YouTube is about to air its first full-length feature film: a political documentary being shown coincidentally during election year in America.

No End In Sight is a documentary movie by director Charles Ferguson which has won many awards, including the Documentary Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

In Full On YouTube

The Academy Award nominee has now been announced as the first widely-released feature film to be screened in its entirety on video sharing site YouTube.

The film looks at the political decisions made before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq and America’s continuing occupation of the country.

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Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, an original series aimed to draw revenue for Google, was announced back in June. And it’s about to start.

No official start date for the Web video series from the creator of Family Guy was known in June when we previewed the series and discussed its innovative distribution model.

NewTeeVee now reports that the series is set to launch on September 10th. In advance of the launch, Burger King has set up a new YouTube channel, and has a trailer for the Cavalcade online.

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The BBC iPlayer continues to go from strength to strength. But the latest move is sure to annoy the already overstretched ISPs even more.

After last week’s announcement of new high quality streams using the H.264 video standard, the BBC has now announced the trialling of what is being called ’series stacking’.

Series Stacking

Series stacking means that rather than episodes of shows disappearing from the service after the usual seven days of being available, they will stay on the site for the duration of the entire series.

According to Brand Republic, the trials of series stacking will begin on September 13th with shows such as Merlin, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Little Dorrit, and Survivors.

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The Democratic National Convention begins today in Denver, and unless you’re a delegate you won’t be able to attend. But that’s no reason to miss the action as there is an abundance of ways to watch the coverage online.

The majority of us won’t be in attendance to see Barack Obama and newly announced running mate Joseph Biden set the stage for their run at the White House, but thanks to the power of Web TV, that no longer matters.

Watch The Democratic Convention Online

Last week, NewTeeVee compiled a list of the places to watch the Democratic National Convention on the Internet, and here they are for your perusal.

The Democrats, who seem to be embracing new technologies and the power of the Web much more than the Republicans, are airing the whole Convention at DemConvention.com. And even better, it’s all in glorious high definition.

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The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have now come to an end, with a spectacular closing ceremony ending the Chinese Games and handing the torch on to London 2012. But did the online coverage of the Games live up to the hype?

Certainly the Web portion of NBC’s offerings didn’t make as much money for the company as it would have liked. But whose fault was that?

$5.75 Million Revenue?

According to The Wall Street Journal, research firm eMarketer Inc estimates that NBCOlympics.com will have generated only about $5.75 million in video advertising revenue for the American television network.

We’ve spoken about video advertising and the difficulty in monetizing Web video a lot here on Web TV Wire, and that difficulty has seemed to rear its ugly head yet again for the Olympics.

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Video may be taking over the Internet but there are many people still unsure about Web video. Which is why this DVD could prove invaluable.

Although its hard for people who use Web video on a daily basis to believe, there are many Internet users who are completely in the dark about the power of Internet video and how to utilise it.

Learning The Ropes

While sites such as YouTube continue to grab viewers attention, the revolution that is Web video is still at quite an early stage and many Web users are still learning the ropes.

We’ve reviewed quite a few books intended to give a grounding for those people looking to move in to the world of Web video, and now we have a review of a DVD intended to do exactly the same thing.

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Stephanie Lenz is a tough woman. Not content with merely getting Universal to retract its unnecessary takedown notice over a YouTube video she uploaded, she went ahead and sued the, for it too.

Last month saw Universal Music, which had issued the DMCA notice over 30 seconds of a Prince song playing in the background of a baby dancing, claim that “fair use is infringing”.

Now, as discussed here by Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge, the judge in the case has refused to dismiss her lawsuit, essentially backing her claims that the clip was fair use, and should have been left alone.

Of Dancing Babies and Overzealous Takedowns: When “fair use is hard!” doesn’t cut it

Yesterday, a federal district court in San Jose refused to dismiss a suit brought against Universal Music for improperly demanding that YouTube remove a home video from its site.

In this case, Stephanie Lenz was sent a takedown notice for posting a home video on YouTube. Lenz had made a video of her toddler stumbling through her kitchen, then hearing and bobbing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” which was playing tinnily in the background on a countertop stereo. 

Despite the obvious fair use of the work, Universal sent a takedown notice to YouTube anyway. YouTube took the video down and notified Lenz that she had been accused of infringing copyright. After Lenz consulted a lawyer and issued a counter-notice, the video was put up again some six weeks later. After this, Lenz sued Universal.

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