Google is known for its quick reactions to copyright claims, taking down videos from YouTube and Google video at the request of original copyright holders -- especially big players like TV networks. Recently, Paulo Ordoveza found one of his videos was the victim of one of these claims, and it was taken down from Google Video. The strange thing is that he had recorded his piece -- a time-lapse of some clouds -- back in 2006, way before it was used by Arianna Huffington's 23/6 Media as part of the infamous "Anonymous Message to Scientology" video.
Paulo says the video is coming back up, but this incident still raises a bigger issue about the effectiveness of Google's automated copyright enforcement scheme, which uses "a program that analyzes similarities in audio or video between user videos and a library of reference content provided to us by copyright owners. When a video matches a reference file, that video is automatically disabled." Is a system like this adequate when it comes to independent authors who want to make a video freely available for use, avoiding any kind of aggressive copyright enforcement?
For the record, Paulo never had a problem with 23/6's use of the video, and he's a fan of Anonymous. 23/6 also never asked that the original video come down. You can compare the two videos for yourself: here's the original, and here's the Anonymous Message.
CORRECTION: Paulo writes in to correct a few things here. The original Anonymous Message was not done by 23/6, who actually made a later parody of that video. Also, the correct link for the clouds from 2006 is here. Thanks, Paulo!
Omnisio is a free web-based video editor that lets you snip and paste videos from YouTube, Google Video, and blip.tv, with support for more sites coming soon. The site is similar to online photo-editing sites like FotoFlexer, but applies the same idea to video. You don't need any desktop software other than a sturdy online browser with Flash support.
The three sites still provide for a very large library to choose from, and you could always add your own videos to a YouTube account should you need some extra content. We can see Omnisio being very useful for all types presentations -- professional or student related -- in which the subject is heavily documented on those video sites (what subject isn't heavily documented on YouTube?).
We can also see the online video-editing service spawning a whole new breed of online-content-remixers, which traditionally take funny and interesting videos, pictures, etc. to turn them into into (what's supposed to be) funnier but fairly stupid creations that usually make fun of the subject and gain mass notoriety. Thank you, Omnisio, for helping us clutter the Internet with even more Star Wars Kid edits.
If you want to get your video seen, really seen, then chances are you upload it to a couple of different video sharing sites. But who has the time to do that?
We wrote about TubeMogul in July, a site that allows you to upload your video to a bunch of sites at once, and now we've come across Hey!Spread another site that will do all your dirty work for you.
Hey!Spread is from the same company that created the Hey!Watch file converter. Hey!Spread can upload video to Sclipo, Sumo, Sevenload, YouTube, Google, Dailymotion, Blip, Metacafe, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace, Vimeno, Revver, Veoh, Vsocial, Photobucket, and Putfile. You give the site your log-in creds for the sites you're interesting in uploading your video to, upload a video file, press start and then Hey!Spread will convert your video appropriately for each site you specified and upload it, sending you an email when the job is done.
Besides being able to upload your video to tons of places at once Hey!Spread can also watermark your videos for you and can take a video you already have on YouTube and distribute it to other sites using the videos YouTube URL.
Hey!Spread was free until January of this year and is now charging users $.05 per video site it uploads your video to. Depending on your video needs, it's ability watermark, pull from YouTube, and upload to twenty sites instead of TubeMoguls 13 may make it worth the expense. TubeMogul is currently free.
Google recently caused something of a commotion with their announcement that Google Video would be shutting down, and that videos would no longer be playable. In return, Google was offering Google Checkout coupons, which many people were (quite understandably) displeased with.
Thankfully, Google appears to have listened to peoples concerns, and has had a change of heart with their policy. According to the Official Google Blog, Google Video customers will receive a full refund via their credit card (once you've confirmed or updated your credit card details), any existing Google Checkout coupons can be kept as a way of saying "sorry [Google] goofed", and Videos will remain playable for another six months.
Of course, this whole saga could have been avoided by not shutting down the service (and perhaps by not using DRM, depending on your point of view), but it's good to see Google owning up to its mistakes and trying to make right on them.
It looks like Google Video's transition from a video hosting service to a video search engine is pretty much complete. Yesterday Google sent out an e-mail to the two or three customers who had actually paid to download premium videos from Google Video.
In a nutshell, the messages said that Google would no longer be offering paid video downloads. Oh yeah, and if you've already bought movies from Google, they won't play anymore. Sorry, have a $2 Google Checkout coupon.
If you forgot that Google even offered paid videos, you're probably not alone. But back when Google Video launched, that was one of the things that set it apart from YouTube. You could get user generated videos or professionally produced content, much of which was from independent producers, for a fee. The only problem is there was hardly any content worth paying for, and Google stopped playing up that feature ages ago.
