Unlike theatrical distribution—studios give out granular performance data for their movies every Sunday to the press—precious little in the way of revenue or transaction figures on movie VOD distribution makes it to the press. For example, while Rentrak would tell us that the Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) comedy Due Date ranks second all-time in VOD distribution, followed by another comedy from the same studio, Hall Pass. A Rentrak representative told us the company has revenue and transaction data on those films and many others, measuring their performances across cable and satellite VOD, as well as internet VOD and download platforms.

And what it calls the “movies on demand business” is up, growing 9 percent last year to nearly $1 billion, according to Rentrak—this compares to the $10.73 billion made by studios at theaters in the U.S. and Canada in 2011, and the nearly $15 million grossed selling and renting DVD and Blu-ray titles domestically.

But citing its relationship with the studios, Rentrak said it’s prohibited from giving out VOD data on specific movies beyond ranking unless authorized. A digital executive for one of the major studios told us it’s “normal” practice for big media companies not to routinely release data about developing platforms. The public, he said, would have no use for data points that are too new to have context. The executive insisted that once it evolves just a bit more, we’ll soon start to see data that make the monetization of digital film distribution as transparent as theatrical release.

We’re not holding our breath on that. Back in 1997, when the DVD was launched, some in the home-entertainment market were saying the same thing. Fifteen years later, when Universal touted Bridesmaids’ $100 million in U.S. DVD and Blu-ray sales in the same press release, that nearly opened as many eyes as the VOD number.

On some level, we tie this reluctance to the byzantine nature of the old-Hollywood accounting culture, its remnants still intact despite the corporate takeover of the studios by media corporations—the less the world knows about your revenue streams, the less you have to share them.

“Sure, the more transparent a studio is, the more phone calls they get from lawyers looking for a piece of the pie,” said Marc Schiller, an independent film marketing executive who works with filmmakers including Ed Burns. Strategically, that philosophy may have worked in regard to the DVD business, which was further “downstream” in the distribution chain, Schiller said.

But particularly on the independent side of the film business, where producers and their distribution partners are releasing VOD simultaneous with theatrical release—or, in the case of the so-called “ultra VOD” model, weeks before it—not having enough data is a planning detriment, he said.

“It’s vital that we know what the benchmarks for success are,” Schiller explained. “Rentrak box-office data is readily available for people who need to understand and develop strategies around theatrical distribution. But one of the major challenges in putting a VOD release strategy together is that there isn’t enough historical data.”

In the independent film business, he said, filmmakers and their distribution partners tend to work more collaboratively, and the VOD reporting process tends to be a little more transparent.

The New Video Group, which distributes more than 6,000 movies through outlets ranging from DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) to iTunes, maintains an online dashboard to give its filmmaking partners real-time performance data on their movies. “We are as perfectly transparent as we can be,” said Steve Savage, New Video’s co-president.

But even in the independent world, information about VOD distribution doesn’t exactly seem to be free-flowing. For example, another VOD buzz number that recently surfaced was the more than $5 million reportedly grossed by the Wall Street-themed Kevin Spacey film Margin Call. The film’s backers gave that number to the press, “But you can ask 90 percent of the people in the film industry, and we still don’t know where that number came from,” Schiller said.

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My company, Wetpaint, was fortunate to participate in a beta phase with Facebook and be a launch partner with The Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) social reader project; in the process, we have gotten a glimpse of how to build media for a fully social web, and it’s had a dramatic impact on our business.

We have learned that without question, there is a ton to be gained in audience acquisition, branding, and retention by integrating into the Open Graph.  And, based on the few months’ head start we’ve had, I wanted to provide a brief guide to what has worked, and explain how to take full advantage of the Open Graph. 

Here, then, are the four most important elements: 

1. Determine what’s inherently social in what you do for your audience – This is the most important part, and it’s not easy, because people don’t want to share everything they read online.  Rather, they share the things that are helpful to others, or contribute to their public identity.

Don’t fight it.  Work with it, instead.  Provide content your audiences will use to define themselves and enhance their reputations as a curator.  With your content, what specifically can they share, and what can it say about them? 

I especially like this item from a cousin who recently posted this recipe for fried Coke (what? oh yes!).  If you think it means she’s a southern gourmet, you’d be right:  she makes the best fried chicken I’ve ever had. And posting recipes like this makes sure we all know about her decadent down-home style. 

People also respond to things that make them smile.  Who wouldn’t like a picture of a cat laughing with a dinosaur?  Sharing it makes a statement about what gems you can find, what loops you’re in, what makes you chuckle, and that you like brightening your friends’ day. 

We are thumbs-up with things that back our opinions, or show we are in the know about things that are important to how we want to be perceived. For a news site, this means interests and causes that we want to support; and, for a sports site, it’s our tribal badging and admiration of teams and players.

And for games, movies, and events, it’s more about sharing something special together. Whether a concert or a conference, convening with others turns content into an experience. The phenomenon of Social TV that we see at Wetpaint, and throughout all TV programming, is proof positive that media events are made to be shared. 

2. Start thinking in verbs – other than “Like” – To date, publishers have been focused on the page.  Now it’s time to think about the interaction – not just with the page, but with the content.  Think in verbs.  Facebook has suggested a handful of obvious ones.  Your audience should “watch” videos; “listen to” songs; and “read” articles.  But beyond that, you can also add your own creative alternatives:  “view” photo galleries, “lust for” celebrities, “OMG” scenes on TV, “vote for” reality TV contestants.  All of these help define a relationship between your audience and what they love.  And as a publisher, you get to take credit for that introduction and its viral distribution among a user’s circle.

3. Own objects, not just content – In the now-more-open Open Graph world, the objects of our affections are no longer just dumb pages.  Rather, you can define objects in the real-world – with the promise of improving Facebook’s and your audience’s connections to them, and to you.  As with the examples above, the limit of what you can define is constrained only by your creativity; however, the focus should be on objects that are natural social extensions of your consumer experience.  Don’t try to socialize objects that no one wants to share – I don’t want to circulate that I “zero balanced” my “bank account.”

