Video continues to be a big focus for AOL. On Monday it will announce an update to its AOL Video portal (soft launch now available here)

According to AOL, the main benefits are:

• A redesigned main page that makes it easier for consumers to discover, search for and find millions of videos from across the Web;
• A redesigned video search experience that leverages industry-leading Truveo^TM video search technology and features better presentation of Web search results to help users more easily find what they are looking for and;
• A new embedded playback experience where consumers can find and watch videos from other popular video sites on the AOL Video site.

I continue to find Truveo to be a real differentiator for AOL (recall that AOL acquired Truveo back in January, 2006). The quality of the search results is consistently better than anyone else's. Just try running a "Tiger Woods" video search on all the different services. Truveo also helps AOL maintain a hybrid "open/closed" approach (my term) - with AOL simultaneously offering access to video anywhere on the web while also operating a walled garden of video supplied by numerous partners.

AOL noted that over the past nine months, skyrocketing consumer demand for online video has propelled the number of unique visitors on AOL Video to grow by 300% to eight million uniques per month.

I have no idea how that traffic divides up, but my guess is that a lot of those uniques are coming to AOL Video to run video searches. AOL pops a new browser window for video found at other places so it doesn't entirely lose the visitor.

In my firm's recent report on broadband video aggregators, AOL was among the 12 companies we identified as most likely to emerge as successes. I continue to like how they're blending web content with in-network content, branded with UGC, search with browse, free with paid and streaming with download. I think of Yahoo and MSN as their two closest portal competitors. While MSN is doing a respectable job, AOL is well out in front of Yahoo from a user experience standpoint. With the recent shakeup at Yahoo, I expect them to better capitalize on their considerable potential.