Webware

Veoh Networks, an online video start-up featuring content such as Lost, ESPN SportsCenter, and The Bachelorette, has begun a beta test of advertisements geared to users' earlier video-watching history and other activity at the site.

The new ad system "combines video consumption, searching, browsing, and community activity data from Veoh's more than 28 million viewers to deliver branded ads and content to viewers across multiple lifestyle and interest categories," the Los Angeles-based company said Monday. Tests of the system showed targeted ads perform more than twice as well as ordinary ads, the company said.

Behavioral advertising offers the promise of more closely matching advertisements to people who are likely to be interested, but they've led to controversy because of privacy issues stemming from potentially close monitoring of people's online activity. They've been a particularly touchy subject at social-networking sites, where users store a wealth of personal information and connections to friends and other contacts.

Behavioral advertising as a concept spans a range of monitoring possibilities: everything from showing ads related to what a user is doing on a site at a particular moment, to including the user's history of behavior on that site, to incorporating the user's personal profile data or contacts, to monitoring all of a user's Internet activity.

Veoh is optimistic about the technology, though.

"With more than a billion video views every quarter, Veoh is in the unique position to observe viewer behaviors and patterns across various forms and sources of content at an unprecedented scale," Veoh Chief Executive Steve Mitgang added in a statement.

The initial system will target ads to more than nine categories of users, but the company also can set up customized categories around specific advertiser preferences, Veoh said.

Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.

Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's Wii console.

Now go ruin your productivity level. As for me, Stumble Video just told me I might want to watch some Daft Punk videos.

Programs that grab videos from Web sites like YouTube aren't a dime a dozen--they're a dime for 200 dozen. Most of them aren't that good, either, which makes Ashampoo's freeware ClipFinder such a breath of fresh air in the video-grabbing game.

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YouTube may be the best-known mainstream video-hosting site on the Web, but it's certainly not winning any awards for the visual quality of its content. YouTube's creators have said higher-resolution videos are on the way, but until then, there are a handful of other services that do a much better job at making your uploaded video look a little less Webby.

There's another problem at hand: size. Video files are big, and a lot of the most popular services place tedious size restrictions. Those restrictions mean that you are either going to have to compress your video through third-party software before uploading or make smaller, lower-quality source recordings to begin with.

We've handpicked four services that have pretty lenient size limits and that don't force you to download software clients just to graduate up to the higher caps. To be fair, we're also comparing all four to the YouTube status quo.

So here's the deal. We took a source video of just less than 2 minutes at full VGA quality at 30 frames per second. It came off a recent-model Canon digital camera that saved it as an approximately 200MB AVI file. Your results for source material may vary, but based on the popularity charts on Flickr, Canons rule the roost both overall and in the point-and-shoot camera category, so we felt that it was a good control.

It's worth noting that Casio has several models of digital cameras with "YouTube capture" modes, though these are simply recording video in MPEG-4 H.264 at smaller resolutions, which takes up less space. You can accomplish a similar feat, albeit using a different video codec, if your camera has a "compact" or "e-mail ready" video-capturing mode.

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MTV Networks announced Tuesday that it will distribute its video content across the Web through deals with a number of social-media sites and video portals: GoFish, Veoh, MeeVee, and Imeem. Through this initiative, users of the video sites will be able to view both short- and long-form content provided by MTV Network as well as embed them on blogs and social-networking sites.

The partnerships will start to go live over the next few weeks; representatives from Imeem, for example, said that MTV Networks video content will appear on the social network, which focuses on ad-supported streaming media, in February.

Jon Stewart: He's back from the writers' strike and invading the series of tubes.

(Credit: MTV Networks)

MTV Networks, a division of Viacom, operates a total of 145 television channels and 300 Web sites across the world, but is best known for pop culture-oriented brands like MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and Spike TV.

Tuesday's partnership announcements add to existing Web syndication deals with AOL, Bebo, Fancast, Joost, and MSN. Additionally, some MTV Networks programs already have extensive content available on their own sites; last year, the Comedy Central programs The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and later South Park became fully available on the Web in a library of ad-supported clips.

