Today Reuters ran an interesting story entitled, “NBC Universal removes YouTube channel,” in an attempt to make way for Hulu, expected to launch at the end of this month. Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and News corp. has been widely regarded as a YouTube strong competitor even it is still not officially goes live at this moment. It would served as a more flexible platform that stocked with movies, TV episodes, and of course the entertainment content from these two successful media companies. Given the brand name of NBC and News Corp., it is common sense to assume that it will attract some well-known partners when it is fully launched in the market.

Hulu, though still in private beta, you can go to their landing page and submit your email address in order to get the invitation.

The other day I came across a new visual search engine that called oSkope. As stated on their landing page, oSkope is a visual browser that fetch and organize the items from Web services such as Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube. Users are allowed to select one of these four services and play around with it, the search results display can be viewed in a variety of ways such as in the mode of grid, stack, pile, list or graph. Click on one of the thumbnail images that can be enlarged when mousing over, and in the right-hand side of the image will display a dialog box that list the item’s product and price information. For an instance, a book image fetched from Amazon will list the book’s particular details. For every book, you will find that there is a link that provided in order for a user to go to the Amazon’s original book page and buy the book.

Visually, oSkope meet the users’ needs when they want to get a better browsing experience. The establishment of these visual search engines tend to complement the existing search engines such as Google or Yahoo! However, if I’m looking for a specific book or photo, I prefer go to the Amazon or Flickr and enter the specific search query. Nevertheless, there is still room left for a visual search engine to further grow on the Web and oSkope might well situated to make money through the referral programs of Amazon or eBay.

Starting from August 15, Google will shut down its premium video service, the download-to-own or rental services on Google Video. Google’s decision to shut down its paid rentals and download service came last Friday, with the email sent to each of its video customers. Google’s main intention was to provide the full focus on YouTube, instead of another video service created by Google. At the same time, customer are entitled for $2 Google checkout bonus for the video that bought but cannot play. However, the bonus will be expired in the 60 days.

No doubt the success of YouTube has indeed made Google Video increasingly irrelevant. It’s the question of when Google will shut down the Google Video, and whether they will satisfy with the revenue that could only be generated via advertisement on YouTube in the future.

It was less than two years since the News Corporation took over MySpace and they had decided to take this social networking site on a new path. The introduction of MySpace TV marked as the new focus area that MySpace is putting their internal resources in. Currently, most of the cyberpundits are now discussing the possibilities of this MySpace TV in challenging the leadership position of YouTube. It seems that video-sharing industry on the Web is still rapidly expanding and far from saturation. However, I don’t see this bold action by MySpace will cost them anything. Instead of releasing more advancing features to the MySpace social networking site, MySpace had shifted the company’s strategic focus, did this implied the new direction, its future prospect is even bigger than the existing social networking industry.

MySpace definitely saw the bigger picture of video-sharing industry. According to the co-founder and president of MySpace, Tom Anderson, “When you see us going from 332 million to 648 million videos per month you know something big is happening. We’re going to be rolling out innovative video products and features in the coming months to further empower our users.”

Currently, MySpace TV was launched in two different URL, i.e. MySpaceTV.com or in a subdomain that named as vids.myspace.com due to the fact that users that did not owned MySpace account could still access to this site. I personally feel that if MySpace can make it in the social network, why not a MySpace TV.

For those who has not yet watch this video, I have embedded in the below. It was a creative video clip, viewed more than 300,000 since it was first uploaded to YouTube two days ago. First phrase of this clip was, “One day, your computer will be a big XXX table.”

Enjoy.