Online Video News - May 23, 2008

For the week ending May 23, 2008

YouTube Traffic Increases to 4 Billion Streams in April
YouTube's video streams increased from 3.6 billion in March to 4 billion in April, TVWeek reported. The site also brought in 74 million unique visitors in April, an increase of 4 million over the month before.

Source: TVWeek

Reddit Prepares for PBS Weekly News Show
Reddit will be powering the news for a new show on PBS called YourWeek. "In a more youth-focused spin than PBS' news is known for, the new show details the week's headlines as chosen by Reddit users," CNet's News.com reported. Reddit has launched a section of its Web site where Reddit users can vote on stories for the show.

The show's pilot will run online only on June 6.

Sources: CNet, Reddit

Hulu Partners with More Outlets; Solidly Beats ABC.com in Video Views, Time Spent
Hulu has added several new content partners, including TV.com, TVGuide.com, Flixster.com, and Zap2it.com, LostRemote reported. Nielsen reported Hulu is now solidly beating ABC.com is the number of videos viewed per month by (Hulu has 63.2 million views, ABC.com has 60.8 million views) and the average number of minutes watched per month by a margin of 2:1.

Source: LostRemote

YouTube to Launch Citizen News Channel
YouTube has launched a new channel for citizen journalism.

"Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe," wrote YouTube News Editor "Olivia M" on the YouTube blog.  "You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold."

The Citizen News vlog is at www.youtube.com/citizennews.

Sources: ArsTechnica, YouTube

LiveNewsCameras Aggregates Streaming News Video
Broadcaster Fox Chicago recently launched a beta version of LiveNewsCameras.com, which collects and organizes live streaming news videos primarily from the United States, The Editors Weblog reported. The video streams are organized alphabetically by city, and thumbnail-size video images refresh frequently. In addition, the site features chat capabilities and a text summary of the latest updates.

Sources: The Editors Weblog, livenewscameras.com

Commuters Use Online Video to Show Traffic Problems, Get Roads Fixed
A growing number of frustrated commuters are uploading videos to YouTube to show traffic problems and needed road repairs. Sometimes, the videos even help get things fixed, according to The Los Angeles Times.

"Things have gotten to the point that it's possible to type in the name of virtually any major city and the word "traffic," and it's likely that someone has posted a video showing traffic in that city," The Los Angeles Times reported.

Source: The Los Angeles Times

Resources: Streaming Media, MediaShift Goes to Multimedia Bootcamp
These two resources might be useful for those who are really interested in online video:
Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com has a blog called "The Business of Online Video". He is principal digital media analyst at Frost & Sullivan, and executive vice president of StreamingMedia.com. In addition, StreamingMedia.com has a magazine called Streaming Media.

Also, Mark Glaser, blogger and host of MediaShift, went through a week of Multimedia Bootcamp through the Knight Digital Media Center. Glaser live-blogged the sessions.