We learnt yesterday that social music network Last.fm has started creating original video programming to drive traffic to it. These will take the form of music interviews and live concert footage.

Now, Bebo, the third largest social network behind MySpace and Facebook has announced that it too is starting to create original programming, including a reality TV show called Gap Year.

The show will follow six lucky Bebo members as they travel the globe all expenses paid.

One Billion Video Views A Month

While speaking to Beet.tv, Ziv Navoth, Vice President of Bebo also spoke about hos many video views the network drives, an astonishing one billion every month.

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Blinkx is currently the largest and most advanced Internet video search engine in the world. Something that seems to be of interest to both Google and media conglomerate News Corp.

The company, which is based in Cambridge and San Francisco, was launched in 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake. It is currently listed on the London Alternative Investment Market.

Intense Speculation

There is speculation that both Google and News Corp are interested in buying the company out, which has seen its shares rise by 50% in light of the talk.

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FORA.tv is a video sharing site which describes itself as YouTube for thinkers. The San Francisco start-up company concentrates on intellectual content.

This content varies from politics, science, culture and business, but it all has a heavy bias towards intelligent, and cogent debate, rather than the more fun and frivolous content you may find at other video sharing sites such as YouTube.

New Venture Funding

The site also organizes videos from think-tanks and symposiums at universities and other highbrow organisations. And now, despite being a very young company, it has secured $4 million in venture funding.

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Lycos Cinema launched over a year ago, in an effort to compete with YouTube and Joost. It actually has more in common with Hulu, though that site hadn’t even been conceived when Lycos Cinema launched.

The big difference with Lycos Cinema is the chance to watch streaming content with other viewers simultaneously using the company’s patented Simulstream technology.

TV As A Social Activity

The main thrust of the site is the idea that rather than television being a solitary hobby, the fun is derived from watching with other people, and sharing the moment with those around you.

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Just two days I spoke about StartYourTube, a website which allows you to start your own video sharing service, however niche, to cater for people similar to you.

StartYourTube uses the popularity of YouTube in a number of ways, by mimicking the name, and using the sale of YouTube to Google for $1.6 billion to entice people to sign up.

It’s not the only site to use YouTube to increase its own profile, and one which has done it brilliantly successfully is GodTube, a Christian video sharing site which has just obtained funding to the tune of $30 million. We first spotted this site about a year ago.

$30 Million Investment

Rafat Ali at Paid Content reveals the news of the $30 million injection of cash from investors, on top of the $2.5 million which the site had already secured earlier in its life.

What’s amazing about this level of funding is that the site only launched last summer in Dallas, Texas, but has seen itself become one of the fastest growing websites on the Internet.

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If you want further proof of how much YouTube has become an integral part of all our lives, you need look no further than the fact that when the site suffers an outage of less than an hour, it becomes major news.

Websites, both small or large, seldom viewed or wildly popular suffer from outages. It can be a huge number of factors which cause them, but they rarely cause even a ripple of excitement.

Everyone & His Mother

However, when YouTube went offline for a time, thought to be about an hour, at around 7am PDT, everyone and his mother seemed to notice.

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When Hulu was launched as a joint venture between NBC and Fox last October, YouTube suddenly became their enemy - NBC even deleted it’s YouTube channel and all of the content.

However, it seems there is now an official Hulu channel on YouTube. It was started on March 3rd, but has only now been noticed by The LA Times.

March 3rd places the channel’s launch date just prior to Hulu launching publicly, after it’s trial beta version. So what is a Hulu channel doing on one of, if not the biggest rival it has?

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