The Internet Archive will be using Kaltura's open source video platform in order to deliver the 500,000 some odd digital video assets housed at the Internet Archive. Kaltura's video player identifies whether a device and browser supports Flash or HTML5 and will deliver the content accordingly.

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The Internet Archive's deployment follows another recent project undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also uses Kaltura to power its video content.

The use of Kaltura's video player matches both of these organization's commitment to making sure content is easily accessible. Videos on Archive.org can now be viewed on the iPhone and iPad, as well as all standard browsers that support HTML5.

This also means that the videos will be more accessible to hearing impaired and multilingual users as the Kaltura video tools support the HTML5 standard for timed text - making it easier for video subtitles to be viewed across browser and device tytpes.

"It was clear to us that we must support both Flash and HTML5 in order to deliver content to all devices" says Tracey Jaquith, Digital Archivist and Video Lead at Internet Archive. Indeed, although more and more video content is now in HTML5 format, this large catalog of videos from the Internet Archive is a prime indication of the amount of material that is still available in Flash only.

That being said, mobile video continues to see substantial increases in viewership, up over 41% from last year and more than 100% since 2009. Internet video streaming is also on the rise.

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Shifting Consumption Patterns Among Younger Generations?

Even though Americans are consuming more video content across multiple devices, the Nielsen report does point to some interesting demographic differences in media consumption - something that definitely suggests that even though traditional TV viewership remains strong, that is likely to change.

Until the fall of 2010, Nielsen found that typically the heaviest media consumers did so across all platforms - mobile, streaming, television. But there is now a new sector that defies that pattern - a group that watches little TV but streams significantly more Internet video. Nielsen says that this is being led by the age 18-45 demographic, a group that is "significant but small." About 20% of this group spends 27 minutes per day watching streaming video online. Just as importantly, this particular group watches the least amount of traditional TV.

Nielsen says that as people age, they do spend more time watching television. But it remains to be seen as to whether or not traditional TV viewership will be the media that we turn to as we grow older.

That being said, mobile video continues to see substantial increases in viewership, up over 41% from last year and more than 100% since 2009. Internet video streaming is also on the rise.

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Shifting Consumption Patterns Among Younger Generations?

Even though Americans are consuming more video content across multiple devices, the Nielsen report does point to some interesting demographic differences in media consumption - something that definitely suggests that even though traditional TV viewership remains strong, that is likely to change.

Until the fall of 2010, Nielsen found that typically the heaviest media consumers did so across all platforms - mobile, streaming, television. But there is now a new sector that defies that pattern - a group that watches little TV but streams significantly more Internet video. Nielsen says that this is being led by the age 18-45 demographic, a group that is "significant but small." About 20% of this group spends 27 minutes per day watching streaming video online. Just as importantly, this particular group watches the least amount of traditional TV.

Nielsen says that as people age, they do spend more time watching television. But it remains to be seen as to whether or not traditional TV viewership will be the media that we turn to as we grow older.

The Web version is similar to the iPad and iPhone app. You can scroll through and view the videos that are in your social streams - shared by you and your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, YouTube network and so on.

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The browser-based version lacks the rich browsing experience that you get with the iPad touchscreen version. You can arrow up and down your stream, but it's not quite the same.

But with the other new features added today, having a Web version makes a lot of sense. There's now a bookmarklet that will let you share videos from YouToube, Vimeo, and TEDTalks to ShowYou, as well as to Twitter or Facebook.

Even better, you now have the option to "Watch It Later." As you're browsing the app (or the Web if you're using the bookmarklet), you can flag videos by pushing the + sign icon. You can then keep a list of videos to watch later - when you're at another device, perhaps, or when you have a better network connection.

Resizing video has become more annoying as more people watch on mobile screens of varying sizes, but apparently Google Research has been working on a fix. Today Google Research announced an algorithm for resizing videos that will preserve the width to heighth ratio for "salient" images while squishing and stretching the "non-salient" parts of the shot.

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Six frames demonstrating Google's retargeting algorithm. Original frame is shown on the left, the resized result on the right.

"Think of salient content as actors, faces, or structured objects, where the viewer anticipates specific, important details to perceive it as being correct and unaltered. We cannot change this content beyond uniform scaling without it being noticeable. On the other hand, non-salient content, such as sky, water or a blurry out-of-focus background can be squished or stretched without changing the overall appearance or the viewer noticing a dramatic change," Google researchers said.

The technique was developed with researchers from Georgia Tech. It's called "discontinuous seam carving" because it divides the salient and non-salient regions of the image with irregular chains of pixels, or "seams." The algorithm preserves the aspect ratio for important parts of the image in each frame and minimizes distortion to the non-important parts, so distortion in the resized version is not as obvious to the viewer.

