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Last summer, YouTube embarked an ambitious film project of the sort that is only possible in the 21st century. They asked thousands of people all over the world to document their experiences on a single day and upload the footage.

The result, titled "Life in a Day," is a 90-minute film directed by Kevin Macdonald and produced by Ridley Scott. It documents human life on Earth for one day, insofar as such a thing is possible within a span of 90 minutes. The movie, which has already premiered at a few festivals, is now available in its entirety on YouTube.

When Netflix announced its plan last month to spin off its DVD rental business into a an entirely seperate subsidiary called Qwikster, customers were not pleased. The company's recent subscription price hike had already irked customers, causing about 1 million of them to quit the service.

Having heard those complaints loud and clear, the company has decided to axe Qwikster altogether and keep their DVD rental service as part of the Netflix brand. This summer's price hike will stay in place, but the company hopes to stop the slow exodous of customers by capitulating on the Qwikster issue, which had proved wildly unpopular.

DreamWorks Animation is betting big on the future of the Web's popularity for consuming premium video content. The major Hollywood animation studio has signed a deal with Netflix to stream its library of content exclusively to Netflix subscribers, the New York Times reported.

The deal, which covers such popular film series as Shrek and Madagascar is expected to net DreamWorks Animation $30 million per movie for the duration of the agreement. What makes this deal significant isn't so much its price tag or the content involved. Its significance lies in the fact that this is the first time such a major Hollywood content provider has inked a deal that skips over pay TV distribution in favor of the Web.

Earlier today, Dish Network CEO Joe Clayton made official what most observers already knew to be true: that the company would be launching a movie streaming service built on the remnants of Blockbuster, which Dish acquired in April.

What was less clear before today's press conference was exactly what the details would be. Those are now revealed, and as it turns out, what Dish and Blockbuster have planned is hardly the "Netflix killer" many predicted.

It's only been a few weeks since Netflix rolled out a price hike that irked customers and forced the company to revise its projected total subscribers for the year. Realizing he could have better communicated the change to subscribers, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings took to the company blog last night to say he's sorry and offer some candid insight into the company's intentions.

Hastings had barely finished apologizing before announcing another radical change: Netflix is spinning off its DVD-by-mail business into a new brand called Qwikster and running it separately from the streaming business, which will continue to be called Netflix. Qwikster, which will be run by company veteran Andy Rendich, will also now include video game rentals.

Television and movie-streaming service Hulu will be making its first move toward an international expansion soon when it launches in Japan, the company announced today.

The service will be subscription-only and will be available across multiple platforms and devices, as Hulu Plus is in the United States.

The new version of the Android Market promised by Google earlier this month has begun rolling out to Android 2.2+ devices in the wild. The first sightings of the updated mobile application were made by members of the XDA-Developers forum, who have already extracted the mobile application and made it available to others who just can't wait for the download.

In addition to a refreshed user interface, U.S. users will also be able to rent thousands of movies from their device and purchase e-books. These two moves in particular make Android a more competitive option to the Apple iPhone than it had been previously.

Netflix announced today that its movie streaming service will be available in 43 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America later this year. Members will be able to access Netflix.com in Spanish, Portuguese or English on a range of Netflix support devices. Interested users can leave their contact information with the company and receive reminders when the service is ready.

What does this mean for Netflix? Foremost, it is adding a huge new potential user base to its market demographic. Technology and content companies that do well in the era of Web 2.0 have significant sources of traffic in international markets, such as Facebook and Twitter which both have 70% or so of users overseas. The move will further cement Netflix as a go-to source for streaming content on the Web. With all the competition in that area, that will be huge for Netflix going forward.

Nearly 3,000 issues of the Hollywood trade magazine BoxOffice have been posted online for free. BoxOffice has been publishing movie news since its beginning in 1920 and continues today. The years 1920-1924, 1927 and 1933-1934 are still being digitized, while the rest are already available, according to the magazine, in a section of the site called The Vault.

"Each week we post five issues from our vast archive which covers everyone from John Barrymore to Drew Barrymore. (Before 1933, Boxoffice was published under different names in various parts of the U.S.)."

It appears that power users who "root" (take administrative control over) their Android devices will not have access to Google's newly launched movie rental service. The restriction has to do with "requirements related to copyright protection," according to this Android Market support article. Users with rooted devices will instead see an error message dubbed "error 49" when they attempt to play a movie.

So much for "open," laugh Android naysayers. Do you agree?