This is a lovely use of archive video to create a long-tail business and something I’ve been advocating since day one. Congrats to KXLY.com in Spokane, Washington. Broadcasting is so accustomed to the idea of instant obsolescence (what we do today doesn’t matter tomorrow) that we miss opportunities for niche videos. This station hasn’t. All it takes is a little up-front work. Kudos.

Despite all the evidence that the Web is different, there are those who are still trying to turn it into a form of cable television. These folks are happy with what they’re doing, and there certainly are elements of the Web that can function this way. But if you’re going to try and make cable TV out of the Web, then you cannot count on the norms of the Web being relevant to your product.

An Online Media Daily article today is headlined with what appears to be an “Ah-ha” moment: Research Contradicts Myths About Online TV Shows. The research is from Futurescape, a London-based digital entertainment R&D firm, and it appears to disprove the “myths” that with viral marketing, engaging and well-produced content will distribute itself online.

“It’s what we we’ve dubbed the ‘viral fallacy,’” explained Futurescape Director Colin Donald. “Producers are adamant that launching a show requires a full-scale promotional campaign, possibly employing broadcast television.”

As a result, said Donald, “total budgets will rise to reflect promotional costs, unless the producer has been commissioned by a social network that can be the promotional vehicle.”

Mr. Donald also refutes the “myth” that it’s cheap to produce online television and provides production cost numbers to prove it.

Here’s my beef with all of this. Futurescape’s “findings” are not findings at all, for what do you expect when the producers of online TV only see the Web as a form of cable TV? The “myths” of viral marketing and cost that the company cites cannot be applied to traditional television online, and, to be frank, I’ve never heard anyone make these assertions anyway.

What I see here is the conflict between web video and television for the Web. They’re two different animals, and what I fear is that false arguments such as those posed by this “research” will spread to media companies trying to figure out what to do in the wake of declining ratings and ad money shifting online.

The processes that are a part of making traditional television aren’t disrupted by the Web, for the creation and distribution of programs for the mass media world are the same whether online or off. The “myths” to which Mr. Donald refers are all part of the personal media revolution, a phrase coined by J.D. Lasica in his book, Darknet, Hollywood’s War Against The Digital Generation, and these people have a big dog in that fight. Rather than dealing with it, however, Hollywood wants needs to keep things as they are. Hence, “revelations” like those painted in this “research” are self-serving and, therefore, useless. The disruption is much deeper than people shifting viewing habits from one place to the next.

In a pretty significant announcement this morning, Google is broadening the scope of open applications that developers can use to interact with YouTube and its player. The end game, according to TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, is the original concept of Google Video — to host all of the video on the Web.

Once again, instead of making it easier to search videos elsewhere, Google is making it easier to host videos on YouTube. Except that the new APIs allow people to upload, watch, search, and comment on the videos on other Websites. The key here is that the videos themselves are hosted on Youtube’s servers…

…YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free. This could prove highly disruptive to other video-hosting platforms such as Brightcove, Maven Networks (now part of Yahoo), and Move Networks.

By offering developers the ability to actually alter the user interface of the player, Google is making it very hard to say no. One day, we may see local news sites using the YouTube player instead of their own. If they can customize and monetize it, why not? The hosting and bandwidth costs go away. It certainly raises the bar for creating an appealing local video portal.

Google continues to confound the experts by giving things away. And that, my friends, is why it is so bloody disruptive.

I spent a part of the day playing with HULU and can honestly say it’s an enjoyable experience. Whether choosing a clip from Saturday Night Live or watching an episode of House, everything about the site works really well. It was nice to watch a 44-minute episode of House in, well, 45 minutes with “limited interruption” from one sponsor (15 second ads). One wonders, of course, if that won’t change, assuming popularity increases.

One thing — and it’s a little thing, I’ll admit — really bothered me. The image below is the player during an ad. Note the language at the top that I’ve circled. In players from start-ups created in Silicon Valley, this same information is communicated with a simple countdown clock. With HULU (and one expects those from other mainstream media companies) it’s all spelled out. In my view, this is typical broadcast thinking, where the audience is too stupid to intuitively figure it out for themselves. Imagine how annoying this will be after months or years of use. Perhaps then, they’ll change it. Along the same lines, when you choose the full screen mode, the player notifies you to hit “escape” to get back to the skin. Um, does that really need saying in this day and age? Less is more.

Overall, though, this is a great site for viewing media clips. The user experience is excellent, and it could become THE go-to site for this, if only the other networks would all come aboard. Will that happen? I say eventually yes, because it makes business sense to put all of these types of programming in one place.

HULU is still in Beta with invitation-only access, but it’s expected to go public this spring.

BoingBoing TV is cranking out some amazing stuff, and this one has to be among the best. It’s by Stefan Nadelman and gives a history of war through the foods of the countries fighting. Don’t forget to stick around for Nadelman’s drunk dog at the end.

This is textbook web video, IMO, and the images will be with me for a long time. Well done.

(Hat tip to John Battelle for the video)