Rent thousands of full-length Aussie and global films on Google Play and YouTube

Australia has a long and rich history of cinema, with one of the world’s first studios, the Limelight Department, opening in Melbourne in 1897. Flash forward a century, and Australia is an indispensible part of the global film industry, represented by world famous directors such as Baz Luhrmann and Peter Weir as well as an almost endless list of actors, such as Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman.

This great tradition makes us excited to announce today that we have launched Movies on Google Play (play.google.com/movies) and a brand new Movies page on YouTube for Australia (youtube.com.au/movies), where you can rent thousands of films from both Hollywood and local Aussie studios. You can see films from The Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, NBCUniversal, Village Roadshow Pictures and Lionsgate, as well as from local distributors such as Roadshow Films, Icon Film Distribution, Madman Entertainment, Hopscotch and Transmission Films.

Sit back and watch recent releases such as Oscar-award winning Midnight in Paris, The Help, Moneyball, Tower Heist and The Iron Lady as well as picks from a big library of all-time classics such as Toy Story 3 and The Bourne Ultimatum. If you are feeling in the mood for something local, check out break-out hits like 2011 release Snowtown or other Australian classics such as Bra Boys and Chopper.

On the web, you can rent and watch movies from Google Play and on YouTube. On Android phones and tablets, you can rent films from the Google Play store app and start watching them instantly on the Google Play Movies app. Movies can also be downloaded to the device so they’re available for viewing during the rental period without an internet connection. And if you are signed in using your Google Account, you can watch the same movies across both Google Play and YouTube.

Movies are available at competitive pricing, with new releases available at $5.99 for standard definition and $6.99 for high definition and library titles at $3.99 for standard definition and $4.99 for high definition. For most movies, viewers will have 30 days to begin watching their rental, and, once started, 48 hours to finish.

We will be adding many more recent and classic films over the course of the year so keep checking back to Google Play and YouTube to see what’s new.

Posted by Felicity Mcvay, Manager, Content Partnerships.

Welcome Gotye to Google+!

Joining the likes of Snoop Dogg, Madonna and Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus, Australia’s very own Gotye can now be added to the growing list of music artists using Google+.

To kick off his time on Google+, last week Gotye hosted a Hangout along with Triple J’s Lindsay McDougall. He was able to video chat with five fans about everything from creating the ultimate mixtape to developing song concepts while taking out the compost. Ever wondered what kind of instruments Australia’s chart-topping, creative genius used in the making of his gold-selling album Making Mirrors, or what kind of books he keeps on his bookshelf? You can catch highlights on the video Sydney Opera House has just posted to their channel.



With Google+, you now have a new way to share and discover creative stuff online. You can form artistic communities, promote your own work, and find inspiration through other artists. Here are just a few, to start. You can even use Google+ photos to showcase your own work, and create personalised recommendations for the things you care about.

And Hangouts are a great way to relax and stay connected virtually with friends when you’re online. Musicians like Gotye use them to connect with fans. And there are budding communities that are jumping on hangouts to share similar interests, like photography.

To keep up to date on the latest with Gotye, be sure to add him to your circles.

Posted by Sophie Hirst, YouTube Music

Living Life in a Day and a summer in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival

This is a cross-post from the Official YouTube blog

This weekend at the Sydney Film Festival, we in the Australia office saw a single day on earth, a legendary summer to be remembered and the vision of thousands of YouTubers from all over the world on center stage. Along with the Australian premiere of “Life in a Day,” the world was introduced to “We Were Here,” a feature film made by YouTubers about summer in Australia.



From January - April 2011, YouTubers down under submitted their videos to create an archive of events and experiences from a summer not-to-be-forgotten. Everything from sunsets at the beach, bats in the night, to extraordinary events in Queensland were uploaded to form a new visualisation of the Australian summer map. These stories were pulled together by up and coming Australian director Amy Gebhardt, mentored by Dr. George Miller of “Happy Feet”, “Mad Max” and “Babe.”



To celebrate the world premiere of “We Were Here,” we’ll be featuring the film on YouTube for a short time before making its way around the film festival circuit. Have a look at this collective vision of the Australian summer, as told by director Amy Gebhardt:

Together, these two films are milestones in the evolution of radically inclusive film-making that is taking shape all over the world.