So what do you do if you're a giant search company that happens to own two separate and kind of competing video sharing services? If you guessed this isn't really a hypothetical question you're smarter than you look.
When you search for videos using Google now, you get results hosted by Google, but also videos on sites including Yahoo!, Metacafe, and of course YouTube. At the top of the page, you'll see a list of related videos and an option to see the next or previous video in your search results.
As for the result itself, you're taken to the site hosting the video -- except you still have the Google interface at the top of your screen. This is similar to the way Google handles image search. For the user, this is either a convenience (find more videos using your favorite search engine) or a huge problem (lose screen real estate while trying to watch videos). But at least Google finally found something to do with its video service.
Sure, there are plenty of ways to grab a video from YouTube, save it as an flv file, and convert it the file format of your choice. But Zunemytube's got to be the simplest method I've seen so far.
All you have to do is install the plugin for Internet Explorer and a little Zune icon will pop up in your toolbar. Then you surf YouTube, Google Video or MSN Soapbox and find videos you want to save. Once you've found a video, all you have to do is click the "Zune It" button in your toolbar and the program will automatically download and convert the video into a Zune-compatible windows media video file. The program creates individual folders for Google, YouTube, and Soapbox videos in your "My Videos" folder.
I have to say, the video quality leaves something to be desired when converting YouTube videos. This is probably because you're taking a highly compressed video and converting it to another compressed video format. I had a bit more luck with Google Videos.
The program only works with Internet Explorer, and I was only able to test it with IE7. Anyone try it with earlier versions?
YouTube is the de facto standard for video sharing on the web, but there are a lot of other options out there. But other features aside, which one offers the best video quality? While Life Goggles doesn't actually answer that question for you, it does gives you side-by-side comparisons of eight major video sharing sites' embedded players so you can judge for yourself. I've been squinting at them for five minutes and can't decide on a clear winner myself, but I will say that Vimeo's scrubber (i.e. seek bar) is by far the best. If you want to put your videos online and quality is an issue, you should definitely check it out. Life Goggles also has a couple handyguides on putting your videos online.
Are you interested in Google Video stats? Come on, they could be interesting sometimes right? Google Video now gives us a little more insight into videos. Next to the "All time views" text for a video, there is now an arrow that can be clicked on that will display:
The number of views
Its overall rank
The number of views from yesterday
Yesterday's rank
How many of yesterday's views were from emailed videos and embedded videos
Its rank in the top emailed and embedded videos
A chart showing the number of views from the last week
Have fun checking the stats out. They could be pretty interesting for the videophiles out there.
Videos are all the craze right now, there are many companies serving up crazy silly videos of everything from kittens climbing walls, to videos of Weird Al dancing. It's hard to keep up on the hottest of the hot videos out there. Now you can, with the Viral Video Chart. It tracks the most talked about videos on YouTube, MySpace, and Google Video, serving them up in one convenient location.
Google has not only beefed up their movie showtimes search feature, but they have also included the ability to view movie trailers directly from the search query.
When a search is performed for a movie and location in Google, we would usually only see a few listings for the theatres where it is playing, and the next available show times. Now when we search, we get a nice little piece of text that says "Trailer" beside the first movie time result above the previewed show times. The Trailer links to the actual studio trailer that is hosted in Google Video. It is an extremely useful new feature, I only wish that Google had decided to maybe put a little more emphasis on the link to the trailer. I would normally have just passed that link by and not noticed it!
Google is hiding a new secret look for the Google Video page layout. They are leaning towards a YouTube look for this special test. The smaller videos are the most notable change in this new design. The extra large full window Video's are what made Google Video special. I'm not a fan of the new layout, but it hasn't been launched yet, so Google could always switch things up.
You can check out the new layout by visiting a Google Video page, and pasting this text into your address bar:
Back in the day when a young Eric Schmidt (with rather large glasses) was a manager at Sun Microsystems, his employees thought it would be rather hilarious if they were to exchange a VW beetle with his office furnishings.
Giraffes showed up at his house, and gave him papers to a car. Thinking it was a weird joke, Schmidt left for work. Upon arriving at work, there was the car. It had been disassembled, and brought into his office. Check out the video after the flip.
Google is known for its quick reactions to copyright claims, taking down videos from YouTube and Google video at the request of original copyright holders -- especially big players like TV networks. Recently, Paulo Ordoveza found one of his videos was the victim of one of these claims, and it was taken down from Google Video. The strange thing is that he had recorded his piece -- a time-lapse of some clouds -- back in 2006, way before it was used by Arianna Huffington's 23/6 Media as part of the infamous "Anonymous Message to Scientology" video. 
Google