The algorithm processes the video sequentially, frame-by-frame, so it could theoretically be used for streaming video more faithfully to the variously-shaped screens on PCs, mobile devices and the upcoming Google TV box.

The new method is novel and appears to solve some of the problems with resizing video, but it's got a long way to go before Google integrates it with YouTube. The researchers noted that the algorithm does not always recognized the correct parts of the frame as salient, so they built an interface that allows the user to correct the saliency by highlighting parts of the frame - but it's hard to picture how this could be incorporated without disrupting the video-watching experience.

Also the algorithm doesn't always work for fast action sequences or artsier scenes that have too much or too little salient content. "In these cases, just like other approaches, our video retargeting might produce unsatisfactory results," the researchers said.

Read about the algorithm in more detail in this paper.

Google is positioning itself as an Internet TV platform, despite not offering a hardware component like Apple TV and Microsoft Mediaroom. Instead, Google has partnered with electronics giant Sony on the hardware side. Google TV launches in the fall inside a new line of Sony TVs, so let's look at what we can expect to see.

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In May, Sony announced a special television that will have Google TV integrated. Called the Sony Internet TV, it will be sold in Best Buy stores in the U.S. this fall. In announcing its alliance with Google, Sony noted that the two companies will also look "to establish new forms of cloud-based user experiences."

The partnership is very much a win-win. Google gets to launch its software on probably the most well known TV brand. Meanwhile Sony clearly hopes to get a jump on its hardware rivals, attempting to create the next generation of television on the back of Google's platform.

Android Developer Platform For TV

As noted above, Google TV is built on the Android OS. It will also rely heavily on Google's Chrome browser, which will be very similar to the computer version of Chrome.

The developer platform is the crucial part of Google TV. It shows that Google is serious about wanting to innovate and change the way television is consumed (and perhaps in turn produced). This quote from the Google Blog in May is key to understanding what Google is aiming for: "your TV becomes more than a TV -- it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more."

When Google TV launches inside the new Sony TVs, Google will release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV. This will enable developers to build applications, which will then be distributed through Android Market from "early 2011." Already Google is working with selected partners, so expect to see initial application offerings in fall of this year.

Google's developer website for Google TV is currently focused on how content providers should optimize for TV. The site both states the obvious ("content is king") and offers solid practical advice for Internet TV developers ("sound is now a viable interface element").

Clicker: The Type of App We Will See

So what kind of applications can we expect from Google TV? Perhaps an indicator of what's to come is an app that we've reviewed on ReadWriteWeb several times: Clicker. Billed as a "TV Guide for the Internet" when it launched in November, Clicker is essentially a browser-based portal for your TV. Clicker enables you to search for online TV programs, subscribe to them, watch them inside the site, and more. It also has an iPhone app, but Clicker will really come into its own when used on the likes of Google TV.

Clicker was one of the feature third party apps at Google's May I/O, where Google TV was announced. At the event, Clicker launched Clicker.tv - an HTML5-based interface for Clicker, optimized for the "10-foot viewing experience" on a TV. While this is not an example of an Android-based app (it's basically an enhanced web site), Clicker will likely be one of the first third party apps off the block when Google TV apps become available in the Android Store in early 2011.

What other types of apps do you expect to be built off the Google TV platform?

The youngster, be he lucky or brilliant, has indicated he might want to transition to the American scene at some time in the near future. With all the media attention he and his service have received and the explosion of traffic - and monetization potential - on his site, his application further opens the can of worms we've been discussing tonight: Where's the best place to raise your startup?

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In December 2009, Chatroulette had 500 users. Today, just four months later, the site sees 1.5 million daily visitors. That statistic alone is enough to inspire investors to beat down the door of its creator, Russian high school student Andrey Ternovskiy.

But what's much more interesting to many is the mechanics of the site itself. "It's video 4chan. Unbeatable formula," said Muhammad Saleem, considered by many to be an excellent authority on engineering virality. Others have called it "brilliant," "the purest form" of the Internet and its userbase, and "a great way to kill time," one of the most common uses of the social web.

I've frequently described it as a box of game pieces with no rules. Users are invited to create any kind of experience they choose given a simple set of constraints. It's inherently viral, addictive, imaginative and essentially human.

Here's the rub: The site is currently unfinanced and non-commercial. The site's creator, a teenaged school kid, has been placed at the crux of nationalistic, capitalistic and technological debates by being asked to choose between Russian financing and a yellow brick road to Silicon Valley. According to one site, the Russian investors involved are seeking to "break the American hegemony in cyberspace - an ambitious plan, particularly as the United States is home to many of the market leaders in the Internet economy.

