Taking a brave step into the online contextual advertising scene is Broadband Enterprises, a company that is hoping to have the video answer to Google Adsense.

With its new vComm venture, Broadband Enterprises is offering a platform which allows advertisers to buy contextual advertising space in online videos.

Essentially, it’ll function as the video counterpart to Google’s AdSense with these contextual video adverts being automatically placed on pages with relevant content. Of course Google Adsense does this with videos and text already and has been doing so for over a year.

“To use the new platform, any Web publisher large or small can add a simple piece of code to their site’s pages, which in turn scans that particular pages’ content. The product then automatically finds and serves the most relevant ad based on that content scan.“

The Apple iPhone was released last Friday and has already reportedly sold over 500,000 copies. We also heard last week that the device will even play YouTube videos! Wowee!

But there are already two major problems:

1. iPhone users being forced to use itunes
2. At&T possibly stopping YouTube videos due to copyright policy

The National Football League, like the Olympics, guards its product and online image very tightly. In this vain, the pro football league has told all media sites that they are no longer permitted to stream unlimited video of content related to the NFL

According to the Washington Post, news organizations can post no more than 45 seconds per day of video shot at a team’s facilities, including news conferences, interviews and practice-field reports.

The interesting thing about this policy is that it does not refer to game footage (which obviously would not be permitted), but rather only to other coverage mostly relegated to regional television channels. This rule makes the teams’ websites the only source for additional video footage.

Clearly, the NFL understands the power of online video. In the U.S., the NFL is the dominant sports league which allows it to have such draconian rules. Other sports league, like the NHL, are trying to promote themselves by lessening restrictions. I guess it is good to be king.

I’m not sure exactly how this would effect the ESPN NFL Channel, if at all.

YouTube is powering ahead in the battle for traffic amongst the on-demand video market. Statistics from a Hitwise article show that from January to May the market share of visits to YouTube rose 70 percent. This impressive increase has come during a time of increased competition and aggressive lawsuits.

Amongst the other contenders for the top crown, the next closest site was MySpace Video, according to the survey, with about 16 percent of the market.

Video startup Veoh has recently unveiled what it calls a “Joost Killer“, its latest innovation VeohTV Beta. VeohTV has been designed from the ground up to provide users with a Web TV experience unlike any other.

Since the start of Veoh the company has released countless different types of software to help users browse and view videos in the Veoh video library. Hopefully Veoh has now settled on a Joost style internet TV application to be the way for the future.

The CEO of Veoh, Dmitry Shapiro demonstrated the new service’s capabilities, and they show a potential which means users are going to have access to virtually any video with unparalleled functionality, quality and control.