from YouTube Engineering Director Jeremy Doig: "We appreciate ideas from the various media companies on effective content identification technologies. We're glad that they recognize the need to cooperate on these issues, and we'll keep working with them to refine our industry-leading tools."

A YouTube spokesman who asked not to be named says Google had talked to Disney about the guidelines but Google and YouTube executives decided not to join the alliance because they were worried that creating "industry-wide mandates" would stifle innovation.

A source close to the deal hinted that the longstanding billion-dollar lawsuit between Viacom and Google over copyrighted content on YouTube may have played a role in Google's decision to back out, citing the possibility that it could have affected how the litigation would unfold. And another source familiar with the alliance finds fault with the fact that Google's new filtering system doesn't actually block infringing content from being posted, but supposedly removes it from the site within minutes. The media group's guidelines call for "blocking infringing uploads before they are made available to the public.

"It's unprecedented that these disparate companies have come together," the source says. "It's a real loss that Google isn't a part of this."

The companies expect to implement the guidelines before the end of the year, another source at one of the companies says. It hasn't been made clear whether this will mean we'll be seeing more announcements and partnerships--or more specifically, whether the two video-sharing platforms involved in the alliance, Veoh and DailyMotion, will become more attractive business partners for the major media and technology companies involved.

"Our goal is to be a vital partner for premium independent and individual producers. We're already a partner to CBS," Veoh's Mitgang said, referring to the company's new online video-sharing network. "We are actively working with everybody on the list regarding this."

Representatives from multiple companies involved in the initiative emphasized that it's not a closed partnership and that other corporations may be introduced into it as well--provided they are willing to adhere to and support the guidelines.

"The principles acknowledge a collective respect for protecting copyrights and recognize that filtering technologies must be effective and are only a part of what is necessary to achieve this goal," a joint news release said.

The guidelines also call for companies to: balance the legitimate "fair use" rights for using copyrighted material, promptly address claims that content was blocked in error, and upgrade technology "when commercially reasonable."

Protecting fair use--which allows people to post excerpts of copyright content and use content for educational purposes and for parody--is important, says Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, which monitors copyright issues online.

Boehm criticized Google for not joining the effort. "Google is continuing to play hard ball," he says. "They are going to use their market share and economic power to just hold off any kind of reform or compromise."

Several sources say plans have been made for representatives from some members of the new alliance--though it's not yet clear which companies--to head to Washington, D.C. soon to meet with members of Congress on the matter. Rather than move to encourage more legislation, it's to educate lawmakers on the issues and show them that occasionally-sparring media and technology companies can handle this on their own.

A full list of the principles involved in this new set of guidelines, which emphasize high-tech filtering, quick removal of pirated content, and promotion of infringement-free digital content, are publicly available at the new site UGCPrinciples.com.

The news was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier on Thursday.

With contributions from CNET News.com's Elinor Mills.

Pirates getting in the way of business? Let's form Voltron.

(Credit: TV Tokyo)

The announcement has been made--read CNET News.com's full coverage here.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that an impressive cast of major media and technology companies plans to announce a high-profile list of joint guidelines for preserving copyright and fighting piracy online. Sources told The Journal that the companies involved include media moguls CBS Corp., NBC Universal, News Corp.'s Fox (and its MySpace social network), Viacom, and Disney, as well as tech icon Microsoft and French video-sharing site DailyMotion.

It's unclear whether these are the only parties involved in the deal. Inquiries to several of the companies allegedly involved in the agreement went unanswered.

The most notable party absent from the group is Google, according to The Journal's Kevin Delaney. Apparently, the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech titan had been in talks about joining but did not go through with it. Google is the parent company of YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing site that had come under fire from media companies for making it easy to share copyrighted content.

Google recently announced an antipiracy technology initiative for YouTube.

Dailymotion, a European competitor to YouTube, has come up with an excellent app that finally brings video content to the iPhone all via the Safari browser (YouTube videos can only be accessed via the onboard YouTube application). The iPhone-friendly portal page looks a lot like the YouTube app, and when a video is selected, a small information page pops up with the video thumbnail on the upper-left corner. There's a tiny Play icon on the thumbnail, and when that's tapped, the video blows up to full size and looks almost exactly like a video from the iPod video player, complete with the same video controls. Why do the videos from this Dailymotion iPhone portal play, when videos from the YouTube Web site can't? Because the YouTube videos require a Flash player, and the Dailymotion iPhone videos are specially Quicktime-encoded to run on the iPhone. Brilliant.

iPhone link:
http://iphone.dailymotion.com/

Web site link:
http://dailymotion.com

HeySpread is a new service from the folks at Particles (creators of HeyWatch and HeyCast) that lets users upload a single video to multiple video-hosting providers. Just pick the video you want to upload from your hard drive, and HeySpread will pull up a listing of various video hosts. All you need is log-in information for each of them, and the file will automatically get sent out to each, assuming you've got the correct credentials.

HeySpread works with YouTube, Google, and MySpace Video, along with DailyMotion, Blip.TV, and four others. In my testing with five of the nine available video services, only one upload appeared to have failed (Yahoo Video), and the rest went up without a hitch.

This is a very helpful service for people who would like to upload things in one place, or those with slow Internet connections. Since you're basically just uploading it to HeySpread to take care of, you can avoid having to double, triple, or quadruple up on upload time to multiple services. The one missing piece is an editor for some of the more advanced options--like privacy settings, video descriptions, and additional links--on these video-hosting services. Of course, in most cases you can go in later on and add them by hand.

Just enter in your video hosting log-ins in nine of the supported sites, and your video will automatically be uploaded to each.

(Credit: CNET Networks)