The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever-changing images.  It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal. The new brand identity will be fully unveiled on December 10, when AOL common stock begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Our new identity is uniquely dynamic. Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people – employees, partners, and advertisers. We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the AOL brand as we take the company into the next decade,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AOL.

Unlike Yahoo, which is also seeking to reinvigorate its brand with a multi-million dollar media campaign, “Aol.” will not be spending big dollars on a media campaign. (The “.” is part of the name, like the “!” at the end of Yahoo.)

According to CEO Tim Armstrong the company will promote its new identity on its own pages mostly. He told PaidContent that the campaign will be “very, very, very inexpensive because we’re focused on just improving the products and services. I would say the marketing budget is the budget we’re using on product development and the changes we’re making.”

This is wise. Aol needs to focus on its content and user experiences across its vast online territories rather than spending loads of money on TV and online display advertising. Just the same, one could argue that brands online matter now more than ever. Aol does need to stand in consumers’ minds for something. The company needs to answer the question “why Aol?” given how many sources of content, tools and information are out there.

A decade ago it was the dominant internet “portal” and destination of the day. But over time and through some neglect the brand became stale and associated with unsophisticated users: “training wheels for the internet.” The company later developed an ambivalent attitude toward “AOL,” pushing independent brands such as Platform A, Moviefone, PopEater, Engadget, MapQuest, GameDaily, TMZ, Truveo, MediaGlow (among others) to minimize or avoid the “newbie” stigma.

Is Aol like Proctor & Gamble or a magazine publisher, which has a portfolio of consumer brands or is it more like Apple, which has a single brand identity with a number of products in the market? Some version of this question must be answered.

Aol has decided the company is going to emphasize “content.” That necessarily involves a balance between cultivating individual brands as destinations online and, if the Aol brand isn’t going to be totally subordinated, some positioning of the parent brand in relation to those content brands.

And then there’s AOL search and where that fits into the strategy, but we’ll leave that for later.

Against that backdrop of intense competition and increasing consumer demand for online video, AOL’s video search engine Truveo has relaunched on a global basis (17 countries).

Truveo began as a video search technology platform and was acquired by AOL in January, 2006. In August of 2007 it became a consumer destination site. The previous version of the site had a number of virtues (depth, global scope, organization) but also serious problems with usability. I wrote at the time:

The single biggest drawback to the site (esp. vs. YouTube) is the fact that many (though not all) of Truveo’s content partners contractually require that videos be served on their sites rather than on Truveo. Consequently a pop-up appears and you watch the desired video (and pre-rolls ads) on the partner sites (about 50% of the time in my quick testing). That creates a variable experience, which YouTube avoids by having everything play in a single, uniform player on its site.

Those problems have largely remedied with the new user experience though there’s still some unevenness. Yet one can watch many more videos on the Truveo site itself today; and where the engine is compelled to link to third party sites (i.e., no video embed code) Truveo frames the experience. Here are two viewing modes:

Among the improvements, there are also new user controls and filters to search or browse video by source or sort by popularity, ranking and recency:

There are also myriad full-length shows on the site. Overall this is a dramatically improved user experience and Truveo should see its traffic increase accordingly.

Truveo itself says that its global reach and the comprehensiveness of its video index — all the video is being crawled, there are no feeds or deals here — are what differentiate the site from competitors. AOL video remains a separate site with a different look and feel, though they share technology.

As part of the announcement this morning Truveo announced a deal to power video search on Univision Interactive Media’s online portal.

Included in the study were Blinkx, Google Video, Microsoft Live Video Search and Yahoo Video search, in addition to Truveo. YouTube was not included because it’s not considered by Truveo to be a “video search engine.” Truveo indexes YouTube results.

The survey involved 5,000 individual queries across the top 100 Alexa rated news, sports, TV, music and movie sites that have video content. In terms of those top 100 sites here’s how the various competitors fared in terms of coverage:

–Truveo: 86 –Blinkx: 20 –Microsoft Live Video Search: 17 –Google Video: 3 –Yahoo Video Search: 2

Truveo went to great lengths with me to show that the survey was unbiased. Clearly any company that conducts a survey in which the outcome declares that company itself to be the winner needs to be extremely transparent, which Truveo is trying to be. Here’s what it said regarding the methodology of the study:

To develop the list of 100 websites Truveo selected the top 100 Alexa-ranked video content websites with the highest traffic rank (as recorded on August 6, 2008) for each of the following categories: news, sports, TV, music and movies. These five lists were combined and sorted by traffic rank. Sites were then checked to ensure they had a reasonable number of videos and were appropriate for the study. The top 100 sites on this list were then selected for testing.

