I remember my brother showing off a new device in the late 1990s that let him navigate the Internet on the television. Back then, there were no dogs riding skateboards on YouTube or NBC dramas on Hulu, but the technology from WebTV appeared to be a breakthrough in the convergence of the two mediums.

The frustrating thing about WebTV was that the dialup connection was so slow–at times crippling–that you often sat on the couch waiting minutes for a page to load. Plus, the resolution on TVs then was far from hi-res, and the lack of multimedia on the Web made the task rather boring.

Fast forward more than a decade: While you can now search the Web at lightning speed on the tube, watch television shows online at will and view Internet videos with clarity on any screen, companies are still struggling to come up with a business model for the Internet-connected television market.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.

The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.

Among the honorees are National Public Radio, which tried to get an All Things Considered segment removed from YouTube because it appeared in an anti-same-sex-marriage ad. Others include NBC, for yanking an Obama campaign video that used archival footage of Tom Brokaw, and the National Organization for Marriage, which pulled YouTube footage of Rachel Maddow criticizing the audition tapes of one of its ads opposing gay marriage.

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YouTube, CBS (CBS), NBC, ABC are going to have an awful lot in common in the not too distant future.

Which company uses its traffic to drive eyeballs to programming on which it sells advertising? They all do.

The biggest difference between YouTube and the broadcast networks is that one actually produces content or pays a licensing fee for the content before they sell advertising around it.

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Blip.tv announced a slew of distribution deals with both new-media and old-media companies, including NBC and YouTube, that it hopes will expand the reach of its online programming.

In a new experiment, the New York Web-video network, whose shows include Rocketboom and Wallstrip, will share its videos with a new NBC channel available in New York, NY Nonstop.

NBC called the local-television project a way of harnessing videos as they become popular. Vickie Burns, vice president of content and audience development, cited “JK Wedding Entrance Dance,” a wedding video that drew millions of eyeballs in the past few days. “For us, Blip is playing the role of agent,” said Meredith McGinn, senior manager of special projects for NBC.

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Hulu, the online TV service launched two years ago by Fox and NBC, has enjoyed incredible success with viewers–too much, it may turn out.

Two weeks ago, comScore’s report that Hulu had pulled into the top three streaming video sites was quickly followed by news that Disney (DIS)–the corporate parent of ABC and ESPN–was taking a stake in the venture.

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Consider, for a moment, what would happen if the identities, geographies and surfing histories of a large number of Internet users suddenly became invisible.

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Walking into Gavin Purcell’s office at 30 Rockefeller Center the first thing you notice is his computer monitor. It’s a 52-inch flat screen mounted to the wall across from his desk. The desktop background is a picture of a Sega Light Phaser.

Ladies and gentleman, the co-producer of NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon”–debuting Monday–is a geek.

Or at least the former producer of G4’s Attack of the Show, is geek-y. He’s not stuck in a basement somewhere uploading pictures to 4chan, but he knows what 4chan is.

The point is that Gavin and his team are bringing a new sensibility to the business of making a late-night talk show. It’s one that they developed by living in an Internet-connected world. “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” will be a talk show for the Twitter era.

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When NBC Universal and News Corp. created Hulu, they gave the video portal a valuable but short-term asset: exclusive rights to distribute NBC and Fox shows outside of the media giants’ own websites.

From that base of content, Hulu.com has become the fourth-biggest online video distributor by unique visitors in January, behind YouTube, Yahoo and MySpace, according to the latest from Nielsen VideoCensus. In total video streams, it’s No. 3, with 232 million, behind YouTube (5.8 billion) and Yahoo (277 million).

But the exclusive part of that NBC-News Corp. deal lasts only two years, and Hulu knows all too well that the scarcity that helped it establish an audience (and brand) is going away soon. Hulu has never said exactly when the deal expires, but it’s likely within a year after the first anniversary of Hulu’s public launch, in March.

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NBC is supposed to give all its hit “Saturday Night Live” clips to its online joint venture, Hulu, not YouTube, right? Well, not always, apparently. Andy Samberg’s “J**z in My Pants” has racked up 6.7 million views on YouTube, and is the most-watched video of the past month.

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NBC seems to be having a change of heart this week. The network recently wrapped up its streaming of the Olympics using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. However, if you tuned in for this week’s NFL season opener, NBC was using Adobe’s Flash technology instead of Silverlight–a fact that made some do a double take. Here’s a look at why NBC left Silverlight in a flash (pun intended).

As we stated, NBC took a chance on Silverlight to stream the Olympic ceremonies for online and mobile viewers. While this was a great opportunity for Microsoft to promote its Silverlight platform, it wasn’t enough for NBC.

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If you haven’t read, ESPN has said that they will be aggressively bidding for the retransmission rights for the 2016 Olympics. Notice that I didn’t say TV rights. The battle for the Olympics rights will be in spreadsheet projections done by ESPN, NBC and probably DirecTV that will take into account what revenues can be generated by TV advertising (traditional and interactive), cable/satellite subscription revenues, an ever-increasing market size for mobile video and advertising, and of course audio/video and text advertising of all types.

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For Internet television, the Beijing Olympics represent a milestone. NBC has created a site with an unprecedented 2,200 hours of live Webcasts of Olympic events. But the Olympics are also a powerful illustration of the current battle line between the big business of network television and the emerging medium of Web video. NBC’s broadcast and cable networks will air 700 hours of live events that will not be Webcast. And even more frustrating to some, another 700 hours of the contests will be taped and shown hours later on television, with no legal way for people in the United States to watch them before the broadcast.

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NBC actually showed Michael Phelps live on the East Coast last night as he shattered his own world record in the 400 individual medley. We watched–and, suddenly, the Olympics were as awesome as, well, the Olympics. If you live on the West Coast, of course, thanks to another absurd decision by NBC, you only got to watch the race after reading about Phelps’s victory online, when it was about as exciting as 1970s Super Bowls.

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Sometimes you wonder how the folks at NBC Universal get anything accomplished, when they seem totally unable to accept responsibility for the market challenges they face and demand that everyone else fix NBC Universal’s business-model problems. Remember, NBC Universal has been the main supporter of the idea that ISPs should be responsible for stopping any unauthorized transfer of content. But why take chances on having just one outside party prop up your business model? Now, NBC Universal’s “chief digital officer,” George Kliavkoff, is saying that it should be Apple’s responsibility to stop unauthorized usage by building special antipiracy filters into iTunes.

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With technologies like TiVo and text messaging taking over the world, marketers are being forced to rethink their approach to advertising.

The New York Times writes that NBC is hearkening back to its roots by moving beyond the 30-second commercial to form bigger, longer-term relationships with advertisers.

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