Qik Video Connect offers video streaming and video calling - available for real-time viewing or recorded and sent as a video message. The app will also allow you to post live video links to Facebook and Twitter.

The pro version offers HD video recording and includes additional features like filters and editing tools.

The live video chat will work between iPhones on Wi-Fi as well as on 3G, and the video messages can be shared to those not on the iPhone platform, making it a good alternative to Apple's own video-calling app Facetime.

Despite the acquisition of Qik by Skype, it appears as though the video sharing app will retain its own name and branding. It's an indication, nonetheless, that Skype plans on being active in video and mobile calling.

Launch participant Brightcove said in a release tonight that "Publishers and content providers can control which videos get which ads and when the ads play in each video." Am I the only one that hates those damned pop up text overlay ads that show up on other services' videos?

There is clearly a lot of room to experiment with video ads.

In some cases even interstitial videos inside a video can be done well, check out almost any of the work of video ad network Castfire, for example. Castfire has a very sophisticated technology for serving up ads in video. While at first blush this San Francisco startup might seem to be in trouble given tonight's news - in reality, AdSense for Video will be about monetizing bulk, remainder and less-than-high quality video more than anything else. That leaves plenty of room in the market for startups taking other approaches, like serving video ads inside of videos - as Google said it was going to do.

A new service from Encoding.com launches today that seeks to address this with a simple new service to make a video playable on a variety of mobile devices: Vid.ly.

From there, Vid.ly makes it easy to share the video with others as it provides a short URL. Those that click on it will be served the video file compatible with the device they're using. You can also embed the code on your website to the same end - people can stream your movies no matter if they're on a Blackberry or an iPad.

Vid.ly certainly addresses one of the major pain points of watching and delivering video content online, and Encoding.com says it will launch a Pro version in the coming months that will offer API access.

News is the most popular genre of online video with every age group except for those ages 18-29, for whom comedy is watched more. YouTube is the most popular destination, with 27% of online video consumers saying they watch or download video from YouTube.

It's on that latter point that this week's poll will revolve. Read/WriteWeb readers are likely to use a larger variety of online video sites than the Pew audience, so we're curious what the results of this poll will be. Note that there are literally hundreds of video sharing sites on the Web - we listed a lot of them in our February Online Video Index. So we can't hope to include them all. But shout out in the comments if your favorite online video site isn't in the list.

Would You Pay Extra for Video Calling?

About a third of those Internet users who are making video calls are also willing to pay for it. According to the Rebtel survey, the price for this feature can't be too high, though. Most users aren't willing to spend more than $10 per month for this, and 44% of those respondents who are willing to pay don't want to pay more than $5. As Rebtel's CEO Andreas Bernstrom notes, "this opens up a new, non-ad based revenue model for providers like Skype who are looking to monetize on their video services."

The app would be much nicer if it allowed you to play your playlist of videos continuously but it's not so taxing to click play after each video. It's a good little app!

I'm going to try using this for an extended period of time, but at first blush it looks like a good source of news and other video. I can imagine this taking a place between Newsy and the Wall St. Journal streaming video apps on my iPad.

The highlights? YouTube viewership grew 9% according to Nielsen, Metacafe grew 27% and Yahoo! Video viewership fell by an amazing 60%.

My takeaways from these numbers? There's plenty of room for change in this market, as expected the TV writers' strike may be increasing online numbers, look out for Metacafe and don't assume that YouTube's growth will slow.

If you're interested in the online video market, you should make sure you're subscribed to the feed for NewTeeVee, the GigaOm network's video news blog.

This kind of personal broadcasting is something YouTube is known for, but now informal video updates can be shared straight to Google+ circles. The Google+ stream allows all kinds of in-your-face content, including animated GIFs and Google Music players, and now it adds impromptu video updates to the mix.

These video status updates bypass YouTube and go straight to the stream. Google+ Hangouts, the live video chat feature, uses YouTube for recording and also allows group watching of YouTube videos. Google began integrating YouTube and Google+ last October, and YouTube's new homepage now features Google+ prominently. There's also a floating YouTube tab on the right side of Google+ pages allowing for quick video searches.

Would you post a video update to your circles?

