What will be YouTube 2.0?

Break.com
Holding a steady audience of about 3 million monthly viewers since March, Break.com caters to a very particular clientele — the Red Bull-drinking fraternity set. “We’re better than almost every other company in providing online video entertainment to 20-year-old guys,” says Chief Executive Keith Richman. Contributors to the upload site try to outdo each other with videos of wild antics and pranks. This week’s most popular footage: a chase involving a bicyclist outrunning police cars on a highway. Sounds like a perfect match for Viacom, whose viewers of the Jackass series on MTV and the Comedy Central network would eat this stuff up.

Revver
If you’re just another user-generated video upload site with a lot of submissions but are looking to stand out (Microsoft’s Soapbox and MSN Video, Yahoo! Video and AOL Video come to mind), here’s a draw: pay your content creators. Startup Revver’s revenue-sharing model encourages people to submit their creations by offering them a 50/50 split of the cash their videos generate. Buy Revver for its trackable ad tech, or invent a comparable solution — either way you’ll make your mark.

Blinkx
The company that cracks video search first is going to win big, says Blinkx founder and Chief Technology Officer Suranga Chandratillake. While his own company, a Web-scanning video search site that uses audio recognition and image analysis technologies to add relevance to search queries, is in the running, so are Blinkx’s partners and potential acquirers. Partnerships with AOL and, soon, Microsoft show that at least some media portals think scouring the Web for content and pointing to it — as opposed to only indexing uploads, which Google and YouTube do — is crucial. But none of them have implemented video search properly. “Video search is a real open market, since nobody is doing a great job,” says Forrester analyst Brian Haven.

Veoh
Snack-sized videoclips are just a fad, says Veoh Chief Executive Dmitry Shapiro. His startup is betting that users will graduate to longer-form, high-resolution video — eventually viewed on a television, not a computer monitor. That’s why Veoh features a sharing network that allows users to download, not stream, gigabytes of content. Time Warner and Disney see the potential — both companies have funded Veoh. Former Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner is serious about online video making its way to TV sets — he joined Veoh’s board of directors and is allowing Apple Computer to move his company’s shows and films to TVs via its upcoming ITV set-top box.

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