[Robert Popper]

The Toyota recall of their vehicles following reports of sticking accelerators, while obviously a very serious issue raising grave concerns over safety, has also been good for a few laughs, too. For example, the unofficial Viz Top Tops account on Twitter has provided plenty in recent days:

• SPEEDING MOTORISTS – just put a Toyota badge on your car.
• PETROL HEADS – fool your neighbours into thinking you own a Toyota by driving at 80mph into the side of their house.
  
• WATCH OUT! The car behind is a Toyota.

Meanwhile, Toyota jumped on the new-fangled media bandwagon of pleading for forgiveness via the medium of YouTube. Director of operations in Blighty, Jon Williams, stares the camera down as if it spilt his pint, failing to realise that apologies look less convincing if you force yourself not to blink throughout. If you still haven’t found time to watch four and a half minutes of a global corporation apologising and pronouncing Toyota as Ter-rurta, here’s a quick summary:

• We’ve really quite sorry, but hey, everything’s ok. My family drives a Toyota so what’s to worry aobut, eh?
• Apart from there’s a chance it’ll kill you! Wahhhh!
• Here’s the science part – concentrate. Your accelerator pedal is screwed. There we are.
• New parts for your cars will begin arriving next week.
• If you don’t contact us willingly, we will utilise the DVLA to hunt you down like the dogs you are.
• The repair takes just thirty minutes and it’s free of charge for all Toyota owners. Assuming you live that long.
• Again, we’re really sorry. Sorry. Cheers.

In a bid to ensure the service does more than create minor celebrities out of performing animals and fat lads dressed as characters from Tron, YouTube is considering introducing a subscription service so the site can carry more material from TV and film studios.

The site is already offering some full-length programmes alongside the several million Downfall parodies available, but many companies are resistant to offering too many releases for fear of cannibalising their own revenue streams through net and DVD sales – advertising revenue wouldn’t come close to replacing the amounts currently earned. Other options being considered by YouTube include variations of monthly subscription models and film rentals similar to iTunes.

It’s clearly a direction YouTube want to move in – YouTube XL was launched in June, which exists solely to provide a television-standard experience for viewers. While it’s miles behind YouTube in terms of users, Hulu has come from practically nowhere to claim second place as the most-watched video site in the US – and it’s running full-length programming with its advertising inventory sold out. Still no word on a UK launch date, though. Bah.

[Reuters]

Now watching thousands of hours of Time Team on your computer has become a little easier thanks a link-up between YouTube and Channel 4. The broadcaster is among the names who will be providing content for the video-hosting site’s new shows section which has just launched.

YouTube say they have 60 partners in the new section’s launch, also including Baywatch, Dead Ringers and ITN News. Dead Ringers eh? Great. Thankfully full episodes of the likes of The Inbetweeners, Brass Eye and the almost-forgotten Absolutely are there as well.

Naysayers will say ‘nay’ to the launch, what with them being naysayers and that, pointing out that the stuff is already available on Channel 4’s 4OD but how many of us spend hours surfing around YouTube then buggering off to 4OD because we’ve got an uncontrollable urge to watch an old episode of Drop The Dead Donkey? Eh? None, that’s how many.

Someone from YouTube said something about partnerships and content and generating new revenues and that but we’re not going to bother. Instead we’re going to embed the ‘Crime’ episode of Brass Eye for you all to watch underneath this story.
Ah, we can’t. Bugger.

YouTube certainly provides us with enough material for posts when we’re otherwise too busy playing Wild Turkey Twister in the office. And three years on since Google grabbed the service for £1 billion, it’s now serving over a billion views a day. That’s good news isn’t it? Without YouTube, we’d have had to do some proper work and four million pairs of eyeballs would have been denied the literal version of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart.

And so on Friday, YouTube briefly snatched back a scrap of faded glory as a game-changing digital darling, what with one billion being such a massively enormous number and all that. But is it enough? Do the big numbers translate into profit? Probably not. A well-publicised post from earlier in the year put YouTubes daily loses at around £1 million. The New York Times last week reported that YouTube are finally get their act together concerning textural advertising appearing alongside copyrighted material using their Content ID system, but the major music labels said potential profits “do not come close to making up for the overall decline in music sales.” But then they say that about everything that doesn’t come in a box and is sold in HMV, and YouTube are hardly the root of the cause.