Ernesto Soriano III, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube Australia recently watched “1000 words for summer.”

Two Weeks until the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia blog.

In just a few days the YouTube Symphony Orchestra arrives in Sydney. The 97 orchestral musicians, winning improvisers, and Michael Tilson Thomas have been hard at work to ensure that their performances in Sydney are nothing short of extraordinary. And to give you a sneak peek, Tourism Australia has flown four winning musicians down under in advance of the full orchestra’s arrival to spend some time with some of Australia’s up and coming musical talent. The pair, Desmond from London, and Luke from NSW have completed a musical track, inspired by their journey:

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra kicks off March 15 for a week-long festival of creativity, technology and the arts. The Grand Finale is nearly sold out, but be sure to pick up your tickets at the Sydney Opera House website for any of the week’s ensemble concerts and the Saturday matinee.



This year, we’ll also be joining an additional YouTuber to jam with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at a special, pre-finale performance at The Basement. Here’s the winning entry from Qantas’ open mic competition, Zak Gottleib:

Even if you don’t have tickets, be sure to come down to Dawes Point to watch the Opera House sails come to life during the Grand finale performance on 20 March. And stay tuned for more sneak peeks of what’s to come!



Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team, just watched Making Tracks: Stu and Sam cycling in Canberra

From the main stage to your computer screen: Laneway Festival Live

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia Blog.

You asked, Jess Mauboy responded. The Temper Trap jammed. Jamiroquai rocked out.



And now, we’re bringing you our first live event on YouTube Sessions, direct from the famous St. Jerome Laneway Festival in Sydney. The festival tours this February throughout Australia & New Zealand. And to make sure everyone can get involved, we’ll be live streaming some of the hottest acts from the first event in Sydney. Catch Yeasayer, Beach House, Two Door Cinema Club, and the Holidays live at youtube.com/sessions this Sunday!

Didn’t get tickets to this sold out event? Never fear. Just tune in this Sunday, 6th February at 5:00pm to catch the live set, which runs until 9:00pm.



Sit back, enjoy the show!



Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team, recently watched Beach House, Used to Be

Coming soon to the big screen: Your Australian summer map

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia blog.

Last week we announced our plan to map the Australian summer with all your experiences. And you responded with videos around Australia, from racing your pets down a sand dune to surf lessons at the beach.



The map of Australia is starting to take shape, and this week, we’re raising the stakes. You may have caught the premiere of Life in a Day, the world’s first full-length user generated documentary. As part of this next generation of radically inclusive creative filmmaking, we’re proud to announce that Screen Australia, in partnership with renowned Australian filmmaker George Miller, will be working with one of the hottest up and coming Aussie directors to turn your summer map into the next great summer film. Only you can answer the question: What does an Australian summer really look like?



Hear from George Miller: What do you see, hear, and feel about the Australian summer?

We’ve just posted a summer playlist with short films from three Australian directors, Ariel Kleiman, Luke Doolan, and Amy Gebhardt, with their own versions of the Australian summer.

One of these directors will be working directly with George Miller to turn your videos into a final film which will debut at the Sydney Film Festival later this year.



What’s more, five members of the YouTube community whose footage is included in the final film will be invited to attend the premiere screening at the Sydney Film Festival.



Ever wondered what the Aussie summer looked like 60 years ago? Here’s one look at our summers past, courtesy of Screen Australia.

To take part in this year’s summer experience, upload your videos from to youtube.com/mapmysummer. You have until March 31st 2011 to film and upload. Let’s share the diversity and the extraordinary nature of this Australian summer with the world.



Ernesto Soriano, YouTube team, recently watched racing your pets down a sand dune.

Join Life in a Day today for its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Blog.

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to take part in “Life in a Day,” an historic cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. From Australia to Zambia, more than 80,000 videos, totaling 4,500 hours of footage, were submitted to the project. After months of hard work, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and a team of editors have created a 90-minute documentary film that gives a surprising, honest and entertaining self-portrait of our world.