4. Live in Facebook’s world – It’s not really just Zuckerberg’s world … it’s your users’ world, too.  500 million Facebook users are logging in every day, and spend seven hours per month (on average) on Facebook.  That’s why it’s important to create an experience that blends with the social world; and that experience needs to be connected, and in real-time. The more you integrate into Facebook’s clearing house, the more you can benefit from seamless transitions, access to connected user data, and user expectations of implicit sharing.  Facebook Connect is critical; as is earning the Likes to be in a relationship with your audience.  When you do that, you can program your users’ news feeds.  At Wetpaint, we average 30 impressions per fan per month.  I’ve never had that much communication in any of my relationships with friends or family (much to my mother’s dismay, which she reminds me of all the time), yet our consumers have it with us all year long.  And, beyond the news feed, creating a Facebook canvas app (we’re working on a new one now) means you can truly be everywhere your audience wants you to be – both in Facebook and on the Web. 

With the new Open Graph features, a short-term way of thinking about the opportunity is that you are integrating into Facebook’s technical architecture.  But a far more meaningful – and, ultimately, more beneficial – way of thinking about it for both your users and your business is that you are integrating into your users’ lives. 

I overheard someone at last year’s F8 event say that Facebook is no longer “Face”-book, it’s really becoming “Life”-book.  It’s that level of integration with real life that can create the most powerful opportunities for the next era of the Web. 

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a web publisher, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the online retailer of luxury goods. He is also an angel investor in various media and e-commerce companies.

From Thursday, Zeebox is starting to include “click to buy” slots in its iPad and iPhone app and to sell second-screen ads to brands, so that each generates money from people watching TV shows with Zeebox on their laps.

It works like this…

Thanks to speech-to-text, subtitles and other metadata including from Philips’ Civolution fingerprinter spin-off, the Zeebox iPad app already shows users a live stream of info “tags” corresponding to material in shows they are watching on their lounge TV. Right now, they link to Wikipedia articles.

But Zeebox also had always hoped to leverage them to start linking to marketing messaging as well as to purchase options during the commercial breaks between shows.

So, during those breaks, Zeebox will denote actionable tag links with icons for songs, products, travel services etc. Those links will send users through to merchants like iTunes (for music), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) (for DVDs), Tesco (for food) and Boots (for cosmetics) via Zeebox affiliate codes, so that it generates a percentage commission of any subsequent sales.

Zeebox is running the system so far on about 20 percent of UK TV’s commercial break ads, mostly for ITV (LSE: ITV) hcnanle.s

Will it work?

“Our consumer research told us that people want an easy way to buy things they see on TV,” Rose’s co-founder Ernesto Schmitt says in a press release.

Do affiliate links add up to a business model? Not in isolation. Shazam claims to make a percentage of music purchases worth $100 million a year that its app sent to stores last year. But it has tried to diversify its revenue streams.

Using just the affiliate commission model, Zeebox will need to generate click-throughs and actual purchases at a large scale in order to clock up significant total income. But the startup appears to be seeking other streams, too.

The prospect of selling specific second-screen tag ads to advertiser brands is exciting as an innovation. But brands would likely consider this experimental until such time as Zeebox is being used by large numbers of TV viewers.

Zeebox last month claimed “250,000 users” - but simultaneous prime-time users metrics are not publicised.

One route to scale for Zeebox is through BSkyB (NYSE: BSY). The UK pay-TV platform leader in January took equity in the startup with a deal through which it will leverage Zeebox features in a social-centric upgrade revision to its EPG app for its Sky+ PVR.

But, still, the whole prospect, for all such operators, depends on the usage scale of tablets or smartphones as engagement facilitators during TV shows. On that hinges the very notion of the second screen but, so far, much research points to a growing trend there.

In yet another case of the tricky line between sharing, mobile data, and transparency, Arun Thampi, a developer for Anideo, discovered Tuesday that Path was uploading the contact information of his iPhone address book when he created an account. Path’s intention was to make it easier for users to find friends using that information, but Thampi and several others found it “a little creepy” that the company felt entitled to the data in one’s personal address book without explicitly warning them first.

On Wednesday, Dave Morin, CEO and founder of Path, apologized (sort of) in saying “we are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.” A new version of Path has been released that no longer uploads that data unless you explicitly choose to do so, and the data collected from current Path users has been deleted, he said in a blog post.

Once again, we see the dance that mobile apps tied to location and social networks have to do around show they handle of private information. Path’s misstep is just another signal that people are willing to share information with mobile service providers up to a certain point but they are not pleased when that sharing happens without their knowledge.

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Co-produced with Motor Trend Magazine publisher Source Interlink Media (SIM), the channel will launch Feb. 17 with eight original weekly shows unfurling on a Monday-Friday schedule.

The series will be themed around SIM brands including not just Motor Trend, but also Hot Rod, Motorcyclist, Lowrider, FourWheeler, Dirt Rider and Car Craft.

Motor Trend is just the latest publishing brand to use YouTube’s seed money to launch a video channel on the platform.

Previous channel announcements have included online video platforms for The Wall Street Journal and Reuters (NYSE: TRI), for example.

For Google-owned YouTube, which is trying to transition its model from user-generated video to a more “premium” experience, leveraging the talent and production wherewithal of individual publishing companies which are not traditionally vested in video production could ultimately produce uneven results.

But in the case of SIM, YouTube isn’t exactly working with rank amateurs. While it’s re-launching Motor Trend as an official channel with dedicated weekly programs, the company has quietly operated a less formal channel for the brand for the last six years. “This was the next logial step for SIM as it continues its transformation from legacy magazine publishing business to a media-neutral content creation company,” said Motor Trend channel executive producer Angus MacKenzie.

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Citing third-party data from Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) and mDialog, NBC says 2,105,441 unique users in the U.S. streamed the game on either NBCSports.com, NFL.com or through the NFL Mobile channel that’s available to Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) subscribers.

