We’ve all got a mate that emails us the latest viral video piece. You’ve seen a lot of them, right? Chopper doing the weather; some amazing car chase; the latest beer commercial.

The ones that have grabbed my attention lately are the movie trailer mashups. There are a couple out there, and they’re really clever. The first that I saw was the trailer for “The Shining” re-edited as though it were a romantic comedy, there’s also a “Sleepless in Seattle” thriller.

The other kind of mashup is taking clips from an existing movie and creating a trailer for something topical. There are a whole lot of Brokeback Mountain mashups right now (“Brokeback to the Future”, for example).

What’s come out of this new need to create and share multimedia content is new sites that specialise in serving up video: Google Video and You Tube for example. These sites offer the kind of functionality that’s becoming synonymous with the current crop of web 2.0 sites: tagging, rating, comments, etc.

More interesting is the fact that Flash has become the preferred method of delivering video. The Flash Player has been capable of playing video since version 6 and is the most installed desktop media player, with numbers far greater than Windows Media Player, QuickTime or Real Player.