Online video is always in the news this year. Perhaps this is because it's become the most critical site of battle between old and new media; the big corporations and the power of crowds.

Most recently, of course, media giant Viacom inc. filed a $1bn lawsuit against Google yesterday, aimed at its internet video sharing site YouTube. The suit charges Google with "massive intentional copyright infringements" of Viacom's assets. Viacom owns such perennial YouTube favourite sources as MTV and Comedy Central. The company says that almost 160,000 unauthorised clips from its programmes have been uploaded onto YouTube and that these have been viewed more than 1.5bn times. "There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process," a statement from the company said.

The BBC reports that Google says it is "confident" that YouTube has respected the rights of copyright holders. However, investors appear to be less confident, with the search company's shares falling fall $11.72, or 2.6%, when the news was announced.

It's ironic that news of the suit comes little more than two weeks after news emerged that YouTube had entered into an agreement with Audible Magic, to license its copyright protection technology to filter out unlicensed clips. The company signed a deal with MySpace on February 12 to perform a similar service. Or perhaps it's not ironic at all, a cynical observer might suggest that it signals the hunger of company lawyers to make money from YouTube's allegedly illegal content before the company could move to eliminate that content itself.

Searching video is already perfectly possible. On Monday, Beet TV revealed that a US defence contractor BBN had "applied a national security technology application, developed to fight terrorism, to "crawl" the audio tracks of public Internet videos through its PodZinger subsidiary." Apparently, more than 1.5mn videos have been analysed, transcribed and made searchable since December. The company is now seeking to sell its technology to other search companies as a 'white box' solution to video search. Meanwhile, music recommendation site last.fm yesterday announced that it was to extend its analysis engine "audioscrobbler" to video files, suggesting that it, too, has access to the means to analyse video for its content.

The deployment of this kind of search technology appears to be vital for the future well-being of sharing sites. Not only will it open those sites up to mainstream users who don't want to have to rely on tags and browsing to find the videos they need, but it will give site owners the capacity to automatically identify material that might lead to litigation.