In an effort to provide its partners with an alternative revenue stream, YouTube announced today that it is officially launching a pilot program that enables its video stars to charge subscription fees to access their channels. Subscriptions will begin at $0.99/month, and every channel will be able to offer a 14-day free trial and discounted yearly rates. YouTube gives the examples of Sesame… → Read More
Jack Conte is an Internet musician who became an Internet sensation and now, thanks to Patreon, he’s an Internet entrepreneur. → Read More
Google+ Hangouts allow for groups of friends or colleagues have an intimate face-to-face conversation, but the “On Air” feature of the service allows you to broadcast to the masses. The President Of The United States Of America has taken part in these conversations, but anyone can set up their own. Today, the Hangouts team has introduced some new functionality that make participating… → Read More
Major League Baseball has always been very strict about its content appearing on YouTube and other video streaming sites. Peruse YouTube for highlights from your favorite players and teams, and you’ll find it nearly impossible to find quality footage. As soon as a clip from a game goes up on YouTube, it’s taken down. Up until now, it’s just a collection of slideshows and footage uploaded from… → Read More
Amazon is pulling a Netflix today, in the sense that it’s now touting the release of its original programming as the “most watched” TV shows on the Amazon Video service since launch on Friday. Netflix previously issued the same statement about its original show, “House of Cards.” But it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, here. When Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said that… → Read More
Voddler, the Swedish film and TV streaming service that has been described as the “Spotify for video,” is going global to take on Netflix, Amazon, Vdio, BitTorrent, and the many others in this space. Live in Scandinavia since 2010, and Spain since 2012 (where all together it has picked up 1.2 million users), this week Voddler is extending its footprint to the rest of Europe and Russia; and it is… → Read More
Roku just announced via its blog that it has sold 5 million of its streaming Internet media players since its launch back in 2008. The devices have managed to stream a total of 8 billion pieces of content in that time, impressive for a device that started out as essentially a dedicated Netflix box. Roku recently introduced its third-generation hardware to market with the Roku 3, which went on sale… → Read More
Twitter acquired the mini-video-taking app Vine last October before it ever launched, sending everyone into a frenzy about the company getting into the video space. In late January, Twitter finally launched the app to much applause. Since then, it’s gone from being temporarily removed from the featured section due to an issue over adult content to being used in interesting ways by brands… → Read More
Well, that didn’t take long – Facebook Home is already being parodied on YouTube, in a video which actually ends up making a few biting comments about the potential problems the new application will face. For example, will the promised monthly updates to Facebook Home end up confusing users as to the basics of how their phone operates? Where will the ads (you know they’re coming) eventually… → Read More
Vdio, a video streaming service created to complement the Rdio music service, is today making its first public, live appearance. The site — offering not all-you-can consume subscriptions but pay-per-view films and TV shows, with an emphasis on new releases — is opening for previews in the U.S. and UK, with $25/£20 gift certificates going out to people who are already subscribers to Rdio’s… → Read More
Pro tip: You can now watch, listen, and subscribe to our TechCrunch TV videos on iTunes. In addition to the video versions, each segment has an audio-only podcast, perfect while driving or working out.
A few weeks ago, we quietly relaunched our redesigned iTunes site. After some tweaking, we’re now ready to get the word out. → Read More
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley used an April Fools’ joke to promote his upcoming new product, a video-focused site called MixBit that emphasizes collaborative video creation, rather than trying to compete with YouTube for a viewing audience. Very little has been revealed about MixBit as of yet, beyond the landing page which allows people to sign up for notifications about its upcoming launch, but… → Read More
Joining what is a newly-hot space within education — those offering massively open online courses (a.k.a. MOOCs), from Khan Academy to Coursera and Lynda.com — CreativeLIVE wants to bring quality online classes and lectures to the masses, live and at an affordable price point.