"The combined value of Google, Microsoft and Facebook amounts to roughly $500 billion, or about a third of the Russian economy's annual output. So if Russia - which has more than 50 million Internet users and boasts one of the fastest-growing markets - hopes to catch up, then it will need to keep talents like Ternovskiy at home."

The Russian investors who have contacted Ternovskiy also invest in Facebook and Zynga; clearly, they have an eye for social virality and profit and see a great deal of potential in Chatroulette. But Ternovskiy, a longtime hacker, dreams of founding a Silicon Valley startup of his own.

Will this young man reinforce the American idiom of Silicon Valley by relocating his seemingly overnight success to the Bay Area? Or will he prove that the startup economy is truly becoming global by accepting Russian financing and remaining in north Moscow?

A more interesting question: Can Ternovskiy sustain this wild success? Or has he simply become lucky with Chatroulette? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

Today, the video site announced it's launching youtu.be links. They're not as short as the super-brief URLs users might see from Bit.ly or is.gd because each one contains a unique ID for the video it links to. But this extra bit of information makes the URLs more useful for developers, too.

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While the resulting URLs aren't significantly shorter than a regular YouTube link, users will have the added benefit of knowing exactly what kind of content they're being redirected to, which isn't always the case with many shortened URLs.

Also, with the video ID as part of the short URL, writes YouTube engineering manager Vijay Karunamurthy, "developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly or track how a video is spreading in real time."

End users can shorten links manually simply by putting the video ID (the part of the YouTube URL that comes after the equals sign and before the ampersand, if there is one) after http://youtu.be/. For example, "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acVM7_rWw4" is the regular URL of an interview we did over the summer with a great startup advisor in Boulder, CO. The short version of that link would be "http://youtu.be/1acVM7_rWw4".

Or, for those copy/paste-averse folks among us, links will be automatically shortened when broadcast thought the site's sharing mechanisms.

This means that those amazing, high-definition videos you uploaded last year will now finally be converted to their original resolutions and will finally look as good as they do on your desktop. The new resolution represents a significant improvement over the current 720p maximum resolution, which leaves all those glorious, pirated segments of old movies tragically blurred and pixelated.

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The fine folks at YouTube cited increased resolutions on consumer video recording devices as the impetus for the improvement.

Here's YouTube's example of a 360p image:

If you're not uploading videos from your phone, however, you're probably looking at something like YouTube's current HD setting, 720p:

And, by way of comparison, this is the new maximum resolution YouTube HD videos will have:

Those images are from YouTube. Why they chose a dog's muzzle, we may never know. But we're awfully grateful for the resolution improvements.

Also, users are specifically encouraged to upload videos that will showcase the capabilities of the new hotness that is 1080p resolution. YouTube engineer Billy Biggs tells users in the related blog post, "Be creative and choose subjects that really show off the beauty of your camera. We will run the best examples on our homepage in a future spotlight."

While it'll be nice to see our own classic jams restored to their original awesomeness, it will also be interesting to see professionally produced videos now appearing in better HD. Well done, YouTube, and thanks for allocating the resources.

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Orb is a desktop software program that facilitates streaming of personal media over the internet. Once installed and configured, you can access your home computer's content library from any internet-connected device. The software easily achieves what many other technology companies are still figuring out how to do - make your media available anywhere and everywhere on any device you use with minimal effort on your part.

One of Orb's best features is the OrbLive iPhone application which connects with your home computer over the internet to provide access to your media library of audio, video, and photos. Through the mobile application, you can access any of your media files and play stream them over either a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. In the Windows version of the software, PC's with TV tuner cards can also connect you to live, streaming TV in addition to the other shared media saved on the PC's hard drive.

To some extent, Orb competes with Apple's own offerings since it provides access to music and video from either a desktop computer or an iPhone. That's why it was somewhat surprising that Apple ever approved the company's iPhone application to begin with. Even more surprising is that they allowed it to function over 3G when similar products - like Slingbox's SlingPlayer for iPhone, another live TV streaming app - are restricted to Wi-Fi only.

No Live TV for Mac Users Yet

Unfortunately, the Mac version is debuting without the live TV streaming functionality. According to Joe Costello, CEO of Orb Networks, support for live TV support will be added in subsequent versions. In the meantime, however, Mac users can install the Orb software to stream music, photos, videos, home movies and webcam feeds stored in iTunes to their iPhones or to any other internet-connected device including netbooks, notebooks, media players, game consoles and more. All that's needed is the new Mac OS X desktop software (works on OS X Intel 10.5 or later).

Those interested in trying out the new Mac version can grab the installer from here: orb.com/en/download_orb. For now, the Mac software is available in English only.