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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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?

You can watch videos right on the site in their own custom interface which is consistent no matter which site's video you are viewing. You can also click through to visit the original web site, if desired. When you're finished viewing, you can share videos with friends and leave comments and recommendations - an experience common to most internet video sharing sites. As you're watching a video, you can continue browsing for more videos while keeing the current video playing in the right sidebar.

You can also customize Invision.tv so it matches your interests. Like YouTube, you can subscribe to channels and create playlists, but Invision.tv lets you embed those playlists on your own web site or blog. However, what's different about this site compared to many other video portals is that, behind-the-scenes, their recommendation engine is scouring the site to find new video choices to present to you which match up with the type of content you find interesting. Here at RWW, we like recommendation engines so we're looking forward to giving this one a test drive.

Flickr will also release the new features it first introduced for the iPhone and iPod Touch in October to the rest of its mobile users on other mobile devices with support for Webkit, Firefox Mobile, and Opera Mine. These new features include a more user friendly interface to view your own photos and recent activity, as well as that of your contacts. Users can also now add contacts, favorite images, and change privacy settings while on the go.

Overall, this is a nice update to Flickr's mobile site, which was already very strong in terms of usability and speed. Adding video is a nice touch (though, Flickr's users were of course somewhat hesitant when Flickr first added video). The core feature for Flickr, however, is still photos, and here the mobile site really shines.

Video is huge, I think it's established that it's not a fad. Comscore reported this month that US consumers are watching an average of 3 hours of video online in the month of July, more on Google sites than anywhere else. It's a lot higher than that in my house (though we watch StumbleUpon Video). I'd be very interested to see how that number compares with other forms of media consumption like movie theaters and newspapers.

Though it might seem small, the inclusion of video search in Google Alerts could be big. Sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference, especially when it's Google that does them. I'm willing to guess that there are as many or more people in this world who use the Google Alerts system as there are who knowingly read RSS feeds in a reader. While that makes me shudder on principle, any progress for a "publish and subscribe" paradigm instead of a "broadcast and hope they come" approach is good news in my book.

When video consumption numbers continue to rise, it will be because of small steps like this one, increasing the accessibility of the medium.

In a recent blog post, the Mefeedia team noted that YouTube (and Flash Video generally) has revolutionized online video, "making it easy to browse and view what you are looking for". The problem, says Mefeedia, is that quality suffers on 1st generation video sites such as YouTube. Mefeedia thinks it's time for the next generation of online video, which the company says will have the following attributes:

Mefeedia says it is an example of 2nd generation online video. Browsing through the site, I found it does have a lot of recommendations (by other users), there are lots of tags to choose from, over 200 guides, and you can create personalized channels and playlists. You can also watch videos in a variety of different ways - feed readers, media players, mobile devices, etc. By default, it uses Quicktime (not Flash) to stream videos - but you can also choose to download them.

Note: I wonder what Mefeedia thinks of Flash video now that Adobe Player 9 has been upgraded to HD TV quality? That may negate their second point above.

The sign-up is quick and easy and there is no shortage of content. Is this the 2nd generation of online video? It certainly has many excellent personalization and recommendation features. All in all, well worth checking out if you're after new online video experiences.

In May 2007, Google sites (primarily YouTube) streamed nearly 1.8 billion videos, good for 21.5% of the US market. Their next closes competitor, Fox Interactive (primarily MySpace Video) streamed just 680 million -- or 8.1% of the US market.

Some other eye popping figures: 75% of Americans watched video online in the past month, and 1 in 3 did so on YouTube. The average video streamer consumed well over 2.5 hours of online video (I confess that I've watched probably more than that in the past month, thanks in part to an always enlightening and entertaining Guy Kawasaki-hosted roundtable discussion). The average video consumer watched more than 2 videos per day, which unless my math is totally batty means that most people are using more than one site (and probably more than two) to get their online video fix.

As we reported last week, Hollywood is taking online video more seriously, and according to ABI Research, there will be nearly 1 billion online video consumers by 2012. As the audience for Internet video and user generated content grows, Google's mega acquisition of market-dominating YouTube, which accounts for about 95% of the company's video streams, last fall looks more and more wise.

Magma provides stats and real-time tracking to help users discover the day's most popular video trends. Each video page is assigned a rating between 1 and 11, depending on the number of trackbacks and the daily traffic. Magma also offers public dashboards for users to share their videos among friends in a feed reader-style queue. If you can't find the video you want to bookmark, you can add an external video to the site by linking to it from Magma or via an installable browser bookmarklet. In this way, Magma is one part video community, one part Delicious, and one part buzz tracker.

It will be interesting to see if users view a Magma "collection" as something different from their group of YouTube subscriptions. As well, depending on how the community monetizes, the idea of having a channel with unlicensed external content may make for some interesting legal battles.

Says Darya Gudkova, Head of Content Analysis & Research at Kaspersky Lab, "naturally, this type of advertising is more interesting and gets more hits." That's bad news for YouTube because when something works, spammers keep at it... with a vengeance. Once word gets around that video spam is more successful than traditional methods, there's no doubt that it will only increase.

How Would YouTube Handle Video Spam?

So what will YouTube do if video spam becomes a real problem on its network? We would like to think that it would take the offending content down, but that could be easier said than done. After all, this isn't like the copyrighted content that their Content Identification tool can easily identify and remove. That tool works by comparing unique signatures somewhat like a digital "fingerprint" from a content owner's copyrighted file to user uploads across the site. Then, if a match occurs, the copyright holder has the option to have the video taken down.

Identifying a spammer's video would be much harder. Just because someone is using YouTube to sell something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's video "spam." That moniker should only be reserved for videos which are truly undesirable messages where fraudulent activities are underway. The question is, how would YouTube know?

Assuming that video spam takes off, the best thing the site could do to police online content is to include a "report spam" button for videos themselves, as it now has for video comments only. 

Of course, for potential victims of video spam, the best thing is not to get duped into visiting YouTube in the first place. Spam filters will simply have to adapt to this new technique. Unfortunately, that will be yet another challenge for Google, which, in addition to owning YouTube, also offers a feature in its webmail product Gmail that automatically embeds any YouTube videos referenced in the email directly in the message itself. That makes it even more convenient for video spammers, who wouldn't have to convince their victims to leave their inbox and launch a new browser window: just click a button on the video embedded below.

One of the requirements for any video added to the site is that it be based on open-source formats. With the heavy exposure that the Wikipedia web site receives - often the number one search ranking for any subject and the seventh most popular web site in the world - the organization hopes to put pressure on other content holders to release more of their videos into the public domain.

Neither adding a video to the site nor clipping a section of video will require users to have any sort of video-editing software on their computer - all the tools will be provided online. In the future, Wikipedia plans to add more features to the system so as to allow users to edit, add to, and reorganize the clips embedded in the articles, just as users are able to edit text on the site today.

To help with the video effort, Wikipedia has partnered with Kaltura, an open source video solution provider, who is helping to develop the necessary tools for importing the video content. The partnership was originally announced back in January of 2008.