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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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.

Where are the apps?

In a lengthy meeting with City analysts on Wednesday, company executives re-iterated its belief that the box, which is designed to lure Sky customers and head off the emergence of connected TVs, is “an open platform”. But, if Virgin’s TiVo is so “open”, why does it still carry only 15 handpicked “apps”, compared with the 1,000 Samsung Smart Hub has in Europe? That question specifically was asked by an analyst from Cazenove…

“You will see a few apps every month,” he was told by company COO Andrew Barron. “They will be heavyweight apps, not just fodder. It’s easy to publish all sorts of things to it, because it’s got Flash - but we want to the real heavyweights.”

It was a skilled response to what analysts are now realising - Virgin’s TiVo platform is a step-change from its forebear but still a way’s away from rival boxes and TV sets in this regard, and the big-platform-operator way of thinking is notable by its presence.

Virgin claimed viewers called up 2.4 million app sessions in November, spending 21 minutes a time. The showcase apps are iPlayer and Spotify, whose content tends to run long.

iPad controller delayed

For all its advanced additions, the TiVo box, which comes with an additional £5 monthly premium, still does not include basic features of its predecessor like BBC Red Button, which is part and parcel of free-to-air Freeview. Meanwhile, the iPad controller promised pre-launch more than a year ago is still absent. Again, an analyst quizzed Virgin Media on Wednesday.

“We’ve got it, it works,” Barron told him. “Ninety-nine percent of companies would have rolled it by now - it’s stable, impressive - but we haven’t…

“We wanted to make sure early adopter enthusiasts will love it - but that, when it hits, it goes mass-market quite quickly and is not viewed as some flaky application for enthusiasts but is polished and doesn’t generate calls to support. It shows you our philosophy - we’re a mass-market company.”

This is far from the product development method which many developers nowadays favour - ship first, iterate later.

To premium and beyond

If Virgin’s TiVo hasn’t yet got to grips with “open” as many internet afficonados recognise it or with the full-blown revolution in over-the-top connected TV services that is coming in to view, it is, however, ushering in a step change in viewing habits…

Half of viewing on TiVo is now carried out through its My Shows section - that is, shows recorded on its PVR and personalised recommendations. Virgin, whose TV box has three tuners for simultaneous recording as well as broadcaster catch-up services, is spearheading a big rise in timeshifting, now showing 90 million VOD views per month from customers.

It’s a continuation of a trend the previous V+ box, as well as the rise of broadcasters’ own catch-up brands, had created before it. But, if TiVo is still far opening the gates to over-the-top operators in reality, it is proving to be an excellent platform through which to watch VOD on Virgin’s terms.

The company’s strategy is to frog-march customers from Virgin’s existing broadband and TV services to TV upgrades (TiVo) and faster broadband (speeds are being doubled), while continually charging more for the privilege.

It is working - average customer revenue for Virgin’s TiVo customers is £60 per month compared with £45 for regular customers. Virgin’s TiVo adoption doubled in Q4, taking it up to 435,000, it reported on Wednesday.

But Virgin must be mindful that continually ratcheting up price in this way won’t simply turn customers away.

In five years’ time, CEO Neil Berkett told analysts, Virgin will have retired its ghastly old Liberate system, will have all its customers on TiVo and will be scouting for “son of TiVo”.

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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Time Warner’s filmed entertainment division grew 7 percent in the fourth quarter, bringing in $3.9 billion in revenue.

The disc rental delays, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told investors, “have enabled our titles to significantly outperform competitive titles without a window.”

Warner Home Entertainment recently extended from 28 to 56 days the delay in which it makes its movies available for rental on Netflix. It’s also trying to extend Redbox’s delay to 56 days, although the kiosk chain is resisting. “We’ll keep working to extend the window for kiosk owners and brick-and-mortar chains,” Bewkes said.

Time Warner’s growth was also spurred by its networks division, with subscriptions to HBO and and carriage fees for channels like TNT leading to a 5 percent growth in revenue to $3.5 billion.

