This caught my attention, only because it’s the first time I’ve seen it: yahoo! sports is now syndicating content from youtube…

hmmm.

A little recent history: in an “if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em” move, last year yahoo! had planned to outsource a major part of its paid search results business to google, until google walked away due to antitrust concern.  Other than that short-lived attempt to do business together, though, the two companies are competitors on several fronts:  search, email, and yes, video.

Well, maybe “competitors” is too strong a word, at least in the short-form online video space – google’s youtube has of course largely marginalized all other short-form video websites out there (maybe you’ve heard).

But so much so that yahoo! sports is now linking to youtube for video content?

Two ways to look at this: on one hand, not a great sign for the yahoo! video brand – but on the other, perhaps this level of cross-syndication is healthy…

I know this is not a political blog. But Washington’s elected officials seems to have gone (finally) seriously digital. 

And I just can’t help myself but chime in.

I recently wrote about the Obama administration’s fervor for online social networking and viral (political) marketing.

Turns out US Congress representatives have long taken similar interest in making Web 2.0 their own. 

No matter where you stand politically, I believe this is generally good news for the technology industry, plus associated consumer software products and applications.

From mundane announcements of “one minute speeches” to instantaneously delivered results on House votes, at least since November 2007, the Clerk of the US House of Representatives regularly provides copious live updates “scraped” right from daily session inside the House chambers.

Then I got curious. Did I also miss the US Senate’s foray into micro-blogging? 

Sure enough, I did 

Although seemingly limited to Senator votes on the floor alone, Twitter has been carrying those posts at least since November 2007.

Turns out, they all nicely track back to govtrack.us, an independent Web site to “help the public research and track the activities in the US Congress.

Little did I know, D.C.’s interest in twittering created a new virtual C-SPAN if you will, sort of the “local access” approach parsed out one online message at a time.

And during yesterday’s historic session (voting on a trillion dollar support budget no less), US House representatives took to Twitter like college students (secretively, under their desks), pushing Blackberry and smartphone keys – eager to issue last-minute statements right from inside House chambers.

To top it all off, now even closed-door Presidential meetings experience their first Twitter “leaks”.

So, if this is not a political blog, why am I (still) writing about this stuff?

I am simply excited about how Web 2.0 is rapidly growing up, maturing from its early teenage “angst” appeal to a “mainstream” text and video channel – all within a couple of years.

Think of it.

As more politicians, news outlets and civic organizations thrive to adopt Web 2.0-style concepts, instant viral messaging from elected officials and others raise the legitimacy of collaborative software as a whole.

From Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Qik, or Utterz, you name it, this is good for the devices and the connecting broadband services that support Web 2.0 at home and on-the-go.

If you still think this trend is not real, the US Postal Service announced today a fiscal-year loss of at least $6 billion, due to a 4.5% drop, or 9 billion items replaced by email and other forms of digital viral communications. 

And although it is not entirely clear to me that the same $6 billion shifted into Web 2.0 software in its entirety  (most social networking and micro-blogging services are free or ad-based at best), it clearly shows a fundamental shift in how we capture and disseminate information these days.

On that note, have you twittered today?

I’m looking over some recent numbers from nielsen online and I’m struck by something: while hulu may indeed be a big fish, long-form internet video is still a pretty small pond.  Consider:

Of the four major broadcast networks, hulu partners Fox and NBC saw the largest month-over-month increases in October 2008:  Fox was up 165%, while NBC (helped by Tina Fey’s triumphant if temporary return to SNL as America’s favorite eye-winking, Russia-seeing hockey mom) saw a whopping 312% increase (by contrast, ABC was up 105% and internet video laggard CBS was only up 38%.)

312 % and 165 % increases over the course of one month? Let’s celebrate – professionally produced long-form video has finally come into its own, right?

Wrong.

From that same Nielsen report, here’s another statistic: during October, YouTube had almost 82 million unique visitors to hulu’s 6.3 million – that’s a factor of fifteen (even with Tina Fey’s Palin sketches driving users to hulu).

A direct comparison between the two by total streams delivered would skew unfairly towards YouTube due to the shorter running time of the average user-generated video – but what the heck, let’s do it anyway, just for fun…  because the difference between those Nielsen numbers is even more stark than you might imagine: YouTube delivered almost 38 times the total number of streams delivered by hulu.