While “Life in a Day” will be officially released later this year, tonight you have a very special opportunity to tune in to the world premiere direct from the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere will be followed by a live Q&A with Kevin Macdonald and key contributors to the film. You can submit questions for the Q&A here.

Today’s stream begins at 12pm on the Life in a Day channel. You can catch a rebroadcast on Friday, January 28, at 7pm in your local time zone, captioned and subtitled in 25 additional languages, with an additional option for audio description (AD) in English.

We hope you enjoy the film!

Tim Partridge, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “Life in a Day: A new type of filmmaking”.

What does an Australian summer really look like?

A cross-post from the YouTube Australia blog

We’re a huge and diverse country - the sun shines in Broome, the rain pours in Toowoomba, the surf’s up in Bryon and the mist settles in the Dandenongs - and our summer is legend. Let’s share our collective experiences of this Aussie summer with the world. With your help, we want to create a map of the Australian summer on YouTube. Starting today, you can upload summer videos to YouTube, creating an archive of events, experiences and people from all around the country.



To take part, upload and follow the instructions to geotag your videos at youtube.com/mapmysummer. They don’t need to be fancy; we want to see any footage you’ve captured this summer on your video camera, mobile, or anything else you’ve got. Roaming through the Australian bush? Cricket at twilight? Your stories will generate an Australian map of summer.

To give you some inspiration, we’re also bringing you summer highlights from several of our top partners, including Tourism Australia, Universal Music, and Tennis Australia among others, and each week we’ll be featuring the best of our Australian summer from around the country. This week, check out a few of our favourites from Sydney Festival. Be sure to keep coming back to see how we’re mapping Australia through video.

So as you head out this Australia Day, remember: the world is watching! Let’s show them what our summer’s like, and why it’s so special. Start uploading today.

Ernesto Soriano, YouTube team, recently watched Australian summers past.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011: We’ll see you in Sydney!

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia Blog.

A few months ago, we announced the second YouTube Symphony Orchestra to be held at the Sydney Opera House, and sent out a call to you, the YouTube community, to Play Your Part. We were blown away by the amazing videos we received in response, and the YouTube community voted on their favorites and visited the channel in their millions.



Today, we’re proud to present the 101 musicians from more than 30 countries around the world that have been selected to form the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011.

These outstanding musicians range in age from 14 to 49 and hail from five different continents, including 4 winners from Australia:



Brent MIller, Timpanist, overcame a neck injury and spinal problems to return to full-time secondary schooling in Toowoomba, Queensland, where he has performed with the University of Southern Queensland Orchestra, Toowoomba Concert Band, and the Queensland Youth Symphony



Mathisha Panagoda, Celloist, has toured Europe and China with the Australian Youth Orchestra, and has even performed at the 2000 Olympics! He has established his own chamber orchestra in Sydney, the Sydney Camerata, which is made up of young, talented musicians from around the country.



John Burgess, Bassist, was born in Queensland, Australia but grew up in the rural Mid North Coast. He began to take an interest in music at age 9, first on piano, then soon after picked up the bass guitar. He will be performing an improvisation to Mason Bates’ Mothership.



Rollin Zhao, Violinist, started playing music when he was two, and could read music before he could read words!



Also among the group is a vuvuzela-fixated trombonist from Germany, an Arizona-based clarinetist who has never left the U.S., and a Guzheng player from China whose instrument is one a lot of the world has never seen or heard before.



The orchestra and winning improvisers will be joined in Sydney by Michael Tilson Thomas, Mason Bates, and a number of professional musicians and mentors from the London Symphony Orchestra, The Berlin Philharmoniker, and the Sydney Symphony, to participate in a week-long celebration of music, creativity, technology and the arts. The week will include several ensemble concerts, classes for Australian musicians, events in and around Sydney, and the Grand Finale performance on Sunday, March 20 to be held in the Sydney Opera House concert hall and streamed live to the world on YouTube.



Everyone can participate in this celebration of creativity and technology. We’ll post videos and behind-the-scenes footage of the orchestra, from rehearsal and master classes to performance, to the YouTube Symphony channel, and to our mobile apps (which you can download on the Android Market by searching for ‘YouTube Symphony Orchestra’ or on the Apple App Store.

