Clicker wants to change this by making it easier to find shows from TV networks, music videos, and web videos from across the Internet. Clicker is currently in private beta and only available in the US. The company gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Read on to find out how you can get yours.

Features and User Interface

There are, of course, already numerous video search engines like blinkx or Truveo. Few of these make it as easy as Clicker to find the videos you are looking for, however. With auto-completed searches, a smart categorization system and well designed search results page, finding the right video on Clicker is a snap.

Whenever possible, Clicker uses video embeds to play videos right on its own page, though if a show can't be embedded, Clicker will point to other sources. It's important to point out that while most of these videos are available for free, Clicker also indexes shows that are only available for paid downloads and streams on services like iTunes or Amazon. Clicker also indexes shows from Netflix - though you need to be a Netflix subscriber to stream these.

A very useful feature on Clicker is that users can subscribe to shows and build up a personal library of shows and playlists. Every episode page gives users the option to add this episode to the playlist or to subscribe to the complete series. Clicker also keeps a record of all the shows a user has watched already.

All of these features are nice and useful, but the area where Clicker really shines is in how it presents the search results and how easy it is to browse the site and discover shows.

Taming the Wild West of Online Video

With its focus on indexing high-quality videos and making it easy to find them, Clicker manages to stand out from its competition. Earlier this week, Clicker added Blake Krikorian, the founder of Sling Media to its board of directors, whose experience in this market will definitely be a boon for the company.

As Clicker's CEO Jim Lanzone told us earlier today, online video is still going through its Wild West phase. Thanks to services like Clicker, it's now getting a lot easier to find and play online videos without having to search through dozens of sites.

Invites

Clicker gave us 1000 invites. Simply click here, sign up, and you are ready to go.

Desktop Uploader

The desktop uploader will allow Vimeo users to upload multiple videos at the same time. Users also won't have to worry about browser time-outs anymore, and the uploader will make it easy to pause and resume uploads if necessary.

Stats

The new stats package will aggregate data about likes and plays, referrer data, HD vs. SD plays, loads and finishes, as well as information about how often a video was shared and downloaded. Most of these features will be available only to users with paid accounts, though some of the more basic functions will also come to Vimeo's free accounts as well.

While the desktop uploader should be available fairly soon, Vimeo stated only that the advanced stats would be launched "before the end of the year."

Overall, it looks like Vimeo is on the right track with these updates. The uploader is useful, but the stats are a must for a paid online video service these days. Some of Vimeo's competitors like Blip and Viddler also offer stats, though Vimeo's new stats look to be far more in-depth than what its competitors currently offer.

The mega-video site is partnering with Videomaker magazine to offer free webinars on topics of interest to the would-be iJustines and Ask A Ninjas of the world. Topics will cover how to shop for a video camera, microphone techniques, lighting and all the basics of shooting palatable online video content.

Because different content creators struggle with different elements of online video, YouTube is asking users to vote on which topics the first webinar should cover. Options include shopping for a camcorder, button basics, lighting and filtering, microphone techniques, the art of composition and handheld camera techniques. Users can also submit their own ideas and discuss common issues.

The first webinar is scheduled to take place October 27, 2009, at 2 pm Pacific Time/5 pm Eastern Time. The webinar will last for one hour, and interested parties can register here.

As we already know, one of the best ways to avoid the brutality that is YouTube comments (which were recently voted the worst thing on the Internet, we will have you know) is to shoot high-quality video content. Even with inexpensive equipment and no formal filmic education, many YouTube heroes have learned to generate stellar videos. All it takes is practice and a few hints from folks who know. Props to YouTube for giving its users a little nudge in the right direction.

And if you can't make time for the webinar, just watch this very serious and detailed tutorial on video blogging from Justine Ezarik:

NBC's Zucker also hinted at the company's interest in the matter. "Whether there are other ways to monetize Hulu down the road, it is something that we are open to, something we will explore," he said, but like Murdoch, reiterated "there are no plans at this time."