That’s thirty eight times more streams from YouTube than hulu.

Granted, hulu is one well-executed website.  Yet clearly, long-form premium video over the internet still has a long way to go.  What’s the takeaway here?  In my opinion, the answer is somewhat obvious: people don’t want to sit alone in front of their computers for a half hour or more at a time to view long-form video – in other words, the effectiveness of the personal computer as a video-viewing device is inversely proportional to the program length of the video being viewed.

The numbers in this report clearly put Hulu and YouTube in stark contrast against one another in terms of actual usage.  However, it would be a mistake to fail to take into account the fundamental differences between the short form/long-tail (user generated) and long form/short-tail (professionally produced) video viewing experiences – or the fact that we don’t have a truly compelling lean-back device for delivering long-form internet video viewing just yet.  Therefore, it would be a mistake to infer from reports such as this that internet video will remain primarily a short-form UGC medium.

For long-form premium video over the internet, it’s going to take a new generation of device that offers content directly from the couch before we can make any such comparisons.   The user interface on these devices will not be a web-browser, instead it will be simpler and optimized for lean-back media. Companies such as boxee (at left) and Yahoo/Intel are working on just such user interfaces. While I’ve already written a bit on the Yahoo initiative here, Boxee is more recent development. Right now it’s just a Windows/Mac application that aggregates disparate video sources (including Hulu) into a cohesive whole. While that’s pretty cool in itself, what makes Boxee really interesting is that the company plans to bring dedicated set-top Boxee hardware to the market within the next year or so – and in ther meantime, the software can be installed on the Apple TV device today. As I’ve said before, I think the prospect of Boxee on – well, a box – changes everything.

We shall see – but in the meantime, a quick reality check is in order: while well-suited to workplace video snacking, the computer and web browser are inappropriate (and ultimately intermediate) solutions for viewing long-form video – no matter how well-implemented a given website (such as Hulu) happens to be.

On the eve of the 2009 CES show, perhaps it’s time for a few more thoughts on what should prove to be The Big Story at this year’s show: televisions and set-top boxes with internet access baked in, for direct internet video access.

For the last few years, numerous companies in the ‘computer’ business (on either the hardware or software side) have made repeated attempts to market solutions involving the PC as viable long-form internet video delivery platforms – with little to no success. Lately, though, perhaps enough anthropologists and/or behavioral scientists have been hired to finally convince at least a few of these companies that despite all the bells and whistles, a computer might never be a television after all (as they say in the south, “you can put a brick in the oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit”).

So while certain companies might have enjoyed a substantial technological head start in internet video, through a stubborn insistence on leveraging the home computer, the opportunity was missed. But no matter: here comes the CE industry – as of Thursday in Las Vegas, it’s their market now.

Apple undertook a conscious expansion into the CE industry several years ago with the iPod (in fact, dropping ‘Computer’ from their corporate name) – is it too late for other computer-centric companies to make a similar move? 

The recent Intel/Yahoo initiative is a particularly interesting case in point.  Both companies, as Yahoo Connected TV vice president Patrick Barry poetically puts it, “emerged from the ocean of the PC”.

Intel Intel has been especially forward-thinking regarding the convergence of the home computing and consumer electronics industries for some time now, having launched the Intel Digital Home Group several years ago.  The interdisciplinary Digital Home Group, active in both processor design and standards development, is particularly close to my heart, as it’s made up of social scientists as well as computer scientists.

Yahoo We’ve been pretty hard on Yahoo lately, but they do have some heavy OEM hitters lined up to implement their embedded internet TV ‘widgets’ system: Sony, TiVo, and Samsung. Also worth noting, the Connected TV initiative intends to follow a purely advertising-supported model, and studies routinely show consumers prefer advertising to subscription fees.  Lastly, yet another issue (and one that holds true for all internet video contenders) is the remote: as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently noted, a Nintendo Wii-like pointing remote will likely be required as internet-enabled television hardware matures.

At any rate, given their recent setbacks, this could be Yahoo’s last best shot at redemption – so look for them to bet the farm (or “throw the long ball”, for you American football fans) on this one.