Here is something that TV companies like Viacom are going to love: The Japanese government is apparently considering allowing anyone and everyone to upload previously broadcast television shows without permission.

Anyone who does upload TV content will need to pay a mandatory license fee to the rights holders.

Ooyola is a new video startup that is keeping quiet about what it has in the pipeline. The company has been founded by Ex-Google employees and all it is giving away is that the company “is focused on delivering a high-quality, interactive, video-viewing experience”.

Over the past couple of years the internet has changed drastically on three fronts:

1. Broadband Video content has exploded and become more accessible.
2. User Generated Content has also exploded as many sites have allowed users to contribute to their content This can take many forms such as through videos (youtube), commenting (blogs), asking and answering questions (yahoo answers), adding pictures (flickr), or actually editing and writing content for the site (wikipedia).
3. Social networking has leveraged the web not only as a place to receive information but also as a means to network and interact with like minded individuals and to work together for a common goal — like highlighting interesting news on digg.com for example.

Now arriving on the scene to bring it all together is KickApps, a service that lets you combine web video, user generated content and social networking and embed this functionality within your own site.

The first stage of the broadband video revolution was driven by user uploaded content mainly consisting of short clips. Now people are able to take things further by actually being able to produce their own online TV destination by creating live channels and scheduled programming through a variety of online tools .

Create Your Own Web TV Station - Mini Guide

This mini-guide compares the currently available tools and services according to whether they incorporate the following features:

• AOL Video - A variety of free, ad-supported videos in addition to paid videos in a jam-packed video portal. Full TV episodes, sports, cartoons and more. According to Time Warner, the site aims to be an all-in-one video destination.
• In2TV - This features a collection of TV Shows to watch on the internet on AOL Video. It is a joint venture between AOL and Warner Brothers. The main appeal of the service is that it makes available numerous old shows which are rarely, if ever, aired on broadcast television. Unfortunately most of the content is only available in the U.S.
• TMZ.com - A Hollywood video blog best known for showing Mel Gibson’s infamous arrest tirade. It is a joint venture between Telepictures Productions and AOL.
• AOL Sessions - A series of music performances (often in video) usually consisting of exclusive and intimate (often acoustic or stripped down) performances of songs by popular recording artists.
• Gold Rush - An interactive national treasure hunt that can be watched online with Mark Burnett and CBS TV.
• UnCut Video - A video sharing site similar to YouTube.
• Nullsoft Streaming Video (NSV) - NSV is an internet video streaming format which is no longer being developed. It was created by Winamp, a media player company that AOL acquired in 1999.
• ShoutCast Internet TV - Primarily used for radio Shoutcast was also used for video using the NSV format. Internet TV channels that use Shoutcast can still be watched if you use Winamp.
• SearchVideo - A video search engine that searches video sites like YouTube, MySpace, iFilm, Revver and AOL Uncut. It uses the technology from video search specialist Truveo which was acquired by AOL in October 2006.

Blinkx is quickly standing out as the online video search engine that is indexing videos from more video sites than anywhere else.

While YouTube is the video host with the most, its collection is a lot smaller than what you would find by searching for videos on Blinkx.

While Blinkx is not my favorite video search engine when it comes to ease of use (that would be uLinkx), I have to admit that Blinkx does have an impressive index of videos.

The latest news from Blinkx is that it is adding videos from the Travel video sharing site, Travelistic, to its video search index.

[Press Release]

- You can find a number of travel plans and information about various destinations on many different travel web sites.
- Flying is one of the most convenient types of travel.
- There is a lot to think about when preparing to go on vacation, but making sure you have all the travel accessories you need.
- Travel insurance should always cover emergency medical expenses.
- Travel guides are a good way to make sure that you are not lost or missing out on anything that you wish to do when going away.

Dave Zatz has gotten word that Verizon’s FiOS TV 2.0 Interactive Media Guide is now ready and will be deployed to existing FiOS TV customers as a software update on existing hardware over the summer.

The new FiOS Interactive Media Guide is a new enchanced user interface. You can see it in action here.

Verizon’s FiOs is an interactive TV service that is delivered down Verizon’s fiber lines along with its phone service, although Dave tells me that he’s been told it is not a true IPTV service, but neither of us know exactly why this is. If anyone can enlighten us please do.

[Via Zatz Not Funny]