TinyChat.tv's interface will feel very familiar if you used the regular TinyChat before.

Room owners can customize the look and feel of their rooms and decide if they want to force users to sign in with their Twitter or Facebook accounts. One feature we really liked on TinyChat was that users could type a random URL (tinychat.com/12345) and the service would automatically create a room with this URL. This feature hasn't been enabled on TinyChat.tv yet, but TinyChat's co-founder Dan Blake tells us that it will come back soon.

For $9.95 per month, users can also buy a pro membership that allows them to set passwords for rooms and stream higher quality video.

For Developers: Free Streaming with TinyChat API

For developers, TinyChat now offers a comprehensive free application programming interface (API) that makes it easy for developers to create their own Ustream clones. Indeed, TinyChat.tv itself was built on top of this API. Earlier today, Dan Blake told us that TinyChat will not charge developers for bandwidth. Stickam currently charges $0.45 per gigabyte for its streamAPI white label service.

Overall, this is a nice upgrade to the regular TinyChat experience. The old TinyChat, where users don't need to sign up will continue to operate. The big development is the API, however, and we are looking forward to seeing what developers will do with it.

Today, Joost announced that it is mostly abandoning its original strategy and that the company will focus on offering white label video solutions for media companies and distributors instead.

As Mike Volpi points out on the Joost blog, the company will also downsize its staff in New York and London, and shut down its development center in the Netherlands. Joost will continue to host content on Joost.com, however, and keep the portal running for the time being. The focus of Joost, however, will be on the white label platform, which the company describes as a "cost-effective, end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands."

Volpi also announced that he is stepping down as Joost's CEO. Matt Zelesko, Joost's current SVP of engineering, will replace Volpi as CEO.

Lots of Competition

Joost is entering a pretty crowded market, with Brightcove, Viddler, EdgeCast and many others vying for customers. There can be no doubt that Joost will be able to deliver the technology, but we will have to wait and see if Joost can make this transition and attract enough customers for its white label solution.

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.

Among some of Watershed's most interesting features are its granular security settings (down to limiting access to certain IP addresses), detailed analytics, and real-time chat and polls.

Competition

Other white-label video streaming services like Level 3 (pdf) or Move Networks offer similar solutions, though they generally only target larger enterprises and media companies. While Watershed's pricing model seems reasonable, the price itself feels rather high, though Ustream's CEO argues that it is comparable to services from other live streaming providers.

Other streaming services like Mogulus Pro tend to charge a monthly fee for their 'pro' services. Mogulus, however, also charges for bandwidth and Ustream argues that its pay-as-you-go service provides more flexibility.

At the same time, however, the total number of video streams per users dropped from 19.4 to 17.4, which is slightly puzzling. QuickPlay attributes this to the growth in adoption of live mobile TV, which generates fewer streams, but longer views.

QuickPlay provides video services to a large number of mobile carriers in the U.S. and Canada, including AT&T, Alltel, Bell Mobility, Aliant, Rogers Wireless, Telus, and Sprint.

News, Music Videos, and Trailers

In terms of content, the most popular genres for live TV streaming were news, music videos, and weather. For regular video streaming, music videos and movie trailers were the most popular genres. The most popular categories for mobile downloading were music, sports, and comedy.

Will this Momentum Continue in 2009?

One of the reasons for this increase might be the rising interest in smartphones, which make accessing video content a lot easier. At the same time, though, it remains to be seen if consumers will continue to be willing to pay for extra mobile video services in the current economic climate.

By the Numbers

Here are the exact numbers from QuickPlay:

Video Streams

• Total live TV and video streams viewed grew 118% from Q3 to Q4 2008, compared with a 27% increase from Q2 to Q3
• Total streams per user dropped slightly to 17.4 in Q4 from 19.3 in Q3
• Average stream duration in Q4 2008 was slightly longer at two minutes and 48 seconds when compared to two minutes and 47 seconds in Q3

Video Downloads

• Average download per user experienced its best quarter of 2008 with an average of 6 per user vs. 4.1 per user in Q3
• Total video downloads showed an increase of 73% from Q3 to Q4 vs. 87% from Q2 to Q3

Image credit: Flickr user Ville.fi

The new linking options inside the comments now allow you to point to another video, channel page, playlist, group, or search query. You will not be able to link to content outside of YouTube, however. The YouTube team also highlights the possibility of linking to a video response page to gather feedback from your audience.

