Microsoft announced at the annual E3 video game show in Los Angeles that it plans to allow users of Kinect motion-sensing device to control live television feeds, search YouTube and play action games with voice commands. Users in the US will be able to access live TV programs via Xbox starting next year. At present Microsoft offers live TV services in Britain, France and Australia.

YouTube videos are now served in WebM format as reported by James Zern, Software Engineer, on the company blog. Now the vide site is transcoding all new videos into the WebM format, as well as other supported formats, which include MPEG4, 3GPP, MOV, AVI, MPEGPS, WMV, and FLV. In the announcement, YouTube says they are working to transcode the rest of the YouTube catalog.

YouTube has launched a new feature to its video editing tool to improve movements on the users’ footages. The video streaming site has announced an image stabilizer and a 3D tool this week. Earlier last year YouTube introduced its cloud-based video editor with basic feature aimed satisfy “majority of people’s video editing needs”. Now users have extended features with a stabilizer. You Tube writes in its blog post: “Ever shoot a shaky video that’s so jittery, it’s actually hard to watch?

Google’s unit YouTube is launching a new educational initiative to help content creators improve their skills. Known as the YouTube Creator Institute the training center is created in association with the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and Columbia College Chicago’s Television Department.

OpenDNS, a provider of DNS-based security and infrastructure services, has recently published a new report that revealed that social media websites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube were treated reversely by corporations and people responsible for networks. These websites appeared both in "top blacklisted" and "top whitelisted" lists compiled for 2010.

Adobe's John Nack wrote in a recent blog post that the new version of Flash Player (10.2) will be up-to ten times more efficient than previous versions. The new product comes with a number of upgraded features including mouse cursor options for developers, full-screen playback support for multiple monitors, and IE9 rendering support.

Irina Slutsky wrote in the postings on the AdvertisingAge that YouTube is preparing new ad units that can be skipped by users. The website will roll out a new option called TrueView over the next few weeks which will "give viewers a choice of three different ads to watch. Users can also skip the ad altogether and the advertiser isn't charged." The new tweak will please both marketers and YouTube viewers. The marketers will have to worry less about annoying people and/or getting ignored, while viewers will be able to decide what sort of experience suits them best.

Transparency Report has been released by Google at the end of the last week. The report reflects how many requests for data governments across the globe have made. Between January and June this year, the US government made 4,287 requests for data on the search engine's users. Same time, the UK government made 1,343 requests.

As reported by the Financial Times, YouTube video-sharing website is accelerating its negotiations with Hollywood movie makers over a global pay-as-you-go video service that could be launched by the end of the year. According to the sources familiar with the matter the new service will likely be first launched in the United States, followed by other countries over time. Google and YouTube "talked about how many people they could steer to this ... it's a huge number," the newspaper quoted an executive with knowledge of the plans as saying.

As it became known YouTube is now planning to boost the maximum upload length to 15 minutes, giving the site’s millions of amateur directors a bit more leg room.  It’s well known, for years YouTube has enabled its users to upload as many videos as they wanted, but no more than 10 minutes in length, unless user was not part of one of YouTube’s special partner programs.

 Americans do not like Facebook! This conclusion can be drawn from the recent merican Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report, produced in partnership with ForeSee Results. Facebook scored 64 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale, which puts its satisfaction even lower than IRS e-filers. This puts Facebook in the bottom 5% of all measured private sector companies and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction. 

Good news for YouTube lovers, the company has recently announced support for videos that are to be shown on 25-foot screens. That means YouTube now supports a resolution known as "4K", used   in movie theaters or when whole walls are used as televisions. To underline the difference, it’s important to say, 4K is nearly four times the size of 1080p.

This week YouTube has unveiled a new version its YouTube Mobile website (m.youtube.com) specially meant for HTML5-capable browsers such as the iPhone's Safari and those on Android-based phones. "[The update] incorporates the features and functionality you've come to expect from the .com site, like search query suggestions, the options to create playlists, the ability to designate 'favorite,' 'like' or 'unlike' videos directly from your device," YouTube product manager Andrey Doronichev writes in a introductory blog post.

Twitter users can enjoy now with their custom-made playlists created with iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm, YouTube, We Are Hunted, Winamp, Rhapsody, Soundcloud, or even if simply scribbled list of favorite tracks in a notepad file. 

As it became known, Sunday, hackers attacked Google's ultra-popular video sharing site YouTube, exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. Thus, the section suffered mostly appeared to be the section where users post comments. This malicious attack compromised YouTube cookies of users who visited a compromised page, but it couldn't be used to access their Google accounts.