Edmonton-based Smibs today at the TechCrunch Real-time CrunchUp released a set of tools to package webcasts called VideoLobby. The service integrates Twitter and Facebook chatter, as well as a form to ask questions of a host that’s powered by a backend comment moderation system. Today, anyone who wants to produce a live show can sign up to host it on VideoLobby for free.

Instead of competing with the myriad live-streaming vendors in the world, VideoLobby builds on top of them, allowing a publisher to use live video powered by Qik, Justin.tv, Ustream and Stickam’s StreamAPI and format each stream as an episode of a show. The service seems somewhat superfluous, given those companies already integrate comments and social media themselves.

DirecTV and EchoStar Get New CEOs; Michael Dugan to come out of retirement to run EchoStar, while Michael White is leaving Pepsi to head up DirecTV. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Spot Runner Intros a Web Platform; company says the Malibu Media Platform helps to algorithmically match ad buyers and sellers. (MediaWeek)

Report: Vivendi Wants More Cash from GE; company wants a bigger portion in cash for its 20 percent stake in NBC in regards to the Comcast deal. (Bloomberg)

Lawyers Launch Class-Action Redbox Site; RedboxLateFees.com let’s people figure out if they are eligible to join the lawsuit. (Video Business)

GlideTV Intros On-Screen Keyboard App for Macs; the GlideTV OSK links the living room to popular application and web sites when used with the GlideTV Navigator. (GlideTV)

CoolIris Now on TV.com; TV portal now using the 3-D visual interface in its “Shows” section. (TechCrunch)

Which HD TV is Right for You? HDGuru provides a walk-through when picking a new set. (HDGuru)

Notional, IAC’s new video production company headed by former CollegeHumor-er, Ricky Van Veen, introduced its initial lineup of programming yesterday (via Variety). In addition to the shows Chopped and Don’t Sweat It, which are already on-air and were inherited when Notional absorbed the City Lights TV crew; Notional is also working on:

-Ready, Set, Dance: people who post dance moves online are forced to dance on the spot for a cash prize.

-You vs. America: a web-based game show.

-Chase the Money: reality game show combing pratfalls and tag.

-Love Taxi: a dating show that takes place in a cab.

Looks like Notional is sticking true to its promise of bridging the TV and Internet worlds with this mix of online and on-air concepts, though the ideas seem decidedly low-budge and low-brow. Probably why they called the company Notional and not “Innovational” (bah-dum-bum). Notional is also looking to partner with Ben Silverman’s branded entertainment company (and IAC sibling), Electus.

Pardon the dated reference, but EveryZing is the P. Diddy of the online video world, as the company announced today that it is changing its name to RAMP. The company was originally known as Podzinger, but changed its moniker to EveryZing, and then must have realized what a horrible, horrible name that was and changed it to RAMP today to align itself with its RAMP content optimization product.

RAMP was initially spun out of military research firm BBN Technologies as a speech-to-text podcast search engine. The company has since expanded its product to enable media publishers to make content discoverable and optimized through parsing of data from video, text, audio and images.

RAMP (the company) has raised $22 million in funding from investors like NBC, which is also a customer. Other clients include FOX properties FOXNews.com, FOXBusiness.com and FOXSports.com.

Lately we’ve checked out sites such as Clicker, Yidio and SetJam, and that’s only the video aggregators that have launched or sent us previews in the last week. But perhaps their pretty interfaces, organized channels and personalized recommendation systems turn you off. Maybe all you want is a simple database query of what movies are available online and how much they cost.

Enter Movie Monitor, a New York-based startup which just launched. Search for movies by title or genre, and you get a simple list of links to where they’re available to stream or download on Amazon On Demand, Blockbuster, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, and Vudu. The company says YouTube is coming; I also wouldn’t mind if it indexed libraries from sites and devices like EpixHD and ZillionTV, even if they’re a little harder to access (though not if you use one of the trials Epix gave our readers). But then, this is a no-frills service, and that’s the charm.

Yidio, an 18-month-old startup that has acquired 4 million unique visitors and 32 million page views per month through word-of-mouth, is making a splash today at our NewTeeVee Live conference with the announcement it’s raised an angel round. The company aggregates premium web content to help viewers find TV shows and movies online. Clearly a lot of people are feeling a need to find an clean and well-organized place for web video so strong they want to create companies around it; Clicker is also launching today at our conference.