Is This a Good Thing?

The question, of course, is if this is actually a good thing. Too often, users already overuse the annotations to advertise some of their other videos or to remind us that the video is also available in HD (a note that also pops up when you are already watching the video in HD, by the way). Even Google seems to be aware of this, as they provide a help page with instructions for how to turn these annotations off for embedded videos.

Omnisio

We can only assume that this is the first part of the integration of Omnisio's technology into the core YouTube service. Google acquired Omnisio last July, though it is important to note that the service did a lot more than just video annotations.

Post to 60 Different Services

We first reviewed Pixelpipe last August when it was still in private beta, but by now, the site has opened up to the public and added a massive amount of new features. While the site itself still looks roughly the same, Pixelpipe has added support for dozens of new services since its launch. You can post images and videos to all the prominent video and photo sharing sites, including Youtube, Vimeo, kyte, SmugMug, flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Photobucket. Pixelpipe also lets you post photos to most popular blogging platforms.

Post PDF Files to Twitter

Yesterday, Pixelpipe launched a new feature that lets you posts links to videos, photos, PDF files, or any other document to text-only micro-blogging service like Twitter, Rejaw, FriendFeed, or identi.ca. Pixelpipe will simply add a link to the document to your text messages and the files will be hosted on Pixelpipe's Amazon S3 storage.

Even if Pixelpipe's internal video player and document viewer isn't compatible with a file, it will still give you a link to download the document. The upload limit is 200 megabytes. Brett Butterfield, Pixelpipe's founder and CEO, tells us that he plans to add support for a few more micro-blogging services in the near future.

Post from Anywhere

One of our favorite features of Pixelpipe is that the company has developed plugins for almost every conceivable desktop application for Mac, Llinux, and Windows PCs. You can post videos from Windows Movie Maker, photos from iPhoto, Live Gallery, or Picasa, and when all else fails, you can also just email your media files to a your personal Pixelpipe address. For mobile use, Pixelpipe provides applications for the iPhone, Android, and Nokia N Series phones.

Power users can also create routing tags (think: @friendfeed or @picasa), which allow you to selectively send items to a specific service or a group of services.

Verdict

The latest round of updates have turned Pixelpipe into an even more versatile tool. Now, sharing a PDF file with your Twitter friends is as easy as emailing it to your secret Pixelpipe address. If you often send the same document to a variety of services (or if you just want to send a picture from your phone to Twitter, but also keep a copy on Flickr), Pixelpipe is definitely worth trying.

Why Shouldn't They Use YouTube?

YouTube is not a public service but a commercial enterprise. Google might, one day, decided to just shut it down, and take its archive with it. One might argue that this is unlikely, but it could happen.

A stronger argument against favoring YouTube, however, is that it does look like preferential treatment of a service that is already close to being a monopoly. Given that services like TubeMogul make it incredibly easy to post videos to a large variety of online video services, there is really no excuse for government officials to only post videos to YouTube except for being ignorant about the alternatives.

As for the new Congress sites, even though this is a bipartisan effort, it would still be in the government's best interest to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Google after all is a major donor to the Obama campaign.

No Ads - But Lots of Status

Also, while Google doesn't directly profit from these government videos (at least we haven't seen any ads on these videos yet), it does turn YouTube into even more of a household name and extends its status as the de-facto video sharing site.

Host Videos In-House?

Congress and the White House probably have enough in-house technical know-how to host their own videos or put their videos on a white-label site. While we commend the members of Congress who put their own videos on YouTube, we would also like to see them use Vimeo, Viddler, blip.tv, and others.

On the other hand, though, YouTube is where the audience is, so putting videos on there makes perfect sense, but we would argue that it shouldn't be the only place to find videos of our elected officials.

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.

If the record labels want to reach the most eyeballs possible, however, then they are still stuck with putting their videos on YouTube. While Hulu surely had a breakout year, its audience is still dwarfed by YouTube's, even though it might be catching up to Google's video-sharing service in terms of revenue, as advertisers tend to favor the professionally produced material on Hulu.

YouTube vs. Hulu vs. a Possible Joint Venture

According to the Financial Times, other options for the labels include "the creation of a premium service on YouTube, Google's video sharing site; or, a standalone venture between some or all of the four largest recorded music groups."

Given that the record labels don't have a good track record when it comes to creating their own destination sites (think Pressplay, the ill-fated joint venture between Universal Music and Sony Music), a corporation with an existing entity still looks like it would be their best option, and Hulu would probably be the most interested in this (non-exclusive) deal, as it would benefit the most from being able to feature this content on its service.

However, we also wouldn't be surprised if the record labels decided to create their own joint venture, where revenue sharing wouldn't be an issue. Finding a sizable audience, on the other hand, might prove to be a problem if the labels decide to go this route.

CC licensed image of turntable courtesy of Flickr user alvzer.

Interestingly, Nielsen also saw a 3% decline in overall viewers from September to October, even as the number of total streams increased slightly by 1% and the number of streams per viewer increased by 4%. Viewers in October watched close to 172 minutes of video online, a 10% increase from September.

Nielsen's numbers for October are generally in line with the comScore numbers we reported last week. Nielsen also saw a slight decline in total streams on YouTube from September to October as the online video market has become more diverse.

Overall, these numbers are in line with other numbers we have seen lately, though the decline of overall viewers is somewhat puzzling. It is also worth noting that in March, CBS reported that its online viewership peaks at 7pm on the East Coast and again at 7pm on the West Coast.

As we pointed out in our earlier story about these HD videos, the quality is amazing and rivals that of some of YouTube's closest competitors like Vimeo. However, it is also worth noting that you need a relatively fast broadband connection to watch these videos without constant stuttering and buffering.

Just in the last couple of weeks, YouTube has been rolling out a wide variety of new features, including the new wide-screen format (which was clearly in preparation for this release) and the addition of over 25k new songs from music licensing firm Rumblefish to its AudioSwap feature.

Game-Changer

These new HD videos, however, are clearly a game-changer. Web video always had the name of having relatively sub-standard video quality and being generally grainy and hard to watch (and YouTube especially). Now, you could easily put up a screen-cast on YouTube in HD, or film a video with your new Flip MinoHD and have it seen in its full 720p glory.

As we reported earlier this year, Kyte is slowly moving away from user-generated content and is focusing on large brands and content producers instead. Among the launch partners for the new branded mobile sites are two Interscope recording artists: Lady Gaga and the All-American Rejects.

One of the most interesting aspects of Kyte's new product is that these mobile sites will display the right type of video for your mobile devices, including QuickTime videos for the iPhone. Users will also be able to rate and comment on shows.

AdSense for Kyte

Kyte also announced that its users can now use Google's AdSense for Video as either a stand-alone product or to supplement Kyte's other advertising products. Kyte's partners will be able to choose between pre-roll videos, overlays, and endcap text ads.

Universal Platform

Kyte wants to be a 'universal media platform,' and these new new announcements are yet another step in this direction. Kyte is smartly focusing on large brands, which makes the service a lot easier to monetize than user-generated videos.

It would not surprise us if Google was adding these options to give professional content producers and TV networks more of an incentive to upload their content to YouTube instead of using Google's competitors.

As HD cameras are pretty much already becoming standard in the consumer electronics space, it would make sense for Google to start supporting this format. Also, a lot of YouTube's competitors like Vimeo already offer HD playback with a resolution of up to 1280x720.

We also know that Google is trying to get more professionally produced TV shows and movies onto its service. In this space, YouTube is competing with Hulu, which already offers some shows in HD, as well as the offerings of individual TV networks like ABC, which streams a large selection of its primetime shows in HD.

This February, we already wondered why Google was allowing YouTube to fall behind its competitors by not offering HD video, but now it looks as if Google might be catching up again. The question that remains, however, is when these 720p videos will become a default option for content producers.

To see these HD videos, you have to add "&fmt=22" to the YouTube URL, but we haven't been very lucky in finding a lot of videos where this option was enabled yet. If you find any, let us know in the comments.