For the entire year, Time Warner reported an 8 percent uptick in revenue to $29 billion and 7 percent growth in operating income to $5.8 billion.

Bewkes cited the HBO Go streaming initiative as a growth driver for the conglomerate’s subscription business, which also grew 5 percent in the fourth quarter.

He used the call to urge major cable carriers including Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) to make HBO Go available through connected TV devices including Roku, noting that greater accessibility to premium cable content will make consumers less likely to cancel their cable subscriptions in favor of over-the-top programming services.

“Not allowing the consumer to access premium content on any device they choose actually increases the relative value of over the top services that really offer the same programming at a later window,” Bewkes said.

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The deal brings “thousands” of Viacom episodes to Prime Instant “over the next several months,” including MTV’s The Hills, Jersey Shore, The Hard Times of RJ Berger and several Real World episodes (what, no Teen Mom?);  Comedy Central shows like Chappelle’s Show and The Sarah Silverman Program; and Nickelodeon episodes of iCarly, Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants and Yo Gabba Gabba.

In Amazon’s Q4 earnings report, the company said it had 13,000 episodes available through Prime Instant Video, so the Viacom deal appears to add around 2,000 episodes.

The company also said that that in Q4 of 2011, “the number of Prime Instant Video streams increased nearly 300 percent” compared to Q3.

Since launching Prime Instant Video about a year ago, Amazon has added content from Disney-ABC, PBS, NBC, CBS, Sony (NYSE: SNE), Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) and Fox.

release

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For the year, the company swung to a £75.9 million net income from a £141.4 million loss a year earlier, as annual revenue rose three percent to £4 billion.

Virgin doubled sign-ups to its new TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) PVR, now at a total 435,000 - but, though it increased its TV subscribe base between October and December, it lost 0.4 percent of its TV subscribers compared with the previous year.

The TiVo box is a big improvement from its predecessor but is still suffering from some quirks, still doesn’t offer some baseline features its predecessor did (like BBC Red Button) and is slow to roll out promised over-the-top services except for Spotify.

Virgin TV customers are now averaging 90 million VOD views per month on their set top boxes through a combination of recordings and hosted on-demand services, exceeding a billion total in 2011 (up 14 percent from 2010).

The company’s strategy is to cater to what it says is growing, voracious demand for digital entertainment and information - in part through its TiVo box and in part by increasing speeds of its broadband service, with which it has a competitive advantage against most copper-wire services by virtue of being fibre optic.

Release.

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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Prosecutors timed the seizures to coincide with a major marketing event, Superbowl XLVI. Similar enforcement actions occurred before last year’s Superbowl and before cyber-Monday last November when the feds bagged 150 illicit sites.

Today’s haul included streaming sites with names like sports95.com and firstrowtv.com. Prosecutors are also charging 28-year-old Michigan man Yonjo Quiroa with criminal copyright for operating the sites from his house.

Meanwhile, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) reports that New England quarterback Tom Brady admitted he used an unauthorized stream to watch last year’s Super Bowl while he was in Costa Rica nursing a sore foot.

The theatrics of the enforcement action resembled previous ones. As on other occasions, today’s news featured a swarm of federal agencies, led by Homeland Security, who displayed fake merchandise and gave triumphant statements.

The website seizures are based on a legal process created in the 1970’s to let federal agents confiscate the property of drug dealers. Once seized, the sites display federal law enforcement badges.

After a number of months, the names are forfeited and become the property of the federal government. The government, in a tactic of dubious legality, has also been using some of the forfeited sites to display anti-piracy messages from Hollywood.

Las Vegas odds makers are favoring the New England Patriots to win the big game by three points over the New York Giants.

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Pivotal Research Group on Wednesday released a report predicting that the cost for a thousand impressions (CPMs) in prime time will actually increase 8 percent for the networks when they convene with advertisers this spring for their annual upfront selling ritual.
The report was assembled by Pivotal’s Brian Wieser, a former advertising agency research executive, who added: “Cable network owners including Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), Discovery, Viacom (NYSE: VIA), Scripps and AMC may also benefit from a ‘halo’ effect around perceived strength going into the 2012-13 TV season.”

