Rovio has been calling these efforts “one of the world’s biggest video networks,” and Brightcove’s Executive Chairman Jeremy Allaire, whose company is powering Rovio’s video streaming, told me Tuesday that he sees this as an inflection point for video franchises. But what do the famous birds and their disdain for pigs really mean for the future of television?

These birds are up to something

First of all, Rovio’s move into the world of original video programming is pretty ingenious. The company established an audience with its games, and now offers its ad-supported video series through the very same apps — no additional installs needed. “They clearly are in a really powerful position,” said Allaire.

Essentially, the company is using its games as very effective trojan horses, in turn demonstrating how iPads, Android tablets and mobile phones have become an important piece of of the puzzle when you’re in the entertainment business. It also shows how much they’re starting to change the game for the TV industry.

Netflix started its streaming efforts on PCs, but most of its streaming is nowadays happening on connected devices. Game consoles like Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are seeing the lion’s share of use, but devices like Apple TV are growing quickly as well. Netflix owes these devices its success. Without ways to get its content on the TV screen, the company would have never been in a position where it could spend $100 million on a show like House of Cards.

Rovio, on the other hand, is primarily a mobile company. Mobile devices are where people are playing Angry Birds, and it will be where they’re going to watch their weekly episodes of Angry Birds Toons. If the show turns out to be a success (and that’s still a big if) it could turn out to be the first big original programming success story for mobile devices.

And that could have an impact on the industry beyond birds and pigs, by signaling the industry that it doesn’t have to rely on traditional distribution mechanisms anymore. “You can establish a new programming franchise over the internet” thanks to mobile and connected devices, argued Allaire in our conversation.

When pigs fly

However, the flip side of this is that Angry Birds Toons also raises the bar for content companies to stand out and actually reach the consumer. It’s hard to compete with 263 million monthly active users. Heck, it’s hard to compete at all in a sea of millions of apps if all you have to offer is yet another show.

“In some sense, the business model hasn’t changed at all,” admitted Allaire. You still need to have highly compelling content, you still need to market that content effectively — and doing both  effectively is likely going to cost you a lot of money. And if you’re in mobile, you’re going to also need a really good app.

Birghtcove learned that lesson the hard way over the last couple of months when it failed to establish its app cloud offering, which was meant to provide publishers with an easy way to deploy HTML5-based apps with a native wrapper across a variety of platforms.

Turns out that publishers actually prefer to have true native apps that take advantage of each platform’s strengths and features, which is why Brightcove discontinued app cloud in February. “If you want a premium video experience, you got to put your best foot forward,” acknowledged Allaire when I quizzed him about its app cloud.

The bottom line is that Rovio may demonstrate new ways to enter the game — but that doesn’t mean that the rules have changed. To find large audiences, you still need to be big yourself or partner with a bigger platform.

That’s good news for Rovio and companies like Netflix and YouTube – but not necessarily for a startup looking to change the future of television.

The print version of the book, which Rovio published last year, goes by the same title, but the app is “not just a book,” said Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO, to a crowd of people that included not just press and book fair attendees but also teenagers and children wearing Angry Birds sweatshirts. “We took the content from the book, 41 egg recipes, but didn’t want to just take the book, make a PDF and sell it to people. We actually made it a lot more interactive.”

“Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes” is on sale in the iTunes store for an introductory price of $0.99 or €0.69 (an Android version is expected soon). The app includes step-by-step photo instructions, an egg timer and photos of the finished dishes. Users can also upload their own pictures of the recipes they make. A Chinese-language version of the app, featuring some additional recipes and photos, will be available in the Chinese app store soon.

“Look at the implications of Rovio getting into the book business,” Vesterbacka said. “With ‘Angry Birds’ the game, we have built the biggest distribution format on the planet, with more than 1 billion downloads. For us, it’s very, very easy and very fast to cross-promote the book in all our games.”

“We’re not looking thousands or tens of thousands of downloads,” he continued, “we’re looking for millions of downloads of this book…We’re going for massive, massive volume.”

