The launch was announced in a blog post Wednesday, which read in part:

“We gave Rdio Unlimited subscribers an early screening of Vdio, our online television and movie service, but starting today, you don’t have to be an Rdio listener to buy, rent, and share your favorite movies and shows with friends.”

Vdio launched a beta test of its service in April, limiting access to users who were also subscribing to Rdio’s music service, which is run by the same company. That requirement is now gone, but there are signs that Vdio and Rdio may be even more closely connected in the future. Rdio’s outgoing CEO Drew Larner recently told Bloomberg that he is helping the company to look for a new chief executive to “expand efforts to sell combined music and video subscriptions.”

That idea shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who has followed Vdio for some time. The video was originally developed by a separate team as part of a stealth startup, with plans to launch a subscription offering that would compete directly with Netflix. Those plans were eventually scrapped, most of the original team were let go, and Vdio was aligned more closely with Rdio.

But the idea to eventually offer some kind of video subscription lived on. Asked about it, Rdio’s VP of Product Malthe Sigurdsson told me in April that a subscription component “is something we would love to do.”

Netflix didn’t give any details about catalog size or pricing of the service, but instead pointed out that Dutch consumers will have access to “Hollywood, local and global TV series and films,” including Netflix originals like House of Cards and the newest season of Arrested Development.

Picking the Netherlands as the next target for international expansion should appease Netlix investors, some of whom have been concerned about the costs associated with the company’s international ambitions. After crossing the border to Canada in 2010, Netflix made a big splash with an expansion into almost all of Latin America and the Carribean in 2011.

Last year, the company doubled down on international markets by expanding to the UK, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Netflix now has a total of seven million subscribers outside of the U.S., but some markets have proven more difficult than others. Latin America, in particular, has been challenging, to the point where analysts have asked Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on the company’s most recent earnings call whether he’d consider pulling out of some of the countries.

Hastings answer was no; but Netflix has long tried to address those concerns by tieing any international expansion to global profitability. The company has also said that it intends to expand into only one additional market in 2013, which means that people in markets like Germany, France or Spain have to wait until at least 2014 before they’ll get access to Netflix.

What’s Trending wants to use the new cash infusion to scale its production and invest in ad sales and multi-platform distribution. The funding comes as a kind of validation that What’s Trending’s YouTube strategy is working. What’s Trending originally launched in 2011 as a web format for CBS, but severed ties with the network soon after and briefly tried its luck as a weekly pop culture show online, only to turn into a daily YouTube format a year ago.

The funding announcement comes just a day after news broke that Fullscreen Networks has raised an undisclosed amount from the Chernin Group, Comcast Ventures and WPP, and adds to a number of funding announcements for YouTube-based businesses in recent months. Which goes to show that — despite all the recent talk to the contrary — at least investors still think there’s money in producing content for YouTube.

Speaking of which: Bedrocket’s Lerer came to our recent paidContent Live conference to share his thoughts about investing in digital media. Check out the video below:

Time Warner Cable felt compelled to publish the post after a number of customers had mused in recent months that the ISP was behind the sub-par performance of their YouTube videos. The supposedly damning evidence? Users had discovered that blocking a few IP numbers vastly improved their experience.

Time Warner Cable’s blog post doesn’t go into the IP number blocking, but explains the core of the problem this way:

“The internet is not as simple as one wire connecting a website’s servers to a customer’s home. Traffic originates in countless places, heading toward billions of end-user destinations. Each network that carries web traffic is itself a collection of a number of complicated technological and business relationships. As traffic flows from one area of the internet to another, it passes through this network of technologies, agreements and protocols and culminates in each particular user experience.”

In other words: It’s all about peering, and where in the network content is cached — which, as Time Warner Cable suggests, is as much about business as it is about technology. Case in point: Netflix has been trying to get ISPs to join its own Open Connect content delivery network and install its OpenConnect caching servers on ISPs’ networks.

The video service is arguing that this would greatly improve customers’ streaming experience while keeping down costs for ISPs, and Netflix is even willing to install and maintain these machines for free. However, getting U.S. ISPs to join has proven difficult. Not only are companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast operating their own TV services, which makes them Netflix competitors, but they also want Netflix, Google and others to pay for distributing so much traffic on their networks.