At last year’s upfront market, broadcast networks including ABC (NYSE: DIS), CBS (NYSE: CBS), Fox (NSDQ: NWS) and NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) saw their CPM prices increase by 9 percent, while cable network CPMs increased 12 percent across the spectrum.

Wieser offered one caveat: There’s no guarantee that broadcasters will sell enough TV ad time during the upfront to match last year’s huge $9.1 billion haul. “There is an absence of empirical data which correlates upfront pricing to actual revenue results,” he wrote.

In any event, Wieser’s prediction that commercial prices will continue to climb comes amid speculation by some that internet companies like YouTube are about to see a major payoff from huge investments in producing premium TV-like video content. Speaking to CNN last week, former MTV Networks CEO Tom Freston suggested that this could be the year for significant migration of viewers and ad dollars from traditional TV to internet-based video. “YouTube’s introduction of 100 channels is going to be a tipping point for the web,” Freston, who is now a consultant, predicted.

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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.

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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TV subscriber additions fell to 40,000 in Q2, from 140,000 the previous year. CEO Jeremy Darroch conceded to City analysts: “Some people are uneasy about making a long-term commitment right now.”

But half-year operating profit rose 16 percent to £601 million on six percent higher revenue of £3.36 billion and average annual customer revenue rose £8 to to £544. Total customer base grew 100,000 to 10.4 million.

“The company made a number of announcements which confirm that – beyond the near term slowdown – structural issues are looming,” Bernstein analyst Claudio Aspesi writes in a research note.

“While we believe the Pay TV business is inherently more defensive than advertising-funded ones, the depth and length of the downturn in the UK economy are still unknown: any significant changes to our forecasts for the UK TV ad market could be large enough to change the outlook for the stock.”

In the worsening consumer economy, Sky is trying to sweeten existing subscribers with new accessibility…

• Device access for subscribers: Sky Go, for watching Sky on non-satellite devices, got 1.5 million unique users in December and is launching on Android in February, with new channels Sky 1, Sky Living, Sky Arts 1 and Sky Sports F1 being added.
• Public WiFi for subscribers: Sky is about to launch its public WiFi service based on its The Cloud acquisition, giving Sky Broadband Unlimited customers free access to over 10,000 public hotspots.
• Fibre premium, wider footprint: Fibre broadband launching from April at up to 40Mbps for £20 per month. Meanwhile, Sky is extending its copper network to 88 percent of UK (an extra million homes) by June 2013.

And there are new threats…

• Cheaper internet TV alternatives: Sky will de-couple its movie, sport and entertainment content from satellite by taking it to the coming wave of connected TV owners as post-satellite pay-as-you-go pay-TV - an attempt to head off internet TV apps from operators like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Lovefilm and Blinkbox.
• Premier League bidders: Al Jazeera Sports may bid up renewal prices in the next rights round. “We’ll have to see what noise there is in the market and who we think may be there,” Darroch told analysts. “It is a blind auction, it’s a sealed bid, but it goes through rounds. Not all packages are awarded in the first round.”

“The unbundling of pay-TV appears a direct response to the launch of Netflix, but also seems to suggest that additional growth through the old model of bundled pay-TV through satellite is coming to a natural end in its growth,” Bernstein’s Aspesi writes.

“The performance of BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) hinges on the continued availability of premium content in the face of possible new entrants determined to build competitive pay-TV businesses over different platforms.”

The as-yet-unnamed and unpriced service will offer Sky Movies, Sky Sports and entertainment over a swathe of devices including tablet, mobile, console and connected TV. There will be no minimum contract and “a wide variety of pricing options”.

It may not look like it today, but this may turn out to be one of the most significant developments in Sky’s history.

