Online videos were made popular thanks to the meteoric rise of YouTube - enabling users to share amateur, home shot videos of their lives. Today, Web videos are no longer limited to clips of cats flushing toilets, mints reacting explosively with carbonated sodas or other such user-generated videos as broadcast networks and studios begin to offer slick programming and TV-like content on the Web. One such venture is, Hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC and Fox that brings free, ad-supported television shows to the Web.  These shows include both old and new features including The Office, 24 and The Simpsons among others.  These are also available on partner sites like MySpace and Yahoo. One interesting feature of Hulu is that it allows users share television shows and video clips with friends (or post to a blog) with the help of an easy editing tool.

Of late, there has been a trend to create webisodes, short episodic, scripted video for the Web. As attention spans on the Web tends to be short, these shows are divided into short bursts to entertain the multi-tasking online crowd. One such Webisodes is Quaterlife, a series produced by TV and film veterans Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick which recently landed a TV deal with NBC. Other Webisodes include Prom Queen, Roommates and Bebo’s made for Web program, KateModern. Celebrities are also gradually embracing this new medium. Tom Green, the former MTV personality, is now the host of Tom Green Live on ManiaTV and tomgreen.com. Comic actors Micheal Cera and Bob Odenkirk are involved in video ventures like Clark and Micheal and actor Will Ferrell has launched a variety of original sketches from well-known movie and TV actors on Funny or Die.

So far advertisers have been reluctant to pour money into or associate their brands with unwitting user-generated videos. However, the shift towards professionally-made content and higher quality videos could change just that. Ad placements of products are now being integrated into related plot lines of webisdoes with brands such as McDonalds, Ford and Volvo testing waters. For instance, Volvo C30 appears in episodes of an online series, Mr. Robinson’s Driving School. Other advertising opportunities include television style 15-30 sec ads before/during/after a video program or placing fixed ad overlays that appear on part of the video screen from time to time, allowing users to click-through to the marketer’s Web site.

Several online video firms like Joost, Blinkx, Crackle and VideoEgg and social networking sites MySpace and Bebo are increasingly adding more valuable TV-like content to their sites. It remains to be seen if advertisers will cash in on the TV-like Web just as they did on our television sets.

Resources: New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal