YouTube launched yet another of their localised international versions of the site on Tuesday, at a flashy press conference with YouTube staff members and stars in attendance.

But for all the razzmatazz, two questions remain; How lame are these region specific spin offs of the video sharing site, and what is the point of them in the first place?

Over the last few months, we’ve seen Brazil, Poland, Ireland and Australia all get their own version of YouTube, and now Canada is the latest to be blessed with the so called honour.

The press conference itself was (by all reports) a well organised event, with a live performance by singer Naomi Streimer (who recently released a single on YouTube) and various other video stars in attendance, but the question is why is the whole thing necessary in the first place?

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The 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike on Monday over new media revenue and DVD royalties.

The irony is, this strike could be a Godsend for new media companies, as they grab a lot of viewers sick and tired of forced repeats and looking for something new to watch.

This is the first strike for twenty years, and is already affecting traditional television programming, with a number of chat and topical shows already being hit by the lack of new material.

There is also the threat to the big drama serials such as Lost and Heroes, with the latter already having the spin off show Heroes: Origins put indefinitely on hold partly because of the dispute (as well as poor ratings and reviews for the 2nd series).

The thing is, there will be many facets of the media which won’t be affected in the slightest by the strike, the main one being that same new media of the Internet which the strikers are demanding a piece of.

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Rather than innovate, when you have a site which is head and shoulders above all the competition, both in terms of usability and traffic, is it better to just copy them and be done with it?

Regular visitors to online video sharing service Revver will notice some major changes now active on the site.

Now, with its new layout and features, Revver is looking more like the most popular video site, YouTube (but with less bold colors), which is currently in the process of being redesigned.

Making much better use of space, the Revver website manages to pack more videos and more information onto the homepage while maintaining a simple and uncluttered arrangement.

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This blog post may well self destruct at some point. I feel I should warn you that there’s a good chance of this happening because of the experimental embedding of a Hulu video clip below. 

OK, the blog post will be here until the end of time, but if we’ve learned anything by trying to embed YouTube videos of Viacom content, it’s that nothing embedded lasts forever.

And so while NBC and FOX have launched a private beta of their new online video service Hulu, there’s no guarantee that the video clips I can embed today will still be available tomorrow. That said, here’s the complete movie Sideways. 

It’s ad-supported, although I won’t make any money from those ads. And while you can watch it in full screen from Hulu.com, there’s no way to make the video full screen from this site.

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Hulu has finally launched, well sort of at least. The joint venture between NBC and News Corp. that some thought would be a YouTube competitor, has at least given some of the chosen few in Silicon Valley a look at the service. 

As far as I can tell from most descriptions of it, it sounds like a video-distribution network that will compete more with Brightcove and other similar video services than it will with YouTube.

In other words, it has nothing to do with “user-generated content” or people uploading video — it’s all about network content from NBC and News Corp., distributed through a Flash player that can be embedded on other sites and will be white-labeled to partners such as AOL and MySpace. 

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The Daily Show is a brilliant satirical show which everyone has probably heard of, even if they aren’t particularly fans of the type of humour.

It’s a great showcase for the satirical jabs of Jon Stewart and pals, as they round on any politician or organisation who has recently acted stupidly. 

If you are one of the many fans, you might have been overjoyed to hear that Comedy Central (which is part of MTV, which in turn is part of Viacom) recently launched a website with 13,000 or so clips from the show, including some of the most-loved episodes.

Finally, you may have thought to yourself — after months of fighting with YouTube over clips from the show (which routinely appear and then are quickly removed), Viacom has decided that giving viewers what they want over the Internet is the right way to go. Bravo.

Not If You Are Canadian

The only problem with that rosy little scenario is that Viacom’s largesse — like every other U.S. TV network that has decided to stream popular shows from their website — is completely unavailable to Canadian viewers (and to viewers in other countries as well). 

You can go to the website and click on a video, but you don’t get anything. To add insult to injury, the pre-roll advertising spot that Viacom has sold for the clip plays just fine, but is followed by a black screen — a screen that might as well say “Hey non-U.S. viewers — look at all the stuff you can’t watch.”

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There were a bunch of stories a while ago about TorrentSpy and the bunch of seemingly mixed signals that were routinely being sent from the site to its users.

At the time, no-one knew whether or not it was safe to venture there any more.

This was after rumors about alleged records of visitors IPs being kept and forcefully transferred to the lovely folk over at the MPAA.

You may also be aware of the many still unanswered questions floating about the blogosphere about the torrent-site-vs-Big-Media battle waged oh-so-unscrupulously in weeks and months past.

Well, yesterday Wired.com was so kind as to publish a story by David Kravets about a major component of the TorrentSpy debacle. 

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