Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

YouTube has nearly mastered the whole concept of video sharing in its current form, so the next step is to improve what they have to offer something even better. There’s always room for improvement no matter what you’re doing! The obvious improvement for YouTube would be to offer high-quality videos which according co-founder Steve Chen, we should see within three months. This announcement was made at the NewTeeVee conference that was held on Wednesday where Om Malik and Liz Gannes sat down to chat with him. I know what most of you are thinking… “hooray!” or “finally!” It’s about time, isn’t it? Some sites are reporting that YouTube will be offering HD content, but according to Liz Gannes there was no mention of HD whatsoever.

Most people upload videos where the quality is much better than what YouTube can support right now. YouTube down-grades the quality of videos and converts them to Flash, no matter what format they were uploaded in.  As broadband Internet makes its way into more homes, there’s no reason why they couldn’t up the quality so that viewers have a better experience. The only downside is that with a higher quality video, high buffer times could potentially drive people away if they had a slow connection. Not to worry — YouTube knows this which is why they say they’re working on a player that would detect a user’s Internet connection to determine if they could be served a higher-quality video.

So, get ready for a better viewing experience with a new player over at YouTube. 3 months to go and counting…

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

The first ever YouTube Music Awards are starting…really soon at 6pm EST (streaming free). Which is cool! Jason Schwartzman and Reggie Watts are hosting, Spike Jonze is directing, and the likes of Lady Gaga, Eminem, Avicii and Arcade Fire will be making appearances.

Read more…

Last summer Google targeted a website called YouTube-MP3 that allowed users to put in any YouTube URL and convert the audio to MP3. The website essentially allowed users to strip the audio out of music videos the music industry placed on YouTube and the MP3s treated are also archived by the website for future downloading. […]

YouTube is reportedly planning on launching its own on-demand music service, something said to be similar to Spotify but with video tossed into the mix. Furthermore, there won’t be much of a wait for the service if the leak pans out, with the sources saying that the music service will launch sometime towards the end […]

This article was written on July 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

We like to think of a service called Qik as “live YouTube.” It’s a video service that allows users to stream live video feed from their mobile phones to the web. Qik launched a private alpha release not too long ago and people like Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble have really helped to create some buzz about it. The Qik team has just taken another big step by launching into public beta, and now the masses will be able to test it out and take advantage of all that it offers.

Before we get into some of the features and improvements that come with the public beta of Qik, one of our initial concerns with this public beta is whether they can handle the increase in traffic. There’s going to be a lot of people wanting to try out this service, so hopefully they are prepared. Already this morning we were having trouble simply getting their site to load. The next several days and upcoming weeks will really put Qik and their infrastructure to the test.

Now on to Qik and what it’s all about. Qik is primarily for those who want to stream video from their mobile phones. Those who don’t have this capability on their phones do still have the option of signing up for an account if they want to make comments of videos that others post. Broadcasting using Qik works with mobile services like AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint which means just about everybody in the United States should be able to take advantage of it, assuming their phone has the video capability.

VentureBeat sat down with Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy and talked about the service. Roy pointed out how Qik is the quickest online video streaming service because their latency is down to a half-second to 3 seconds, something other competitors aren’t able to claim (latency is the time it takes from when someone starts capturing video to when it appears live on the Internet).

Here you’ll find a list of all the mobile phones that Qik supports. You’ll notice that there are A LOT of supported Nokia phones, a couple of Motorola’s and two Samsung phones. Not on the list currently is the iPhone, although there is a working alpha version of Qik available for a first generation iPhone that is jailbroken. Their goal is to eventually get a working version available for the iPhone 3G.

We’ll be keeping our eye on Qik to see how well it does now that it has launched into public beta. It looks and sounds like a promising new service, and it’ll really be interesting to see if it turns into the YouTube of live video streaming.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com