Subscription Services Already in Testing?

While that may be the official company line, other sites are reporting a slightly different variation on this story. The Business of Video blog, for example, says they've been in contact with sources who have confirmed that Hulu is already beta testing a subscription-based service internally and is working out the technical requirements. If that story is to be believed, the offering won't go live anytime this year as Hulu still needs to figure out the details of the business plan.

Whether or not that rumor is true, it wouldn't be surprising to hear that Hulu is working on such a project, given their obvious interest in adding more revenue-generating features to the site. Zucker himself even updated his ongoing conference comment about "analog dollars" being used to chase "digital dimes." (In 2008, it was "digital pennies.") "Certainly by next year the goal should be at least quarters," he joked.

What We Want to See: Premium Channels on Hulu

Subscription services would be a brilliant way to chase those quarters, indeed. Perhaps it could even convince cable-only paid channels like HBO and Showtime to get on board with the venture. They've already tentatively given iTunes a shot, but still seem reluctant to share current episodes in a timely fashion on that service. The reason for the networks' timidity is because their iTunes revenue simply doesn't compare to their cable TV subscription offerings or even their DVD sales. (Ironically, that's probably due to the fact that they don't offer current programs via iTunes!). Instead, they would rather entice consumers to subscribe by tempting them with their backcatalog of programming.

However, if the situation was to change and consumers could subscribe to these channels online for a comparable fee to what the companies generate through cable TV distribution, would they continue to put up such resistance? After all, money is money, who cares where it comes from?

These days, more and more consumers are pinching pennies by cancelling cable subscriptions thanks to the numerous alternatives available online. Obviously, premium channels are getting the boot, too. Imagine if they could have a chance to win back some of those penny-pinching former subscribers by way of an online subscription service. After all, what would you give for piecemeal plans that let you buy a 3-month pass to HBO instead of the all-or-nothing combo packages available via your cable TV provider?

Of course, all this is just wishful thinking on our part, but if Hulu does it right, the possibilities for their new TV distribution network are virtually endless.

In total, the average viewer watched about 135 video clips. While full-length shows are becoming more popular, it is still important to note that the average video is only 3.7 minutes long. Hulu, which focuses on full-length TV shows, also recorded its best month yet, with 457 million views.

Another Record-Breaking Month

June, according to comScore, already broke most records, but at that time, the company credited the surge to the large number of high-profile events (including the death of Michael Jackson and the elections in Iran). ComScore argues that TV viewers are turning to the Internet right now because most of the shows on TV are currently on summer hiatus. While this probably plays some role in this current growth in interest in online video, we would also argue that a lot of viewers are simply changing their viewing habits and have moved away from watching shows on traditional TV and cable networks. Instead, they are watching popular clips on YouTube and full-length shows on Hulu.

A scan of the Break Media homepage headlines as of writing tells you all you need to know about the content on this site: 'Eight Perfect Pogostick Backflips,' 'Mexico Versus Uruguay Basketball Fight,' 'Kid Hit in the Face by Field Goal Kick,' 'iPhone Commercial for Ex-Boyfriends,' 'Human Head Turntables and Drums,' ... you get the picture.

I checked out a couple of videos from the site, purely for research purposes of course. And while I wasn't game to watch the one where a gymnast "snaps neck on dismount," (!!) I did watch and enjoy this one about a sports reporter in Prague dealing with drunken fans:

It doesn't take an in-depth analysis to figure out the appeal of Break Media - it's entertaining, generally funny and not to be taken seriously at all. So it's no surprise that Break Media is becoming one of America's most popular websites. The appeal for viewers is very similar to that of YouTube - and look how that turned out.

As well as a large monthly audience of 23.5 million unique users, Break Media has 'stickiness.' Break Media cites [PDF] a comScore report stating that viewers spend an average of 3.3 minutes watching a video, which the company claims is above average for video sites.