NBC also said that 78.6 million total minutes of game coverage were streamed and that 1.83 million game clips and Super Bowl ads were viewed digitally. CBS’ coverage of the NCAA’s “March Madness” men’s basketball tournament actually recorded more than 3 million digital viewers for individual-day of coverage last spring. But no single game came close to the 2.1 million mark.

Although it was the first time the Super Bowl has been streamed, NBC routinely streams its Sunday Night regular-season NFL coverage, which averages around 300,000 unique viewers, the network said.

Prior to the game, sports buyers for several large media agencies told us they were reluctant to spend a mid-six-figure sums for Super Bowl digital advertising time, noting that they were concerned that the game wouldn’t attract a big viewership number. This is appointment viewing, they noted, the kind of game for which fans go to viewing parties and watch the game on a big-screen TV.

Sunday’s numbers might cause them to reconsider future digital buys for big sports events.

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The Dublin- and Rome-based company is buying Cidade Internet, a Brazilian portal which publishes 10 popular websites and other blogs inluding Fofocando, Automovel and Das Marias.

Formerly known as GoAdv, Populis operates the Nanopublishing and Blogosfere blog networks, has built up through acquiring Italy’s Blogo.it network from Dada, Germany’s Mokono network. It also owns Excite Europe, the Better Deals repository of user-created consumer guides and the Koego blog platform. In all, the company sels ads against the thousands of articles contributed by its hundreds of users each month across what is now a portfolio of several hundred websites.

Brazil’s consumer internet economy is taking off, with online ad spend surpassing that in the UK in 2011 (source and more data: IAB Brasil).

Cidade’s properties will be fully integrated under the Populis banner. Populis is gaining Cidade’s Rio and Sao Paulo offices, intends to open another this year and add 30 staff.

By trying to operate so strongly in non-English languages, Populis claims to avoid the “Demand Media clone” tag - complementarity that could ultimately make for an exit to such a group.

Netflix has said that it will not make any announcement about the audience for Lilyhammer, which has eight episodes, all of which are debuting on Netflix simultaneously. And with pay-cable rivals like HBO stating their own discomfort with so-called “overnight” ratings in an increasingly fragmented viewing world, it could be only a matter of time before they follow Netflix’s lead.

“We already know what our subscriber base is watching and how they’re watching it. We’re not selling advertising, and we don’t need to publish ratings to show how popular our show is relative to a competing network,” Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said Monday.

A lot of decisions on whether to watch a particular show come down to buzz. So how will the public know that Lilyhammer is worth watching? “If they renew it, you’ll know they are pleased with how many people are streaming the show,” said Brad Adgate, senior VP and director of research for Horizon Media.

But how about impressing the Hollywood creative community? If Netflix is going to compete with cable outlets for shows, doesn’t it want to define itself as a place for hits? “That’s not done with ratings, that’s done with money, and we’re able to write some big checks,” Swasey said.

Even in the realm of premium cable, which also doesn’t rely on advertising, pushing out ratings data the morning after series and season premieres – or often, for each original episode—has been a standard business practice for decades. Take HBO, for example. Viewership for shows like Game of Thrones is now scattered across not only encore runs, but DVR time-shifting and multi-platform service HBO Go. And that data isn’t as useful as it used to be.

You can’t look at the viewership number for Game of Thrones and compare it to an older HBO hit like, say, The Sopranos, because HBO’s viewership model has changed so much in recent years. It’s apples to oranges at this point. The Sopranos could get over 20 million viewers for a single run. Game of Thrones won’t pass 10 million.

Still, after every Game episode, the network puts out an “overnight” ratings announcement, seeking to spin TV journalists, investors for parent company Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) Inc., and the Hollywood creative community that the show is a hit. In recent years, however, executives for HBO and other traditional TV companies have noted the increasing obsolescence of ratings data derived from a single premiere run.

HBO hasn’t called for the industry to stop feeding ratings data to the press, but it has suggested the model change to something less immediate that accounts for viewing on multiple platforms weeks, even months after a premiere. With a new competitor on the scene that doesn’t publish any numbers at all, is it possible they’ll ditch the publication of ratings data altogether?

“The [pay channels] are now in a different arena—it’s streaming, it’s not ad supported, it’s on demand,” Adgate noted.

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The new subscription service will launch in the latter half of the year, a joint announcement said, and will be 65 percent co-owned by Verizon. It will combine the power of Redbox’s 30 million disc renters with Verizon’s substantial cable TV and wireless reach. The companies would release few details about the new venture, citing “competitive reasons.”

“This will be a national over-the-top service, available to anybody who has a broadband connection, and available across a full range of devices,” Eric Bruno, VP of product management for Verizon, told paidContent.

With Netflix telling investors two weeks ago that it will stop actively trying to grow its DVD and Blu-ray rental business, and an increasing number Netflix subscribers choosing only to stream their video due to the increased prices of disc-and-streaming combo packages, Verizon and Coinstar officials said they do see an opening in the market for bundled subscription plans that are still vested in DVD and Blu-ray.

“We think that physical media is going to be attractive for a very long time,” Galen Smith, senior VP of finance for Coinstar, said. “We’re excited about it, and we think this actually helps home entertainment preserve the life of the physical format.”

So does this mean Coinstar and Verizon will under-cut Netflix on the price of a disc/streaming subscription package? Bruno would only say the price point would be “competitive.”

A flurry of new competition has emerged recently for the streaming market Netflix pioneered—Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), for example, is also looking to develop a subscription streaming business. But Netflix investors have not been spooked by Monday’s early announcement.

As for noon on the Nasdaq, Netflix shares were trading at $126.87 per share, up about a third of a percentage point.

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On Sunday, marketers of social TV apps – which typically blend social-network interaction and live-TV viewing—expect to engage more users for a single event than ever before. And from Coke to Pepsi to General Motors, social TV companies including GetGlue, IntoNow, Shazam and Miso will be working with a number of major brands.

