Last month, Google began showing the new versions of Google TV at CES, giving the press a taste of what was in store. One particular panel discussing Google TV’s new capabilities led Rupert Murdoch to take to Twitter, bemoaning the pirating ways of the search behemoth. Forbes has the backstory here. Google TV posted on its Facebook page yesterday, saying that it has some big announcements in store for Monday.

Today, it announced that it is upgrading the YouTube experience on Google TV with a new, revamped app. The YouTube app for Google TV is available for download on the Android Marketplace. The initial drive behind Google TV was to create a user experience that seamlessly blends web video with the boob tube, to change the way consumers interact with TV, but the first Google TV fell flat. Matt Burns reviewed the version, saying that, while it’s getting closer, it still has a long, long way to go.

In its announcement today, Google is promising some “big improvements” to its new YouTube app, among them that navigation is smoother and faster, along with some much-needed additions to its UX, like the new “Discover” feature, which basically just brings YouTube channel categories to Google TV, enhancing their browse-ability within the app. They’ve also brought its new channel pages, enabling users to navigate playlists and videos and subscribe to favorites.

Google says that users can also now view related videos from the same user by pressing the up and down arrows on their remote controls, or to find the “Info screen” to leave a thumbs up, add to your playlists, or to leave a comment.

The new app looks good, and this certainly stands to improve the YouTube experience on Google TV, though it’s certainly not the “big announcement” that many were hoping for. We’ll be keeping our ears out in the event that there’s more Google TV news in store for Monday.

Google’s video-sharing property YouTube now sees 4 billion video views per day. That’s a 25% increase over the past eight months, the company told Reuters in a report released this morning. There’s now approximately 60 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, compared with roughly 48 hours uploaded in May.

The last time YouTube released this data was in May 2011, when the company was celebrating its sixth birthday. At the time, YouTube was seeing 3 billion views per day, an increase of 50% over the past 12 months. That’s the equivalent of every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos per day, the company explained at the time to give the figure some impact.

Previously, YouTube hit the 2 billion views per day mark in May 2010, which the company noted was “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.” And the site had passed 1 billion views a day in October 2009. However, as Jason Kincaid noted then, that number was likely a bit lower than the actual figure. It had previously been reported that the site had reached 1.2 billion views a day the previous June.

So it could be that YouTube reached this latest milestone of 4 billion views per day several weeks (or even months) earlier, but has just now chosen to share the information publicly.

Reuters notes that most of the 4 billion videos viewed on YouTube today don’t make money. Only 3 billion YouTube videos a week are being monetized, the company says. YouTube is also now focusing on content deals with media partners as of late. It just added Reuters TV (which is likely how they got to this data first) as one of what’s now 100 original programming deals.

Update: Google confirmed the statistics which it gave to (new media partner) Reuters this morning, via a company blog post. As always, YouTube is having fun with the numbers, noting “you’re uploading one hour of video every second!” (Whoa).

YouTube also launched a fun site called onehourpersecond.com, which shows an interactive collection of what happens in a YouTube second. A sample is below:

YouTube may be best known for its viral sensations, lawn gnomes, and feline shenanigans, but the site’s massive collection of content has given rise to plenty of more benevolent — and, some might say important — trends.

Like helping non-profits including charity:water harness the power of video to connect to millions of viewers. And serving up lectures from major universities, opening the doors of learning to remote villages hundreds of miles away from the nearest school. In short, YouTube has done a lot of good so far. And it’s hoping to do a lot more.

Hunter Walk, a long-time Director of Product Management at Google who has steered YouTube’s product side for years, recently decided that he wanted to spearhead YouTube’s social good efforts. Granted, the role he wanted didn’t exactly exist yet, but he managed to convince YouTube chief Salar Kamangar to let him create it.

Walks’s new, self-appointed mission: Bake ‘good’ into any part of YouTube he can.

He explains that plenty of YouTubers have worked on projects to support social good efforts in the past, but there’s never been any consolidated effort to do so. So these days he wanders the company’s halls, asking people if they’d be interested in launching an expedited support queue for non-profits, or a new white-list feature for schools. He says he rarely gets turned down — adding that YouTubers tend to view it as pro bono work, and they’re generally happy to help.

Walk says that he views YouTube’s relationship with ‘good’ as supported by three main pillars: Causes & Non Profits; Education; and, finally, Activisim and Free Expression.

