The Wall Street Journal expects the next generation of YouTube to begin next week with Channels, a handful of hubs focused around a particular theme that feature hours of original, studio-produced programming.

From the way people are already drooling over tonight's tweetable, social media-savvy Super Bowl ads, you would be forgiven for thinking that the famed Lombardi Trophy will be awarded to an ad agency, instead of the usual football-playing recipient.

Hulu just put out a casting call in search of hosts for a new clip show they have in the works. While seemingly innocuous, could this be the birth of the internet's first major TV studio/broadcaster?

To promote online game Mafia Wars Las Vegas, game developer Zynga hired Snoop Dogg to blow up a 4-ton armored truck in the Nevada desert, while it was live-streamed to Ustream. It pulled in more viewers than TV broadcasts attract.

Sticking a couple big ones up Adobe's way, Vimeo's embeddable Universal Player allows for playback of Vimeo videos on iPads and other non-Flash-supporting devices, using HTML5—but also detects other supported video formats, playing in Flash or native too.

With the release of the iPad, among other things, HTML5's been pitted against Flash as the savior of web video. It might be! (Or not!) Either way, a crucial arguing point is that it's more efficient. So, uh, is it?

That's a resounding no from Comcast chief operating officer Steve Burke, who unfortunately isn't able to make this call, at all. But at least he means well!