We’ve been getting a lot of tips from people who have been having problems reaching the Revver website lately, getting videos uploaded or playing the ones already hosted on the platform. We haven’t paid much attention to them so far, because every time we check, the site seems up and we experience no trouble playing videos.

But something is definitely up.

By publishing the names of customers and the videos they rented, Facebook and Blockbuster may have violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, New York law professor James Grimmelmann explains on his blog. Don’t worry Zuck, it’s only $2,500 per violation.

Grimmelmann examines Facebook and Blockbuster’s most likely defense: Facebook and Blockbuster did offer users a chance to opt out of the notifications with litte popups. But the VPPA requires “the informed, written consent of the consumer given at the time the disclosure is sought,” and the popups don’t quite pass that test. One presumes that Amazon.com and Netflix, which have allowed customers to share movie purchases and rentals for years, but voluntarily, have managed to satisfy this test.

Grimmelmann’s conclusion? “Class action lawyers,” he writes, “start your engines.” Good thing Facebook allowed users to turn off Beacon when it did.

Source:Valleywag

It’s not that people object to Google making money on YouTube, really. They just want their cut. Yesterday, YouTube opened a program which pays a portion of ad revenue to content creators to all comers. Well, all comers from the U.S. and Canada whom YouTube deems acceptable, that is. Rather than specifying who it will accept, YouTube suggests you keep applying if you’ve been rejected. That worked so well with Susie in the 8th grade, after all.

The policy just confirms what we always suspected was Google’s attitude: Users are losers, and we know best. The Google-owned video site claims that channel partners who regularly produce videos with more than a million pageviews can earn “several thousand dollars per month,” but those are few and far between. The real winner is Google, which continues to dominate the Internet video market, and now eliminates the small advantage held by rival upstarts Revver, VuMe, and Metacafe which have been touting their own loser-generated-content reward programs for some time.

Revver is announcing the launch of Revver 2.0 today. Revver.com 2.0 also offers several new and easy-to-use tools intended to foster dialogue among its user community. Revver users are encouraged to interact with other creators using the new “Video Response” function that allows users to post a video in response to a particular video. An improved “My Dashboard” allows users to program a personal “Contact List” within their accounts so that they can subscribe to video feeds from peers and scroll through updates in real-time. E-mail functionality is also included in Revver.com 2.0, allowing users to send and receive messages from other Revver users.

For advertisers, the site offers more opportunities to engage with Revver’s diverse creative and user communities. Revver.com 2.0 allows brands to sponsor videos collections such as “Most Watched” on the home page and to purchase banner ads on category landing pages such as “Sports” as well as on content creators’ landing pages – all without compromising the site’s uncluttered look and feel.

From their release:

“With enhanced discovery, viewing, and community-building features, Revver.com 2.0 makes it even easier for content creators and advertisers to engage audiences online,” said Kevin Wells, CEO of Revver. “This release extends our commitment to creating the best possible platform for sharing and monetizing high-quality videos effectively.”

How many video content creators, amateur, semi-pro and pro are using Revver these days? When they launched it seemed everyone was using them but lately sites such as Vimeo, 5min, Viddler, YouTube, etc. seem to be gaining in buzz and momentum while I rarely ever hear about Revver anymore.

I can’t look up stats because the video players are embedded and those pageviews won’t count so it would be unfair to show their Alexa/Compete/Comscore traffic figures.

They are having a launch party this evening at the For Your Imagination studios in New York.

The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film. YouTube has more than 70m users a month and was recently bought by Google. The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website.

The company, which Google bought in November last year for $1.65bn, was currently working on “audio fingerprinting” technologies to identify copyrighted material, Mr Hurley said in a session on social networking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Speaking to the BBC after the session, he declined to give further details, saying that YouTube was still working out the technology and processes involved - both for the rewards system and the video clip advertising system. But he confirmed that the various features would be rolled out one by one over the next few months. “There won’t be one big release,” he said.

The audience of the YouTube website will not have to put up with overly long “pre-roll” adverts. Mr Hurley said a clip of three seconds length was one of the options, although the details had not been worked out yet. Other video sharing sites such as Revver already split advertising revenues with users uploading original content, but only YouTube has managed to attract an audience measuring in the tens of millions.

Mr Hurley said the fact that YouTube had not had a revenue sharing model was one of the reasons for its success, as that had allowed the website to focus on its key strength, making it easy to share videos with others. YouTube has repeatedly clashed with film studios and music publishers over copyrighted material that has been uploaded to the website.

The company says that it is quick to remove copyrighted material on the site that has been brought to its attention. Since the takeover by Google, YouTube has also negotiated a string of deals with large media groups, which also involve some revenue sharing.

By Tim Weber : Business editor, BBC News website.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/6305957.stm