On pricing, he said, “there’s no reason why you should price book applications any differently [from other kinds of apps]. There’s no reason why something should cost more just because it happened to be a book before it turned up on one of these digital platforms.” So the app is $0.99 for now — it will later go up to $4.99 — while the print version of “Best Egg Recipes” is $9.99 on Amazon.

Here’s a short video of the app demo at Rovio’s stand at Frankfurt.

On Thursday it made its debut on iOS and Android, with PC, Mac and Windows Phone versions apparently on the way.

To be honest, there’s not much to say about Amazing Alex itself. It’s a physics puzzler in which you use a variety of objects to construct Domino Rally-style pathways that complete a task — such as moving a ball from one side of the screen to the other, or bursting a balloon. Cue comparisons with a million other titles out there, including big ones like Cut The Rope, and of course, Angry Birds.

In fact, it might look even more familiar than that: As rumors suggested, it does seem to be a pretty much a re-badging of a game called Casey’s Contraptions, which proved popular with players and was bought by Rovio recently. The art, design and most other things seem the same.

In fact, the core mechanic is pretty similar to Angry Birds, and the rest of the game owes it a great debt too. My first impressions were that it was a fairly strong example of its type, but didn’t quite have the destructive, chaotic element that makes Angry Birds so addictive. Plus on the iOS versions it was hit with a glitch that meant it couldn’t connect to Game Center, a problem which caused a bit of consternation.

@amazingalex I bought it half an hour ago. It won’t let me on game center.

— Cole Miller (@colewmiller) July 12, 2012

But generally reaction seems pretty good so far. It’s already selling well in the app stores: currently No3 in the iTunes paid apps as I speak.

So the big question: does it have staying power? That’s not clear. Very few games do.

But of course, Amazing Alex doesn’t need to be a megahit: Rovio is already making a ton of money. But it still has something to prove.

The company does need to show that it can generate success away from the Angry Birds franchise if it’s going to live up to its billing and become something of real significance. In this case, it seems to be trying to do that not by building a new game (remember, it infamously produced 51 non-hit games before Angry Birds) but in trying to use its marketing power to push existing IP into the stratosphere.

I’ve argued before that Rovio really needs to show it’s got more in the tank if it wants to meet its ambitions and go public — as it has said it wants to on many occasions.

Sure, it’s milking the Angry Birds brand for everything it can get, including games, toys, theme parks, the rest. But if it wants to build a Disney-style business, and not just burn on the bonfire of single-franchise entertainment properties, then it needs Amazing Alex to be right up there.

Here’s how a habit is formed: A cue leads to a routine leads to a reward. “Not a lot of attention has been paid to the cue or to the reward,” Duhigg says.

For example, BlackBerries were moderately popular until RIM figured out how to make the BlackBerry vibrate when a user got a new e-mail. The vibration was the cue, the routine was checking e-mail and the reward was “a moment of distraction.” Then “there was an explosion in the number of people checking their BlackBerries throughout the day,” Duhigg said. (Of course, now RIM’s in trouble partly because other devices — hello, iPhone — have found new and better ways to provide those moments of distraction.)

“Solving boredom is the #2 way to create habits”

“Books are perfectly positioned to take advantage of things that are habit-forming,” said Duhigg, because “solving boredom is the number-two way to create habits.” He pointed to The Atavist‘s e-singles, enhanced with video and pop-up images, as an example of “the bookification of Angry Birds.” Those enhancements can offer a “fast delivery of rewards.” (Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that enhanced e-books haven’t done very well, but that could be in part because publishers have tried to charge more for them.)

Or authors can offer “intermittent rewards” and the element of surprise — essentially by writing good books that offer something unexpected throughout.” Duhigg gave the example of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” as a book that “surprises you constantly.”

The 152-page lawsuit, filed in Austin by veteran business lawyers, may also help shape the rules of what Silicon Valley can and can’t do with the personal data that sits in every smart phone.

The address book issue first gained widespread attention in February when the media reported that Path, a social sharing app, was helping itself to users’ contacts without permission. The incident also produced rumors that many other tech companies had been quietly doing the same thing.

