Youtube, Internet | featured news

Roger Corman's campy B movies, children's shows like "Sesame Street" and "Inspector Gadget," and inspirational monologues by celebrities — these are among the 30 channels that will require a paid monthly subscription on YouTube coming soon.

The Web site this week is expected to announce a plan to let some video makers charge a monthly subscription, according to people with knowledge of the plan.

With more than one billion unique visitors every month, YouTube asserted last night that the battle between television and the online video giant is over. YouTube claimed victory with six billion views per month. According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited Mark Mahaney's estimates, a stock analyst at RBC Capital Markets,  that YouTube generated about $4 billion in revenue in 2012, up from $2.5 billion in 2011.

YouTube has once again beaten Viacom in the long-running copyright case that the companies have spent the last several years fighting. This marks the second time U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton has taken YouTube’s side in the case, agreeing that the streaming video provider was protected by “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

If you feel like you haven’t seen Julia Stiles on screen lately, you may just be looking for her in the wrong places—or rather on the wrong screen. Stiles is currently starring in the YouTube series “Blue,” which returned for a second season on March 15.

A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world.

A child watching videos on YouTube is an average of three clicks away from potentially disturbing adult content, according to a recent study released by British digital security firm Kaspersky Lab.

PSY’s ubiquitious Gangnam Style video just passed Justin Bieber’s Baby as the most viewed YouTube video ever. It has currently clocked 803,761,928 views. According to ChannelMeter, Gangnam Style had its best day ever on Oct. 28, when the video was viewed 24,563,506 times. Since it premiered 132 days ago, it has averaged 6.1 million daily views. ChannelMeter now predicts Gangam Style will be the first video in history to reach 1 billion views on Dec. 16, 2012.

Part of the enduring appeal of YouTube is the sheer random nature of it all -- the way videos of a South Korean pop song or a doped-up kid after a dentist visit can go from obscure to internationally known in a matter of days. But increasingly, the Web's leading video site has also been working to become the Internet's cable provider, mixing channels of its own original content, often in partnership with established stars, into the mix.

Hey, YouTubers! Have you danced your fill to "Gangnam Style"? Have you seen enough versions of "Call Me Maybe"? Now video grazers can check out a brand-new YouTube channel that promises to be as amusing as any cat on a skateboard but also to engage you with ideas for changing the world. TakePart TV, launching Tuesday, is a digital home for what the network has termed "clever, eye-opening and optimistic content around big issues that face our planet." The target audience is millennials ranging from teenage to 30.