The funding, which was led by Appolicious’ Alan Warms, was “in the 500,000 range,” he said. Yidio founder Adam Eatros said the key to the site’s early success has been its self-explanatory episode guides. The company sees itself as a search engine, so it doesn’t shut out unauthorized content, which has probably helped with its traffic as well. After a recent refresh for the site, next up is introducing a discovery engine that uses collaborative filtering to make recommendations, said Eatros.

Clicker, a young company we’ve already written about a few times, is launching to the public today only a couple months after it started giving out beta invites. CEO Jim Lanzone is planning to take the lid off the site later this morning at our NewTeeVee Live conference.

Clicker is shaping up to become a significant brand in web TV, with the promise that it will shepherd and expose people to content they want to watch and help them organize it into a familiar playlist format. The site is building a massive index of video content available online: 400,000 episodes from more than 1,2000 sources, including online originals, and more than 30,000 from Netflix and Amazon. During the beta period, it added features like Facebook Connect logins, better recommendations and user comments. Clicker has a number of competitors, including giants like TV Guide and also a bunch of startups like SetJam, Yidio and CastTV. It has raised $8 million from Redpoint Ventures and Benchmark Capital and recently added Sling founder Blake Krikorian to its board and investor list.

AdWeek today, in a story about digital distribution, mentions the existence of a startup called Digiboo, a new (but oh so cute!) name for us. Looks like Google is largely unaware of Digiboo, bringing up only this weird landing page, though LinkedIn tracks down a CEO, COO, product manager, CMO, head of operations.

AdWeek describes the company as a Redbox competitor; it wants to put touch-screen kiosks in airports and other venues for users to plug in flash drives and to download movies and other content. Another competitor is MOD Systems, which is backed by Toshiba and NCR and moves around content using SD cards.

Digiboo thinks it’s a good alternative to digital downloads because content being stored in each kiosk makes transmissions almost instantaneous. CEO Richard Cohen says “Digiboo’s technology has taken portability and convenience to another level entirely. We think this is exactly what the consumer wants and exactly what’s been missing from other models.” Well yeah, but you have to be in the vicinity of a kiosk first!

The company is apparently angel-funded, and aiming for a nationwide rollout. It will be interesting to see what kind of deals and pricing it can get considering how divisive Redbox’s success has been with dollar-a-night rentals. If you know more or are affiliated with Digiboo, drop us a note.

We wrote earlier this week about the fact that NBC is planning to require would-be Vancouver Olympics watchers to authenticate in the U.S. Once users have proved they are paying TV customers in good standing, they’ll also have to download the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight if they don’t have it already. But once you get past the setup, the 2009 Olympics is going to be a state-of-the-art high quality video experience, and you know the content won’t be too shabby either.

Today, the U.S. Olympic video tech team is being formally named (though we’ve written quite a bit about some of their participation already). Here’s the full roster:

iStreamPlanet is taking the live video feeds from NBC in New York and feeding them through the stream preparation process. Inlet Technologies‘ Spinnaker will encode each stream into six different bitrates for Microsoft’s IIS Live Smooth Streaming and send them to Microsoft’s Windows Servers. Akamai will deliver and cache the content around its network. Viewers will tune into a version of the Silverlight player customized by Vertigo, which brings in a data feed from Deltatre for play-by-play and stats. Conviva contributes monitoring software to immediately report any issues with the streams to NBC and Microsoft.

While Akamai and Microsoft are established giants, that’s mostly a list of startups, which seems fitting given the Olympic spirit of amateur competition. From what we’ve seen, these companies are the best of the best in live streaming.

What does that mean for viewers? In addition to a more stable platform, higher quality video (full 720p) and a better experience provided by adaptive bitrate streaming that adjusts to fluctuating bandwidth conditions, streaming improvements over the last Olympic Games in Beijing include features such as fast-forward, rewind and slow motion capabilities and the ability to jump to key moments within an (on-demand) stream. There will be 23 different video feeds: nine venue feeds, four broadcast feeds, one Olympic News Channel, six “Beauty Cams,” two victory ceremonies and one press conference.

