SiliconBeat

Once again, Netflix has been placed on a death watch. But I’m not buying it for a second. We’ve heard that too many times over the company’s history. And each time, the company has nimbly defeated new and established competitors, while growing like gangbusters in a horrid economy.

I wrote last year that I was done betting against Netflix. And I’ll stand by that now. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent analyst report by Credit Suisse that YouTube could lose as much as $470 million in 2009 has prompted some insiders — and outsiders -- to try to stir up enthusiasm for a YouTube spin out. The loss is not insignificant, even for Google, which recorded $4.2 billion in net income in 2008. To put it in perspective, the estimated YouTube loss exceeds the $448 million Google spent on salaries and other administrative expenses for the first quarter of 2009. It also exceeds what Google spent on sales and marketing.

But in a conversation with reporters on Thursday, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the company is committed to YouTube. “We believe YouTube will eventually be a successful and profitable business and that it will take some time to do that. I don’t know how long it will.”

Schmidt also downplayed another option for reducing the expense of YouTube by downgrading video delivery to third-world countries where advertising revenue is insignfiicant. “I have not personally been in meetings where there were discussion on throttling bandwidth because of its costs,” Schmidt said. “In general we don’t link the two (bandwidth and cost). A typical example is India. A few years ago… we spent quite a bit of money to dramatically increase the connectivity to India even though it had no short-term or even near-term way to justify it economically. And I’m very proud of that. That’s how Google works. So I would discourage a linking between the two.”

This morning, an odd word “pman” appeared briefly on Twitter’s new trend list.
If you clicked on it, you found posts written in Moldovan (or depending on your political point of view Romanian.)
It turned out the students were storming the Parliament building in Chisinau to protest what they said were rigged elections. The mysterious word “pman” stood for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, a square in the historical center of the city.
This video appears to have been shot in the square shortly before the youths took over the Parliament building.
“I am terrified,” tweeted Maria Voloh. “But i hope that the REVOLUTION will happen and that our country will be FREE…at last…after years and years.”

Google said Monday that China has apparently relaxed a ban on YouTube, Google’s popular video-sharing service. “We have received reports that users in China are now able to access YouTube,” said spokesman Scott Rubin. “We have no further information on the cause of the blockage nor why it was unblocked.” China began blocking YouTube last Tuesday.

WARNING: VIDEO HAS GRAPHIC IMAGERY

China’s official Xinhua News Agency quoted an anonymous government official on Tuesday who accused the Tibetan government in exile of fabricating a video that purports to show Chinese security forces beating handcuffed Tibetan prisoners. The video also chronicles doctors’ attempts to save a man named Tendar who worked for China Mobile and who was allegedly tortured after he intervened to help a monk who was being beaten. According to the video, the man died from his wounds.

The Chinese government also blocked access to YouTube on Tuesday, though it is unclear if it was because of the video. China has previously shut down Google’s video-sharing service on at least one prior occasion and has also blocked access to particular videos.

At a press conference, a foreign ministry official responded to a question about YouTube with the following statement:
“The Chinese Government is not afraid of the Internet, otherwise how do you explain the following figures: At present, the number of Chinese netizens reached 300 million, ranking first in the world than 8 years ago, an increase of 30 times; the total number of Chinese web 2,100,000 over 8 years the former increased by 138 times; blog space for more than one hundred million, the United Kingdom than in many population also. These sufficient to prove that China’s Internet is fully open. We encourage the active use of the Internet, but also to manage the Internet according to law.”

(The Web page was automatically translated by Google.)

One year ago, before Hulu became widely available, there was a serious debate over whether people really wanted to use their computers watch full-length Hollywood productions versus short YouTube clips.
Hulu, which is co-owned by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Providence Equity Partners, put its money on Hollywood. So far the gamble is paying off.
In exactly twelve months, Hulu has become the second-biggest video brand on the Web, according to Nielsen Online. Of course, YouTube, the number one brand, is still almost ten times bigger, but Hulu’s rise from zero to number two is still impressive.
And as Mark Cuban pointed out last year, “Hulu is laughing at Youtube all the way to bank.” The reason: unlike YouTube, Hulu can easily sell advertising around every video on its site. It can also use YouTube to promote its videos, posting teaser clips to its heart’s content that lead back to Hulu.

Think those old Hollywood fuddy-duddies are too busy learning to use e-mail and Facebook to compete with Google? Think again.

Here are the numbers for February.

According to Hitwise, a traffic measurement firm, visits to Google’s Gmail, long the smallest of the big online e-mail services, are accelerating. For the last two weeks, U.S. Internet visits to Gmail surpassed visits to YouTube, making Gmail the tenth most popular Website — in all categories — on the Internet in the United States.

While the numbers are sure to provoke new concern about Google’s growing dominance, they could make it easier for Microsoft and Yahoo to merge their Internet operations at some future time. Leaving aside the fact that Yahoo does not want to merge with Microsoft, one of the stumbling blocks to the deal proposed last year by Microsoft was the monopoly that a combined Microhoo would have in online mail.

Here are the latest rankings of the most popular Web sites from Hitwise for the week of March 7:

Google: 6% of all U.S. Internet visits
Yahoo Mail: 5 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
Yahoo: 3 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
MySpace: 3 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
Facebook: 2 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
eBay: 2 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
Windows Live Mail: 1 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
Yahoo Search: 1 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
MSN: 1 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
Gmail: 1 percent of all U.S. Internet visits
YouTube: 1 percent of all U.S. Internet visits

Last week, privacy advocates went into a tizzy over the ruling by a New York judge that YouTube must turn over all its data about which videos that its users watch to Viacom. The latter is suing YouTube, which is owned by Google, over copyright infringement.

It’s a reminder, of course, of what lies at the heart of the Internet. In essence, companies like Google have turned the Internet into a vast collector of personal data which they then use to figure out how to get us to watch, read or buy more stuff. The amount of knowledge a company like Google has about your personal Web surfing habits would likely boggle your mind if you knew the full extent of it.

But the outcry left me wondering just what everyone was so worked up about.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a column in the Mercury News today about Mike Homer’s battle with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and the social media and networking campaign started by the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

For those who want to know more, or get involved, here a few more relevant links: Read the rest of this entry »