For all the talk of how HTML5 will be the future of the Web, and how, in particular, it will replace Flash for rich interactive and animated content, the reality is that the technology is out of reach for a lot of the designers and animators currently using Flash. While HTML5 developers are working directly with JavaScript, SVG, CSS, and other technologies, Flash designers enjoy a high-level environment with timelines, drawing tools, easy control of animation effects, and more. With Edge, released in beta Sunday, Adobe is striving to bring that same ease of use to HTML5 development.

MPEG LA, the self-styled one stop shop for motion video patent licenses, says that 12 different companies have come forward with patents "essential" to the VP8 algorithm championed by Google as a royalty-free compression standard. The organization met with these companies in June to discuss the formation of a patent pool, though there has not yet been a decision to determine whether a pool should be formed, or what its terms and conditions might be.

The organization started the search for VP8 patents in February, with the initial call for companies to come forward ending in March. That deadline came and went without comment from the company, so streamingmedia.com interviewed a spokesman by e-mail to find out what the current situation was. MPEG LA did not disclose which 12 companies held patents it felt to be essential to VP8, nor did it say how many patents there were in total. The group also did not say how many patents had been submitted for evaluation only to be deemed inessential.

Google today launched a new content delivery network (CDN) called Page Speed Service. Like any other CDN, Page Speed Service provides improved Web performance by creating cached replicas of a site at locations distributed around the globe. Visits to the site are then served by a high-speed, low-latency local server, rather than having to use the authoritative master server.

Page Speed Service goes a little further than simply offering naive caching, however. It also performs a number of optimizations to the content it serves up. For example, it includes on-the-fly compaction of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, stripping out the extra whitespace that can pad these files by 20-30 percent, and performs optimization of compressed PNG and JPEG images. Taken together, Google claims that Page Speed Service's features can make sites between 25 and 60 percent faster.

The service is also easy to get up and running, requiring little more than signing up and modifying DNS entries to refer to Google's servers. Not all sites will be eligible, however; configurations that use "bare" DNS names (no "www." in their Web addresses), SSL, or various other complex features can't use Page Speed Service. The company also has an Apache plugin to perform many of the same optimizations within the Web server itself.

Page Speed Service is not the first effort by Google to accelerate Web performance. The company has a proprietary alternative to secure HTTP, named SPDY, that it includes in its Chrome browser to reduce the overheads implicit in accessing secure content. A CDN is less radical approach to tackling the same problem, and much easier to adopt.

Page Speed Service is presently free of charge, allowing Web publishers to test and assess it. Google intends to charge for the service, but has not yet released details of the pricing, other than to say that it will be "competitive."

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Those who enjoy Fox shows such as Family Guy, Glee, or The Simpsons will soon have to wait an extra eight days if they want to watch new episodes online—or prove that they're a paying cable or satellite subscriber. Fox made the announcement on Tuesday, saying that it would begin putting next-day streams of popular shows behind a paywall.

The changes go into effect on August 15. At that time, Fox and Hulu will stop putting Fox's shows up the day after they air on broadcast TV. Instead, those who subscribe to the DISH Network service will be able to log into DISH's website in order to "authenticate" themselves and see the shows immediately online. The company says that DISH will be the first partner for the new system, but that other cable and satellite providers will be "coming soon." Paying Hulu Plus subscribers will also be able to log into Hulu and see the shows the day after they air.

Over 3 billion videos are viewed each day on YouTube. The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report today documenting the demographics of Americans using video-sharing sites. The Pew Internet Project is one of seven projects that comprise the Pew Research Center, a non-profit “fact tank” that produces reports on American trends and attitudes.

Pew found that 71 percent of online adults have gone to video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. That is a 5 percentage point increase from Pew’s research in 2010, and a 38-point increase from 2006. Twenty-eight percent of Americans use video-sharing sites on a given day.

Kathleen Moore, the Pew Internet Project analyst who wrote the report, explained the increase in usage: “The rise of broadband and better mobile networks and devices has meant that video has become an increasingly popular part of users’ online experiences… video-sharing sites are very social spaces as people vote on, comment on, and share these videos with others.”

Moore also cites the dramatic increase in content as a major reason for the expanded viewership. Forty-eight hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute, adding up to nearly 8 years of content daily.