YouTube’s special relationship with non-profits goes back to 2007, when the site began giving them free access to features typically reserved for premium content partners. These include videos that are longer than fifteen minutes in length and the ability to include a special Donate button that lets users contribute money. Non-profits also have the unique ability to include links to external sites using YouTube’s annotations feature (which they can use to drive people to a petition or ‘further information’ page, for example) — no other partners are allowed to use annotations to link off-site.

And today, as one of the first fruits since Walk took on his new role, YouTube is launching a ‘Playbook’ of best practices that non-profits can use to effectively produce and distribute their YouTube videos (YouTube first launched a broader-ranging Playbook last July, and it plans to launch more vertical-specific guides in the future). Walk says that non-profits have more features coming soon as well, including the ability to live-stream video, which is currently in testing with a handful of partners.

Walk’s second pillar — Education — is also fairly well established on the site. YouTube’s Edu Portal features thousands of videos from the likes of Harvard, Yale, and online schools like the incredible Khan Academy. This educational content has been watched a whopping 22 billion times on the site already.

Walk says that up until now YouTube has been primarily focused on acquiring all of this content to build up its library. Now, it’s beginning to focus on the second, and equally-important step: curation. Teachers and scholarly institutions will increasingly be able to build out and share lists of their favorite videos, drawn from any of the site’s EDU channels.

And YouTube is also focusing on making the site more school-friendly. Historically some students have had issues watching YouTube because their school’s firewall blocks the site (apparently it’s easy to waste time on YouTube). To help remedy this, YouTube is testing a ‘YouTube for Schools’ domain that will schools will be able to whitelist. This would enable students to watch videos as they please, but only content that appears as part of the Edu part of the site.

With these additions and others, Walk says he’s hoping to make teachers’ livers easier, and to give people who don’t have classrooms the power to listen and learn about anything.

Which brings us to Walk’s third pillar, which he dubs Activism and Free Expression. This pillar has more to do with how people are using YouTube, than it does with any particular improvement the site can make.

Walk recalls an experience he had during a trip to Baghdad two years ago, when he asked a 17 year-old girl what she used YouTube for. “It allows me to understand what the world cares about”, she said. And the ability to watch a variety of camera-phone footage and news reports from various media outlets helped her arrive at her “version of the truth”.

Walk also points to 2011′s Arab Spring, when social media services helped Egyptians spread news with each other — and around the world. Despite the fact that Egypt blocked the Internet for 5 days during a two-week period, Walk says that the number of video uploads in that region actually shot up 72 percent to 100,000 videos.

Another interesting stat: the highest usage of YouTube per capita/Internet user is in Saudi Arabia. The reason? Walk says the less diverse the media sources available to a user through traditional routes like television and print, the more important it becomes to them to find other content. Which is why Walk says YouTube is committed to providing its entire corpus of content to all of its users.

Walk didn’t have any upcoming features to discuss around this third pillar, but based on my conversation with him, it’s the one he’s most passionate about.

He made it clear that, despite plenty of forthcoming hurdles around government censorship, YouTube is committed to hosting and freely distributing footage of the demonstrations, the speeches, the atrocities, and the joyous celebrations that will shape the world in the years ahead.

The move to bring original programming to the web continues to heat up this week, with today’s announcement of Reuters TV, a new YouTube channel featuring ten new commentary and analysis shows from the news and media division of Thomson Reuters.

The new channel joins nearly 100 other media partners on YouTube who are delivering original content, including a few big names like eHow, Motor Trend, Pitchfork TV, TED, The Onion, WSJ, WWE and more.

Reuters, however, is arguably the biggest news provider among the 100 being featured on YouTube’s partner page. And plans for its newly arrived TV news channel are no small effort.

According to the company’s announcement, the YouTube channel won’t mimic traditional TV, but will use an editing style that’s “suited for Internet programming.” Reuters global exec producer Barclay Palmer developed the shows, which will be “high energy” (oh, so that’s what they mean by “Internet programming,” hmm?) and will include reports and commentary from the outlet’s nearly 3,000 journalists worldwide.

