But Adobe (ADBE) says the majority of the Web’s video uses its Flash standard. And if you surf the Web via Apple’s (AAPL) iPad, you’ll quickly find clips that don’t work on the Flash-free device. Instead of video, you’ll confront the dreaded blue box.

So who’s right? Depends, of course, on whom you ask. But the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

Earlier this month, Encoding.com said that 66 percent of the videos it processes are in iPad-friendly H.264, adding that this number reflects the wider Web. But MeFeedia, a video search engine, which says it catalogs millions of videos from 30,000 sources, pegs the H.264 universe at a much lower number, 26 percent of all clips.

The two data sets aren’t necessarily at odds. Encoding.com is looking at clips it has been paid to…encode. while MeFeedia is looking at a wider range of clips, including lots of old ones that publishers either don’t want to re-encode or haven’t gotten around to re-encoding yet.

And it’s a perfectly rational decision for some publishers with big video archives–say, the New York Times (NYT)–to encode only their newer clips in H.264 for now. Because the new clips are probably responsible for the majority of their views.

It’s also worth noting that MeFeedia says it is tracking videos around the world. So its numbers are skewed by giant video sites like China’s Youku.com and Tudou.com, which are all-Flash.

Still, the H.264 cohort is growing. MeFeedia says that when it did the same tally in January, it found just 10 percent of clips in H.264. Easy enough to explain the jump as an “iPad effect.” And MeFeedia CEO Frank Sinton says that he has seen many publishers move aggressively to make their stuff iPad-ready: He cites Break, Vimeo, CNN and DailyMotion, among others.

No Flash Lego speed design from Tony Gil on Vimeo.

[Image credit: Tony Gil]

The music label’s suit made it very difficult for Veoh to climb out of the deep hole it found itself in last year. But it was the Web video start-up, not Universal, that dug that pit.

First, some housekeeping. CEO Dmitry Shapiro now confirms his company’s impending shutdown and Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing.

Plans to either sell or refinance the company came “close, in both cases,” he told me late this afternoon. “But we were unable to secure either option.”

Shapiro didn’t offer any details about the future of the Web site or the videos users have uploaded there over the years. I gather that’s because he doesn’t know himself.

He did, however, sketch out a brief picture of the company’s demise. Like others, Shapiro points out the problems caused by Universal’s copyright suit, which is broadly similar to the one Viacom (VIA) is still fighting with Google’s (GOOG) YouTube.

“Clearly the UMG lawsuit was a tremendous weight on the company. It was both financially draining and distracting, and it choked off the ability for any significant strategic deals, because everybody we talked to was terrified of getting sued immediately,” he said. “And we know that potential investors were thinking that, too.”

But the UMG lawsuit didn’t burn through $70 million of investors’ money. At most, sources say, the company spent something in the $6 million to $8 million range on legal fees.

Where did the rest of the money to go?

To fund Veoh’s YouTube-sized ambitions, apparently. Sources familiar with the company tell me that during its go-go days, it was spending as much as $4 million a month on a bloated staff and infrastructure.

But Veoh only generated something like $12 million in sales over its five-year life, and most of that was in the past couple years, sources said.

Veoh’s burn rate was cut back significantly after the economy crashed. And it shrank even more last April, when Shapiro returned to the company he founded and replaced then-CEO Steve Mitgang.

Could Veoh have raised more money at that point? It’s hard to see how, even if the Universal lawsuit wasn’t hanging over it. It was difficult to raise money for any online advertising venture in the spring of 2009, let alone a money-burning Web video site.

And it’s worth noting that Joost, another well-funded Web video start-up, more or less shut down a few months after Veoh’s restructuring.

On the other hand, France’s DailyMotion managed to raise another $25 million last October. So there are still people out there betting on Web video, and Shapiro says they’re right. But his company was too early, and it grew too fast–and ultimately, not fast enough.

“We were pioneers, and we were there in the first few years when there was no advertising market to speak of,” he says. “Over the next couple years, do I think that more and more brand advertisers are going to move into online video? Absolutely. Online video is going to be a success.”

Music videos are so popular on Google’s (GOOG) video site, in fact, that YouTube had to break its most watched list into two lists–music videos and everything else. If it hadn’t, then people like you and me, who have only a vague idea who Pitbull and Keri Hilson are, would have been totally baffled.

Speaking of baffling, you’ll note that two of the 10 videos below aren’t actually from YouTube at all, but from France’s DailyMotion. For whatever reason–at this point I’ve basically given up trying to figure out the vagaries of YouTube’s rights and clearances–YouTube still isn’t letting people embed the Susan Boyle clip. And U.S. viewers, at least, can’t watch the Hilson clip at all. Go figure.

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)

2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)

3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)

4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)

5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global):

1. Pitbull “I Know You Want Me” (82+ million views)

2. Miley Cyrus “The Climb” (64+ million views)

3. Miley Cyrus “Party in the U.S.A.” (54+ million views)

4. The Lonely Island “I’m on a Boat” (48+ million views)

5. Keri Hilson “Knock You Down” (35+ million views)

The Web is full of chatter about yesterday’s game, but video is hard to come by. Again, this appears to be a case of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube flexing its ContentID system on behalf of copyright owners, in this case the European sports marketing company Sportfive.

This is a theoretical victory for content creators, who want to be able to control how and where their stuff appears on the Web. But since there doesn’t seem to be an approved video, it’s not really a solution. If it’s a story that’s attracting most of the world’s attention, someone’s going to find it, somewhere.

For instance, a bit of searching did yield these two, at least for now: A high-quality YouTube version of what appears to be a French broadcast, via the Los Angeles Times, and what appears to be a German highlight reel, via DailyMotion and FootyTube, which consistently has great soccer highlights, legal or not (thanks to Zen Web Solutions for the reminder).

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”

Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides.

According to sources, Google (GOOG) is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud computing arenas.

That would be welcome news for many.

That’s because, as The Wall Street Journal noted in a piece today, “August was shaping up to be the worst month for deal making since 1995, according to data provider Dealogic” (see the chart).

That was, until Disney (DIS) bought Marvel for $4 billion, in a deal announced Monday.

Then yesterday, eBay (EBAY) traded 65 percent of its Skype Internet telephony unit to a group of free-spending private investors, led by Silver Lake Partners, for $1.9 billion.

While eye-popping numbers like that make dealmakers smile, most think it is in the spate of smaller venture-backed companies that more of the action will happen, with big companies like Google, Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL) and even Yahoo (YHOO) as predators.

Many of these were funded in the Web 2.0 boom and have done well enough, but are figuring out that a link with a larger fish will likely make for a better outcome, along with filling in tech and product gaps at the giants.

Think about Facebook’s $50 million acquisition of social networking site FriendFeed recently and you have the right idea.

According to more than a half-dozen Silicon Valley VCs I have spoken to this week, this is the likeliest kind of exit for a large group of their portfolio companies.

Thus, they are putting on their finest and placing themselves on display in the store window, offering talent and innovation.

“We all realize that a lot of these companies are not going to be independent, so we’re all trying to figure out where they best fit in,” said one VC. “We essentially did business development for a lot of the large companies.”

Thus, here are some companies whose names have been bandied about of late by M&A types who say they are more likely candidates for sale:

Veoh, the Web video portal that MediaMemo wrote about in July, has reportedly been searching for a home for a while now as it struggles in a costly space dominated by giants like YouTube and Hulu.

That goes for many other similar video efforts, such as Joost, Metacafe and Dailymotion, all of which have been trying to gain traction.

There is also likely to be a shakeout in the gaming and “guy” content space, which has also seen a lot of funding in the last several years and less monetary success.

Some possible names here include: Xfire, a gaming instant-messaging company Viacom (VIA) bought a couple years ago for $100 million; Giant Realm, a 20-something guy site funded by Comcast (CMCSA) and others; and UGO, Hearst’s version of a 20-something guy site.

Probably, given the need to focus on monetization, the most active M&A space will be in online advertising.

Sources said Google, for example, has been interested in companies such as Teracent, a dynamic ad-serving and optimization start-up in San Mateo.

There are lots of names in this general arena to pick from, from Tumri to Quantcast to AdMob to the Rubicon Project, not all of which are for sale, but might be for the right price.

Lastly, there is the smart phone and telecom space, where there might be some of the bigger deals.

While Palm (PALM) has been trying mightily to gain traction with its Pre offering, many think that if it does not go as well as hoped, the company will be an acquisition target eventually for giant companies like Nokia (NOK).

While many think Microsoft could also be a buyer of Palm, given the lackluster performance of its Windows Mobile devices, it might be more attuned to a much bigger catch: Research in Motion (RIMM) and its business-oriented BlackBerry empire.

