AOL will unveil a revamped video portal next week, the latest move by a major Internet company to strengthen its position in this very competitive market. The centerpiece of the upgraded portal will be a lineup of more than 45 video-on-demand channels with a mix of free and fee-based clips, the Dulles, Virginia based company plans to announce on Monday.

People will be able to scan the channels’ “thousands of hours of videos” using a new interactive programming guide, an AOL spokeswoman said. The channels will feature videos from a variety of AOL partners, including A&E, MTV, Turner’s TNT and TBS, and Warner Bros. Entertainment. It will also feature a prominent link to AOL’s video-sharing site UnCut, she said.

We saw this yesterday but didn’t get a chance to take a test-drive;

Dabble uses the many different social gestures people make to express how they feel about media, to find better matches in our search results. If people play with media in playlists, sharing their collections with others, and tell us how it?s useful to them, we can take that information and show better lists of media.

Steve Garfield posted his review, check-out the Vlog Soup 16 playlist.

The makers of Blinkx have created a new site – SelfcastTV.com – to allow quick sharing and downloading of mobile videos online. It boasts a simple registration process, 3-step upload system, and UK-specific operation. Upload happens straight from a mobile by MMS’ing a standard number. SelfcastTV users can also create their own channel to select and view their favourite videos and can even use the MovieMode feature to combine their selected footage into one continuous video.

Via: TechDigest

TechCrunch posted a positive review on Gotuit Media:

Boston based Gotuit Media launched Gotuit late Sunday evening. Gotuit offers users on-demand free premium content like music videos, sports clips and short films. Find what you want, click it and watch it immediately.

See, for example, the music section. At launch they have over 2,000 music videos fully licensed for streaming to users on the site for free. The also have deep content in sports, news and movies, including short films. The site will eventually have advertising around the content, as well as 15 second video ads between plays.

As Mike pointed out the Flash UI is pretty slick – browse while viewing – and video click to respond time is really quick.. sweet. This one’s got legs, speaking of which their have a groovy cheerleader clip too..

Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are at it again. After disrupting the music and voice cartel?s operations, the duo is taking on television. It shouldn?t come as a surprise.

Business Week has dug-up more details on the company, which has hired software engineers in nearly six major cities. So far, it seems the project, dubbed, The Venice Project, has been funded by eBay millions that lined the dynamic duo?s pockets.

Via: Om Malik

Has this ever happened to you? You’re watching this documentary on monkeys and then halfway through, this monkey does the funniest thing ever. So of course, you want nothing more than to share this hilarious monkey moment with your friends. Now, on Google Video, doing just that is easier than ever. Now you can email links to specific points inside a video! All you have to do is add the time you’d like to share to the end of a video’s URL.

For example, Invisible Board is a 1 min 46 sec long video but I believe the coolest part is at 1 min 26 sec, so all I have to do is add #1m26s to the videolink I’m going to send to my friends!

Here’s another example. Music and the Mind is a really interesting lecture from UCTV, but I don’t want my friends to have to sit through the first half hour to get to the best part. So all I have to do is add #35m24s to the end of the URL and send them this Video-Link.

Via: The Official Google Video Bl0g

The Canadian National Film Board has a section dedicated to streaming their classic animation short features — EH! — such as The Cat Came Back and The Big Snit. Nods of approval to all the people involved over there to make this happen.. def. good enough for defacto government work.

When we think of the hours it must have taken to make this clip.. it surely deserved a few minutes to post it here for everyones enjoyment. Gosh isn’t user this kind of generated content fun..

Yahoo TV launched a beta version of something called The 9, a daily compilation of video that features the nine top Web videos of the day. The show is a kind of Entertainment Tonight meets VH1’s Best Week Ever concoction. The 9, which features a busty babe named Maria Sansone teeing up the clips and oozing her bronzed charisma all over the screen. And I mean oozing.

The 9 asks folks to vote on the daily videos they like the best and also features something called “The Pepsi 10th,” which enables users to submit their picks for the most compelling Web video of the day.. nice way to get viewer input to help them skim better cream!

Via: MediaPost

Three weeks after being let go by CBS, the former anchor has agreed to launch a program called “Dan Rather Presents” on HDNet, the high-definition channel owned by billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. “We are excited about it,” Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, said yesterday. He described the show as “an opportunity to do news in what I like to call ‘fearless mode,’ what Dan calls ‘with guts.’ Go out there and find the stories we think will have impact.” He added: “Traditional broadcast and cable news is all about numbers. Get a pretty face, pay for it in the upfront,” the annual conference for advertisers. ” ‘How does MSNBC beat Fox?’ The lead story is never the reporting or news itself.” HDNet plans to roll out the Rather program in October.

Via: Washington Post