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According to a new report by Entertainment Media Research, a London-based media consultancy firm, YouTube users in the U.S. clearly see the popular streaming video site as the default destination for streaming video content. While the researchers found that users expect brands to have a presence on YouTube, however, most users also said that they did not want to see any additional ads on the service, and over 50% stated that they preferred the site when it was less commercialized.

Just a few weeks ago, Google started to block music videos on YouTube in England, after its negotiations with the UK's artistic royalty-collecting body PRS for Music failed because of disagreements about the price of the license and a lack of transparency. Today, Google's negotiations with the German music rights association GEMA also failed, and Google will now block music videos in Germany as well. Google's contract with GEMA expired yesterday, after the two parties failed to come to an agreement about the price of a new license.

Just a few weeks ago, we reported that Hulu had pulled all of its content from Boxee, a popular cross-platform media player. However, as one could almost expect, Boxee, which has yet to work out a new deal with Hulu, found an easy workaround and Hulu's content is now back on Boxee. The company now simply routes Hulu's public RSS feeds to a new feed reader plugin in Boxee.

Update: Looks like we were wrong about Hulu's ability to keep Boxee down. According to a statement on Boxee's blog, Hulu has now blocked Boxee's browser from accessing the service.

The president's weekly video address was often called the 'YouTube address,' but after complaints from privacy activists, the White House has now decided to leave YouTube behind and use Akamai's content delivery network to embed the president's weekly address on the White House web site. The White House will still post videos to YouTube, but, by default, it now directs visitors to Vimeo instead of Google's streaming video service.

It has now been confirmed that Hulu.com has indeed pulled its videos from TV.com. Until yesterday, you could watch embedded Hulu videos on TV.com, but since last night, these videos have become unavailable. TV.com relaunched its site as a video portal last month and Hulu apparently believed that TV.com, which is owned by CBS, was becoming too much of a competitor to its own service.

Alex Chitu spotted a new 'purchases' section in his YouTube account today and YouTube just made it official: YouTube's partners can now offer their videos for paid downloads. While Google has always given its partners the option to offer downloads of their videos under the Creative Commons license, some of Google's partners will  now also be able to charge for their videos.

The Participatory Culture Foundation just released version 2.0 of Miro, the open source online TV application formerly known as Democracy Player. Miro is a combination of a video and audio podcast player with a built-in bittorrent client. In this new version, Miro also adds rudimentary support for streaming video, though in that respect, it is clearly outclassed by Boxee. Besides the support for streaming video, the new version of Miro also features a more streamlined user interface, a better programming guide, and, maybe most importantly, significant performance upgrades.