And YouTube isn’t just for the young crowd. Even though YouTube lists its demographic as 18-54 years old, Pew found that nearly one-third of online Americans age 65 and older uses video sharing sites.

Parents are also 20 percentage points more likely to have used a video sharing site than non-parents. In fact, parental use has increased in the past year while non-parental use has dipped.

Pew was surprised to find that rural Internet users are just as likely to have used video-sharing sites as urban and suburban users; an insignificant 4 percentage points separate the three demographics. However, rural users are less likely to use the sites on a given day (14 percent compared to 31 percent for suburban and 33 percent for urban).

The Project also reported that non-whites are more likely to use video-sharing sites than whites. Sixty-nine percent of whites admitted to using the sites (more than double the 31 percent in 2006), compared to 79 percent of non-whites (up from the 41 percent in 2006).

There is a direct correlation between household income and the percent of Internet users who use video-sharing sites; the study found that online Americans with an income of $75,000 are most likely to use the sites, at 81 percent.

Moore commented on the ability to upload and stream video via mobile devices as a recent phenomenon impacting the usage of video-sharing sites. Pew did not ask about mobile devices in its study until this year, but found that 34 percent of American cell phone owners have shot video on their phone; 26 percent have watched video on their phone, and 22 percent have used their phone to post videos or photos online.

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It has been two weeks since Netflix announced, much to the chagrin of its loyal user base, that it would be hiking its monthly subscription prices by 60 percent for users who want both streaming and discs. How have things been going for the company since then? If you were to ask some parts of the Internet, Netflix is about to crash and burn. But according to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, there haven't been very many complaints.

Netflix announced earlier this month that it was splitting out its streaming and DVD plans and pricing them at $7.99 apiece per month—up from $9.99 per month for streaming and one DVD at a time. Assuming you want to keep both services (and not everyone does), that's $5.99 more per month for the same level of service, or $71.88 more per year. The company said it had decided to bump prices because there's still a large demand for DVDs, and splitting the services would make better financial sense for the company.

Copyright holding groups are always coming up with creative ideas for the classification and ranking of content. Here's another that hadn't occurred to us. Why not ask search engines to attach "red light" symbols next to sites categorized as a "risk" and put green ticks next to sites deemed safer?

That's exactly what a United Kingdom music copyright royalty collection organization proposes.

"Traffic Lights provide a visual indication to users approaching an unlicensed site that the site is facilitating copyright theft," explains the Performing Rights Society for Music's new plan (PDF).

"The traffic light—a green tick or red cross—would appear next to a link to the site in question. The traffic light can be applied wherever the site is, not just those in the UK, increasing the ability of consumers to protect themselves from sites hosted abroad and increasing their confidence in legitimate sites."

Google's search engine has started warning users that they've installed certain malware. "Your computer appears to be infected," a banner will proclaim across the top of every Google search whenever the malware is detected. Clicking a link in the banner leads to instructions on how to find an appropriate anti-virus program to remove the software.

The malware that Google is detecting routes certain Web requests through proxy servers controlled by the criminals behind the malware. Any search made through one of these proxies will receive the warning message. Use of the proxies is generally transparent to users; typically, the malware modifies the user's hosts file. The hosts file is used to map domain names to IP addresses, so that domain names can be looked up without having to use a DNS server.

It's likely that the malware authors will respond to this measure soon enough, however. The malicious proxy servers are already used to rewriting pages to include ads and interfere with access to anti-virus software; those proxy servers can equally remove Google's warning message.

One potential problem is that rather than recommend or link to specific anti-virus software, Google refers users simply to a Google search for "antivirus." Such searches can direct users to the abundant fake anti-virus software that is available on the Web; in attempting to fix the problem, users may just end up making things worse. Specific recommendations or hardcoded links to genuine anti-virus software might risk claims of favoritism, but it would probably be safer.

Worse, these warning messages run counter to training and advice that's often given to Web users. Due to the proliferation of fake anti-virus scams, users are strongly advised to ignore any website that's telling them they have a virus and that they should just download a program to fix their computer. To be effective, Google's new malware detection requires and encourages them to ignore this usually sound advice; taken in isolation, Google's warnings are sensible progress, but the broader implications could yet be negative.

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