Video

YouTube made a brief reappearance in Pakistan yesterday after a three-month absence.

The video-sharing service, which was blocked by that country's government in September, was available to Internet users in Pakistan for somewhere between three minutes and three hours on Saturday, depending on which media outlet one believes. The ban on the site, which has been blocked since refusing to pull a clip that mocks the prophet Muhammad, was lifted then reinstated after it was found to still host "blasphemous" content.

YouTube was blocked in Pakistan on September 17 after the Middle East erupted in protests in … Read more

Netflix has doubled the compensation package CEO Reed Hastings will receive in 2013 over the current year, the streaming and video rental company revealed today in a regulatory filing.

Hastings will receive $2 million in salary and another $2 million in compensation through stock options, according to a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The increase is a significant pay bump over 2012, when Hastings received $500,000 in salary and $1.5 million in stock options.

The compensation increase would seem to represent renewed confidence in Hastings, whose stock option allowance was reduced in December … Read more

VP9, the successor to Google's VP8 video compression technology at the center of a techno-political controversy, has made its first appearance outside Google's walls.

Google has built VP9 support into Chrome, though only in an early-stage version of the browser for developers. In another change, it also added support for the new Opus audio compression technology that's got the potential to improve voice communications and music streaming on the Internet.

VP9 and Opus are codecs, technology used to encode streams of data into compressed form then decode them later, enabling efficient use of limited network or storage … Read more

Your TV may be smart, but you're not making the most of that talent.

Facebook, Twitter, online shopping, Web browsing -- they're simply not getting much screen time on Internet-enabled TVs, according to a new report from NPD. It seems consumers prefer to engage in those activities on other devices.

"In general, these have failed to resonate with the audience, not least because there are better platforms, such as the PC, tablet, or smartphone, for such services," NPD's John Buffone wrote in a blog post today. "The one saving grace to date has been … Read more

Netflix will get "social features" that will allow users to share their viewed movies online, according to a report by Talking Points Memo.

Netflix has long wanted users to link their video accounts with Facebook and other social networks, but has been prevented from doing so because of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bars company from disclosing information such as video rentals. An amendment to that law passed on Friday allows digital, as opposed to written, permission from users and thus makes it easier for Netflix to move forward with its social plans.

CNET contacted Netflix for … Read more

Netflix's video streaming service suffered a Christmas Eve outage on "many but not all devices" across the Americas, according to the company.

The outage continued into Christmas morning for some customers. The company tweeted on its Netflix US account at 8:45 a.m. PT today that the service was "back to normal streaming levels."

Netflix first started responding to tweets about disrupted service before 1 p.m. PT yesterday. About three hours later, Netflix offered an apology on its main Twitter account.

"We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers … Read more

The wildly popular "Gangnam Style" music video by Psy has gone where no YouTube video has gone before.

Earlier today, the official video surged past 1 billion views, making it the first clip on the site to ever hit that mark, and the latest in a long line of feats for the popular video.

Last month, "Gangnam Style" surpassed pop star Justin Bieber's "Baby" video to become the most popular YouTube upload of all time. Bieber's video, which at the time had 805 million views, was beaten in just five months. As … Read more

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has asked his corporate overlords for twice as much cash as last year to fund the company's growth strategy, a new report claims.

Kilar has petitioned Hulu owners Walt Disney, Comcast, and News Corp. for $200 million for 2013 to be used for acquiring more programming and expanding the company's reach around the world, the Wall Street Journal is reporting today, citing people who claim to have knowledge of the talks. Last year, Kilar asked for about half of that figure.

According to the Journal's sources, a decision hasn't been made yet … Read more

Fun, fun, fun!

That's what digital movies, music, and books are supposed to be about. But for the people who create and sell the stuff, it's been all crumbs, crumbs, crumbs.

The past year was another tough one for the sale of entertainment media on the Web. The irony is that as more entertainment fare is sold online, the less profitable the businesses become.

Few, if any, online music services are profitable. In Web movie distribution, download sales are dismal. Even Netflix, the Web's top video rental service, saw a slow down in the rate it added … Read more