Three people in Canada were charged for firing at ducklings on a pond from a vehicle. They uploaded the incident taking place itself on YouTube. The three individuals were immediately charged 16,000 Canadian dollars ($14,500). The police were notified about the video by a bunch of tippers calling the anti-poaching hotline. The three hunters are from Cudworth, Saskatchewan.
The three were charged with careless firearm usage, allowing game meat to spoilt, and hunting waterfowl even though it was not in season. The three were also charged for illegally hunting migratory birds with a rifle. One of the individuals was charged with firing a gun from a vehicle.
The three were identified as David Fraser (30), his brother James Fraser (23), and their brother-in-law Jeremy Rowlands. The three plead guilty earlier this week to 15 counts of violating wildlife protection laws.
David said that at the time they did not know it was a crime. They also did not know that bullets ricocheted off the water. They posted the video online because they thought it was funny. In one scene, one of the shooters fired numerous shots at a duck causing it to become severely dismembered.
A video has been captured and uploaded on YouTube of Dalia Dippolito. The police told Dippolito that her husband had just been killed by a hitman. But here’s the twist: her husband was never actually killed and it was Dippolito herself that called the hitman. Unfortunately for her the hitman was actually an undercover police officer in Boyton Beach, Florida.
The video above shows Dippolito acting that she is sad to hear the news. The police had even set up a fake crime scene around her house. The video that was uploaded on YouTube and will be used against her as evidence when she stands for trial to commit first degree murder.
Before the police taped up her townhome, Dippolito met with the supposed hitman and gave a down payment of $1,200. That would cover the cost of a handgun. Her alibi was that she was going to get her hair done in Boca Raton as an alibi for being away from the house when it all goes down. Dippolito said she would pay $3,000 to follow through with the murder.
When the police officer (hitman) asked her if she was sure, she said “I’m not going to change my mind. I am 5,000% sure I want it done. When I set my mind to something, I get it done.”
Dippolito was brought in to the police station after hearing the news from the police officers that her husband was dead, but to her surprise she found out that her husband Michael was alive in the room next door.
This whole situation reminded me of the movie The Whole Nine Yards. In that movie, Bruce Willis played an experienced hitman and Matthew Perry played a dentist. Matthew Perry’s wife in the movie hired Willis to do a hit on Perry, but (spoiler alert), they became friends instead. In this case, the hitman probably won’t become Dippolito’s friend.
As many of you know by now, our friendly rivals at TechCrunch are building a new electronic tablet called the Crunchpad, slated to be released by this November. Apparently Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge got a chance to play around with the prototype.
Judge tweeted “Just met chief blogger at Tech Crunch. Talked about the Crunchpad and saw a prototype. Great looking device, think it will be a real hit.” This just tells me a couple of things. The Crunchpad may actually have a chance against a rumored upcoming Apple tablet computer. And this also tells me that Best Buy seems to be a bigger fan of TechCrunch than he is with Gizmodo.
An hour before Judge tweeted meeting Arrington, he tweeted that he met YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley to discuss ways to better leverage the video website. He also asked his followers for ideas on what other retailers do to use YouTube well. Here’s my two word answer for Judge: viral videos. The Improv Everywhere group hit over one million views in their viral video of sending a bunch of blue shirt, khaki wearing agents into a Best Buy store.
Amit Chowdhry | August 3, 2009 | 234 views | Comments Categorized under Google, YouTube
YouTube has launched a new service that focuses on local news. At the URL YouTube.com/news, YouTube has a service called News Near You that pulls video clips that are within a 100 mile radius from your IP address location. YouTube insists that this new service will be a boon for local news companies because they plan to share ad revenue with them.
However news companies may be skeptical because this same service could inevitably take people away from the TV. News agencies make a substantial amount of their revenues from money earned from advertising on TV.
There are about 200 news outlet companies that currently are posting news packages on the website and are splitting the revenue with Google.
