Want to tune in online on Tuesday to pay your respects to the King of Pop? Plans for the public memorial for Michael Jackson are just being finalized, but here’s what we know so far.

Everything gets started at 10 a.m. PDT. While broadcasters told us they are still waiting on details of what coverage they will be able to provide of the memorial itself, it does seem that live video will be made public. Los Angeles leaders have encouraged mourners to stay home and watch on TV or online so as to maintain public safety. There is expected to be a pool feed supplied by the Jackson family and Staples Center venue owner and Jackson tour promoter AEG. The venue fits only 20,000, and more than 1.6 million people applied for public tickets online. A pool feed means anywhere you watch, you’ll get the same coverage, though some streams may be more reliable than others.

CNN, for one, is hoping to differentiate by encouraging viewers to update their Facebook status while watching the broadcast, much like it did during the Obama inauguration. You’ll be able to connect to friends who are watching the memorial service by seeing what they’re saying about it and commenting back. Go to CNN.com Live starting at 9 a.m. PDT.

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It’s one thing to say goodbye to the king of pop. It’s another to say goodbye to the king of infomercials. Billy Mays, the legendary infomercial host who could get excited about any product, passed away last weekend. And for those who live for mocking infomercials, the news apparently came as a real blow.

Take Jabo0odyDubs, a YouTube mocker who made a vocation out of talking over Mays’ commercials. On his YouTube profile, he writes “Billy Mays, The Infomercial King passed away June 28, 2009. No more Billy Dubs will be released, the old ones are more than enough to cherish as classics. I will find other stuff to dub. I feel as though I’ve lost a best friend/hero. God bless Billy, his family, and his fantastic products. We will miss you billy, RIP.” He also rocked the Sarah McLachlan for a tribute video.

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As we’ve known for quite a while now, Steve Chen has moved on from running YouTube’s technology. MediaMemo today got this quote from YouTube PR: “Steve shifted his focus to help with some Google engineering projects. He’s still involved with YouTube and invested in its success.” Chen has not held the CTO title since last fall, but YouTube has not named a replacement for that specific role.

Chen, the YouTube co-founder and CTO of the site until well after it got bought, deserves credit for his emphasis on accessibility — something that made YouTube stand out from its video portal peers as it rapidly grew. He spoke about his philosophy of prioritizing widespread access before addressing quality at our NewTeeVee conference a couple years ago (live blog, writeup and video).

So what is Chen really up to? We do know from his YouTube account, where he signs in every now and again, that he’s learning to play golf! (See video above.)

One of The Pirate Bay’s long-discussed side projects, video streaming site The Video Bay, finally has posted a couple of public test clips and revealed a bit of a game plan. But for now it’s in “extreme beta” and may not go live for potentially one to five years, according to the TPB spokesperson quoted by TorrentFreak.

The most notable planned feature for The Video Bay is that it will use open video. For an extended primer on what that means, please see my feature story from last week. On the user side, The Video Bay won’t require Flash (or other plug-ins); you can just view video right in the browser. But you will have to download a new browser that supports HTML 5. Today, such browsers are Firefox 3.5 beta 4, Opera 9.52 preview, Google Chrome 3, Safari 3.4 or Safari 4. If you’re in an older (though in many cases the most current release version) browser, no dice (hence the screenshot above for those who’d rather not upgrade just yet).

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There’s a long list of YouTubers poking fun at tech and social media, but with February’s viral hit 25 Things I Hate About Facebook, Julian Smith proved he’s one of the few doing it well.  (So well, in fact, that he was invited to film a sequel vid at the Facebook offices.)  Smith, who just turned 22, launched his YouTube channel last year with the subscribe-or-he-dies series Kidnapped, and now boasts more than 17,000 subscribers.  Recently, with Got my Mac on with iPhone 3Gs, Smith took timeliness to a whole new level, getting the slick music vid up less than 48 hours after the phone was released.

NTV got in touch with Smith to discuss YouTube fame and how he managed to make “cut, copy, paste” into such a catchy lyric, so quickly.

NTV: Tell us about how you found your way to online video.

Smith: I was raised in a musical family; I grew up writing, singing and playing.  When I was about 12, I started making goofy videos with my friends. By the time I was 15 I was doing freelance video full-time.  (ed. note: Smith was homeschooled and balanced video work around his studies.)  In September (of 2008), in hopes of building an audience and working my way into feature films, I started a YouTube channel and began weekly comedy sketches.

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YouTube has doubled the size of standard uploads for regular-Joe account holders to 2 GB from 1 GB. The company told us this afternoon the move was in order to accommodate users’ HD uploads. But despite the size increase, non-partner videos are still limited to 10 minutes in length.

Alongside the move, YouTube is also making it easier to share and embed HD videos, something that was possible in the past but only through appending video URLs with some inscrutable code (&fmt=22) that was publicized by a few blogs. Now, it’s slightly simpler: add &hd=1 to any YouTube URL to play in HD (if possible). There’s also a “play in HD” option when you’re configuring an embed code to copy and paste elsewhere.

Barry Schwartz had actually found that his account upload limit was raised to 20 GB today, but a YouTube spokesperson said that the new max is 2 GB. Lucky guy, Schwartz must have gotten in on some user testing for cool kids.

It’s clear that HD videos are becoming a significant portion of the new YouTube library, only six months since the site enabled them. YouTube raised the video upload limit to 1 GB from 100 MB in only September 2008.

Joost has announced that it is going to allow third-party developers to add Flash widgets to its video player soon. The Joost Labs blog this week previewed a widget that adds keyword-based Twitter search results to a video. Joost wants to eventually release a widget API that will expose some of the underlying video’s metadata and make it possible to integrate these widgets within the Joost Flash player.

This isn’t the first time Joost is toying with widgets. The company’s P2P-based video application also featured a widget API, but few wanted to develop for a player that had no user base. However, Joost has clearly been thinking about how to make widgets work in the past few years, and some of these ideas could lead to interesting results.

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Michael Jackson reportedly died of a heart attack this afternoon at the age of 50, leaving behind an amazing discography and a complicated life story. Today, personally, I’m gonna focus on the former.

After all, the man made one hell of a music video. Jackson had an official YouTube account, featuring his best-known music videos, but embedding on those videos has been disabled. So go there to remember Thriller, Beat It, Smooth Criminal, Remember the Time and so on.

But here’s a live performance from 1988 of Man in the Mirror, proving that gospel choirs make everything better:

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Facebook’s live status update stream alongside CNN’s live video stream of Obama’s inauguration was a seminal event in combining the web and TV. Sure, we don’t want to make too much of a simple topical stream of comments, but it’s a start.

Since then, Facebook has worked with content creators such as the NBA, the Jonas Brothers and the DEMO Conference to enable what it’s now calling a “Live Stream Box” on their own sites and Facebook pages. Today, it’s releasing the Live Stream Box to any site using Facebook Connect.

When the box is enabled, users will be prompted to log into their Facebook accounts from a page where they want to watch a live video broadcast. They will then be able to toggle between an “everyone watching” tab, which shows all global status updates submitted by people watching through the app, as well as a “friends” tab which just shows all their friends’ updates in real time. But without any filtering for relevant keywords and the like, it seems like it will be rare for relevant and personal commentary to find its way through. It’s not every day you watch a presidential inauguration alongside literally everyone you know.

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