YouTube Launches Auto Caption For All Videos: As reported on this blog back in November, Google started auto captioning their videos. It started with educational videos, but just extended it this week to all English videos. What does this mean for video on the web? Well besides being accessible to the deaf, it also helps immensely with search. If you have the text of the words spoken, then search algorithms can find and sort videos much better. The online video history is only at the beginning, with many more changes to come.

Vote for .tv In the Streamy Awards: No, .tv isn’t up for an award directly. But, the nominations came out this week (streamed live by Ustream.tv) and .tv shows up 14 times in the various awards categories [warning, not all have a "G" rating]. From the Streamy Awards site, here is a description of their work

“The Streamy Awards is the first and most prestigious awards ceremony devoted to honoring excellence in original web television programming and those who create it. The annual ceremony, and its live online broadcast, brings together top talent, decision-makers and influencers shaping the online entertainment industry. Awards are presented for the past years’ finest achievements in a variety of categories spanning multiple disciplines, including Performance, Directing, Writing, Editing, Visual Effects, Sound, and more.”

As they say in that “other” awards show…and the .tv nominees are:

Best Drama Web Series

Compulsions.tv

OzGirl.tv (who I see is using Blip.tv…so another mention)

Best News or Political Web Series

Obama’s War on VBS.tv

Best Foriegn Web Series

OzGirl.tv (representing Australia)

Best Animated Web Series

Ellie’s Dirty Jokes on GoPotato.tv

Best Branded Entertainment Web Series

TheTempLife.tv

Best Directing for a Drama Series

Compulsions.tv

Best Female Actress in a Comedy Series

Sex Ed on KoldCast.tv

Best Male Actor in a Drama Series

Compulsions.tv

Best Female Actress in a Drama Web Series

OzGirl.tv

Best Visual Effects in a Web Series — The Crew

TheCrew.tv

Best Live Production in a Web Series

Coin-Op.tv

Fantasy Live Football using Ustream.tv

Twit.tv

Best Product Integration in a Web Series

(Kodak) on WokeUpDead.tv

Best of luck to the nominees!

Ustream.tv Recognized as Most Innovative: In the category of the “web,” Ustream.tv was ranked one of the top 10 most innovative companies by FastCompany. Since launching it’s pay-per-view and social stream feature, the site has really grown “in January, the site attracted 70 million unique viewers, up 500% from the year before.”

One Quarter of New TVs Sold in January are Connected to the Internet: Making it that much harder to tell the difference between the Internet and TV, and making the online video space much more interesting, iSuppli released information that 25% of all TVs sold in January were connected to the Internet. Wonder where this will lead…

Mr. DNS is Great: I took DNS (Domain Name System) training today given by VeriSign’s very own Matt Larson. It was a terrific class. It’s fascinating to understand the history and all that goes into resolving a domain name or an email address. For those of you that would like to really know how domain names work, his podcasts can be found at www.ask-mrdns.com

Introducing the VeriSign Trust Seal: This announcement isn’t about .tv or online video specifically; but our sibling division at VeriSign had a big announcement this week that helps the Internet as a whole; so I wanted to pass it along. Fellow VeriSign blogger Tim Callahan’s blog has more details, but the new product adds daily malware scans and will make available the VeriSign Trust Seal to sites that don’t require SSL encryption.

P.S. I saw on the news last night that one couple getting married yesterday in the blizzard used www.ustream.tv to have their wedding and broadcast it to all their guest that couldn’t make it due to the snow. Seems not only did they get their guests, but over 800 people signed in to see the couple take their vows. What a great use for streaming video and .tv!

For those of you with Android phones, they are offering a free Kiss concert in celebration of the launch at 7:30pm (eastern) tonight.

Online video chat by Ustream