TiVo has signed up daily video blog (or vlog) Rocketboom, directed and produced by Andrew Baron and co-written with host Amanda Congdon, and will include it in its video download trial for broadband users, according to a post last week on Micro Persuasion. Meanwhile, the New York Times over the weekend ran a story on vlogs, highlighting Rocketboom's success - it reaches 100,000 fans a day - and pointing out that a year ago there were fewer than two dozen active vlogs, whereas now there are 2,000 or so. And just as podcasting flowed into the mainstream with the help of Apple's iTunes, so are vlogs, or "video podcasts," as Apple calls them, writes the Times.

A couple of months ago, Apple's iTunes began stocking vlogs; when Steve Jobs introduced the video iPod to developers, he showed a playlist of video podcasts on his computer - and Rocketboom was at the top of the list.

Baron and Congdon, at a cost of about $20 an episode, reach an audience of tens of thousands. Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine has pointed out that if they charge $8,000 for an interactive ad at the end of the show, it would bring in about $2 million a year.

Congdon and Baron will get half of the revenue from ads sold by TiVo to appear before and after their newscast, which will gain access to more than 300,000 TV sets connected to the new generation of TiVo boxes.