Google, which dominates the Internet ad space, and the Nielsen Company, the definitive voice in measuring TV audiences, have joined forces to give advertisers a more realistic and accurate measure of how many people are watching their TV commercials and who these people are.

It’s a long way off at the moment, but the teaming of Google and Nielsen and the information they produce could one day alter television advertising, disrupting the way ads are created, how they are sold, how they’re targeted, and ultimately what we as viewers see at home.

“We can make advertising more relevant to the viewer at home,” said Mike Steib, the director of the Google TV Ads program. (BusinessWeek.)

“We want to bring all the advantages that we see in online advertising — like more accountability, a better sense of audience, better tools to optimize a campaign — and bring them to television to make TV advertising more effective,” Steib said. (New York Times.)

“We see a future in which, when you sit down in front of your television set, you will see ads that are more relevant for you,” he said.

With all the news recently about Sony’s Playstation 3 becoming a full-fledge media device, particularly overseas, I’ve wondered what Microsoft plans to do with its Xbox game platform.

David Richards at Smarthouse may have answered my question. He reports that Toshiba, owner of the HD-DVD patents, is working with Microsoft on an Entertainment Xbox, due out in late 2008 or early 2009. The device will feature, naturally, an HD-DVD player, a large hard drive, and new entertainment software that’s a spin off of Microsoft’s Media Center.

For Toshiba, an Entertainment Xbox with an HD-DVD player is critical for success if it is to defeat Sony’s (and others’) Blu-ray players in the format wars.

Of course, the Entertainment Xbox is being developed in response to Sony’s Playstation 3, which has started slowly but seems to be gaining momentum lately after price cuts, game availability improving, and the device being positioned as a powerful stand-alone home media hub (mostly in Europe and Asia), not just a game console or a PC-based media extender.

There’s one thing to this whole video identification business I don’t understand. If it’s so important that we stop people from uploading copyrighted content to video sharing sites like YouTube and Veoh, then why haven’t the best brains in multiple industries figured out a solution?

Is video fingerprinting not possible? Is it too complicated? Is it barking up the wrong tree? Trying to stop people before they upload copyrighted video seems nearly impossible to me — and many of us think it’s a complete waste of time and resources.

But we’re not Big Media.

Big Media is hellbent to stop people from uploading copyrighted video to the Web. So instead of getting together and working on a viable solution, what do Big Media and their Internet buddies do? They announce the formation of a copyright protection blood pact that promises to “foster online innovation while protecting copyrights.”

Today’s announcement that YouTube’s video identification technology is now in beta was mostly met with jeers, not cheers.

As Read/Write Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote, “[It] will not come close to satisfying angry rights holders.”

Bob Tur, the first to file a copyright lawsuit against YouTube, is one of those angry rights holders. He told Webware.com, “It’s a slap in the face of copyright holders.”

The loudest complaint about YouTube Video Identification is that it puts the burden on rights holders to upload versions of their copyrighted movies, TV shows, and other video content to a database. The content is then broken down into data points and analyzed so that any pirated versions posted will be automatically identified and taken off YouTube within minutes.

Sometimes it’s just easier to sit in your favorite chair or stretch out on the sofa and watch a TV show or movie “on demand.” No muss, no fuss.

A just-released report by Pike & Fischer notes that Americans are warming up to the idea of watching movies and TV shows on a whim. Video-on-demand, the report notes, will occupy well over a third of Americans’ TV-viewing time by 2012.

The Maryland-based market research firm says that a majority of U.S. households will watch some form of on-demand content from cable, satellite, or fiber-optic providers. It expects that the amount of time viewing video-on-demand will rise from 8.5 percent at the end of 2007 to about 38 percent by 2012, while the average monthly TV viewing per household will remain stable.

By the time you read this, thousands of happy fans will have already picked up their pre-ordered copies of Halo 3, the most hotly anticipated video game release of the year. No doubt most of them will have started playing too. The third and final installment in the successful Halo franchise, Halo 3 is in a lot of ways more than just another video game. It has become a de facto entertainment brand, complete with books, comics, action figures, and more. Additionally, Halo 3 has become an important marketing vehicle for Microsoft and its partners. In this post we take a look at the relationship between Halo 3 and Microsoft’s overall digital media strategy.

Games journalist Steve Boxer recently interviewed three Sony executives on the influence of Web 2.0 on gaming, a product the company is developing called SingStar, and its new virtual environment, Home. What caught my eye, and got me thinking, was the admonition that Home will pull in a wider audience to the PS3.

Here’s what Peter Edward, the director of the PlayStation Home Platform Group, had to say:

Let’s be honest, most of the purchasers of PS3s are classic 18 to 34 (year-old) males right now, but there are lots of other family members and friends who might see [core gamers] using Home and think: ‘That looks like fun. I’m not normally the sort of person who would use a PS3, but let’s have a go with it.’