After banning YouTube and other social Web sites on all overseas computers in May, citing bandwidth and security issues, the U.S. military on Tuesday launched an alternative video-sharing Web site for troops, their families, and supporters.

The new site is called TroopTube and has a look and function very much like YouTube, with one major difference: a Pentagon employee screens each video upload for taste, copyright violations, and national security issues.

Technically, you need to be a member of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, or National Guard to register with the site for uploading. However, there’s no enforcing mechanism to make sure that’s the case. There are also options to register as a family member or civilian friend.

TroopTube limits videos to 5 minutes in length and 20MB in size, as opposed to 10 minutes and 1024MB of YouTube. Unlike YouTube, you can’t rate a video but just leave comments.

According to the Associated Press, TroopTube was built with the help of Delve Networks, a four-month-old start-up that builds advanced tools for approving, sorting, and managing videos.

Delve’s technology automatically generates the video content into different file sizes to feed the viewer best depending on his or her Internet connection. This makes the site more bandwidth-friendly than YouTube and other movie sites. The company also creates a text transcript from the uploaded videos’ sound tracks for better and more relevant search results.

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Now showing on YouTube: Star Trek.

(Credit: Google)

Google’s YouTube has begun testing a dramatic departure in content and advertising, adding 15 50-minute TV episodes from Star Trek, Beverly Hills 90210, and MacGyver and with prominent new ads.

“We are starting to test full-length programming on YouTube, beginning with some fan favorites requested by you,” Google said on its YouTube blog on Friday.

It’s an experiment in video display and advertising, too, with ads for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Intel’s Centrino chip technology showing prominently on the videos I watched. The TV shows are preceded by a 15-second pre-roll ad, and YouTube will show mid-roll and post-roll ads as well, according to the blog posting. “As we test this new format, we also want to ensure that our partners have more options when it comes to advertising on their full-length TV shows,” Google said.

The shows also feature new display possibilities that set off the ads–no doubt the “in-chrome ads” that Chief Executive Eric Schmidt referred to earlier this year when discussing the high priority of making more money from YouTube. A new “theater view” sports bright ads against an otherwise darker screen, wrapping the video in deep red faux curtains. And the “lights-out” mode retains the traditional YouTube interface, but with the darker screen and relatively bright ad.

The TV shows are all from CBS, which owns CNET News.

The content is tagged with a new film strip icon to indicate that it’s different from conventional YouTube videos. The icon shows in search results, too.

Update 3:23 p.m. PDT: YouTube’s long-form move has been expected for months, and now Google will begin to see how well viewers take to the idea.

Milking more money from YouTube has been a top priority for Google this year, and the new content and ads clearly are a part of that. They also show the increasing sophistication of Google’s relationships with studios, which with the exception of litigant Viacom, have been warming to YouTube in some cases.

Schmidt has said the right way to pair advertising with YouTube’s vast and fast-growing video collection is the “holy grail.”

YouTube features ‘theater mode’ that lends prominence to the video and the ads.

(Credit: CNET News)

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In light of Tuesday’s announcement of the click-to-buy option heading to YouTube videos, it’s worth mentioning Nintendo and YouTube’s two-week old special promotional page for the Wii game Wario Land: Shake It. What makes it so special? It dynamically deteriorates based on what’s happening in the video.

Coins explode out of the top of the player and trickle down the page, while various elements get knocked down with each headbutt, explosion, and power up. There’s no way to regenerate items as they fall off without refreshing your page, although you can pick up each piece and throw it around, which is almost as much fun as watching it fall apart. Some things like the share and favorite buttons remain clickable too.

Useful if you were trying to read the video information while it flies off the screen? No. Mind-bogglingly cool and memorable? Definitely.

As the video plays bits and pieces of the page fall apart, including the video itself.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Sharing your music, videos, and opinions with other people online is the drive of many Web companies, each striving to make experiences more interactive, and to bridge the gap between the anonymous Web and face-to-face reality. Three companies peddling their wares Thursday afternoon at Plug and Play’s Fall 2008 Expo in Sunnyvale, CA are taking online music-making, video conferencing, and content-sharing a step further.

Bojam can be thought of as the Wikipedia of music-creation. Musicians from around the world can add and tweak compilations piecemeal for profit or for play. The online mixer lets musicians from anywhere lay down tracks, produce, and distribute music asynchronously. It’s a cool concept, but the input and output quality had better be flawless if it’s going to keep the interest of talented professionals.

ViVu is a video conferencing tool that lets viewers chime in to live conferences or Internet shows using their own Web cameras. Instead of watching the panelist or host’s face while listening to a caller’s question, ViVu puts the spotlight on the audience member–a good way for viewers to connect with the host and with each other. A queuing system lets producers screen, switch, and queue callers. They can also pull the plug in cases of abuse. I could see this adding spice and inspiration to shows like CNET’s own live tech program.

Koollage’s Web app lets you arrange your digital media–photos, video, songs, and text–into mini Web sites, then shrink them into small form factors for embedding onto social networking profiles and for playing on mobile phones. The ‘Pods,’ as Koollage calls them (it stands for ‘packages on demand’) are customizable, and could therefore become a popular way for the MySpace Generation to produce and share their stylized media.

