There’s a great deal of buzzing today about a few Internet video news items:

• Amazon is debuting a streaming video store. The service, Amazon Video on Demand, will offer about 40,000 streaming videos for customers to choose from.
• TiVo is adding YouTube support. TiVo’s YouTube support was announced in March, and is available to broadband-connected subscribers with TiVo Series3 DVRs, including the TiVo HD, which retails for around $299.
• Lionsgate has cut a revenue-sharing agreement with YouTube that will create a Lionsgate-branded channel, where advertising will be placed on clips of Lionsgate video clips, ranging from the “Saw” franchise to classics like “Dirty Dancing.” Lionsgate’s TV programming, including “Weeds,” is also a part of the deal.

These are all important deals, but, we’re waiting for the big deal – the deal that brings long-tail ad-supported Internet television to your television.

You don’t need a DVR, or even a video store, if there’s a warehouse of long-tail video available for free on the Internet, and that’s exactly what we see Hulu building.

If Microsoft could get Hulu on the XBox 360, or Apple could get it on Apple TV, it would change the world of Internet video. You’d have a huge library of free movies and television on demand, on your television. They could add a rental option, too; pay a small fee and the ads go away.

Apple’s done the best job of bringing social media video to the TV, but the company that snags free long tail Internet television and movies and brings them to your TV will leap to the head of the pack and become the iPod of Internet television.

Podcasting site Odeo has relaunched. Again. We have kind of lost count, but Beta News says that this is Odeo’s sixth launch. Initially launched mid-2005, Odeo debuts (again) with a number of new features.

The biggest addition to the site is video, but other new capabilities allow users to:

— Search & explore over 500,000 channels with millions of audio & video episodes
— Browse by category or by keyword tags
— Subscribe to channels & get notified when new episodes are published
— Rate & review content
— Collect favorites & create playlists
— Create a profile page & connect with friends
— Get recommendations & discover new and relevant content
— Share content via email or embed into external sites & social networks

Some of the features are not yet available, but are promised to be in the works, such as synching to mobile devices, easier embedding of audio and video for social networks plus an upgraded set of recording tools through a new version of Odeo Studio. There is also talk of bringing back the Fire Ant media player to the site.

Odeo’s parent company, Sonic Mountain, has also forged “strategic partnerships” with content networks Revision3, blip.tv, and NextNewNetworks, to build out Odeo’s library.

Odeo has had a colorful history. Founded in 2005 by Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, the company was purchased by Sonic Mountain in 2007. (Lots of previous articles about Odeo here.)

If you have some thoughts to share about the new Odeo site and features, or reminiscences of older incarnations of the site, we’d like to hear from you.

BlogHer, the online community (and conference) for women bloggers, has entered a strategic partnership with iVillage, a subsidiary of NBC Universal and a popular website toward female viewers/readers. The agreement provides iVillage access to BlogHer’s network of 2200 member blogs, and shared promotional and advertising opportunities across BlogHer’s audience. As part of the arrangement, NBCU websites iVillage, Oxygen.com and BravoTV.com will feature select BlogHer content.

The announcement was made today by Lauren Zalaznick, President of Women and Lifestyle Entertainment networks for NBC Universal, and creator of popular television programs Top Chef and Project Runway.

“This strategic partnership underscores NBC Universal’s serious commitment to invest in the future growth of iVillage and the newly formed Women@NBCU sales initiative,” said Zalaznick. “I am incredibly excited to tap into this new online community and superserve both clients and consumers in today’s robust women’s marketplace.”

The DirectVoxx Muso is add-on for the iPod and iPhone that is designed to let you access your music with voice commands.

The Muso synchronizes with your iTunes library and can respond to commands like “Play me some Led Zeppelin”, “How about some Rolling Stones”, “Gimme jazz” or “Go to My Broadway Tunes playlist”.

The Muso is expected to be available in December for $159.

The third in a series of Boston-area open space unconferences for podcasting and new media enthusiasts, PodCamp Boston is coming up this weekend, July 19-20, 2008, at The Joseph Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA.

Unlike previous PodCamps, walk-in registrations cannot be accepted (building security needs a list of attendees). The deadline for registering for this weekend’s PodCamp Boston is noon (ET) Wednesday, July 16.

In advance of the upcoming conference, and in light of some of the changes being made for this edition of the gathering, PodCamp co-founder and organizer Christopher Penn (creator and host of the Financial Aid Podcast) took some time out to answer my questions about the event.

Make Internet TV is a very cool site that explains how to create your own video podcast or video blog.