We sat down with CreativeLive co-founder Chase Jarvis to talk about the origins of CreativeLive, what differentiates… → Read More
Will Sasso, it is said, is an actor. If you were to, say, look for all of his Vines, you would also discover that this is the only man in the entire universe to use the medium correctly and, what’s more, you will laugh all day long at his tiny, tiny videos. → Read More
A note of consolidation in the world of digital music: Rumblefish, a company that works with the likes of YouTube, Amazon, Vimeo, Facebook and Slideshare to let users add licensed soundtracks to their digital creations, is today announcing the acquisition of Catalogik, a platform to help find and monitor the use of specific digital tracks. → Read More
Call it a fad, call it the Twitter effect, or call it another example of when it pays not to be the first mover, but it looks like two months out of the gate, Twitter’s short-form video-sharing app Vine is picking up users like they’re going out of style. → Read More
In today’s episode of my Foundation series, I talk with Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, and founder of AVOS. Chad talks about life after YouTube, hints at his latest ambition in the video collaboration space and recalls one very important breakfast meeting at Denny’s. → Read More
Vyclone, a service for creating collaborative videos of events and locations launched its iOS app for last summer. Just about a week ago, the company launched its Android app and today, it is also launching a web-based experience that focuses less on taking videos than on editing them in the browser. To do so, the service partnered with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, though the editor… → Read More
Electrostatic interfaces – systems that make your fingers “feel” textures on a smooth metal plate – have been around for a long time. They haven’t quite caught on because the sensation is a little creepy and it’s not quite foolproof. However, a researcher at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Olivier Bau, has created a unique system that creates these sensations on any surface using a… → Read More
Editor’s note: Robert J. Moore is the co-founder of RJMetrics, a company whose software helps online businesses make smarter decisions using their own data.
In January, Twitter released Vine, a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. We set out to learn how popular Vine has become in its first month and how it stacks up. Here’s what we found. → Read More
Vimeo, the IAC-owned user-generated video site with 15 million members that competes against YouTube and others like DailyMotion, is getting down to the business of making money, and to that end it today announced that it would be appointing Mark Pinney as its first CFO. → Read More
Canon today announced the successful creation of a new full-frame CMOS sensor, designed exclusively for shooting video. The new sensor can capture full-HD video with extremely low noise in settings where it has been hard for traditional cameras to even operate at all in the past. The sensor will have immediate benefits for astrophotography and for use in security systems, but the developments here… → Read More
While I’m sure there’s some scientific reason for demonstrating how the quadrupedal Big Dog can pick up and throw cinder blocks across a workshop (“Ahem, urm, we’re showing how the mass of the brick has little or no direct effect on the quadruped’s center of gravity, allowing it to carry large objects in the field, ahrm.”), I think what we’re seeing here is the first example of a nascent new… → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Chang is CEO of YesVideo, a video-transfer and sharing service.
There are three trends in the world of personal video, and they have one common theme: answering the call of the consumer. Here’s how personal video tech is being affected by consumer demand and what companies like Apple and Google are doing about it. → Read More
With tablets and smartphones consuming more and more video content, a new app for Android simply called “PAUL” aims to ease that ever-increasing network strain by using a predictive cache/download algorithm.
Similar to peak-shaving in electrical grids, PAUL begins to predict your video consumption habits and downloads videos that it thinks you’ll like, whenever you’re logged into a WiFi… → Read More
TenHands, a company that offers video collaboration as a service for web and mobile applications, just announced that it now supports WebRTC, the increasingly popular standard for making audio and video calls inside the browser without the need for a plugin. The TenHands API will now automatically use WebRTC when it detects that the user is running Chrome 24 and above. → Read More
If you watch one paranoid fever dream video of a missle-blown New York set to a Muzak version of “We Are The World,” make it this one. While the prospect of mass nuclear annihilation isn’t funny, what is funny is this video from the official North Korean propaganda corps that shows a sleeping NK citizen dreaming of Glorious Missiles Of The Fatherland winging their way to New York where they… → Read More
Tapping into the growth of online education, Skillshare launched in 2011 on a mission to build a digital marketplace for knowledge. Yet, instead of going in the direction of traditional online education or the new generation of MOOC platforms like Coursera and Udacity, Skillshare eschewed hosting classes in traditional education subjects to instead offer classes that teach people real-world skills… → Read More
Another move today from Amazon that speaks to its growing presence in content delivery and enterprise services, done at competition-beating prices: today the company launched Elastic Transcoder, a new service that lets people upload digital video and put it into formats — h264, AAC and mp4 for now — that are usable on devices like smartphones and tablets, as well as PCs. Amazon hopes to lure in… → Read More
DARPA has released more details on the ARGUS-IS, a 1.8-gigapixel camera that will be attached to unmanned drones to spot targets as small as six inches at an altitude of 20,000 feet. The camera – which is one of the highest resolution systems in the world – can view ten square miles of terrain at a time and zoom in on targets with surprising clarity. → Read More
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