We recently got a preview of an upcoming product called Vidrollr meant to help TV shows and other brands connect with their fans. Vidrollr comes in the form of a widget or ad unit and enables users to upload short clips from their webcams. The idea — in the vein of recent TV social media experiments like Fox’s “Tweetpeats” — is none too complicated. Cast members and writers post videos to start conversations or solicit feedback from fans. Fans respond with videos of their own. Since the entire thing is packaged as a widget, fans can also embed the conversation on their own blogs and social network pages.

Vidrollr is made by the folks at Invoke Media, a Vancouver, Canada-based interactive agency that also makes HootSuite, a corporate Twitter manager. Invoke is being shy about making screenshots public, but I thought the idea was worth mentioning. Vidroller will roll out as a revenue share with content partners — video game portals, dating sites and non-profits are other potential clients in addition to TV networks — so we’ll keep you updated if deals get signed. Invoke said it thinks it can launch with its first partner in the next month, but we’ll have to see.

Vidrollr isn’t a giant leap forward, but rather a video twist on text chat widgets such as Meebo Me. It seems most similar to Seesmic, which originally launched similar video conversation functionality as a standalone site but ended up finding a more interesting business in social web product aggregation. However, the broad space of “social TV” is a tricky one, as we’ve been learning lately, and it may just have been that Seesmic didn’t have the right combo of interface, content or social connections.

Invoke partner Dario Meli told us he thinks Vidrollr has the right approach because it has a nice threaded interface with a thumbnail trail of all the videos, it offers moderation tools should its partners want to implement them, and it’s pretty and simple. We have to imagine parsing through video conversations will still take some work on the part of users — but if the right content partner comes on board, fans will put up with just about anything.

You know the viral “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years“? Well, what if Noah took a 4-second video of himself instead? And what if everyone else did, too? That’s kind of the effect you get from the new Robo.to TV service, a derivation of a product from Particle, a San Francisco-based web product shop.

Robo.to’s main function is simple — a place to post clips that are sort of a webcam status message, with no sound and a time limit of 4 seconds. You can use the GIF-like autoplaying video Robo.to creates for you as a sort of avatar that displays your most recent mood or location — or that’s the idea anyway, as compared with Seesmic (which doesn’t really do video anymore) or 12seconds, which use video clips more conversationally.

The new Robo.to TV mode stitches updates together, either as a selection of members or sorted by metadata. (Check out the #everyone example video embedded above.) I’m not really sure if Robo.to TV is an art project or a product, and Particle co-founder and CTO Aubrey Anderson said that’s yet to be determined by seeing how people use it. So far, Robo.to itself is proving to be rather popular — in part because investor Justin Timberlake is already a built-in celebrity spokesman. Particle CEO Rey Flemings said Robo.to has had 20,000 active users, 100,000 videos, and 375,000 visitors in the last month, and it only launched in May.

We haven’t written about Seesmic on NewTeeVee in a long time, and it sounds like this may well be the last time. The company is deemphasizing — though at this point not removing — its video conversation service in favor of supporting its social aggregation tool, Seesmic Desktop, and associated products. CenterNetworks had the news this morning after noticing that video was pushed way down to the bottom of Seesmic’s site in a redesign.

Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur posted a video on his site (at least he still uses the service!) saying that the video community was not growing and he needed to direct his company towards something more promising. He asserted that competitors like 12seconds are not seeing growth, either. It can only be a matter of time before San Francisco-based Seesmic shuts down video entirely.

Seesmic’s video service enabled users to post public threaded asynchronous video comments on its own site and in the comments sections of participating sites. At times the company had experimented with producing original shows and hosting chat sessions with famous people, but those petered out. We can’t think of a video service offering an exact alternative with the same global and public emphases, but quick-upload video from phones and webcams is definitely growing on larger sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Seesmic had raised significant funding — $12 million — but has also made multiple rounds of layoffs.

The new year doesn’t promise to bring much in the way of good tidings for most startups, much less those with the shaky business models found in digital media. But, at the same time, online video consumption is a strengthening reality that won’t be suppressed by tough economic times. So, if you’re involved in a video venture looking out at the spread for 2009, where do you stand?

First of all, let’s talk about where things ended up last year. The big news items for video startups (and young, internal ventures at big companies) in 2008 were acquisitions, layoffs and shut-downs — and of course fundings. Many of the companies we cover raised funding last year, though the pace of new investments slowed along with the economy. (As for including a category for IPOs…yeah right.) To recap some of the highlights (and lowlights):

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PermissionTV, a provider of white-label video sites that says it differentiates its service from its many competitors by making its platform more open, has let go of six employees from operations, sales and marketing. The company has replaced three of the salespeople, for a net loss of three people.

We initially looked into the layoffs under the assumption that they were related to increased pressures due to poor economic conditions, something that’s affected many tech startups in the last couple weeks, including Seesmic and Heavy in the video space. However, a PermissionTV spokesperson described the shift as “performance-based” and a called it part of a changing of the guard under new SVP of sales and business development Jim Alla.