Sadly, the Pew study did not ask users about their sentiments towards video calling. There is some anecdotal evidence that many people prefer voice calls and don't feel comfortable being on video. Qualcomm's senior vice president for Global Marketing Bill Davidson, for example, told us last week that he does not believe that video calling will be a killer feature for the next generation of wireless data networks as users simply aren't that interested in it. It would have been nice to see some data to either back this up or bust this as a myth.

Instead, the Pew survey focuses on the demographics of those who use video calls. There are no major surprises there. More affluent and younger users tend to use video calling more than others, for example, and urban users are far more likely to participate in video calls than users in rural regions (27% vs. 12%).

Yahoo! claims it is the first portal to enable such "an immersive video experience" directly on its home page. The following two screenshots indicate how it works. The first is the homepage with new video module, and the second is what happens if you click 'play video' on the Daily Show image:

The new video features are very nicely implemented, although I did have trouble using it in Firefox on a Mac (worked fine on Safari). Yahoo.com is also lucky to have exclusive videos from Daily Show correspondent Rob Riggle as he covers the war from Iraq. Not to be missed :-)

With Video Chat, you'll see a picture-in-picture display so you can preview your image before placing the call. You can also switch cameras during the call, in order to show your caller what you're seeing around you. A mute feature and call logs are available, too.

To maintain a list of friends and colleagues available for calls, the app ships with a Friends List feature which lets you list your contacts, associate a picture with their contact entry.

RIM says the app will begin to roll out starting on May 3.

Yahoo Video Search lets users filter searches by the length of the videos. Search queries can also be restricted to official videos from a band or artist. Just like it does with non-music related searches, Yahoo also features recently shared videos from Twitter at the top of the search results.

Yahoo Video displays videos from services like YouTube, DailyMotion or MetaCafe right on the search results page. For the vast majority of video services like Artist Direct, however, users have to leave the site to see these videos. In our tests, this new feature mostly worked as advertised, though it sometimes showed songs that weren't part of the album we had selected.

Reaction to Google Music Search?

It is worth noting that while Google launched its new Google Music Search service last month, Yahoo also offers a seamless integration with Rhapsody on its site.

So, it's now August 2007 - has online video been the biggest trend in 2007? You could argue that Facebook and iPhone have been bigger events in 2007, but online video is still right up there.

To find out exactly how big an impact online video has had in 2007 so far, we're doing a special series this week. We'll look back on R/WW articles about online video, as well as those from our niche blog devoted to online video and other aspects of the digital lifestyle - last100. We'll also pick out the best of online video and predict what's to come.

blinkx's whitepaper covers the following topics:

• Cleaning and conversion of metadata
• Optimizing titles, description and filenames
• Leveraging sitemaps
• Utilizing Media RSS
• Content Management
• Where to submit
• What to Avoid

There is certainly a lot of useful info here on how blinkx and other search engines rank video content. I especially liked this high level view of the video search industry:

A little more about blinkx: according to the press release today, blinkx has indexed more than 7,000,000 hours of audio, video, viral and TV content, and made it "fully searchable and available on demand." Does that make them the biggest video search engine in the world though? I don't actually know - anyone care to comment?

The percentage of online video available in HTML5 format has grown 5X since January and more than 2X in the past 5 months, according to a report by web video cataloging service MeFeedia today. An estimated 54% of online video is now available in HTML5, generally in addition to availability in Adobe Flash.

What does that mean? It means iOS devices can play a whole lot of video without concern for Flash, it means that Flash's (alleged) memory problems can be minimized by deferring to HTML5 players and it may mean less industry dependence on Adobe's Flash publishing technologies.

The MeFeedia survey incorporated analysis of video from more than 33,000 publishers, including Hulu, CBS & ABC, YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion. Adult video sites were not included, but given that the porn industry's technology tends to be as advanced as its politics tend to be retrograde - the percentage is probably even higher there.

The HTML5 video landscape is set to change even more, with startups like Sublime Video (our review) and Handroll.tv (our review) making bold new entries into the field. Handroll, which is positioning itself as the WordPress of HTML5 video, recently built a simple Twitter client into its video player, for example.

For an in-depth technical comparison of Flash and HTML5 video performance, see Sarah Perez's article Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests.