Zoom In on VeriSign

And sure, Joost may be just the revolution everyone has been waiting for, but until it wins a large and loyal following, it will have to stand in line with Netflix and all the other would-be revolutionaries: BitTorrent, Amazon.com's Unbox, the studio-sanctioned MovieLink, Apple's iTunes and whatever Google is planning through its ownership of YouTube.

Joost's weak point right now is an absence of partnerships with film and TV production studios, which have been less keen on using the fastest, slickest technology than on making sure consumers watch their programs exactly when and how the studios instruct. So far, MovieLink, Amazon, Apple and even BitTorrent have gained ground with studio partnerships.

But there's another piece of the equation that could make a big difference in determining who wins share in the Internet-video market: People need software on their PCs to let them download movies there, so the company with the most widely distributed software program will have a key advantage.

This is no small matter. YouTube leapt past longtime stalwarts such as RealNetworks' RealPlayer partly because users didn't need to install a special program to watch videos. YouTube relied on Adobe's Flash technology, which was already installed on most PCs.

And that brings us to the third piece of online-video news this month -- the least noticed but potentially the most important. Adobe hasn't yet monetized the ubiquitous role its Flash technology plays in video sites such as YouTube, but that may change with a deal it signed to integrate Flash with a peer-to-peer software program owned by VeriSign .