As 2005 comes to a close, companies and organizations announce end of year winners. This week Business Week shows off the best of 2005 with podcasting, blogging, and Google coming out as best idea winners. Light Reading announced the 2005 Leading Lights winners with Verizon FiOS TV taking home one of the awards. Verizon continues to garner attention with their IPTV rollout across the U.S. and Internet TV is hot, hot, hot. Whether it be premium content like CNN's Pipeline, video blogging like Rocketboom, iTunes downloadable episodes, or Akimbo's video on demand, Internet TV is standing in the spotlight.

Here are some other interesting reads...

Light Reading Names 2005 Leading Lights Winners
Light Reading - December 15, 2005
"The Awards Dinner was the culmination of several weeks of hard work. The winners, in each case, are real winners, having survived three months of scrutiny and debate by a staff of more than 20 editors and analysts from Light Reading and its leading market-research division, Heavy Reading. Light Reading received more than 300 awards nominations in all, and each one was screened by our editors and analysts."

Verizon's Elby: IPTV Could Take Years
Light Reading - December 15, 2005
"In his keynote here, Elby said that the 'IP paradigm shift' continues apace, and that Verizon will continue to move all new services to IP technology because 'having a small number of networks is better than a large number of networks.' The goal, said Elby, is to separate the applications from the network so that Verizon can roll out any type of new service over a single IP-based network."

Microsoft Patents Pause
The Register - December 15, 2005
"Hyper-links to Internet sport pages or chat rooms can be included and the information displayed in a split screen along with the game, or the viewing of the game can be paused at the viewer's discretion for any length of time. Even with these arbitrary pauses the present invention(s) permits the viewer to watch the entire game, no matter when and how many viewing pauses are taken."

Brightcove's Allaire says IPTV will "rewrite" TV biz
Networking Pipeline - December 14, 2005
"I'm not just talking about moving video over IP… I'm talking about a wholesale rewriting of the television business," said Alliare, claiming that the Internet's open distribution models and advancing search and advertising technologies will soon bring about an explosion of content providers from all walks of life, whose emergence may spell the beginning of the end of the current high-cost method of producing so-called "broadcast quality" programming.

The Best Of 2005
BusinessWeek - December 14, 2005
"Wow, what a year! In 2005 the business world moved to the music of innovation. There were more revolutionary changes in more markets sparked by more breakthrough ideas than at any time since, well, the golden '90s. Admit it: Despite being overworked and dog-tired, you had fun. This year we saw Google and Yahoo! change the paradigm in search, classifieds, publishing, e-commerce, telecom, and video. We watched with awe as Apple blew apart entire distribution networks of established broadcasting and movie empires. We marveled as MySpace came from nowhere to commercialize the coziness of social networks (yet another invention by that key pioneering group, our own teenagers). We took notice when General Electric embraced design, ecology, and creativity as it set out to build a new corporate culture -- and generate big profits."

The Road Ahead—And Who's Driving
webpronews.com - December 12, 2005
"There are so many metaphors to describe the future of the Internet. It's a beehive--busy, varied, distracted, and catacombed. It's a world within a world, a microcosm, a virtual political/social/you-name-it mirror of the world outside, with good and bad neighborhoods, with utopian egalitarian potential that may never be fully reached."

Could This Woman Drive Broadband Television?
TVPredictions.com - December 12, 2005
"Amanda Congdon, an attractive 24-year-old woman who lives in New York, is the star of a new 3-minute mock newscast featured on Rocketboom, a video blogging site. The video broadcast features her comments on daily Internet trends and occasionally politics, which may not sound new nor particularly entertaining."

Cable's à la Carte About-face
Red Herring - December 12, 2005
"The cable industry’s tough stance against à la carte pricing is crumbling rapidly as more operators say they will support a version of à la carte pricing for families concerned about their children’s access to adult programming."

Prime time for CNN.com premium video?
CNet - December 12, 2005
"On Thursday night, Pipeline offered video streams from CNN International, a memorial service for slain Beatle John Lennon in Central Park, the House of Representatives and a traffic cam on a snowy Chicago night. That last pipe turned out to be prescient an hour later, when news broke out from Chicago's Midway Airport when a Southwest Airlines jet slid off a runway. The third stream became video live from the scene at WFLD-TV."

BT joins battle against Skype
Computer Business Review - December 12, 2005
"BT Group Plc, the former UK telecoms incumbent, has announced its own plans to take on Skype Technologies SA, with the news that it plans to undercut the VoIP pioneer with its revamped VoIP product."

Telco David Takes on Goliaths
TV Week - December 12, 2005
"The IPTV version of Discovery HD Theater delivered by Sacramento-area telephone company SureWest actually looked better than the satellite one. The picture was crisper, brighter and clearer around the edges, as judged by this reporter. The telco's engineers were pleased. After all, the delivery of video services has become a cutthroat business, with new competitors cropping up daily, threats rising from every corner of the wired world and all of the players looking to grab a slice, or even a sliver, of the potentially lucrative market for delivering entertainment services to ravenous consumers. Providers will take any edge they can get, including a slightly better HD signal."

PluggedIn:Edgy Internet TV helps writers reach mainstream
ZDNet - December 10, 2005
"Suddenly, Internet TV is hot. Networks like ABC offer hit shows through Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes download service, while established tech companies like America Online and Yahoo Inc. have beefed up their offerings of video that can be viewed via Web pages or transferred to a pocket-sized gadget."