This time, though, they’re not trying to convince consumers to pay for music or asking advertisers to subsidize it. Instead, they’re trying to act as a middleman between labels and publishers who own music and advertisers, Hollywood and other folks who want to use the tunes for commercial purposes.

Via Twain Media, their personal investment company, Goldberg and Roback have purchased a smallish start-up called mSoft and renamed it Dashbox, which they describe as a “subscription service that aggregates and manages all of your production music and sound effects.” The idea is to link up people who need to buy music for commercial reasons with rights holders, who are often scattered and hard to track down.

Roback will take the CEO spot at the renamed company; Goldberg, who has a day job running SurveyMonkey, will be chairman. The company hasn’t disclosed the terms of its mSoft purchase, but people familiar with the transaction tell me they bought the company for under $10 million.

Roback and Goldberg founded Launch Media in 1994, and sold it to Yahoo (YHOO) in 2001; the two stayed on to run Yahoo Music until 2007. Earlier this year, Goldberg invested in and took over SurveyMonkey, an online survey coordinator.

Goldberg is one of many former digital music executives I’ve talked to who thinks the music business is fundamentally broken, so at first blush it’s a tiny bit surprising to see him back in it again.

But he and Roback are essentially investing in an entirely different industry–it’s a business-to-business market that really hasn’t been affected much by the digital revolution. If you want to use a song in your TV show, you can’t steal it via BitTorrent or stream it for free on Spotify.

Nor has the digital revolution affected the industry’s infrastructure, which remains pretty ancient. Music supervisors for TV shows and movies still end up resorting to faxes and phone calls to track down tunes they’d like to use.

So there are some obvious opportunities for someone who can amass scale and decrease friction here. It may not be as sexy as providing consumers with all the free music they want, but it may end up being more profitable.

This is old news, literally: Chen left his spot as chief technology officer last fall, though he remains employed at Google (GOOG), which bought his company for $1.65 billion in 2006. “Steve shifted his focus to help with some Google engineering projects. He’s still involved with YouTube and invested in its success,” says YouTube spokesman Ricardo Reyes via email.

Google hasn’t officially named a replacement chief technology officer for Chen, and people at the company say the job no longer exists. But the highest ranking engineer at the company is now Louis Perrochon, who has been at Google since 2003.

Chad Hurley, who co-founded YouTube with Chen and Jawed Karim in 2004, remains the company’s CEO. But it’s not unusual for founders to move on from their companies within a few years of selling them.

The fact that Chen’s move  has gone unreported until now should underscore that his departure didn’t represent a major org chart reshuffling. The technical challenges of the site have long been handled by a large engineering team, which makes sense considering that the challenges themselves are large. YouTube now uploads 20 hours of video per minute.

Chen was reportedly working on a technology incubator project last fall along with BitTorrent co-founder Ashwin Navin; no word on what Chen is actually doing at Google now.

Here are Chen and Hurley in a video they shot and uploaded on Oct. 9, 2006, the day they sold their company to Google.

Thanks to all the readers who set me straight. It turns out there’s an easy answer for MegaVideo’s popularity: It’s a really good way to watch pirated movies and TV shows online.

The trick, it turns out, is not to go to MegaVideo itself to look for “The Dark Knight” or HBO’s new “Eastbound & Down” show. Instead you head to sites like movietvonline.com or sidereel.com, and they’ll direct you to one of MegaVideo’s streams. The stuff generally appears to be pretty good quality, and it’s much easier to access than a BitTorrent download–if you can use Hulu, you can use this stuff.

Apologies to anyone who finds this old hat. It’s obviously becoming more and more common for many of you. Again, take a look at this comScore (SCOR) growth chart. This is how you move from obscurity to the 10th-most popular video site in a year’s time (click graphic to enlarge):

Can’t Hollywood try to crack down on sites like MegaVideo and the sites that showcase their streams? After all, Google’s (GOOG) YouTube was once a piracy haven, and is much less so now. Same thing with DailyMotion, etc.

Sure. But the Chinese government has, um, a mixed record when it comes to IP protection. And in any event, we’re certainly going to see more of these coming down the pike, and it’s only going to be more commonplace.

All of which means that Hollywood, network TV and the cable companies have no choice if they want to keep viewers from turning to the pirates: Give them easy access to whatever they want, whenever they want it.

It’s the same scenario the music guys faced at the end of the 1990s, and they screwed it up. Look at them now.

Right now some of the players are talking a good game–“We think everything on television should become available to you on broadband for free,” Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes said yesterday at an investor conference. He doesn’t really mean free, by the way–he means free to cable and satellite TV subscribers.

The industry can hash out payment plans later. But first, those who make money creating and distributing video need to move very fast to get their stuff in front of viewers, wherever they want to see it. Because MegaVideo is already doing it.

Bad news, Internet music, movie and other content “sharers”: The content companies are trading their sue-’em-all strategy for one that leans on Internet service providers to help them fight their battles for them. This may ultimately be much more effective. Here’s how it will work, via The Wall Street Journal:

The [Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's trade group] said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some ISPs, but declined to say which ones.”

The fact that the big labels are going to stop suing people who “share” their music via P2P services is the least interesting development here. That’s just the industry accepting that it lost a battle that ended years ago. In Q3 of this year, the volume of music swapped on via P2P increased 28 percent, says NPD.

More interesting is that Big Music thinks it has finally found an ally in the ISPs, who have traditionally been just fine with letting their subscribers swap all the music they wanted. It’s not clear what incentive they’ve offered to get the ISPs on board. And note that the WSJ doesn’t identify any ISPs that have actually signed on to this strategy. So this still may not be a done deal.

But the people who sell you Internet access–whether its the cable guys like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), or telcos like Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T)–have already shown a general inclination to help content owners fight piracy. Or at least help them fight particular kinds of particularly egregious piracy.

They’ve been doing so by trying to limit, in various ways, your ability to swap lots of files with other people. Some of these strategies have been clumsier than others.

Last year Comcast tried “throttling” the connections of broadband subscribers using some file-sharing software–a ham-handed approach (particularly the lying about it) that earned them a wrist-slap from the FCC.

But other companies have been more upfront about telling subs that they reserve the right to cut off file-sharers. A different approach that many are contemplating: simply charging heavy file-sharers a lot of money.

Do the ISPs really care about the sanctity of copyright? Doubtful. But they do care about the cost of moving lots of data around–and those costs are only going to increase as consumers start consuming more and more video over the Web.

And at least in the case of Hollywood, they do care about keeping content creators somewhat mollified, since all of the ISPs want to make money by selling, renting, or just offering up Hollywood’s movies and TV shows to subscribers.

So I’ve always understood why Comcast was standing up for the likes of Sony’s (SNE) movie studio. But why is Comcast (or its peers) going to start working on behalf of Sony’s music group? I’m all ears.