The 10 new shows include the following:

• Reuters Investigates, featuring investigative journalism and special reports from around the world, in coordination with Reuters award-winning Enterprise unit;
• The Trail, with Reuters political reporters covering the presidential candidates on the campaign trail;
• Felix TV, with Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon, named by Time magazine one of the Top 25 financial bloggers;
• Media Bite, featuring Peter Lauria, editor of technology, media & telecommunications, and his team of reporters covering a media world experiencing massive change;
• Tech Tonic, with Anthony De Rosa, Reuters Digital’s social media editor, dubbed by The New York Times “the undisputed king of Tumblr”;
• Freeland File, with Reuters Digital editor Chrystia Freeland interviewing top newsmakers;
• Fast Forward, hosted by Chrystia Freeland and featuring Reuters’ top commentators and journalists, including David Rohde, Reuters columnist, author and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Rob Cox, US editor of Breakingviews; Bethany McLean, Reuters columnist, Vanity Fair contributor and author; David Cay Johnston, tax expert, author and Pulitzer Prize winner; Geraldine Fabrikant, Reuters columnist, senior writer for The New York Times and winner of the Loeb Award; Steven Brill, Reuters columnist, author and founder of the Yale Journalism Initiative; Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group; James Ledbetter, Reuters Op-ed editor and author;
• Money Clip, with Lauren Young, personal finance editor and former editor at BusinessWeek and SmartMoney;
• Rough Cuts, with Jen Rogers, showcasing the remarkable news video that Reuters video journalists shoot around the world, allowing viewers to see and hear that video in greater depth than most television networks can offer;
• Decoder, explaining in succinct and surprising ways the key topics in the news, ranging from the debt ceiling to the Strait of Hormuz.

Reuters is kicking off the launch with an exclusive interview from Chrystia Freeland with Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire and sportsman who has made the controversial announcement that he is running for president in Russia, challenging Vladimir Putin.

YouTube is spending $100 million on original programming, and is attempting to line up big media partners, including distributors, studios and other content producers.

It’s only one of many companies competing in the newly hot Internet TV space in recent months. Just yesterday, for example, we covered Hulu’s move into original programming with its plans to launch Battleground, a new scripted show. Netflix also has plans for original shows including Lilyhammer, House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, and it’s resurrecting Arrested Development. Tom Hanks is making a cartoon TV series for Yahoo. MTV Networks’ NextMovie site just snagged vlogger Sarah Austin today for scripted content. MTVN’s Comedy Central property also moved to bulk up web show production this past spring.

Looks like Pseduo’s dream is now, in 2012, finally coming true.

Say what you will about YouTube’s affinity for cats or their audience’s collective inability to write insightful comments, but there’s one thing that YouTube really just doesn’t get enough credit for: saving the music video. As MTV losts its original love in favor of Nick Cannon Presents: Whacky Garbage Nonsense and re-runs of America’s Next Quickly Forgotten Reality Show Person, music videos went without a proper home for nearly a decade. Then came YouTube.

The only bad part about watching music videos on YouTube? Everything else on YouTube. The soul-crushing comments; the gawdy artist backgrounds; the endless recommendations. That’s where Tubalr comes in. It’s YouTube’s glorious music video collection, minus all of that darn YouTube.

Looking past the fact that Tubalr has a downright ridiculous name (is that supposed to be tubular? Tuba Lore? Two-baller? No idea), it’s quite great. You punch in an artist name, then pick either “only” (to play only that artist’s videos) or “similar” (to play videos from similar artists.) It queues up a big playlist, and you can go about your business as the tunes play on. Think Pandora’s concept, mashed up with Youtube’s music video archive.

The search algorithm still needs a bit of tuning (a search for “Reel Big Fish” built a playlist of nineteen music videos… and one clip called “Jessica the Hippo”, which was three minutes of an older gentleman talking to a hippo at a zoo.) but this is definitely something I expect to have running on one of my monitors throughout the day. Check it out here.

Bored? Yeah, me too. Which is why I just killed nearly 30 minutes doing mindless web surfing on Facebook, Reddit and Amazon. But it looks like YouTube would like a little of my holiday downtime clicks – and yours, too. The company just blogged about YouTube Slam, a game that involves pairing up two videos and voting for your favorites.

I guess you could call YouTube Slam a “Hot or Not” for videos. Except in this case, you’re not picking the hottest/sexiest face, you’re picking the funniest clip (Comedy Slam), the best dancer (Dance Slam), the cutest kitten (Cute Slam), best music (Music Slam) or weirdest video (Bizarre Slam).

Here’s how it works:

Click on the category of videos you want to watch. View them both and vote for your favorites.

Wow, that was hard.

The top-rated videos are then featured on the “slam leaderboard,” which is great, but nothing like getting onto the YouTube homepage, of course.

The site was cooked up by YouTube with folks from Google Research, and has actually been around since this fall, when Google Research used it as the output destination of a machine ranking project. The project analyzed “singing at home” videos and attempted to surface those that belonged to truly talented musicians. The results were then spit out to YouTube Slam to help crowdsource the discovery of the “hidden gems.”

