Queen launches YouTube channel

Queen launches YouTube channel

Old and new clips can be viewed on the site

The Queen has launched her own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.

The Royal Channel will feature her Christmas Day message, and has recent and historical footage of the monarch and other members of the Royal Family.

The launch marks the 50th anniversary of the Queen's first televised festive address in 1957.

The palace said it hoped the site would make the 81-year-old monarch's annual speech "more accessible to younger people and those in other countries".

Changing times

The opening page of the channel, which went live just after midnight, bears the title "The Royal Channel - The Official Channel of the British Monarchy" and features a photograph of Buckingham Palace and the Queen's Guards.

This year's festive address will appear on the site at about 1500 GMT on Christmas Day.

She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit Buckingham Palace spokeswoman

Back in 1957, when the Queen delivered her first television message, she acknowledged the need to adapt to changing times.

"I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct," she said from her Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

"That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us."

Clips from garden parties, state visits, prime ministers, investitures and a day in the life of the Prince of Wales will all be available to watch on the channel.

Newsreel

Among the older clips is footage from a film by Lord Wakehurst called Long to Reign Over Us, which has never been released to the public.

The former Tory MP, who died in 1970, was a keen amateur film maker and charted many key royal events, including the death of King George VI, the Queen's accession and her coronation.

The site also has footage of Queen Alexandra's West End tour among the rose-sellers in 1917, and silent newsreel of the 1923 wedding of the Duke of York and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon - the Queen's parents.

Announcing the launch of the channel, a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said the Queen "always keeps abreast with new ways of communicating with people".

"She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit," she said.

"This will make the Christmas message more accessible to younger people and those in other countries."

Poor education

Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, said that the Queen's reign was a "continuing rebuff and rebuttal" to those calling for a republic.

"The Queen represents one of the things that is best about Britain," he wrote in the Sunday Mirror.

But historian David Starkey, who has been promoting his new TV programme on the monarchy, said the Queen "runs a mile from anything called culture".

"She is poorly educated. It's not her fault. It's the fault of her late mother. She had a wretched education, from not terribly well-qualified teachers," he told BBC Radio 5live.

The Royal Channel can be viewed at www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel, and the Queen's Christmas message can also be downloaded as a podcast from www.royal.gov.

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CIA 'launches Facebook for spies'

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The CIA is to open a communications tool for its staff, modelled on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, the Financial Times reports.

The project, known as A-Space, aims to improve the way that intelligence agents communicate, it said.

Officials believe that the online workplace will allow staff to better analyse information together.

However to ease fears of undercover workers having their cover blown, participation will be voluntary.

Reticent users

A-Space, due to launch in December, will feature web-based email and software recommending issues of interest to the user said Mike Wertheimer, a senior official at the Department for National Intelligence (DNI).

We are willing to experiment in ways that we have never experimented before Mike Wertheimer Department of National Intelligence

He told the FT that the new infrastructures would help break down some of the physical communications problems in the intelligence community.

"I am unable to send email, and even make secure phone calls, to a good portion of the community from my desktop because of firewalls," he said.

He added that while it was understandable that some operatives were reticent about sharing information which could pose a risk, the 9/11 attacks had showed that not pooling data could also cost lives.

"We are willing to experiment in ways that we have never experimented before," he said.

Mr Wertheimer added that while it had looked for collaboration from overseas, foreign intelligence agencies had been "the folks most virulently against" sharing information through an "intelligence library".

The DNI already operates a collaborative online encyclopaedia - or wiki - for members of the US intelligence community.

And earlier this year the CIA used Facebook to advertise job opportunities within the organisation.

YouTube introduces video adverts

YouTube introduces video adverts




Video advertising has started on the YouTube website, its owner - internet giant Google - has confirmed.

Google said it had designed the way the adverts work on the video-sharing website to be as unobtrusive and undisruptive as possible.

The adverts will begin 15 seconds after a user has started to watch a video, but only on 20% of the screen window.

Google said the advert would then disappear within 10 seconds if the user had not clicked to watch it.

'Providing value'

While YouTube already carries advertising banners, the introduction of video adverts is Google's first big push to increase revenues on the video-sharing website, which it bought for $1.65bn (£831m) last November.

"The philosophy at YouTube is pretty much core to what we at Google do generally, which is that all the ads we serve need to provide value to the end user," said Eileen Naughton, Google's director of media platforms.

The first video advertisers keen to tap into YouTube's more-than-130 million unique monthly visitors include Warner Music, News Corporation, 20th Century Fox and New Line Cinema.

The adverts will be connected to music videos and other selecting postings.

According to market expectations, the value of video advertisements on websites will soar to $4.3bn a year in the US alone by 2011.

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