Other than the flagship break.com, Break Media owns a range of niche sites targeted to men; including Cage Potato, MadeMan, Chickipedia, Holy Taco, Screen Junkies and All Left Turns.

Is Break Media the future of Web entertainment? We sure hope not, but you can't argue against its general appeal as a place to go to waste some time... and that Prague sports reporter video was funny!

As startups such as Blip.tv continue to grow and partner with old-guard media companies for television distribution, what will happen to the major networks, whose current model creates a scarcity of opportunity for revenue while requiring a "least objectionable programming" approach to content? Will network TV survive? Watch and find out what Hudack thinks.

Web 2.0 Fridays being what they are, the Blip.tv team geared up for beer and Rock Band about 5 minutes after the interview finished. More announcements about "super-secret" developments now in the works (Hudack's terminology) are to be released in the weeks to come.

This study, which was sponsored by media research firm Nielsen, however, concludes that the average adult in the U.S. still watches an almost unbelievable 5 1/2 hours of live TV every day. 94% of adults watch TV on any given day, while most people only watch online videos for a few minutes a day.

TV (including DVR playback) represents 99% of all the video watched by U.S. adults, and even for the youngest group in the sample, those 18-24, online video only represented 2% of all screen time.

The Bad News for TV

In terms of general use, however, computers and mobile screens have clearly taken time away from TV, even if online video still has a lot of room to grow. Users 18-24 spend more time in front of their computer screens than any other group (143 min a day on average), but still watch 210 min of TV every day.

The older a person, the more time they are likely to spend in front of their TV (421 min for those 65 and older). For TV executives, however, this means that the next generation of viewers will most likely spend even less time in front of their TVs.

With YouTube XL, Boxee, and the new Hulu Desktop, a growing number of players are also now pushing online video onto the TV screens of mainstream users, and chances are that within a few years, online video and traditional TV will simply start to converge. While we will probably still be watching the majority of video on TV sets, users will care less and less whether it is coming from their cable company or ISP.

Note: we reported some data from a preliminary version of this report in March.

One of the nicest things about Tinychat is how easy it is to use. Just head over to their site, click on create room, choose a username (no need to register), and allow Adobe Flash to access your webcam. You can also just use a microphone or join the old-school text chat. You also have the option to send a message to your Twitter followers if you want them to join you in the chat room. The free version of Tinychat will have very few privacy controls, though the room owner (generally the first person to enter a room), can ban users or mute them. The most complicated thing to figure out for new users is how to choose their webcam and to remember to click the "start broadcasting" button if they want to participate in the video chat.

Tinychat is also available as a Facebook application, which replicates most of the functionality of the regular web app, though with a different layout.

Up to 12 users can be on video simultaneously and up to 100 users can watch the stream live. If you want to give it a try, just join our RWW video chat room here.

Pro Version: Better Video Quality, Recording, and Screen Sharing

Some of the best features of Tinychat are hidden behind a pay wall. Tinychat offers a pro version for $20 a month which will come with better video quality (though the regular video quality isn't too bad). Other features available with the pro version are: the ability to reserve names for up to five rooms, more privacy controls (including password protected rooms), and, maybe most importantly, the ability to record and save your conferences.

For now, the pro account allows you to download the various streams separately as FLV files and edit them in your favorite video editor (though you might need a converter to turn the Flash video into a format that your video editor can use). Soon, though, Tinychat Pro will also give users a widget that will allow paying users to just embed a video with the recorded chat as well.

Sadly, the screen sharing feature is only available for paying customers. We got a chance to test it, though, and while it only refreshes about once a second, and would hence not work well if you were planning to stream videos over it, the image quality was excellent and the refresh rate is probably sufficient for most of the online demos it would most likely be used for.

We talked to Tinychat's CEO, Dan Blake, as he and his team were developing this new app over the last few weeks. He told us that, as part of Tinychat's business model, the company will also provide white-label versions of Tinychat to corporations which will not have any limits on the number of viewers.