The company's decision to syndicate its content to select partner sites across the Web comes at a time when many other big media players are choosing to do the same thing. NBC and News Corp. joined forces to create Hulu, which has both a central portal as well as syndication partners. Rival CBS, meanwhile, has amassed its own set of video syndication outlets.

For all these content creators, it's a way to make sure that their video can circulate online with advertising support. MTV Networks' parent company, Viacom, still has a $1 billion lawsuit standing against the Google-owned YouTube for allegedly facilitating the distribution of pirated video. And two of MTV Networks' new syndication outlets, Veoh and Dailymotion, are partners in the antipiracy coalition announced in October designed to combat infringing content--a coalition from which Google is notably absent.

Updated 12:30 p.m. PT

A coalition of major media and technology companies that notably does not include Google appears to be getting serious about copyright on the Internet.

A who's who of media companies--CBS, News Corp.'s Fox Entertainment Group, NBC Universal, Viacom, and Disney--as well as Microsoft and the News Corp.-owned MySpace, along with video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Veoh Networks released a set of guidelines Thursday designed to halt online piracy.

Notably absent from the list is Google, which unveiled filtering technology for its YouTube video-sharing site on Monday. Sources familiar with the coalition plan say Google was involved in the talks at one point, but backed out shortly before making its own announcement. Disney and Microsoft initiated the effort, multiple sources said.

"Initially Disney reached out directly to us," Veoh Networks CEO Steve Mitgang said in an interview with CNET News.com.

In response to questions, Google released a statement from YouTube Engineering Director Jeremy Doig: "We appreciate ideas from the various media companies on effective content identification technologies. We're glad that they recognize the need to cooperate on these issues, and we'll keep working with them to refine our industry-leading tools."

A YouTube spokesman who asked not to be named says Google had talked to Disney about the guidelines but Google and YouTube executives decided not to join the alliance because they were worried that creating "industry-wide mandates" would stifle innovation.

A source close to the deal hinted that the longstanding billion-dollar lawsuit between Viacom and Google over copyrighted content on YouTube may have played a role in Google's decision to back out, citing the possibility that it could have affected how the litigation would unfold. And another source familiar with the alliance finds fault with the fact that Google's new filtering system doesn't actually block infringing content from being posted, but supposedly removes it from the site within minutes. The media group's guidelines call for "blocking infringing uploads before they are made available to the public.

"It's unprecedented that these disparate companies have come together," the source says. "It's a real loss that Google isn't a part of this."

The companies expect to implement the guidelines before the end of the year, another source at one of the companies says. It hasn't been made clear whether this will mean we'll be seeing more announcements and partnerships--or more specifically, whether the two video-sharing platforms involved in the alliance, Veoh and DailyMotion, will become more attractive business partners for the major media and technology companies involved.

"Our goal is to be a vital partner for premium independent and individual producers. We're already a partner to CBS," Veoh's Mitgang said, referring to the company's new online video-sharing network. "We are actively working with everybody on the list regarding this."

Representatives from multiple companies involved in the initiative emphasized that it's not a closed partnership and that other corporations may be introduced into it as well--provided they are willing to adhere to and support the guidelines.

"The principles acknowledge a collective respect for protecting copyrights and recognize that filtering technologies must be effective and are only a part of what is necessary to achieve this goal," a joint news release said.

The guidelines also call for companies to: balance the legitimate "fair use" rights for using copyrighted material, promptly address claims that content was blocked in error, and upgrade technology "when commercially reasonable."

Protecting fair use--which allows people to post excerpts of copyright content and use content for educational purposes and for parody--is important, says Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, which monitors copyright issues online.

Boehm criticized Google for not joining the effort. "Google is continuing to play hard ball," he says. "They are going to use their market share and economic power to just hold off any kind of reform or compromise."

Several sources say plans have been made for representatives from some members of the new alliance--though it's not yet clear which companies--to head to Washington, D.C. soon to meet with members of Congress on the matter. Rather than move to encourage more legislation, it's to educate lawmakers on the issues and show them that occasionally-sparring media and technology companies can handle this on their own.

A full list of the principles involved in this new set of guidelines, which emphasize high-tech filtering, quick removal of pirated content, and promotion of infringement-free digital content, are publicly available at the new site UGCPrinciples.com.

The news was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier on Thursday.

With contributions from CNET News.com's Elinor Mills.