Sky has offered TV to internet devices since 2006 but, currently, all such efforts, including Sky Go and the Sky News iPad app, are geared at providing enhanced value for existing Sky satellite subscribers. Where Sky has allowed non-satellite subscriptions, they have been so prohibitively priced relative to satellite that the idea has, in essence, been to drive satellite subscriptions.

The risk for Sky was that the new wave of internet TV services - including from consoles, dedicated boxes, integrated connected TVs that ship with thousands of free on-demand services and the emergence of cheaper over-the-top operators like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Blinkbox - would tempt existing and new consumers away from the core Sky satellite option.

Already, Sky TV sign-ups are slowing - down to 40,000 in Q2, from 140,000 the previous year, Sky announced on Tuesday. “Some people are uneasy about making a long-term commitment right now,” CEO Jeremy Darroch conceded to City analysts.

So it is logical for Sky to turn that threat in to an opportunity - the opportunity to take its top-tier pay-TV content to a new generation of otherwise pay-TV refuseniks, minus the cost of satellite.

Consumers are expected to be able to subscribe to Sky on YouView; TVs from manufacturers like Samsung, Sony (NYSE: SNE) and LG; (SEO: 066570) Xbox; iPad and more.

Sky has been wedded to and defined by its satellite distribution system since launching it in 1990.  But, by allowing customers to subscribe to Sky Sports, Sky Movies and so on directly on the internet TV they buy in 2012 and beyond, Sky is de-coupling its content and its distribution platform in the future.

CEO Jeremy Darroch told analysts: “It will give another choice to the 13 million UK households that have chosen not to subscribe to pay-TV. It will be a new way to reach out to consumers who love great content but have no need for the full range of Sky services.” There will be “no infrastructure investment”.

“Beyond the near-term slowdown, structural issues are looming,” writes Bernstein analyst Claudio Aspesi in a research note. “The unbundling of pay-TV appears a direct response to the launch of Netflix, but also seems to suggest that additional growth through the old model of bundled pay-TV through satellite is coming to a natural end in its growth.”

Fascinating to watch Sky reinvent itself in OTT world. My prediction- number of subscribers to its core satellite service to halve by 2015.

— Wil Stephens (@wilstephens) January 31, 2012

Sky will lose a lot of its turnover but become immensely profitable as it strips out huge infrastructure costs associated with legacy biz.

— Wil Stephens (@wilstephens) January 31, 2012

Under a newly extended agreement by the two parties, NASCAR will move much of the operations for its online and mobile platforms from Turner’s Atlanta-based studios to the racing league’s headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., effective January 2013. Turner, which has operated the popular NASCAR digital platforms for the last 11 years – and has a broadcast relationship with the racing league dating back 28 years – will continue to sell ad time on the platforms.

Between 2006 and 2010, NASCAR’s TV viewership dropped 24 percent on the channels of broadcast partners Fox (NSDQ: NWS), Turner and ESPN (NYSE: DIS). Ratings rebounded by about 10 percent across the board last Sprint (NYSE: S) Cup season, but are still way off from their 2005 peak. An individual close to the league’s digital efforts said NASCAR wants to use its digital platforms to “evangelize” the sport and bring its metrics back closer to their 2005 peak.

NASCAR negotiated its current broadcast deals—which total $4.48 billion—with Turner, Fox and ESPN in 2005, and they went into effect in 2007. Those deals run through 2014. (NASCAR’s rights deal—of just over $500 million a year—is about half of the nearly $1 billion annually the NBA gets.)

Marc Jenkins, VP of digital media for NASCAR, says the league is satisfied with the popularity of the Turner-run NASCAR.com, which averages about 6 million unique users a month. Mobile usage has continued to expand through carriage by principal league sponsor Sprint, he added.

But NASCAR wants to use digital to grow the overall popularity of its sport rather than merely service advertisers – a goal that might not be so congruent with Turner’s long-term interest. “Turner has been a great partner, but at a certain point we can’t keep asking them for favors – we need to do a lot of things that are uniquely in our interest,” he said. “We want to do things like push our content out on YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) to reach a younger demo. There might not be a lot of ROI in that, but it helps drive the sport.”