Verdict

While Tinychat will be great for just getting a group of friends together, we could also see how this could be a great tool to easily create a video podcast with multiple guests (similar to what TechVi is doing, for example). In some ways, the new Tinychat is similar to the now defunct Yahoo Live platform, though with more features and an easier to use interface. Yahoo abandoned this product last November, but Tinychat might just find a nice niche here, especially thanks to its close connection to social media tools like Twitter and Facebook.

Give it a Spin

If you would like to try Tinychat out with us, just head over to our room here.

Enter new media marketing for new media products! A rash of online promo videos for social products show how Internet and mobile entrepreneurs have taken lessons from traditional broadcast advertising as much as they have from YouTube.

Best of all, the videos have given great ROI (that's "return on investment" for you non-advertising types).

Regarding this promo video for MyNameIsE.com, founder and designer Renato Valdés Olmos said, "That video actually cost us rental money for the camera, some drinks, and pizzas!"

In 3 days, the video got "4,000 views and great responses" before Vimeo took it down; apparently, the site doesn't allow commercials. However, the E team got the video up on YouTube.

"Sign-ups spiked as soon as the video started being posted around," said Olmos, "and it also works great in pitches and presentations."

All this was acheived with no marketing budget and little support from major bloggers and Twitter influencers.

Another promo video making the rounds comes from iPhone app Birdhouse.

"There's no question that the adoption of Birdhouse benefitted hugely from the exposure that came from the promotional video we put together," said cofounder Adam Lisagor. "We knew from the beginning we'd be making a video people would enjoy despite any interest in the actual app. We heard over and over, 'I don't even know if I'll use Birdhouse, but the video made me buy it.'

"This is something that almost all software developers overlook: the power of entertainment to communicate why you built it and why you want others to enjoy it as much as you."

A third video we've seen is almost a straight-up live demo for LoveToGoOut.com, a new site that aims to organize pub crawls, club nights, and other nocturnal, boozy get-togethers.

"Originally, the video was created to promote the site at a local university event here in the UK," said advisor Barry Pace.

"[We] haven't promoted this too much online (if at all). Measurement of success is more about local awareness rather than attempting to monitor any buzz online."

Nevertheless, if current trends are any indication, site traffic will spike with proliferation of the video.

In total, the new portal will feature about 130 episodes from 20 shows, and PBS promises to add more shows and episodes over the next few weeks. PBS also plans to make PBS Video the clearinghouse for shows from local affiliates.

In some ways, the interface resembles ABC's streaming video player, with a substantial dose of Hulu thrown in for good measure. PBS does not allow users to embed any of its shows on other sites, which is quite a shame. This is probably a compromise PBS had to make in order to be allowed to put these shows up on the Internet in the first place.

Sadly, the user interface isn't always very user intuitive. Every show, for example, is presented as a deck of cards, which looks cool, but which would be almost impossible to work with if it wasn't for a standard, text-based table of shows at the bottom of the page. Most shows open with standard pre-roll ads from PBS sponsors. The site also features links to these sponsors, as well as links to local PBS stations, where viewers can make donations.

There is still a clear North/South divide when it comes to Internet penetration levels in Europe. While all the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are highly connected, with penetration rates over 80%, countries in Southern Europe like Greece, Turkey, or Portugal hover around 40%.

Microsoft, however, expects that this will slowly change, as Internet usage continues to grow in Southern Europe, and as the Northern countries reach their saturation levels.

Broadband connections in Europe represent about 83% of all Internet connections, which is far ahead of the U.S., where broadband only accounts for about 70% of all connections.

Online Video

Microsoft assumes that TV, radio, and newspaper consumption, which has been flat in Europe for the last couple of years, will start a slow decline. Since 2004, Europeans are already spending less time on watching DVDs (-16%) and reading magazines (-6%).

By 2010, Microsoft predicts that Europeans will spend an average of 14.2 per week on the Internet, while they will only sit in front of their TVs for 11.5 hours per week.

Currently, about 9% of Europeans watch live TV on their PCs and 4% record TV programs to a hard drive, either through a dedicated media PC or with a DVR. Microsoft, however, doesn't believe that the TV will be left behind. Instead, the company predicts that the traditional TV will morph into an Internet-enabled device that will offer consumers the ability to watch on-demand videos and connect them to their social networks and other online activities.

Unsurprisingly, this study, which tracked the media consumption habits of 350 Americans, also found that older adults tend to spend more time in front of their TVs, while they also spend significantly less time in front of their computers. Interestingly, among all age groups, the overall time spent in front of screens is very consistent (about 8 1/2 hours), but boomers 45-54 consume about one hour more than all the other age groups.

With regards to computer usage, surfing the web, emailing, and using 'any software' are the predominant activities. On an average day, young adults 18-24 watch about 5 minutes of online video. As expected, this group also uses email far less than any other group (20 minutes), except for users over 65 (11 minutes). According to this study, younger adults also have a stronger tendency to use all different kinds of media simultaneously (think surfing the web on the couch while watching TV).

Online Video is Still Very Small Compared to TV

Surfing the mobile web (0.9 minutes per day), and watching mobile video (0.1 minutes per day) is clearly only a hobby for a small minority of users. We do know, however, that those users who do watch online and mobile video tend to watch a lot of it, so clearly, this market has a lot of room to grow, even though TV will surely hold on to its dominant position as the preferred means of consuming video content for quite a while.

A Few More Interesting Results

• users who owned a DVR early on used it to watch TV far more often than those who only got a DVR recently.
• HDTV owners who just bought their first or second HDTV watch more TV than others
• Americans over 45 spend more time fiddling with the screens on their GPS navigation systems than they spend on watching Internet video.

Sadly, the report does not include data for users under 18. Our suspicion is that the numbers for online and mobile video viewing might be quite different for this demographic.

Overall, the results from this study also correlate well with Nielsen's own A2/M2 Three Screen Report from 2008.

Here is a copy of the press release (pdf).

CC-licensed logo image used courtesy of Flickr user Aaron Escobar.

This "next-generation entertainment service" is expected to launch as a premium movie channel in the fourth quarter of 2009 but will be offered to online subscribers first, with an expected Web launch in May.

Studio 3 Networks, the joint venture formed by Viacom's Paramount Pictures unit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate plans to provide access to directors' script notes, outtakes, auditions and other extras giving Web folk over and above what is currently available on other movie sites.

Offering up newly released movies such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at launch, epix will also have the rights to all 17 re-mastered James Bond movies as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Unfortunately subscription prices have yet to be announced but we look forward to watching it evolve.

In contrast to Hulu, TV.com is putting a lot of emphasis on the social networking features on its site, starting with a chat widget right on the homepage. CBS also puts more emphasis on letting viewers rate shows and makes these ratings a focus of its service.

At the same time, TV.com makes good use of the rich amount of data it has collected over the years. Every show comes with short descriptions of the show, reviews from viewers, and a list of all the cast members, as well as blogs and forums for some shows.

Hulu, on the other hand, puts the shows front and center on its service and offers very little additional information. Also, while Hulu barely mentions broadcast TV on its site, TV.com put the prime-time schedule for the big networks on almost every page.

TV.com Needs More Content

If CBS manages to get more content on its service, then it could indeed challenge Hulu, which saw its market share grow rapidly last year. For now, however, the 'Watch Now' buttons on TV.com often only lead to short teasers for the shows and the links to 'Full Episode Videos' often leads to pages fully devoid of full episodes.

For now, Hulu is clearly the better destination if you simply want to watch TV shows online. Hulu has fewer features than TV.com, but it also features more shows and makes getting to these shows easier than TV.com.

Do TV Viewers Want to be Social?

Another question, of course, is if most viewers are actually interested in all these social features. Watching TV, after all, is not exactly a social activity, though sites like Television Without Pity have shown that there is a market for sites that cater to hardcore fans.