YouTube's Safety Mode

YouTube's Safety Mode Natali Del Conte: Google launches a Facebook-like service in Gmail. Youtube helped you block your children for searching for porn and Netflix is going to 1080p but not any time soon. It’s Wednesday, February 10. I’m Natali Del Conte and it’s time to get loaded. The internet was a buzz yesterday with early news that Google was launching a Twitter-like service for Gmail in order to compete with the social networks. Well, it turns out that the actual news was way more than just status updates. Google Buzz is more like a Facebook feed than a Twitter feed. It will allow users to update their status but it will also let them post links, YouTube videos, photos from Picasa and that launch will link with user’s Flicker and Twitter accounts. No support for Facebook yet. The feature will roll our over the next couple of days right underneath your Gmail inbox. YouTube launched a new parental control called safety mode. I did a demo of the tool on the CBS early show this morning, take a look. It’s really important. What it does is filter out all offensive content on YouTube. That includes pornography, nudity, graphic violence, narcotics, those are the kind of things that should be taken off YouTube anyway but since they’re so much on YouTube, YouTube can’t police it. So now, at least it will be filtered for age appropriate viewing. Male: It also filters out comments that write – even on sites that wouldn’t be theoretically be safe, it would filter out the stuff that — because people say horrible things even on safe sites. Natali Del Conte: Right, exactly. So that comment are collapse, you don’t see them by default because it could be a clean video about kittens but there are still some users who are going to be jerks since they bleetiby-bleep this kitten. So even if they do say that and you pull down to see the comment, those bleetiby-bleeps would be bleeped out by starts. Male: So I’m going to be — you’ll be the parent. Natali Del Conte: Okay. Male: I’m going to be the person next door, show me how I can do this on my YouTube so I can block my kids out. Natali Del Conte: Okay, so here’s YouTube right now. We are logged in to YouTube. I’m going scroll down to the bottom and it says here, safety mode is off. I’m going to turn safety mode on. I’m just going to click it and click ‘On’. Now, I have the option to save it which means I’m saving it for my session or I can save and lock it. I’m going to choose that so that means that even when I log out of my session, that next user still cannot turn this off, so the children cannot turn it off. Male: That’s good. Natali Del Conte: So let’s try a search here. I’m just going to search the word naked. And see what happens, it says, “No videos are found for naked.” So there’s nothing there that your husband or your older children that your younger children cannot see. Safety mode is rolling out gradually to users today. The Apple store went down momentarily yesterday for a short time for Apple to unveil its latest version of its professional photography work flow software Aperture 3. It contains over 200 new features plus, some welcomed edition from its consumer cousin iPhoto 09. The new software will support Facebook ignition, GPS location data for photos and 64 bit photo memory support if you have Snow Leopard and at least an Intel Core Duo processor. This software is available for purchase for $199.00 or if you have a previous version of the software, $99.00 fore the upgrade. Netflix mistakenly released information that pointed to 1080 p streaming support later this year for its watch instantly service. The premature revelation was quickly shut down with Netflix acknowledging that 1080p was in its future but not this year. What will come this year however is a closed caption support and 5.1 surround audio with its HD streams which will remain at 720P Real Networks is planning to spend of its Rhapsody Music Service. Rhapsody was a subscription music service and was a joint venture between Real Networks and Viacom. The service never really got a major fall in since the iPod never really supported it. Good news so far for Rhapsody subscribers, the other service will continue to function for now. Panasonic Japan released a sly of neat 3D TVs this week and they even have pricing and release states. Of course, we did see 3D TVs back at CES but almost none of them had price or release dates. Panasonic has six new 3D TVs as well as new blue ray players and recorders. A 50 and a 54 inch TV that uses active shutter, glasses will be released in April for $4,800.00 and $5,900.00 respectively. To be honest, I thought the first round of consumer 3D TVs would cost a lot more than that. I mean it’s still definitely too expensive but not as bad as I thought. Music publishers has may have gotten less than they bargained for when they renegotiated variable pricing with major digital music distributors like iTunes and Amazon’s mp3 store. While digital sales were up this year over last year, they did not make up for the rapid decline of physical album sales. Now music execs are not blaming variable pricing just yet but they do admit that raising price 30% on some of the most popular music may not have been the best idea in the middle of the worst recession since the great depression. Those are all your headlines for today. I will see you tomorrow with more. Thank you for watching. I’m Natali Del Conte with Cnet TV and you’ve just been loaded.