Such a massive acquisition–most of those I bounced that idea off agreed–would be an uphill battle, but it would be perhaps the best fish story ever.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

A good bet: Veoh, one of the best-funded would-be YouTubes. Multiple sources tell me the company is aggressively marketing itself in hopes of finding a buyer.

And if a deal does go through, it will result in a loss for the company’s high-profile backers, who include former Disney (DIS) CEO Michael Eisner and Goldman Sachs (GS). I’m told that CEO Dmitry Shapiro has been shopping the company at prices below $70 million, which is the amount investors have sunk into the portal since 2005.

What happened to Veoh? The same thing that happened to almost every other Web video portal that isn’t Google’s (GOOG) YouTube or Hulu: Not enough audience, not enough ad revenue, too many costs.

Veoh claims an audience of about 25 million users, which is less than auditors like comScore (SCOR) report, and is, in any case, an order of magnitude smaller than YouTube’s. Sources tell me the company lost money on revenue of about $6 million last year. Sales are up and executives are optimistic it could break even this year, but the trajectory isn’t high enough to keep Veoh afloat as an independent company.

Complicating matters for Veoh is a costly court battle with Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, which accuses the company of copyright violations. That two-year-old fight has cost the start-up millions in legal fees.

The fact that Veoh’s backers include media-savvy players like Time Warner (TWX); former Viacom executives Tom Freston and Jonathan Dolgen; and Spark Capital, one of the primary investors in Twitter, hasn’t been enough to help the company extricate itself from the suit.

In April, Veoh laid off a good chunk of its staff, replaced CEO Steve Mitgang with Shapiro, the company’s founder, and focused its energy on a new “Video Compass” player that users are supposed to download and install in their Web browsers.

At the time, Shapiro said that the company’s Web portal business was a success but acknowledged that “quite frankly, there are a lot of things like that.”

So who would buy Veoh? Theoretically, at the right price, the company could be attractive to a large Web player like a Yahoo (YHOO), which used to be a big player in video back when video was a small market. Or the company could try marketing its technical expertise to a cable/telco company like Time Warner Cable (TWC) that hasn’t done much with online video but says it will soon.

But rival Web portal Joost tried making the same pitch to various buyers over the last few months and couldn’t get a deal done. Last week Joost laid off most of its staff and said it would try to go it alone as a services company.

This kind of flux is now par for the course among the big Web portals that thought they could rival YouTube, or at least secure second place. But Google’s lead over everyone else in video gets bigger every day, and its primary competitor is now Hulu, which has the advantage of premium content from its Hollywood owners–Disney, GE’s (GE) NBC Universal, and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox.

In addition to Veoh and Joost, France’s DailyMotion has swapped out CEOs in recent months and is reportedly looking to raise money. Meanwhile, Metacafe, yet another video hub, has hired boutique investment bank Think Equity to look for “strategic investors to provide expansion capital.”

Metacafe CEO Erick Hachenburg says his company doesn’t need the money and can survive on its own if it doesn’t go ahead with a deal. “You would expect in this marketplace that you’re going to have a shakeout, and the stronger players are going to make it,” he says.

That sounds right. The question is whether we’ll have more than two players left when this is all over.

The service is laying off the majority of its employees, and CEO Mike Volpi (pictured right) is out, replaced by Matt Zelesko, who had been SVP of engineering. The Joost.com portal site will stay open, but best to think of it as an ad for the company’s hosting and distribution services, which it will try to sell to cable companies and the like.

A Joost spokesperson declined to say how deep the layoffs will be; but I’m told that the company, which had more than 100 employees last fall, will be down to a couple dozen after the cuts are done. In a post on Joost’s Web site, Volpi said the company “will say goodbye to many of our colleagues and friends.”

This isn’t a shock: Joost’s fate has been the subject of whisper and rumors for the last year or more. The service made an initial splash in 2007 by raising $45 million from the founders of Skype and an array of high-profile investors and media companies, including Sequoia Capital and Viacom (VIA), and was initially supposed to deliver copyrighted content via a peer-to-peer distribution system and a player that users downloaded to their desktops.

But YouTube, and later Hulu, conditioned users to watch video via their browsers, and Joost’s software never caught on. By last fall, the company had retooled and began offering video via the browser like everyone else, but it has never been able to generate a significant audience. In November, a month after the company launched its Web browser, it said it was attracting 2.1 million unique users world-wide, a fraction of YouTube’s audience, and well behind rivals like Hulu, MetaCafe, Veoh and DailyMotion.