While the new deal ends Turner’s editorial management of NASCAR digital—accounting and other parts of the operations will also be moving to Charlotte—it does extend their ad sales partnership through 2016. Matt Hong, senior VP and general manager of sports operations for Turner Sports, said he was unable to say just how many Turner Sports staffers will be affected by the move. “Things will be status quo through 2012, and then we’ll figure it out from there,” he said.

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Washington, DC-based SnagFilms, which offers access to a library of about 3,000 indie movie titles for viewing on over 100 types of digital devices, took another step in that direction Monday when it announced an additional funding and financing to the tune of $7 million.

The infusion marks yet another expansion of a four-year-old company that has quickly grown into perhaps the most potent digital distribution force in indie film today. Few companies in the movie business beyond the major studios have the ability to distribute through as many digital VOD and streaming channels.

The company’s emergence has coincided with the roiling of the independent film sector, which has seen production funding and traditional theatrical and TV distribution channels dry up in the global economic downturn. There is now an ample supply of inexpensively produced indie film in need of some kind of distribution, and companies like SnagFilms and New Video have positioned themselves to be the ones to lead the charge in releasing this content into streaming and VOD channels. Unlike, say, New Video, however, SnagFilms has its own streaming destination that plays on pretty much every digital device.

Rick Allen, SnagFilms’s CEO, said the money will be used to further expand the company’s library and market its films. It also will be used to augment its technology. “Going up on more than 100 devices and platforms was not an inconsiderable task,” Allen told paidContent, noting that the company plans to begin streaming to Apple’s iPhone within the next 90 days.

SnagFilms’ viewing module now plays on 95 percent of tablets, including the iPad and Kindle Fire, all Android smart phones, and connected TV devices including Roku and Boxee. The company also conducts distribution to a wide range of cable/satellite VOD service providers, as well as digital and electronic sell-through services.

“The question really is what will become the premiere destination for independent film, and Snag has been making some very smart moves,” said Marc Schiller, founder and CEO of BOND Strategy and Influence, which consults producers and entertainment companies on digital marketing.

SnagFilms’ viewership is still in the “low millions” in terms of unique monthly users, Allen said. But Schiller thinks that given its reach and growing catalog, the company has the opportunity to establish a brand presence in indie-movie streaming similar to what Netflix has built in the realm of mainstream film. “Netflix only is the only company that I can think of that’s available on this many devices and platforms,” Allen added.

All of SnagFilms’ current investors participated in this latest round, including chairman Ted Leonsis, and Steve and Jean Case’s Case Foundation Ventures LLC. Meanwhile, veteran media executive Terry Semel, who joined the company’s board last week, also participated.

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In a blog post from Friday afternoon—the traditional time that many companies like to break bad news—Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) announced that it would stop developing and supporting 10 apps that it offers across various mobile platforms. They are Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone); Yahoo! Mim (iPad); Yahoo! Answers (Android); Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone); Yahoo! Deals (iPhone); Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry); Yahoo! Movies (Android); Yahoo! News (Android); Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone) and Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone).

As you can see, the list is a mix of some of Yahoo’s more popular online brands and some services it created especially for mobile users, but all have one thing in common: they weren’t being used much by consumers. In the words of Yahoo itself, it is removing the apps as part of its effort “to continuously measure and scrutinize what’s working and what isn’t” as part of a new “mobile first” strategy.

What isn’t working? Yahoo has for years now been steadily falling behind Google in terms of how it has tackled the mobile opportunity.

This latest move seems like a particularly damning admission in the case of popular online brands such as Yahoo’s news and finance portals: it is yet another demonstration that Yahoo has failed to find mobile traction with consumers in some more obvious areas.

Meanwhile, others like Meme (Yahoo’s microblogging network), Deals and Shopping (mobile commerce initiatives) are signs that Yahoo’s attempts at creating me-too services to mimic those from more popular brands—like Twitter in the case of microblogging, or Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) in the case of deals—have not come to much, either, at least on some platforms.

