When YouTube unveiled the ability to upload and stream 720p video last year, it started off a bit slow, which is to be expected, with only 1% of the uploaded videos taking advantage of it. But now that number is approaching 10%, so YouTube has announced that it will increase the maximum resolution of videos to 1080p.

Awesome news yes? The company is vowing to let users stream video that looks as good or better than the source quality. According to YouTube Director of Product Management Hunter Walk, the company is re-encoding all the 1080p videos that have been uploaded over the past year, and they’re about halfway through already.

Everybody is crazy about 3D. It’s all the rage and we’re happy about that. We truly are. Just as long as we don’t have to wear those dorky glasses. Looks like YouTube is even getting in on the action, working on 3D videos so that you can see stuff like Keyboard Cat in glorious 3D.

YouTube is testing out 3D videos on the site by offering some viewing options for different 3D systems. We’re not sure if this is going to catch on or not. If it does, you’ll want to purchase the sure to follow specialized 3D camcorders that will practically make you feel it as you’re watching some dude get hit in the groin. You know, so you can upload that baby and let the whole world feel the pain

YouTube XL is a redesigned version of the video sharing website. It still runs in your browser window and you won’t need to go through the hassle of downloading another piece of software, as long as you have the latest version of Flash.

YouTube XL features a clean interface that doesn’t feature any ads (at least for now). Stuff that is basically clutter is gone, like suggested videos, and comments. YouTube XL will function on most devices that have a browser, and can be hooked up to your TV.

YouTube might not be making that much money for its owner Google today, but the site certainly draws a huge amount of visitors. YouTube has all sorts of videos from blog-like entries to car crashes and everything in between including music videos from top artists.

YouTube and Universal Music Group have announced that they are launching a premium music and video service called Vevo. The site promises to offer UMG’s broad catalog of artists and will allow users to create and upload their own videos using UMG songs.

If you ever wondered what most Internet users do while they are on the internet, the answer is watch video according to new research released today. That’s really no surprise considering that many TV networks now offer streaming programs and sites like YouTube are so popular.

According to ComScore, YouTube has reached over 200 million viewers for the first time ever. The data shows that 76.8% of all US internet users viewed videos online in January. On YouTube alone viewers watched 6.3 billion videos for an average of 62.6 videos per user.

YouTube, that purveyor of all things online video, continues to grow in popularity, pulling Google right along with it. This is according to data released today from comScore, a measurer of Internet traffic trends.

comScore reported YouTube continues to lead the online video market through September 2007 with 28 percent market share. This in turn made Google as a collective whole the top U.S. video property with 2.6 billion videos viewed. It was trailed by Fox with a measly 387 million videos viewed and Yahoo with 381 million. Specific to YouTube, said comScore of the whole Google picture, was the note that nearly 70 million people viewed more than 2.5 billion videos. It seems like Google’s acquisition of YouTube was not that bad of an idea after all.

Get ready for the launch of Hulu which is expected to take place as a private beta possibly as soon as next week. NBC, who is in a joint venture with Fox to create the online video download site today pulled its video clips from Google’s YouTube site and closed a channel in what was confirmed by an NBC spokesperson as a move to help the launch of Hulu, a new online video site.

Although the new online service doesn’t appear to be a video sharing site, it could be seen as a direct competition for YouTube and having NBC pull its content from YouTube only enforces that idea. However NBC insists that the move is not making a stance against Google, but only to lessen the competition when NBC’s own new video download site launches. According to a YouTube spokesperson, Google and YouTube were informed about the plans as early as Friday.

Only yesterday we saw Google bring their YouTube online anti-piracy tool to beta to help combat the illegal posting of copyrighted videos. Today an announcement by a group of technology and media companies suddenly sheds some light on the significance of Google rolling out the service when they did.

A group consisting of Fox, CBS, NBC Universal, Walt Disney, MySpace, Viacom, and Microsoft (note the absence of Google) has announced a copyright protection agreement for rules that they feel a website should abide by when publishing potential copyrighted content. According to the Wall Street Journal, the principles of the agreement are to prevent the any copyright infringing content to be uploaded before it is accessible by the public.