So there you go: mindless web surfing. For science! Slam away.

This winter is looking to be a mild one (it’s something like 60 degrees here in New Jersey), but no worries: YouTube is bringing the snow to you, even if Mother Nature won’t.

It looks like most of YouTube’s videos are now outfitted with a special snow button, which as you may expect, turns the video into a winter wonderland.

Alright, so maybe that’s a stretch. It’s not so much a blizzard as it is a handful of snowflakes that trickle down from the top of the video and pile up at the bottom. There’s no word yet on how long the snow effect will stay live, but here’s hoping it sticks around for a while — it’s bound to be the only snow I get to see all winter.

I’m already looking forward to playing with the snow button on some really inappropriate videos — how about making Tatooine look more like Hoth? Or how about this CrunchGear classic, which thanks to YouTube’s new flair, combines some hot pancakes with some cold weather?

YouTube is launching what the company calls the biggest redesign in its history today, including sweeping changes to its homepage and channel pages. The goal is better personalized video discovery and viewing, with a notable emphasis on social features. Think of the changes as the latest example of Google’s campaign to create a unified social layer for all of its products.

The new homepage looks a lot like Facebook, or Google+ for that matter. An activity feed view dominates the middle of the page, while a left-hand navigation bar provides a set of filters for what you see in the feed.

The default Subscriptions feed appears to include algorithmically determined video uploads and activities determined by information like what videos you’ve watched and which channels you’ve subscribed to, although YouTube group product manager Noam Lovinsky wouldn’t tell me exactly how it worked. The previous version of the homepage feed, which launched early this year, doesn’t appear to be algorithmically tuned to the same degree.

G+ and Facebook also get prime-time spots in the navigation bar, listed right beneath the first feed. Click on either and you’ll be able to view videos shared by friends on those networks. G+ videos are automatically in there since YouTube accounts are linked to users Google identities. Facebook requires an opt-in login.

Google is playing up the already social aspects of YouTube to help it bolster Google’s cross-product G+ push. The Facebook integration is a bit more surprising considering that it’s the main social competitor out there. But Lovinksy downplayed that point when I brought it up, noting that only around 10% of YouTube’s views are from embeds, meaning that Facebook is just a part of that percentage.

He went on to explain that the prominent locations for G+ and Facebook are to help with onboarding for newer users. Instead of looking through the entire site for interesting channels, or trying to see what YouTube’s general recommendations tell them, they can get started by seeing what their current friends are already sharing.

The rest of the left-hand bar includes other options for filtering the feed. You can pin any subscribed channel to the top section as well. Click on any of those subscriptions and you’ll see a reverse-chronological feed of all the activity in that channel.

Further down, the bar includes a YouTube-curated section showing Trending, Popular and Music channels, and another section showing recommended channels.

The new homepage has a lot in common with Facebook’s left-hand navigation lists, its algorithmic feed, and its right-hand side recommendations and ads. But that’s a reflection of the design paradigm for all social products, as Lovinksy tells me. Users need a homepage that can help them consume new and interesting content as easily as possible, paired with landing pages that let you add subscriptions. In YouTube’s case, the homepage emphasis on filtering channels is based on users’ desires to watch sets of videos in a single sitting. Like, you know, television, channels.

To that end, YouTube is also adding some new templates for channel pages. Here’s what they include, according to the company:

• The Blogger template: A featured video, a reverse chronological list of videos from 1 playlist of your choosing, playlists, and other Channels.
• The Creator template: A featured video, featured playlists, and other Channels.
• The Network template: A featured video and featured Channels
• The Everything template: A featured video, featured playlists, and featured Channels

These additions, which are more analogous to template options in Tumblr or MySpace rather than Facebook’s one-size-fits-all style, let producers promote their works in the most natural style for what they offer. These templates come with a Feed tab showing any of the following actions from the channel owner:

• Liking a video
• Commenting on a video
• Subscribing to a Channel
• Favoriting a video
• Uploading a video, and
• Adding a video to a playlist

Importantly, any of these social actions can also potentially appear in users homepages, similar to how activity on a Facebook page appears in users news feeds. The Feed tab includes a section for users to post their comments, another section for the owner to feature other channels, and an About form.

The homepage and channel changes are the two biggest updates today, but the company is also introducing a site-wide design upgrade to all the elements — typography, iconography, etc (like the new logo at the top of this article). It’s separately adding new versions of its Xbox and Google TV applications, that feature magazine-style tile interfaces showing various channels. Finally, the company is touting the success of its advertising platform, saying that it’s seeing strong demand for its new cost-per-click style of video ads.

