YouTube's most popular content has always been user-generated, with a lot of self-produced stars making a name for themselves on the site. People go there to watch the latest viral videos, and maybe TV shows that haven't yet been taken down due to copyright. That's why it might sound strange that YouTube is reportedly getting into the business of streaming Hollywood movies, a la Hulu or Netflix. According to the Wall Street Journal, heavy-hitting movie studios like Sony and Warner Brothers are already in talks with YouTube.

Streaming rentals would be available for a limited time, and would either cost a flat fee (like iTunes) or be ad-supported (like Hulu). The WSJ speculates that $4 would be the price to rent a new release. Although this squares with what iTunes charges, iTunes movies are downloadable, and don't necessarily need a speedy internet connection like streaming does. YouTube is no-commenting the story, except to say that they're developing their relationships with movie studios.

[via Wired]

My wife (and the rest of my family in fact) has never comprehended what I do as a software developer. Throughout all the years we have been together she has seen me sat in front of the computer and typed code into the screen for hours on end. But still she does not know how ideas in my head are transformed into a software application like one that she uses everyday. She thinks it is all voodoo magic, really she does. Last week, I explained to her that software development is kind of like cooking. Not the follow the recipes in the cookbook type, rather the Michelin Star chief type where the dish is created out of thin air.

The image of 'programmers' and 'hackers' portrait by Hollywood does not help either. When I tell people that I write computer software for a living, I am pretty sure in their mind they see binary code (probably green) flowing down the black screen continuously in multiple overlapping windows. Just like in 24 or The Matrix, in fact. And coding involves typing a few lines of indecipherable command in one of those black windows, more code flows down, and Boom! Global warming is solved!

While this image works really well in a TV series or movie, unfortunately software development is not that dramatic or glamorous. The idea of someone (be it a genius or a mad scientist) working alone deep in the basement and conjuring a software application out of nowhere and that every single line of code is memorised is so deeply ingrained in the general population psyche that I truly believe this is affecting software development as a whole.

Of course, it is partly our own fault. We, the software developers, have worked so hard to make complex and powerful software easy to use for the users. We have worked so hard to improve our development process to decrease the turnaround time for each development cycle so new features and bug fixes are delivered to the users with increasingly shorter time-scale. This has raised the expectation of the users on our ability to deliver feature that looks deceptively simple on the surface but probably hugely complex behind the scene.

Is there a light at the end of this tunnel for software developers? Perhaps, but only if we work very hard on at least the following two areas. First better design concepts (object-oriented design, design patterns, refactoring), processes (Agile, TDD), and development tools (C# 3.0's LINQ, Ruby On Rails, etc.) will continue to be improved to let us deliver more and faster. These are already in place and many clever people are working hard to take us there. More importantly, as well as building kick-ass software; we also need to begin an education initiative.

We need to change the perception of our work in the users' mind from part voodoo magic, part art, part skills, and full nerds to a disciplined profession. Some may even want to call it 'software engineering', do you believe that?! Until the general population considers software development on the same level as lawyers, doctors, or engineers, recognises the immense complexity of software applications and the skills requires to build them out of thin air, our job as software developers would only get harder and harder.

* Dev Chair: The place where I plant my butt after a hard day of code bashing and muse about meta-issue. [Alex Hung is a co-developer of desktop blogware ecto and will be penning a regular series for DLS about software development.]

Hollywood and the MPAA are pretty serious about stopping the spread of pirated movies via Bittorrent and other P2P clients. Unfortunately, it appears they're losing the battle through a hole their first line of defense: Public Perception. According to a new research study, most Americans see downloading movies rather than buying them as tantamount to a "minor parking violation."

Only 40 percent of Americans polled called downloading copyright protected movies without paying for them a "very serious offense," a condition which Kaan Yigit of Solutions Research Group attributes to the Robin Hood effect. Simply put, most people see Hollywood and its stars as being too wealthy already, thus viewing a little personal piracy as an easy way to take from the rich and give to the poor, a pseudo-altruistic view that tends to break down when exposed to the light of day.

It's obvious that a sue 'em all and let god sort 'em out approach like that employed by the RIAA only further solidifies internet users in their Robin Hood philosophy but, what's the answer? Cheaper DVDs? Inexpensive DRM-laden downloads? How would Download Squad's readership stop the bleeding and start the healing?

DivX, the little video compression software company that could, is aiming to go public this week, CNET is reporting. The company has almost matched last year's annual revenue of $29.3 million in the first 6 months of 2006, and after adding copy protection to its software which helped it land in over 50 million DivX-certified devices to date, the company is now shaking hands with its former enemy: Hollywood studios. DivX is hoping to strike it big with said studios in a lucrative web distribution deal for films, though as far as we can tell, no deals are itching to be signed just yet.