While the YouTube Video Identification tool that Google announced yesterday …

Today Google has announced the beta launch of YouTube Video Identification, a new antipiracy tool that we heard about in July during a copyright infringement lawsuit with Viacom. The new system is a result of a number of angry video owners, Viacom being one of the angriest, complaining that YouTube was supporting users uploading and sharing illegally copied video content.

The new system will use a “fingerprinting” type of technology which provides a unique identification to each video. With Video Identification users will still be able to upload any videos they would like and have the instantly appear on the site as before, but once uploaded YouTube will then be comparing the uploaded content to legitimate videos provided by the owners. When matching videos are found the owner’s can choose to automatically have the video removed, promoted or in true Google form they can even take advantage of the uploaded content and monetize the video for copyright holders who chooses to license their videos.

Google may have an antipiracy tool for the YouTube video sharing site as soon as September according to a statement Friday by an attorney for Google. During a hearing in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google last March a Google attorney stated that they are currently working on some type of video recognition technology.

The new technology should be able to create a unique identification on each video, similar to the uniqueness of a fingerprint, that owners of the videos can place on their media. In the event that anyone would upload a copyrighted video on to YouTube the site would be able to automatically recognize and remove it within minutes of its upload. According to the attorney’s statement to the judge Google hopes to have this technology in place this fall and could …

Doing a great job keeping up their momentum, Apple today announced that YouTube videos will be available on the iPhone when it launches June 29th. A new application for the mobile device will allow users to eventually watch the full lineup of YouTube videos in the H.264 (not Flash) format and access them through Wi-Fi or EDGE.

Of course all the videos on YouTube were not originally coded in the H.264 format so not all will be available right away but YouTube is promising that 10,000 of them will be ready for the launch on the 29th. YouTube will continue to encode the clips until all of them are available in the new format this fall.

Overshadowed by the iPhone portion of the press release, Apple also announced that YouTube videos are now available through Apple TV. Apple TV owners can …

Today Google announced that its recently acquired video sharing site YouTube will begin serving localized versions of the YouTube home page and search functionality for nine additional countries aside from the U.S.

Prior to this update, videos have been shared from users around the world but the entire interface was available only in English. According to the co-founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the main featured pages of the site also showed content that was “heavily skewed” to the preferences of U.S. visitors even though more than half of the actual content posted on the site was from users in non-U.S. countries.

The countries targeted with the new local versions of the site are Brazil, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Currently only the text content and search functions will be in …

EMI Music has finally fallen in line and taken a big swig of the YouTube/Google kool-aid along with peers Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner by making an agreement with the mammoth video sharing site to show “approved” EMI content. EMI may have ben the last of the “big 4″ to make a deal with YouTube since they were recently consumed with being the first to launch a DRM-free music catalog with Apple.

With the agreement, EMI is able to get compensated for it’s videos that are shown on YouTube through any advertising revenue that is generated on pages with those clips. They are also given some administrative control over the YouTube website with some tools to remove content that is not approved (such as the Beatles) or where they feel the content is being used inappropriately.

This agreement …

The immense popularity of YouTube and the rapidly eroding audience of network television could only mean that one day someone out there would think of bringing it into our homes and not through our computers. I am of course referring to Apple’s announcement to bring YouTube direct through its Apple TV streaming service, the next greatest thing from the mind of Steve Jobs (barring the release of the iPhone of course.)

Ironically enough Apple will debut the YouTube service in mid-June, right about when the iPhone hits the masses. Apple will be launching with “thousands” of YouTube’s videos and adding thousands more each week, promising that the entirety of the Tube’s content will be available for Apple TV customers sometime this fall. How often Apple would update its YouTube content after that wasn’t mentioned but if you really need that …

Friday YouTube and their new parent company Google were hit with another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time from England’s top soccer league and a US music publisher.

The Premier League and Bourne Co. issued the lawsuit citing that not only does YouTube have their copyrighted content on the video sharing website, but that they are encouraging people to view the footage on the website and subsequently are “knowingly” misappropriating the two companies intellectual property. By this, according to the lawsuit, the operators of YouTube are exploiting the valuable intellectual video property for their own gain without any payment to the owners of these videos.

This lawsuit comes less than two months after Viacom sued YouTube and Google for copyright infringement of their television programming, and 6 months after the search engine giant Google purchased the YouTube …