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YouTube Starts Selling Video Downloads

 

The site is allowing a select group of partners to offer their videos as free downloads or as paid downloads through Google Checkout.

 

By Thomas Claburn

InformationWeek

February 12, 2009 07:40 PM

 

YouTube on Thursday said it has begun testing free and paid video downloads, a move that promises to help Google monetize its vast inventory of long-tail content that isn't appealing to advertisers.

 

Last August, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt said his company was still figuring out how to make money with YouTube. By October, Google started to include e-commerce links with YouTube partner videos so that viewers could purchase related products.

 

 

Asterpix lets users interact with any video on the Internet Mashmaker allows developers to add a bit of JavaScript to any page and have that page automatically populated with appropriate widgets, making the page more useful for site visitors. Jean-Raymond Naveau, VP of product development with Stakeware, demos the company's "sustainability on demand" solution, which provides customers with insights on environmental, social, and other economic and business risks.

Jean-Raymond Naveau, VP of product development with Stakeware, demos the company's "sustainability on demand" solution, which provides customers with insights on environmental, social, and other economic and business risks.

Now viewers can purchase the actual videos as downloadable files.

 

YouTube is allowing a select group of partners to offer their videos as free downloads or as paid downloads through Google Checkout. Its partners have the ability to set prices -- a freedom iTunes content providers desperately want -- and to choose the license they want to apply to their videos.

 

YouTube has created a new My Purchases tab under the My Videos menu to help users keep track of videos that they've downloaded.

 

Free video downloads are now available from Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV. YouTube partners Khan Academy, Household Hacker, and Pogobat are selling videos through a link that says, "Download this video ($0.99)," just below the left side of videos in their archives.

 

Downloaded videos are in the MP4 format, which can easily be copied. This is likely to scare away major content providers. But in the absence of big-budget entertainment content, a healthy market for educational videos appears to be taking shape.

 

For YouTube users seeking to download content that hasn't yet been made available for download, there are already a large number of Web sites, like Vixy.net and Keepvid.com, that allow users to do just that. YouTube videos also can be downloaded using a browser bookmark.

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