But for all the hoopla surrounding social TV this year, a lot of the second-screen campaigns amount to low-cost experimentation. “For us, [campaigns like the Super Bowl] continue to be essentially pilot projects, and not so much about the money involved,” said Alex Iskold, president and CEO of social TV company GetGlue, a startup that will be sponsored by PepsiCo this weekend. “Our No. 1 objective right now is building our network and our user base. We’re learning how to monetize GetGlue and what advertisers want.” Industry-wide, Iskold said brand-commitments for social TV Super Bowl activity this weekend will typically range in the low six-figures.

Super Bowl watchers will be using their second—and maybe even third—screens to, of course, text, Tweet, Facebook and even email. Marketers, meanwhile, will be trying entice users of the social TV apps to download discount offers, enter sweepstakes, vote on their favorite ads and buy music, among other actions.

Adam Cahan, founder of social TV app IntoNow, purchased last year by Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) for around $30 million, said it can be hard to gauge the purchase price of a second-screen sponsorship. A typical brand buy-in for his platform, he explained, will often also include elements across myriad other Yahoo platforms. “The typical buy can be a six-figure buy, but generally speaking, it’s part of large-scale packages in which the advertiser is getting multiple consumer experiences,” said Cahan, whose company is also working with Pepsi this weekend.

So what’s the timeline to monetization? “We are working on mapping that out now, but for it to scale and turn into a real business, we will need to grow our user base at least 10 to 20 times the amount we’re at now,” Iskold said. Currently, GetGlue says it has about 2 million users. “It is hard to say how long that will take, but we are hoping to cross 5 million users by the end of this year,” he added.

With big brands coughing up, on average, $3.5 million for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial this weekend, Iskold said they’re “not yet eager to spend TV-like dollars on the social media.” “We’re looking to digital for a more meaningful way to engage with the consumer one on one,” Pepsi Max brand team executive Sam Duboff told us.

Iskold added: “Everyone agrees this is valuable. We’re just trying to figure out how much value it has.”

For operators like Iskold, the value the Super Bowl represents is more about user-base building. He said his company is expecting have its highest usage ever this weekend, with more than 50,000 GetGlue users. In last year’s Super Bowl, GetGlue couldn’t handle its traffic volume; this year, the company has doubled its number of servers.

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To be sure, the former CEOs of Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) would gladly trade places with Page, who last year regained control of the company he founded and brought new focus, and Brin, who is probably living out an alpha geek’s dream by working on Google’s most secret and far-out projects. But even since Michigan—Page’s alma mater—beat Virginia Tech in the January 3rd Sugar Bowl, not much has gone right for Google.

A quick recap:

Tarnished Chrome: Google was caught participating in a “sponsored post” scheme involving advertising for its Chrome browser, in which bloggers were paid to write favorable reviews of the browser that in some cases included the Web page for Chrome. It blamed outside agencies and reduced the rank value for the Chrome Web page, as buying links through ad campaigns is a no-no for everyone else.

When Google+ Is A Minus: Google managed to out-CES CES with its breathtaking decision to incorporate Google+ pages directly and prominently into its crown jewel: search results. The Search Plus Your World rollout generated a huge controversy that overshadowed any one single event that happened that week in Las Vegas, troubling both internal employees and former Googlers unable to recognize a company that would alter its search results to favor links to a half-baked social network.

Caught Red-Handed: After a local-business directory in Kenya noticed that some of its customers were calling it for support on building Web sites—a product the company didn’t offer—Mocality set a trap for Google employees who were systematically accessing its database and attempting to poach its customers. A “mortified” Google fired its country manager for Kenya and apologized.

A Short Quarter: Google missed financial analysts’ expectations for its fourth quarter, and observers began to wonder if the cash machine that is Google’s AdWords and AdSense had started to wane. Google’s stock has fallen nearly 7 percent since those earnings were released amid a rise in the Nasdaq over the same period.

Dealing Drugs: Google had already admitted to improper behavior involving ads for drugs sold by rogue pharmacies, but details emerged from a Wall Street Journal (NSDQ: NWS) report in January that showed Page was aware of the fact that Google ad executives helped those operating such pharmacies circumvent review policies designed to exclude such ads.

Transparently Murky: In a public-relations decision borrowed from a desperate company’s playbook, Google chose to reveal sweeping changes to its privacy policy at almost the exact same time that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) released its fourth-quarter financial results on schedule. While the tech press was pretty busy dealing with the impact of Apple’s surreal quarter, Congress was not, and Google was forced to explain its conduct. The company said the changes were designed to simplify policies across multiple products, but they also had the effect of letting Google see your online activity across a host of its products—from Gmail to YouTube, Google+ to search—and form an aggregated picture of your potential buying habits.

When It Rains: In a sign of just how far Google has fallen in many people’s estimation, an obscure change to a technical policy involving the Galaxy Nexus phone—the best Android device yet released—briefly convinced many that Google was removing that device from the special Nexus category, which allows people owning those phones to receive software updates unencumbered by their wireless carrier. Google exacerbated the problem by botching its initial public-relations response, and outrage flew at the speed of Twitter before it was able to clarify that nothing had changed from a consumer’s perspective.

Meanwhile, Google’s biggest rivals are living it up.

Facebook is the new darling of the tech and investment communities following its plans to file for what will probably be the biggest initial public offering ever raised by a tech company. Tim Cook is attempting to prove he can run Apple without Steve Jobs, and has taken a big step with a huge quarter and a new interest in charitable giving. Microsoft’s collaboration with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) probably won the week at CES, it is preparing to launch a new operating system that will help bridge the chasm between the company’s PC era and what it hopes is its mobile era and it gleefully jumped all over Google’s missteps.

Google’s unlikely to have a month like that again, this year anyway. But it’s kind of shocking to contemplate just how uneasy the company has made a lot of people by its decisions around social search and privacy. Perhaps more troubling, its responses to those big questions have been tone-deaf and almost defiant, traits one did not associate with Google until recently.

