YouTube, like the iPod, has become a cultural phenomenon and part of our online lives. From politicians to pointless singers, everyone knows and uses YouTube. And that is why when the largest online video site goes down, it is major news. Of course it results in all sorts of rumors - DNS hacks, domain expirations or aliens landing on the roof of YouTube office (OK I made the last one up).

Actually the explanation might have been less exciting and proved to be a plain old technical snafu of sorts. A YouTube spokesperson said the service went down for an hour due to internal technical issues, and the problems have been fixed.

YouTube like many large consumer websites continues has had a history of outages. Check out the Pingdom page and get a good idea about YouTube’s track record so far. YouTube’s performance seems to have progressively improved since Google acquired the company for $1.6 billion back in 2006. YouTube receives about 10 hours of video per minute, and serves up terabytes of data per second. I will post an update later in the day.

Move Networks, a streaming video startup, says its technology will be integrated into the new iteration of Microsoft’s Silverlight technology when it becomes available later this year.

John Edwards, CEO of Move, told NewTeeVee that, going forward, if you have Silverlight installed on your computer you won’t need to download Move’s web video client or browser plugin; the technology will be directly integrated into Silverlight.

Even though Move’s client is tiny and doesn’t take more than a minute to download on a slow dial-up connection, Edwards thinks it just makes things simpler, allowing a company to focus on its services and back-end technologies. “It makes things simpler and easier on the client side and people don’t need to download the client,” Edwards told me.

Move is based in American Fork, Utah, and has developed a new way to deliver high-quality video to the browser without needing expensive media-serving infrastructure. Move’s video streaming technology allows videos to start faster, play smoothly with no buffering, and deliver high-quality video. It’s no surprise that most of the major U.S. networks — ABC and Fox, for example — are using Move to deliver video streams. Edwards didn’t rule out working with other platforms such as Adobe’s Flash.

Related Posts:

• Move Networks Makes Web TV Watchable
• Move Networks, Acinion Raise Millions.

Disclosure: Move Networks was one of the many sponsors of NewTeeVee Live.

CNET reports that Microsoft is streamlining its video operations, putting Internet Protocol television, Media Center, and HD DVD groups into one single group, Connected TV group. The new group now falls under Robbie Bach’s Entertainment and Devices division. Enrique Rodriguez, the VP who till recently was running Microsoft IPTV, is now in charge of Connected TV Group, while Peter Barrett, former CTO of the IPTV group is now CTO of Connected TV group.

The idea behind the reorganization, according to News.com, is that since Microsoft is trying to put video on a variety of devices – Zune and Xbox in particular – it makes sense for a single consolidated effort.

On the IPTV front, Microsoft is moving ahead with its effort to allow additional programs to run on set-top boxes using its software. Microsoft said it now has more than two dozen companies working on software for its Mediaroom platform, including ES3 and Emuse Technologies.

Microsoft plans to make a big splash at the CES and announce a whole slew of new video focused products. Similarly in 2008, a lot of Microsoft’s IPTV deployments will graduate from mere press releases to live deployments. Having been highly skeptical of their efforts so far, I am looking forward to next year and see how close Microsoft comes to delivering on their vision/plans.