Daredevil Evel Knievel has died at the age of 69 and the web is remembering him through online video. Many of his stunts decades old have gone viral.

Above: Evel Knievel Jumps 11 Mack Trucks

Above: Evel Knievel Jumps 50 Stacked Cars

Above: Evil Knievel Jumps Snake River Canyon

Above: Evil Knievel at Ceasar’s Palace

Above: Evil Knievel Jumps Buses, Crashes

Maybe its all the talk about product and brand integration in the online advertising space that made this scene of ‘30 Rock’ make me laugh a little harder than normal. Maybe it was just funnier in general. But the Verizon Wireless integration into last week’s episode (which I watched on DVR but could have watched the whole episode on Hulu) made me think about product integration and how it will ultimately work online.

Nothing new here, of course. Mike Myers lampooned product integration in movies in his Austin Powers movies 10 years ago.

Not a day goes by where I haven’t been asked about product integration lately. But as we consider issues like shifting ad dollars from television into online, do we need to worry about ad agencies having to compete with real talent agencies like William Morris as well? They’ve got a digital department too. Who leads the strategy here? Are media planners working hand in hand with talent agents, or is this the next “silo” to be broken down? Who is better equipped to handle these online dollars? Advertising agencies or our Hollywood power lunching counterparts?

But I digress. Maybe Tina Fey and the writers of 30 Rock just have a knack for phone jokes. They had their fingers on the pulse of mobile phone content development last season. Weren’t you thinking about your mobile video ad strategy when this episode ran?

By the way, I made my own clips. I didn’t want to make readers click away to watch the full 1:30 minute clip on NBC’s site, and Hulu’s video trimming functionality sucks. Please don’t sue me. Seems like fair use to me, but I guess we’ll find out.

Just in case, though, here’s my Hulu version. Which, by the way, plays the whole episode after you see the :20 second long clip that I wanted you to see.

The NFL wised up on Thursday night, offering the Packers Cowboys game on NFL Network live to fans. The league announced last night that live online coverage will be offered for all NFL network games this season.

Unfortunately, while they offered the first three quarters nearly in their entirety, they provided extremely limited live coverage of the fourth quarter.

Dion Sanders and Marshall Faulk chatted live with fans while 30-second mid-roll ads urged fans to visit iwantnflnetwork.com and to complain to their cable operators. As we noted yesterday, it seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Well, that was OK I guess. To be honest I didn’t make it through the whole thing, but was back to see the gay general make his awkward speech at the end after they turned his mic back on after cutting it off the first time.

Standard talking points were pretty much the name of the game, whether or not they answered the questions asked. From what I saw the selections were more stale than in the democratic debate, or it could just be that the novelty has worn off.

Some highlights of the chosen:

Above: Should Vice-President Dick Cheney have so much power?

Above: A gay Brigadier General asks a question

Above: The Obligatory National Debt Question

And the not chosen (someone give this snowman a development deal):

Above: A Snowman’s Question for Mitt “the Flip” Romney

And the Snowman Unmasked

A step aside from online video to point out a post on Barrons Tech Trader Daily about a company I worked for a while back, bidz.com.

A negative report this week from Citron Research has sparked a steep selloff in bidz.com stock after pointing to irregular bidding activity and a major shareholder and supplier convicted in the 80s for fencing stolen jewelry.

Bidz today went back on the offensive, threatening legal action on a day when the Citron website has experienced Denial of Service attacks

In case you’ve ever considered buying from Bidz, consider these tales from my time there: the “$1 no reserve” claim they flaunt has always been a joke.

When items were sold below a certain price they would error out in the system preventing the sale. Customer service was instructed to tell users the merchandise was damaged or oversold.

There were countless complaints that a piece of jewelry a customer purchased appeared used, had an engraving, or came with a photocopied or otherwise altered certificate of authenticity.

I never myself saw shill bidding, but I did see a number of user accounts with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise purchased at prices way above what a reasonable person would pay for them.

If you buy from bidz, or own stock, good luck. Frankly I’m amazed none of this came out sooner, I never thought the company would be around this long.