Going forward, look for YouTube to introduce more social features, Lovinsky said. While he didn’t get into specifics, my impression was there’s going to more fine-tuned discovery options coming, like channels on the homepage that show you content on topics related to videos you like. A “hip hop” video channel for instance. And, of course, look for YouTube to add tighter G+ integrations across the site.

YouTube has upgraded its viewer demographics and video tracking tools and changed the name from Insight to Analytics. The changes should be rolling out to “everyone with a modern browser” today, though you can still access Insight if you want to do a little comparison of capabilities.

The changes are non-destructive; some existing features have been tweaked and expanded, and there are a few new tools that could help the struggling YouTube-jockey pull in more views and better understand their viewers.

The look has been overhauled to give the stats a little more space around them, and the amount of simple clickable text is removed. The layout has been mixed up somewhat and some crucial social stats (likes, comments, net subscriber change) are front and center. Search has also been made more obvious and some drilldown controls are placed prominently.

All the usual reports supposedly now have more detailed information, perhaps only of interest to stat hounds, but appreciated nonetheless. The audience retention measure looks like a handy tool:

Comparing to other videos of the same length seems ridiculous (this was the retention tool from Insight), but seeing the points of the video at which people stopped watching, or had their attention grabbed, is certainly handy. Is the intro sequence too long? Did that lull in the conversation kill viewship? Good info here for people looking to tweak their content.

A few more details and links are available at the YouTube blog, and if you’re logged in this link should take you to the new stats page.

The U.S. comScore Video Metrix stats are out now for October, revealing that 184 million U.S. Internet users watched online videos last month, with an average of 21.1 hours per viewers. The total U.S. audience viewed 42.6 billion videos, an all-time high, says the measurement firm. Meanwhile, “Google sites,” led by YouTube, retained its number one ranking. However, in October, Facebook staged a comeback by moving up into the number two slot from its previous position of fifth place.

Facebook had been the number three property in August, but dropped down to the fifth slot in September, losing out to VEVO, Microsoft Sites and Viacom Digital. This month, Facebook saw 59.8 million viewers, second only to the ever-dominant “Google Sites” (mainly YouTube) and its record-high of 161 million views and 20.9 billion videos viewed.

VEVO is still going strong, with 57 million viewers, followed by Microsoft Sites with 49.1 million and Viacom Digital with 48.2 million. As noted above, there were more than 42 billion videos viewed this past month, which meant a lot of ads were viewed too. 7.5 billion video ads were shown in October, the most of which were on Hulu where over 1.3 billion impressions were served. Hulu also had the high frequency of ads, with an average of 46.5 ads per viewer.

Time spent viewing ads totaled over 3.2 billion minutes during the month, with Tremor Video delivering the highest duration of ads at 614 million minutes. Tremor Video ranked second overall in ad impressions, too, and highest among video ad exchanges/networks, as it crossed the 1 billion mark for the first time. BrightRoll Video Network ranked third with 756 million, followed by Specific Media with 512 million and CBS Interactive with 415 million.

53% of the U.S. population watched video ads in October, at an average of 47 times per month. (Makes you want that part of your life back, doesn’t it?)

ComScore also ranked the top YouTube partner channels this month, with the top being VEVO (54.2 million viewers), Warner Music (30.4 million viewers), gaming channel Machinima, Schmooru, Maker Studios, Demand Media, FullScreen, Warner Bros, IGN and Big Frame.

Pro Tip: If your new business plan entails buying a bunch of domains that are clearly just one letter off from that of a major brand, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Such is the case for one gent from Illinois, who snatched up not one, not two, but six domains meant to look nearly identical to YouTube.com, filling them dubious surveys. As you’d expect, Google has now moved to seize the domains.

First noted by the super domain-sleuths at Fusible, Google has officially filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum (you can find it with case number 1416796). If successful (and it almost certainly will be), Google will be given full control of the domains.

The list of domains:

• Youtbe.com
• Youtub.com
• Youtue.com
• Youube.com
• Yutube.com

Given that the three primary criterion are “identical or confusingly similar to a trademark” (check), “owner has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name” (check), and “domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith” (check! I mean, just look at that screenshot below), this one probably won’t take too long to clear up.

