The Now Film Festival announces an exclusive partnership with MySpace to present the 3rd annual Now Film Festival. As part of this partnership the festival will select one short film per week for the next 24 weeks to be showcased on MySpace's Film channel as well as on MySpaceTV. The MySpace community will also have the opportunity to watch the films and interact with the filmmakers on the Now Film Festival's official MySpace profile.

Metacafe launches its new “Director’s Cut” channel. Now live at www.metacafe.com/directors, the channel showcases short videos made for the interactive Internet medium that honor the art of storytelling and the craft of filmmaking. Adobe Systems is the current sponsor of “Director’s Cut” and provides information about Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium software, the video production industry’s most comprehensive collection of integrated post-production software. The cross-platform tools available in Production Premium CS3 help video professionals deliver creative, innovative content for film, broadcast, DVD, mobile devices and the Web.

MySpace rolled out an original scripted web series, Roommates, in collaboration with Iron Sink Media and sponsored by the 2008 Ford Focus. The first of 45 episodes goes live today on MySpaceTV with new episodes debuting each weekday at 1:00 pm PT/ 4:00 pm ET through December 21. Roommates is the company’s first co-development project and the first original web series created specifically for MySpaceTV.

Roommates is an original scripted web series that follows a group of eight former college roommates after graduation. The four main characters – Peyton, Violet, Heather, and Sigourney – move to Los Angeles where they are invited to participate in a “reality show” by living in a house wired with cameras and computers to document their every move. The series is a combination of raw and voyeuristic segments, confessionals, and college flashback footage, and allows old friends and romances of the main characters to address viewers interactively via video blogs.

Two days after YouTube announced the beta launch of their new video identification software, a coalition of several of the world's leading Internet, media, and technology companies announced their joint support for a set of collaborative principles that enable the continued growth and development of user-generated content online and respect the intellectual property of content owners.

The companies supporting these principles include CBS Corp., Dailymotion, Fox Entertainment Group, Microsoft Corp., MySpace, NBC Universal, Veoh Networks Inc., Viacom Inc. and The Walt Disney Company. Interesting enough, Google and YouTube are nowhere to be found on the list.

The principles are to serve as a set of guidelines to help user-generated content (UGC) services and content creators work together towards their collective goal of bringing more content to more consumers through legitimate channels. 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.

But will words equate to actions? Certainly if all participating companies work together in sharing information or developing a universal water-marking solution that prevents mass distribution of pirated works, that would be a significant achievement. However, only "written principles" and the news of this new coalition just days after YouTube's announcement seems all too protective and coincidental.

Note: You may want to wait until tomorrow to check the website due to the current traffic. It's nearly unusable at the moment.

Comedy Central has been a busy little bee lately. The company has been working on the new home of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". The website, thedailyshow.com, features video clips from every episode dating back to 1999, the year Jon Stewart took over the reins of "The Daily Show," and will be expanded to include the show's entire video history, totaling well over 13,000 high-quality clips.

Visitors to thedailyshow.com can watch video clips from last night's show, the week's best moments and videos spanning the full Jon Stewart era -- including guest interviews, correspondent segments and a myriad of other highlights, including many clips never seen since their original airing. In addition, the site will extend the users' experience with episode synopses, correspondent (past and present) profile pages, embeddable video, games, downloads, mobile content and merchandise. In addition thedailyshow.com will feature one-click bookmarking and link-sharing with sites such as Facebook, digg.com, del.icio.us and Fark.com.

Ina and Dailymotion announce the signing of a partnership agreement to protect copyrighted video content on the Dailymotion platform using Ina's "Signature" technology. Ina's innovative technology is based on a signature, or digital fingerprint, which constitutes a genetic code representing a sequence of images.

Google announced today the the launch of the YouTube Video Identification beta.

"YouTube Video Identification will help copyright holders identify their works on YouTube. We have worked with Google to develop one-of-a-kind technology that can recognize videos based on a variety of factors. As its Beta status indicates, our Video Identification is brand-new, cutting-edge stuff, so we will be constantly refining and improving it. Early tests with content companies have shown very promising results. As we scale and refine our system, YouTube Video Identification will be available to all kinds of copyright holders all over the world, whether they want their content to appear on YouTube or not."

