Of course, there are thousands of commercial videos on YouTube where producers did not ask for written consent from the company before posting these videos, and, according to Mediaweek, YouTube has only contacted a very small number of these though the service is clearly trying to signal that it is not happy with the current situation. While YouTube is only notifying a small number of content owners, some producers complain that YouTube will not promote their videos if they include product placements.

YouTube, which dominates the online video market, is one of the most important outlets for most content producers, and YouTube has every interest in keeping its most prolific talent on the service. At the same time, though, YouTube is also bleeding a good amount of money every single day.

According to Mediaweek, YouTube will soon announce a more formal process for integrating commercial videos that integrates their own ads and product placements.

In the meantime, YouTube now also offers a new 'automatic caption timing' feature for all new uploads that makes it easier to add captions manually. You simply upload a text file with a transcript of the video and Google's speech recognition technology will figure out when those words are spoken and create captions based on this information.

YouTube's speech recognition technology is based on the same speech-to-text algorithms that transcribe voicemails in Google Voice. You can also translate these captions into 51 languages.

As expected, these captions aren't always perfect, but work surprisingly well on the videos that we have seen so far.

If you want to have a look at how these captions work, have a look at one of the videos in the UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and Google & YouTube channels.

We are not quite sure how, exactly, ESPN will bring its own player to YouTube and whether this means that ESPN will continue to host its content and ads on its own servers. We asked YouTube about the details of this arrangement and will update this post once/if we get an answer.

Google has generally shied away from doing pre-roll ads on YouTube and argued that they did not perform well on the service, but given the current economic climate and the pressure on YouTube to actually make a profit at some point, it would seem that Disney and ESPN were able to convince YouTube to give pre-roll ads a try.

For the time being, these ads are only available in the U.S. and in English, though Google plans to launch them in other regions and languages as well.

Google has obviously struggled to turn YouTube into a profitable business unit. Taking YouTube ads out of the YouTube silo could help Google to win over more advertisers and give current advertisers more reasons to buy ads on YouTube.

YouTube goes out of its way to state that this move has nothing to do with the record labels. Patrick Walker, YouTube's Director of Video Partnerships, Europe, Middle East and Africa, lays the full blame on PRS for Music - and PRS, of course, blames Google for being too greedy. Walker, however, also says that the negotiations continue, so we might just see a solution in the near future. For now, however, users will have to resort to illegally uploaded videos if they want to watch music videos on YouTube in the UK.

The most popular videos on YouTube this year were a bunch of major label music videos - not the user generated content the site would like to be known for. Ultimately there's plenty of room for both, but let's get our story straight.

Both lists are fun to watch - even if the mega-classic Shoes was somehow not included on either. (I mean, "these lists SUCK.") I suppose to be fair, Shoes was a 2006er - as was Dick in a Box, but do any of the videos below come close to the awesomeness of either of those videos?

Some video producers have found innovative ways of using YouTube's annotations feature, but often, they are only a distraction, and a lot of videos are simply better without them. Interestingly, YouTube acknowledged this in its announcement today and YouTube makes it pretty easy to turn annotations off altogether. Just go to your 'Account Settings' and look for the Annotations settings (obviously, you have to be logged in to YouTube for this to work).

While YouTube added Adsense recently, with embeds, comes a different form of advertising; you can now control annotations, look at captions, and even search for other videos directly, regardless on where they are posted.

How does it work?

Advertisements appear on the bottom 20 percent of the screen (see image below) and last for about ten seconds, apparently the time recommended for maximum engagement. You can see it in action on Lisa Nova Live.

Image: Monetized YouTube embeds on Lisa Nova site

An interesting function that they've included is the ability to scroll though advertisements, and while we're not quite sure who would want to do that advertisers seem keen: you can now click through directly to the advertisers site.

Google certainly seems to be making an effort to monetize YouTube; adding Adsense yesterday, monetized embeds today, you have to wonder what's coming tomorrow.

What do you think?

So what's this all about? It seems that, in the coming weeks, YouTube plans to launch a brand-new user interface for their Channels section and if you click the secret link, you can be a part of the group that helps test it and provide feedback.