Walt Disney Studios and YouTube have struck deal which will bring hundreds of Disney movies to YouTube, starting today. The new partnership between the two companies includes movies from Disney, Disney-Pixar and DreamWorks Studios. The films, some of which have already arrived on YouTube, are available to rent starting at $1.99.

Some of today’s new releases include Alice in Wonderland, the new Winnie the Pooh, Cars,  Cars 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The older titles are less expensive, it seems. For example, Alice in Wonderland is $1.99 while Pirates is $4.99. The rental allows users up to 30 days to begin watching, but after the video starts, you only have 48 hours of viewing time.

Rentals can be watched online, via your Android phone or tablet, or on Google TV.(U.S. and Canada only).

Disney is the fourth major studio to partner with YouTube, following Sony, Universal and Warner Brothers. The deal is also the first significant partnership since the rental store’s relaunch in May of this year.

Disney and YouTube also announced another partnership earlier this month which aims to bring “family-friendly” original series to a co-branded YouTube channel. The content, according to reports, will include “video drawn from relevant family-friendly content currently available across YouTube, original video produced by Disney, as well as a blend of current Disney Interactive original series, select Disney Channel programming and Disney user created content.”

The first series, which launches in February, will be based on a Disney mobile game (“Where’s My Water”) and its main character Swampy.

YouTube has become the go-to source for video distribution and hosting, and, to date, the video giant has seen tens of millions of channels created, where users are uploading their video content in droves — by the second. Professional videographers, amateur smartphone camera operators, and everyone in between is taking advantage of the YouTube limelight, many of them through their channels. Of course, while these channels are a great place to store one’s cache of video, maybe you want to create your own independent video site to host your own videos — to take advantage of all those video optimization assets you can’t get from YouTube.

A startup called VidCaster, which aims to make online video publishing painless and profitable for individual users, small businesses and enterprise clients alike, recently launched a new feature that allows YouTubers to do just that — for free. The online video platform has released a free plan that brings its site-making and video SEO tools to the YouTube ecosystem to let users quickly create their own branded destination sites.

And the best part? VidCaster’s free plan automatically syncs with your YouTube channel, so beyond the initial setup, no maintenance is required. Videos automatically pop up on your YouTube channel once you’ve uploaded them there, and vice versa.

The startup’s first incarnation was a custom content workflow solution that was built for a local San Francisco video media property. VidCaster Co-founder and CEO Kieran Farr said that, after some time, it realized that the video workflow management tool they had created could be turned into a sort of white label service that could be used by all video producers.

Farr said that by providing SMBs and small video producers with the technology to manage their video work flow, hosting, and SEO, they want to let video producers get back to focusing on their content and the creative aspects rather than dealing with technical and workflow logistics.

VidCaster joined 500 Startups’ summer batch, where the CEO said that Dave McClure and company encouraged them to focus on their metrics and to consider launching a freemium model to monetize the business.

VidCaster had initially launched with paid plans, like VidCaster Silver (at $39 a month) and Gold (at $99 a month), which offer elevated levels of storage, bandwidth, and number of users. After building out their suite of features, the startup has now elected to go freemium with its YouTube plan — in what is seemingly a reverse trajectory for most startups, which tend to start with freemium business models.

Farr said that he thinks that Heroku’s approach to monetization, making the platform open and accessible with most features available for free, is the way to go. Then, if users want deeper functionality or customization, only then does it make sense for them to pay. And so far, it’s been working for clients like Zendesk, Twilio, and Airbnb.

Today, VidCaster’s free plan allows users to choose a professionally-designed site theme, upload their logo, and select custom backgrounds and colors to create a tailored look for their videos. And like their paid plans, the new free plan includes automatic video SEO to direct search results on Google and other search engines back to a user’s domain.

Users of the startup’s free plan can set up their site on their own domain name for $20 a year, though for those users that want to put their logo in their player, run their own advertisements, customize CSS and HTML, etc., VidCaster is pushing those users to sign up for their paid plans.

VidCaster’s one-click video site maker and hosting and management platform has also found appeal among investors, as the startup is announcing today that it has raised $350,000 in seed funding led by Quest Venture Partners.

The funding is part of a larger round that the company is currently raising, which looks to include contributions from several other angel and venture investors. Farr said that the company will use the new capital to hire additional developers and push forward to the point where they can release a full-fledged API so that third-parties can start hacking.

For SMBs, corporate marketers and content producers, VidCaster is a cool alternative to the hassle of having to combine separate content management services, like YouTube and WordPress or Brightcove and Custom CMS, for example. With automatic video SEO optimization, YouTube syncing, one-click distribution to a host of video sites, and analytics, VidCaster could be a great resource for SMBs looking for a quick way to host their videos in a way that’s consistent with their brand.