It covers the gear you need, shooting tips, editing, licensing your content, publishing and promoting your videos.

The site targets beginners, so if you’ve been wanting to try video podcasting or vlogging, but have been daunted by it, this could be a great place to start.

You already know you can make your own YouTube videos, your own video podcasts and your own movies and distribute them over the Internet.

You may not know, though, that there’s a growing DIY guerilla drive-in theater movement.

According to MobMov, a site that documents this trend:

A “mobile movie” or mobmov for short, is quite simply a drive-in that drives-in. Participating in a mobmov is very similar to attending a drive-in from the days of old, except now the projector is located inside and powered by a car, and the audio is piped in stereo over the FM band to the attendees’ cars.

As a mobmov driver, you assemble the kit, decide on the movies, and announce your showings to friends and the community at large. Then everyone assembles in a dark place with a big wall, and you watch a movie. It’s a new technological twist to a nostalgic idea.

The site details the gear you need to set up a guerilla drive-inn theater, and offers tips for avoiding problems with police and lawyers.

Filmmakers can also apply to have their films played at participating mobile theaters!

RawVoice CEO Todd Cochrane got in touch with us a few days ago to alert us to this week’s launch of a new podcast publishing and hosting system via the Blubrry podcast network.

Blubrry Podcast Publishing with Hosting is an integrated solution that combines podcast statistics, media hosting, and promotional tools to “grow and support your show.”

Cochrane calls the new system “one of the most advanced and fully integrated podcast publishing and hosting systems in the [podcasting] space.”

The new publishing/hosting setup includes a feature-rich blogging platform along with such features as:

• Media Hosting
• RSS 2.0 (iTunes compatible)
• Web based Media Uploader with Upload Progress Bar
• Rich text Blog/Podcast post editor
• Full Blog API Supports WordPress 2.5+)
• Post to Twitter
• Ping Weblog (e.g. Google Blog Search, Technorati)
• Media Artwork Management
• ID3 Tagging (writes information such as episode title to media files
• Media File Naming (Portable Media Player Optimized)
• Blog Post Image Management
• “Podcast Statistics Premium“

Cochrane is offering special rates for existing Blubrry community members, but the services are available to all podcasters.

Google announced today that it had reached an agreement with Viacom that will avoid a media debacle over YouTube users privacy:

As we let you know on July 4, YouTube received a court order to produce viewing history data. We are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original demand for all users’ viewing histories and we will not be providing that information. (Read the official legalese here.)

In addition, Viacom and the plaintiffs had originally demanded access to users’ private videos, our search technology, and our video identification technology. Our lawyers strongly opposed each of those demands and the court sided with us.

We’ll keep you informed of any important developments in this lawsuit. We remain committed to protecting your privacy and we’ll continue to fight for your right to share and broadcast your work on YouTube.

The agreement stipulates that Google will anonymize their log data before sharing it with Viacom:

Substituted Values: When producing data from the Logging Database pursuant to the Order, Defendants shall substitute values while preserving uniqueness for entries in the following fields: User ID, IP Address and Visitor ID.  The parties shall agree as promptly as feasible on a specific protocol to govern this substitution whereby each unique value contained in these fields shall be assigned a correlative unique substituted value, and preexisting interdependencies shall be retained in the version of the data produced.  Defendants shall promptly (no later than 7 business days after execution  of this Stipulation) provide a proposed protocol for this substitution. Defendants agree to reasonably consult with Plaintiffs’ consultant if necessary to reach agreement on the protocol.

The agreement lets both companies avoid the media feeding frenzy that was coming if Google shared users’ private viewing information.

However, Google has still failed to unambiguously state that it will not share users’ private information, and they appear to be headed for a protracted legal battle with Viacom. This means that Google will forced to continue treating user-generated content as deadweight, and may make it impossible for Google to achieve their top goal for 2008, figuring out how to make money from YouTube.

Matt Mullenweg has announced WordPress 2.6, the latest update to the popular blogging & podcasting platform.

Five Hot Changes In WordPress 2.

• Press This! is back– this popular feature disappeared in an earlier update to WordPress, but is back with a vengeance. Inspired by Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious, and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, the Press This bookmark is designed to provide a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog. For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it will extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post.
• Revamped image control – for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Better media support – You can now upload media when in full-screen mode, drag-and-drop Galleries to organize them and you can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• Gears Support – keeps a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of pages by several seconds. You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending.
• Post Revisions – lets you view who made what changes when to any post or page through an easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

These are welcome updates – and we’re excited about the upcoming iPhone WordPress app, too

Here’s the official video introduction to WordPress 2.6: