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A few months ago, we reviewed Tinychat, an easy to use web app for creating on-demand chatrooms with close connections to Twitter. Today, Tinychat relaunches with a number of very cool features, including video chats with up to 12 people, recording, screen sharing, and a Facebook application for video chats on Facebook. The new version of Tinychat keeps a lot of the features that we liked in the text-only version (no need to sign up, very easy to use, vanity room names), and adds the new video features on top of that.

Users are bombarded with new sites and apps that spring up every five seconds. It's becoming increasingly difficult to know what's the next big thing and what's just more noise and clutter.

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.

NPR has a great site to find its line-up of podcasts, but until now, PBS only featured videos from its TV shows on their respective homepages. Now, however, viewers will be able to turn to just one site, PBS Video, to find all of their favorite public television shows like 'Nova' or 'Antiques Roadshow.' Even though PBS is a non-profit organization, it faces some of the same challenges as its commercial brethren like Hulu or YouTube, as local stations don't want to lose viewers to the net, and as production companies don't want to give up control over their content.

Microsoft, in a new report about Internet usage in Europe, predicts that the Internet will overtake TV as the most consumed form of media in Europe by the middle of next year. Broadband connections in Europe have grown by 95% in the last five years and the average European now spends about 8.9 hours per week online. Microsoft also predicts that over the next 5 years, usage patterns will shift away from traditional PCs to other web enabled devices like game consoles, IPTV, and mobile phones.

Even though online video is clearly making its mark in the media landscape, TV is still the predominant means of media consumption for the average American. Indeed, according to a new study sponsored by Nielsen, even among young adults 18-24, Internet video only represents less than 1% of their total media consumption. In total, the average American adult spends about 8 1/2 hours a day in front of a TV, computer, or mobile phone screen. On average, these adults also watched about 72 minutes of TV ads per day.

While sites like YouTube and Hulu may have rights to limited content from Hollywood, Studio 3 Networks plans to take online video to a new level with epix, a service that will offer in excess of 15, 000 films and television shows across multiple platforms.

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.