"No matter how accurate the tools get, it is important to remember that no technology can tell legal from infringing material without the cooperation of the content owners themselves. This means that copyright holders who want to use and help us refine our Video ID system will be providing the necessary information to help us recognize their work. We aim to make that process as convenient as possible."

You can read all about the new tool on this page. Google makes it quite clear in their first paragraph that "YouTube Video Identification goes well above and beyond our legal responsibilities."

PeerBox announces a partnership with Metacafe to provide Metacafe’s 27 million unique monthly visitors access to highly entertaining short videos on their mobile phones. With one click on the ‘get on mobile’ button, Metacafe viewers enjoy the chosen video on their mobile phones with the help of PeerBox technology. The PeerBox Mobile application provides instant access to Metacafe content, allowing users to stream or download videos.

YouTube rolled out long-awaited technology to automatically remove copyrighted clips, hoping to placate movie and television studios fed up with the Web site's persistent piracy problems. The filtering tools are designed so the owners of copyrighted video can block their material from appearing on YouTube, which has become a pop culture phenomenon in its 2-year existence. They also give the owners of copyrighted video the option to sell ads around their material if they want the clips remain available on YouTube.

The BBC and Adobe announce a strategic relationship around the delivery of web video. By adopting the Adobe Flash Player software, the BBC will make its free catch-up TV service – BBC iPlayer – available as a streaming service across Macintosh and Linux, as well as Microsoft Windows, by the end of the year.

The strategic relationship will also allow the BBC to provide a single consistent user experience for the majority of streamed video and audio content on bbc.co.uk.

Playboy TV has launched Playboy Prime, an innovative new format designed to appeal to the short-form preferences of the "YouTube Generation," its key 18-34 year old male viewer demographic. Broadcasting every night of the week from 8pm ET though 11pm ET, viewers are treated to a rotating kaleidoscope of sexy, funny and provocative entertainment.

Playboy Prime's short-format shows include the best series from Playboy TV like "Totally Busted," "Naked Happy Girls" and "Sexcetera" as well as new additions "Playboy News" and "The Playboy Radio Minute" (uncensored video from the studios of Playboy Radio, SIRIUS Satellite Radio # 198), and "Hot Babes Doing Stuff Naked," a highly popular series in which viewers email in scenarios for Playboy TV's "Hot Babes" to perform. While naked. Requests for the Hot Babes already include house cleaning, tennis playing, skeet shooting, mechanical bull riding and deep sea fishing. And premiering in November will be the new comedy series, "Canoga Park," which chronicles the misadventures of a hapless adult film mogul and his crew as he dreams of producing the ultimate adult film blockbuster.

Dailymotion and Turner Broadcasting System Europe announce an agreement to make news, entertainment and animation programming available to audiences across Europe. The agreement marks Turner's choice of Dailymotion as a key partner in the wider distribution of its content across non-linear platforms and the continued distribution of Adult Swim outside of the US.

blinkx announces the expansion of its video search service into Western Europe. In response to the rapid proliferation of multimedia Web content around the world, blinkx now offers search capabilities in French, German and Spanish, to make it easier for audiences in these international markets to search for online video in their native language.

A new online video advertising network and technology unveiled by Podaddies ensures that behaviorally targeted ads will be able to play, track and pay whenever and wherever the media is consumed. Using the Podaddies ad network, advertisers can reach highly desirable markets they’ve been unable to reach while creators and publishers can track and monetize their video and audio content not only on web pages, but also after it’s been downloaded, shared and distributed through email, blogs, peer-to-peer networks and Apple’s iTunes.

Justin.tv announces that it has opened its network, making the power of live video available to everyone. With just a computer, a web cam and an Internet connection, anyone can broadcast high quality video for free, making Justin.tv the ultimate destination site for viewing the most compelling and entertaining live content from around the world.