The boiling point has been reached as Viacom today stated that it has sued YouTube and Google for what they claim is "massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom's entertainment properties."

Viacom said, "After a great deal of unproductive negotiation, and remedial efforts by ourselves and other copyright holders, YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused."

The suit was filed in in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and seeks more than $1 billion in damages, as well as an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement.

Viacom has been quite critical of YouTube in the past couple of weeks after content distribution negotiations between the two companies went sour. Viacom has since ordered YouTube to remove all videos but Viacom's complaint contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Light Reading has done the research on the online video sector and reveals who are the best websites for paying out on your videos. The report examines 75 video sharing sites and 8 companies willing to share the revenue including Blip.tv, Break.com, Eefoof.com, Google Video, Lulu TV, Metacafe, Revver, and YouTube, each of whom has devised their own crafty method for dishing out the dollars.

"Online video sharing has spread like a virus, and a select few have made tens of thousands of dollars thanks to some innovative video-sharing Websites," says Phil Harvey, Managing Editor for Light Reading. "Some sites aim for well-defined niches, while others require a huge audience. This report details what the differences are, and shows how a site's business model might fatten -- or flatten -- a consumer's wallet."

Be sure to check out the entire article for an in-depth look at each video site's feature set.

CBS SportsLine, CBS Sports, CSTV and the NCAA will be bringing NCAA March Madness online with their updated player that provides live streaming video from 56 games beginning with the first round of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship.

In 2006, MMOD was presented free of charge for the first time since its debut in 2003, producing tremendous traffic results with over 19 million video streams and five million visits, resulting in one of the largest live Internet events ever and one many experts called a watershed moment in media history.

To accommodate an even greater audience in 2007, CBS SportsLine has doubled the bandwidth capacity for MMOD. However, in order to effectively control a massive anticipated peak in demand during Thursday and Friday, March 15 and 16, access to the MMOD video player will be carefully managed using a "virtual waiting room." If demand exceeds peak capacity on the 15th, 16th or at any other point of the tournament virtual lines will form.

CBS SportsLine has partnered with Akamai Technologies to provide video bandwidth support for NCAA March Madness on Demand.

Poor YouTube just can't get a break. If they aren't getting criticized for managing copyright violations, they're playing the referee to a Greek and Turk online video punch out. This bickering has now blown up in YouTube's face as a Turkish court has ordered that Internet access to YouTube be blocked by the nation's ISPs.

The reaction comes after the posted videos allegedly insulted Turks and the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In Turkey, these acts are considered illegal and even punishable by prison.

Turk Telekom, Turkey's largest telecommunications provider has already started enforcing the ban. Turkish visitors will find a message when visiting the site stating, "Access to this site has been blocked by a court decision."

Online video company GoFish Corporation will start using Audible Magic for filtering and identification technology for its website.

Audible Magic's monitoring services will help identify licensed copyrighted material on GoFish. This information will be reported on and provided for revenue sharing between GoFish and its partners. In addition, the Audible Magic fingerprinting software, which is based upon its CopySense technology, will allow GoFish to streamline content management in its database of hundreds of thousands of songs used in videos across the GoFish Network.

Maven Networks announced the launch of its new Internet TV Platform and the latest roster of major media companies that have embraced it, led by Hearst Corporation.

Hearst Magazines, publisher of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Good Housekeeping, is launching 14 new Internet TV channels built on the Maven platform with separate branding, promotions and advertising around the target audience of each magazine title.

The Lost Remote reports that Viacom has seen increased traffic after demanding that YouTube remove their content. "We are very pleased to have more traffic on our sites since we took down our video from YouTube because we are able to monetize that as opposed to someone else doing so," said CEO Philippe Dauman during Viacom's fourth quarter earnings conference. They have some interesting traffic stats for Viacom properties to check out.

On a related note, the Oscars demanded YouTube remove videos after the show aired last Sunday. However, some of those videos were already viewed over 200k times before they were taken down. Mark Cuban provides his thoughts on whether this was actually beneficial for the Oscars and recommends essentially spamming YouTube with videos promoting your site, rather than sending takedown notices. "To capture Youtube viewers, the first step would be to OVERWHELM Youtube with partial clips of full length that tease Youtube users and point them to Oscars.com. For this Will Ferrell clip, I would have created a video that showed the first 10 secs of the clip, then had 4 minutes of a billboard that said, 'Great videos from the Oscars telecast and exclusive behind the scenes videos are all available at Oscars.com.'"

The media just can't stop talking about it. TIME writes very highly of Joost and the potential of moving TV to the Internet.

The article also states that Joost will announce another deal this week with JumpTV for rights to their international content. JumpTV has rights to a very large collection of ethnic television and broadcasts via their own website over the Internet. With over 250 channels from 70+ countries, JumpTV delivers its subscribers news, sports and entertainment content.

