Tired of kowtowing to start-up Internet video companies, News Corp. and NBC said that they were starting their own YouTube clone and media player. But apparently News Corp./NBC said their videos will appear on sites like AOL, MySpace, Yahoo, and maybe even YouTube.

The new partnership is keen to point out that they are protecting copyrights, unlike say, YouTube. So apparently, the site won’t host movies or TV shows, or at least it will have News Corp and NBC content. Whoopie!

But do we really need another online video destination? It’s notable only because this is being created by a TV network and a movie studio. If this will have just user-generated content or just NBC or Fox content will it really get viewers to come? Viacom may be next to try their hand at a YouTube clone since they’ve now sued YouTube for $1 billion.

Doesn’t this remind you of the pre-boom dot com days? Those idyllic days when big Hollywood producers and directors decided to get into Internet video. Now YouTube is enticing Holllywood back to the Internet. For example:

Steven Spielberg is working with Survivor-creator Mark Burnett on a website called Onthelot.com, which lets aspiring filmmakers submit videos for a chance to win a $1 million development deal. The best shows make it to a TV show on Fox, where viewers will vote and choose a winner.

Burnett is also teaming up with MTV to create a site where users create parodies of movies. The best videos will be shown during the MTV Video awards next year.

Michael Eisner is getting into Internet content as well with a production company that is producing short online serials (about 90 seconds long). Eisner hopes to generate ad revenue from in-stream ads appearing before and after the shows, as well as product placement.

And finally, TV writer Steven Bochco is teaming up with MetaCafe to launch a series of confessional short videos. The project, called “Cafe Confidential” will include videos that are unscripted and feature just ordinary people not actors. Video producers that attract the largest audience can get some payment, although there was no word on how much. From the Time article:

Bochco says he views the Web as a medium best suited for snippets of entertainment that can be consumed between tasks, something he calls a “mental shower.” “I think people go to the Internet, particularly younger people, assuming they’re not going for information, for a distraction between tasks,” Bochco said.

Remember a few years ago when Hollywood big wigs like Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen backed Pop.com? The site which eventually closed before it even launched. A victim of a bloated (over $50 million) budget and the beginning of the dot-com crash.

I wonder, will Hollywood really understand Internet video?

Popularity: 12% [?]

Last week advertising company DoubleClick announced results about online advertising that found that video is a “highly effective format for online advertising.” That’s something that TV advertisers already knew, but it’s a nice confirmation that video works online as well.

Video advertising has been growing in recent years, with many sites showing muted videos, for example, that un-mute when you roll over the video. One such video I saw yesterday was from IBM(!), which showed some IT people batting at a PC like it was a pinata. It was amusing to look at, so I decided to un-mute it to see what was going on. (See the video, called “Hard Boot Pinata” on YouTube.)

Major findings:

More Interaction. Doubleclick says that audiences interact with video ads more than plain image ads, such as mouseovers, expansions, interactions with the video control buttons, clicks and other events.

Viewers See 2/3rds of Videos. On average, people play online video ads about 2/3rd of the way through the entire video. That equates to 19.1 seconds for a 30-second ad and 10.3 seconds for a 15-second ad. I found this rather surprising. Why are users not watching the entire ad? Are they bored? Annoyed at them? Have no attention span for even 15 second video ads? I think more research is needed here to find out the reasons behind this.

Higher Clickthrough Rates. Finally, Doubleclick found that click rates are “far higher” than those of image format ads. Online video ads had click-through rates between 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent depending on the online video format. By comparison, plain image ads like GIF or JPG get about 0.1 and 0.2 percent, says DoubleClick. That sounds like a no-brainer since videos are more engaging than animated ads.

DoubleClick says that it conducted its research of over 300 online video ad campaigns that were placed by more than 130 advertisers over a four-month period in 2006.

[Via iMediaConnection]

Popularity: 10% [?]

AT&T announced that its IPTV service called U-verse will be available on PCs and cell phones. Only certain channels, like A&E Broadband, Fox News, The Weather Channel, and Bloomberg TV will be available.

This is an interesting move by AT&T. It differentiates its TV service from cable and satellite providers and from Verizon, an IPTV competitor here in the U.S.

Here’s how it will work. U-verse subscribers pay an extra $10 per month and will be able to watch about 30 channels on their PCs. Later, the service–called U-verse OnTheGo–will be available on AT&T wireless devices.

AT&T is providing this service through a partner, MobiTV. There’s no word on what type of content protection the shows will have or if it will be stored on user’s hard drives. I doubt TV studios would want that. MobiTV currently streams shows to cell phones, so I think that’s how the U-verse content will be delivered.

