In recent months, DVD-by-mail darling Netflix has been re-branding itself as a video-on-demand service with a strong broadband component, and judging by a recent user survey conducted by the company, they’re contemplating a push into the next-gen game console space as well. According to Reuters, Netflix is asking customers if they’re interested in streaming movies via the Xbox 360. When the news service asked if this means they’re about to jump into bed with Microsoft, a company spokesman coyly demurred, except to note a desire to distribute movies “in as many ways as possible.”

If the survey results are positive enough, I suspect it’ll end up a done deal. Regardless, the fact that Netflix is even feeling out this possibility suggests a larger takeaway: Forget about Blu-ray, think broadband streaming.

Sony was recently crowing about its triumph over Hollywood studios, which after much pressure, largely acquiesced to rejecting HD-DVD in favor of the conglomerate’s high-definition Blu-ray standard. Trouble is that for Sony, almost all of its Blu-ray install base is in the PS3, the third place next-generation console that’s struggling to compete with the 360. If the 360 adds a movie-streaming feature with the name-brand cachet of Netflix, however, it’ll be Sony that feels the pressure to add a competing service. In the ensuing struggle, Blu-ray would most likely lose its luster to the appeal of getting instant movies at a button’s touch.

Provided, of course, Netflix or a competing service keeps pushing into this space. Watch this space for more developments.

A bit like Meet the Spartans for elves and orcs, this video is the fun and slickly-produced first 10 minutes of a feature-length movie created entirely in Vivendi/Blizzard’s World of Warcraft; appropriately dubbed MMOvie, it’s a comedic pastiche of popular movie references (Titanic, Terminator, etc.) threaded into a broader storyline tracking the misadventures of three Warcraft characters.

Originally conceived as a viral video to promote a gaming social network, the production was shot on live Warcraft servers, so the filmmakers had to hire high-level players to keep other WoW gamers from wandering into camera shot. With quality video streaming from Ooyala, it’s also a showcase for all the advantages of using WoW as a machinima platform (great locations and visual effects) — along with its limitations. Due to WoW’s limited library of expressive avatar animations, for example, the sheer amount of shrugging in MMOvie is enough to drive you batty.

Now with 10 million subscribers after 3.5 years of growth, the surprise is it’s taken so long for the WoW community to produce a movie with this level of ambition.

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Forget about Lonelygirl, Tay Zonday, or any of them — as of this week, the biggest grassroots viral video star to break out into big-time mainstream TV is Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. At least that’s how I interpret the news that the X-Play show on G4, Comcast cable’s TV network for gamers, will be airing previews of Crowshaw’s Zero Punctuation video column on The Escapist game site. We profiled Croshaw a couple weeks ago, explaining how some of his crudely animated reviews on YouTube quickly became a phenomenon watched by millions of gamers.

“It’s a licensing deal,” Croshaw told me via email from his home in Australia. “G4 gives The Escapist a bag of money to license the previews (The Escapist own the publishing rights to ZP, if you recall), and The Escapist passes on half the contents of the bag to me. It’s mainly been worked out by the behind the scenes backroom types. Zero Punctuation’s reaching a wider audience and that’s cool with me.”

That last point is actually debatable: Last year, Variety reported that G4 attracts a paltry 125,000 viewers in prime time. A single Zero Punctuation episode, by contrast, attracts up to 1.15 million views, according to The Escapist’s Russ Pitts [see update below]. If anything, G4 probably needs Croshaw to reach a wider audience. In any case, he hasn’t watched G4, himself. Read more of this story

Last election cycle, a politician’s own ill-chosen words became a viral video that cost him his candidacy. This November, will a politician get undermined by an ill-conceived viral video made by his own supporters? That’s the thought I had after watching “Yes We Can“, a new YouTube video currently storming The Viral Video chart. It’s a putative tribute to Senator Barack Obama’s stirring words after the New Hampshire primary, directed by Jesse Dylan with music by will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas. (Who’s better known for his stirring words, “Whatcha gonna do with all that junk … inside your trunk?”)

The video was made without the Obama campaign’s participation or permission, according to ABC News, which is a good thing, because it’s an appalling exercise in celebrity self-congratulation, reducing the Senator’s soaring plea for optimistic unity into an opportunity for some popstars to preen in front of the camera. (While Obama’s image is shunted aside, an unidentified brunette hottie actually flips her hair; Scarlett Johansson giggles. It’s like Obama Girl without irony.)

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Earlier this year, the managers of popular MMO Gaia Online tried an experiment: they streamed George Romero’s horror classic (and public domain) Night of the Living Dead in one of Gaia’s virtual theaters, to see if anyone would watch. Within two weeks, CEO Craig Sherman told me recently, a million Gaians had shown up to see the four-decades-old, black-and-white zombie thriller. The attendance, he said, “Totally blew us away.”

Not only did Gaia learn something about the movie-viewing tastes of its 2.5 million monthly active users, most of whom are in their teens, but it suggested a new source of revenue, which goes into effect now: Gaia is partnering with both Sony and Warner Brothers to stream their content into the world, reports Variety, screening movies and TV shows for the Gaia Cash equivalent of $1.99 per viewer. (The company earns part of its revenue through virtual currency that users buy for real dollars.)

With tens of millions of people already active MMO users, and that number expected to grow to 80 percent of all active Internet users by 2011, this is a potentially revolutionary deal.

While most of the focus on Internet-driven video has been on the technical and business aspects, watching movies and television are ideally a social experience — the challenge is how to recapture the magic of sitting on a couch with friends and family for users who are actually sitting alone at a desk in front of a computer monitor.

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