A Path-related lawsuit has been anticipated for some time and now it’s arrived with a vengeance. It appears plaintiff attorneys were taking their time in search of deeper pockets and now have found them. In addition to Path, the other defendants include Twitter, Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) (maker of Cut-the-Rope), Yelp, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) and Angry Birds maker Rovio.

The plaintiffs, who want to represent every iPhone and Android phone user who downloaded the apps, say the companies violated federal computer and racketeering laws as well as a series of California and Texas state laws.

They add that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) too should pay millions for “aiding and abetting” the app makers and failing to enforce its own policies.

The claim against Apple is interesting because the lawsuit also describes how the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) App Store for Android and the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android Market (now Google Play) sell the offending apps but yet it doesn’t name them as defendants.

According to plaintiff lawyer, Carl Schwenker, this was a “strategic” decision that resulted from Apple having a “closed system” that gives the company a “significantly larger amount of control” over how the apps are used. Schwenker also suggested Apple is liable because its iOS developer library provided information that allowed the app makers to harvest address books without permission.

The lawsuit itself portrays Apple and its late founder as scheming and hypocritical over privacy issues:

For example, Apple has rejected Apps for competitive reasons .. and occasionally even for moral reasons. Mr. Jobs further expressed that Apple’s control over the approval of Apps for iOS-­‐‐‘system devices was instituted, in part, to provide device owners “freedom from programs that steal your private data” [..]

Apparently, [Instagram's] non‐‘compliance with Apple’s own App Store policies and developer agreements is not a disqualifier for Apple’s “App of the Year” award [...]

If not for Apple’s assistance, encouragement and support, the defendants’ Trojan-­horse-‐‘like Apps would never have been available to the iOS-­‐‐‘device user marketplace over the AppStore

Apple is likely to respond in court by stating that it simply provided developer tools like any other publisher, and that it’s not responsible for app makers that misuse them. I’ve reached out to Apple but the company almost never comments on lawsuits.

Schwenker, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, says the lawsuit is a seminal one in which consumers are “really looking to see reform in the industry.”

The legal case is likely to take further shape this summer when Apple and the other companies respond or file motions to dismiss.

Samsung is a behemoth in consumer electronics already: Boo-Keun Yoon, president of Samsung Consumer Electronics, said that 1.7 billion units of Samsung electronics goods were sold last year, or roughly two items every second. However, even if the company remains very focused on unit sales, it is also attempting to lay more groundwork for a future where it will also need (and want) to compete on the services beyond the hardware. That’s an area where people like David Eun, who was recently appointed to oversee global media initiatives, will be expected to contribute some bright ideas. And that was, essentially, where the bulk of its TV announcements fell today:

No more new TVs? Well, just one more. Samsung said that Smart TVs sold from 2012 will be equipped with card slots in the back that will let the TVs get updated with all their latest software updates (note: Samsung is using its own proprietary platform for its connected TVs — not Google’s as it has done with smartphones and tablets). These cards will start to ship from 2013. “Our smart TV will get smarter every year, without you needing to buy a new TV set,” promised Samsung’s president Tim Baxter. With the company silent on pricing today, you can probably expect that these newest, no-need-to-renew devices will be sold at a premium. One unveiled and showcased today: the ES8000.

Gestures. A big nod to Kinect here and what it is doing in the connected, interactive TV space at the moment. Also a possible precuror of what we might see coming from Apple? (NSDQ: AAPL) In Samsung’s version, users will be able to use their voices and movements to navigate and control their sets, starting from its SmartHub UI, where all interactive content resides. Samsung also showed off some of the other features that will come with it, such as Fitness, a personal training service that will tailor special workouts for each user.

Samsung Apps. The company has had 20 million TV apps downloaded to date, from among some 25,000 TV apps, with the numbers still growing. The newest addition: those loveable Angry Birds from Rovio. They will come both in the form of games — as well as at least one (possibly more) dedicated channels featuring shorts with the characters. This is also a sign of how Rovio is diversifying and getting as much mileage from those birds as it possibly can. (The Mickey Mouse theory of merchandizing and branding.) This may be Rovio’s first connected TV deal, but it probably won’t be the last. Nor will it be the only content aimed at younger folks: Samsung is also launching a dedicated portal for kids.

