New series Viralcom takes Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s theory of viral video one step further into a fully fledged viral video machine.

The series comes from Warner Brother’s Studio 2.0 and takes a look behind the scenes at the web’s hottest “User Generated Content” studio for an exclusive look at the “real” viral video industry: a digital Hollywood where the A-listers are celebs (Chris Crocker and the Chocolate Rain guy make an appearance), and where favorite YouTube classics are professionally produced.

Promo above and the first two episodes below the fold for those interested.

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Very few would argue with the statement that video is hot right now. From the cultural phenomenon of YouTube, through to the rise of live streaming services, money is pouring into startups from content creators through to service providers. Getting into video isn’t as easy as setting up a blog, so here’s some advice of which direction to head in.

The basics

Obviously you’ll need a camera to get started in video; if you’re a Mac user you might have a cam built in, but if not web cam’s are fairly cheap. Alternatively people like Chris Pirillo stream from a professional video camera, but even a second hand older model can also work, for both live and recorded shows to computer. For camera effects, CamTwist for the Mac is free and fully featured with effects such as text, clocks, image overlays, Picture in Picture, and much more. Fix8 (our coverage here) offers cartoon style overlays if animation or funny faces are more your thing.

Recording

You’ll have two ways of recording a video: local or to the web. Local could directly on to a camcorder through to Quicktime or something in-between. Quicktime Pro (around $45) does the recording and it’s a quick and easy solution. To the web means recording your video directly to a website; the advantages are that you don’t have to upload it and it’s available immediately, however depending on your internet connection the recording quality can be significantly poorer than recording a video locally and uploading it. YouTube offers the direct recording option and is an obvious candidate, but the Live streaming services also allow you to record to their services and even distribute your video out to sites like YouTube later. I’ve also found that the quality of the live stream services can often be higher in recording than YouTube.

Streaming Live

Live in the newest sector in online video with venture capital being spread around a range of services. Live offers some advantages over doing recorded video alone (although they are not mutually exclusive); streaming live means you can interact with and network with your audience while creating archive footage than can be distributed later. Companies in this space include Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, Mogulus, BlogTV, Stickam and others. All of the services have strengths and weaknesses and you should explore each one, but if you haven’t got time for that I’d recommend Justin.tv or Ustream.tv. Ustream.tv is attracting the professional, higher quality streaming shows so if you want to be in that space, you’ll be well positioned. Their tool set including full video conversion makes for a solid product. Justin.tv has a slant towards a younger, Gen Y audience, and if you’re pitching more to that audience it’s the better place to be. I also found when testing both that Justin.tv was more reliable for streaming quality from outside of the United States, and at times Ustream.tv was unusable for me, even on a 14mb down, 1mb up ADSL2 connection; you wouldn’t experience this in the US however. Of the others, Mogulus has a stronger emphasis on professional video and doesn’t have the strong community yet, BlogTV has a lot of potential, and Stickam seems to be dominated by soft porn, at least when I visited it.

Distribution

I asked Chris Pirillo for some tips for this post and one of his key points was simply: “you must understand that (a) It’s all about YouTube, and (b) It’s all about YouTube.” Like it or not YouTube dominates online video today more than Google dominates search in the United States. Other video bloggers I’ve spoken to suggest distribution to many sites, but always making sure YouTube is top of the list. TubeMogul is one the oldest of the video distribution sites, and is simple to use and free. You upload your video to their servers, enter you user name and password for a list of sites (first time only) then press the button and off they go. TubeMogul also tracks traffic statistics from each site so you can see which videos are being watched there. An alternative service is Hey!Spread (our review here).

The other consideration in distribution is getting your video onto other devices, like iPods. The key is to provide the correct file type and feed for services such as iTunes. You can do it manually with a WordPress plugin and by making sure the file is available on your server in the correct format, or you can use Blip.tv.

