Everyone's talking video these days. So what's the deal? Here's a recap of some recent stats and stories from the Wild Wild Web.

According to eMarketer, the online video ad business will reach $2.35 BILLION dollars by 2010, up from $385 million in 2006. But even this prediction may be low:

"Recent news indicates that those estimates from June of this year may already be outdated," says David Hallerman, an eMarketer senior analyst. "Whether it's advertising or it's content, the internet audience increasingly wants video."

So many streams... According to the comScore Media Metrix results for August, Fox Interactive (which includes MySpace) beat out both YouTube and Yahoo! for streams served, with 1.4 billion streams during the month, accounting for 20.1% of the market. Not bad.

Not surprisingly, a few of the ad-serving heavyweights are coming out with products and services to cater to this blossoming market. Just last month at ad:tech NY, DoubleClick launched its first foray into the in-stream ad market with an update to the Motif product line, called Dart Motif for In-Stream. Then this week ValueClick launched a beta service offering in-stream and in-banner advertising for advertisers and publishers on its network of 13,000+ sites.

Meanwhile, the folks over at AOL have come up with a Video Search service and companion product to help other sites submit their video feeds to the AOL Video Search index, as well as integrate video search into their own sites. The best part? It's completely free!

Why all the fuss? Because according to some industry survey, there is a massive shift of ad dollars coming over from TV:

"Of the 168 respondents, 33 percent predict that switch to be between 10 and 19 percent. Budgets for 2007 online advertising are expected to rise by an average of 42 percent over 2006."

No doubt there will be more news in this space over the coming months as online video continues to dominate the headlines. I'll be sure to keep you posted.