Pakistani officials have announced that the government has blocked all access to the popular video-sharing site YouTube because there have been a few anti-Islamic videos posted on the site.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) notified all 70 Pakistani ISPs that access to the site is to be blocked indefinitely.
The PTA revealed that the ban was mainly due to a “trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release an anti-Quran movie portraying the religion as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.” Governement officials would not elaborate further.
The group also urged YouTube fans to write to the site and request the removal of all “objectionable movies” saying that the government would unblock the site once the movies were taken down.
The banning follows recent decisions by Turkey and Morocco to block access to the video sharing site, both for similar reasons as Pakistan.
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Google has announced they will be adding links to select media content on YouTube videos that will allow users to purchase music and games from both Amazon MP3 and iTunes.
The service, the YouTube eCommerce Platform began today and will be expanded internationally over the next few months.
“Our goal is to improve the overall YouTube experience by connecting consumers with relevant information and entertaining content,” Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO, YouTube, said in a statement. “The addition of retail links will enhance the viewing experience and allow people to engage more deeply with the content they want to consume.”
Beginning today, on the pages of “authorized video content”, Google will be placing embedded download links to the online music services of Amazon and Apple.
So far only EMI and Electronic Arts are part of the service although “partners who use YouTube’s content identification and management system can also enable retail links on claimed videos that they choose to leave up on the site,” Google said.
“Amazon.com is always looking for new ways to make discovering and buying products as convenient as possible for our customers, which is why we’re excited to collaborate with YouTube,” Scott Merlino, senior manager of the Amazon Associates Program, added.
“This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable eCommerce platform for users and partners on YouTube,” according to a YouTube blog post. “Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos.”
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If you want to get videos off YouTube you are not alone! Millions of people use YouTube and are damn near addicted to it (I know I am) and many of these YouTube addicts want to grab those videos for their own home computer, iPod or other portable device for a variety of reasons.
Before YouTube takes it down! - Often the best stuff is taken down by YouTube because some company gets its panties in a twist and demands it be removed. If you can save it quickly then you will not lose it!
Slow net connection - If you internet connection is quit slow you do not want to reload those videos every time, just once then saving them is a lot easier for your favorites.
Mobile access - While getting internet anywhere you want is a current technology it is expensive and YouTube takes a lot of bandwidth making viewing YouTube from a mobile device long and costly.
Presentations - Some fantastic videos can be used for business and school presentations but you do not always have a net connection and even if you do waiting for a long video to load can ruin your flow.
The problem is to get videos off YouTube you need to be very tech savvy and understand the file formats and the way it is embedded into the page code because YouTube does everything it can to stop you downloading the videos (unlike Google vids).
If you do not have time for this then there is an easier way to get videos off YouTube with programs the super geeks have already developed!
