Hasta La Gadget!

Remember how long it took Spotify to end up in the States? The issue? Music rights, of course. Before it could make its way to our shores, the service had to strike deals with a bunch of record labels, making sure the artists, the executives and EMI janitorial staffs all get paid. Whyd, a new French music service that will be clawing its way out of beta later this month, offers a bit of a workaround to that conundrum, pulling music from sources like YouTube and SoundCloud, aggregating them into a single dynamic location. That means that all content can be brought in, from some kid playing acoustic originals in her bedroom to long time music streaming holdouts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

Once you signed in via Facebook or created a new account, you get started with the search field at the top of the page. From here, you’ll find tracks posted by other users. Click on a track and you can watch / listen, Like it, add it or post it to Twitter or Facebook. Songs that are added pop up on the Your Tracks page, a sort of central hub for the site. Playing the tracks from here will pop up a toolbar on the bottom of the page that lets you pause, scroll through the track and skip between songs. For the sake of organization, it’s also possible to divide songs into different playlists.

Continue reading Whyd mines YouTube, Soundcloud and others for songs Spotify can’t deliver (hands-on)

Filed under: Software

Whyd mines YouTube, Soundcloud and others for songs Spotify can’t deliver (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Whyd  | Email this | Comments

YouTube has announced that it is investing more money to bring a professional level of content to its website in an attempt to lure more viewers and advertisers. The new round of investments, nearly a year after YouTube invested $100 million to create over 100 new channels, including a lot of celebrity content. Google says that it will provide a second round of funding to between 30% and 40% of its original partners.

Those original partners that will be getting an additional round of funding will be notified the next few weeks. YouTube says that it wants the new round of funding to help kick start the ecosystem to bring in even more great content creators. YouTube found that having a channel with a celebrity attached wasn’t good enough to lure in viewers stating, “Celebrity alone isn’t enough.”

25 of the top new channels now average more than 1 million views a week and the top 33 have over 100,000 subscribers, which is a key indicator of repeat viewing according to YouTube. Most channels will be receiving a second round of investment of roughly equivalent to the first round. The first round of investment of somewhere between $1 million and $5 million per channel.

That round of investment was to guarantee a year of content that YouTube could sell exclusively. One condition of receiving the funding is that the producers of the channels have to pay back YouTube’s investment before they can sell their own ads. It remains unclear if even the most successful channels could pay back the initial investment at this time.

[via Adage]

YouTube to start another big round of content investment is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Arguably the best science fiction series in some time, Battlestar Galactica aired its last season almost three years ago with a few spinoffs since. The latest spinoff movie is the prequel Blood & Chrome which tell the story of young William Adama and his trials on the Galactica during the first Cylon war. The 97 minute feature film will be initially available online as 10 episodes via Machinima Prime between November 9th and February. Then it will premiere on the Syfy channel and finally become available on Blu-ray, DVD, On Demand and digital download on February 19th, 2013. We’ll be interested to see how this unorthodox release window works out for Universal Studios Home Entertainment, in the meantime more details are available in the full release, along with a trailer after the break.

Continue reading Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome is coming home any way you want, YouTube’s up first

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome is coming home any way you want, YouTube’s up first originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 23:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  MachinaPrime  | Email this | Comments

We obviously do a lot of different things on the Internet each and every, but when the peak hours between 9PM and 12AM arrive, it’s all about Netflix baby. A new report from Sandvine shows that in North America, Netflix is responsible for 33% of the downstream traffic on fixed networks between those hours. That’s good enough, but Sandvine’s report also says that 65% of all downstream traffic during those hours is coming from video and audio streaming sites, meaning Netflix is responsible for half of that.

In Europe, it’s a bit of a different story there, as YouTube accounts for 20% of all downstream traffic during peak hours on both fixed and mobile networks. It probably won’t come as much of a surprise that video streaming sites take up most of the downstream traffic during peak hours, but what’s interesting is that Netflix takes so much share for itself. Amazon, Hulu, and HBO Go were all mentioned in Sandvine’s report, but they only respectively account for 1.8%, 1.4%, and 0.5% of downstream traffic on North American fixed networks during peak hours.

Hearing that, it’s immediately clear just how strong Netflix is in North America. All in all, Sandvine says that mean monthly data usage on North American fixed networks has risen quite a bit, jumping from 23GB to 51GB in just one year. That’s an increase of 120%, and we can probably expect that to climb even higher as more people begin turning to the Internet for their video content.

Sandvine, which calls itself a “leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators,” collected this data from a selection of its 200 customers around the world. It’s an interesting study to say the least, and we’ll be even more interested to see where these numbers are a year from now. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Sandvine is predicting that the 2014 World Cup will be the most-streamed event in Internet history.

Sandvine report shows Netflix dominating during North American peak hours is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Trying to launch a concerted nonprofit video campaign can feel like tilting at windmills: you might have one moment of undivided attention from viewers before they’re off to watch cats and Nigerian pygmy goats. Google wants to make the most of that time through its YouTube Campaigns initiative. The strategy brings on-video overlays and channel sections that show viewers both a progress meter for the campaign as well as a handy links to explore and share what they’ve found. If all goes well, charities and like-minded organizations get more donations and YouTube views, while we in the general public are reminded that there’s more to life than K-pop videos. It certainly beats manning the phones for a celebrity fundraiser.

Filed under: Internet, Alt, Google

YouTube Campaigns lets nonprofits draw our interest without the telethons originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Oct 2012 06:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Official YouTube Blog  | Email this | Comments