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From the makers of Odeo, the podcast hosting service, comes Hellodeo a simple vidcasting service that I have to admit is pretty cool.

You fire up the website, on the front page is a button to let the website access your webcam. You then see yourself on the site with a button to hit record. You can then record yourself, say what you have to say, and then submit it to the site. You then get a piece of code back to embed the recording into your blog post. You don’t need to register, it just works. Very cool, so I had to give it a try, and here are the results.

The latest company to jump into the online video gold rush is Gotuit. Much like YouTube, the videos come up on a flash player with the navigation wrapped around the video window. The difference is Gotuit has licensing deals with the content creators. At this point their offerings include news updates, sports clips (such as video from the NBA Draft), and lots and lots of music videos. The videos are served up fast and the interface is very intuitive.

What we’re seeing her is the structure of the television channel and the schedule is eventually going to be replaced by the search and on-demand structure of the web. These websites are just beginning to explore what the new paradigm is going to be.

From Techcrunch 

I listened to a fascinating podcast today, an episode of Inside the Net with the guys behind the highly successful Ask A Ninja video podcast.

Ask a Ninja is a series of video shorts done by a couple of guys in a crappy apartment in L.A. The gimmick is a Ninja answering viewer questions. Most of the time the Ninja is flat-out hilarious, and the shows are around 5 minutes or so, which seems to be the sweet spot with online video content.

In the podcast, they talk about how exciting it was the moment they realized that the distribution problem, which had kept media tightly controlled by the big studios and media companies, now has a solution. The web allows anyone with good content and some tenacity to find an audience. Their marketing budget was zero, so much of the marketing was done through social networking sites such as the now gargantuan myspace and bebo. They’ve been doing the show for about 6 months, and now have 350,000 viewers per episode. Zero budget, zero marketing money, online distribution, and tons of talent. Today’s episode has a small ad for a new movie on the backend, so it looks like they’re starting to monetize that audience.

The tools to create video content are now accessable to anyone. The bandwidth to send a video podcast to millions can be had for as little as $30 a month. What are we waiting for?

Watch Ask A Ninja Here

Listen to the Ask a Ninja episode of Inside the Net here

Update: Here’s an interesting article about the social-network marketing of Ask A Ninja. Check it out here 

Apparently Google is working on something that to me sounds a little freaky. Through a microphone in the room, a computer could listen to what’s on the television, and identify what the person is watching by taking a small audio snippet. That info can be fed back to Google to feed contextual advertisements back to the home viewer, or just spy on what kind of trashy reality shows you really enjoy.

Not sure what the benefit is, but if Google is working on knowing everything, then this will probably be part of it.

Check out the story here.

OK, you’re a big media company, and you want some way to monetize the large amounts of content you pump out the door everyday. There are a whole lot of websites out there that need content, so it was only a matter of time before clip syndication services would start to come online. Attach a little ad to the front of the clip, sign up small websites to show the clips, and you’ve got yourself a pretty wide audience. I guess it remains to be seen whether or not the future in media is a whole bunch of small websites or the single, powerful brands that have traditionally driven audience. It’s going to be fun to find out.

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