January could easily be a blip in the long run for Google. The economy seems to be improving, which could boost search advertising spending. Android remains a vital part of the mobile story, and Apple could have a hard time sustaining the pent-up demand for the iPhone 4S (it would be unfair to expect gains like that every quarter). And if Google+ really does turn into a service on par with Facebook or Twitter, Google could have both pieces of the modern online data puzzle—search and social—at its disposal.

So why then do many people I talk to about Google—both tech insiders and regular Joes at the bar—feel uneasy? Maybe it’s because a lot of those people finally realized in January that Google has turned into a conventional company—one that pushes the line wherever possible to maximize revenue and profit even at the expense of users and customers—something it swore it would never become.

Once you’ve gone down that road, it’s pretty hard to go back, and all the driverless cars and mysterious entertainment devices in the world won’t necessarily help.

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The movie and TV show streaming company is the first client of Palo Alto-based start-up eyeIO, a maker of a video encoding system it claims reduces the bandwidth needs of Netflix streams by more than 50 percent without sacrificing picture and sound quality.

The issue of bandwidth availability is one of Netflix’s most pressing concerns as it moves away from DVD rentals and seeks to expand its streaming service globally. In Canada, for example, large internet service providers including Rogers Communications have lowered the monthly usage caps to the tiered options they offer their subscribers. Some usage plans in the Great White North allow for as little as 2 gigabytes a month of usage, which will barely get you through Marley and Me.  Other, more expensive plans allow up to 150 gigabytes a month, which is enough to watch about 10 movies in HD. In cases where subscribers can’t satisfy the usage caps, they either face extra fees or can even be kicked off the service.

In Latin America, where Netflix is looking to expand next, slower bandwidth speeds are an issue. And in the U.S., where the company is seeking to grow mobile usage, wireless providers are now capping data on their fixed networks. EyeIO co-founder Rodolfo Vargas, a former video program manager for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), has extensive experience working with Latin American broadband infrastructure, a background that made him even more attractive as a partner to Netflix, he told paidContent.

Bandwidth caps, of course, affect more than just Netflix—they can impact any company with a streaming business that uses third-party networks to do that streaming.

“We are not in an exclusive relationship [with Netflix], and we have discussions under way in companies in similar fields. We expect to see a stream of releases in the coming months,”
eyeIO chairman Charles Steinberg told paidContent.

Current streams of 720p HD videos by Netflix consume roughly 3.8 megabits per second of bandwidth, but eyeIO says it can reduce that to 1.8 Mbps without the subscriber missing a thing. According to an eyeIO spokeswoman, Netflix began testing the technology has summer and has already begun to deploy it.

“EyeIO technology is an important part of the technology we use to improve video quality and overcome bandwidth challenges presented by internet infrastructure,” said Netflix product development VP Greg Peters in eyeIO’s Wednesday announcement.

EyeIO was founded in late 2010 by Vargas and Robert Hagerty, former chairman and CEO of teleconferencing technology company Polycom.

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The “Reuters and Klout 50” ranks CEOs by Klout score, but mostly by who is most active on Twitter. The rules: “To make the list the user has to be a CEO, active on Twitter, tweeting in English, and have their own handle separate from their company’s (sorry @zappos).” The top three “most influential execs on the web” are Mashable’s Pete Cashmore (with a Klout score of 89), Oprah Winfrey (81), and Rupert Murdoch (80). Others in the top 10 include Square CEO Jack Dorsey and Carnival CEO Micky Arison.

At the top of the page is “The Hit List,” links to stories “being talked about by the newsmakers we follow.” “The more a story is shared on Twitter by these influencers the more likely it is to appear here,” the site explains.

“The Conversation” curates journalist tweets—and is supposed to “track social-media spats and chats between two Twitter parties,” though the storyline at this point is hard to follow—and “Reuters Bloggers & Reporters” features Reuters journalist tweets.

Overall, the site’s reliance on Twitter as penultimate social gauge seems somewhat limiting, with other sources—stories read and shared across Facebook, for instance, as well as stories trending on blogs and other news sites—not included. (You can see the stories shared on Facebook by your friends but not more broadly in the “business community” this site is aimed at.) “It’s not simply about how customers view a particular company, but how everyone engaged in the social realm views that company,” said Reuters’ director of news product Alex Leo in a statement. Or at least how much they tweet about it.

“Our advertisers typically do not have long-term advertising commitments with us,” Facebook’s S-1 warned. “Many of our advertisers spend only a relatively small portion of their overall advertising budget with us.

“In addition, advertisers may view some of our products, such as sponsored stories and ads with social context, as experimental and unproven.

“Advertising on the social web is a significant market opportunity that is still emerging and evolving. We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage reach, relevance, social context, and engagement offered by Facebook.”

Facebook manages to target standard display advertising very well because it knows so much about users, but the biggest opportunity may yet lay in getting users to participate in and distribute to their friends ad campaigns that are part of their social experience may yet hold greater promise. It is a long way from there, however.

Forrester analyst Nate Elliott cautions (via Reuters): “I worry that the billions of dollars of revenue that they generated last year aren’t as solid as they need to be because the advertisers who spent the money aren’t as thrilled with the results they got for it.”

Amongst advertising’s biggest skeptics is advertising’s biggest beast. WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell thinks advertisers will be challenged to reach social network users without offending them, making Facebook a better PR and word-of-mouth medium than a straight advertising one.

Indeed, Facebook has been trying to strike that very balance. But, with its quest to roll out the perfect formats still ongoing, Facebook has made frequent missteps along the way, such as its Beacon system, which proposed sharing users’ web purchases to friends before it was aborted.

