Arstechnica
In honor of YouTube’s 10th birthday, ars technical takes a look back at the video hub’s beginnings, the many hurdles it has faced, and how far it has come. “It's easy to forget YouTube almost didn't make it,” it writes. “Survival for the site was a near-constant battle in the early days … The company not only fought the bandwidth monster, but it faced an army of lawyers from various media companies that all wanted to shut the video service down.”
Associated Press
One of the concerns consumer advocates and competitors had with the Comcast deal was that it could undermine the streaming video industry that is reshaping TV. Comcast could, for example, require onerous payments from new online-only video providers for connecting to its network. Dish, the satellite TV company behind the new Web video service Sling TV, and Netflix opposed the deal.
Reuters
Ten years ago to the day, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim posted the first video, about his visit to the zoo. Now, by one good estimate, YouTube daily views reach nearly 7.9 billion a day. But Facebook is coming on strong. It now claims 4 billion views a day, and $1 billion in revenue from that. And investors are taking notice.
AdAge
Advertisers sometimes just don't get how these entities that live within YouTube actually operate. NewFronts is a selling opportunity, and a learning opportunity
Arstechnica
To be able to buy NBCUniversal, Comcast said it would not be involved with Hulu, except to maintain its ownership. But it appears that behind the scenes, that might not have been true.
Forbes
Investors will be looking at the impact of video on Facebook earnings when it reports Q1 results on Wednesday.The number of video views per day recently surged to three billion, as compared to one billion in September last year. Facebook rolled out auto-play video ads internationally in Q4, and also recently began scaling up video ads on Instagram platform.
Boston Globe
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, based in Boston, has urged the FTC to subject the same federal rules on deceptive advertising it applies to TV to the Internet, too, arguing the new YouTube Kids co-mingles advertising with programming. Regulatory rules that would stop that on TV don't apply to the Internet, the group says.
Wall Street Journal
Verizon FiOS was planning on offering new mini-bundles of channels, including a separate sports tier. But ESPN says its contract with FiOs stipulates the sports network must be part of the basic package. (We'll watch to see which Nike drops.)
Search Engine Watch
A look at four irritating ways marketers abuse videos, turning something that should be interesting and engaging into something that is just plain infuriating.
The Guardian
Video hub Vessel just raised about $57 million from Institutional Venture Partners and other investors. Founded by former Hulu executives Jason Kilar and Richard Tom, Vessel will use the money to scale and continue “trying to lure popular YouTube creators to debut their videos on its service,” The Guardian reports.