At NewTeeVee Live, a panel of venture capitalists that have backed online video startups like Veoh and Heavy.com talked about funding for the nascent market. Depending on who was talking, the outlook for VC investments varied from treacherous to less treacherous.

Entertainment-lawyer-turned-VC Dennis Miller of Spark Capital warned that there are already investors who are becoming “roadkill” and there will be more roadkill ahead. George Zachary of Charles River Ventures generally agreed that there aren’t a lot of Google-like opportunities in video now that will pay mega-dividends to early investors. Instead, Zachary thinks the money isn’t in the content but in the social networks that are built around content.

At NewTeeVee Live, the subject of copyright came up in a roundtable about “crossover hits” between the Internet and TV, and an MTV executive boldly went where other content owners have been hesitant to go before.

Ty Ahmad-Taylor, vice president of product development at MTV Networks, said he thinks the best antidote to piracy is making your content widely available. Apparently, not everyone at MTV’s parent company Viacom shares that exact view, since Viacom’s filed a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube.

This is a guest post by Ryan Jarrett. Ryan is a UK-based IT consultant and blogs regularly on digital content.

The BBC will launch their long-awaited iPlayer this Friday, which has the potential to change the way television is watched by the masses. In this post we examine what the iPlayer is promising, the BBC’s future developments for TV over the internet, and how rival networks are competing for our bandwidth.