Today, less than half a percent of people who Like big brands’ Facebook Pages actually bother to engage with them, according to new research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

Social is not Facebook’s only advertising play. Its offering today is focused mainly around display ads that run alongside users’ feeds. Here, Facebook is so big that, in some key markets like the U.S. and UK, it’s actually the biggest player of all in display advertising - social or otherwise - leaving those that effectively created the display field—Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), AOL (NYSE: AOL) and others—in the dust.

But it’s social advertising where perhaps the greatest potential lays. And frankly Facebook, like its advertisers, has not yet cracked the nut; that mission goes on.

If, previously, upgrades like Beacon, Timeline and its perpetual redesigns have prompted user outcry, expect future responses to manifest as share price fluctuation when such revisions take place in the public glare of Wall Street.

Still, users’ redesign shock often subsides, stock price can rebound accordingly. And, if Facebook can execute fully on the social advertising holy grail, it can become spectacularly successful.

None of this looks very problematic today. In 2011, Facebook advertising revenue rose 69 percent because it showed 42 percent more advertising thanks to a growing user base; it scored an 18 percent higher price per ad.

But Facebook concedes these growth rates may not be sustainable. “Our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue,” its S-1 says. “But “our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time”, especially in the west.

One Facebook ad buying agency thinks that slowdown could be a good thing…

“The market has now entered a phase where there is no longer any super-growth in user numbers to dilute the increases in cost caused by demand increases,” Alchemy Social managing director Will Ashton writes in a new white paper. “As such, we expect costs to increase at rates substantially higher than those we have seen previously.”

In other words, advertisers rushing to Facebook are driving up demand, but the slowdown in Facebook user growth suggests finite supply, driving up the rates it can charge.

Outside the west, Facebook has a huge opportunity in mobile, having gathered 425 million users. But it’s not monetising a single one because it is not selling any ads through mobile. Worse - until then, mobile success could actually hurt the company from within…

“Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently display ads, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results,” the company warns. “Our ability to (generate mobile revenue) successfully is unproven.”

$3.1 billion in 2011 ad revenue suggests Facebook is well on its way. What an amazing number for such a young paradigm. But some investors may question whether much of that was short-term experimentation by advertisers, meaning Facebook must work hard to prove its value to them as much as they have to itself.

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845 million active users, 100 billion “friendships”, 250 million photos uploaded daily

That works out to an average of 118.3 friends per user, and an average of 3.4 0.3 pictures uploaded each day by those active users. Among those 845 million active users, more than half—483 million—are actually daily active users (taking the photo average up to 0.5 uploads per day, or around 15 per month). They’ve gone up by 48 percent since December 2010, when they stood at 327 million DAUs. Those numbers sound big on one hand, but not so big on another: doing some very basic math, this works out to average revenues per user of only $4.39. As a point of comparison, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) currently makes about $36 per user; Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) $16 per user (via CBS).

$1 billion in net income on revenues of $3.711 billion

That works out to net income at about 30 percent of revenues in 2011, up slightly from the previous two years when net income was at about 29 percent of revenues. A sign of improving efficiencies?

$3.2 billion in ad revenue

That’s the ad revenue figure for 2011, out of total revenues of $3.7 billion. The rest of its revenue is made up by Facebook Credits and other payments. The growth in ad revenues at the moment appears to be slowing down: Facebook says between 2009 and 2010, ad revenues grew by 145 percent, but then between 2010 and 2011 it grew by only 69 percent. There’s a clear sign that Facebook will need to further diversify how it makes its money if that trend continues. Credits and other fees are still very much on the rise and becoming a more prominent part of the overall revenue pie. In 2011 they amounted to 15 percent of revenues ($557 million); in 2010 they accounted for only five percent ($106 million).

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$0 in mobile advertising

Facebook currently makes nothing from advertising on mobile devices because it has yet to extend ads to its mobile platforms. The S-1 didn’t specify whether it planned to introduce this and in fact cast its mobile prospects in the most sober light possible: Facebook thinks that growth in mobile monthly active users will exceed the growth of overall MAUs “for the foreseeable future” as Facebook continues to encourage more mobile use of its platform. There must be a business agenda in that but Facebook doesn’t spell it out here. In fact, it cautions that as more people could just start using the mobile platforms more than the desktop version, where ads do appear, “if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected.”

Zuck’s salary is going down to $1 from next year. At the moment Facebook has 3,200 employees in total. That works out to an average revenue per employee of $1,159,687.50.

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There’s no firm idea yet on what that $5 billion might mean for a valuation of the company. But here are some quick early numbers: Facebook made $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011, almost twice what it did in 2010. Of that $3.71 billion, $1 billion was net income.

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It has 845 million active registered users with 483 million of them termed “daily active users”.

Advertising accounted for 85 percent of its revenue last year. Zynga accounted for 12 percent of its revenues overall and over 80 percent of its payment revenues.

And to confirm the rumors we heard about which banks are involved: Morgan Stanley is leading the IPO filing with J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, and Allen & Co also participating.

Several folks are in line for a big gain on their investments. Facebook listed Accel Partners, DST Global Limited, Goldman Sachs, and T. Rowe Price as its major institutional shareholders. Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder and CEO of startup Asana, is also a major stockholder listed in Facebook’s statement. Notable among the individual investors is Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and will serve on Facebook’s board of directors.

It’s not just the IPO price, bankers and valuation that had people busy guessing. People have been speculating about other aspects of this IPO, including how much of a fee the banks will get on the deal (the range we’ve seen: between one percent and seven percent).

Now, with the IPO finally out, people will begin to pore over the numbers to figure out all sorts of things about Facebook that have not been completely clear while it was still in startup mode: What are its margins? What does it expect its growth rate to be? What are the comparative sizes of different business areas like advertising versus Facebook credits? What’s the geographical spread of its business?

However you cut it, the company has been a ground-breaker in the online world. You can argue about whether or not Facebook introduced the concept of social networking, but it has certainly run away with it, and now has 845 million users. And counting.

The question today is whether it will be able to convert that into a sustainable financial juggernaut, too?

More S-1 detail and number crunching here.

