The former Disney CEO, Michael Eisner, is embarking on a new endeavor called VuGuru.

VuGuru, who’s vacant website currently consists of just a logo, will be a new independent studio that specializes in professional TV and cinema productions that will be shown online.

This is really something that the internet TV industry needs. While the internet has flourished with user generated amateur and semi-professional content, it is seriously lacking in exclusive professional TV shows and movies.

PromQueen TV

VuGuru will be creating "high-quality, story-driven content for the Internet" and the first TV series will be PromQueen TV which will feature 80 episodes aimed at the tech-savvy teen audience. Each episode will only be just 90 seconds long which fits in nicely with the short attention spans of those tech-savvy teens.

The platform is Veoh

Michael Eisner sits on the Veoh board of directors so it is no surprise that Veoh is the chosen platform for the VuGuru online episodes. That does not mean that VuGuru will be forgetting the web video giant YouTube where it will also be broadcasting its videos, but most likely at a lower quality.

VuGuru is definitely a start-up to keep an eye on.

[Via New York Times]

Its been said before that HDTV will slow down the evolution of Internet TV because the general low quality of web TV just doesn’t cut it against the sharp crystal clear high definition plasma TVs.

Network2 TV, a web video start-up that was founded by Jeff Pulver, has received all its entries for its $25,000 video contest. The competition has accepted a variety of videos that will show people “How to Watch Internet TV” to help raise awareness of the internet TV phenomenon.

The prizes are as follows:

• Grand prize: $25,000.00 US
• Second prize: $10,000.00 US
• Third prize: $5,000.00 US

There were over 60 videos submitted to the competition including submissions from a number of popular web TV shows including Viral (see entry below ) and Galacticast (see entry here ).

The winners of this contest will be announced on March 20th at Spring 2007 Video on the Net.

To give you a taste here is the submission from the web TV show Viral:

You can see the rest of the videos submitted to the competition here.

An affordable way of getting one way links by hiring a manual directory submission service

People often look at the number of visitors that a website receives, and how many pages that visitors look at on the site, to decide whether a website is popular or not. An easy way to do that is just too simply check the Alexa traffic rank of a website.

But just because a site is busy does not mean that people necessarily like it more than a site which is less busy. But how could you see how much people actually like a site?

Use Del.icio.us to compare popularity

Well you could check how many times people have bookmarked all the pages from a site (not just the homepage) in Del.icio.us. People will only tend to bookmark something if they find it interesting.

It is pretty much impossible to find out how many Del.icio.us bookmarks a website has. You would have to search for every single page of that website in Del.icio.us and add then together all the bookmarks. Can you imagine doing that for a site like YouTube?

I am please to announce the winners of the Joost invite competition.

The 20 winners are listed below along with their correct answer. All winners should have already received an invite from Joost with the email you provided.

The Joost Invite Winners!

1. Nick
   http://www.searchvideo.com – video search engine
2. Andrew
   http://www.faganfinder.com/video – video search engine
3. Banjo
   http://www.blinkx.com – video search engine
4. Martijn
   http://www.vidmeter.com – community driven video aggregator
5. Trevor
   http://www.podzinger.com – video search engine
6. Hassan miah
   http://www.videosift.com – community driven video aggregator
7. Mark
   http://www.break.com – community driven video aggregator
8. Scott
   http://www.liveleak.com  - community driven video aggregator
9. Rob toole
   http://www.dabble.com – community driven video aggregator
10. Kimmie
    http://www.altavista.com/video/default – video search engine
11. Rickie
    http://www.netscape.com/video – community driven video aggregator.
12. Newt42
    http://videobomb.com – community driven video aggregator.
13. Ali
    http://www.purevideo.com – video search engine
14. William
    http://getfireant.com/ – video blog subscriber and player
15. Joe
    http://www.apple.com/itunes – video blog subscriber and player
16. Ethan
    http://dogpile.com – a video search engine
17. Darren
    http://www.flurl.com – community driven video aggregator
18. Allan
    http://www.clipblast.com – video search engine
19. Kirra
    http://www.alltheweb.com – a video search engine
20. Collin
    http://www.gotuit.com – community driven video aggregator

The competition brought out some interesting sites from the wood work. Many I have heard of but there were definitely some interesting ones that I hadn’t heard of, or didn’t know were working with video. Nice work everyone!

Thanks to everyone who took part!

The three major search engines — Yahoo, MSN, and Google — recognize video as an evolving and increasingly popular phenomenon on the web.

But what have these three beasty corporations done to secure their stake in the online video market?

Read on…

Yahoo and Video

• In May 2005 Yahoo launched its video search engine which also integrated video sharing allowing users to upload their own videos.
• Although often forgotten about, Yahoo is actually a leading video website that rivals YouTube and MySpace.
• It September 2006 Yahoo acquired the video sharing website JumpCut.
• It has a large number music videos available on LaunchCast.
• It has a large number of videos in its news section.
• Yahoo offers regular TV listings which are linked to relevant online videos.

Microsoft and Video

• MSN previously arranged a licensing deal with Blinkx to help provide results in its video search.
• Microsoft launched the video sharing website SoapBox in September 2006.
• Microsoft has developed IPTV middleware that is being used by a number of TV providers, and will be available on the Xbox 360 by the end of 2007.
• It has the Xbox Live Marketplace for video downloads on the Xbox 360
• Microsoft has Media Center PCs that create a rich TV/video experience on the PC.
• Microsoft has launched media extenders to connect media on PCs to the TV screen and other PCs.
• Microsoft has the proprietary VC-9 technology which is a high compression video format that can be used over the internet.
• Microsoft has the MSN video portal which features a mixture of video content.

Google and Video

• Google acquired the video sharing website YouTube in December 2006.

• Google launched Google video in January 2005 as a service to search for TV programmes online. The functionality of the site changed when Google video added video sharing functionality in April 2005.

• Google video also allows publishers to sell video online.

• Google has introduced video adverts which have appeared on Google videos.

Smile the MSN way: Free MSN emoticons makes MSN more fun!