According to the August, 2008, volume of eMarketer, and www.eMarketer.com, U.S. online video ad spending is expected to hit $3.4 billion in 2011. Currently, eMarketer predicts that video ad spending will hit $505 million this year and will grow for the next few years, peaking in 2012, when it will reach $3.4 billion.

And, according to www.newteevee.com, Lehman Brothers said the online video ad market would be worth $1.1 billion this year and would grow to $2.4 billion by 2010. And if those stats weren’t enough, Parks and Associates said that transactional revenue (non-advertising) from premium Hollywood content would hit $6 billion by 2013.

With such a dramatic increase in ad revenue for online video expected to come from premium content, more and more sites are looking to distribute and host high-quality, premium Hollywood-style videos.

The website www.Hulu.com went live and public to U.S. broadband users in March 2008. The new online video site offers access to premium TV shows and movies in both short clips and full-length format for free. Hulu is ad-driven, with integrated video ads and banners played during the streaming of a piece of content. Hulu was founded about a year ago as a joint project of NBC Universal and News Corp., and until now, it was in private beta with limited access granted to test users. Along with the main site, Hulu has partnered with several consumer portals including AOL, Comcast’s Fancast.com, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo! to have embedded Hulu content run on their video portals.

According to a January 3, 2008, Reuters.com article entitled “CinemaNow and Macrovision Collaborate to Deliver Premium Online Video Entertainment,” the two companies – CinemaNow and Macrovision – “have integrated their technologies to enable consumers to acquire premium video content and download it directly from CinemaNow to Macrovision-enabled consumer electronics devices such as digital television sets (DTV), set-top boxes (STB), and network attached storage (NAS) devices.”

So with current trends leaning towards free, quality video content, consumers can look forward to a future of their favorite movies, sitcoms and news programs, both web-based and broadcast-based, on demand at the click of a mouse at any given time! And, with transactional revenue from Hollywood-created content expected to hit $6 billion by 2013, audiences around the globe can expect their favorite producers, directors and actors’ names to show up in the credits of a number of videos created specifically for web distribution.

And, as high-quality video content finds its way to the Web, the Web itself is also evolving to its next stage – Web 3.0; the third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’ – one that involves semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies – which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience (but we’ll save the Web 3.0 discussion for another day). So, the next time someone tries to tell you that broadcast television is a dying medium, you can tell them, “It’s not dying; it is just finding a new, more interactive and highly sophisticated life on the Web!”