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Just think about all the changes humans have been asked to adopt in the past eight years. Most of us, back then, didn’t carry mobile computers in our pockets. If we did use tablets, like I did, they were expensive, slow, low resolution devices that could only last about two hours. We had no idea what a mobile app was, and if we did, because we were on Nokia (NYSE: NOK) phones, like I was, they were hard to discover, download, and use. Now both Android and iOS each have more than 400,000 apps (iOS has 500,000).

Back in 2003 the mainstream was just understanding blogging. Heck, +TechCrunch didn’t start until 2005.

I remember back then that Tim O’Reilly popularized the term “Web 2.0.” He and I spoke at the first Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Zeitgeist conference and I remember sitting next to him and he was pushing the Web 2.0 term with folks online.

Barcamp started in this age.

Twitter was born in this age. So was Zynga. LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD). And Facebook.

Eight years ago Google was the only one who I knew that had these monster huge datacenters around the world with hundreds of thousands of servers. Now these seem commonplace.

We’ve seen extraordinary shifts in how we communicate, protest, and work together.

Yammer, Jive, Salesforce Chatter, didn’t exist back then.

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) was only a retail store back then. The really disruptive stuff came out in the past eight years from them.

Xbox was just starting to get noticed back then but even while I worked there in 2003 to 2006 they had no clue just how disruptive Xbox Kinect would be.

Heck, back then most of us didn’t have an HDTV.

If you look back at the last eight years we saw disruption in how we live, play, and work together it was really extraordinary.

But this is the first January when I haven’t been blown away by something new in quite a few years. There wasn’t a new iPhone. There wasn’t a Kinect. There wasn’t dozens of new iPhone apps that are mind blowing (I’ve only seen one, Highlight, and it’s not mindblowing, just executed well). Here’s a video where I get a look:

Does this seem mindblowing? Nope, not really, but it will be hot at SXSW so it might lead to something else, it just doesn’t seem like other pre-SXSW times where we saw Twitter and Foursquare gain traction in February and March.

It’s pretty clear that while we’re still seeing plenty of new things, and new companies, the tech industry threw an extraordinary amount of disruption at the world. So, it’s time to take a breather. This year we won’t see a wild new innovation spread like wildfire, but, rather, we’ll just see more people adopt the disruptions of the past eight years.

Think we’re there yet? Sorry, out of all the attendees at the World Economic Forum, only about 30 percent are on Twitter. San Francisco might have been at that point in 2009, but many many people around the world, including leaders, still aren’t using the disruptive technologies that the rest of us are already getting bored with.

It’s time to shave the edges off of all those apps (tomorrow Foodspotting will demonstrate the trend I’m seeing to do just that) and execute and build businesses that have real customers and real business models.

We have a lot of work to do!

That’s a way to say that the IPO of Facebook is the closing of an extraordinary chapter in our history. Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg and the thousands of people working at Facebook but congratulations to ALL of us who have adopted social media/networks/technologies in the past eight years. We’ve made this disruptive chapter happen and I don’t mind it at all if we take a year off shipping huge new disruptive technologies and just get down to the business of using all of these new things.

Here’s a test: out of the 500,000+ apps that are in the iPhone app store how many have you used? I’m supposedly a “heavy” early adopter and I’ve only tried around 600. Our ability to keep up with the pace of change in this industry is being stretched to the limit. We need a year just to breathe and get used to swimming in this new disruptive world.

Now we need to make all this stuff work.

That’s one reason why I’m changing focus at +Rackspace Hosting to focusing on small teams who are using all these new disruptive technologies to have a huge impact in the world. Don’t know what New Relic are? Loggly? Node.js? Echo? Janrain? These are the things that have me excited now because they help small teams do things for millions of people. Here’s one of our early shows, with Janrain, which is helping lots of companies outsource its user management.

If there’s disruption in 2012: that’s it. These new small companies are helping lots of other companies scale their engineering efforts.

At SXSW we’ll be explaining more about what we’re doing in this regard, but you can see a hint on Rackspace’s Small Teams, Big Impact site.

Do you know of a company that is helping small teams have a huge impact on the world? Let me know!

Oh, and it’s also time to get back to blogging. I’ve been reading Dave Winer’s blog lately and am seeing a reason to blog again instead of just using my Google+ account, which is where I’m spending 90 percent of my time lately.

Robert Scoble is an employee of Rackspace, which can help you with all your hosting needs. He is chief troublemaker in the building43 community of Internet fanatics. He blogs regularly on Scobleizer.com.

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Leading the second round of investment were Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) Ventures and Innovacom, along with participation from prior investors Creandum and Northzone; and takes the total amount of funding in the company to almost $18 million.

Videoplaza says that it will be using the investment to help fund its international growth and product development. Those two areas appear to be running fast at the moment anyway: the company says that its client base already spreads across 17 markets, and in the past year its ad serving volumes grew five-fold. Some of its clients include the publisher Dennis, French commercial broadcaster M6 and Spanish newspaper group La Vanguardia and the France-Telecom-owned interactive ad network Unanimis, and it partners with other established names in the business, like Brightcove, to help monetize their video ad traffic.

Videoplaza’s target is to tap into some of the $160 billion that is estimated to be spent on TV advertising annually at the moment, and following those ad budgets as media buyers try to chase down viewers as they start watch more and more of that TV content on an ever-growing variety of screens, from IP-enabled TVs to smartphones, tablets, cars and desktop computers—and who knows what else. Videoplaza projects that by 2020 there will be more than 10 billion connected devices in consumers’ hands that could be used for consuming streamed video.

It is not the only one: companies like YuMe, spotXchange, BrightRoll (a Videoplaza partner), Hulu, CBS (NYSE: CBS) and many, many others are also scrambling for substantial market share in this space. It’s still a fast-growing area, with the amount of ad-funded, streamed video content still very much on the rise—both in terms of volumes and consumption—but there is bound to be some consolidation on the cards among these ad players, too.

