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YouTube has just announced a new channel that truly deserves the overused adjective, "epic." It's called YouTube Space Lab, a partnership with Lenovo, Space Adventures, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Space Lab will allow students to submit a science experiment by video, and a panel of scientists and astronauts, including Professor Stephen Hawking, will pick the best submissions. The winners' experiments will be performed aboard the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the whole world.

For the past three years, I have been doing custom-made video screencasts for private consulting clients. These are moving captures of the images on a PC screen with my own voice-over narrations about IT-related products (you can see the entire collection here). And lately, more vendors have stepped up their own efforts to produce their videos as a way to explain what their products do, or as Mike Lee has said, what they might eventually do. There is also a growing awareness that these screencasts can be used as way of product documentation and support.

Let's talk about what tools you need, some best practices that I have gleaned, and some other places to learn more about this craft.

YouTube just announced that users can now edit videos from within the browser and save changes. The editing tool enables rotation, stabilization, brightness, contrast and temperature controls, as well as adjustment of the start and end points. It also offers several color effects, which the YouTube team developed in collaboration with Google-owned photo editing site Picnik.

Previously, if a YouTube user wanted to change a video, it had to be edited with other software and re-uploaded, meaning all the views, comments and links would be lost. Not only does built-in editing offer a much more convenient workflow, these basic features could probably replace outside video editing software altogether for everyday users.

The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), a group that represents hundreds of songwriters and music publishers, has backed out of four-year-old litigation against YouTube after reaching a settlement with the video-hosting giant.

The agreement, which the Google-owned video site struck with the NMPA and its subsidiary Harry Fox Agency, will allow music publishers and songwriters to start getting royalties from songs posted to YouTube, whether the post includes the original music video or a user-generated one.

Encoding.com has been around for the past several years, and they have yet another turnkey video encoding service called quick catchingly, Vid.ly. The product, which has been in beta since February, was announced today and so far has had more than five million video views already.

Experian Hitwise reports that YouTube just had its biggest month of traffic ever in the UK. In July, YouTube accounted for 1 in every 35 UK Internet visits, period. The boom in traffic is due to massive growth in mobile viewing.

Since January, mobile visits to YouTube have doubled in the UK. Hitwise estimates that smartphones and tablets account for as much as 10% of UK YouTube views. Across platforms, YouTube received 22.5% of UK visits to social networks, placing second after Facebook, which received more than half.

While YouTube dominates the online video space, a new entrant is trying to compete on price and features and may have an opportunity. Vidyard.com announced it is offering a wide array of features, including a choice of embedded players, social sharing and ad-free playback. There are several pricing plans announced on its site, including a free plan for a single video and some basic analytics and a $50 per month plan for unlimited videos.

We've already covered Wistia.com here, which offers somewhat similar services, including the ability to track originating IP addresses, and how much of any given video a viewer has actually seen. Wistia's monthly plans start at $79 per month. And there are certainly plenty of other choices for video hosting sites, including Vimeo which has both basic and plus accounts. For $60 per year for the latter, you get analytics and the ability to upload unlimited videos (the free account provides for a single weekly HD upload).

YouTube announced this morning that its three-year-old Promoted Videos advertising program has now shown one billion videos. That sounds pretty great for a website that was widely believed to be a giant black hole for bandwidth and money.

When viewed in context, though, it sounds a little less amazing. This spring the site announced that it is now showing viewers more than three billion videos every single day. So one billion views of promoted videos seems like a pebble tossed in a very big body of water.

Panopto announced updates today to Panopto Focus and Panopto Unison – tools used by educational institutions and enterprise customers for video and multimedia capture and management. The latest updates include full HD recording and archiving, remixing and editing content, search improvements, and integration with Twitter and Facebook.

You would expect that if anyone has gotten deeply into social media, it would be college admins. For the past several years, researchers from University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research let by Dr. Nora Barnes have looked at how quickly this adoption has happened, and their latest report shows almost total immersion. The researchers interviewed 456 college social network administrators from last November to May at all sizes and kinds of institutions.