Amit Chowdhry | July 30, 2009 | 436 views | Comments Categorized under YouTube
A couple of days ago I wrote about how Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz had a wedding video on YouTube that virally accumulated over 12 million views in less than a week. The video features the bridesmaids, groomsmen, bridge, and groom dancing to Chris Brown’s Forever down the aisle.
Given the number of views that took place in a short span of time, the rights holders of the song benefitted from the tools available for having a viral hit on their hands. The rights holders had Click-To-Buy links over the YouTube video which gave users the chance to buy the song through Amazon.com or Apple iTunes.
The click-through rate of the advertisement on the JK Wedding Entrace video was two times the average of other Click-to-Buy ads on other videos. Even one year after the song was released, the Chris Brown song reached as high as the #4 most purchased song on iTunes and #3 on Amazon.com’s best selling MP3s again.
Since YouTube shares the revenue on advertising with the right owners, they made a good chunk of change too.
The Kodak Zi8 will be arriving on the shelves just in time for back-to-school. The Zi8 has 1080p recording, face tracking, image stabilization, 2.5″ LCD display, SD card slot, YouTube uploading, and Facebook support. The Zi8 will be available in colors such as blue, red, and black. The price tag is roughly $180. This would be a great way for your kids to begin their hobby as an amateur videographer.
I believe that choreographed dance moves have a special place in YouTube’s heart when it comes to becoming viral. One of the latest viral hits is “JK Wedding Entrance Dance.” The video has hit over 12 million views from about 100 different clips since arriving on the web on July 19th.
The video features a dance that took place while walking down the aisle at the wedding of Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz. The couple was later interviewed on The Today Show. The song that the wedding dancers decided to perform was Forever by Chris Brown. Brown’s song hit the top 10 charts on iTunes shortly after the wedding video became popular on the Net. The wedding took place at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Another viral video featuring a couple’s first dance on YouTube is when the bride and groom were seen dancing to a slow song, but quickly changed into a choreographed dance to Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-A-Lot. These videos are exactly the reason why YouTube got bought out for a good amount of money.
Amit Chowdhry | July 13, 2009 | 900 views | Comments Categorized under Evian, YouTube
There is something viral about using babies in an advertisement performing adult-like tasks. E*TRADE used babies trading stocks as a viral advertisement. The babies trading stock have millions of views on YouTube. Now Evian has created a hit viral video in the with dancing babies on roller skates.
In about one week the video received about 5 million views and Ad Age reported the video as 2nd place on the viral views chart for the week of June 29. The first place video was given to Air New Zealand for a video in which the airplane staff had uniforms painted on their bodies.
By embedding a link to Evian’s website on the YouTube videos, this may have given the company a major traffic boost over the last week.
Pruane2Forever is one of the most subscribed channels on YouTube. Pruane2Forever is best known as the Canadian kid with braces that vents about movies, rap music, Bill O’Reilly, and life in general.
The kid also refers to himself as “Sexman.” The reviews seem serious, but actually come off as pretty entertaining. As a matter of fact, I find Pruane2Forever more entertaining to watch than LonelyGirl15. I think this kid should get some sort of book and movie deal. In one video, Pruane2Forever vents about rapper 50 Cent for endorsing Vitamin Water, make-up, and sex toys.
In response, 50 Cent decided to befriend Pruane2Forever. Below is the video. Pruane2Forever’s thoughts on 50 Cent has forever been changed. In the video, Pruane2Forever even uses 50 Cent’s typical catchphrase when referring to his rap group “G-G-G-G-Unit!”
In the last 5 days a YouTube video received about 5.5 million views. The video features a bunch of worms that formed into a disgusting cluster in a North Carolina sewer. The cluster looked so abnormal that at first people believed the worm cluster to be an unknown life form. The life form even reacts to light.
Raleigh environmental coordinator Ed Buchan confirmed that the creature is a tubifex worm colony that attach themselves to roots. The worms then work themselves into weak points in pipes.
“The worms naturally occur in sewage and pond sediment and are actually sold both live and dried as fish food in pet stores. He said other staff members in the department have seen it before, although sightings aren’t particularly common. ‘I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them,’ he said. ‘We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.’”
