Revision3, the online video studio founded by Kevin Rose and home of the Diggnation video podcast amongst others, suffered a denial of service attack at the end of last week. While that’s pretty common, there was a bit more to it than your normal DOS.

The website’s servers suffered extensive outage over the memorial weekend, and the problem continued until Tuesday when the admins came back to work and solved the issue.

MediaDefender To Blame

After the problem had been rectified Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 posted a very detailed run-down of the issues surrounding the attack, and MediaDefender came out as the culprit.

MediaDefender, as many of you will be aware, is an organisation which gained notoriety last year after setting up a P2P distribution platform which is actually entrapment for illegal file sharers.

So why did MediaDefender target Revision3, a legitimate company that goes by the book, and isn’t trying to promote the distribution of illegal videos?

In yesterday’s post about Glam Media’s new online video platform GlamTV, I mentioned how the popularity of online video has so far failed to turn in to massive profits for the companies involved, and that is the greatest challenge to overcome now.

Fast forward a few hours, and an interesting post appear on TechCrunch looking at the same issue, but focussing on YouTube, and how it is building a huge market dominance but how the business of profit is failing with it.

The popularity of Web video is now no longer in question. YouTube is massive, and growing all the time, and services such as Hulu and the BBC iPlayer have proved to be massively successful.

However, an ongoing problem which has yet to be fully explored, let alone solved, is how to successfully monetize the business of online videos.

Sure, Google saw fit to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube, but that worth was all potential. So far it has yet to make so much as a bean from the site.

YouTube is used by all kinds of people, to show off an achievement on a game, a funny incident with their pet, a favourite music video, and now, a whole channel dedicated to their various crimes.

Andrew Kellett, 23, from Leeds in the UK appeared in court after posting more than 80 videos of him performing various crimes, from high-speed driving, to anti-social behaviour.

An ASBO For His Crimes

Kellett received an ASBO to stop him from posting any more videos or photographs of his activities online, before a full hearing in to his crimes occurs in July.

The Viacom lawsuit against YouTube could result in the way information is exchanged over the Web by millions of people, and by millions of websites, according to a legal response to the suit.

The lawsuit was first brought last March, when Viacom decided to seek $1 billion in damages from Google and YouTube over the “intentional copyright infringement” taking place on the site.

The complaint cited 160,000 unauthorised clips from Viacom’s entertainment channels, which include Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks and a number of cable channels such as MTV and Comedy Central.

No More Playing Down

At the time, Google played down the legal challenge, and instead concentrated on reiterating the site’s aims, and extolling the virtues of YouTube to content creators, but things have changed somewhat over the past year.

Web video has been growing for a fair number of years now, with broadband sparking an explosion in on-demand video services and sites.

With YouTube leading the way, video viewing over the Internet is growing around the world, and according to a new research paper, that growth is going to carry on and even speed up over the next five years.

Screenflow is by far my favourite screencasting tool, of which you can read my gushing review in this post. But like every application or piece of software known to man, it can sometimes go wrong.

Twittered

Yesterday I was whining on Twitter about how I’d had the tiniest little problem with my Screenflow.

In short, I’d had a couple of shots where a tiny pixel had attached itself to a particular type of cursor. The type of thing that you would never even notice if the footage weren’t super-magnified. Not a biggy.

Within a few minutes, Vara had picked up on my tweet, replied to me and asked if I’d like to submit a support email. Which was awesome - I see Twitter used and abused in a lot of ways, and it’s great to see it being used so pro-actively by a developer to monitor and respond to feedback.