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NEW YORK–Viacom division MTV Networks announced Monday that it has turned its minority stake in software company Social Platform into a full acquisition: Social Project, formerly known as Tagworld, is the basis for Viacom’s Flux.

MTV Networks launched Flux just over a year ago as a social-networking platform that would be used across all its digital entertainment properties as well as eventually sites outside Viacom. The original Tagworld investment started in November 2006. Flux now powers community features on MTV.com, Colbert Nation, Atom.com, and other Viacom-owned sites, allowing users to access all of them with a single login and profile.

“The web is fragmenting,” said Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks in a press conference on Monday, describing Flux as an “open, flat, and connected” technology. “People are attracted to niches and to what they’re really interested and passionate about, and we as a company have a history in the cable business of going after niches.”

In conjunction, MTV promoted Joshua Dern from vice president of social media strategy to senior vice president and general manager of social media.

Earlier this month, MTV launched what is arguably its most high-profile social initiative,Backchannel, which uses Flux profiles and credentials to power a game centered around the hit show The Hills.

But the service won’t become an MTV exclusive. “Even though they’re now part of us, we still want them to work with outside Web sites,” Salmi said of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Social Project.

“We will let anyone use the Flux network, with few exceptions,” Dern said, adding that the lone exception is…porn.

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The Mozilla Corporation has released an advance testing version of its popular Firefox Web browser, just days after Google revealed its competing Chrome software.

The second alpha of Firefox 3.1 was made available overnight. The software, code-named Shiretoko, is at this stage intended for software developers and testers only, with the stable and recommended version of Firefox being 3.0.1.

In a statement, Mozilla said the testing version of Firefox introduced several new features, including the browser’s highly anticipated support for a new video tag element introduced with the HTML 5 standard to provide more functionality around the amount of video that is increasingly being delivered through Web browsers.

In addition, Shiretoko allows users to drag and drop tabs between browser windows, improves performance in some areas and provides better integration with Windows Vista’s Aero ‘Glass’ theme for those wanting to add extra themes on top of Firefox.

The new software also adds some speed enhancements to the browser, particularly in the area of JavaScript handling, which was one area Google highlighted as being a strength of the Chrome browser it launched this week, also in testing form.

Mozilla is planning to integrate a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, into Firefox. However the organization noted that technology was not included in the software released overnight, although it could be tested by following a set of instructions posted online.

The alpha release of Firefox 3.1 can be downloaded from Mozilla’s Web site.

Renai LeMay of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

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Joost isn’t letting the public try out the site yet but that will change soon.

(Credit: Joost)

Finally, Joost is going to correct the error that badly hobbled the Web video service many once considered to be a serious YouTube competitor.

Currently available for Windows and Mac, Joost is planning to launch a test version of its new site later this month that will feature a browser-based plug-in and will no longer require users to watch via the company’s much maligned desktop client. In a not so surprising move, users will be able to embed Joost’s videos.

CEO Mike Volpi acknowledged in an interview with CNET that the desktop client was one of the company’s missteps but that the new browser-based player would provide ease of use, a high-quality video experience, and more content. The new site, according to Volpi, will even be less taxing on laptop batteries. News of Joost’s new site was first reported by The Industry Standard.

But the big question that Joost must answer is whether the site overhaul comes too late to catch to Hulu or Google’s YouTube.

Joost pounced onto the online-video scene with seemingly the right combination of founders, investors, and technology. The media instantly christened it a legitimate YouTube killer.

The start-up was the brainchild of Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the founders of Skype and Kazaa. Among the backers were media conglomerates Viacom and CBS, parent company of CNET, publisher of News.com. Joost was powered by the same peer-to-peer technology that turned Skype and Kazaa into the most disruptive forces in the telephone and music sectors, respectively.

The public wasn’t impressed. The content offering was thin. The player often stalled or stuttered, and it relied on the desktop client–meaning that you couldn’t just log on to the Web from any computer to access your Joost account.

Volpi came on a year ago, and not much changed until January, when the company’s CTO left and Volpi initiated a house cleaning. Volpi says it’s still too early in the game to crown any site a winner.

“There is still ample opportunity to create a portal or aggregation site,” Volpi said in an interview last week. “People will go where they can find the content they want.”

Yes, but are Web video fans already used to getting what they want at Hulu, the company created by NBC Universal and News Corp? The competitor launched last spring to glowing press reviews, and traffic has continued to mushroom. A report issued this week by LiveRail reported that Hulu is probably already generating as much revenue as YouTube, which launched in 2005.

When it comes to YouTube, the Google property is still far and away the Internet’s most popular video site. More than a third of every video viewed online is at YouTube. But YouTube is a user-generated site, with most of its content 10 minutes or shorter. Joost is much more like Hulu, a distribution platform for mostly professionally made content.

Volpi said Joost has greatly enhanced the content selection. The site will feature shows from Warner Bros., CBS, and Comedy Central, as well as other Viacom properties. Volpi said Joost will eventually offer a greater selection than Hulu. Volpi said Hulu offered little outside of the shows from NBC and Fox.

He called the selection “tired.”

Joost’s videos will follow a five-second advertisement or “preroll.” Despite enabling users to embed video, the site will not concentrate on syndicating content.

“Our plan is to be a destination site where people go to watch their favorite shows,” Volpi said.

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