“Right away, you’ll notice we’ve added content categories across the top navigation bar to make it easy to for you to jump to your chosen section – whether it is TV, Kids, Latino, Search, or something else. Inside each category, you’ll discover what’s new in our content library so it’s easy to discover new shows and keep up with the shows you already love.”

Hulu rolled out a revamped website last summer, and relaunched its PS3 app soon after. Hulu’s UI for consumer electronics devices has been in need for a refresh for some time, as it is essentially unchanged since its launch in 2010.

A spokesperson told us Tuesday that the company doesn’t have anything to announce at this point, but it’s likely that other devices will get a UI revamp soon as well.

Vivendi just launched (PDF) Watchever on Wednesday. The service offers access to “entire seasons of award-winning U.S. series, blockbusters and international art house films” for €8.99 (USD $11.99) per month. Among the “thousands” of available titles: AMC shows Mad Men and Breaking Bad, early seasons of HBO shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and films like Slumdog Millionaire and There Will Be Blood.

The Next Web, which first reported the news, thinks this “could be the start of a trend in which Apple cuts deals for regions where there is a strong localized offering that delivers content appealing to Apple TV owners there.”

Netflix is not available in Germany. The Amazon-owned Lovefilm, which offers both streaming and physical DVDs, is available in Germany but, like Amazon Instant Video in the U.S., it’s not available on Apple TV.

What are the chances for such a product, if it might arrive? Different, depending where you are in the world, perhaps. Sanford C. Bernstein senior U.S. media analyst Todd Juenger told an investor briefing (summary):

“I think Apple is largely stymied in the US to do anything truly disruptive in terms of the television ecosystem. All of the content that people care about most is in the hands of the US media companies … None of them has really any discernible upside to gain from entering into any agreement to make that content available to Apple … In fact, they have a lot to lose by doing that … Apple would need to do that to really disrupt things. What Apple has left to do is to build a device.”

Juenger says the absent middle ground in the U.S. TV ecosystem — between the expensive multi-channel pay TV most viewers buy and the five-network free TV a minority take — is not about to be occupied any time soon by a cheaper or alternative service offered by the likes of Apple.

However, in Europe, Bernstein says, the situation may be more promising for Apple. Senior European media analyst Claudio Aspesi told investors (summary):

“Several players (including new entrants and Telcos) are trying to potentially find a niche and a play; if this process were to lead to a sufficiently fragmented market, it would be easier (relative to the US) for technology companies to find a foothold in content. If the market fragments that much, then, it will be all that much easier for Apple (or Google or Amazon), at some point, to come in and consolidate this.”

I agree that each market is different but, in some ways, I have the opposite conclusion. Although Apple, under Steve Jobs, broke ground by licensing rights to sell and rent out movies and TV episodes in its native market, elsewhere around the world it has been relatively lackluster at acquiring content rights in the same way.

On that track record, I would not be confident that Apple can sign to acquire TV content in Europe with the same success rate it could at home, certainly not at the same time as U.S. TV content — not least because the pronounced differences in the two businesses would compel Apple to negotiate using different strategies at the same time.

Regardless, whether Apple really wants to sign content in the way many describe it is far from certain. Most technology companies describe themselves as platforms, not content owners, and the thing they can best bring to bear on content industries is user interface accessibility improvements.

We have recently seen no outcome affirmative conclusion to the slightly far-fetched notion — mooted in some media quarters — that Apple or Google would bid for expensive European soccer rights. Indeed, whilst a growing number of YouTube channels is launching to host some highlights, YouTube is taking pains to distance itself from ownership of those videos.

Apple’s interest, however, remains clear, and may even have graduated beyond the “hobby” status that Jobs once gave the company’s TV interests, judging by CEO Tim Cook’s comments to NBC’s Brian Williams in an interview this weekend:

“When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years. It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

Read our recent story on why digital media banker Terence Kawaja thinks tech firms hoping to disrupt the TV business “cabal” are going to be hard-pressed.

Apple has shown that it can disrupt and support one content industry in the past — music. iTunes Store popularized the track download format, restored legal consumption to a business diminishing in Napster’s heyday, and atomized the album.

Much of that was imagined by Jobs. What can Cook bring to TV execs’ tables?

You see, app platforms are fundamentally a numbers game. Apple CEO Tim Cook made as much clear when he boasted about the latest iOS numbers early on during the keynote, stating that there are now 650,000 iOS apps out there. Out of those, 225,000 have been specifically designed for the iPad – something he contrasted with “just a few hundred” apps for Android tablets.

There are two reasons for this, and one is not quite as obvious. Of course, there are many more iPads out there, making it a much more desirable platform to develop for. But iOS and Android also treat apps fundamentally different. Android apps scale gracefully to bigger screen sizes, making it possible to use many apps that were originally designed for phones on tablets as well. Apple, on the other hand, only offers users the little-loved 2x view of an iPhone app, with results in many cases that are pretty ugly. That’s done on purpose: Developers are forced to build native iPad apps if they want to be used on the tablet. The carrot for this stick is the iPad’s huge user base.

But in the TV space, Apple has a much smaller installed base. Sure, Apple TVs sell pretty well. Cook recently said that the company sold 2.7 million units in six months, which is more than any of its competitors in the smart TV companion box space. But it’s a far cry from the 40.5 million iPads the company sold in 2011. And a smaller device footprint equals less money and opportunities for developers.