We’ve covered the occasional content deal on Blip.tv but we’ve never seriously looked at their distribution platform, and it’s the reason shows like Rocketboom, Mahalo Daily and Moblogic are using Blip.tv. On top of the obvious video hosting everyone in this space provides, Blip.tv also offers distribution to external blogs (including an automatic option), the Internet Archive, de.licio.us (links), Flickr (pics from the video), Adobe Media Player, MySpace, Twitter (text alerts), Facebook, Yahoo Video, AOL Video, Akimbo, Lycos Mix, MeeVee, MeFeedia, Meebo, Blinkx, Splashcast, Pando and the most important one of all: iTunes. Blip.tv offers an iTunes subscription feed and file conversion service; users do have to manually go to the dashboard within Blip.tv and request the file conversion on a free account, but with a premium account ($8/ mth or $80/ yr) get the conversion done automatically. A premium account also has other benefits, such as priority file transcoding that in my testing made it the quickest service available (that is time from when the video was uploaded until it was ready to view).

There was an argument between Ze Frank and Rocketboom a year or two back where Ze Frank disputed Rocketboom’s viewer numbers as they were reporting 10x the traffic of Ze’s The Show. The key to Rocketboom’s success has always been distribution, and for a long time you couldn’t open a media player without seeing Rocketboom pre-loaded. Distribution is key, and combining services like TubeMogul and Blip.tv make it a lot easier.

Content

Chris Pirillo told me that the key is to make sure every video has something different, and that you should use supportive text with each video posted as Google loves text. Ultimately what you decide to create is up to you: it may be something simple like a web cam chat, or you may want to get more creative. We cant tell you what will work for you, but the easiest way to start is to get on YouTube and just see what different people are doing, you’re sure to find something to inspire you.

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Youtube has announced that their Partner Program is expanding to include Japan, Austrailia, and Ireland. It was previously only available to users in Canada, the UK, and the United States. The program is designed to reward Youtube’s most prolific and popular video providers with portions of the ad revenues gained from their videos.

Since December, when it was first made available to all users, the program has paid out more than $1 million to these partners. YouTube first announced a pilot of the program last May, which was offered only to handpicked members of the YouTube community. Now, all users from the aforementioned countries are welcome to apply, but they must still be approved by Youtube based on their popularity and history following the site’s TOS.

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YouTube has quietly launch a new layout on video pages with a new tab focused layout and video statistics (pic above).

The first change in the consolidation of Share, Favorites, Playlists and Flag into a dedicated tab driven box. The share tab expands out to give a more extensive range of sharing options which includes social bookmarking and voting sites (notably including Mixx), the ability to post a video to a blog, and send to the friend via email.

Commentary (comments and video responses) is now offered in a tab next to “Statistics and Info.” Statistics provided are video honors (YouTube awards) and video referrals. It would appear that users can hide site referral statistics but they are turned on by default, at least for existing videos hosted on YouTube.

There’s nothing to not like about the new layout and features and most will welcome the change.

(thanks to Rahul Kumar for the tip)

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Flickr users can now add video clips alongside their photos, a much requested and much anticipated feature that has been promised for over a year. The puppet version of Shel Israel graciously kicked things off for us by announcing the new feature in the Flickr Video below.

The product is not a YouTube clone by any means. The Flickr team, led by Director of Product Management Kakul Srivastava, spent considerable time debating the feature set and user experience internally before launch.

The goal is not to have people upload long videos or clips of copyrighted material. To reinforce that, videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size (however these limitations may be changed later, Srivastava says).

In a phone prebriefing, I was very critical of the length limitation. But the team then brought me in for a demo and I was sold. The short clips are a perfect compliment to event photos, in my opinion.

Videos are treated the same way as photos and are placed alongside those photos in albums and the main stream. Videos can also be tagged in the same way as photos.

The video player itself is extremely clean, so videos look like photos on pages that include them. Videos can also be embedded, of course, as we’ve done above.

Another great feature is the ability to play the videos from the thumbnail screens as well as the permanent page for the video.

