Youtube, Internet | featured news

Google Inc.'s head of operations in Brazil was detained by the country's federal police Wednesday after the company failed to heed a judge's order to take down YouTube videos that the court ruled violate Brazilian electoral law....

Google Inc rejected a request by the White House on Friday to reconsider its decision to keep online a controversial YouTube movie clip that has ignited anti-American protests in the Middle East... "We've restricted access to it in countries where it is illegal such as India and Indonesia, as well as in Libya and Egypt, given the very sensitive situations in these two countries," the company said. "This approach is entirely consistent with principles we first laid out in 2007."

Google is smart. We all know that. Here's a great bit of search engine cleverness of Kafka-esque proportions. How can you be seen by the entertainment industry as fighting piracy of copyrighted material and yet not have a negative impact on one of the largest infringers, YouTube—who you happen to own?

YouTube has added a tool which automatically blurs out the faces of people appearing in uploaded videos. It said the function would be of use to activists wishing to share footage of protests involving participants who wanted to remain anonymous. It hinted other features would follow, describing the move as "the first step towards providing visual anonymity".

A new study has found that YouTube is emerging as a major platform for news, one to which viewers increasingly turn for eyewitness videos in times of major events and natural disasters....

From the looks of this screenshot posted by one of our readers, it appears YouTube is testing a new homepage styled more like the look that recently rolled out on Google+. The current default look rolled out last winter with more focus on channels and social integration, while this new facade features more white space and list of channels and friends to the side. We asked YouTube about the new look and a spokesperson issued a boilerplate statement about experimenting with ways to help users find the videos that are important to them. The statement in full is after the break, however the key part is that they're listening to user feedback so take a close look at this pic and the rest at the source link below then let us (and Google) know what you think.

YouTube users are now uploading three days’ worth of video to the site every second — a whole 24 hours more than the site had last year. To celebrate its 7th birthday, Google’s video-sharing site released all-new metrics about itself, including its new upload numbers as well as the fact that subscriptions increased 50 percent in the past year. Another cool fact? The site logs 3 billion hours of viewing time per month.

YouTube is adding to its original programming by launching channels specializing in female dramas and United States Olympic athletes.

More than a week after KONY 2012: Part II – Beyond Famous hit YouTube, the video, which was also created by Invisible Children, has racked up about 1.7 million views. That’s less than 2% of the traffic that KONY 2012 got in its first five days. Part II’s performance shows that the success of the initial video will be hard, if not impossible, to repeat.

Google is adding 600 movies from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to the titles it has available for rent on YouTube and also Google Play, its digital content store for Android-powered mobile devices.