YouTube, LG to develop mobile phone

South Korea's LG Electronics said it has signed an agreement with YouTube, the world's biggest video-sharing website, to develop a mobile phone which can operate the service.

LG Electronics said the proposed model will enable users to upload, view and share video clips or user-created content (UCC) online freely without using computers.

"LG Electronics will unveil the mobile handset that fully supports the YouTube service for the first time in Europe in the second half of this year,'' the South Korean firm said in a statement.

YouTube is the world's most popular online video-sharing website where computer users can upload, view and share video clips.

Industry data shows YouTube has some 70,000 UCCs posted and more than 100 million people logging on to its website every day.

LG Electronics, the world's fifth-largest mobile phone manufacturer, is also stepping up its partnership with Google, the world's largest internet search engine which owns YouTube.

It began selling third-generation (3G) handsets called "Google phones'' with software installed for directly using the Google service, in Europe last month.

The phone offers one-click access to Google's search engine as well as Google maps and Gmail.
Google acquired YouTube late last year for $US1.65 billion ($1.93 billion) to strengthen its video-linked online advertisement business.

YouTube still has more visitors than rival sites combined

YouTube, which has had to pull copyrighted videos off its site after legal attacks by some big media franchises, has enjoyed a surge in U.S. audience share that leaves it far larger than the next 64 video-sharing sites combined, a survey found.

The U.S. market share of visits to YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion last November, rose 70% from January through May, online audience measurement firm Hitwise Inc. said in the survey published Wednesday.

By contrast, visits to the next 64 largest sites tracked by Hitwise rose only 8% during 2007's first five months.

"As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50% greater than those 64 sites combined," Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott said in a summary of her firm's data.

YouTube's share of the U.S. online video market was 60.2% in May, according to Hitwise. Its closest rival, News Corp.'s MySpace Videos site, had 16.08% of market share, the survey of Web surfing habits showed.

YouTube's sister site, Google Video, held 7.81%, while Yahoo had 2.77% and Microsoft's MSN, 2.09%, according to the study.

Start-up Metacafe ranked No. 8 in U.S. visitors to video sites with 1.07%, Time Warner's AOL Media had 0.94% and Veoh was No. 10 at 0.86%, Hitwise said.

Viacom filed a copyright infringement suit against YouTube in March seeking more than $1 billion in damages and demanded that YouTube take down thousands of segments from its popular programs, including The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park.

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Apple's iPhone to access YouTube content

Apple Inc.'s widely anticipated music and video playing iPhone will allow subscribers to wirelessly stream material from Google Inc.'s popular video sharing site YouTube, Apple said on Wednesday.

YouTube has begun encoding its videos in a new format to improve quality and save battery life when viewed over wireless devices.

The iPhone will be the first mobile device to use the new format, Apple said. More than 10,000 videos will be available on the iPhone when it hit stores on June 29, with more material added each week.

Google Video Now Turning Into Video Search Engine

When Google spent $1.6 billion to acquire YouTube, it was left with the inevitable question: "What do we do with Google Video?" Google Video had lagged in popularity behind sites like YouTube and Revver, but the community uploading videos to Google Video staunchly opposed any notion of simply shutting the service down. They complained that Google Video's uploading and video-editing tools were much better than those of any other video-hosting service, and that embedding and streaming video from Google Video wasn't as buggy and problematic as it was on YouTube. Still, it didn't make sense for Google to operate two different video-hosting services, especially when it now owned the market leader. So last Thursday Google announced that it had finally decided on what it would do with Google Video: Turn it into part video-hosting and part video-search.


You can still upload videos to Google Video, and you can still edit and tag them, so the service is pulling double duty for the time being. It's clear, however, that Google will eventually make Google Video a video search service. Whether that means that all of the videos wind up making their way to YouTube or they'll vanish entirely remains to be seen.

YouTube adds a new feature for their embedded videos

I read that YouTube recently updated the interface for their embedded videos. Though lately most of my videos were uploaded at Dailymotion, some of my early video ads can still be found at YouTube. So just for curiousity I tried to put 1 real estate video w/c i uploaded to YouTube, and pasted it to a sample page. (see image below)


What happens is when you click the "menu" button on the bottom right corner of the screen, the current video shrinks and an array of related videos will pop up below the screen. Hovering and clicking on any video will open it on the same player. A very cool feature indeed, because if like me, you have a set of videos for say, different condominiums, all my other videos will most likely appear below so viewers and readers don't have to go to the next web page just to see the other movies. But the problem is not only my videos will appear, but most likely videos by other real estate brokers/agents (competitors) which in fact happened in the sample above. So though it is a neat feature by YouTube, there's also a risk that I might lose some prospective clients if videos by other property agents will suddenly appear. And with that i'm still sticking to my embedded Dailymotion vids :)

Since Google acquired YouTube, others say it's an attempt of monetizing with YouTube... For the next several months, people will get very used to using the related video tool that was just introduced. As soon as it becomes second nature for viewers to use it, we should start to see sponsored results mixed with these related videos. Pretty clever, don't you think?