- Integrate Hulu - almost every single comment made on our recent articles about Joost involves a complaint about the lack of quality content....Sure, the interface will need some tweaking, but that’s a small price to pay if you get instant access to tons of quality programming in return.

- Turn Joost into a podcasting client. There are literally hundreds of great video podcasts out there...So why can’t I watch any of them with Joost?

- Build a web version. This is pretty much a no-brainer. Sure, P2P won’t work on the web, and there are plenty of competitors out there. But it’s about offering your users the convenience of being able to watch your content where they want and how they want..

- Build a Firefox plug-in. Consider it the next step in merging the web with the Joost app. A plug-in could make use of Joost’s P2P network, its widgets and its community and at the same time allow access to any other content online...

- Get Joost on the Wii. Forget about Apple TV. The real home entertainment powerhouse is Nintendo...Give me the ability to control my videos with some wild Wiimote gestures, and I’ll chose Joost over Hulu any day...

"Toshiba America Consumer Products said it cut prices of its HD DVD players effective January 13 to boost market adoption of its next-generation DVD players by mainstream consumers after what it said was a successful fourth quarter in unit sales....Toshiba's players will now start as low as $149 going up to $399 for the top-of-range player."

"We can use HD discs to train consumers to move into digital, but it's a transition," said Dan Silverberg, vice president of high-definition media development at Warner Bros. "Downloaded content will come, but the consumer will get quicker tutorial into video-on-demand, etc. by owning a Blu-ray player or HD DVD."

"Just as we've seen with audio, where audiophiles tend to prefer analog LPs or tape to digital downloads, we could see Blu-ray or HD DVD discs being the province of cinephiles..The problem with that is the cost associated with maintaining a niche format. Ultimately, though, downloads and streams [will likely] win out, and I think what you find is that the majority will opt for the temporary ownership of a movie or TV show.."

"Hopefully you'll enjoy the first part of steal this film...It achieves some, but by no means all of our goals.  To continue we need your help.  This film is free for you to share, watch on your DVD player or on your iPod or show in cinemas.  But if you like the work we have done and want us to carry on, use our donate link to send us a couple of dollars or euros.  We will start making the second part straight away, and release it on this site and on major bittorrent trackers when it's done....the plan for the second part is on our wiki.  Feel free to add suggestions."

"Whether you call it Cinema 2.0, or Open source cinema, it’s an innovative participatory experience you can be part of.  Our vision is to bring filmmaker and fan together into entertainment communities making distinctive films based on artistic choices not marketing ones.  This is not about making a couple of bucks, but about making cinematic history.  A Swarm of Angels is a third way between the top-down approach of traditional filmmaking and the bottom-up nature of user-generated content.  A way for anyone to influence the creation of a professional £1 million+ ($1.8M+) feature film.  We are gathering 50,000 people in a giant new media experiment to be part of an exclusive community which funds and helps make this film. We want people to freely download, share and remix the feature film and all original media made for this project and have embraced the flexible digital-age copyright of Creative Commons toward this end."

As we approach the end of 2007, we naturally reflect on the last year and look to the next year.  2007 saw the continued rise of video on the Internet still, to a large extent, powered by YouTube.  Created in 2005 and making international prominence in 2006 following its sale to Google for $1.65 billion in stock.  This year plugincinema's Ana and Tom gave a talk about why YouTube became so successful at the Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube Conference (you can see the video here ) – but it seems to us that for similar reasons to why YouTube made it, that YouTube is an intermediate stage of the development of online films.  2008 will see a number of new sites, with new ideas and new technology emerging on the Internet.  There are many challengers to YouTube's dominance, and we would like to share a few with you;

blinkx.com - This is the company that makes advanced video technology such as searching within video content and clicking on object within a video file (you can see the commercial potentials of this!).  They recently also setup a video portal that searches the Internet for content by category.  So far it does not allow users to upload content, but who knows what the future holds!

Stage6.com – A video sharing site from DivX, the video compression codec people.  It allows the upload of high-definition footage, can be (depending on the source footage) amazing size and quality streamed footage and has mode advanced user tagging of content.

blip.tv – Good quality site geared more for regular series than random one-offs.  Has some great features such as better license conditions for uploaded content and ad share revenue.
metacafe.com - Like blip.tv, this site share content with the users.  It promotes this angle heavily as you can see which video producers were the top earners each week.

VideoHybrid – A classic net-centric concept; using the power of users.  On this site users can request films or TV they would like to see, then other users are encouraged to find video streams of the requests.  Amazingly this site features full-length films to be streamed!  The technology seems very rough around the edges and copyright issues are up- in the air, but its a great idea nonetheless.

Here at plugincinema we have chronicled the rite of alternatives to the cinema and TV as platforms for showing films; and that rise has been dramatic. However, we've never lost our love of cinemas – the popcorn, the big screen and surround sound! So we were charmed to learn that research backs up the vibe you get in the cinema ;

"...new research suggests that the presence of other people may enhance our movie-watching experiences. Over the course of the film, movie-watchers influence one another and gradually synchronize their emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant's evaluation of the overall experience -- the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie....In a series of experiments, the researchers had participants watch a video clip. Some of the participants watched alone, some with other people whose expressions could not be seen due to the presence of a partition, and some with other people whose expressions could be seen...While assessments did not line up by second--people liked or disliked specific scenes in the film according to their own tastes-- the researchers found that people watching a film together appeared to evaluate the film within the same broad mood, generally tracking up or generally tracking down.”

Very interesting, and should be of note to cinema owners and those who run film-festivals; what ever the Internet throws at you, if you get people together, you've got a Unique-Selling-Point! (USP) This is an interesting finding and reminded us of the 'illegal' cinema found underground in the Paris catacombs ;

"In 2004, police found the remnants of an underground cinema in the Paris catacombs. It had been used by a group called Perforating Mexicans, who hijacked public spaces for art. They left behind a note, which asked its finders: 'Don't try to find us.' Underground, when truly underground, goes deep. Checking Perforated Mexicans' film schedule, I expected to find snuff, graphic porn, or at the very least cock-fighting, but discovered instead a cinephile's dream: the Japanese animation Ghost in the Shell, Coppola's Rumble Fish, and David Lynch's Eraserhead. In other words, this underground experience was less about the actual films shown, and more the radicalism of illegal cinema itself.”

Clandestine popcorn! Another USP? This 'group illegal vibe' is also harnessed by the idea of 'guerrilla screenings', made possible by using accessible digital technologies such as laptops and digital projectors, the curators pick an outdoor spot, such as a park or abandoned building and simply set up a cinema (see example ). The future may be digital; but nobody said it had to be alone...