Following on from their Facebook and Twitter infographics, Website Monitoring have produced another stats sheet, this time for YouTube.

Here are a few key facts taken from the chart:

• The first video was uploaded to YouTube on 23 April 2005
• The most popular video on the site, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, has been played 185.39 million times
• 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute
• 70% of YouTube’s traffic comes from outside the USA
• The most popular channel on YouTube has 2,159,651 subscribers

See the full infographic on the Website Monitoring site.

YouTube South Africa, the first localised YouTube site on the African continent, has gone live. You can see it in action at www.youtube.co.za.

The new domain has a strong focus on content uploaded by South African users, and makes use of adjusted search algorithms to promote South African content on category pages and in the “featured videos” section.

YouTube has also signed partnership agreements with several South African media companies, including the SABC and e.tv, enabling these companies to establish a presence on the site and easily distribute their content. The SABC will be piloting a certain amount of old and current content on the channel, and if the pilot proves successful, this offering will be extended to include a range of SABC news, sport, soaps, dramas and comedies.

Perhaps more importantly, video download speeds are now significantly faster for South Africans. No more grabbing a quick cup of coffee while you wait for that hilarious cat video to load!

Of course, if the new site is still not fast enough for you, you have the option to watch videos with YouTube Feather. This beta offering is a stripped-down version of the standard video page, including only the most basic features. YouTube Feather can be accessed via the TestTube section of the site.

Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder, says, “We’re very excited to bring a local version of YouTube to South Africa and we look forward to continuing to improve the YouTube experience for our South African users.”

Internet users in South Africa, and MWEB uncapped adsl clients in particular, now have one more reason to be happy. At last South Africa has a Video-on-Demand (VOD) service, thanks to a partnership between MWEB and MultiChoice.

The service is being offered exclusively to DStv Premium subscribers, and they will be able to access it free of charge via both their PVR decoder and MWEB ADSL broadband.

1. The DStv On Demand HD PVR offering, accessible via PVR decoder, will provide 20 hours of the most popular TV series, sporting shows, magazine shows and movies, for up to 7 days after their broadcast on DStv Channels.

2. The DStv On Demand online offering, available exclusively to MWEB ADSL customers (both capped and uncapped), will provide 800 hours of premium content including blockbuster movies, award-winning series, all the best sporting action, kids’ shows and documentaries.

Programmes are chosen for the On Demand service based on monthly consumer surveys. Content will be continually updated after each show appears on DStv channels; international series will be available for 7 days, and local content and movies for 30 days. The pilot episode will always be included.

MultiChoice says of their partnership with MWEB, “DStv Online is committed to delivering the highest possible quality of service to our subscribers. As a result, we request certain guarantees from our ISP partners – the most important of which is uncapped broadband access. MWEB was the first ISP to offer an uncapped ADSL service in South Africa and to meet our quality of service and technical requirements. We are excited to partner with them to offer you unlimited viewing pleasure at no extra bandwidth costs.”

DStv plans to roll out this service to the rest of Africa shortly. They are also investigating the feasibility of launching a Transactional Video on Demand (TVOD) service, which would allow subscribers to have access to the latest movies on a pay-per-view basis, before they are screened on DStv.

Find out more about the DStv On Demand online offering.

Adobe just released news that Creative Suite 5 will be available on April 12th, with shipping expected to start a month later.

As usual, CS5 will combine the very best features in graphics, video and web design for professionals, for an extortionate price.

That said, have a watch of this video of just one of the new Photoshop’s capabilities. You will be blown away. This makes light work of what previous would have taken hours, maybe even days of work. Graphic designers will rejoice everywhere.

Here’s a preview of Opera Mini on the iPhone, including a feature overview and a real world speed test. Apple seems likely to reject the Opera app, because they have previously blocked submissions that duplicate the capabilities of the iPhone’s built-in apps (in this case Safari). However, the Opera team said they are confident their new browser will be approved for the iPhone. We are not so sure.

One thing that’s sure though is the Opera Mini browser is lighting fast.

How I here you cry? Well, the Opera browser loads web pages rapidly by using a technology called server-side rendering, which compresses most aspects of a Web site on a server, sometimes reducing the load time of 90 percent of a Web page, before sending the data along to a phone’s browser. Check out the video after the jump -

Read the rest of this entry »

Sky News political editor David Speers talks to News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch about paywalls, politics, and more.

Internet Explorer 6 is certainly not on the credibility list of big names from the Web 2.0 world. It was Digg that earlier hinted at cutting the support for the Web Browser and now it is suspected that YouTube is also phasing out the Browser shortly — a screenshot taken by an IE6 user is pretty much conclusive that the time for the IE6 is up.

“We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one of these more modern browsers”

Given the bugs and issues on the site, and the fact that only 5% of users on Digg are using IE 6 — hence causing a minimal 1% of diggs, buries and comments, the website announced that they’ll remove support for Internet Explorer 6.

Following on the same lines as Digg, YouTube will also prefer its developers spending time optimizing the service for newer and better browsers rather than paying attention to the fading Microsoft browser. Google is going to have their efforts concentrated on more “modern browsers” like Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5 or Safari.

Totally understandable, don’t you think?

[via TechCrunch]

There is no doubt that only few companies on the Internet experiment success as frequently and with the magnitude, Google does.

Their newest venture makes video downloads from YouTube as easy as mouse click. Launched in a highly limited version for now, the download tab on videos is currently available on some of the videos from President-elect Barack Obama’s ChangeDotGov Channel.
The option allows you to download videos in high-quality MPEG4, H.264 format, making them suitable for iPhone and even tv playback While the option for all users to download YouTube content freely is no small matter, one must note that many Internet addicts already use rip-off software to download these videos.

Despite having the feature regularly at some point in future, many of the videos might still be without the option for obvious copyright reasons.

Meanwhile, hold your horses. There’s no need to get too excited about it, because the experiment of allowing free video downloads could trigger legal hassles in the near future. So better wait and see what they come up with.

[via ArsTechnica]

Bandwidth Blog would like to congratulate the winners of last night’s Crunchies. In attendance to collect awards were Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Google product chief Marissa Mayer, Twitter founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jack Dorsey, imeem founder Dalton Caldwell, and many more.

In adition to the winners, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur, and Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis also made appearances on stage. The slideshow above gives a feel for the event and the party afterward, which was in the stunning Rotunda of City Hall (thank you, MySpace). Or you can check out people’s reactions on Twitter. Results and video of the ceremony after the jump Read the rest of this entry »

Google I/O ’08 Keynote: Imagination, Immediacy, and Innovation… and a little glimpse under the hood at Google

Marissa Mayer has been with Google for 9 years, helping to build Google into one of the world’s most popular web services. As the VP of Search and User Experience, her team is behind some of Google’s most popular and successful products including core web search, images, news, books, maps, iGoogle, toolbar, desktop, and health. This talk is a glimpse from inside the trenches of how Google builds products (including practical insights on how to build the best products), how to prioritize your efforts especially under resource constraints, and how to think about strategy.