Cloud-based content. Samsung will be extending its Media Hub, already on tablets and smartphones, to TVs: it will give users the ability to watch on-demand movies and TV shows seamlessly between different devices. This kind of service has essentially become table stakes in the connected TV world, so no surprises here. However, here’s a thought: while you might assume the Media Hub will only work on Samsung devices, that’s not entirely clear yet, either: the company is keen on releasing APIs — right now to developers wanting to work on its own platform, but potentially I can imagine this also working to make different vendors’ devices more interoperable, too. Other cloud based services included a nice-looking photo-sharing service it calls “Family Story.”

3D services. Another buzzy concept that has yet to really take off. Samsung’s take will be a 3D streaming service, which it will run in partnership with content partners. Today it named NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) Universal as one, which will contribute shows like a 3D version of Battlestar Galactica to the mix.

A version of the game was also released for the Android Market on October 16. It is also free.

The idea of Cut the Birds is very basic: the player chops birds flying across the screen with a swiping motion before they “hit” the glass, avoiding bombs that look a lot like the birds. The game, at least in the current version, increases in difficulty with more and faster birds. No advertising or any other revenue options are available in the current iteration.

There are many other apps and games that play on and borrow from the fame of Rovio’s original creation, which itself has spawned many of its own official games, and a very large merchandising franchise to boot (the latest: a cookbook).

The difference here is that the birds look like they’ve been lifted directly from the original Rovio game, and the challenge itself from Halfbrick’s original. And you could even argue that the name borrows from the best-selling Cut the Rope, made by a third developer, Chillingo.

As the blog GamePro points out, copying is fairly common in the world of gaming apps. Still, it’s not often that the product of that copying goes straight to the top of the charts.

Solverlabs is a Ukraine-based software developer that has created other games — including at least one other that lifts from Fruit Ninja, the Fruits and Ninja app for BlackBerry App World. That is selling for $0.99. The company also works on enterprise services, listing three different U.S.-based companies among their clients.

Vesterbacka tells paidContent that the app is a “blatant rip-off” but it’s not clear whether Rovio can or will do any more than say that.

We have reached out to both Rovio and Halfbrick, as well as Solverlabs, for further response, but for now, the biggest outcry seems to have come from customers. Even though the game is getting downloaded by the masses, a fair number of of them are also getting fairly loud in their copying accusations, too, via the comments on the App Store page for the app.

It may be that it’s too difficult to try to chase the developer down, but as Om Malik points out, it’s surprising that the games got published in the stores to begin with, and haven’t yet been removed.

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Judge Ward was instrumental in making the District of Eastern Texas a favorite forum for patent plaintiffs by changing procedural rules to make the district a “rocket docket. According to American Lawyer, these changes and a reputation for plaintiff-friendly juries made the small towns of East Texas a national hotspot for patent litigation.

The current state of that litigation is reflected by the app developer case, which was launched by Lodsys Inc, a shell company commonly known as a patent troll. Lodsys has no real employees but created a business by obtaining a handful of patents and then filing lawsuits against the makers of Angry Birds and other developers.

Many of the developers do not have the resources for a Texas patent fight and are pleading with Apple and Google to help them fight the troll. Apple has filed to intervene in the case, arguing that it has a license for the patents that extend to the developers. Google has initiated a separate proceeding to invalidate the patents.

For the last two months, the case has been confined to procedural matters and the terms of Apple’s license are sealed so it is for now difficult to predict the outcome of the case.

A court filing on Wednesday by Chief Judge David Folsom confirmed that all of Judge Ward’s case were transferred to him this week. Judge Folsom has been on the East Texas bench for 16 years and says he will retire in March.

The biggest app stores are now tipping the half-million mark in terms of overall inventory, but a recent report from the app analytics firm found that when it comes to the most popular apps, consumers often gravitate to content published especially for their markets. In the biggest store of all — the App Store from Apple — on average, nearly one-third of the most popular apps in each country store — 27 percent — were unique to those stores.

Distimo notes that the U.S. — at 7,158 apps — has the most exclusively published apps in its App Store. No surprise, really, given this is where so many developers are based and where so many hope to find success first before trying elsewhere.