As for what is working, Yahoo says that it will continue to support a number of other apps: for now, News and Finance will continue, for example, on iOS; as will Sports, Mail, Messenger and Flickr. Yahoo is also pressing on with two new apps it launched last year, IntoNow, a GetGlue-like ‘check-in’ app for TV and other entertainment viewing; and Livestand, a Flipboard-like aggregated magazine (pictured).

But given that it’s easy enough to describe these apps in terms of popular competing services, one has to wonder if their days will also be numbered if take-up doesn’t take off.

Yahoo also notes that some of the technology in the de-commissioned apps, meanwhile, will be making its way into some of the apps that are staying online.

In his plans for building up Yahoo’s audience, usefulness and credibility once again, Thompson has made a point of talking up Yahoo’s culture of innovation—he mentioned it on his first conference call after taking the job; and again last week during his first quarterly earnings call. This should be the company’s way of making space to be able to execute on some of those ideas, and indeed Yahoo says it will be releasing new mobile products this year.
 
In that sense, it’s probably a step in the right direction. Thompson still has a very big task ahead, though, to convince an increasingly more distracted consumer base that this slightly tired Internet brand is one worth watching for the future.

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After months of negotiating, which paidContent reported on in August, BBC iPlayer and ITV (LSE: ITV) Player will be added to the Sky+ box’s Anytime+ service later this year.

But Sky, which had wanted to syndicate the broadcasters’ shows and not their branded services, has softened on its determination to own the customer experience...

Both the BBC and ITV services will be explicitly branded “iPlayer” and “ITV Player”, will live in their own areas with distinct looks and feels, and editorial control for their front pages will rest with the broadcasters. They will look more like their equivalent web products than like Sky’s typical system of blue menus.

Previously, Sky customers had to actively record BBC and ITV shows using their Sky+ PVR. The Sky Anytime, pseudo-VOD service had also pushed a selection of shows to PVR overnight. Now customers will get access to most BBC and ITV shows from the last seven days, and often longer. Sky has also signed a deal for ITV archive shows.

Such services have fast become a baseline necessity for any modern TV service. Virgin Media’s rival pay-TV service had both iPlayer and ITV Player with its TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) and previous boxes. Smart TVs are shipping with these services already integrated and interim internet TV boxes like Roku are all shooting for similar.

The risk was that customers would start to see greater VOD value in free-TV options like smart TVs than on pay-TV services like Sky.

It was important that, ahead of Tuesday’s Q4 earnings statement, Sky shows investment analysts it has a coherent VOD strategy.

Currently, Anytime+, which lets viewers watch shows by plugging a broadband Ethernet cable in to their PVR tuner box or by buying a WiFi dongle, includes on-demand shows from MTV, Discovery, FX, History, Disney (NYSE: DIS), UK TV and National Geographic Channel, as well as Sky’s own-brand channels.

Channel 4’s 4oD, Channel Five’s Demand Five and S4C’s S4/Clic VOD services are as yet absent from Anytime+.

Meanwhile, Sky is dropping its requirement that Anytime+ viewers must have a Sky broadband connection.

Anytime+ is now used by 1.2 million Sky customers, but Sky wants to hike that to five million.

Driven by a flurry of big breaking-news events in 2011 – everything from the Japanese tsunami to the Egyptian uprising – Time (NYSE: TWX) Warner-owned CNN Digital averaged 73 million unique viewers a month last year across its various platforms, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR). Fox News Channel, far and away the leading cable news outlet in prime time, averaged less than 30 million unique users across its channels, while No. 2 network MSNBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) averaged just over 50 million.

Given that other Time Warner sites including Time.com and People.com are folded into the CNN Networks metric, just comparing unique users overstates CNN’s advantage. But in the social networking universe, the 1 million fans on CNN’s Facebook page dwarf those for Fox News by a factor of eight. And with a combined total of 9.4 million followers, @CNN and the rest of the news brand’s Twitter handles have 1.8 million more followers than the closest news competitor, the New York Times.