Motionbox announced today that it is making its video hosting service available as a commercial product called Motionbox Pro for customers such as real estate agents and outlets such as Gawker Media and Reuters (who have both already signed on as customers).

Motionbox powers personal video uploads for Shutterfly and AOL, so it’s got the ease-of-use thing down. What the company offers commercial users is a simple way to upload and show HD video in an unbranded player. It’s easy enough for non-technical users but still looks professional.

The product is pretty darn cheap, with a $50 setup fee then $25 per user per month with 25 GB storage and 25 GB streaming. New York City-based Motionbox says it’s still focused on the consumer business (for which it also charges some users), but with at least 60 customers already using Motionbox commercially it decided to formalize a professional product.

Here are examples of Gawker and Reuters videos in Motionbox players. Like we whined about yesterday, Gawker is being lame and choosing to use a Motionbox Pro feature that disables embeds, so you’ll have to click through for that one.

Motionbox, which has raised $17.2 million, recently acquired Viddyou, another personal video-sharing startup.

Cookie Jar Entertainment Launching Hulu for Kids Site; Jaroo.com will kick off with 50 TV series digitize a library of 6,000 episodes. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Blinkx Issues Shares Worth $8.1 Million; company turns to stock market after losses associated with infrastructure deployment grew. (paidContent)

Break Partners with Southern Comfort for Social Sportz Net; web series will show dudes how to plan holiday parties. (MediaWeek)

The Colbert Report Sponsors U.S. Speedskating Team; “Colbert Nation” will be on the team’s uniforms. (Associated Press)

Sorenson Launches Squeeze 6; new video and encoding software promises higher quality video and faster speeds. (release)

Auditude this week announced that it is powering video ads for MTV Networks’ various sites, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, as well as the company’s syndicated content on Dailymotion, Comcast and others. Previously Auditude had a deal with MTV to serve ads alongside its content (both official and unauthorized uploads) on just one site — MySpace — so this is an expansion of that relationship.

Auditude’s Connect ad platform was initially built to digitize the process by which ads are matched with inventory — a pretty complicated task in the world of super-syndicated video. These days, the startup is doing just about everything it can to make video ads more complex and flexible (in a good way). It targets ads based on content, user and context; it also brings a variety of e-commerce opportunities into content, including MP3s, DVDs, tickets and ringtones. The company has recently had success with creating “ad pods” for online video, in the vein of TV commercial breaks, in which it strings together four ads into one unit. For the Paramount series Circle of Eight on MySpace (which we just reviewed, but the way), it shows each user a spaced-out package of pre-roll, overlay and mid-roll.

One of Auditude’s other big deals is to help Yahoo serve ads onto MLB.tv, and it also works with Warner Bros. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company raised $10.5 million in March from Redpoint Ventures and Greylock Partners, for a total of $23 million in funding.

Did you know that a startup called Vidyo powers Gmail’s video chat feature? Not many people do, and that seems to be by design. There’s a tiny little reference to Vidyo’s participation in the product when you install it, though when I talked to Vidyo today they said they don’t comment about the deal publicly. Google built a web client around Vidyo’s system and launched it nearly exactly a year ago; I for one am grateful to whoever powers the functionality to turn my text chats with my sister in Montreal into video; face-to-face is so much better.

Today Vidyo did comment on something else though: the Hackensack, NJ-based company announced that it has secured a patent for the technology that underlies the telepresence service it provides Google and other customers: “System and Method for a Conference Server Architecture for Low Delay and Distributed Conferencing Applications.” Vidyo’s technology treats every participant in a conference individually so as to give each the best capable up-stream and down-stream experience at any one moment by adjusting bitrates and resolutions dynamically (Google limits its implementation to only two people, but Vidyo can accommodate many more). Through its architecture and the new H.264/SVC video compression standard, Vidyo avoids requiring a centralized multipoint control unit (MCU), as most videoconference systems do.

