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Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you've made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you'd be wrong.

The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube's new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

We just came across Pixelpipe.com, a new service that allows you to easily post your digital pictures, videos, and audio files to a growing number of different services with only a few clicks, similar to what Ping.fm lets you do with text based messages. Pixelpipe supports forwarding to 33 different photo and video sharing sites, as well as most of the larger blogging and micro-blogging services. To upload photos, Pixelpipe has developed clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as for Nokia N Series phones.

Earlier this week we announced that popular livestreaming services Qik and Flixwagon were now available for the iPhone. Unfortunately, the only way to get these apps was to have a jailbroken iPhone. Jailbreaking your iPhone is against Apple's terms and conditions and voids your warranty.

For those brave few that have jailbroken their iPhone, here's a way to video record from your iPhone using Qik without broadcasting those hilarious but embarrassing moments to the world.

WonderHowTo aggregates and curates a large database of instructional videos from all over the Internet. It employs a number of editors who search the web for good how-to videos and then categorize them into 36 vertical categories. Thanks to this editorial process, the quality of these how-to videos featured on WonderHowTo is surprisingly high and topics range from Spanish pronunciation to surviving nuclear blasts. One of the most interesting features of WonderHowTo is its recently launched 'Related How-To Videos' sidebar for Firefox.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Olympics are off to a good, but not amazing start on the Internet. Over the first three days, NBC's online coverage drew an average of 4.7 million viewers per day, with the numbers steadily rising over the weekend. So far, Sunday was the most watched day, with 5.1 million total users and 3.42 million streams. According to the same article, only 0.2% of all viewers exclusively used the Internet to watch the Games, while 90% used the traditional TV coverage exclusively and 10% used both the Internet and TV.

Maybe to counter some of the bad news around YouTube today, Google just announced the acquisition of the Y Combinator funded video annotation and mashup company Omnisio. According to Google, the acquisition of Omnisio will allow them to keep pushing the envelope of what is possible with online video. Neither Google nor Omnisio have commented on the price of the acquisition, but it is clear that the Omnisio team is going to join YouTube.

The live streaming video service Qik just opened up its previously closed beta to the public. Apparently, the public is so interested in the service that the site crashed completely just after the announcement was made (the site is back up now). Once it is back online, users will be able to stream live video from their supported mobile phones directly to the web without having to wait for an invitation from Qik.

The Canada-based live-blogging tool CoverItLive added support for live video streaming to its application this week. Users covering live events can now add streaming video from Qik, Mogulus, and Ustream.tv to their live blogs. Bloggers can simply copy and paste the embed code from one of these services into CoverItLive. Adding video to live blogging takes it to a completely different level and will allow those who are covering these events to focus more on commentary and interacting with viewers than just reporting the events.

Kiva.org is the world's first person-to-person lending web site that helps empower entrepreneurs in the developing world by connecting them with others who lend them small amounts of money called "micro-payments." Founded in 2005, the site now connects lenders in 70+ countries with business owners in 43 developing countries and works with 89 microfinance partners. Now Kiva is tapping into the power of Facebook to attract new members to their cause.

....But It's Not A Success Story Yet!

To the average user, Hulu.com, the free web site that offers high-quality streams of TV shows and movies in the U.S., looks like a runaway success: the selection of available content is more than decent, Hulu's Collections make browsing related videos easy, HD videos have been made available, embed codes are provided for re-posting the videos on the web, and the site gets a good amount of traffic, too. In fact, Hulu's CEO reported in March that 5 million visitors watched videos on the site during the past 30 days while the service was still in beta, and that number has been increasing ever since.

Jane Fong is the founder and CEO of Akibanana, a six-person company that aims to help bring Japanese anime animation from the world of traditional distribution onto the web. Her three part plan includes a media hub tracking the industry, a real-world tour of the Tokyo neighborhood where anime culture is centered (Akihabara) and a B2B service helping change media distribution models. In the following interview, Jane discussed doing international business in media distribution in Japan, as a woman.

The world's largest stock imagery company, Getty Images, this week released a new mashup that leans on the company's vast stock image and audio assets. The flash app called Moodstream draws on Getty's photo, video, and audio collections to create what the company calls a "powerful brainstorming tool designed to take you in inspiring, unexpected directions." The mashup debuted earlier this week at the Webby Award Film and Video Awards after party in New York.

Not much has been known about TidalTV, a Baltimore, Maryland-based broadband video startup, besides the fact that they had plans to launch a "professionally produced, branded programming" service which would run through the browser. In February of this year, the company secured $15 million in funding, but there was still a lot of confusion about what exactly TidalTV would be offering. It appears that we don't need to wait any longer to find out - TidalTV has now launched.

Online video sites are cropping up all over the web. Yet the majority seem to be Youtube copycats in one way or another. Innovation is low and the space is becoming crowded. iSofa.tv is a new online video service that has a great concept and visual interface. Here's a better look at the service to see whether it has what it takes or if it's just another Youtube clone.

The Filter, a personalized content filtering system which had been hanging around in beta status since sometime in 2006 (our coverage) has finally opened its doors to everyone and officially launched. The service was pioneered by musician Peter Gabriel and, at its beginning, was not much more than a playlist creation tool for iTunes. Today, The Filter has morphed into a larger recommendation system that finds not just music, but also movies, TV, and internet videos, customized to your personal tastes.

Chris Albrecht has a post on NewTeeVee this morning asking for suggestions to help him break up with cable. Even though cable prices have gone up 77 percent since 1996, which according to the New York Times is nearly twice the rate of inflation, many people are having trouble kicking the habit. "I hate dealing with the cable company, but I just can't seem to break up with it," says Albrecht. There are plenty of options out there, how have you cut the cord?

uvLayer allows you to search for videos and organize them in a Minority Report fashion. Do a search for any video and uvLayer will instantly provide you with a handful of videos matching your keywords in a collection. With the results, you can drag videos outside the collection and onto your canvas to play with them in a variety of ways. Here's a look at the Adobe AIR app for uvLayer.

It's no secret that YouTube's age demographics skew young, but young still means 18-34, and much of the content on the site would be inappropriate for children under the age of 13 -- the COPPA cut off age that YouTube adheres to as the minimum allowed for anyone to sign up on the site. Totlol is a new video site that launched in beta this week aimed at children aged 6 months to 6 years. The site is community moderated to ensure that video content is always appropriate for small children.

When I was a kid, I made dumb videos that a total of 5 people actually watched -- me and the 4 other kids I made them with. But today, a kid with a funny video can be seen by millions of people, whether he is swinging a golf ball retriever or lip syncing to a German pop song. There is an Internet shooting star falling to earth every day. Someone creates a video that goes viral and generates millions of views, and for some this flashes and fades, but others are parlaying these flashes into commercial success.

Last July's Democratic CNN-YouTube debate was mostly well received (though November's Republican follow up was met with less critical acclaim). This fall, Google and YouTube hope to replicate that success with a third presidential debate to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana. The "Presidential Forum" is sponsored by Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal and Democratic New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and will take place September 18, 2008. No media partner has been announced.