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Viacom vs YouTube - Part II

     The clash of these two titans continue. After Viacom demanded that YouTube remove all the content it owns from the site just last month, it has come out swinging again. This time Viacom has filed a copyright lawsuit against Google, the owner of YouTube, for a $1 billion compensation.
     This is the first time any media company has launched a frontal attack against Google and it would interesting to see the outcome of this development.

Presidential webvideo campaigns

     The era of YouTube has already had an indelible influence on politics. Just ask George Allen. This fact is not lost on the 2008 Whitehouse aspirants either. This presidential campaign will probably be the first one where webvideos will play a prominent part.
     With the exception of Rudy Giuliani and to some extent Sen. Brownback, all the front runners have a video section on their campaign websites. Both Democratic and Republican Candidates are unanimous in their choice of YouTube . Also Sen. Obama and Sen. Brownback atleast one thing in common - both use Brightcove to host their video/s.

* - DEMOCRATIC Candidates - *

Barack Obama


Hillary Clinton


John Edwards


Bill Richardson


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*- REPUBLICAN Candidates-*

John McCain
This is probably the best of the bunch. A very slick site in monochromatic tones and extensive use of web videos.



Mitt Romney


Sam Brownback - The only video on the site - announcing his candidacy.



     On a related note - There is now an interactive web-video forum called Fora.tv, dedicated to the topics of current Political, Social and Cultural issues. This is a very interesting effort by founder & CEO Brian Gruber. The site features various channels, with content derived from sources such as Brookings Institution, Hoover Institution, Cato institute and C-SPAN to name the few.

Travel Video Resources

This is past-post update.
     In my earlier post, I had profiled two travel websites - Travelistic and TurnHere. (TurnHere has since morphed from an exclusive travel video site to a professional internet video service provider that now caters to a wide variety of businesses).
     Recently I chanced upon another interesting travel video site called the GeoBeats. Geobeats hosts free professionally produced short videos on international destinations, highlighting its history, culture, cuisine, shopping, nightlife and other aspects of interest. These short videos usually feature a host who gives a guided tour of the place.
     Geobeats also provides its own convenient downloadable video player that has all the videos from the site. All you have to do is just select the destination and the topic to be visually transported to that exotic place.
   Featured video of the day - "Jail Hotel" in Lucerne, Switzerland.


     Other useful video resources are the websites of popular travel channels on TV such as Lonely Planet and National Geographic.
* Lonely planet has a dedicated video site that features video clips from its own shows and also allows the users to upload their videos into any of its six channels.
* National Geographic has a video section with clips exclusively from its own TV shows. Check out the tab under "People and Places" for high quality videos from places both ancient and modern.


For many more video sites - Click Here