Be sure to tune in for more details on the week’s events.



Next stop: Sydney.



Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Australia, recently watched “Synergy: Unsung Heroes” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq_sBkNkGpY

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011: Help your favourite Aussies make the final cut

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia blog.

We recently announced the shortlist for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011. Musicians from around the world are ready to play their part, and we need you to play yours! With 336 finalists selected from 46 countries, help our fellow Aussies get to the Sydney Opera House in March.



Here’s a few words from Maestro Vladimir Ashkenazy, Principal Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra:

So have a look at our 12 Aussie finalists, get voting, and stay tuned to find out who makes the final cut!

adam360, Flute

bmpercussion, Timpani

BrahmsWhiskers, Violin

jasechong, Violin

JohnBurgessMusic, Bass

MikieRei, Piano

MrDavidrowden, Clarinet

mrsaxmanny, Saxophone

schnarchentier, Contrabassoon

tishmp, Cello

vananhnguyenmusic, Piano

ViolinoDanski, Violin



Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team, recently watched Katie Noonan - Vote Now

Double rainbows, annoying oranges, and bed intruders: The year on YouTube

It’s time to rewind back through the YouTube videos that people in Australia and around the world were watching and searching for in 2010. These lists of most-watched videos reflect the people, places and events that captured our collective attention and imagination throughout the year. During 2010 you all watched more than 700 billion YouTube videos, and uploaded more than 13 million hours of video. We met new faces, some new words and phrases entered our shared lexicon, and we celebrated as some new YouTube partners hit the big time with millions of views. Remember these moments?

• It started with a crime scene, and ended up on the Billboard chart: when Antoine Dodson met the Auto-tune the News guys, a viral hit was made.
• He’s an orange and, yeah, he’s pretty annoying. And that’s been the key to this clip’s meteoric rise in 2010: in less than one year, more than one million people have signed up for a regular dose of wise-cracking citrus.
• Paul “Yosemite Bear” Vasquez’s emotive footage of a spectacular rainbow in Yosemite National Park caught the attention of a few pop culture sites and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, whose Tweet helped make this clip and the “double rainbow” one of the most beloved memes of 2010.

And now … the moment you’ve all been waiting for … here are the most-watched videos of 2010, compiled based on the view counts of videos uploaded during 2010 (in some instances aggregated across multiple versions of the same video):

In Australia, the most-watched music videos on YouTube were:

1. Auto Tune The News: Bed Intruder Song
2. TIK TOK KESHA Parody: Glitter Puke - Key of Awe$ome #13
3. Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
4. BAD LOSER
5. JUSTICE CREW ~ WINNER of Australia's Got Talent 2010
6. Cody Simpson - 'iYiYi' ft. Flo Rida [Official Video]
7. Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Trailer Official HD
9. Annoying Orange Wazzup
10. THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE - Trailer

Globally, the most-watched YouTube videos were:

1. BED INTRUDER SONG!!! (now on iTunes)

2. TIK TOK KESHA Parody: Glitter Puke - Key of Awe$ome #13

3. Greyson Chance Singing Paparazzi
4. Annoying Orange Wazzup
5. Old Spice | The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
6. Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10
7. OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg Machine version
8. THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE - Trailer
9. Jimmy Surprises Bieber Fan
10. Ken Block's Gymkhana THREE, Part 2; Ultimate Playground; l'Autodrome

The most-searched for queries on YouTube during the year show what was on our collective minds as 2010 played out. Like Google Zeitgeist these lists reveal the interests, issues, and entertainment that connected us - is that what you were searching for each month?

January - iPad

February - luge

March - eclipse trailer

April - dog man

May - airplanes

June - california gurls

July - old spice

August - teenage dream

September - x factor

October - commonwealth games 2010

November - firework

For more reminders of the people, places and events that played out on YouTube during 2010, visit youtube.com/rewind or check out YouTube trends for more detailed lists including the most-watched videos in the US.



Posted by Mia Quagliarello, YouTube Community Manager.