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Once reserved for big-budget Web portals, video is poised to change the World Wide Web of static text-and-photo pages into a full-motion medium, market watchers say.

Plummeting production and on-line distribution costs, along with easy-to-use software such as Serious Magic Inc.'s new Vlog It!, are making it easier for smaller sites to use video clips to beef up their content. Do-it-yourself video production packages are being used by businesses, and they've also spawned a new type of personal weblog called the video blog (vlog).

The growing use of video is not just a case of Web masters playing with new toys. Web publishers are noticing that video can give site traffic a serious boost.

"On-line video is getting very popular," says Duncan Rawlinson, a Vancouver resident and entrepreneur who has been publishing a video blog since 2003. His site, thelastminute.typepad.com, features standard journal-style blog text entries alongside video footage he has shot. Like most vlogs, it also acts as a conduit for circulating footage created by others. When he picked up video of the tsunami disaster in December and encouraged people to donate to the relief fund, Mr. Rawlinson was surprised by the results.

"My little blog got over 100,000 [visits] in two days," he says.

The popularity of vlogs is having an impact on the business community, too. In the United States, for example, bicycle lock manufacturer Kryptonite Corp. recently felt the power of on-line video after a rumour was started that its U-shaped lock could be picked with a ballpoint pen. New York blogger Benjamin Running posted video confirmation of the claim on his blog, thirdrate.com. It was downloaded by more than half a million people in the first four days, and the public relations nightmare is expected to cost Kryptonite millions in product exchanges.

Video is also being used to promote business ventures, and posting quick on-line clips isn't just for amateur film makers. Professional footage is being used to generate buzz around Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson's upcoming movie, a remake of King Kong. Part video blog and part production diary, KongisKing.net includes exclusive behind-the-scenes video clips and a daily account of the film's progress.

"The video footage was Peter Jackson's idea," says Montreal-based Michael Regina, editor in chief and segment producer with OneRing Inc., the virtual on-line marketing company behind the vlog. "This is another way to promote the film and get information out there to his fans . . . For bloggers who are constantly updating their sites with information, it [video] is a useful tool."

Thanks in part to the video clips, KongisKing.net received more than 1.6 million unique visits in January and 3.1 million in February.

While increased broadband penetration across North America is helping to fuel demand for on-line video, making it easier for people to download and view clips, bloggers and site publishers are also building traffic as a result of new services such as specialized video search engines and Media RSS.

The latter is a variation of the text-based Really Simple Syndication (RSS) system. Internet users subscribe to Media RSS feeds from site publishers, and those publishers inform them of newly released videos and where to find them.

Though Internet search engines designed specifically to track down video clips are still in their infancy, surfers already have their choice of Singingfish.com, a multimedia search engine acquired by America Online Inc. in 2003, and the video search engines launched recently by Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. (Yahoo also offers video search through its AltaVista and AllTheWeb engines). Insiders say Microsoft Corp. is also working on a multimedia search engine.