The first video ever uploaded to YouTube recently celebrated its seventh anniversary. The video, called “Me at the zoo,” was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim at 8:27 pm on April 23rd, 2005. In the video, Karim stands in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo and comments about their “really, really long trunks.” While the clip runs for only 19 seconds and the quality is terrible, it marks a crucial moment during the launch of a service that would to change the Internet forev...

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Google have come to an agreement to offer 600 movies for rent through YouTube and the Google Play marketplace for users in the U.S. and Canada. “Thanks to MGM, you’ll be able to join in this trend and grab its movies online and on the go,” the company said in a blog post on Monday. “From timeless love stories like West Side Story and Moonstruck, to sci-fi action films like The Terminator and Robocop, to modern classics like Rain Man and Rocky, you can now rediscov...

A federal appeals court on Thursday revived Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google’s YouTube video-sharing website, The Wall Street Journal reported. The media conglomerate had alleged that YouTube allowed users to post unauthorized Viacom content between 2005 and 2008. The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the case to a lower court, instructing a district judge to determine whether YouTube had knowledge or awareness of infringing material and if it was unwilling to remove it. R...

Google on Wednesday announced a new deal with Paramount Pictures that will allow more than 500 movie titles to be rented through YouTube and the Google Play marketplace. The Mountain View-based company now has rental deals with five of the six major Hollywood studios — including Paramount, Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures — and 20th Century Fox is the only studio that hasn’t yet reached an agreement with Google. “Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, Paramou...

Motorola Mobility does not expect any large changes following Google’s acquisition of the company. Alain Mutricy, Motorola’s senior vice president of portfolio and product management, said interview with Fierce Wireless that the vendor will not alter its plans once it comes under the Google “umbrella.” Until the deal closes, which may be soon, Motorola and Google are two separate companies and the manufacturer will  continue on its path as subsidiary of Google. “I don’t ...

President Obama will be hosting his first Google+ hangout tonight at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. In the discussion, the president will be answering questions that were submitted over the past few weeks through YouTube. Google maintains that the White House has had no role in which questions will be selected. Google’s team will instead choose the top-rated questions among those submitted, ensuring there will be several different issues discussed. The event will take place in the Roosevelt Room of the White House ...

Earlier this week, Google announced that the company would combine individual privacy policies from a variety of its products into one main policy. The idea behind it was to provide users with a “more intuitive Google experience.” Critics of the change are worried that Google is now collecting more data than ever, however, leading members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee to demand answers. Read on for more. (more…)

Google recently confirmed that YouTube now receives more than 4 billion video views per day. Reuters reported the news Monday morning and noted that the site has seen a 25% increase in videos viewed per day since May. Google, which owns YouTube, also confirmed that there are more than 60 hours of fresh video uploaded each minute, up from the 48 hours of video added per minute in May. Advertisements on videos generate roughly $5 billion in revenue each year, Reuters said, but just 3 billion videos feature ...

Google on Tuesday announced that videos on YouTube were collectively played more than 1 trillion times this past year. In its look back on the year in YouTube videos, Google revealed that it served more playbacks than ever before in 2011. To quantify the massive figure, the company noted in a blog post that a trillion playbacks represents about 140 views for each person on earth, or more than twice the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Hit the break for a quick countdown of the 10 most popular YouTube ...

YouTube served up more than 20 billion video views during the month of October — 49.1% of all 42.6 billion video views on the web during the month. The research was recently published by comScore, which also found that Google and YouTube had a total unique audience of 161 million viewers, nearly three times that of Facebook, which served up the second most video views during the month. Facebook had 59 million unique viewers and 346 million video views. VEVO, the popular music video website, was the No.3 sit...

YouTube exists, and this is why. You see, if it wasn’t for YouTube, there’s no way this guy would have been able to put together this video and share his life-saving insights with the world. From an iPad, to a Kindle, to just sitting in a room full of electronics, dirty electricity is all around us. And it’s dangerous. If you aren’t properly grounded, you’re exposing yourself to harmful radiation. The only way to save yourself? Go buy David Wolfe’s grounding mats, groundi...

Google’s YouTube team on Wednesday announced two milestones to help celebrate its 6-year anniversary. Most notably, YouTube stated that as of this past weekend, the site now serves over 3 billion videos each day. That’s equal to half the world’s population watching one YouTube video each day, and it represents an increase of 50% over last year. The company also said that over 48 hours of footage is uploaded to the site every minute, which is a 100% increase over last year. Needless to say, Y...

Nokia’s N9 handset has made a brief cameo via a one-minute, official-looking video clip. What do we learn from said video? Not a heck of a lot. What we do see is a 12-megapixel camera complete with Carl Zeiss optics flash before our eyes, and the iconography seen suggests that the device will be a Symbian offering complete with the Anna software update. The rumor mill states the N9 will be a pentaband GSM handset that could make an appearance stateside, although… since Nokia is going all-in with W...

Can’t get enough Sony tablet madness? The company has just posted a teaser video for their just announced S1 and S2 tablets set to debut later this fall. We’re talking about products that could change at any time (even the names aren’t final), but it’s still great to see a visual representation of what they’ll presumably offer, no? (more…)