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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Two days ago Viacom dropped a $1 billion lawsuit on Google and YouTube stating that the video sharing giant had violated copyright laws by hosting videos created by some of Viacom’s programming brand.

In response, attorneys for Google feel that they have strong legal protections under current copyright law, according to Reuters. The legal team feels they have a very strong defense due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, …

Last month Viacom had asked YouTube to remove over 100k video clips from its website that Viacom stated violated copyrights, and then later that month Viacom made a deal with Joost to provide video content for their website. Today Viacom has issues a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google for copyright infringement claiming 1 billion dollars in damages.

Viacom is claiming that YouTube has over 160,000 unauthorized video clips of Viacom’s content on their website which collectively has been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Viacom is …

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has announced a deal with YouTube to publish excerpts from the BBC news and entertainment programs on the popular video downloading site. The BBC clips starting appearing on YouTube Friday, which marks the first time an international broadcaster has made such a deal with the Google-owned YouTube site.

Mark Thompson, BBC director, hopes the agreement will help drive more traffic and subsequently more revenues to the BBC web site to supplement British license fees for taxpayers. “It’s essential that the BBC embraces new ways of …

A version of YouTube mobile will soon be available to Vodafone customers in the U.K.

The YouTube mobile service for Vodafone will include a new selection of popular videos each day. Customers will be able to upload their own content from their mobile phones, forward links of videos to friends, and search through video content.

“Today’s announcement with YouTube further expands the range of Internet services we’re bringing to the mobile, introducing a seamless experience that allows customers to engage with user generated content on the move,” said Frank H.Rövekamp, Global Chief Marketing …

November saw Google’s acquisition of YouTube and many of us wondered what would happen to the existing Google Video product. Certainly Google wouldn’t need two competing Video services. A recent post in the Google blog by Salar Kamangar, Vice President of Product Management, has shed some light on their plans for Google Video and the future of video in general.

Google’s extraordinary strength has always been creating products that make information more available and easily searchable. Google products aren’t necessarily known for their friendly, cheerful interfaces which is likely a …