A stake from a company like Qualcomm—which plays a central role in making processors and other parts and software for mobile devices—could potentially give Videoplaza a leg up in that respect. At the moment the vast majority of video ad consumption for Videoplaza is still coming from PCs: only eight percent came from other devices. But the company believes that by 2013 (that is, in a year) that will shift to a 50-50 balance.

But let’s go back to May of 2005, less than a year after Facebook was initially incorporated. TheFacebook, as it was then called, measured its users in the low millions. Only American college students could be on the network, and they were verified through their college e-mail addresses. TheFacebook had steamrolled first through Harvard, beginning in February of 2004. Here is Zuck’s first statement as the proprietor of The Facebook, which he gave to the Harvard Crimson’s Alan Tabak, now a lawyer at the high-powered firm, Davis Polk:

“Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg said. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can
do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”

As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

After conquering the Crimson, Zuckerberg expanded the operation to a group of Ivy League schools, and then on to the rest of the country’s colleges. It was clear big things lay on the horizon for the company, but I’m not sure anyone could have seen quite how big.

It was that spring that ‘TheFacebook, Inc’ made its first filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The paperwork details a $6,840 investment from a time when only Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Dustin Moskovitz had to be listed on the startup-friendly Rule 506 Form D. Zuckerberg appears to have used is personal phone number for the filing, a New York 914 number rather than the Palo Alto landline used after August of 2005. The legal fees associated with the filing were a mere $50. And it’s signed by the very hand of Zuckerberg.

In the next filing (dated a week later) things get really interesting. We see the $12.7 million investment that came in from Accel Partners. Peter Thiel’s name also shows up on the SEC filing as a director and beneficial owner of the company. Still, I find the first filing the most compelling. If Facebook is now the 800-pound gorilla of the social space, this is that monster’s birth certificate.

Facebook’s First SEC Filing

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YouTube is shedding its scruffy adolescence and seeking to redefine what entertainment means in the online video era. In fact, with each passing day, it becomes more evident that YouTube is building a parallel universe to the traditional world of cable TV, targeting niches that have long been mined by a multitude of specialty channels. This theme will crystallize as 2012 unfolds.

YouTube’s 100 new channels of original online-only content have begun rolling out and will continue to do so throughout the year. For a relatively modest $100 million (by Google’s standards!) YouTube is getting first dibs on programming that is laser-targeted at valuable niches. Importantly, it is helping galvanize a community of content creators who have either not been a part of the traditional pay and broadcast TV ecosystem, or are seeking a new, less constrained environment to play in, or both.

The latest sign of YouTube’s magnetic pull came yesterday as Electus (the multimedia studio headed by NBC’s former entertainment honcho Ben Silverman and backed by IAC) announced that it had recruited Bruce Seidel to head its food channel on YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG). Seidel, who most recently led programming for the Cooking Channel and was previously a senior programming executive at Food Network, where he developed the Iron Chef shows among others, obviously knows a thing or two about creating compelling food-related content. No doubt he’ll quickly establish Electus’s food channel as a popular draw while leveraging YouTube’s many interactive possibilities.

Meanwhile, today brings the launch of “START” the new gaming channel from IGN, which News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS) acquired for $650 million in 2006. It will feature at least 5 long-form original programs, some of which will be produced by Reveille, another News Corp. property (coincidentally founded by Silverman) that is responsible for popular TV shows “Ugly Betty” and “The Office.” START will compete for audience with cable’s G4 among others.

On top of these are channels from celebrities like CSI’s Anthony Zuiker, Stan Lee, Jay-Z, Deepak Chopra and action sports stars Tony Hawk, Shaun White and Kelly Slater among others. Then there are a host of new channels backed by hugely popular online content destinations like Machinima, TED, SB Nation, The Onion, WSJ, VICE, MyDamnChannel, Bleacher Report and others. Each one of them will compete for attention, to one extent or another, with various channels found on the cable dial.

Beyond the channels themselves, there are also interesting dynamics regarding how YouTube will play a role in launching new talent. For example, I was intrigued by a session I moderated at last week’s NATPE Conference (where YouTube also had a huge presence) with David Sievers and Jeremy Welt, executives with Maker Studios. For those not familiar with Maker, it’s an online-only studio that is now generating over 500 million views per month via YouTube, and is also part of the 100 channels effort with its Maker Music channel. Something that really struck me in our conversation is how they view YouTube as offering a totally new playbook for breaking new talent. YouTube’s vast reach and engagement offer a vibrant platform for new artists to express their creativity and directly find their audience. The new channels represent a launch pad for them.

I was recently having a spirited debate over what impact new over-the-top alternatives will have on the pay-TV industry (e.g. cord-cutting, shaving, nevering, etc.) with a former colleague of mine from my cable days who has gone on to become one of the industry’s top researchers. My position was that the wasteful cross-subsidies inherent in multichannel subscription bundling, coupled with spiraling rates, will create momentum for Over-the-Top (OTT) options, eventually leading to fragmentation. The internet has proven itself ruthless in rooting out analog era market inefficiencies and long-term, I believe the video business will be no different. He took the opposite view, insisting the firewall is that the majority of new, compelling content is not available on the Internet.

That comment struck me as reflecting the same type of thinking as that of broadcast TV executives from 30 to 35 years ago as they dismissed nascent cable TV networks then airing a hodgepodge of re-runs and lesser sports. The lesson: it’s all too easy for incumbents to see the world only as it is, not as it could be. YouTube - and the many others who are pursuing original online programming - are still in their early days. But when combined with changes in viewer behavior, the proliferation of connected and mobile viewing devices and the firming up of online video monetization models, I’m betting that these efforts, particularly those led by YouTube, are going to be a highly disruptive force to the traditional TV ecosystem.

Will Richmond is president and founder of Broadband Directions LLC, a market intelligence, publishing and consulting firm specializing in broadband-delivered video, which he established in 2003. Will edits and publishes VideoNuze, a daily online publication widely read by broadband video decision-makers.

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