Here's the message that displays:

The new Channels section lets you edit your Channel within your channel. Using buttons at the top of the screen, you can change "Settings," "Themes and Colors," and "Modules." Previously, this type of editing had to be done on a separate page. Also, an "edit" button appears within different sections of the page, letting you further customize those particular parts.

Here's what the current Channels section looks like:

Here's the new Channels beta:

YouTube has also set up a "secret" blog which they'll use to communicate with the beta testers. You can follow the blog here: http://youtube-channels-beta.blogspot.com. There, you can leave bug reports, requests, and other feedback in the comments section.

After watching quite a few of the performers, we know that (unlike with American Idol hopefuls), this crew really knows their stuff. Under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, all signs point to the concert being a treat. Plus, it is an unprecedented opportunity for talented musicians from all over the world to meet each other and their mentors - as well as being a resume highlight once it is complete.

Stay tuned for the grand finale, the Symphony Orchestra performance at Carnegie Hall. We are certain it will look (and sound) amazing when broadcast via YouTube HD.

Many Senators and Representatives already have their own YouTube channels, and these two new sites aggregate the content from these. Over time, we hope to see more elected officials on YouTube, though we also hope to see more than just clips from local TV news shows.

One trend we noticed on a lot of these pages, however, was that quite a few Senators and Representatives decided not to allow comments on their videos. We would hope that more of our elected officials would value comments from their constituents.

Senate and House in HD

We do, however, commend Congress for using YouTube's new HD capabilities (even though some of the material in the intro video looks like it was shot with substandard cameras).

House vs. Househub

On a lighter note, the announcement on YouTube's blog links to this page, instead of the new page for the U.S. House of Representatives. You decide which one you find more interesting.

OpenCongress

If you don't want video, but hard facts about Congress, we recommend OpenCongress, which aggregates information about the details of business on Capitol Hills.

Warner Will Sell its Own Ads and Get a Custom Player

Judging from the announcement, it is clear that the Google Content ID system (which was just integrated with YouTube's stats package earlier this week) was a major factor in bringing Warner back to YouTube. It's also important to note that Warner will sell its own advertising inventory. Thanks to this, as Billboard's Antony Bruno points out, Warner will be able to set its own prices and keep the majority of the ad revenue, even though it will share revenue with YouTube. Bruno also notes that YouTube will create a branded player and custom artist-channels for Warner's content and that Warner hopes to include more commerce and social networking features in this player.

Currently, the stats package does lack a few important metrics such as search engine referral information, being able to tell where users bail on a video, and general link referral info. Chan did seem to indicate that referral information would be available at some point, though.

According to Chan, Insight turns YouTube into "one of the world's largest focus groups." What it really does, though, is add another piece of the puzzle for YouTube to become what Google wants it to be: the place where all the world's videos are stored. We reported a couple of weeks ago on additions to YouTube's API that will enable YouTube to become more like a content delivery network (think: Akamai or Limelight for videos of your cat). As YouTube says, they are now "an open, general purpose, video services platform, available for use by just about any third-party website, desktop application, or consumer device." Adding detailed video stats simply makes YouTube that much more attractive to use as a video host.

Why Shouldn't They Use YouTube?

YouTube is not a public service but a commercial enterprise. Google might, one day, decided to just shut it down, and take its archive with it. One might argue that this is unlikely, but it could happen.

A stronger argument against favoring YouTube, however, is that it does look like preferential treatment of a service that is already close to being a monopoly. Given that services like TubeMogul make it incredibly easy to post videos to a large variety of online video services, there is really no excuse for government officials to only post videos to YouTube except for being ignorant about the alternatives.

As for the new Congress sites, even though this is a bipartisan effort, it would still be in the government's best interest to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Google after all is a major donor to the Obama campaign.

No Ads - But Lots of Status

Also, while Google doesn't directly profit from these government videos (at least we haven't seen any ads on these videos yet), it does turn YouTube into even more of a household name and extends its status as the de-facto video sharing site.

Host Videos In-House?

Congress and the White House probably have enough in-house technical know-how to host their own videos or put their videos on a white-label site. While we commend the members of Congress who put their own videos on YouTube, we would also like to see them use Vimeo, Viddler, blip.tv, and others.

On the other hand, though, YouTube is where the audience is, so putting videos on there makes perfect sense, but we would argue that it shouldn't be the only place to find videos of our elected officials.