We are back with a new selection of videos to tickle your fancy. These videos are not all from this week, but they all made us laugh or caused our jaws to drop recently. Enjoy!
Aniston Succeeds in Going Viral
Tasked with creating a viral video to promote Smart Water, Jennifer Aniston decided to “borrow” from some of the best and most well known viral videos of recent years. The results are actually pretty funny, and the video has indeed gone viral. Well played, Rachel, well played.
Bicycle Kick Proves Soccer is Awesome
Ok, maybe a single bicycle kick won’t win over haters to the world’s biggest sport, but you have to admit that this kick is pretty awesome. Pro tip: unless you are a pro soccer player, do not try this kick on your own unless you want to kick someone in the head and land on your neck. Or if you do, please video tape it and send it to us.
Charlie Sheen is in Your Kitchen Right Now
Watching Charlie Sheen these days is like watching a train wreck that is being covered by several television networks, magazines and websites that are all egging the train wreck on. But Sheen seems to have a sense of humor about the whole “him being crazy” thing, and to prove it he went to the website “Funny or Die”, and created this video teaching you how to cook, the Charlie way.
House Decides to Go For a Walk, Up Style
Because apparently houses just aren’t sexy enough, a group of scientists decided to get together for the National Geographic Channel and see if they could recreate the floating house from the Disney/Pixar animated film Up. They do, and yet strangely, the video does not show the house landing…
While typically these blurbs for the videos are written with tongue firmly in cheek, there is nothing funny about this video, which shows some of the damage caused by the tsunami that struck Japan yesterday. It is fairly amazing to see though, and in a country as technologically sophisticated as Japan, you can bet that there will be a lot of footage of the disaster. We have accumulated some of the more incredible videos, so check it out and send your best thoughts to Japan.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.