online video

Baidu Inc made a forecast for its revenues for the third quarter, outpacing well ahead Wall Street's expectations as large advertisers increased spending.

A Chinese top search engine has seen a significant growth of its profits as it has focused on online video and e-commerce over the past time.

Seeing large flows of money from big advertising customers in the largest Internet market in the world Baidu posted $252.6 million net profit in the second quarter of 2011.

YouTube videos are now served in WebM format as reported by James Zern, Software Engineer, on the company blog. Now the vide site is transcoding all new videos into the WebM format, as well as other supported formats, which include MPEG4, 3GPP, MOV, AVI, MPEGPS, WMV, and FLV.

In the announcement, YouTube says they are working to transcode the rest of the YouTube catalog.

According to fresh forecasts made Monday US advertising spending is expected to increase by 3.1% this year supported by cable television, online video and mobile marketing.

Interpublic Group’s Magnaglobal said that now corporations are more confident about launching big branding and product campaigns.

Magnaglogal says that the forecasted 3.1% rise this year is nearly identical to the 2010 growth rate.

YouTube has launched a new feature to its video editing tool to improve movements on the users’ footages. The video streaming site has announced an image stabilizer and a 3D tool this week. Earlier last year YouTube introduced its cloud-based video editor with basic feature aimed satisfy “majority of people’s video editing needs”. Now users have extended features with a stabilizer. You Tube writes in its blog post: “Ever shoot a shaky video that’s so jittery, it’s actually hard to watch?

Google’s unit YouTube is launching a new educational initiative to help content creators improve their skills. Known as the YouTube Creator Institute the training center is created in association with the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and Columbia College Chicago’s Television Department.

A new Digital Year in Review report from comScore revealed that in the fourth quarter US users watched 19.4 billion minutes of video on Hulu, which was twice as much as the how much viewers watched on the websites of the five major TV networks combined. Viewers watched another 9.7 billion minutes of online video on the websites of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW.

According to the latest reports Amazon.com Inc is in talks with several media companies to launch a subscription service that gives users unlimited access to some television shows and movies over the Internet, a move that could rival Netflix Inc. The report came from the sources with the knowledge of the situation.

Amazon has approached media companies including Time Warner Inc, CBS Corp and Viacom Inc, these people say. It remains uncertain whether the media companies would agree to Amazon's proposals which are still at an early stage.

This week YouTube has unveiled a new version its YouTube Mobile website (m.youtube.com) specially meant for HTML5-capable browsers such as the iPhone's Safari and those on Android-based phones.

"[The update] incorporates the features and functionality you've come to expect from the .com site, like search query suggestions, the options to create playlists, the ability to designate 'favorite,' 'like' or 'unlike' videos directly from your device," YouTube product manager Andrey Doronichev writes in a introductory blog post.

Dyyno has launched a new application for Facebook which as claimed by the company is the first free app that businesses can use for making money. The application was designed for business customers to allow them to produce, distribute and monetize video for marketing and promotional efforts.

Users who post their video on YouTube will now be able to add music to their videos for a reasonable commission. YouTube now supports a site called FriendlyMusic from RumbleFish. The site lets YouTube users purchase a lifetime license to edit songs into their videos. Users can find the music composition they like, pay for mp3 and use it in their video clips. Once the user purchases the song from the site it remains licensed for unlimited views.

On its official blog YouTube says the following:

YouTube has introduced a vuvuzela trumpet sound to its website allowing thus its users to watch video clips with the vuvuzela playing alongside. Now visitors to the popular online vide site will be able to make their video viewing more cheerful and noisier.

As is known from reports the blasting of the plastic trumpet caused much controversy and debates at the World Cup. The organizers of the competitions said the will not ban the noisy trumpets -- which sound like millions of bees or a herd of charging elephants -- despite criticism from coaches and players.

A Manhattan federal judge brought an acquittal judgment this week in a Viacom case launched against Google and YouTube on allegations of copyright infringement marking a major victory for Mountain View.

In its lawsuit Viacom alleged "tens of thousands of videos on YouTube, resulting in hundreds of millions of views," had been posted based on its copyrighted works, and that the defendants knew about it but did nothing to stop illegal uploads.

A new research was recently released by Ipsos. The research studied how consumers engage with media brands, with a specific focus on popular online video and TV brands. The results show that YouTube is considered the most engaging online video brand.

Yet, YouTube achieved lower ratings when it comes to credibility as compared with its high ranks in entertainment.

HSBC has introduced a new consultation service that allows Premier customers in Hong Kong to hold virtual meetings with the company managers online. Customers are able to get access to the Live Connect service through the bank's Web site, clicking on a button to open a window containing a real-time view of their relationship manager.

Speaking to the managers via a webcam and computer speakers consumers can ask their questions and get instant financial advice on products.

During its web developer-focused conference Google announced the introduction of a new video format WebM. This new open-source, royalty-free video format is based on the VP8 codec intended for use with HTML5 video. According to the announcement the goal of the project is to develop "a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone." The initiative is supported by Google, Mozilla, Opera and many other companies.