Will Sullivan

Chris Ave, the genius behind the Politifact Song, has a new video for his song, "Copy Editor's Lament." Check out the all-star dance scene. - Will Sullivan

"Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, we've introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I'm deaf. Today, I'm in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions. Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages." - Will Sullivan

"Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage. The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites. Of course, news organizations will still be responsible for actually curating the content to ensure that it’s accurate, which is a task that will require additional manpower for the more popular news sites. All video content uploaded through these tools will be available on YouTube proper as well." - Will Sullivan

“The new fan experience involves Twitter and YouTube and has made the game story even more obsolete than it was five years ago,” says Jason McIntyre, founder of the blog The Big Lead. “I usually hunker down for the NFL on Sunday or College Football on Saturdays with the TV on two games and the computer by my side. Twitter is open. If you want to toss ESPN 360 into the mix, you can follow so many games at once it can become dizzying. The last thing you want to do is wake up the next morning and read a reaction to games and events that happened 12 hours ago.” - Will Sullivan

"Dasari said Web video's growth is being stifled by the lack of content available at Hulu and other sites. For example, there are only a handful of feature films available at Hulu. Crackle.com, Sony Pictures' Web service, only posts a fraction of its vast library of films on the Internet, but there's not another studio even offering that. So what? What does it mean if the studios hobble Hulu? Consumers have watched TV for over half a century. They can still go back there. Right? Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland, whose company tracks traffic on peer-to-peer sites--where most illegal file sharing occurs--told me recently that consumers are heading online for video entertainment and he doesn't expect them to return to their traditional viewing habits ever again. Garland's data shows that Hulu is the first legal Web service to snatch market share away from the pirate sites." - Will Sullivan