As the news cycles wind down for
Easter weekend and this Good Friday, I found myself picking up a bunch of small stories just in the normal course of my video voyages consumption.
I thought that YouTube was happy being
"You-biquitous" regardless the competitive positioning of its distribution partners. After all, the video portal has been a packed-in member of the iPhone app deck from Day 1. It is on
Apple TV as one of the only non-Apple apps. And it encourages unfettered distribution of individual clips via embedding. But no YouTube soup for you, Roku. The over-the-top box was asked to take down
an unofficial YouTube app from its service the other day.
YouTube was not baked into the Roku experience. Nor were there branded apps to be found in the library. But industrious users
could create their own "private channel" at the Roku Web site, enter a code and get access to the site videos on their set-top box. According to the revised FAQ Roku eliminated the link that made the
hack possible. "At the request of YouTube, this private channel is no longer available on Roku," the FAQ now says.
The take-down notice of sorts was first noticed at Zatz Not Funny.
According to Zatz, the third-party YouTube app actually was made by a developer
Roku eventually hired.
As I covered here recently, Sony's video portal Crackle is challenging Netflix and Amazon's streaming movie model with an enlarged library of ad supported films.
That model came to the iPad this week with an app that mimics some of the Netflix functionality, including playback resume and movie queues. The selection is not huge but it sure is better than the
early days of online movie services when public domain horror and martial arts flicks reigned. I watched "Da Vinci Code," albeit interrupted every fifteen minutes by the same damn ad for the
Battlefield 3 video game. Next up, "Easy Rider."
Finally, Facebook opened the Facebook Studio site yesterday as a showcase for creative ad executions on the site. Videos demonstrating
campaigns on behalf of Coca-Cola, HP and BMW are on show. Well, sorta. All day yesterday the video functionality was broken on the site. "Please bear with us!" the banner read atop Facebook Studio into the evening. "Our videos are currently down and we are working to be back up and running soon." Well, it was a good idea
at the time.
By the way, Facebooks wasn't the only one have network problems yesterday. I ran into an oopsy message at Foursquare early in the morning, and Sony's Playstation Network
announced that its system was down inexplicably...and could be offline for days.
Did somebody eat the Internet?