The immediacy and level of access that YouTube offers people to videos is its greatest asset, but also its greatest problem, at least according to film studios and the music industry. Because YouTube offers users access to film trailers, snippets of TV shows, movies and music videos, the issue of artists being paid for their work was one that YouTube, even with Google’s powerful hand on the tiller, couldn’t resolve.

In March this year YouTube, after failing to reach any agreement over how music artists would be compensated for views of their music videos on YouTube, acted to block access to many music videos to UK audiences.

Now however Google and YouTube have reached an agreement with PRS (the songwriters’ group) to compensate artists for views of their videos. Details of exactly how much is to be paid by Google for each view have not been revealed, but the good news is that UK users of YouTube can now view videos of all music performers from Lady GaGa to the late Michael Jackson, to (more…)

The first answer that pops into most people’s minds when they’re asked how much money is YouTube costing Google is ‘loads’. With billions of videos streamed from the website each month, YouTube must be costing, the admittedly very rich, Google a pretty penny in bandwidth and resources.

However, it seems that we may be wrong with our first impressions for according to a new report YouTube isn’t costing Google quite as much as we might believe.

While a report released in April by Credit Suisse claimed that YouTube could be costing half a billion dollars per year due to the bandwidth used by the videos and the failure by Google to effectively monetise the website, another report contradicts the findings.

A second report by RampRate, from San Francisco, say that Google has managed to reduce overheads at Google with superior infrastructure, which has led to losses from the video sharing website to be (more…)

Video on the Internet is becoming more popular with websites. It is being used for adverts, for instructional videos, for presentations, brand awareness and just for entertainment. Video on the Internet is much easier than creating programmes for television because you don’t need the budget, you don’t need the production facilities and you don’t need the professional crew. Anyone can make their own Internet videos with a camcorder and some editing software, such as Adobe Premiere of Final Cut.

But what is the best way of hosting your videos online? Video files can be very large, so hosting them on your own website uses up your server space, uses up your bandwidth when people watch it, and that can slow your website down.

No, the best way to host your videos online is by using the Google owned YouTube, as everyone from home video fans to major Hollywood studios use YouTube to showcase their videos.

Some reasons YouTube is the best way to host videos are:

• The hosting is free, you don’t have to pay a penny for it
• The videos can be embedded directly onto your website
• The videos can be in high definition if you want them to be
• YouTube videos can have comments, meaning people can give you feedback

Of course none of these reasons really touch on the most important reason for using YouTube for your videos, and that’s (more…)