YouTube buys US web television company

By Cris Frangold:

Twitter, the global network for short bursts of information, is buying a startup, Crashlytics, that tracks when bad code causes apps to fail abruptly.

YouTube, the Google-owned video sharing website, has become a major platform around the world for news, posing challenges to media organizations, a study said Monday.The Pew Research Center report said that news related events were the most searched items on YouTube in five months of a 15-month period in 2011 and early 2012.That means that news is rapidly becoming important on the site, which is popularly known for amateur videos of children and pets.

Online groups startup Fridge said it has been bought by Google and will become part of the Internet giant's freshly-launched social network.New York city-based Fridge is closing and its small number of staff will become part of the Google+ team, the startup said in a post on its website."We look forward to continuing the vision of creating fresh and exciting social group experiences for users across the Web," the Fridge message read.

YouTube and Univision announced an agreement on Monday to bring short- and long-form programming from the Spanish-language broadcast network to the video-sharing site.YouTube said shows from Univision's three networks -- Univision, TeleFuture and Galavision -- will be available in the coming months on the Google-owned video site along with special events such as Lo Nuestro Latin Music Awards."This is a very exciting milestone," said Kevin Conroy, president of Univision Interactive Media, Inc.

YouTube announced Wednesday that it will begin testing an online movie rental service on Friday to kick off the Sundance Film Festival.Five independent films from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance festivals will be part of a "small collection of rental videos" to be available to US users of the popular video-sharing website in "the weeks ahead," according to YouTube."Making content available for rent will give our partners unprecedented control over the distribution of their work -- they can decide the price of their videos and the rental duration," YouTube said in a blog post.

YouTube users can now edit their own videos online. The Google-owned video-sharing site added an online editing tool this week that allows YouTube users to combine multiple videos, shorten a video or add soundtracks from songs in the AudioSwap library.The newly created video can be published to YouTube directly from the editing site.To edit a video, a user drags a thumbnail of the video they want to edit into an empty timeline. The video can then be trimmed or other videos added to make it longer.