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YouTube Goes International
Bizzeh writes "YouTube has announced that they plan to go international. The video site, owned by Google, has launched nine country-specific versions across Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. The BBC reports: 'YouTube is now stressing its credentials as a platform not just for user-generated content but also for professional broadcaster and advertisers. The company says it has more than 1,000 global partners, with more than 150 deals signed in Europe since March. [Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder] said: "We respect copyright and we want to create new revenue streams to create opportunities. "We have been working with rights holders to help them leverage new audiences."'"
It is noteworthy that they felt they had to stress the fact that they respect the law, in this case copyright law, isn't it?
However, what it really means is 'We want to squeeze as much money out of this as we can' - they probably have a close partnership with the RIAA on this.
It's also possible the Germans weren't interested.
This is amazing. At last the international world can explore the wonderful technology that has brought together so many, using an effective comment and rating system to ensure that each video posted is as high quality as the last (the infallible "5 star system").
No but seriously, YouTube is like a cesspool. There is no quality control for comments. There are no moderators who bann idiots who do stuff like chain letters and spamvertising their own videos. People are now using videos of themselves talking for what the comment box was supposed to originally be. And this is not just the fault of the stupid users on youtube. The limited size of the comment box and the ease of posting comments is all their issues.
Lets not ignore the fact that people are trying to make this like a second my-space. I'm tired of getting e-mails from people who just want to say "hi" to me over and over again for no god-damned reason. Its nice and all, but its not a "comment" or appropriate "message". Your not telling me what I can do to make better videos. Your not critiquing my videos or even asking me what the source of my video files are (to which I usually reply "it costs money" and never hear from you again).
Furthermore, the lack of quality control of videos (I'll just say it: reposts) and lack of meta-tag control is absurd. I see people copying-and-pasting lists of every anime ever created (or at least most of them) followed by every number from 1 to 400 to ensure there SLIDE SHOW OF GOOGLED IMAGES can be found. 90% of the "anime music videos" on the bloody site are either slideshows that don't even match the beat of the music or use a single image size for consistency, or else videos copied and pasted from AMV.org.
Lets not forget the flagging system. With this wonderful system, even the most innocent of videos can be tagged as inappropriate, nevermind that it was tagged simply because its a "rival video" of another creator...
This isn't even looking at the fact every video uploaded on youtube ends up having lower quality then an AVI washed through windows-movie maker with the default render settings.
I'll stick to Crunchy Roll and Stage6 for now, thank you very much.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
From the article: "It's not just about translating, it also about creating content unique to certain countries."
This is marketing double-speak for 'we want to restrict certain users from accessing certain content.' It'll start with pressure from commercial organisations (MPAA, TV networks, etc) and gradually move towards yielding to government pressure - as we've already seen with Google's search engine censorship antics. Anyone in China want to see footage of Tiananmen square? Forget it. It's not in Google's best commercial interests.
In future you will see only what Google wants you to see. With its increasing dominance of both access to web content and content itself, Google is becoming the new global censor, answerable to no-one but its shareholders. This is very, very scary