Here’s the service’s unique visitor count, per Comscore (SCOR); Joost’s unique viewer count, which is the more relevant metric for video sites, is considerably smaller (click to enlarge):

Joost has been a frequent candidate for buyout rumors, and the company hasn’t gone out of its way to deny them. The supposed buyers would be cable companies like Comcast (CMCSA) Time Warner Cable (TWC) or telcos like AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ), which would presumably use Joost’s technical team to help build out their own Web video plays.

But some of the cable guys and telcos insist that they’re fine with the people they have. And if they do want to buy a video player, they have plenty of options: Just about all of Joost’s peers have been on the block, formally or informally, for the past few months.

JOOST TO PROVIDE WHITE LABEL ONLINE VIDEO PLATFORM

NEW YORK AND LONDON – June 30, 2009 – Joost, the online video startup, announced today that, along with Joost.com, it will focus on providing white label online video platforms for media companies, including cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators. This technology and service offering will support content owners’ efforts to build comprehensive branded environments online.

Media companies around the world are embracing internet-based video portals as a key path to distribute their premium video, but building a world-class video portal is increasingly difficult and expensive. Joost will focus on this issue and provide the market with a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands.

As a part of this new direction, Joost will reorganize and restructure its business. A core team in New York and London will work on providing these solutions, as well as operating and supporting Joost.com and its associated video applications. Joost also will wind down operations in its Leiden development center.

Matt Zelesko, currently SVP of Engineering at Joost, will take over as CEO while continuing to lead the engineering organization. Stacey Seltzer, currently SVP of international business development and content acquisition at Joost, will run the business operations. Mike Volpi has stepped down as CEO of Joost but will remain actively involved as Chairman of the Board.

Joost plans to make its white label video platform commercially available to media companies around the world. This offering will provide a solution for companies looking to build a branded experience for their content on their own site as well as other sites and platforms in their distribution networks.

Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle is indeed all she is cracked up to be.

But her virality on the Internet is not, even though she has–in fact–become an Internet sensation.

Though the performance of the unemployed 47-year-old woman–dressed in a dowdy frock, wowing the judges on the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent,” with an astonishing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Miserables”–has been viewed many millions of times now and growing, it’s not easy to move it around on the Web.

It should be.

And that’s too bad for those left slack-jawed by her obvious talent, including the notorious crab-apple judge, Simon Cowell, who also judges for the similar U.S. show “American Idol.”

Her performance got a huge boost from those who heard about it and watched it on the Internet, especially on the huge Google (GOOG) video service, YouTube.

But anyone who wants to do anything more than send a link to the video of Boyle singing on YouTube, most specifically, embedding it in posts, is out of luck.

That feature has been fully disabled on every YouTube version of the clip I looked at, with the note, “Embedding disabled by request.”

It’s ironic that YouTube gets intense copyright religion right when the video of a singing human angel goes viral.

So most people are watching the show’s seven-minute clip of Boyle on its official YouTube channel, which has gotten 11.4 million views so far.

But, thankfully, YouTube is not the only choice out there.

I finally grabbed one from DailyMotion, which has a ton of embeddable ones, such as the one below:

Thanks to all the readers who set me straight. It turns out there’s an easy answer for MegaVideo’s popularity: It’s a really good way to watch pirated movies and TV shows online.

The trick, it turns out, is not to go to MegaVideo itself to look for “The Dark Knight” or HBO’s new “Eastbound & Down” show. Instead you head to sites like movietvonline.com or sidereel.com, and they’ll direct you to one of MegaVideo’s streams. The stuff generally appears to be pretty good quality, and it’s much easier to access than a BitTorrent download–if you can use Hulu, you can use this stuff.

Apologies to anyone who finds this old hat. It’s obviously becoming more and more common for many of you. Again, take a look at this comScore (SCOR) growth chart. This is how you move from obscurity to the 10th-most popular video site in a year’s time (click graphic to enlarge):

Can’t Hollywood try to crack down on sites like MegaVideo and the sites that showcase their streams? After all, Google’s (GOOG) YouTube was once a piracy haven, and is much less so now. Same thing with DailyMotion, etc.

Sure. But the Chinese government has, um, a mixed record when it comes to IP protection. And in any event, we’re certainly going to see more of these coming down the pike, and it’s only going to be more commonplace.