So if YouTube aren’t making money, and copyright holders aren’t seeing much for their troubles (except for the PRS, perhaps), what about the users? YouTube highlights the likes of Michael Buckley, whose What The Buck? celebrity nozzlefest is reported to make him over £60,000 a year. But for every such queen in a tie who’s been locked in a cupboard full of Sunny D all day, there’ll be thousands of users making next to nothing.

There have been massive digital media deals that have worked out – Facebook is now in profit, so why can’t YouTube do the same? Facebook can be monetised in a more contextual and influential way because users must be registered; it’s difficult for YouTube to profit from a video that goes viral and is seen by a million random and potentially anonymous users in a week, while lumbered with the costs of serving the content regardless.

As vital a service as the internet considers it, if YouTube doesn’t make enough money to even cover the costs of operations, it won’t survive. But let’s not worry about it for now, and enjoy YouTube’s own efforts with this, the very first video uploaded to the service. We’d pay to learn such amazing facts about elephants, and you most certainly would too – as it is, right now they’re effectively paying for you watch it:

* obviously 1 billion skateboarding cats is entirely wrong, because it’s a reference to the number of views a day, not the number of said cats on YouTube.

Poor YouTube. There it is, a global phenomena and one of the world’s biggest brands, yet it still can’t find a way to monetise its service beyond buttons; there’s a distinct chance it’d earn more busking on the underground, or by submitting the videos to You’ve Been Framed. But today’s release of YouTube XL is perhaps a doff of the hat to its future intentions.

XL is like YouTube, only bigger. Well, not quite. The service is all about quality, not quantity, because YouTube XL delivers an interface optimised for television screens. Most of the features of the usual site have been stripped out to provide a menu that reminds you of an EPG, a DVD menu, or the BBC iPlayer for that matter. While the quality of the content won’t improve, HD material is becoming prevalent on YouTube, so assuming your ISP provider doesn’t throttle the living daylights out of your connection, then you’ll be able to easily navigate your way through high quality content on a larger screen.

So where’s the money in it for YouTube? As internet connection speeds have increased, a gradual migration of online video from computer to television has begun, in terms of content and presentation. American platform Hulu is likely to launch in the UK this Autumn, but whereas YouTube offers user generated content of limited length, Hulu will offer popular full-length television shows in high quality. XL doesn’t feel like an exciting proposition right now, but if a deal can be struck to begin delivering high quality content similar to Hulu, then a platform optimised for television screens makes far more sense.

The original Pandora, accidentally streaming all evil into her face.

So earlier this year both Pandora and YouTube shut down music-streaming operations to the UK following the continual and rabid hassle from the Performing Rights Society over them owing considerable (but as yet unknown) royalties to the (as yet unpublished) artists they represent.

In the face of such undefined yet constant claims for recompense we have undergone a considerable decrease in the amount of access we have to both streaming services.

However, the PRS have just cut the cost of streaming a song from 0.22p to 0.085p, because in their words: “We believe these new streaming rates will stimulate growth in the digital music market and will benefit our licensees and our members.”

Presumably they’ve just clocked that some revenue is better than nothing at all. Perhaps they’ve realised such services don’t give a jizz about their earlier demands. YouTube and Pandora have not commented thus far, but I’m supposing that the PRS hopes the price cut means they can re-instigate full service to the UK.

[BBC News]

Not so long ago, Project Kangaroo was set to revolutionise British digital media. It was a video-on-demand service that would have combined the not-inconsiderable forces (and back catalogues) of BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4. Unfortunately, the Office of Fair Trading had other ideas; concerned that such a platform would squash the competition like puny ants, the OFT referred the project to the Competition Commission – a Kangaroo court, if you will – who blocked further progress.

In the three months since that ruling, Hulu has set about filling the void. They’re massive news in the US right now, and have been for some time; unlike YouTube, which has so far failed to monetise its service, Hulu (which is backed by Disney and NBC Universal) has found its feet by providing high quality content from current television networks and archive shows, all for free. To be fair, the two are very different services at the moment, though YouTube are scrambling to launch a similar VoD platform.

But Hulu are already ahead. According to The Telegraph, the company is in negotiations with the former Kangaroo services to provide content for their online service in the UK – currently the site is only available to US users. As well as streaming programmes from these three providers, Hulu would also mean access to over 3,000 hours’ worth of American shows. Yee-haw.