Netflix has started to take this peering fight to the court of public opinion. The company is publishing a monthly ISP speed index, and launched a new Super HD video quality level that is only available to customers of ISPs that have joined Open Connect. Time Warner Cable has responded to this by alleging that Netflix is discriminating against its customers – a charge that Netflix unsurprisingly denies.

Google has thus far kept quiet in this peering fight. But the fact that its users resort to blocking IP numbers to get better quality levels on certain ISPs, as well as Time Warner Cable’s new denial, makes it clear that even for YouTube users, the peering wars are far from over.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Swetlana Wall

A Fraunhofer infographic showing how SiDiM would turn one book into individual copies.

Reports about the work first popped up on German blogs this week, with one blogger revealing examples that include changing wordings like “invisible” to “not visible” and “unhealthy” to “not healthy.” Other examples included sentences in which the order of words was changed, or in which hyphens were added to words.

The idea behind SiDiM is similar to the way rights holders have been trying to protect music and video for some time. Instead of trying to lock down copies through technical measures that prevent copying, so-called fingerprinting measures simply add markers to a work that make it possible to identify the original purchaser. In theory, this prevents people from sharing their works for the fear of being caught.

However, in music files, these types of changes are a lot less notable than a machine rewriting a book, which is why it’s unlikely that authors and literature friends would embrace SiDiM. The system is currently in testing, and Fraunhofer secured some state funding to run these tests and even got a subsidiary of the German book publisher’s association to join.

But here’s the twist: German blog Lesen.net pointed out that the book publishers actually joined because they’re interested in finding alternatives to the traditional lock-down approach of DRM, simply because they’ve learned in the past that even the strongest lock can be broken.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user gazzaPax.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Time Warner Cable has been using its negotiating muscles to keep TV networks from licensing content to Apple and others. An industry insider who declined to be named confirmed this account in a conversation with GigaOM, saying that the company has been aggressively pushing for these kinds of clauses in its recent contract negotiations.

At the center of the dispute are so-called virtual cable operators — companies that operate pay TV services without having any physical infrastructure of their own. Instead of using their own satellites, cables or phone networks to get TV signals to the consumers, virtual operators would simply stream their programming over the internet.

There have been reports that Apple was considering a plan to launch such a virtual operator in the past, and other companies have looked into launching these kinds of businesses as well. One of the more notable efforts is Intel’s forthcoming TV service, which the company wants to launch before the end of the year.

To compete with traditional cable, these operators would have to be able to offer much of the same programming. And that’s something that cable companies apparently want to prevent. Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research first reported Tuesday that at least one or more of the existing operators had added clauses to their contacts with TV networks that would prevent the networks from licensing their content to companies who don’t control their own infrastructure.

Bloomberg was able to get Times Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt on the record about contracts featuring these provisions:

“We may well have ones that have that prohibition.”

It’s worth pointing out that cable companies wouldn’t be able to keep all kinds of programming inaccessible with these kinds of provisions. NBC and Comcast are specifically barred from these tactics as part of their merger conditions, as Greenwald points out. However, other TV networks don’t have these kinds of restrictions, and some may be inclined to follow the demands of cable companies in order to protect their growing retransmission fee revenue stream.

In the past two years, we have seen a number of disputes arise between networks and operators about the amount of money operators have to pay to carry certain channels. In the end, most of these disputes ended with networks having the upper hand because operators simply couldn’t afford to lose key programming. But it’s possible that barring competitors like Apple and Intel from access to the same content is one of the benefits that networks now have to throw in to sweeten those deals.

The announcement comes just days after Redbox Instant launched on Google TV devices, and GigaOM readers won’t be too surprised by it: We reported last month already that the service was about to launch on Google TV, and then tackle Roku next.

The collaboration with Roku is another notable step for Redbox Instant as it is working to widen its device footprint. Roku has sold more than five million players in the U.S. to date. Redbox Instant won’t be available on first-generation Roku devices, but the move should still give the company access to a few million additional potential customers.

Two Bay Area-based startups, Showyou (see diclosure) and Vidora, believe there is another way. Both have slightly different approaches to the problem, but at the core of both approaches is a solution as old as television itself: Publishers should just rely on channels and aggregation instead of insular apps
.

