WatchIndia is set to storm the 3.5 million members of the Indian community living in the U.S. and Canada. The Web site announced the launch of its suite of live Indian channels and video-on-demand content featuring the best of Indian TV and entertainment -- breaking news, hit Indian TV serials, Bollywood movies, music, entertainment and the latest sports and cricket events.

WatchIndia offers Indians a way to not only get the latest news, but also stay up to date with culture, entertainment, music and sports -- keeping them involved with life back home in a way a phone call or an ethnic newspaper subscription never could. WatchIndia's content includes a breadth of live and video-on-demand entertainment and a collection of the top Indian media outlets, spanning news, sports, music, movies, religion and pop culture. Content includes programs such as Hindi movies, Punjabi series, Indian pop culture, gurus and more.

Paltalk solidifies its leadership position in socialcasting with the launch of Screening Rooms. Socialcasting, as defined by Paltalk, brings together high quality programming and video content with social networking and live interactive community. This launch also coincides with the release of Paltalk's latest video community service called PaltalkScene. Screening Rooms, PaltalkScene and all of its features support an active and participatory, rather than a passive, online video experience, where users not only watch content, but can interact with it and each other in real-time.

Tudou.com has launched its advertising platform to enable advertisers to easily incorporate brand advertising into Tudou videos. In conjunction with this launch, Tudou received $19 million in venture capital funding, led by Capital Today and General Catalyst Partners with participation from new and existing investors Granite Global, IDG China, JAFCO Asia, KTB Ventures and JAIC. The funding will be used to further expand Tudou’s technical infrastructure to serve the rapidly growing demand for its service, as well as expand advertising relationships with some of the world’s most recognized brands already advertising on the Tudou network, including Adidas, Ford, KFC, Lenovo, Motorola, Nike, Pepsi, Samsung, and Sony.

The cost of watching Barclays Premier League football on television took a dive today as BT launched its BT Vision Sport service. This service allows fans to catch-up with more matches in full than any other service and for just £4 a month. Fans will be able to choose from Premier League matches just hours after the action - at a time of their choosing - and they can combine the service with a package of live English and Scottish matches from Setanta Sports for only £12 a month.

BT Vision Sport is ideal for fans who have BT Total Broadband but who are unwilling, or unable, to pay high TV sports subscriptions. BT’s “near live” service includes 242 Premier League matches per season and – through a new deal announced today - up to 125 Coca Cola League and Carling Cup games. Fans can also access Setanta Sports’ live action which includes 46 Premier League matches from England and 60 from Scotland (including all the old firm derbies) as well as action from other European football leagues, US PGA tour golf, Nascar and Magners League rugby. BT Vision also offers a library of classic sporting action and documentaries available on demand and supplied by sporting giants ESPN and IMG.

BET and Brightcove announce a partnership to distribute ad-supported Internet video channels in the United Kingdom. Through its partnership with Brightcove, BET International will extend the distribution of its compelling content -- including entertainment, music and celebrity programming -- to online audiences in the UK via the new Internet video site, BETonBlast.co.uk. BET will also take advantage of Brightcove's viral promotion features to enable consumers to share and embed BET Internet video content on websites, blogs and social networks in the UK. All Internet video channels will also offer online advertising opportunities sold by Viacom Brand Solutions in the UK.

Brightcove and Hachette Filipacchi UK announce the corporate-wide adoption of Brightcove to roll out Internet video channels across its magazine properties. The Brightcove Internet TV service enables Hachette Filipacchi UK to extend its magazine brands to the online video space as well as reach new online communities, and generate additional advertising revenue. The first channel to launch, ELLE Magazine's ELLEUK.com, will feature daily Internet video coverage focused on fashion events, beauty and style tips and travel stories.

Using the Brightcove Internet TV service, Hachette has been able create branded Internet video experiences for readers of its magazines and websites. The Brightcove service enables placement of relevant advertising and the ability to manage syndicated video through affiliates such as fashion websites, news portals, social media sites and blogs.

MultiVu announces the availability of its next generation online video network, geared towards assisting organizations in targeting video to consumer audiences directly through dozens of video sharing Web sites. Building on its strategy of 'Broadcast & Beyond' initiated when industry veteran Tim Bahr founded MultiVu five years ago, over the past six months the company has focused on steadily increasing the number of video sharing and syndication Web sites to which it distributes its customers' video. The result is a ground breaking video network, officially announced today, which enables organizations to target consumers directly with video, and significantly benefit from the viral effect of this new medium. MultiVu's online video distribution represents the future in online multimedia communications, taking video content 'beyond' the broadcast medium and directly to consumers, wherever they are.

