Web purists may see Viacom's moves as a repudiation of what the internet is all about, i.e. the free distribution of all kinds of content and damn the copyright. Some will see it as part of a needed maturation of the web into a place where businesses make money and artists get paid. But it may be just a step along a road that is fundamentally changing how consumers view and pay for video content.

Certainly for YouTube and its owner Google, Viacom's decision can only be bad news: the leading search engine's attempts strike a revenue sharing deal with Viacom for shows like SpongeBob Squarepants and MTV's The Crib have failed. Viacom wants better security for its content and probably also a bigger cut of the revenues than Google was willing to give. Given all this, Google's decision to pay $1.6bn (€1.2bn) for YouTube perhaps looks like a deal too far.

The truth is that Viacom has other options. YouTube may be the biggest video sharing site at the minute, but that was built by its being the destination site for videos of all kinds. If some of those videos start going elsewhere, so too does (at least some of) the audience.

Which brings me to the next big thing for video content on the web: Joost, the new online site (now in Beta trial) that will bring together and (hopefully) copyright-protect content from a number of different sources for its users. Joost uses peer-to-peer technology and could undermine a lot of pay-TV business models.

"It's a game changer," said one high-level TV executive who is watching Joost closely. Although there may be other video sites out there - many launched by the content owners themselves - Joost's USP is that it has aggregator ambitions and contacts with the big media companies and advertisers to make it happen. Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have form: first they disrupted the music business model with Grokster, then the phone business with Skype. Selling Skype to eBay for $2.6bn in 2005 only solidified their credentials.

The point is that Joost will use the web and broadband to deliver a TV-quality product, with full-screen video and even "channels" that will be streamed to a PC and even easily routed to the TV set. The technology is now available to make the picture really look good and the growing number of robust broadband connections means the available audience also continues to grow. As if to underline the appeal of Joost, the entrepreneur behind Italy's FastWeb Silvio Scaglia is in the process of launching a Joost-like service called Babelgum.

So, what does this mean for the traditional pay-TV companies? Certainly, as the competition heats up, pay satellite and cable TV need to shine up their offers and ramp up their service in order to keep customers happy and paying. Web TV promises viewers an infinite menu of content, new advertising models are being developed to track new viewing behaviours into streams of cash, and new search technologies are going to allow viewers to sort through what's available much more easily than is now available from most TV EPGs. Joost's founders call what they will offer a kind of "infinite Tivo" or PVR.

So given what is coming down the track at them, the high-profile spat between BSkyB and UK cable company Virgin Media about which channels will be offered on which platform at what price seems parochial and very short-sighted. What both Sky and Virgin Media must realise is that they no longer have a quasi-monopoly on how people get their video. You would think the biggest UK pay-TV players would have learned that from the rampant success of Freeview, the DTT TV service that, with nine million boxes now sold, counts a bigger installed base than Sky TV in the UK.

Individual broadcasters and producers all seem to be jumping into the online distribution of content, launching VOD sites as well as streaming services. The BBC recently announced its first big-budget drama targeted at web rather than TV audiences. Called Signs of Life, the new eight-part drama has a budget of £800,000 (€1.17m), very close to the cost of a traditional TV production. There are no plans to put it on traditional TV.

Gerhard Zeiler, the CEO of RTL Group, says: "Distribution in the digital age will be a commodity, but content will not be." RTL is ramping up its online sites under the umbrella brand Clipfish; in Germany Clipfish has attracted 200m impressions in just six months. If the websites work the way RTL hopes, then the broadcaster may rethink how it organises and markets its TV channels. If Clipfish is RTL's answer to YouTube, then how long before other broadcasters do the same and the first age of the video sharing site boom is well and truly already over