seeking fresh content for your video-enabled iPod? look no further! iTube (Windows only) is a dead simple tool allowing to download any clip from YouTube straight to your player. just enter the URL of the chosen video, and iTube will download the movie, convert it to mp4 (or mpeg, for other players) and update your iTunes library. it won’t get any simpler. Mac-users may try out PodTube instead…
earlier today, Google’s press-center confirmed what probably will be this years hottest and most controversial aquistion in IT-land: YouTube, 65 employees strong and searching for a business-model in business for less than 2 years, was sold to Google in an $1.65 billion all stock transaction (TechCruch has more details). besides the self-evident decision to continue the YouTube-brand (raising the question about the future of Google’s very own Video-service), details on the deal haven’t been disclosed. however, Google not only bought the worlds fastest growing website, but a plethora of possible IP-lawsuits against YouTube (read Mark Cuban’s post) as well. now that YouTube is owned by someone actually worth suing, it’s probably only a matter of time until the media-companies go to court. anyway, congratulations to Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, founders of YouTube!
now that’s what I’ld call ‘news’ - of course if it turns out to be true… Michael Arrington reports on rumors whispering that Google might be about to close aquisition of YouTube for $1.6 billion. Arrington ponders that these rumours are “40% likely to be at least partially true”…;)
update: the rumor is still around, backed by articles in the NY Times and the Wallstreet Journal.
rev2.org - a site dedicated to web2.0-news - didn’t come to my attention until their recent - very extensive - company-profile of YouTube. covering the company’s history, lack-of-a business-model, legal threats and technological background (don’t get me wrong, this is really an interesting read!), the article makes me crave for more in-depth profiles on other companies (compare this MySpace-roundup, published on Valleywag)!
until recently, integrating video into Wordpress was quite messy. Viper’s Video Quicktags is a neat Wordpress-plugin embedding video-content into the richtext-editor by a single click. Video Quicktags syndicates streaming video from YouTube, Google Video and iFilm as well as static quicktime-,avi-, mpeg-, wmv- and flv-files.
in this weeks The Clicker, Stephen Speicher suggests newcomer youtube.com stops growing and starts making some money. while luring more and more users every day - resulting in increasing bandwidth-costs - the social video-phenomenon has yet to find a valid business-model. Speicher’s interesting proposal recommends youtube to back the costs with inserted advertisments, splitting the revenue between youtube, the producer of the footage and moreover the site-owner who syndicates the content. this, according to Speicher, creates a win-win-win situatin for everyone. For everyone but the audience, at least as long as the ad’s aren’t targeted very specificall…