Looking at worldwide trends, language also plays a big role.

Taking the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia, these countries’ top apps overlap 54 percent of the time. Although Latin America does not seem to get ranked by Distimo, you can imagine that it too would see a similar trend. The storewide average overlap is 33 percent.

On the other hand, countries with the highest number of localized apps in the top rankings marry two important trends: they have very mobile-friendly consumers, and they are countries where English is not the first language.

Japan topped the list with 67 percent of its most popular apps being popular in that country alone. China, where Apple launched a country-specific App Store in October 2010, came in second with 56 percent of most popular apps specific to the China App Store.

Is there a limit to how many local apps have a chance against the world-wide bestsellers like Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja? For now, it appears the answer is yes. Distimo notes that one-third local seems to be the general number for local apps’ popularity across all platforms, not just Apple’s.

Nokia’s Ovi Store, for example, has significantly more country-specific apps than other app stores — 29.4 percent for Ovi with Apple the next-highest proportion at only 5.2 percent — but Distimo notes that the number of local apps that make it into the top rankings are roughly the same as for the App Store and the Android Market, despite Apple’s and Google’s catalogs having far fewer local apps.

That could spell an opportunity for those developers looking to have more visibility among users in specific markets.

You can see that trend playing out especially in China. Platforms like Android are seeing the creation of full-out local app stores to compete with the Android Market, catering to those using devices built on the OS, with app stores from the likes of Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) and Tencent.

There have also been a number of companies setting up shop to help localize apps from, say, the U.S. market for the Chinese market. The most recent of these was an effort from the DIY app platform Mobile Roadie, which as partnered with local mobile agency FabriQate to launch Q Mobao to help Western developers create iOS and Android apps for the Chinese market. It has also launched a similar initiative in South Korea.

Targeting specific markets is not just about local content, of course.

Last week IDC published figures (via Bloomberg) for smartphone market share in India, and it turns out that Apple has only a tiny part of the market in that country, shipping just over 62,000 iPhones to India in the last quarter, less than it shipped to Norway. That gives Apple a 2.6 percent share of the smartphone market in India. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) currently enjoys the biggest share of the market in India, with 46 percent.

With India the second-largest mobile market after China, that is a big miss for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). IDC notes that part of the issue has been a lack of widespread 3G network for fast mobile data services. Although users can still connect by WiFi, that’s an impractical solution for a person on the move.

Considering that Club Penguin was one of the first, big social networks developed for the 6-14 year-old consumer segment — it started out back in 2005 and was acquired by Disney (NYSE: DIS) for $350 million in 2007, after it had picked up 12 million users — and given how popular smartphones are with younger people, it’s a surprise that it has taken so long for Disney to launch Club Penguin’s first mobile product.

But it doesn’t look like it will be the last. Robin Wyatt, head of marketing and distribution for Disney Online Studios, says that today’s launch of “Puffle Launch” is part of a broader strategy to launch more mobile games spun out of the online product.

“We are looking at different games that we can move into the app store,” she said.

That sounds like a turnaround: before, there were some signs that Club Penguin has lost its way: in May 2010, the company was reported to have missed its earnings targets, thereby missing its $350 million earnout. Then, this year, Disney forgot to re-register the domain name for the site, resulting in a temporary loss of the site.

The huge success of apps like Angry Birds and other games, as well as the many story-telling apps and other educational and entertainment content, has helped to make children very early adopters of smartphones. If anything, that looks like that popularity has made Disney especially conservative with this launch:

The app, which will be sold for $0.99, will be ad-free, just like the Club Penguin site itself. Unlike the site, there will be no virtual goods sold in the “Puffle Launch” app — at least at first. Virtual coins that users collect in the app can be transferred to be used in the online game.

Mainly, “Puffle Launch” will be banking on word-of-mouth marketing among an existing base of Puffle fans: Disney says that in the online edition of the game, some 20 million Puffles have already been adopted.

A recent report from Nielsen found that nearly 40 percent of social media users are accessing social media content from their mobile phones (compared to 97 percent via computer). It also found that social networking apps were the third-most used category of apps among smartphone users, with games the most popular.