Yesterday I spent the better part of an hour watching the Thundercast movie, “The Beginning.” That’s not what’s really matters though. What matters is that Viacom will now know that I was watching the movie. This ruling may not be completely legal though. As the EFF points out, “Federal law ‘prohibits video tape service providers from disclosing information on the specific video materials subscribers request or obtain.’”

As Mike Arrington points out, the data required to be handed over includes every “YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube.” This is a pretty ridiculous court ruling and one that I’m sure will be appealed by Google. I seriously doubt that Google is going to turn over the user data.

Still, this ruling is a substantial one and it’s not the lat that we’ve heard about this. In the meantime, I highly recommend checking out the Thundercats movie. Hopefully Viacom doesn’t come knocking at your door. Ryan Singel at Wired highlights that Google’s own defense in prior court cases was used against them. That prior defense was that “IP addresses of computers aren’t personally revealing in and of themselves, against it to justify the log dump.”

The one win by Google was the ability to stop Viacom from forcing the company to hand over YouTube’s source code. This is still a massive loss for privacy advocates though.

Michael Learmonth at AlleyInsider has the scoop about YouTube adding long-form video to their site. Apparently the company has decided that 10-minute videos were simply not enough among increasing competition from sites like Hulu which are providing entire episodes of television shows. Here’s what Michael Learmonth had to say:

YouTube’s 10-minute limit has served a couple of purposes to date: It keeps bandwidth costs down, and it makes it harder for copyright owners to complain about unauthorized streams: Technically, you could cut up “300″ into 10-minute chunks and distribute it through the site (and we assume some people have). But who wants to watch that? And short clips also work for YouTube because, well, it’s the Web, and there’s a limited appetite for anything that lingers on for more than a couple of minutes.

So what’s Google thinking about here? One obvious answer: Advertising. YouTube sells ads against videos uploaded by its content partners, but there are only so many ads you can sell against a short, under clip. Presumably YouTube wants to figure out if it can sell more of them against longer clips.

On Monday I wrote about what the future of television looks like. The post was inspired by an extremely trashy show called No Good TV that I couldn’t seem to stop myself from watching. Based on the number of views on the company’s other videos, it looks like other people had the same problem. While I’m not typically a fan on filth, for some reason this filth has inspired me.

It has also driven me to wonder if the same model is used for traditional television. First, let me explain my understanding of how you succeed on YouTube. Also, keep in mind that my measure of success is the number of views you get for your video. If you want a quick way of figuring it out, simply look at the image below which displays the top videos on YouTube for the week.

My conclusion is that the easiest way to get views on YouTube is to:

1. Create a title that includes the word “Sex” or a curse word
2. Have a video clip or image directly in the middle of your video that includes boobs

That’s it! You have now successfully followed the two step F’in boob model of success. Playtex successfully used this model to attract over 1.3 million views of their most recent video and over 4.5 million views to one of their other videos for the “Playtex Who Knows You Like We Do” campaign.

This isn’t the only model for success but it definitely works. It also makes me wonder about the quality of content on YouTube but then again, I typically don’t spend much time viewing the site. Sites like Blip.tv try to use an alternative model called “Creating Good Content”. I like to call that the CGC model. If you want to get millions of views though your quickest way to success is the F’in boob model. Do you know any other models of success on YouTube or web video?