CNN.com served up 135.9 million page views last March when the earthquake and tsunami ravaged the Japanese coastline, and it averaged 101.3 million video starts a month, a 19 percent uptick over 2010. Sections including Belief (up 64 percent to 7.8 million page views), World (up 23 percent) and This Just In (up 29 percent) also posted big gains.

CNN Digital also remained No. 1 in mobile news for a fourth straight year, averaging 19.4 million unique users, a 60 percent edge over Fox News Digital. (For its part, Fox News is quick to note that it has an engagement metric advantage – according to comScore, the average user spent 10.7 minutes on Fox News sites compared to just 2.2 minutes for CNN.)

These digital rankings, of course, are a complete reversal from what has been happening on cable news television over the last decade.

The Atlanta-based CNN ranked No. 3 in prime-time cable news ratings last year—despite its 16 percent uptick in average nightly prime-time viewers and Fox News Channel’s 9 percent decline. For the year, Fox averaged 2.2 million watchers in prime time, MSNBC came in second averaging 902,000, followed by CNN with 735,000. This, according to TV ratings tracker Nielsen.

Perhaps most key, CNN trailed Fox in the all-important adults 25-54 viewer demographic, averaging less than half of Fox’s 522,000 in the category in which advertising sales are based on. So what’s with the discrepancy between digital and cable performances?

According to Brad Adgate, senior VP and director of research for ad-buying firm Horizon Media, the very programming attributes that seem to give Fox News an advantage over CNN on cable television also seem to have a converse effect online. Focused on what Adgate calls “infotainment” and leveraging the opinions of strong, ideologically minded personalities like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, Fox News’ programming is thematically different from that of CNN, which is rooted in breaking news. In short, CNN has more pure news product that can be easily converted into text and optimized for search.

“If news breaks, and you’re searching for something specific, you go to CNN,” Adgate said. (For their part, CNN officials contend their digital numbers are not all based on breaking news search, noting its Opinion section posted 54 percent traffic growth over 2010.)

Larry Kramer, founder and former CEO of CBS (NYSE: CBS) Marketwatch.com, agrees: “When you first hear about news now, you’re generally not in front of a TV. Your first inclination to go to a site, and for a lot of people, that’s CNN. When news breaks, you’re going to see them get the biggest burst.” Kramer said that Fox’s opinionated personalities have resonated and stood out amid a cluttered cable news spectrum. “But that kind of voice is not unique at all on the web,” he added.

In 2010, when Time Warner actually broke out financial data for its cable news division, revenue from digital platforms matched sales of advertising from U.S. prime-time programming—both accounted for about 10 percent of the company’s bottom line. (Time Warner listed operating income as $500 million that year.)

Despite its growing strength in online and mobile platforms, CNN is unlikely to try to transition into a pure-play digital company anytime soon. Here’s why: While the No. 3 prime-time audience share for the CNN flagship channel may harm the news company’s domestic advertising sales revenue, its cable carriage fees remain among the highest in the TV industry, according to Kramer. Indeed, in 2010, CNN and its related brands grossed nearly half of their revenue from U.S. and international carriage fees. “That’s a far more significant revenue stream than anything they’ll get on the web,” Kramer said.

Looking forward, the real opportunity for CNN, Kramer added, is to be a true global, multi-platform news provider, in which a centralized news-gathering force services all distribution points. Kramer specifically cited CNN.com’s user-generated-content initiative iReport, which added 250,000 registered users last year. Just like the early days of CNN, when viewer-supplied camcorder video helped transform the cable channel into a must-see destination, iReport could be equally transformative for the brand in an age of camera-equipped smart phones. “There’s no other brand, save for Reuters (NYSE: TRI), that’s so solely associated with news,” Kramer said. “This is one of the only pure-play news brands that really exists internationally.”

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