For more on VidCaster, check ‘em out at home here.

Google is shipping more Google+ features today designed to increase user engagement and sharing. These include a YouTube slider that lets you watch and share YouTube videos with your Google+ friends and two new Google Chrome extensions for sharing webpages and tracking your Google+ notifications.

The YouTube slider is a button that appears on the right-side of the Google+ homepage, that, when clicked, slides out to reveal a YouTube search box asking you “What do you want to play?”

When you type in a search and hit enter, a pop-up window appears which is somewhat like a scaled-down version of the YouTube website featuring the video and a playlist of videos matching your search term. As you watch the videos, a “+1 button” at the top of the video lets you perform the Google equivalent of the Facebook “like,” while a prominent green “Share” button lets you post the video to your Google+ profile.

Pop-up windows aren’t the most elegant integration for this new functionality, but it gets the job done.

The new YouTube feature also lets your Google+ friends open a related playlist directly from the video post you shared on the network (via a blue button beneath the update). This is actually kind of great for things like music videos, as indicated by the example below.

YouTube is now being indexed in Google+ search results, too.

The other new additions today are two Google Chrome extensions, whose functionality has been provided by third-parties for some time. The “+1″ extension lets you click a browser toolbar button to like page and share it on Google+. Meanwhile, the Notifications extension displays the Google+ red notifications box indicating new activity (new followers, pluses and comments) on the social network.

Heavy Google+ users probably already had something similar installed, but now there are official versions.

Given Google’s overwhelming obsession with getting into social this year, it’s sort of surprising that it didn’t just bundle these extensions with an update to the Google Chrome browser in order to force Google+ down Google users’ throats the way it did with Google Reader’s latest update (yes, I’m still bitter about that). Maybe that integration is still to come.

In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing today, YouTube co-founder Steven Chen reminisced about selling his company to Google. “Was there any way you could not have sold?” Sarah Lacy asked? Hindsight is 20/20 Chen replied.

Chen revealed that the entire $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition was completed in one week’s time. Chen met with executives from both Google and Yahoo, including Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, at a Denny’s in Palo Alto, “We didn’t want to meet at offices, so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’”

Chen said he ordered the Mozzarella sticks.

The deal was set to be announced at the closing of markets on Monday, so Chen and company were up until the last-minute completing paperwork at Wilson Sosini’s offices. In a historic moment for TechCrunch, our own Mike Arrington ended up breaking that news.

Chen said that his meeting with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt was instrumental in the decision to go with Google. Schmidt basically promised the founders unlimited resources in return for an “infinite amount of happy users” and an “infinite amount” of good content; “Here are all the resources that Google has around the world, and you can pick and choose”

“For twelve months, whatever we wanted to do, we were allowed to do,” Chen said “It was tremendous courage from Eric, allowing this group of 20 year-olds to run the company.”

I love finding services that bring value to small businesses. Viewbix falls squarely into that category.

ViewBix comes from the founders of Qoof, who gave agencies and advertisers a way to easily create interactive videos. The need for customization, however, tended to bring a lot of friction to the selling process.

For SMBs, it was pretty much completely out of scope. This was frustrating for Qoof’s founders, who were noticing growing demand in that vertical.

Viewbix was created to dramatically reduce the aforementiond friction that came with customization, allowing videos to be wrapped-up in a variety of features quite effortlessly. Here’s how it works:

Step one is to select an existing video. ViewBix currently supports YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook video. Step two is to customize the player in terms of colors, size, call to action, etc.

Step three is really where the promise of ViewBix resides: interactive features that can be easily added to videos, including music, additional videos, photos from services such as Facebook, Flickr & Picasa, and more. The ones I found most compelling for a small businesses are the ability to include a Twitter feed, eBay auctions, coupons, and Skype integration.

Once the player is created, it can be embedded and shared anywhere, including inline on Facebook. It will even display in HTML5 on mobile devices (iOS and Android).

You can check out ViewBix in action, here and here.

Viewbix tracks every action that occurs in the player, so more savvy users can dig into the data and optimize their players with the best performing apps.

The service is based on a freemium model with a base product that is currently free. In the near future, Viewbix plans to charge a monthly fee, starting at $14.95/mo, for branded players, premium apps and detailed analytics.