FOX unveiled a plan to extend FOX television programming to more than 200 broadcast network affiliates, enabling to offer their local viewers the ability to watch or buy FOX's primetime shows. Programming will be delivered via "FOX on Demand," the company's video distribution platform. To date, "FOX on Demand" has offered an ad-supported, streaming-only platform; now, it will enable visitors to purchase television shows for play on the go on a computer or portable device. "FOX on Demand's" new commerce functionality is powered by FIM's Direct2Drive digital retail store, which also offers video games, movies, anime and more.

Ron Berryman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Fox Interactive Media Stations Group, said, "We're seeing great traction with 'FOX on Demand' on MySpace on a national level and in the initial local offerings on the owned-and-operated station sites."

Alex Zaharov-Reutt at iTWire has a good write-up on the potential bandwidth costs associated with watching video over Joost.

Most people usually speak to the advantages peer-to-peer offers. However, for those with bandwidth limits, peer-to-peer can suck your quota dry or mean higher bills if you get charged for additional usage. Throw into the mix streaming video at rates Joost suggests (320MB per hour down, 105MB per hour up), and you could have a potential disaster.

"If you watch 10 one hour shows, that's 3.3Gb you've just downloaded, and 1.5Gb you've uploaded. Watch a single one hour show for 30 days, and that's 9.9Gb. If you're stuck on a 10Gb download limit, you've just used it all up watching a Joost TV show every day," writes Alex.

VeriSign and Entriq have entered into a strategic alliance to combine Entriq's rights-management and commerce solutions with the VeriSign Intelligent Content Delivery Network (CDN). Together, the two look to offer media companies a solution for managing, monetizing, and delivering their media assets online. Entriq's services include customer care, billing, content geographic controls, download controls and support for a wide variety of business models. VeriSign's Intelligent CDN, introduced in December 2006, delivers video over the Internet utilizing patented peer-to-peer technology.

Applian Technologies released their Replay Media Catcher software, which allows online video and audio recording for streaming Flash and MP3 sites. The software allows users to capture digital reproductions from destinations like ABC.com, NBC.com, MySpace and thousands of others, as well as popular places like YouTube and Google Video. On Applian's website, one can even find how-to guides on recording video and audio from popular sites.

How do content owners feel about this? Recording of this video would easily allow users to then turn around and post these on any popular video site. However, this would go against Applian Technologies' terms of use, which does state, "Applian Technologies recording products are not intended for use in circumventing copy protection mechanisms or for making illegal copies of copyrighted content. Replay Media Catcher can be used for recording for your personal use only."

When Time Warner and Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner decided to back Veoh Networks, I'm sure the last thing they had in mind was producing yet another site with unauthorized content. Yet again this is the case with video sharing site Veoh.com. The only difference being that they have a new issue on their hands.

Veoh claims its advantage in the video sharing world is due to their peer-to-peer technology and ability to stream long-format high-quality video. Well as you can guess, this has provided an even better venue for the sharing of some full length content.

So what is Veoh's response to all of this: blame the people who are posting the material!

"We have a policy that specifically states that when we see copyright material posted, we take it down," said Veoh Networks CEO Dmitry Shapiro. "This problem is the democratization of publishing. Anyone can now post a video to the Internet. Sometimes the material belongs to someone else. We take this very seriously."

CNET has a great write-up on this.

It's hard to believe that this announcement is coming this early in the game, but Joost announced today that Viacom will offer a range of programming via the new Joost distribution platform. Under the agreement, Viacom's divisions -- MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount Pictures -- will provide television programming on the Joost platform. The programming will be offered at no cost to consumers.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The deal comes only weeks after Viacom pulled content from Google's YouTube due to their inability to reach a distribution agreement. Concern has been raising by a number of major media conglomerates over copyright claims with YouTube. In what seems as a direct response to these fears, Joost founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis continue to reiterate that Joost is a secure, efficient, piracy-proof Internet platform that guarantees copyright protection for content owners and creators.

On Friday, Joost (formerly the Venice Project) released version 0.8 of their beta player for Windows and also the first Mac beta. According to the Joost team, the availability of a Mac version has been their most emailed question. However, the new Mac beta is only for Intel Macs.

In version 0.8 of Joost, they have included a new CoreAVC video decoder and added some additional content. We gave the new version a whirl and did notice a small difference. We previewed some of the newly added documentaries from National Geographic. While the video was quite blurry when the application was fully expanded, it did look cleaner when we minimized it to a smaller window. However, we still encountered some jitteriness while playing and when trying to stop and close the player, it locked up on us. O'well, that's a beta for you.