Showyou’s new channel platform

Showyou’s video discovery app has been around for some time, but the company is now offering publishers the ability to launch and program their own channels within the Showyou app. “Making an app is really hard and expensive,” Showyou CEO Mark Hall told me Wednesday. “(It’s) harder still to get distribution, and even harder to get people to use it regularly,” he added.

Showyou now wants to take care of all of that: Distribute a publisher’s content through their app, give them tools to place advertising against their content, and promote these channels within the Showyou app. Publishers can keep 100 percent of their ad revenue, but the startup will be charging an admin fee that’s based on usage and can range from $5 to $400 a month starting in September.

Vidora’s publisher-centric discovery app

Showyou is getting some competition from newcomer Vidora, a startup that was founded by a handful of ex-Ooyala engineers last year and that unveiled its own video discovery app Thursday. Vidora bills itself as a tool for users to find the best content from publishers like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant video, Fandor and others, which the company’s app is serving up through a variety of categories. It’s part Showyou, part Fanhattan, if you will.

What differentiates Vidora from its competitors is the close integration of publishers, Vidora co-founder Alex Holub told me during an interview Wednesday. This includes authentication for offerings like FlixFling, as well as analytics and monetization options through integrated advertising. “We want to help them with their brands, we want to help them monetize,” Holub said.

Hulob also hinted at a few things planned for future releases that could make Vidora pretty interesting for publishers: The app, which currently supports AirPlay to play content on Apple TV devices, wants to jump on the Miracast bandwagon as well once it comes to Android and essentially replace dedicated video streaming devices like Roku with an app on your tablet or mobile phone. And Vidora also wants to offer publishers what Hulob called a “standard metadata language for content” to easily allow them to create second-screen experiences for their videos.

But where are the eyeballs?

Of course, all of this only makes sense if app makers like Vidora and Showyou can also promise publishers an audience for their videos. Vidora still has to prove itself in that area, and Showyou, while already established, also doesn’t talk about the size of its user base.

But Hall also told me that the sheer number of users on any platform isn’t really all that indicative for anything, especially if you go with a channel model like Showyou. “There are 200 million folks on Twitter” he said. “But signing up doesn’t mean you’ll get one million, or two million or 10 million followers. You have to work it,” he added.

(Disclosure: Showyou maker Remixation is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

This, and the roll-out of new mobile apps, has helped YouTube to triple its mobile ad revenue in the past six months, according to Bloomberg, which got YouTube VP of Sales Lucas Watson go on the record about the mobile growth.

Bloomberg is also guesstimating that “as much as $350 million in sales probably came from mobile video ads” in Google’s last quarter alone. However, that number isn’t coming from Google, and it’s based on a few assumptions from analysts, so I would take it with a grain of salt.

Still, even without a firm mobile revenue number, tripling mobile ad revenue in a six-month time frame is impressive, and it seems to be the direct result of YouTube launching its iPhone and iPad apps late last year, as well as rolling out a full-featured mobile web experience across all platforms. Previously, iOS users were accessing YouTube through an app built by Apple, and YouTube wasn’t able to monetize any of those views.

For more on YouTube’s mobile strategy, check out this interview I did with Shiva Rajaraman, YouTube’s director of product management, at last year’s Mobilize conference:

The company is currently spending around five percent of its content money on originals like House of Cards, Hemlock Grove and the new season of Arrested Development. Asked about that show, Sarandos said that the company had extremely high expectations about the initial viewership of the show. “And it met our expectations, and we are thrilled,” he said.

He added that viewers also seem to love the show, despite a few early bad reviews. 80 percent of the viewers who watched the show within the first 24 hours rated it four or five stars, Sarandos revealed.

Sarandos also had to answer a few questions about the company’s decision not to renew its deal with Viacom, which has led to the company removing popular kids shows like Dora, Spongebob and Blue’s Clues. Sarandos defended the move, pointing to some of the other kids content that Netflix has added recently and saying: “I feel like that was the right trade-off.”

Sarandos said that slate deals like the previous agreement with Viacom, which force Netflix to buy a wide breadth of content, often simply aren’t worth the money, especially if the same content is available elsewhere as well. “We value that content for sure. We just disagreed on the value of the content,” he said.

However, Netflix executives have stated in the past that they’d be willing to license some of Viacom’s more popular shows individually, and Sarandos said Thursday that this option is still on the table: “These discussions are ongoing,” he explained.