Flickr video also differentiates itself from YouTube by only allowing pro users upload videos (it costs $25/yr for a pro membership), although both free and pro users will be able to view videos. As with photos, videos can be made public or private. They can also be shared/embedded individually or as part of sets.

Other standard Flickr features are also available for video: tagging and geotagging, search by tags and descriptions, and uploads directly from camera phones.

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Pandora.TV, South Korea’s largest user generated video site, is expanding into new markets with additional language support and features.

Pandora.TV launched in 2004 and has grown to become the “YouTube of Korea,” ranking as the countries 24th most popular site according to Alexa (comScore data is not available) with 20 million monthly unique visitors, 2.5 billion monthly page views with 2.5 million hosted videos. Notably the company has taken $16 million over two rounds from Altos Ventures and DCM, said to be the largest foreign investment made in a Korean internet startup.

Pandora.TV offers a mix of YouTube style videos and Live streaming. Like YouTube, videos can be embedded, voted upon and comments left on each page. A key selling point is unlimited video storage.

As of today Pandora.TV is now available in English, Chinese, Japanese as well as its native Korean. New features rolled out with the international expansion include HD quality video playback (H.264 codec support), multiple video upload (up to 5 files simultaneously), unlimited category creation and site widgets. Pandora.TV has also claimed cross-browser support as a new feature, however the Live Streaming service requires a download to view and stream that is only available to Windows users.

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The victim of an alleged rape that made worldwide headlines after footage was posted to YouTube, has been arrested on suspicion of underage sex and perverting the course of justice after it was discovered that the rape was fake.

According to The Register, the 24-year-old mother was arrested on March 28 and released on bail. The alleged rapists, aged 14 and 16, are now unlikely to face charges.

The video led to calls for YouTube to manually check all videos being uploaded to the site, with British MPs targeting YouTube over the incident. Adam Price MP said following the initial outrage that the video “surely shows [YouTube’s] system is completely inadequate.” The fake rape video had 600 views before being pulled by Google.

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A few weeks ago YouTube released a more powerful set of APIs that allow web developers to create services that upload, watch, search, and comment on videos remotely.

Magnify, the video channel service recently focused on social networking, has been hustling to be the first to implement these APIs. What they’ve come up with is a widget called VidyUp (like gitty up, get it?).

Site owners can place the VidyUp widget on their pages to solicit videos from visitors. For example, we could use it here on TechCrunch if we wanted to hold a video contest. Instead of telling everyone to upload their videos directly to YouTube then send us the links via email, we could just embed a VidyUp widget and all videos uploaded through it would be handled in the appropriate manner (emailed to us, added to a particular page, etc).

All in all, it’s actually a decent little widget, although I’m sure just being the first to build something with the APIs was Magnify’s primary goal. The company says it won’t try to monetize the widget, but if site owners get a lot of use out of it, they will be able to turn their visitors’ uploaded videos into a full-fledged Magnify channel.

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If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.

YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video. We’ll see if YouTube.com does the same at midnight EST tonight, too.

This is ok, but not nearly as funny as it would be if the YouTube team broke into the Google search servers and simply redirected Google.com to the video. Now that would be funny.

More coverage of this here.

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Who says nothing good comes from getting deadpooled?

Blake Machado was the winner of a YouTube announcement contest we held a couple weeks back. He was the first to guess correctly that YouTube would come out with some new APIs to spread its influence over the web. The prize was an iPod shuffle.

Turns out YouTube’s announcement was particularly poignant for Blake given his connection to the previous deadpooled Stage6. As he revealed to us after winning:

Ironically guessing/winning this is bitter-sweet. I was the PM of
Stage6 and this is an area where we had planned to beat YouTube to the
punch and gain some, hopefully, extremely positive results. We would
have as it was scheduled for Feb. release — oh well.

So how’d we comfort him in his time of need? Etched a reminder of that deadpooling into his “consolation” prize, of course. You’re welcome, Blake.

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