YouTube Renting Sundance Film Festival Movies

These are early days and in the coming weeks we'll also invite a small group of partners across other industries, in addition to independent film, to participate in this new option. Anything that brings more content to the YouTube community is a good thing. And making content available for rent will give our partners unprecedented control over the distribution of their work -- they can decide the price of their videos and the rental duration; they can decide when and where their content is available; and they can keep 100% of their rights.

The videos will cost around $5 but the exact price will be set by individual filmmakers. Coverage from USA Today mentions that YouTube will split revenues, but will give the lion's share to the filmmaker.

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Will YouTube Be the Place to Rent Movies?

YouTube has made a couple of big announcements. First of all, they are going to start renting movies. They are kicking off this initiative by partnering with the Sundance Film Festival, making five films from 2010 and 2009 available for rent for U.S. users. This starts Friday and will run through Sunday January 31.

In addition to those five films, another small collection of rental videos from other U.S. partners across different industries (including health and education) will be made available in the coming weeks. "We're also excited to put out the call for more independent filmmakers to join the rental program as part of our 'Filmmakers Wanted' campaign at the festival," says the YouTube team.

"These are early days and in the coming weeks we'll also invite a small group of partners across other industries, in addition to independent film, to participate in this new option," the team adds.  "Anything that brings more content to the YouTube community is a good thing. And making content available for rent will give our partners unprecedented control over the distribution of their work -- they can decide the price of their videos and the rental duration; they can decide when and where their content is available; and they can keep 100% of their rights."

This could lead to something huge for the movie rental industry. If major movie studios get on board with this...just imagine. YouTube is far and away the biggest video site on the web. What if you could just rent all of your movies from there? That could give even Netflix a run for its money, especially as Internet-ready televisions become more mainstream. Going that far is only speculative of course, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

To rent the movies YouTube will be offering, users can use Google Checkout to pay (what a great way for Google to drive more people to that too).

YouTube also announced that it is introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported video player. "Most notably for YouTube users, HTML5 includes support for video and audio playback," says YouTube engineer Kevin Carle. "This means that users with an HTML5 compatible browser, and support for the proper audio and video codecs can watch a video without needing to download a browser plugin."

"Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations," he adds. "HTML5 on YouTube doesn't support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video (currently that means Chrome, Safari, and ChromeFrame on Internet Explorer). We will be expanding the capabilities of the player in the future, so get ready for new and improved versions in the months to come."

The HTML5 experiment can be found here. If you're interested, you can join the experiment, which will enable HTML5 video for your browser, if you use one of the ones mentioned.
 

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Twitter Expands Into More Languages

Update 4 : Twitter is now supporting the German language.

Update 3 : Twitter is now supporting the Italian language.

Update 2 : Twitter is now supporting the French language.

Update: Twitter is now supporting the Spanish language.

Original Article: Twitter announced that it intends to roll out the service in the French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages. Currently it's only available in English and Japanese.

Expanding into more languages should have a profound impact on Twitter's growth in new users. The company doesn't plan to stop there either though. Co-founder Biz Stone says that's just a starting point.

Twitter is taking a cue from Facebook and calling upon users to help with translations. The company has launched a tool for people with experience in different languages to suggest translations for the Twitter site itself. "Then, we'll follow up technically," says Stone.

"We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first," he explains. "As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster and we'll have enough material to respond by making Twitter available not only in English and Japanese but also French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well."

Our latest numbers have shown that new user registrations have declined slightly for Twitter. The more languages that Twitter supports, obviously the more useful more people will find it. It has a long way to go to get Facebook-like numbers, but this would be a huge step in the right direction (along with the forthcoming "lists" feature) to step up the game.


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Interesting Chrome Extensions On the Way

Google has opened up the Chrome Extension Gallery (beta) to developers. This means that anyone can now upload their extensions. Google says it is making the upload flow available early so developers have time to publish their extensions ahead of Google's full launch.

"Once an extension is uploaded, our gallery takes care of packaging and signing," says Google software engineer Lei Zheng. "Updating an extension is also incredibly easy — all a developer needs to do is to upload a new file in the gallery. Finally, to further help developers, in the next few days, we plan to open up the gallery to a small group of trusted testers. They will provide developers with insights and bug reports that will help them polish their extensions ahead of our beta launch."

Google provides the following tips for uploading extensions:

- Upload a ZIP file of your extension directory, not a packaged CRX file.

- Include a well-designed product icon in your manifest (more info).

- After uploading your extension, you will need to provide a detailed description, as well as screenshots or a YouTube video of your extension in action.

The review process is fully automated in most cases. Google will manually review ones that include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect "file://" URLs. Developers will have to give Google additional information for these types of extensions, for security reasons.

Information about how to write extensions for Chrome can be found here. Google says all types of extensions are welcome, as long as they comply with their terms of service.


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