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.