Then, the study selected 10 representative videos from each of the websites and queried each search engine for each video. If a search engine returned at least five of the 10 representative videos, it was counted as covering that website. Because the test was designed to measure coverage, the search engine needed to return the exact video from the original site in order to be counted. The queries were run between August 8, 2008 and August 28, 2008.

The full methodology is available upon request from Truveo or AOL.

Google:

Google has an Olympics homepage that showcases a range of services and tools to keep track of events, including an iGoogle gadget. Depending on what country you’re in, there are different YouTube channels. And there’s a mobile site.

Google is also offering special OneBox results for individual Olympic events. Yahoo:

Yahoo has a medal count shortcut, extensive coverage on Yahoo Sports and a dedicated mobile site.

Yahoo is also offering Olympics video clips.

Microsoft Live Search:

Microsoft is supplying Olympic updates and medal counts through a partnership with NBC. The links displayed in blended search results click through to the NBC Olympics site.

Truveo/AOL:

Truveo has extensive video coverage of the Olympics from multiple partners and sources across the internet.

Ask:

Ask offers special smart search results, pull-downs (by sport) and refinements.

In the non-search engine category, ESPN and NBC have extensive coverage on their sites. There’s also a fair amount of video on the NBC site. Reuters has some in-depth coverage as well.

According to the AOL press release, the new ads were developed in conjunction with Gannett-owned PointRoll. Here’s how they work:

Rather than overlaying an ad and obstructing the view of a video, AOL’s video ticker ad appears at the bottom of the video player 10 seconds into the video stream. When clicked by a user, the ad expands while the video pauses. If the user does not interact with the ad, it will dissolve after 15 seconds leaving the branded text link. Clicking on the branded text link, located at the top of the video player, will relaunch the ticker.

Below is a screenshot:

The new AOL ads are similar to those recently integrated by YouTube on the site. However, none of the video is obscured in the AOL ads, as the release excerpt says above. Yet the approach is similar to the YouTube (and Brightcover and VideoEgg) approaches. It suggests a new standard may be emerging for online video advertising, which avoids pre-roll entirely.

NBCU and News Corp. video destination HULU has also said no to pre-roll.

YouTube has numerous international sites as well. However, Truveo indexes YouTube video in addition to video from major branded content sites and producers. Truveo CEO Tim Tuttle previously said to me that one important difference between Truveo and YouTube is that content is presented in an environment that is “favorable and friendly” to professional content producers.

This new international expansion, which, according to Tuttle, was challenging technically in certain respects, helps serve the already large non-U.S. audience for the site. It also comes just a couple of days after the private beta launch of NBC and News Corp.’s high-profile joint video venture, Hulu. AOL is one of several distribution partners for Hulu as well.

One of the interesting discussions that Tuttle and I had during the briefing for the international launch was how all this online video content and video search would eventually make its way onto TV. Tuttle agreed that it would.

With sites like Truveo, Hulu, and YouTube making a huge variety of branded and “tail” video content available, viewers might ultimately opt for those sites and sources rather than traditional broadcast TV or cable. Assuming the quality of the online video experience continues to improve, eventually a traditional cable TV subscription might be less and less necessary. One might only need the Internet and a screen in the living room.

Last night, Truveo relaunched as a consumer video search destination. Emphasizing branded content (including branded channels), it may be the most comprehensive video search site on the Internet. The site also has a host of personalization and social media features (user favorites, what’s hot, etc.). Truveo CEO Tim Tuttle contrasts the site with YouTube (which is also indexed on Truveo) as a place where branded content is presented in an environment that is favorable and friendly to professional content producers.

Tuttle also says that the organization and presentation of content on Truveo avoids the “noise” that one finds on many video sites and thus enables people to get to the videos they may want faster. For example, a search for “Harry Potter” on YouTube might yield scores of videos and montages put together by fans mixed with content from professional producers. Truveo calls out the professional content, while also presenting the fan content. Compare YouTube and Truveo search results for “Harry Potter.” Many people will watch and enjoy the fan videos, while others just want to see the professional clip or interview.

Arguably Truveo overwhelms users with too much content and too many choices, but there will be refinements over time as users interact with it. The single biggest drawback to the site (esp. vs. YouTube) is the fact that many (though not all) of Truveo’s content partners contractually require that videos be served on their sites rather than on Truveo. Consequently a pop-up appears and you watch the desired video (and pre-rolls ads) on the partner sites (about 50% of the time in my quick testing). That creates a variable experience, which YouTube avoids by having everything play in a single, uniform player on its site. However, YouTube no longer legally offers some of the branded content (e.g., The Daily Show) that helped boost it to its market-leading position. (Although those verboten clips are constantly reintroduced by fans.)

Tuttle acknowledges this user-experience limitation and believes that more content sites and producers will allow videos to play on destination sites/video search engines like Truveo over time because it’s a better user experience.