DEMOfall has some great debuts on show this year including a YourTrumanShow widget called VideoMap. This little tool links friends and their videos across several social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

The intuitive, embeddable widget is a graphical relationship map that renders a graphical representation of video collections. The new widget can be placed and accessed by anyone on the Web and it allows video producers and fans to share content from inside the widget.

Your Truman Show

YTS was founded last year by Arturo Artom and Luca Ferrero. The San Francisco company is a video blogging enterprise that helps everyday people distribute great stories in their video diaries. 

The beta version allows anyone to create a personal channel, share life stories and view other people’s lives. This latest widget promises to connect people even more closely via what is essentially a mental map to their YTS presence.

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Faucet PVR is a new web based personal video recorder (PVR) which allows the recording of mainstream Italian network channels.

These can then be easily downloaded to your Apple iPod or iPhone, and be instantly accessible.

This unique service is in beta testing at the moment, and is at a purely experimental stage of development with no commercial ambitions. But it provides a truly useful, easy to use product in an area where rules and laws have left an open gap in the market up to now.

Born out of the engineering and product development team of Inrete, an Italian company devoted to help and support large enterprise customers in their IT network needs, Faucet PVR is a web-based personal video recorder that can capture any time range on the all the major on-air clear broadcast channels available in Italy.

A Virtually Unique Service

There seems to be no similar service yet in the international market as competing tools are either scheduling software front-ends for video-television recording software or web-based versions of TiVo-like personal video recording systems. 

All competing or similar systems I have been able to find online require a direct TV reception capability in your computer either via set-top box, tuner card or other device, while Faucet records any television program even if you are lost on an island with no reception.

In the case of Faucet PVR, the recordings are all done and reside on the Faucet servers and each user can access and download what she has selected to video record. 

Faucet does NOT record indiscriminately all of the on-air programming takes place but it rather provides an interface to a web-based digital video recorder that each individual can use to record his preferred television shows.

The recordings are then made available for a limited amount of time in the user account and can be easily downloaded to an iPod or any other portable media player including mobile phones and PDAs.

Here are more details:

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The MediaDefender-MiiVi debacle continues on, so I thought we’d take a look at the truth behind the whole sorry saga.

Miivi is a site once thought to be your average run of the mill peer-to-peer channels, home to both legal and illicit linking,  but now discovered to be a front, run by MediaDefender, an “establishment” now known to be operated under the auspices of Big Media.

Knowing this, you’ve likely now judged those in their respective ivory towers as no-good [expletive], whose underhanded (and possibly illegal, if one can successfully argue entrapment is/was at play) activities as of late all but warrant the complete abandonment of decency when dealing with them and their copyrighted materials.

In other words, you’d really just like to stick those media execs with the “crooked” tag, and think it’s just that you play your part as a consumer-advocacy-minded pirate and play this game of cat and mouse as dirty as the big guys are playing it.

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Apple has recently inked a deal with a San Franciso based video advertising start up called Podaddies to develop advertising compatibility for both Quicktime and iTunes. 

While no money has yet been exchanged in the deal, does this mean that future downloadable iTunes videos could have embedded advertisements included?

Currently, Apple does not provide any ad-supported content, but I wouldn’t put it past them given the revenue potential that the advertising industry now has.

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At a New York conference on Monday sponsored by The Deal ( a financial news organization), Michael Fricklas (Viacom’s general counsel) came out with a string of ironies, omissions and misinterpretations about Online Video and copyright violation.

The biggest and best was that “Viacom likes fair use!”

Fricklas, of course, is the legal force behind Viacom’s $1 billion suit against YouTube for copyright infringement. It was therefore somewhat shocking to hear him say that “Litigation is a poor way to resolve disputes,” particularly for a suit that Fricklas expects won’t get heard until 2009. 

On the other hand, lawsuits are useful because they help get their side of the issues out, as opposed to those people organized by law professors and people who love Napster’s free music “who had center stage.”

Instead, Fricklas prefers a combination of automatic filtering and appreciation for fair use is a better set of tools for dealing with those pesky videos that pop up from time to time. 

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BlogTV.ca, the video streaming experiment from Alliance Atlantis launched with much fanfare in March (well, a big fancy party at least).

And now it’s getting the chop… so let’s have another party.

I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time on it, because frankly it isn’t worth it, but I thought I should take note of the fact that it’s gone, and about time too.

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Not so long ago, Amanda Congdon split from Rocketboom, and the news of the separation was the biggest news in the blogosphere.

It was all over Techmeme for days, as everyone pored over her blog posts and comments by Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron.

For those who have forgotten, Amanda co-created or co-owned or was hired to front (depending on whom you believe) Rocketboom before leaving over a row with Baron.

Now, there are reports that she has parted company with ABC — where she was doing occasional video reports — and there has been barely a peep. Why? Hard to say, really. 

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