How this video was able to get millions of views is even more of a mystery than the worms themselves.
The problem with services that report the analytics and visits for many websites is that they don’t have direct access to server logs. Whenever Comscore or Nielsen reports the numbers for a website, it is usually an underestimated number. Earlier this month, it was reported that YouTube streamed about 6.5 billion video views. Based on this number, it comes out to be about 200-225 million video views per day.
However a source at Google reported to TechCrunch that the actual figure is about 1.2 billion views per day across the world. Unlike many other video content websites, Google has not really reported the numbers before. In the past Comscore has admitted that they can only estimate based on available data.
Given the bandwidth and storage that is required to run YouTube, the cost of keeping the site online is pegged to be around $2 million per day. If there are really 1.2 billion video views and about 30,000 hours of footage being uploaded per day, I wouldn’t be surprised if it costs more than that.
Amit Chowdhry | June 5, 2009 | 549 views | Comments Categorized under Google, YouTube
Every day there is about 30,000 hours of video footage uploaded to YouTube. The amount of bandwidth and storage space needed for this upload rate, YouTube is costing Google about $2 million per day to keep running. That is about $730 million per year. YouTube currently isn’t making as much as it costs, but it is getting there.
In April, about 16.8 billions were viewed on the Internet in the United States. This is a 16% increase over the month before. The reason for the surge from March was primarily due to YouTube’s growth. Google accounts for about 41% of the online video market. In April, there were about 513 million MySpace Video views and 397 million video views on Hulu. Yahoo! Video has about 355 million video views.
According to Alexa, YouTube is the #3 most visited website in the world following Google and Yahoo!, respectively. The websites behind YouTube are Facebook, Windows Live, MSN.com, Wikipedia, Blogger, Baidu, and Yahoo! Japan, MySpace, and Google India.
In April Universal and YouTube announced that they are teaming up on a music video website project coined Vevo. Today Sony Music Entertainment joined the Vevo venture. Vevo will be launching later this year.
Between Universal and Sony, they represent artists such as Alicia Keys, Eminem, AC/DC, Lady Gaga, Akon, The Killers, The Black Eyed Peas, etc. Warner Music and EMI have not yet planned on signing to Vevo yet. Vevo will have music videos and possibly reality shows.
YouTube will handle the back-end of Vevo and the music labels will provide the music videos. The President of Vevo will most likely be Universal Music executive Rio Caraeffas.
As the cost of buying larger screen TVs are lowering in cost, the need for consumer-friendly Internet video interfaces are becoming more in demand. Watching music videos on YouTube and network shows on Hulu from a laptop connected to a large screen TV is becoming very customary.
This past January YouTube introduced a way to watch YouTube videos on a Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3. Now the company has created a new interface of their service for large screen TVs, YouTube XL. The quality of the videos isn’t any different, but the YouTube XL interface allows you to navigate around the website much easier.
Some of the features of YouTube XL include a large menu on the left hand side. After clicking on a video, there is continuous play of the related videos. The video control buttons has a much larger size too.
The only thing I don’t like about the new service is that the quality of the video is not much different. I tried watching a few videos on a 27″ TV, but it did not look that great. Perhaps YouTube will start adding more HD videos in the various categories.
4chan is a forum where hackers make designated online attacks on celebrities and popular services. Recently 4chan users were notified about Salma Hayek’s MobileMe Account login information. 4chan users also built a Twitter bot that gathered thousands of followers in an attempt to beat Ashton Kutcher and CNN to the first million followers. This time 4chan users decided to attack YouTube.
Anyone that searched for Hannah Montana or Jonas Brothers may have noticed some inappropriate content show up. 4chan planned this attack on YouTube as a protest against the removal of audio from copyrighted music videos. Some of the links connected to those videos were linked to websites that asked visitors to download malware too.
Google responded quickly in removing the offensive videos but warned that there could be a few videos left. About 20 hours of video are added to YouTube per minute so it is difficult to keep tabs on every single video being uploaded.