All of which means that Hollywood, network TV and the cable companies have no choice if they want to keep viewers from turning to the pirates: Give them easy access to whatever they want, whenever they want it.

It’s the same scenario the music guys faced at the end of the 1990s, and they screwed it up. Look at them now.

Right now some of the players are talking a good game–“We think everything on television should become available to you on broadband for free,” Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes said yesterday at an investor conference. He doesn’t really mean free, by the way–he means free to cable and satellite TV subscribers.

The industry can hash out payment plans later. But first, those who make money creating and distributing video need to move very fast to get their stuff in front of viewers, wherever they want to see it. Because MegaVideo is already doing it.

Despite the little-movie-that-could, “Slumdog Millionaire,” sweeping the Oscars on Sunday night, it was well-nigh impossible to find a really good online video of the amazing Bollywood-style dance routine done during the closing credits to the also award-winning song, “Jai Ho!”

(Even the Pussycat Dolls have covered the song, which loosely translates to “Victory.”)

Unfortunately, the A.R. Rahman tune (two well-deserved Oscars for him!) in the catchy song-and-dance number seemed to be subject to takedowns all over the Web just when it probably was a good time to put it out and generate even more box office buzz for “Slumdog.”

Why? Well, as you can see below from the video mashup on Dailymotion that I finally found, it perfectly communicates the infectious mood of the movie:

At the top of a VideoSurf results page for ‘Mad Men,’ users can search for clips featuring specific characters.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by “seeing” images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip’s visual content, as well as its metadata — especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you’re looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn’t always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google (GOOG) Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf’s clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video’s contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf’s filmstrip views showed me exactly what I’d be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they’re looking for — or, often more important, what they’re not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, “Brothers and Sisters,” into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights — including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.’s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source — not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip didn’t show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo (YHOO) or CBS.com (CBS). Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren’t what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Recently, while I was at a conference in Los Angeles, I caught up with Veoh Founder Dmitry Shapiro.

BoomTown will be focusing a lot on online video this year and Veoh is one of the several online video-sharing sites–a group of smaller players that includes sites like Joost, Hulu, Dailymotion, Vimeo and others that I like to call not-YouTube.

But there are pluses to not being the Google-owned (GOOG) video behemoth, in that major entertainment companies who want to figure out how to put their content online aren’t wondering all day long whether to hug or sue you (or both if you are Sumner Redstone).

Today, for example, the Los Angeles-based Veoh announced that the ABC (DIS) television network would put full episodes of its hot prime-time shows–such as “Ugly Betty” (love it) and “Desperate Housewives” (not so much)–up on the site on a non-exclusive basis.

While Veoh has a lot of short, user-generated material, it has also made a push to get more professional material from big media companies like CBS (CBS)–which wins kudos for being the most promiscuous of networks–on its service.

Interestingly in this deal, media connections seem at play here: Disney-owned ABC is giving over content to Veoh, which has former Disney poobah Michael Eisner as one of its principal investors.

The traffic-type deal is typical–Veoh gets paid to send audience to ABC’s site or gets it to use ABC’s really nice player, and ABC tries to monetize it. Veoh currently says it has 28 million unique monthly visitors.

Of course, Veoh is also trying to figure out that nettlesome monetization issue that all online video sites face, which centers on building audience with the attractive big media content and then getting them to watch other ad-supported fare on its site.

But, as with all video sites, it is still in the early stages and, thus, Veoh got another tidy pile of new funding just two weeks ago to help it muddle through.

That would be $30 million more to add to the kitty of about $40 million previously raised.

Along with existing investors–Shelter Capital Partners, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs (GS), Eisner’s Tornante Company, Tom Freston’s Firefly3, Time Warner (TWX) Investments and Jonathan Dolgen–Veoh’s latest round included Intel Capital, Adobe Systems (ADBE) and also media and tech investor Gordon Crawford.

I talked to Shapiro, who now serves as Veoh’s chief innovation officer, about the money and more here:

Here are links to the posts I have done from BoomTown’s trip to Europe–with glamorous stops in England, France and Monaco (and all the videos are below too!)–in chronological order going backward:

Kara Visits the Royal Society in London

Kara Visits Cambridge University

Kara Visits a Feast!

Silicon Valley Loses to the Brits!

Kara Visits Dailymotion in Paris

Kara Visits Netvibes in Paris

Kara Visits the Monaco Media Forum: More Interviews on the French Riviera!