Maven Networks has been selected by Gemstar-TV Guide to power its online video channels. Maven will work with TV Guide to launch next-generation broadband video experiences for TV Guide on its over 300 dynamically generated video players at www.TVGuide.com, delivering vast amounts of media and entertainment content to the site’s highly-engaged user base.

As evidenced by its vast popularity with audiences and advertisers alike, broadband video channels and online content syndication offer considerable value propositions for major media companies such as TV Guide. TV Guide has selected Maven to manage and monetize its vast library of video assets and tap into the value and opportunities that viral syndication presents. Maven enables TV Guide to manage its web video content workflow and publishing, create and quickly update state-of-the-art video user experiences, and offer its advertisers powerful analytical capabilities and enhanced video advertising opportunities. The Maven platform serves as an integral part of the technology foundation for TV Guide’s direct-to-consumer web video offerings and ad revenue generation efforts.

Despite estimates that an astounding 126 million people in the US alone view online videos each month, a majority of consumers are dissatisfied with their video experience online. A survey released today by Kelton Research has found that most of these viewers are lost, frustrated and overwhelmed by online video chaos. Officially launching and available today in North America, the United Kingdom and Brazil, WeShow has created a human-powered guide to organize the chaos and provide a convenient, easy-to-navigate view of high quality videos from around the world.

blinkx unveils AdHoc, the first contextually relevant video advertising platform. Just as Google's AdSense transformed advertising on the Text Web, blinkx's AdHoc platform will revolutionize video advertising by matching compelling, customized, TV-style ads to your audience on the Video Web.

Search technology performs two useful functions - finding content, and also matching that content to meaningful, relevant advertising. blinkx's distribution strategy has established it as the de facto standard for video search on the Web, so the natural evolution was to apply that proven technology to the automatic selection of ads. AdHoc leverages blinkx's patented speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis technology to understand video content more thoroughly and effectively than any other service today, and can therefore dynamically place the most pertinent advertising against it.

Dailymotion launched a US version of the popular site. The localized US portal to Dailymotion delivers the highest-quality online video entertainment experience, with premium-level programming and superior video streaming and viewing technology. The US site also launches with the MotionMaker program that identifies and rewards outstanding contributors to the Dailymotion creative community.

Dailymotion’s US launch is accompanied by planned implementation of monetization strategies for both content partners and for Dailymotion. These monetization programs for content partners, which will include banner and innovative forms of in-video advertising, enable even the most global of advertisers to reach consumers at the most local level. Advertisers will be able to reach one of the largest online audiences through the use of contextual in-stream ads as well as via niche and behavioral targeting through channels. Revenue sharing agreements are available to media companies as well as individual content creators through the MotionMaker program.

In some news from last week, News Corporation and NBC Universal have appointed Jason Kilar, a former executive at Amazon.com, to CEO of the online video joint venture the companies formed in March, 2007. Mr. Kilar will join the new company on July 9 and will report to its Board of Directors.

The company's site will debut later this year with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips from myriad networks and two major film studios.

As for some old, but significant news from last week MySpace will launch its new video platform, MySpaceTV. The announcement comes on the heels of explosive video growth driven by dozens of industry content partnerships and user interface changes. According to comScore Media Metrix, MySpace’s total number of video streams has leapt by 100% and the site has added 15 million unique streamers since January.

MySpaceTV will be an integrated component of the company’s worldwide community and content platform, continues the evolution of the company’s video offering by aggregating the best elements of video and empowers MySpace users to view, create, and share videos in new ways throughout the community. MySpaceTV will serve as the community’s primary video channel and as a stand-alone user destination at www.myspacetv.com.

AOL launched an update to its AOL Video portal with enhancements designed to make it even easier for consumers to find, watch and share more than 20 million videos from across the Web without having to visit multiple websites. New features of the updated AOL Video portal include:

• A redesigned main page that makes it easier for consumers to discover, search for and find millions of videos from across the Web;
• A redesigned video search experience that leverages industry-leading Truveo video search technology and features better presentation of Web search results to help users more easily find what they are looking for and;
• A new embedded playback experience where consumers can find and watch videos from other popular video sites on the AOL Video site.