It continues to amaze me and many others how online television and video offerings are being compartmentalized by territory, when the Internet is a truly global playground. An International Hulu shouldn’t actually be necessary but unfortunately it is. But at least it’s on its way, which is better than nothing.

International Plans

Hulu has reportedly had plans to roll-out internationally for a while. In March, the company hired a senior vice president of international operations whose role was described as being “responsible for leading Hulu’s expansion efforts outside the United States.” Then in May, these plans to expand outside of the U.S. borders were revealed.

There were newspaper reports at the time stating that Hulu was in negotiations with several large British broadcasters, including ITV and Channel 4. The plan was to make the UK the first port of call in an international roll-out of Hulu. Each country would get a localized service, with some American shows available alongside shows from that territory.

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The Pirate Bay has sold out, to a Swedish company no one has ever heard of. The acquisition has been confirmed but the future of the site is still mired in confusion. Could this be a Napster moment for the file-sharing community, or could this actually be a good thing?

Things happen fast in the world of peer-to-peer torrent tracking. Just a few days after unveiling The Video Bay, a new streaming video site based on open source video standards, The Pirate Bay had even bigger news to announce this morning: it’s selling out.

Sold Or Sold Out?

The Swedish press broke the news story first, forcing The Pirate Bay to confirm the truth in a blog post earlier today. The Pirate Bay has been bought by Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB.

The price, a cool $7.7 million, is enough to pay the $3.6 million in fines racked up by the four co-founders of the site in their recent court case, and have enough left over to ensure they never have to work again, or at least be able to walk away from the whole thing better off than when they began.

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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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Michael Jackson’s death has dominated all areas of the media since Thursday, online video included. The King Of Pop may be no more but his influence on the world continues on.

Michael Jackson died suddenly and unexpectedly on June 25, 2009 after suffering a cardiac arrest. He collapsed at his Los Angeles home, was taken to hospital, and declared dead after paramedics spent an hour trying to resuscitate him.

In The Action

Online video immediately became involved when news channels around the world showed footage of the paramedics arriving at Michael Jackson’s home in L.A. The video looked to have been shot on a cellphone or small video camera by a passer-by. The quality wasn’t great but it provided the first shots on the ground of what was happening.

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Big-hitting and ever-popular shows such as The Simpsons and CSI now carry a higher advertising rate on the Web than they do on television. Is this the moment we have been waiting for - when the digital revolution starts to pay for itself?

I Have A Dream

It seems as though everyone, with the exception of the cable companies who need the status quo to continue in order to make money, is keen for online video to fulfill its potential and herald a new revolution in this digital age. There are just a couple of problems, huge problems at that, to overcome before this dream becomes reality.

One is for content creators and copyright owners to realize the world is one place connected by the Internet, rather than a fragmented jigsaw puzzle. Which means making Hulu viewable outside the States and the BBC iPlayer viewable outside the U.K. The other, even larger, problem, is how to make Web video profitable without scaring viewers away by charging the earth for streaming content.

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The social side of online video is becoming an increasingly important tool in demonstrating the divergence between traditional broadcasts and Web-only broadcasts. Facebook is now taking advantage of this sector of the market with its new Live Stream Box. Ustream is the first company to take advantage of the Facebook Connect feature.

Social Networking Features

Recent months have brought news of a couple of innovations in the field of matching up online video and social networking. The new Xbox 360 Sky Player will allow fans to watch football matches together using on-screen avatars. While both Joost and Hulu have recently unveiled new elements to their services which are designed to increase user interaction during programs. And CBS Interactive introduced Social Viewing Rooms to bring the idea of sitting around watching TV together in a living room to the Web.

Live Stream Box

Now comes a new feature which brings a similar concept to Facebook, the world’s largest social network with in excess of 200 million members. It’s called Live Stream Box and it enables Facebook users to watch a streaming video event, comment and chat while it is happening, and see their messages appearing both alongside the video and on their Facebook profile.

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You surely cannot have missed what is currently happening in Iran. Coverage of the disputed presidential election and the protests that have followed has been everywhere. But most of all, it’s been available via the increasingly important medium of online video.

The Back Story

The 2009 Iranian presidential elections were held on June 12, 2009. The result, that sitting president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 66 percent of the public vote, was duly announced and then immediately disputed by the opposition, ordinary voters, and other countries.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the man who nabbed 33 percent of the vote, called for peaceful protests to take place, and these began in Tehran shortly after. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei first urged the nation to back the president, before denouncing the demonstrations as illegal.

Protests still happened over the weekend, but the Ayatollah’s declaration coincided with a much stronger use of force against the protesters. On Saturday, there were reported to have been ten deaths, all of protesters having been shot by pro-government security forces. Among them was a young lady named Neda Agha Soltai.

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