That means no special equipment, and it also means a remarkable lack of latency; I talked to Vidyo SVP marketing Marty Hollander today using the company’s Mac app for video and my cellphone for audio (not an ideal situation, but our office bandwidth was acting up) and amazingly, his voice and picture were just about perfectly in sync. All you should really need is solid broadband and a webcam. The company, which launched in Jan. 08, is also included in Hitachi’s video conferencing products and Teleris’ telepresence room systems. Check out the charmingly hokey video demo embedded below:

Vidyo has 84 employees and has raised a total of $45 million, including $15 million earlier this year in a round led by Menlo Ventures with Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds and Star Ventures. When it was founded four years ago it was called “Layered Media.”

Comcast Working on IPTV and Video Convergence Project; “Excalibur” will reportedly be a “services overlay” that puts IP services into a common provision and management system. (Cable Digital News)

Taboola Partners with Brightcove; Taboola to provide video recommendation and ad engine to Brightcove clients. (release)

SeaChange Launches Network DVR; company’s seven-rack unit offers 108 terabytes of data, which would provide 500 subscribers with room for 100 hours of standard definition content, or 25 hours of HD content. (Multichannel News)

Q&A With Quincy Smith; soon-to-be-former CBS Interactive head talks about TV Everywhere, Nielsen and Hulu. (Broadcasting & Cable)

Cake Boss to Get a Web Series; sponsored by Hunts, show will feature Buddy Valastro presenting old-school Italian recipes. (MediaWeek)

Are the Accountants Running TV? Bill Gorman lays out the argument that networks are paying more attention to costs than ratings. (TV by the Numbers)

Learn How to Create Your Own Web Series; WebTVPrep will teach you how (featuring our very own Liz Shannon Miller as a lecturer!) in four weeks (in L.A.). (WebTVPrep.com)

Funny Or Die, which has held steadfastly to a destination site strategy over the last two and a half years, will finally launch its own YouTube channel in November, COO Mitch Galbraith said on a panel I moderated today at Digital Media Conference West. Also in the works are 12 half-hour shows of sketches, segments and mini-shows of original Funny or Die Presents for HBO and a feature-length film, he said.

Galbraith said that Funny or Die feels it now has a mature enough brand that it can send content to YouTube without sacrificing its own site. Plus, YouTube is “publisher friendly” (read: he got a good deal). That’s not to say Funny or Die has been anti-syndication. It has always provided an embeddable player, and gets an average of 15 percent of its views on embedded players, which shoots up to 60-70 percent for some highly viral videos.

Funny or Die makes more than $10 million on advertising a year, Galbraith said, half of that from branded content (both sponsored videos and campaigns around that content). He pointed to two recent successful examples of a health care PSA for MoveOn that got 2.8 million views and an episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis that inserted an awkward (in a good way) product placement for EA Sports.

While Funny or Die may have de-emphasized user uploads since it first launched, the site considers discovering talent a “critical” part of its success, said Galbraith. He said a Funny or Die director now has a deal with Sony, and a writer has since moved on to Saturday Night Live.

I asked Galbraith whether Funny or Die was planning to make different content for every platform, given its ongoing work developing a premium TV show and a movie. What about over-the-top web video? Galbraith said he is certainly interested in putting web content in a different venue, but he feels the connected living room is a little too nascent. He’s waiting for a “channel of choice” to emerge, he said, as well as an audience that’s big enough to make money from.

Updated: This story was clarify the description of Funny or Die Presents.

Juniper Makes Strategic Investment in Ankeena; company also gives Ankeena access to its JUNOS Software and development platform to help MSOs, telcos and ISPs manage new media infrastructure. (emailed release)

Eye-Fi Shares Videos Directly to Facebook; wireless memory card for digital cameras can now wirelessly upload videos to the social network. (emailed release)

5min Partners with HealthCentral; the two will create a new online video health network. (emailed release)

Voddler Launches a Hulu-like Service in Sweden; offered through ISP Bredbandsbolaget, it will stream U.S. movies from Paramount, Disney and others. (Variety)

Hulu No. 2 on MediaWeek’s Digital Hot List; premium content site the only video site on the list. (GigaOM)

Televisa Takes Soccer Into 3D; Spanish language network broadcasts the game into four theaters in Mexico for 89 pesos ($6.70) a ticket. (Variety)