Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, delivered the keynote address at the NewTeeVee Conference. OVW readers know that I’ve been a Netflix fan, streaming their content onto my HDTV for a while now. And despite working in the advertising business, I’m a huge believer in the subscription model, especially when you’ve got the content to support it. I love my Netflix and Rhapsody subscriptions. Period.

Watch they keynote right here, or check out NewTeeVee’s own coverage of it here.

Taboola, a developer of personalized video discovery platforms, today launched their ViDiscovery video recommendation solution for online video publishers.

While the company has acknowledged that search has more than proven its effectiveness with textual and informational queries, it is lacking in terms of personalization and in its ability to predict the continuous video experience viewers are seeking.

ViDiscovery addresses those challenges through a recommendation solution built to match viewers with personalized video recommendations. According to the company, the technology analyzes the context and content of each video and anonymously studies the viewing patterns of users as they view videos on publishers’ websites.

Separately, the company announced a $4.5 million second round of funding led by Evergreen Venture Partners.

At the Kelsey Interactive Local Media Conference this week, ATG which powers e-commerce websites for a number of major brands including the Boston Symphony Orchestra BestBuy.com announced the addition of an online video solution, eStara Video Connect to their suite of e-commerce solutions.

Citing the need for greater ROI analysis due to shrinking ad budgets and research showing higher engagement statistics for video, ATG VP of Media Sheri Solis said “video is the best product integration out there.”

According to research from The Kelsey Group, “sfter viewing video ads, 47.3 percent of consumers reporting visiting a Web site, 19.1 percent requested information about a product or service, 18.2 percent visited a brick-and-mortar store to check out a product, and 16.9 percent made a purchase.”

ATG’s eStara solution is already used to drive website engagement - their click-to-call solution allows users to enter their phone number and be connected directly with a retail store or orther seller, and their save-and-send option enables users to receive a text message with seller contact info. The addition of video the thinking goes will add to engagement and increases the chance of a sale.

Demo Goes Here

Of course a major part of this is that the creative needs to be engaging to begin with, just offering video alone isn’t necessarily enough but as more businesses, especially local stores look online for higher ROI ways of generating sales, ATG’s eStara’s Flash based Video Connect API and Video Connect Flash container seem to offer a pretty good turnkey solution.

Ah, the blogosphere, where analysis and wild speculation go hand in hand. Remember the late 90s when analysts pumped up worthless internet stocks for brokerage firms? Now those guys have a new home. If I was one of the many recently laid-off investment professionals out there, a blog would be one of the first places I’d look for employment. Where else can you make wild unsubstantiated speculations and be read by thousands with no risk of repercussions?

The Financial Times has the early scoop on a forthcoming report from Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel who predicts that Hulu revenues will grow from $70 million this year to $180 million in 2009, about the same amount of revenue he forecasts for YouTube.

Peter Kafka follows up with Amel who says that Hulu is probably already generating a gross profit. Further, “Amel thinks YouTube is paying more for those fees than it does for infrastructure/bandwidth.” Where he comes up with this I have no idea, nor do I believe it, but we’ll need to wait for the report which may or more likely may not have real numbers to know for sure.

And leave it to Henry Blodget, while an analyst at Merrill one of the leaders of 90s irrational exuberance, now in the perfect role at Alley Insider to weigh in with his own speculation, though at least time it’s more on the side of reason.

I will admit that it’s interesting reading, I’m as curious as the next guy to know how well these Hulu and YouTube are really doing and how far they are from a profitable model, but the latest “news” on Hulu is the more in a long list of posts based on nothing.

But apparently it gets readers, so at the least blogs wildly speculating on revenue are generating revenue. Anyone care to take a stab at Insider’s share of AlleyCorp’s revenue?

Beleaguered auto manufacturer General Motors has posted a video on YouTube and on its own site, GM Facts and Fiction, to explain to the public what happens when one of the largest employers in the country goes belly up. Self serving, sure. And I doubt any of the republicans who are against giving them a handout are watching YouTube for their industry briefings, but a compelling strategy nonetheless.

For the first time, the weekly Democratic address has been released as a web video. It will also continue to air on the radio.

President-elect Obama plans to to publish these weekly updates through the Transition and then from the White House. Truly instituting his message of change, the ‘Bam-camp continues to show its mastery of new media, transitioning the weekly “radio address” into a series of Web videos.

