US President Barack Obama answered questions from YouTube users Monday in the latest embrace of cyberspace by a White House that has also launched Facebook and MySpace pages and Twitter and Flickr feeds.

The 40-minute event with the president, who relied heavily on the Internet during his election campaign, was live-streamed on the video-sharing site and the official White House website.

Thousands of YouTube users submitted more than 11,000 questions on a wide range of issues including jobs, the economy, health care, foreign policy, energy, the environment, education and financial and government reform.

YouTube users then voted for their favorite questions and some of the top vote-getting video questions were shown to Obama by Steve Grove, the head of news and politics at Google-owned YouTube.

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Thanks to The White House and YouTube News and Politics Editor Steve Grove, YouTube has the full, high-definition video presentation of the State of The Union Address President Barack Obama gave on Wednesday, January 27, 2010.

If you missed it, you can watch it right here on video without leaving this post: The speech was one of the greatest President Obama has made in history because it came at a time when he, and America, needed a great speech. Obama needed it to reset the course of his young presidency. The United States needed it to establish a vision of a possible, full employment economic recovery.

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YouTube recently announced its new partnership with the Sundance Film Festival to make five films available for online renting through the end of January. The idea for Google's YouTube movie rentals is an attempt to compete with rivals such as Netflix, iTunes and Xbox Live.

The five rentable movies so far are "The Cove," "Bass Ackwards," "One Too Many Mornings," "Homewrecker" and "Children of Invention." All of these movies are top audience favorites and world premieres. Despite YouTube's growing popularity for homemade videos, Ralph R. Frasca, professor of economics in the School of Business is skeptical of its movie rental success.

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Users in the United States will be able to view films from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance Film Festival on YouTube from tomorrow until Sunday, January 31

The Sundance Festival gives independent filmmakers a chance to show their work. Only a handful of the films showed at the festival are offered distribution deals which means we never see them. YouTube will now give these filmmakers a way of promoting their products and giving us a chance to view these films.

YouTube will charge viewers $3.99 (£2.50) each to view films over a 48-hour period. This will be a big boost for their revenue and an end to many discussions over paid-for feature films. Since Google bought the site in 2006 it has struggled to make a profit despite being the most popular video sharing site and reportedly serving over one billion views per day in September according to CEO Chad Hurley.

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When President Obama hits the airwaves Wednesday night to give his State of the Union address, YouTube viewers can do more than simply watch. According to YouTube, "this year's State of the Union speech will also make history." During the speech, those viewing the address on YouTube will be able to ask questions about the speech's content.

The address will be displayed on the company's Citizentube page, where people can submit questions via text or video. YouTube said that people will be able to continue to ask questions of the president for an additional few days, as well as vote for their favorite questions.

But here's the best part: next week, President Obama will answer the top-voted questions in a YouTube interview from the White House. It will be broadcast live on Citizentube. For now, YouTube hasn't provided an exact time or day when President Obama will answer the questions. It plans to make that information public when it irons out the details.

Indie filmmakers looking to YouTube as a possible new distribution outlet might want to think twice, based on weekend returns from the video site’s new movie rental service. Last week, the online video site teamed up with the Sundance Film Festival to make a small selection of critically acclaimed full-length films available for rent for 48 hours.

But, despite a post on the YouTube blog and pickup from various tech blogs, very few users have actually taken YouTube up on the offer. Based on a quick look through the movies that were made available, it appears that YouTube viewers rented the five films less than 1,500 times in total, or an average of 300 times each.

At $3.99 a piece, that means the indie films generated less than $6,000 in total sales over the course of the weekend, or about $1,200 per movie — and that’s before YouTube took its cut for hosting the files.Video     Views
Bass Ackwards     308.

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Alexei Dymovsky, the former police major who was fired after his videos against corruption appeared on YouTube, was arrested in his hometown of Novorossiisk on Friday. A local court sanctioned the arrest on the grounds that Dymovsky had put pressure on an investigator, local human rights campaigner Vadim Karastelyov said.

"During the hearing it turned out that he had supposedly threatened a law enforcement officer taking part in the criminal investigation," Karastelyov told Interfax. Dymovsky was dismissed from the police force after posting two online addresses last November in which he complained to Prime Minister Putin about rampant corruption in the police force. Last week, he was charged with fraud and abuse of office, and he faces up to six years in prison if convicted.

Karastelyov said Sunday that authorities refused to immediately hand over warm clothes brought to Dymovsky. "Today his lawyer brought clothes to the pretrial detention center, but according to their rules he will receive them only on Monday, Karastelyov told Ekho Moskvy radio. Temperatures in the Black Sea port stood at minus 8 degrees Celsius over the weekend, according to the Meteonovosti.ru web site.

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Popular video-sharing website YouTube is set to rent out a “small collection” of movies beginning with five films from last year’s and this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The video sharing website by Google will take another step towards becoming a full service online video outlet and include movies like.

The Cove, One Too Many Mornings, Homewrecker, Children of Invention and Bass Ackwards, which it will rent for $3.99 each, Contactmusic reported. However, they must be viewed within 48 hours of downloading. “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.

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Internet giant Google said Wednesday it would stream all the upcoming Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket matches live via its YouTube videosharing website.

Under the terms of the agreement, Google will have exclusive online rights for IPL content for two years and both Google and IPL will jointly share revenues from sponsorships and advertising.

"We are thrilled to have the IPL as our global partner," said Shailesh Rao, a senior manager of Google India, in a statement. "YouTube offers an open platform for sports and entertainment companies to take their content to a global audience and a great opportunity for advertisers."

The third edition of the popular Twenty20 tournament, featuring the world's top players in eight teams owned by rich businessmen and Bollywood stars, will be held from March to April this year. "This unique initiative by IPL to partner Google India will give the league a global reach on a single distribution platform," Lalit Modi, chairman of the IPL said in a statement.

Are you looking for a way to convert YouTube videos into MP3 or audio files? Well, the tiny youtube converter does just that.

Tiny Youtube Converter is free software that you can use to convert Youtube videos into audio files through a simple process; basically a fast and easy way to download MP3 music from youtube.

Tiny Youtube Converter is free and installs fast. Currently it is in beta and only works on Windows sytems (XP, Vista, and 7). This is the fastest and easiest way to turn Youtube videos into MP3 files, especially for those that aren’t particularly technologically savvy (like myself at times) and just want an easy to get something from Youtube onto their iPod, for example.