Audio/Video

Popular YouTube user Michelle Phan is being sued for alleged copyright infringement on songs she has used in her videos, according to reports from the BBC. Ultra Records claims that Phan has used 50 of its songs in her YouTube posts and on her website illegally despite one of the label's own artists objecting to the legal action.

Phan's YouTube channel centers around using and buying makeup, and her videos are often backed by upbeat music with the artist credited in the video's description. Artists whom Phan has used in her videos include Kaskade, deadmau5, and Calvin Harris.

The University of Bristol has researched ways to transmit high quality video over wireless signals to handle the growing amount of mobile video traffic attributable to the rise of smartphone apps.

Published in the journal IEEE Transactions for Mobile Computing, the research was led by professor Andrew Nix and Dr Victoria Sgardoni from the University of Bristol's Communication Systems and Networks group.

iHeartRadio, the online radio service from terrestrial radio giant Clear Channel, has hit 50 million registered users, a milestone only three years in the making.

The pace of iHeart signups -- faster than that of rival Pandora, the biggest radio provider on the Web, as well as Twitter and Facebook -- reflects the growing popularity of streaming music as well as the promotional heft that comes from a giant like Clear Channel as the parent of the developing service.

The second episode of the fourth season of, you guessed it, Game of Thrones, takes the crown.

The HBO episode generated more than 193,000 pirates simultaneously sharing the same file late Monday. Other files of the same episode were also being downloaded by the thousands—some 1.5 million downloads in all, TorrentFreak noted.

The site predicted that the record will be broken as the Game of Thrones season progresses.

Reports are circulating that Yahoo is looking to launch a video site that would go up against Google's behemoth YouTube.

The rumors largely stem from a Re/Code report late last week that cited anonymous sources saying Yahoo is looking to not only launch a YouTube competitor in the next few months but also is trying to pluck some of the video-sharing site's stars and favorite networks.

Amazon is gearing up to launch a free video streaming service for both television and music videos, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The videos would be ad-supported in the vein of Hulu and YouTube, and the service would reportedly follow the launch of Amazon's as-yet-unannounced streaming device.

It's no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much "pirated" content as they can, but sometimes they go too far. In a recent DMCA notice, for example, Sony Pictures Television claims that Fox's hit show 'Almost Human' infringes on their copyrights.

Day in and day out copyright holders send hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices to Google, hoping to make pirated movies and music harder to find.

isoHunt, a search engine for BitTorrent files founded more than a decade ago, has agreed today to shut down all its operations worldwide. The company, founded by Canadian Gary Fung, has also accepted a judgment that it must pay the movie studios that sued it $110 million.

When you're picking out a DVR for your home, there's a pretty short list of candidates—TiVo has its new 6-tuner DVRs, or you can get something from your cable provider, or you can roll your own. But consumer-grade DVRs don't really scale all that well for media companies that need to record and process lots of TV. When you've got 30 or more channels that you need to be recording simultaneously, your cable company's DVR isn't really up to snuff anymore and it's time to call in the big guns.

While there are lots of fans of Apple's products who routinely stand or sit in lines outside of stores waiting to get the next iPhone or iPad, there were no such lines in front of US movie theaters this weekend to watch the heavily hyped biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The movie, titled simply Jobs, is estimated to have grossed just $6.7 million from 2,381 screens, placing it in a dismal seventh place on the box office charts.