Oddly enough, despite knowing that the videos were being posted on YouTube, I couldn’t find it through a simple search for “Your Weekly Address from the President-elect” (the title of the video), or on the Barack Obama YouTube Channel, showing that we’ve still got a long way to go in video search.

Mr. President-elect: If you happen to be reading OVW, give us a shout. We’d be happy to help you with your online video strategy. After getting more than 137,000 subscribers to your “BarackObamaDotCom” channel, and then dropping the new video on the “ChangeDotGov” channel, I’m guessing you’re going to lose a few people.

UPDATE: The video has since started turning up in the search results.

Couldn’t have been a crazier week. Some advice - being out of the office for two weeks makes coming back pretty difficult. So here’s whats sitting in my “blog about this” list.

YouTube jumps into Live Event streaming. Ok. Its video, and when YouTube does something, its basically news. They’ve got the audience and the infrastructure, but will they be taken seriously against some of the other dedicated live event streaming companies, like Mogulus or Ustream? Maybe they’ll be the de facto destination for streaming your 3 year old’s birthday party, but I’m doubtful they’ll make any seriously headway for professional live streaming. But they do have that audience. If you stream a live event and nobody watches……

ProTail Hits the Scene: Gartner has slapped a new label on a market segment that is already difficult to define, but as I told Contentinople, its a pretty good description. For the past year, we’ve been focused on where the content has lived - aka the “mid-tail” - but hadn’t quite slapped a monicker on the content itself. In my consumer electronics days, we focused on the level of equipment used to produce the content, and who was doing it. Pro-sumer. Not a handicam, not a $25k HD camera in a studio. ProTail, the content segment between professionally produced content and user-generated clips. Hmmmm…I like it.

More importantly, Gartner said there was a 600% increase in the availability of higher-quality niche content that provides advertisers a safe, targeted inventory in which they can place ads.

Michael Learmonth, now over at AdAge, breaks down YouTube’s deal with MGM, and why Hulu does’t have anything to worry about.

Instead of plopping your kid down in front of the boob-tube, now you can drop them in front of the computer. Sesame Street hits Hulu, iTunes, and (again) YouTube.

If this isn’t the All YouTube edition, I don’t know what is. But Googlevision also signed Fremantle Media, producers of American Idol, to a deal. Jeeez, they’ve been busy.

And to end on a worthwhile note, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) joined with the Ad Council to launch a national multimedia public service advertising campaign. The campaign directs veterans to the first and only community exclusive to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans through a new social networking website, www.CommunityofVeterans.org, where they can listen, share their experiences and access resources. Support our troops and stream some video.

ESPN has released its first episode of its scripted web series Mayne Street. ESPN’s John Skipper said last month that the network has 15 episodes done his “expectation is it can generate millions of viewers.”

Above: Mayne Street Episode 1: “Fixes”

As ReelPop notes it shows shades of ABC’s Sports Night.

A little more than a year ago the Department of Defense shut down military access to a number of social networking and online video sites which American soldiers had been using to communicate back with their family and friends in the U.S.

Yesterday, on Veterans Day the DoD launched TroopTube, an online video portal powered Delve Networks. The video sharing platform will be available to the approximately 4 million active duty military and reserve personnel, giving the DoD a first look at whatever content is being distributed by troops so they can centralize and censor content when necessary.

Video on TroopTube is not embeddable, so you’ll have to click here to watch General David Petraeus give a shout out to the troops.

Swamped again of late, but here’s some other content worth reading:

Save Your Career, Start a Blog: Joseph Jaffe on why now is the perfect time to start a blog.

Todou to produce Original Content: Tudou.com founder Marc Van der Chijs tells The China Perspective’s Andrew Siegfried: “Tudou is now also looking to move into own production of video content, just like HBO did in the US…We also keep on acquiring good content for our users. At this point we already have over 10,000 episodes of films and series licensed, many exclusively for Tudou.”

Startup Keystream has launched its SmartAd platform which places ads in empty spaces in video. Terry Heaton calls it “the dumbest idea in years“.

VentureBeat claims to have confirmed Alley Insider’s report that YouTube will partner with UStream. If anyone else has insight into this drop us a line.