This past Thursday, Viddler launched an advertising system that lets companies and individuals overlay advertisements at variously tagged points within the videos it hosts. The system is very similar to Google Adwords, except advertisements are within videos instead of search results, and advertisers sponsor tags instead of search terms.

Viddler’s embeddable player has always been unique in providing content producers and viewers with the ability to place comments and tags at various points within a video. If something is funny at the 1:39 mark, you can submit the comment “lol” and it will show up as a discreet overlay at that particular time during playback. Similarly, you can tag a video during playback with “bicycle” at a point where there’s someone riding a bike. As with other video services, you can also submit tags that describe videos as a whole, rather than just particular points within a video.

While CEO Robert Sandie says that these metadata features were not developed with monetization in mind, Viddler now provides a way for advertisers to run campaigns that take advantage of both global and timed tags (the former being tags that describe videos as a whole, and the latter being tags that describe points within a video). Anyone can advertise through this system by participating in a bidding process akin to Google Adwords. Viddler has also partnered up with Amazon, and is talking with the likes of Buy.com and Shopping.com, to serve up ads for products sold by those online retailers.

The bidding process involves the choice of particular keywords through which you want to advertise. It also involves the highest CPC (cost per click) that you are willing to pay for each keyword. If you are willing to pay more per click than anyone else who wants a particular keyword, you practically own that keyword, and your advertisement will show up as an overlay in any video hosted by Viddler that has been tagged with it. This will remain the case until someone else outbids your maximum bid threshold. Viddler will email you if this happens so you can up the ante if desired. As for Amazon, its advertisements will automatically show up as overlays for tags that have not already been claimed by bidders.

A note on so-called global tags: while the placement of advertisements for timed tags naturally occur at their respective spots during playback, advertisements for global tags show up 1/4 the way through videos. They are also represented as green dots in the timeline, whereas advertisements for timed tags appear black (and regular comments show up white).

Viddler has decided to split revenues 50/50 with content producers, and it has given them a good deal of flexibility regarding the service as well. Producers can opt out of the advertising system completely or sign up for multiple levels of deployment. For example, you can deem that only advertisements from bidders can be displayed, and only through timed tags that you as a producer have created. Or you can allow Amazon to advertise as well, and through tags that your viewers create in addition to your own. For bidders’ advertisements, you will only receive money when your viewers actually click on them (not just view them); and for Amazon’s ads, you’ll only receive money when your viewers actually end up buying something from them.

If you currently publish videos on Viddler, you can set up advertisements by first going to the “Revenue” section and clicking “Enable Revenue Share”. You’ll then have to provide a PayPal account email address and/or an Amazon Affiliate ID to get paid. From this revenue section, you can also manage the tags on your videos and track how many impressions and clicks you’ve experienced for each. You can also set the advertising preferences that will apply to all of your videos (per video settings are not yet available). Advertisers who want to bid on keywords can do so here.

Viddler’s new advertising system can be compared to Google’s Adsense for Video, which has yet to be rolled out fully on YouTube, or any other video sharing service for that matter. As you can see on YouTube’s advertising page, Google plans to deploy animated flash overlays and run video commercials once those overlays are clicked on.

Below is a demonstration video by iJustine for Viddler’s new ad service:

Time for another roundup, and this one coincides with a notable first-year anniversary: that of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, confirmed on October 9th, 2006.

Since then, the name “YouTube” has become virtually synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month. Second-place Yahoo Video trails with 48,026,000 visitors. But must YouTube remain the clear winner in the online video space? While they have certainly captured the largest audience – which may in the end be all they had needed to do to secure their position – we shouldn’t underestimate the many other companies vying for mindshare.

Even if YouTube remains the destination of choice for the vast majority of consumers, producers ought to take a serious look at the alternative services. They often support more file types, bigger uploads, and higher resolutions. They also place fewer restrictions and provide an array of features simply overlooked by YouTube. That said, a few of these services are mere YouTube clones and hope to follow in YouTube’s footsteps by providing very basic features.

These are the services we looked at: blip.tv, Brightcove.tv, ClipShack, Crackle, DailyMotion, Sony eyeVio, Google Video, Megavideo, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Spike (ifilm), Stage6, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.

Since they are all about 80% the same, I’m not going to go through each of them one-by-one at length. However, there are some overall trends that ought to be pointed out, as well as some key differentiators. To get into the details as to how all of these websites differ, check out the comparison chart we’ve provided above. You’ll notice that there are some gaps, so please email me if you can help us fill in the holes.

First of all, only YouTube, DailyMotion, and Metacafe appear to place any hard restrictions on video length. With the rest, video lengths are determined indirectly by file size restrictions. While YouTube and several of these sites place the file size cap at 100mb per upload, others place it higher at 250mb, 500mb, or 2000mb. Veoh places no limitations on file size, but they recommend you use their desktop player for files over 100mb. If you’re willing to fork over some cash for a premium membership, Brightcove.tv and Motionbox will also let you upload files of any size.

While YouTube allows users to upload files only formatted as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG, other services accept a much greater range of file types. If you want to make your life easier, however, get into the habit of encoding in .MOV (Quicktime) and you’ll be welcome at almost all of these sites.

When it comes to video quality/resolution, it’s not perfectly clear how these services compare, because most of them don’t state their video bit rates or explain their transcoding processes. However, several of them clearly blow YouTube out of the water. Stage6, a DivX-based service, and Sony’s eyeVio, a Japanese-only service, support the most stunning video quality. Videos hosted by Veoh and Crackle also look very sharp.

Out of all these alternative services, blip.tv stands out as the most professional video sharing solution. The website and player are cleanly designed, they accept perhaps the widest range of file formats, they will automatically syndicate your videos to many other websites, and you can choose to place midroll, postroll, adjacent, and overlay advertisements in your uploads. Additionally, you can track your shows’ statistics quite closely and allow users to download your videos. I could go on and on about blip.tv’s useful features. The only major bummer with blip.tv is that you can’t seek ahead to points in a video using their Flash player.

It’s no surprise that shows like Rocketboom have decided to migrate over to blip.tv. We even decided to use them for our TechCrunch40 conference. And PC World agrees with us that blip.tv tops them all.

While we have a strong preference for blip.tv, the others have their own peculiarities that may make them more attractive to you. ClipShack, while mostly a YouTube clone, has an area where you can use a webcam to add movie, book, video game, and TV show reviews directly to the site. Crackle serves as a talent discovery system through which amateur producers can win a chance to pitch ideas to Sony and other media executives.

Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Megavideo support a wide range of languages. Sony eyeVio, which unfortunately doesn’t plan to roll out an English version, enables users to download videos straight to their PSPs, Walkmans, iPods, and mobile phones. Metacafe and Megavideo both have programs with which they pay content creators according to how many people view their videos. Motionbox, the most private of the services, has a video player with a unique filmstrip that can be used to visually locate segments in a video (they also provide a simple online video editor).

Revver provides a WordPress plugin so that video bloggers can upload and manage their content more efficiently. Veoh lets you both upload videos to other sharing sites and watch videos from all over the Web in its download client. Vimeo sports the best-designed website and a strong community feel. And Viddler’s player packs in a bunch of features, including the ability to leave comments in videos at particular points.

Since embeddable video players are the faces of these services, we have placed screenshots of them below (click to enlarge). We are also in the process of uploading a sample video to each of these websites so you can compare their video qualities. Links to these videos can be found in the comparison chart.

The popularity of rich media publishing (such as podcasting and videocasting, the YouTube phenomenon, etc.) is a problem for search engines and people trying to use search engines to find this content. The problem is that the traditional ways search engines index and rank content don’t apply to rich media because, well, it’s not easily indexable.

A few startups are focusing on creating transcriptions of podcasts and video content (see Pluggd and Podzinger, for example), which search engines can then index.

