There’s a definite feeling that Microsoft is bouncing back after a dismal last few years which saw Bill Gates leave the company and Windows Vista hit the shelves. Windows 7 is now with us, its Bing search engine is competing with Google, and the company is also making efforts with online video.

Microsoft Returns

Microsoft is doing all it can to replenish its tarnished reputation. The release of Windows 7 is huge, and Bing is a search engine which may actually manage to provide competition for the ubiquitous Google.

Silverlight 3.0 is obviously proving popular with media companies seeking to stream video over the Internet but 2009 has also seen a few changes take place in terms of Microsoft’s approach to online video.

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Online video is growing all the time, both in terms of popularity and frequency. Which is all good for the sector.

However, navigating the breadth of choice now out there and filtering the available content is getting harder as a result. Enter Magma, which acts like a Billboard Hot 100 for online video.

Online Video Growth

Online video has grown, and continues to grow, in popularity and breadth of content. The choice of sites, portals, content, and video clips now available is breathtaking.

There are the long-form video destinations such as Hulu and the BBC iPlayer, and short-form video factories such as YouTube and Dailymotion. Between all of them the range of content available to your average viewer is simply astonishing. It would take years to watch it all.

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The video streaming sector of online video is already a very crowded place. Lead by YouTube, there are also many other video sharing sites trying to compete. And now The Pirate Bay is preparing to join the battle with a little site it calls The Video Bay.

The Pirate Bay

Whether they’ve used it or not, almost everyone will have heard of The Pirate Bay. It’s not the largest torrent tracker in the world, that honor goes to Mininova, but it is the most notorious. In fact, the people behind the site go out of their way to cause controversy, stoke the fires of file-sharing, and generally try to upset the big media companies currently fighting P2P technology.

The Pirate Bay’s latest innovation is unlikely to change how the site is viewed by people in the industry. Not content with providing one of the wheels in the cog required to share files online over a network, The Pirate Bay now wants to try its hand at video streaming.

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Bing, Microsoft’s latest attempt at changing Internet search, has already caused controversy thanks to its live video thumbnails search results. Not only is porn accessible on the site, but being able to play videos without ever visiting the source raises possible fair use concerns.

Internet Search Options

The Internet search market is dominated by one company – Google. The company boasts an almost two-thirds share of the market, managing 64.2 percent of all searches compared to the 20.4 percent managed by Yahoo! and just 8.2 percent by Microsoft. No wonder then that Microsoft is currently rebranding and re-energizing its search engine.

The result is Bing, which launched over the weekend. It’s very much like Google, sharing many of the same features and elements as the market leader, including results for online video. But Microsoft is also trying to redefine the power of search, which it’s managing to do already, just not in the way it intended. The name just makes me think of Chandler Bing from Friends (pictured above) but there’s worse to come.

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The Pirate Bay today went on trial on charges of copyright theft, promoting copyright infringements, and profiting from the file-sharing of copyrighted material. Let’s take a look at the facts behind the Internet piracy trial of the decade.

The Trial Begins

The case against The Pirate Bay, and four people connected with the site in particular, has been two and a half years in the making. Ever since the torrent tracker’s offices were raided in May, 2006, the police, the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) and various copyright holders have been preparing to attack.

The four people in the dock for this trial are three of the site’s administrators, Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom who is alleged to have bankrolled the venture early on in its life.

While these four people are the ones on trial, The Pirate Bay itself, and the process it uses to enable peer-to-peer file-sharing to take place is the real target. The prosecutors know that taking down these men, and taking them for every penny they own in the process, will not actually kill the site. So this trial also aims to have the site taken down, and be a catalyst for hardened laws against illegal BitTorrent sharing.

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Although it was am obvious move that many were surprised didn’t happen sooner, the culling of Google Video is still big news. Will Google Video now evolve into something else? And will Google’s new focus on YouTube mean the site fulfils its obvious potential?

Bound To Happen

When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, two things were clearly marked to happen. The first was YouTube being turned into a profit-making entity, and the second was that Google Video’s time was sure to be up.

Google has for the last year or so been making mammoth efforts to turn YouTube’s potential into the money maker it clearly deserves to be. But until now there has been little happening on the Google Video side of things.

Google Video Dead

Now though, faced with a crumbling worldwide economy that is even affecting the biggest and brightest companies, Google has acted. Google Video is being effectively killed off along with five other seemingly worthless products.

In a series of blog posts this week, Google announced the demise of Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebooks, Jaiku, and the application we as an online video site are concerned with, Google Video.

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TV.com was part of the acquisition of CNet for $1.8 billion by CBS last year. The site with the valuable domain name is now in the process of being turned into what the TV network hopes will become the ultimate Web video destination.

An Evolving TV.com

I know TV.com as an information and community resource all about television. If there was a new series that I needed to find out about, or a need to check the episode guide for Lost or Heroes, TV.com would be my first port of call.

While those factors remain, with new added social networking features, the site is now being rapidly turned into a comprehensive database of online video. If there’s content to be had, CBS wants it on TV.com.

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