Yahoo! currently seems to be on a mission to take over the world of online video, despite facing the immediate threat of a hostile takeover bid by industry giant Microsoft. They say all good things come in threes, and Yahoo! seem intent on proving that at the moment.

Last week saw the unveiling of Y! Live, a lifecasting site to compete with the likes of uStream, Mogulus and Operator11. As those sites do, Y! Live enables ordinary members of the public to become broadcasters in their own bedroom, setting up a video channel, and showing whatever footage reels off from their webcams.

Then a few days ago, we saw Yahoo! acquire Maven, an online video platform which could see the company up the ante on the advertising and monetisation side on web television.

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Yahoo! may be going through a rough patch at the moment (read understatement of the year), with Microsoft launching a hostile takeover bid worth $45 billion, and staff being culled left, right, and centre, but that hasn’t stopped it from carrying on business as normal.

Today, they have formally announced the acquisition of Maven Networks, an online video platform which offers video hosting and distribution services, as well as a targeted video advertising system.

The deal, which has been rumoured around the blogosphere for the last fortnight, right before Microsoft threw a spanner in the works with its bid, is worth an estimated $160 million, about $10 million higher than was first thought.

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Tom Huntington, a spokesperson for DivX has announced that DivX, a growing video compression software company, has signed a two year deal with Yahoo! that replaces a previous agreement that DixX had with Google.

As the terms of the contract state, DivX software will now be offered with a co-branded Yahoo Toolbar and a version of IE7 pre-configured with Yahoo tools. Yahoo!, in exchange, will now provide links to DivX and its online video service, Stage6, within the Yahoo toolbar.

Could Yahoo! possibly be a better partner for DivX than Google?

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Yahoo! has just unveiled plans to cement its online video credentials with a service aimed at tackling the likes of the ubiquitous YouTube.

Yahoo’s general manager for video, Mike Folgner, has stated that music videos, movie trailers, television shows and sports highlights are among the features that will be available on the new site.

One of our strategies is to put video everywhere you are on the Internet. We’re going to build a much better destination for you to access all this different content.

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comScore, one of the world’s leading digital entertainment surveyors, has revealed its latest Video Metrix report for May 2007, which showed that nearly 75% of all Americans watch video online during said month.

Not surprisingly, YouTube, the undisputed king of video content on the web, topped the list of places to watch, with 35 percent of users tuning in to 1.8 billion streams during the four-week period. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 8.1 percent (680 million streams), while Yahoo! Sites earned bronze with a 4.6 percent share and 387 million streams.

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I just noticed that Google is integrating video thumbnails into its regular search results. It is doing this for video clips from select sites (pictured above).

Video sites that seem to get a thumbnail are:

• Yahoo Video
• MetaCafe
• YouTube
• Google Video
• MySpace
• Vimeo

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We often hear about how the traditional cable and satellite companies are going to suffer as internet TV begins to take over. We hear it but so far there has been little evidence of it.

In fact Comcast has been flexing its muscles to place itself in a position to theoretically thwart the open web TV revolution.

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