And many people are tagging audio, video and photo content. YouTube, Flickr and others allow this (and see Google’s efforts to tag photos using humans). Tags help describe the content and are usable by search engines as well as humans. But highest level tags, when they are present, don’t capture all of the content, so a lot is missed.

Figuring out how to search the meta data around rich content (tags and lots of other descriptive data) is big business. Truveo, a video search startup that launched in 2005 and was subsequently acquired by AOL for at least $50 million, helped solve this problem (but still falls woefully short of perfect). A new unlaunched startup, CastTV, takes rich media searching another few steps forward (much more on them in a later post). But even these new search companies can’t find all of the content in a video or audio file, and certainly can’t take you right to where that content is presented.

That’s why I like the idea of deep tagging. It requires human labor but for many publishers it’s worth it. Instead of simply being associated with a file, a deep tag is associated with a clip from the file. Click on the tag and jump right to that part of the clip.

We’ve covered a few companies that are facilitating deep tagging, such as MotionBox, JumpCut (acquired by Yahoo last week), Viddler and Click.tv. Also, Google recently added a captioning feature to video, as well as the ability to permanently link to any time spot in a clip.

Veotag is doing this as well (we haven’t covered them yet but a few commenters have pointed them out in the past). Today I received an email from Howard Seibel, Veotag’s VP Marketing. He pointed me to this page which is a better version of a TalkCrunch podcast I recorded last week with Om Malik and Robert Scoble. He’s added deep tagging, so listeners can jump right to certain parts of the show.

I like the fact that I can embed the Veotag player right into the TalkCrunch website, and people who listen to the podcast on the site can utilize the deep tags (right now we have a simple Flash player). I’m having our trusty analyst Nick Gonzalez look into integrating Veotag into TalkCrunch sometime soon. If you know of other startups addressing deep tagging, please let us know.

I just got a sneak peek at a video sharing site due to launch in September, called Viddler. The company has focused on making the video publishing experience compelling and enabling discussion, tagging and sharing tied to particular moments in time. It’s a good looking system with smart features and a viable business model.

Company lead Robert Sandie lives today in Bethlehem, PA but has a background managing Adobe flash servers for enterprise clients. The distributed team is made up of designers Andrew Smith and Chris Tingom in Arizona and developers Lukasz Hankus and Kasper Cecek in Poland. The vision for the product is deeply inspired by Flickr and it shows. The business model, for one thing, will be driven not by pageviews and advertising but by subscription for premium features. I think that’s smart. The premium features will be announced later, but they look good.

The keystone feature here is the ability to add tags and comments tied to particular points in a video. Those tags are then searchable, so if I want to find the particular point in one of my videos that I tagged “touchdown,” that’s easy to do. I can also have a conversation with other users regarding a particular moment in a video and choose to embed the video on another site in it’s entirety or only from a particular point I select. While users can link to particular points in a Google Video as of last month, that’s easier and is just the beginning in Viddler.

Multiple videos can be uploaded at once and upload doesn’t pause your work in the interface. Videos are served as streaming files, so they can’t be downloaded and will thus be preserved from copyright violation.

Different services are trying different things to really harness the dialogue that video sharing makes possible; I think that Viddler’s focus on time specific interaction could prove both easy and enjoyable for a wide variety of video publishers and viewers. The interface is appealing and if the forthcoming premium features are as well put together as the preview of the basic service I saw today – Viddler’s future could look good.

Online video sharing is obviously a very crowded space, but I think there is plenty of room and time for new players to establish themselves. While Viddler isn’t about downloading video, the fact that Pew estimated last year that only a quarter of US internet users were downloading music or video indicates to me that very few are uploading video yet and the market has lots of room to grow. See also our review of many players in the market last December (”Comparing the Flickrs of Video“). There really are a lot of video services launching, but surely there’s room for more than a handful to come up with a winning strategy.

Viddler will launch in September but you can visit their site and sign up for notification of the launch today.