We already know that YouTube is seeing 3 billion videos viewed per day day, but now the online video giant is now seeing a whopping 800 million people per month visiting the site, Google revealed in its third-quarter earnings report last week. And today, YouTube is also announcing the ability to sell merchandise, tickets and more via the site.

Through a feature called the Merch Store, YouTube partners will be able to sell artist merchandise, digital downloads, concert tickets and other experiences to fans and visitors. YouTube has partnered with a number of companies to launch these stores. Topspin is helping power merchandise sales, concert tickets and experiences; SongKick will help sell tickets for concerts; and iTunes and Amazon will power transactions for music downloads.

YouTube says be rolling out the Merch Store to music partners globally over the coming weeks. YouTube declined to reveal the specific nature of the financial split for these sales, but did say that the site takes a small percentage of sales just to cover costs. However, the artist gets the same revenue no matter if they go through the Merch Store or through the affiliate on other channels.

The ability to add merchandise sales, ticket sales, digital downloads and more to an artists YouTube site definitely gives these sites more of an engaging presence for artists with their fans. These destinations will now become more than just a way to discover music videos, but also a way to transact business and actually see the artist and buy their works.

Google’s YouTube debuted an experimental music discovery project dubbed YouTube Disco last year in January, enabling users to create quick-and-dirty playlists and discover new artists and music videos on the fly.

Not that this is a really big deal or anything, but a reader informs us that the feature, which was launched rather quietly via YouTube test lab TestTube, recently stopped returning results even for queries like ‘Lady Gaga’, ‘Justin Bieber’ and ‘Madonna’. No more Finding, Mixing or Watching, folks.

Update: it”s back!

Perhaps the team felt the need to shut it down now that Google axed the Disco app.

Fortunately for YouTube – or not – nobody seems to have noticed so far. Which is probably because no one was using it, save for our eagle-eyed reader of course.

(Picture above via Flickr user mikemccaffrey)

When I was just a wee pupil, an excellent science fair project didn’t get you much. At best, you walked away with a blue ribbon and the satisfaction of knowing your paper mache volcano was better than your friends’. These days, a great science project can win you much more, like the opportunity to attend a rocket launch in Japan. Way cooler, yes?

Thanks to a partnership between Lenovo and YouTube, students from all over the globe will be able to submit an explanation of their experiments through YouTube for a chance to have those experiments conducted in space. The project is called Space Lab and it officially kicks off today.

Here’s how this is going to work:

Students between the ages of 14 and 18 from anywhere in the world can submit projects from now until December 7. During the first week in January, world-renowned judges including Professor Stephen Hawking and JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide of Japan will get together and decide who came up with the best ideas.

Then in March of 2012, both the regional and global winners will be announced. Regional winners will include six contestants from each region from both the 14-16 age bracket and the 17-18 age bracket. That’s 36 regional winners, if my math’s up to snuff. Prizes for regional winners will include a special trip to Washington D.C., the opportunity to experience true weightlessness on a ZERO-G flight, or a Lenovo IdeaPad U300s Ultrabook.

There will only be two global winners selected — one from the 14-16 bracket and another from the 17-18 bracket. The main prize will obviously be the chance to watch a live stream of your very own experiment being conducted on the International Space Station in space. The other facet of the prize package includes either the opportunity to train in Star City, Russia (home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center), or get a front row seat to watch your experiment blast off in Japan.

The live stream will happen sometime during the summer in 2012. Even though that’s a ways off, you really only have about three months to think up your experiment and submit it into Space Lab. In other words, get to work future space geeks.

YouTube today delivered its movie rental service to UK customers, making it the third country to gain access to the service. Both Canada and the U.S. have enjoyed YouTube movie rentals for a while now. At this point there’s plenty to choose from, with over 1,000 different titles ranging from blockbusters to indie films.

Each rental will last 48 hours, and cost between £2.49 (USD $3.87) to £3.49 (USD $5.42). Users can access their rented videos from any computer as long as they’re signed in to their YouTube account, along with Google TV, any Honeycomb-powered Android tablet and select Android smartphones.

Here’s what YouTube had to say about it in a blog post:

We’ve got some cracking films to keep everyone entertained through the upcoming winter months and beyond. From blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Reservoir Dogs, to new releases such as Hanna, Fast Five, and Red Riding Hood, and even British classics like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Sounds like a nice rounded-out collection to choose from, and it doesn’t stop there. The service has partnered with studios such as Universal, Lionsgate, Entertainment One along with independent British film makers such as Metrodome and Revolver Entertainment.