Google's YouTube is on the way to making amends with Hollywood, CNET News reports, and could soon be home to legally-obtained clips from popular movies and TV shows. The report said that insiders are claiming Google has "adopted a more accommodating approach" toward movie and TV studios. For example, Lionsgate struck a deal with YouTube that allows cooperation with a major (unnamed) film studio.

Other big media companies are in talks with Google about similar deals, said sources from three different studios in the report. "We've been working with them on filtering and they're doing a pretty good job," said an executive at one of them. "We're pretty impressed with the results and their ability to identify our clips and allow us to automate the process."

As Daisy Whitney of TelevisionWeek reports, only 15% of online Americans have even heard of Hulu.com, the NBC-Fox online video venture; that's despite the site's high-profile in the media industry. However, the few people who use it "like it a lot."

The report said that Hulu users like the ability to search and find both old episodes of TV shows and recent ones they missed. "Hulu visitors also like that the shows are free and that the service operates as something of an online digital video recorder," saying that the only thing they don't like so far is that they can't watch older episodes of shows.

Interestingly, the report said that Hulu users are "more likely to own laptops, smart phones and video-capable MP3 players than the average online American," while about 39% of users said they "frequently" pay attention to online ads on the site.

In a world of YouTube, iMovie, and digital music tracks, what constitutes fair use? That's the subject of an ongoing struggle between an angry Pennsylvania mother and—essentially—the entire music industry.

As CNET News reports, Stephanie Lenz's attorneys were in federal district court on Friday morning, trying to thwart a motion to dismiss her lawsuit against Universal Music Group; a year ago, the music label ordered YouTube to pull down a 30-second video she took of her infant son dancing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy."

At the time, she won the lawsuit, claiming that her video was protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Fair Use provision in copyright law. But now she is "out to teach the music industry a lesson," and is countersuing to make sure that they have a legitimate complaint before sending down take-down notices—or face damages as a result, according to the report.

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And in other online video news today, TiVo has finally released its long-awaited YouTube update that lets TiVoers watch skateboarding dogs and cats drinking out of sink faucets right from their living room couch.

Engadget reports that this comes even as mobile users can already watch YouTube all over the place: on their iPhones, on the Helio Ocean, at m.youtube.com, on the Apple TV, and probably on one of those refrigerators-with-LCD-TVs-built-in that we keep seeing everywhere. The report said that TiVo users can expect the update to pop over their TiVo's regularly scheduled downloads sometime during the next few weeks.

TiVo users can already control their devices from certain Verizon cell phones, a service that the company released back in March.

Amazon.com is introducing a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand, according to The New York Times.

The report said that customers will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them. That's because Amazon's new service streams video directly, like Netflix Watch it Now. It's actually different from online stores like Apple's iTunes Store, and Amazon's earlier, failed effort called Unbox, both of which make users sit and wait as the movie downloads before they can watch it.

Unbox also required proprietary software to be installed first. Apple requires the same thing—iTunes—but just about anyone who wanted to try their video effort already had the app for music.

While everyone scrambles to figure out how to monetize mobile video, the online desktop video market is showing no signs of slowing down. MediaPost is reporting that U.S.-based Internet users watched a staggering 12 billion online videos in May, up 45% from a year ago and about 10% from April, according to comScore's Video Metrix service. Some more numbers quoted from the report:

- Google took first place with a 35% share of all videos viewed.
- Fox Interactive Media was second with 6.4% market share;
- Yahoo came in third with 2.9%, followed by Microsoft (2%) and Viacom Digital (1.7%);
- Hulu, the NBC-Fox joint-venture, debuted at number 10 with 0.7% share.

Call it a case of improving one's PR—something that the Motion Picture Association of America desperately needs. Wired reports that in an effort to expand the group's efforts beyond public relations campaigns and federal lawsuits, they've employed man's best friend. Or, rather, two of them:

"The movie industry's specially trained dogs, Lucky and Flo, are ferreting out counterfeit DVDs in piracy hotspots around the globe. Trained to sniff out the polycarbonate used in DVDs, the two black Labrador retrievers have recovered millions of pirated discs, and collared dozens of counterfeiters in the United States, the Czech Republic, Malaysia and elsewhere. In Malaysia, professional counterfeiters are believed to have placed a cash bounty on the heads of the disc-sniffing canines."

As the article reports, the dogs "illustrate the lengths to which the MPAA is going in search of new and less-controversial tools to combat piracy, which the movie studios' lobbying arm claims costs them billions in lost revenue every year."

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At an annual retreat of media moguls this week in Sun Valley, Hollywood leaders focused on the "chilling effects of industry change brought on by labor strife, fragmentation and new technology," Reuters reports.

"The whole industry is in transition," said Anne Sweeney, co-chairman of Walt Disney Co's Disney Media Networks and President of Disney-ABC Television, in the report. "I'd say that every day for the next five years, you have to track consumers and be adaptable," she said.

The article said the big studios are facing oversupply as new, small independents add films to the pipeline at a time of stagnating attendance and slowing DVD sales and an increasingly fragmented audience to the Web and other formats. It's still too premature to say it, but some pundits are already discussing the eventual demise of the DVD.

And speaking of TV, here's a cheery prediction: Wired reports that Brothers analyst Anthony DiClemente said that the TV and video business is about to face a nasty downturn, and it could happen faster than most people expect—over the next two years, in fact.

"We believe the feature film and TV content businesses are on the verge of structural changes that appear to impact the core revenue and profits of entertainment business models," wrote DiClemente in the report.

And it's all the Internet's fault. "Digital distribution, audience fragmentation and widespread file-sharing are eating into network and studios' profits, and those profits may not come back," says DiClemente. "Content may no longer be king in the entertainment business, as distribution giants Apple and Google seem to prove again and again."

(Image credit: Clipart.com)

NBC Universal on Monday announced that Vivi Zigler will be promoted to president of NBC Universal Digital Entertainment, according to MediaPost. She will oversee all NBC Universal entertainment sites, and will continue to head the NBC Universal Digital Studio and NBC Digital Entertainment, including NBC.com, the report said.

On Monday, NBC Universal also expanded its NBC Universal store online. The article said that the newly revised marketplace attempts to offer viewers a better experience for browsing, locating, and quickly purchasing both physical and digital products, from wallpapers to subscription services. There's also a new official online store for merchandise related to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.