One analyst called the new service “weak” especially compared with other services like NetFlix, Amazon’s Unbox and others. I think the $10 price tag is a big high. This seems more like a value-added service, if it’s going to PCs.

But it’s an interesting integration of PCs and TVs, except this time the TV is coming to the PC, rather than the other way around. Will people really want to get their U-verse channels on a PC?

AT&T’s U-verse service, launched in 2006, is presently available in 15 U.S. markets.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Microsoft is temporarily shutting Soapbox, its video sharing site, to new users. After two months, Microsoft will open up the service to new users again. Current users however, will still be able to access the site and upload videos. Apparently, too many users were uploading clips from TV and movies, which is what got YouTube in trouble and sued by Viacom for over a billion dollars. Microsoft is expected to use some filtering technology to prevent users from uploading copyrighted videos.

Content delivery provider Limelight Networks filed for an IPO looking to raise $201 million. In 2006, Limelight raised $130 million in a financing round led by Goldman Sachs Capital Partners.

Angel investors provided $25.6 billion in funding to companies in 2006, That’s an 11% increase from 2005, Healthcare and medical devices accounted for the largest share of angel investments (21% percent) followed by software (18%) and biotech (18%). About 51,000 businesses received angel funding in 2006.

TV Guide announced that it was launching an online video search site next month. It would feature video from TV networks but not user-generated content like YouTube. Seems like TV Guide is trying to be relevant again especially since the company recently changed the format of its print TV Guide magazine. This new venture puts TV Guide in competition with Blinkx.

Seems like its the end for viral video company iFilm. Parent company Viacom said it was folding iFilm into its Spike TV brand and launching a redesigned SpikeTV.com. iFilm was one of the early viral video hosting sites on the Internet, which MTV Networks acquired in 2005 for $49 million.

Last week satellite radio company XM was sued by the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) with both organizations saying that XM isn’t paying royalties for its music download service. The record industry (RIAA) sued XM last year. XM’s service called “XM+MP3″ allows subscribers to download music to their receivers equipped with hard drives.

Movie Gallery, the second-largest movie rental chain behind Blockbuster, announced that it was launching an online movie rental service later this year. Just this month, Movie Gallery acquired Disney’s failed movie service, Moviebeam.

Popularity: 55% [?]

There’s no question that Internet video is popular. And it’s great to see some research numbers behind it. Measurement company Comsore released data on the U.S. streaming video market and found that almost 123 million people (or 70% of the total U.S. Internet audience) viewed 7.2 billion videos online in January 2007.

That’s a lot of bandwidth.

In fact, Comscore found that the average video streamer viewed 59 streams in one month, which is almost two videos per day. I’d say that I watch at least a hundred videos per month, but then again, I do write and blog about Internet video. I regularly surf YouTube, Revver and Stumble Upon Video just to pass the time and to look for interesting things to write about. It’s kind of cool to watch Internet video for your job, isn’t it?

Comscore also found that viewers watched an average of 151 minutes of video online during the month, with the average viewing time per video at 2.6 minutes. This is somewhat surprising since I don’t like to watch videos longer than 45 seconds generally. Anything longer than that and I feel like I’ve been watching an eternity. I want to see the action and move on to the next one. I have watched a few long-form videos, most notably the 9/11 documentary Loose Change on Google Video. But mostly, I’d rather get comfy and watch longer videos on my TV screen.

(My favorite video is something called “Charlie the Unicorn” a hilariously weird animated 4-minute clip which features Charlie the Unicorn going to Candy Mountain, but I digress.)

Here are some other interesting items:

Google Was Top Streaming Video Property. Not surprisingly, Google/YouTube was the top streaming video property in January, with 54.7 million total unique streamers and 1.167 billion total video streams. Most of that is coming from YouTube.com, which accounted for 992 million video streams, leaving Google Video at just 175 billion streams. Seems kind of puny compared to YouTube. I still wonder when Google will integrate its Google Video and YouTube properties—will that ever happen?

Highest Video Consumption Time: Weekdays from 5-8 P.M. That’s also not too surprisingly. It suggests that viewers are watching video after work, which means that most videos are not work related. I’m glad to see that people are watching video for pleasure rather than work. In fact, Comscore found that video consumption was 60 percent higher than average during 5 to 8pm. After 8pm, I’d guess that people move on to their TV screens. On the weekend, the highest relative video consumption occurred between 7:00-11:00 P.M. This is TV prime-time, but Saturday nights are always a slow day for TV networks.

Advertisers Take Note. According to Erin Hunter, executive vice president of comScore, advertisers can use this information to target ads. “Shrewd marketers will utilize a multi-channel strategy to capitalize on these adjacent ‘primetime’ blocks in order to maximize their marketing impact,” said Hunter.

Popularity: 19% [?]