Kara Visits the Monaco Media Forum: Opening Dinner

Kara Visits Monte-Carlo

After my visit to Netvibes, I also went over to another cool Web company here that I have been following for a while: Dailymotion.

Based in Paris and funded with $32 million from Atlas Venture and Partech International, the video-sharing site positions itself these days as kind of an anti-YouTube–better at programming, easier to use with new tools for both user-generated and more professional content and more vigilant about copyright protection.

In fact, big media companies–like YouTube-suing Viacom–have singled out Dailymotion as an online video site they can do business with, even as they are also launching premium sites of their own.

But, obviously, offering premium fare from media giants is not Dailymotion’s main aim. Unusual videos are and, indeed, the fare on the site is a step up from typical cats-on-skateboards videos. Today, for example, there’s a cool video on skydiving in the Maldives.

Still, while popular in France, where it really counts at this point–the United States–Dailymotion obviously lags way behind YouTube in traffic. Nonetheless, it is not doing badly compared to other similar sites.

According to a report this summer from comScore:

Dailymotion.com has taken hold in the U.S., drawing more than 4.7 million video streamers in April. The average video streamer at Dailymotion.com viewed more than 10 videos and nearly one hour of video content in the month. Metacafe.com also generated substantial activity, as 3.7 million streamers viewed 33 million video streams, while Break.com saw 3.1 million streamers view 32 million video streams. Veoh.com, which attracted the smallest video-viewing audience of the group, had the highest level of user engagement with more than 104 minutes per streamer, benefiting from the many full-length videos hosted on the site.”

In any case, as these sites sort out their business plans–which YouTube is also still doing–to figure out a way to make money from advertising, here’s a chat I had with Dailymotion co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Benjamin Bejbaum:

(I am still having problems with the Brightcove player, so I uploaded this to Dailymotion, which is a nifty player anyway.)

Please see this disclosure related to me and YouTube (owned by Google).

Nonetheless, we press on and serve up some interesting items from around the Web–this time with a Euro-focus.

First observation: If you want to make a friend abroad, carry an iPhone. They are not for sale here yet, as deals between Apple and major European telecoms are still pending.

But Apple is likely to sell the iPhone here later in the year, with one of the major carriers, which include Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile, France Telecom’s Orange or ultra-hip Telefónica’s 02.

Until then, with it visible in my hand, I made about 53 new friends at Heathrow Airport where I was changing planes. I also scored free first-class champagne from the stewards on board British Airways for giving them a test run of the device.

Most people treated the phone as if it were Paris Hilton suddenly appearing in their midst, with a lot of pointing and gaping at it, as I watched the first season of NBC’s “Heroes” I had downloaded. (Save the cheerleader, indeed! From her creepy adopted Dad is more like it!)

And I could elicit visible oohs when I kept shifting the screen vertically and horizontally, as if I were performing some sort of “Harry Potter” magic.

Since I am in Ireland, here is a link to an Irish blogging site talking about the iPhone.

And check out the video Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert did especially for Philippe Dauman’s appearance at D5 this year–his impression of using an iPhone midway through skewers the ridiculous fascination with the iPhone perfectly.

And there’s a race here to figure out which European companies will be the best imitations of hugely popular sites in the U.S., such as Facebook and YouTube. Of course, both those companies are here on their own aggressively and hope to keep their share in Europe as strong.

Next week, I will be visiting the London offices of social-networking site Bebo, which has a strong presence in Britain and was rumored to be entertaining offers from Yahoo.

There are scads of other social networks here that are likely to get bought up by the big ones. And while MySpace is increasing its dominance here too, it is much more of a race than in the U.S.

There are a lot of YouTube wannabes here too, of course, like France’s Dailymotion, which has a lot more esoteric stuff, as well as boatloads more explicit nudity (one of the more popular videos on the site today, for example, is all you want to know about a particular woman’s body part).

Here’s an interesting animated video on Dailymotion from Britain called “Solar,” as an example of the fare:

And, of course, there is a recently launched European Commission channel on YouTube itself, called–of course–EUtube.

It got into a little controversy (and got lots of traffic), when it posted this short video on sex scenes from European films (here’s the link, as it is a bit racy with a very funny tag line at the end).

Of course, because it is Europe, the European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr brushed off the prudishness: “The European Union is not a Bible belt, we believe in freedom of expression and artistic creativity.”

Most of the channel is more tame, like this depressing video about AIDS, which has been viewed 150,000 times.