If the various parties can come together in time, expect another super VoD service in your life to rival the iPlayer – Hulu is aiming for a UK launch in September.

[The Telegraph]

It gives us no pleasure whatsoever to announce the biggest tech failure of the past decade belongs to Microsoft.

Hey, it’s nothing to do with us – if you want to have a pop at some two-bit, half-arsed Windows haters who couldn’t write their way out of a colouring book, leave us out of it and take it up with that other bunch of amateurs – TIME Magazine.

In their article “The 10 Biggest tech Failures of the Past Decade”, Windows Vista rocks in at top spot, and rightly so:

“According to research site Net Applications, as of last month Vista’s global share of PC operating systems was less than 24%. Windows XP had 62% of the market and Apple’s (AAPL) OS X product had over 9%.”

Of course, it’s not only Microsoft that has screwed up in the last ten years – the finger can be pointed at plenty of other causes, although we should warn you that some BW readers will go apoplectic over the list that follows:

Gateway

HD DVD

Vonage

YouTube

Sirius XM

Microsoft Zune

Palm

Iridium

Segway

We don’t tend to think off YouTube as a failure, partly because it’sso rich in content and so widely linked to, however “Credit Suisse estimate that YouTube will lose $470 million this year primarily due to the costs of the storage and bandwidth required to run the website” meaning that the video hosting site “would have to triple its revenue just to break even.”

And oh look, there’s Microsoft. Again.

[TIME]

She sounds like God’s vocal coach, and she’s had 75 million video views on YouTube. And Britain’s ITV has amassed ad revenues of exactly £0 from Susan Boyle’s angelic rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” on Britain’s Got Talent. The Times is reporting that ITV wanted to include pre-roll advertisements, and YouTube insisted on overlay and text ads. The result has been along the lines of “Potato, po-tah-to, let’s call the whole thing off.”

By some estimates, revenues of a million pounds have been lost. Views will likely drop off as the world awaits Boyle’s next performance, and who knows whether it will attract anything like as much attention. YouTube certainly had the ability to include pre-roll ads, and ITV could have allowed overlay ads while the details were hammered out. But no.

And now you can’t embed Boyle’s YouTube video, further quashing the distribution of the sensation. If only YouTube and ITV had mothers someone could call to report this childish behavior.

So what happens when you catch members of your kitchen staff sticking food in their orifices and farting on the sliced meats? Well, you sack them, obviously. And then, at the prompting of your PR agency who realise what a skull-meltingly catastrophic PR disaster this could be, you have the president of the company apologise to the whole world.

And if you’re the local sheriff, you get your 15 minutes of fame by issuing arrest warrants and hauling the guilty pair in for breaking sanitation laws.

So in response to the YouTube video of Dominos employees adding extra toppings not found on the menu, company President Patrick Doyle has filmed his own. He may be mad as hell, but he can’t look you in the eye while talking, so either he’s only apologising to just one customer seated off-camera, or he’s hiding something even bigger than snot on your large Sizzler:

[Consumerist]

To quote Douglas Adams:

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Adams would have adored Twitter. Not only has it proved its worth in breaking major news stories before media organisations have time to think, but bad news can now traverse the globe in nano-seconds.

So on Monday, when two employees at a franchise of Dominos Pizza decided to film their hilarious food preparation etiquette and then post to YouTube, it took no time at all for the link to be re-tweeted around the world. By yesterday, they were already sacked.

And it may have been a franchise in Hicksville, North Carolina, but the world will just see the Dominos logo and question how much extra “protein” their food might have. Dominos PR people, start earning your crust:

I haven’t sent a Christmas card in six or seven years now, though not because of environmental concerns or because I was an early adopter of e-cards. In fact I’m just a miserable old sod with few friends and no desire to wish any of them compliments of the season.

Don’t let my terminal loneliness and bitter hostility towards Yuletide tradition sway your feelings on the matter. If you’ve been meaning to wish goodwill to all men but haven’t got around to sending your cards yet, YouTube offer a fun twist on the e-card. Select a suitably festive YouTube video (or record your own and upload it), choose a seasonal background, write your message and send it to friends. Voila! Rapping Santas and kittens wearing reindeer antlers, all with hilarious consequences.