The Republicans face off tonight in another CNN/YouTube debate. 4,927 questions have been submitted for the eight candidates, more than double the submissions for the CNN/YouTube democratic debate.

James Kotecki has been chosen by YouTube to curate the debate homepage, and has selected some of the most worth watching user-generated political videos (above). The questions, as they were last time are pretty good.

Meanwhile, the debate over CNN’s right to select questions rages on, as do Ron Paul nuts supporters. Giuliani has emerged as the Republican front runner with 29%-33% support depending on where you look. Regardless of your politics it should be interesting.

The low rumble of angry fans who won’t be able to watch this week’s Packers Cowboys football game will be a roar by game time Thursday. Tens of thousands of football fans will pack local bars and living rooms of friends with DirectTV to watch the game on NFL Network.

All season long the NFL has e-mail blasted fans in attempts to pressure cable operators into offering the channel, and to do so as part of their basic package. More recently the league has stepped up the propaganda war, with a website (iwantnflnetwork.com) encouraging cable subscribers to cancel their service altogether.

In the four years since NFL Network launched it has reached agreements with a handful of cable small operators, it is now in 35 million homes, most of those DirectTV households but the largest MSOs, Time Warner, Comcast and Cablevision have held out.

It isn’t easy launching a cable network, MSOs have tremendous power creating very high barriers to entry. Time Warner knows fans will pay for a premium tier to get NFL Network. They’re not willing to up their basic rates by the $.50-$.75 per subscriber the league wants, nor are they going to add the channel, keep the price steady and take a loss.

Add these pressures to the cost and scale of putting together a 24-hour network in one of the most competitive areas of television and it’s easy to see why MLB and the NHL have stayed away from getting into linear cable biz. Exclusive content will only get you so far, and ESPN already does it so well.

Unless you have the leverage of another successful network or content so desirable that it is inconceivable that people would not get it (and short of a new genre of content that’s hard to see happening) there is very little reason to start a basic cable channel anymore.

Online video has become the new basic cable, offering an outlet to deliver content to a mass audience at a fraction of the cost of a linear network. Cable subscribers who wish to watch Thursday’s game will pay for a higher tier to watch it, and cable operators are happy to wait until the NFL figures this out.

I almost feel bad mentioning this after Yahoo! Video’s precipitous drop in traffic over the past month, but New York online video mainstay Kirby Ferguson’s Goody Bag TV is featured on the front page, check it out:

Yahoo! Video visits fell 27.5% from September to October, reports the Compete blog, ouch. But Yahoo!’s audience is pretty loyal, unique visits were steady, and the word on the street is they’re planning yet another relaunch of their video product.

MSN meanwhile was loving October, with 25.3% visitor growth.

Sports Business Daily announced the results of their third annual reader survey yesterday with some interesting stats.

The most surprising to me: nearly 80% of respondents think YouTube and Google are good for sports properties and networks.

YouTube: Friend or foe for networks and sports properties:
Friend: 79.9%
Foe: 20.1%
Responses 2,071

Digital partner you’d most like to have:
YouTube/Google 52.0%
Facebook 11.2%
MLB Advanced Media 10.8%
Yahoo! 10.6%
Myspace/Fox Interactive Media 9.6%
Responses 2,046

Contrast the YouTube finding with the fact that the top two league websites in the survey, MLB.com and NFL.com have arguably been the most restrictive of their online content.

League/property with the best overall digital strategy:
MLB 34%
NFL 20.4.%
NBA 7.8%
NASCAR 7.4%
NHL 6.9%
Responses 1,973

Favorite league web site:
MLB.com 32.1%
NFL.com 23.4%
NBA.com 8.4%
NHL.com 8.3%
MLSnet.com 6.7%
NASCAR.com 6.2%
PGATour.com 5.8%
Responses 2,060

By keeping the majority of online video on their sites and syndicating it to a very select list of partners MLB and the NFL have been recognized as the leagues with far and away the best digital strategies.

Sports executives clearly see value in increased consumer engagement through video sharing and social networks. The question remains how to effectively increase audience interaction without sacrificing too much control over valuable content.