It was with great pleasure that we heard billionaire investor Warren Buffett enjoys hours and hours of YouTube watching his favorite videos.

The "Oracle of Omaha" also suggested that YouTube should be charging him "a lot of money" based on the enjoyment he gets from YouTube. We agree and are happy to announce a new subscription offering: YouTube Pro. Pro will be offered for a limited time at the low price of $100 million/year. We don't expect to sell many, but if Mr. Buffett wants to make sure he's paying his fair share, we take cash, credit and, for him, personal check.

There seem to be two schools of thought about business on the web today: "charge for everything" and "charge for nothing".

But maybe there really is no "charge for nothing" model. Maybe it's a facade. Perhaps Google is charging for YouTube, just not in dollars. They don't want your dollars, they want your information. They can get the dollars from advertisers. If you use enough Google services they basically know everything about you. What you like to watch, what you buy, where you are, where you work, when you work, etc.. That kind of targeting is worth... well, a lot of money.

Seriously cool piece of artwork. I had no idea that we'd tested that many nuclear bombs.

Kind of makes you never want to drive through Nevada and New Mexico again though.

This decision means that other user generated content services will not have to make the choice that YouTube had to make. Judge Stanton ruled that YouTube was operating within the framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which says that web services that have infringing material in them must respond to take down notices but do not have to proactively weed out their services of all infringing material.

This is a huge victory for entrepreneurs and the web. I am ecstatic.

I kind of wanted Viacom to win this one. As much as I love YouTube, and as big a proponent I am of the safe harbor provisions set forth by the DMCA, YouTube took it too far. 

The reality is that YouTube didn't get to be #1 as quickly as it did by letting people upload videos of their cats. For a few years YouTube was the place to go for network television and other pirated content that they didn't have the rights to. They operated with impunity. I remember watching full episodes of The Daily Show, South Park, and The Colbert Report. It was this content, not lonleygirl15, that launched YouTube into the #1 spot. 

I'm not sure what Fred Wilson means by, "... a huge victory entrepreneurs and the web." How is this a victory? You can hide behind a safe harbor law to build an empire off of the hard work of others? At least half of the $1.6 billion they ended up selling for was value created through piracy. That's not a win in my book.

That is the most bullish signal about investing in the Internet that I have seen this year. If you include audio over the Internet (what radio becomes) and video over the Internet (what TV and cable become) in the Internet line, then I bet Internet will someday be over two-thirds of the ad spend.

I really like reading things by smart people who, quite simply, "get it." Fred Wilson is one of those people, and his comment on the future of ad spending is spot on.

As Internet video explodes the :30 TV spot that costs a fortune is going to become something of a rare commodity. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now agencies that focus on creating TV spots are considered niche. Web video is about to shoot through the roof. Google TV, Boxee, the [next] Apple TV. The cable box is about to die. Good riddance.

What the hell is Skype doing? They finally added group video chat (only 6 years after iChat) and they are going to charge a premium for it?

Group video calling is just one in a set of new premium features you’ll see us roll out during 2010. We haven’t set prices for these premium features yet, but rest assured that we’re still absolutely committed to bringing you free voice and two-way video calling.

My response when I first read this: LOLWUT?

iChat offered this six years ago, and with higher quality. Tokbox offers this for free, via the browser, on every platform, for free. What kind of a business model is this? Try to charge people for a service when there are other, better, alternatives for free? Are they just trying to dupe grandma out of her money?

I understand that Skype has a very paradoxical business problem (if everyone uses Skype, they make no money because Skype-to-Skype calls are free), but this is not the solution. This is just retarded. 

And they can't even release the Mac version in-step with the Windows version? Failure.

Two posts featuring videos form College Humor back to back? There was a time when I wouldn't even visit the site. Before they started down the road of original content their site was garbage. Their original productions are carrying the site and just getting better and better; I'm not sure why they bother with anything else. The rest of their site is still terrible.

But this video... this video is awesome. Watch. LOL. Repeat. Share.

This is really old, but slipped by me somehow. That is, I've never seen it. Given it's awesomeness (and the obscene amounts of time I spend on the interwebs) that's pretty rare.

So awesome.

HTML5 has the potential to capture the online video market from Flash by providing an open standard for web video — but only if everyone can agree on a codec. So far Adobe and Microsoft support H.264 because of the video quality, while Mozilla has been backing Ogg Theora because it's open source. Now it looks like Google might be able to end the squabble by making the VP8 codec it bought from On2 Technologies open source and giving everyone what they want: high-quality encoding that also happens to be open. Sure, Chrome and Firefox will support it. But can Google get Safari and IE on board?

If true, this would be awesome EPIC. I kind of suspected this might happen after the On2 acquisition. I figured that Google probably wanted to get away from the aging VP3 codec that YouTube was built on, and it just didn't make sense to pay the insane licensing costs for VP6—they could just buy On2—and then they did.

And while H.264 is great, it isn't the best for streaming (cost wise), especially when YouTube is serving over a billion videos per day. VP6 is, in many ways, superior. If VP8 is everything that On2 claims it is, it should be no contest.

This is so fucking great: an HTML5 video player by Jilion with beautiful playback controls, click-to-play control over automatic buffering, full-window playback with gorgeous animated transitions, and more. Works great in Safari, MobileSafari, and Chrome; Firefox support is in the works. Oh, and if you’re using a current WebKit Nightly build: full-screen playback. Seriously, this is the real deal — full-screen H.264 playback with no Flash, no browser plugins, full iPhone OS support, and sane CPU usage, better in every single regard than any video player ever made with Flash.

Apparently Steve Jobs once said,

People think it's this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

I do believe that this HTML5 video player by the good people over at Jilion is a great example of how that line of thinking can create exceptional products on the web. It's really amazing how quickly HTML5 is being pushed as a standard. The rise of WebKit on mobile devices made by Apple and Google has pretty much made HTML5 a standard overnight, at least in North America. If you have a look at this report from AdMob, you'll see why.

iPhone and Android now account for 81% of all page requests on mobile devices in the North America. The vast majority of mobile web usage now happens on HTML5-enabled devices. Once RIM releases a WebKit-based browser for the BlackBerry OS, that statistic will jump to over 91%.

For better or for worse, the W3C has become irrelevant. Apple and Google now decide what the standards are. Hopefully the open source nature of WebKit and the Chromium Project will prevent an Apple/Google oligopoly over the web that results in the kind of standards that Microsoft once imposed upon the world with Internet Explorer. Hopefully.

We're rolling out a new beta test today: the HTML5 player!

What's the HTML5 player, you ask? Simply put, it's an alternative to our current Flash player that looks and works almost exactly the same way.

First YouTube, now Vimeo. It's only January. Mark my words, by the end of the year most of the video on the Internet will be playable without Flash. Two or three years from now we may be looking at an Internet population with a much smaller Flash install base. What will happen to rich media when it no longer has the ability to reach the majority? I don't know, but I kind of like the idea of death to rich media.

The one thing I can envision happening that would add long term viability to Flash is it being open sourced. Maybe then we'll get a Flash runtime on Mac and Linux that doesn't peg CPU utilization at 100% when watching a 480p video. Unfortunately, the codebase for the Flash runtime is probably so piss poor that it isn't even worth the time trying to optimize.