Google News now features prominent news videos hosted at YouTube. Some news headlines now feature a small YouTube logo. Clicking on it triggers an embedded YouTube player with a news video.
Those videos are drawn from Google partners in the YouTube news channel.
The greater attention to YouTube move potentially increases the incentive for news organizations to work with YouTube. And, as CNET says, it makes Google News more of a hub for news consumption, rather than just a mechanism for referring readers and viewers to other sites.
Wildly Divergent Numbers On Hulu’s Audience
Nielsen reported 8.9 million visitors to Hulu in March, while another measurement firm, comScore, counted 42 million. “The wildly divergent numbers demonstrate the nascency of the market for online video measurement. It’s still the wild wild West,” said Rod David, a leader of the Interactive video practice at OgilvyInteractive.
So no one seems to know for sure how big the site’s audience is the Web’s most popular place for TV viewing. Nine million people a month or 42 million?
Obviously Hulu executives say Nielsen is undercounting the site’s visitors.
And given the growing importante of video advertising, the numbers are coming under more scrutiny. The research firm eMarketer projects that online video ads will account for more than a billion dollars of spending this year, up from $734 million last year.
Video Sites Dedicated To Categorize What is Worth Watching
On the Web there are video digital curators –either individuals, communities or Web services- that filter content and select what might be of interest to a larger audience.
For example, Nizmlab.com is a video sharing site managed by editors with good taste who categorize and ranks interesting and worth watching YouTube and Vimeo videos.
Chunnel.tv is another site. There’s also Videos Antville, a hub for music videos that has been around since 2002 and is powered by community submissions.
Other similar sites are TheDailyTube.com –whose 10 editors scour many sites to find the best new videos, AuditoriumA.com -a guided tour of the, WonderHowTo.com, and Todaysbigthing.com.
The iPhone 3.0 Will Include Sophisticated Streaming Video Technology
The 3.0 release of the iPhone operating system, due out June, will include much more sophisticated technology for streaming video. Right now, video on the iPhone uses progressive downloads (the phone starts downloading a file and starts playing it befote the transfer is complete). Streaming, which uses less bandwidth, can start faster and can be used for live events.
Right now there are 20 million users of iPhone. That is an attractive market for video. As expert say, “that’s more than Comcast”.
