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 forever.

Since the video’s debut, YouTube has seen enormous growth, amassing over 1 trillion views — equal to almost 140 views for every person on Earth. More than 4 billion videos are viewed each day, while 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

The site receives over 800 million unique visitors each month who watch over 3 billion hours of videos. More videos are uploaded to YouTube in one month than the three major television networks in the United States have created in 60 years. The site is even more popular overseas, with 70% of its visitors coming from outside the United States. YouTube is also localized in 39 countries and across 54 languages.

Without YouTube there would be no Justin Bieber, no Chocolate Rain and no Rebecca Black — although that may have been a good thing. The work of thousands of aspiring singers, songwriters, filmmakers and artists would have gone unnoticed however, as would thousands of videos of cute kids and cuter animals.

YouTube has not only changed the way the world consumes entertainment, but also how it consumes news and information. Jawed Karim’s video follows below.

Read

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 rediscover MGM’s movie-making magic on Google Play and YouTube.” The Mountain View-based company has rental deals in place with five other major Hollywood studios, including Paramount, Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures. NewsCorp’s 20th Century Fox remains as one of the few studios that has not yet reached an agreement with the Internet giant.

Read

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. “We are pleased with the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals,” Viacom said in a statement. “The court delivered a definitive, common sense message—intentionally ignoring theft is not protected by the law.” Tensions between the two companies looked to be easing; just yesterday, Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures struck a deal with the Internet giant to allow more than 500 of its movies to be rented through YouTube and the Google Play marketplace.

Read

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, Paramount has been responsible for some of the most memorable films in cinema history,” said Malik Ducard, YouTube’s director of content partnerships. “With the addition of Paramount, we now have five of the six major studios and over ten independent movie studios offering nearly 9,000 movies for rent to millions of people around the world. It’s still early days for us, and we’ll continue adding new titles and expanding our service to more countries this year.” The majority of the movies tied to this deal are available now, and the rest will be added to YouTube and Google Play over the next few months.

Read

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 see a very short term, complete change of the product direction,” Mutricy said. “I think that we have a business to run, and therefore I think that there is continuity to be expected for 2012.” Mutricy also believes that having closer collaboration on Google’s services, such as Google+ and YouTube, could be a great opportunity for Motorola.

Read

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 and is scheduled to last 45 minutes. The hangout will also be streamed on the White House’s web site, and reporters and press cameras not permitted inside during the event. Obama has previously hosted town hall meetings on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of which received harsh criticism and claims that the President ignored subjects that drew the most questions.

Read [Google+] Read [CNN]

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.

The search giant claims that it is not collecting more data and the new terms merely clarify how existing data is used to improve the Google experience. “We’re making things simpler and we’re trying to be upfront about it. Period,” said Google’s policy manager Betsy Masiello in a blog post. “You still have choice and control. You don’t need to log in to use many of our services, including Search, Maps and YouTube.”

Users will also have access to privacy controls, with the ability to customize options for search history, Gmail, and other services. “You can use as much or as little of Google as you want. For example, you can have a Google Account and choose to use Gmail, but not use Google+,” Masiello added. “Or you could keep your data separate with different accounts — for example, one for YouTube and another for Gmail.”

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 ads each week. The growth in viewership was attributed to users accessing the service from smartphones and televisions.

Read

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 videos of 2011 hosted by none other than Rebecca Black.

Read

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 site with 56.9 million unique viewers but a greater 827 million video views. Additionally, comScore found that the average YouTube viewer watches more than 7 hours of video each month.

Read

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, grounding sandals and grounding sleeping bags, hunker down, watch the video, and you too can be free from dirty electricity. Hit the break for a heaping dose of snake oil.

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, YouTube has become an Internet staple over the past six years and try as they might, competitors have yet to come close to seeing the tremendous adoption YouTube has experienced.

Read

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 Windows Phone, we’re not sure what the fate of this handset is. The video is after the break. Have a look for yourself.

Read

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?

The first commercial promoting Samsung’s new flagship Android handset — the Galaxy S II — was a bit bland. And while we can’t say this second commercial sport has blown us out of the water, it does a much better job accentuating one of the device’s new enhanced features, Voice Talk. Bottom line: if you find yourself in the Arctic — wearing a parka, mukluks, and mittens — Voice Talk is going to be extremely useful. The thirty-second clip is after the break.