Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc.'s widely anticipated music- and video-playing iPhone will allow subscribers to wirelessly stream material from Google Inc.'s popular video-sharing site YouTube, Apple said on Wednesday. YouTube, which has developed a huge audience on desktop computers but is not widely used on cell phones, has begun encoding its videos in a new format to improve quality and save battery life when viewed over wireless devices. The iPhone will be the first mobile device to use the new format, Apple said. More than 10,000 videos will be available on the iPhone when it hits stores on June 29, with more material added each week, it said. AT&T Inc. has an exclusive deal to sell iPhones with its wireless subscriptions. While the phone will not support AT&T's highest-speed cellular data links, Apple said YouTube would work well on the phone's short-range Wi-Fi network connection. Prior to the development of the new mobile format, Verizon Wireless, a ve...

When the video-sharing site YouTube.com was sold to Google, many of its users worried that corporate ownership would restrict the con tent of its videos. But now one of YouTube’s partners is changing the ways that users comment on those videos. YouTube, which is host to many official CBS video clips under an October licensing agreement with the network, has changed its layout for some of the Web pages with CBS videos. Most YouTube videos are embedded on Web pages that allow viewers to read user comments, with some of them listed directly below the video. These comments can range from the coherent (“That was hilarious.”) to the, er, less-so (“omg lol!”) to the profane. The comments on many of the videos posted by CBS have now been moved to a separate page; instead of sample comments underneath the videos, a link to “view all comments” takes users to a separate Web page where they can read comments. CBS began moving and filtering comments on some videos shortly after announcing its lice...