YouTube and Apple TV - Part 3

This is turning out to be an even bigger deal than I first touted!

In March, UK broadcaster the BBC agreed a deal with YouTube that will see short news and entertainment clips made available through the service. EMI yesterday also agreed a deal with YouTube that will allow its users to access videos by EMI artists - all four major labels have now reached such deals with the service.

Via MacWorld UK

Talk about a trojan horse! Apple doesn't need to develop its own content delivery network, it just plugs Apple TV into YouTube then waits for all the content creators to sign deals to distribute content via YouTube.

YouTube: According to Moody, the YouTube update will take place in stages, beginning with the free software update for Apple TV owners in mid-June. At launch, “thousands of videos designed for Apple TV” will be available, with additional thousands added weekly until the entire YouTube library becomes accessible to Apple TV users this fall. When asked what “designed for Apple TV” meant, Moody said that YouTube will soon be encoding videos in the H.264 streaming-efficient compression format preferred by Apple TV, and that all new videos submitted to YouTube as of the mid-June launch of the AppleTV update will be playable by the device. From then until fall, YouTube will be encoding its entire back-catalog in H.264 format, adding videos in chunks until everything is accessible to Apple TV users. Direct links and the on-screen keyboard-based search engine mentioned in our previous update will bring you to current and old videos alike.

via iLounge

So the biggest video download service on the planet is going with H.264, the preferred video codec for Apple TV! Good grief! So Apples preferred codec becomes a defacto standard (OK so it's a standard already but you know what I mean!) and YouTube gets a serious quality speed bump? Does this mean higher resolutions will be available for YouTube? Do they still have the original content that can be re-encoded at higher resolutions? Will they have the option to upload high resolution material mid June? A hobby? Classic Jobs :-)

Technorati Tags: Apple, google, youtube, Apple TV, Leopard, IPTV, Steve Jobs, wwdc2007, WWDC

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Pick a browser, any browser....

Here we go again! My favourite browser on the mac is Camino, I don't really know why, I just like it. However, I use Google Reader as my main RSS reader but for some reason, it won't play nicely with Camino :-( So I've gone back to Safari and it's OK. Now I find that Google have released Google Gears, some new fangled code that allows you to use your web based Google Reader offline - how cool is that! Of course, it doesn't work with either Safari or Camino! I imagine that Google will eventually extend the usage of Google Gears to all of its online applications so it's a fairly significant release and as I'm a big Google Apps fan, I've just got to install it! OK, So I've just downloaded the latest version of FireFox (which is supported) and I'll see how long I can use that before switching to another browser!

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Google Apps Premier Edition

Google Apps Premier Edition But why does it still not work with Safari?

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BBC on Twitter

The BBC have started posting news on Twitter. Very cool! Just search for BBC on your Twitter home page and you'll find about a dozen BBC twitter entries. Add them as friends and you'll get news popping up during the day via Twitterrific

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The River of News - Google Reader Style

River of News-styled reading is a good idea for some, if it suits your mood.I ended up wanting to categorize it into the organized form I used to read it in. I’m not in the mood to read everything today, I’m in the mood to read certain topics and people.

I tried ‘river of news’ style but… at Eric Rice

Eric Rice is pushing back against the "River of News" metaphor that seems to have become so popular in certain quarters.

I've gotta agree with him!

That's why I was such a big fan of NetNewsWire as it let me categorise feeds into folders and I could pick what I wanted to read depending on my particular need at the time. I'm subscribed to over 200 feeds and no way could I cope with a deluge!

In some ways, Google Reader is even better in that I can assign multiple categories (or tags) to feeds so that a feed can be in both my Mac related category and my Notables category. If I feel like reading about mac related stuff, all my mac feeds are agregated into a single list which I can skip through and read using the "j" key but it also includes all my "notable" mac related people as well. If I feel like reading about people, it's easy just to click on the "notables" and read all the agregated posts.

I can of course see who has posted and just jump straight to that feed.

Even better is it's on the web so I can do it from any machine anywhere and always be current.

Bliss!

Technorati Tags: googlereader, Eric Rice, River of News

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