ReadWriteWeb

YouTube announced today that it is adding around 3,000 movie titles available to rent on demand for users in the United States, confirming rumors from late April that said Google's video service was looking to partner with major and independent studios to rollout premium content.

YouTube is also bolstering its investment in content with its 20,000-plus partners. Through YouTube Next the platform is attempting to grow original content by bolstering YouTubeNextUp and following up on past projects like Partner Grants that helped fund content creators. YouTube is available on 350 million devices with two billion views a day.

As a tech journalist who travels a lot, I often find myself sitting next to someone at the airport or on an airplane who wants my advice on whether they should buy an iPad or which apps they should download. (Note to self: start carrying print books again in lieu of gadgets to avoid these sorts of conversations.) Lately, when it comes to showcasing the iPad's wow-factor, I've shown people Showyou.

The video-browsing app launched last month to great praise, much of it comparing Showyou's reinvention of consuming videos on the iPad to Flipboard's reinvention of consuming blogs, tweets, and RSS feeds. The enthusiasm for the app doesn't just come from the tech press. Since its launch, Showyou says it's already fetched over 10 million videos from its users' Facebook and Twitter feeds, and the startup says that users watch, on average, more than 4 videos every time they open the app.

When the news was leaked last fall that Yahoo was planning on "sunsetting" the bookmarking service Delicious, you could hear the hearts of a million geeks breaking. As ReadWriteWeb co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote in a lovely requiem to the site, "R.I.P. Delicious. You Were So Beautiful To Me."

For its part, Yahoo later clarified that "sunsetting" didn't mean "killing." It meant selling. And today we now know who the buyers are: YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

According to a report from the Hollywood-tracking news outlet The Wrap, Google's YouTube will soon be expanding its on-demand movie rental service to include mainstream Holloywood films. Major movie studios including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers and Universal are all said to be on board, as are a number of independent studios.

The sources cited by The Wrap are "movie executives with knowledge of the deals," but YouTube itself said it would not comment on rumor and speculation.

Last week, Google notified owners of video content on Google Video that the site would be officially shuttered, giving them what felt like very short notice on its closure. Effective April 29, videos would no longer be available for playback, and users had until May 13 to download content.

Although Google Video hasn't allowed uploads since 2009, the site still contains almost 3 million videos according to Google Operating Systems. Many users complained that Google had made no easy way to port content over to YouTube.

On Friday, Google announced that it was making some adjustments to its plans. It's eliminating the April 29 deadline. Furthermore, it's working on a way to automatically migrate videos to YouTube.

YouTube is announcing this afternoon that all videos uploaded to the site are now saved in WebM format, as well as other supported formats including Adobe Flash. 30% of the YouTube archives, making up 99% of the views, is now available in WebM as well and the full archives are being put in the new format as we speak.

WebM is a format that many different companies have been working on, in an effort to create a way to show and view videos that is better suited for the web than Flash and is royalty free. Firefox added support for the format last month and Internet Explorer announced a plug-in that would add WebM support. Google and Opera also offer browser support for WebM. Where's Safari? Google added WebM support to Android's Gingerbread version in December.

Long before Google acquired YouTube, it had its own rival video service, aptly titled Google Video. True, Google Video never had the viral power of YouTube, but it was a place where you could upload video content that was longer than YouTube's 5 minute limit. And even though the site hasn't allowed uploads since 2009, there's still a lot of content there - some 2.8 million videos, according to Google Operating System.

Google Video became a video search engine rather than a storage and sharing site, but now it's official: it's shutting down. Effective April 29, videos will no longer be available for playback. If you've uploaded files there, you have until May 13 to download your content.

Yesterday, YouTube redesigned its copyright help center to help educate its users about the ins and outs of copyright law. Copyright law can be complicated and, in light of that, the site now sends offenders to the YouTube Copyright School where they can watch explanatory cartoons in an experience that our own Audrey Watters isn't too sure arrives at education.

If you agree, then you might want to get in on YouTube's next effort - a Q&A with legal experts it will be holding on the video site at the beginning of May.

YouTube has long had to battle complaints and lawsuits - most often from record labels and film studios - that the video-sharing site is awash in copyright infringements. YouTube does take measures to pull content when an infringement claim is made, and it has had a longstanding policy to ban users who repeatedly post videos that violate copyright.

But in YouTube's words, "copyright law can be complicated," and so rather than just banning without recourse or reform, the service has redesigned its copyright help center and made a few changes to its policy.

Things keep changing at YouTube and today the site announced the launch of YouTube Live, a portal to highlight the live video streams of trusted user accounts. "The goal is to provide thousands of partners with the capability to live stream from their channels in the months ahead," the company said today. "In order to ensure a great live stream viewing experience, we'll roll this offering out incrementally over time."

It's not a surprise to see YouTube go live, it's just a surprise to see it happen so soon. We've spoken with participants who have been testing the program for months and we'd heard that it wasn't going to launch for some time. We've also heard that the technology and user experience for publishers is excellent.