This is where we get back to the screen scaling. Google TV has sold far fewer devices than Apple – the latest number suggest that there are less than one million Google TV devices in use. However, the platform is based on Android, so users can still access thousands of Android apps, which gracefully scale up to the big screen. Apple on the other hand would start out with much smaller numbers, and essentially be where Android tablets are today – which is not a place the company wants to be in.

Sure, one could argue that developers would nonetheless jump on the opportunity and build their own apps for the platform, just to be there when it grows up. But for that, Apple would have to give them some guidance and show where it wants to go with Apple TV. Is it an accessory, an Airplay receiver? Or will it evolve into a full-fledged TV platform, complete with its own TV set and access to premium content?

The latest Apple TV UI upgrade didn’t seem to suggest much room for innovation, or even additional apps, for that matter. To become relevant, Apple would have to think big, and not just in terms of screen size. Simply opening up the SDK for the current-generation platform wouldn’t cut it. Apple knows that, and it simply didn’t want to bother with small numbers.

DirecTV Chairman Michael White, at an investor’s conference in New York on Friday, doubted that a new Apple TV OS would be so good that current cable or satellite subscribers would shell out for another set-top box, and he believes they’d still keep whatever current box they already have, according to Variety.

He was also skeptical about content providers getting on board:

“They are going to launch something, maybe in the next two weeks…but I don’t see media companies saying ‘You can stream things in bundles over the Internet,’” White said at Sanford C. Bernstein’s Strategic Decisions confab. “Typically with technology, it smashes the cost structure in some new way (but) with content costs, rights fees and the cost of spectrum it’s hard to see (it) obsoleting our technology.”

While skepticism is called for when it comes to whether content providers would get on board with an Apple television, White could probably afford to be a little less certain about the appeal of Apple TV in its current form. While it isn’t currently in danger of becoming a product as important as the iPad or iPhone, the company has sold 2.7 million Apple TVs in the first half of its fiscal year 2012, after selling 2.8 million all of last year, Cook said earlier this week. At least some of those customers bought one in addition to their cable or satellite box, or replaced their pay TV set top box entirely.

But at least White understands that Apple, with its technology, is clearly intending to disrupt his industry — Time Warner Cable CEO Glen Britt infamously didn’t even know what AirPlay is.

For his part, Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts was far less defensive in his remarks at the same conference. He practically welcomed Apple to the TV business, but he’s secure in knowing that to use Apple TV customers need Internet access, which he will happily keep selling them.

But the Disney-owned sports channel spent most of Tuesday hyping — and shooting down rumors about — new digital initiatives.

Notably, an ESPN spokesperson denied a Bloomberg report that earlier stated that ESPN and Apple executives are in talks to make the authenticated TV Everywhere app WatchESPN available on Apple TV.

That’s not to say a deal is never going to happen.

Bloomberg quoted Sean Bratches, ESPN executive VP of affiliate and advertising sales, as saying his company would be open to a deal with Apple that would allow subscribers of select multichannel TV services password-protected access to ESPN programming on the over-the-top Apple TV platform.

ESPN already has a deal in place with Apple to let subscribers of select multichannel services, including No. 1 provider Comcast, stream its sports news on iOS mobile devices the iPad and iPhone. And in the living room, Comcast Xfinity subscribers can also stream ESPN programming on Microsoft’s Xbox gaming consoles.

“To the extent that in the future there’s an opportunity with Apple to authenticate through the pay-TV food chain as we’re doing with Microsoft, that’s something that we will participate in,” Bratches told Bloomberg.

Just don’t get your hopes up for anything to happen soon.

“We’re not having conversations with Apple about authenticating WatchESPN,” ESPN spokeswoman Amy Phillips re-iterated to paidContent.

Double-teaming brands with Twitter

At its upfront presentation earlier in the day, ESPN unveiled an advertising partnership with Twitter that will allow the social media giant to monetize all those tweets that occur around big-ticket sports events. (During the final three minutes of February’s Super Bowl, for example, Twitter reported that 10,000 tweets per second were being transacted on its network.)

The collaboration will kick off with next month’s NBA Finals coverage. Studio analysts for ESPN’s NBA Tonight highlights/analysis show will encourage viewers to tweet their painted “game faces” with the hashtag #gameface, with the most telegenic of the lot presented on the linear broadcast.

Twitter and ESPN will be co-sell the campaign through promoted tweets and trends, as well as product plugs on Disney’s ABC, ESPN and ESPN.com channels. The cross-platform offering will be sold to sponsors as a single package.

A report today in the Wall Street Journal on the so-called Apple TV says that Apple has been talking with media companies about the launch of a new product — possibly a new version of Apple’s existing TV box, or possibly a whole new TV set — that would include voice and gesture controls, the ability for users to access their media files across all of their Apple devices, letting content follow people on whatever devices they used; and possibly even full pay-TV services similar to those being offered by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) via its deals with Verizon and other TV providers.

If any of the above turns out to be true, it will be a fair advance on what Apple offers already in its existing Apple TV service, which lets users access their iTunes media files, their own media files, and content from partners like the NBA and Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX).

The market for TV services — encompassing advertising and pay-TV — is potentially a big market for Apple to tackle. The TV industry currently makes $150 billion annually in the U.S. alone on advertising and pay-TV subscriptions. And that’s before you factor in revenues from TVs and other hardware.

But it’s unclear so far what involvement Apple would want to have in that industry: The article notes that SVP Eddy Cue is among those leading on the project, but that Apple has been “vague” about the details, not going as far as licensing content yet for the service.

One key thing to watch is whether Apple tries to work itself into TV content in the same way that it has done in mobile content.

With Apple’s existing suite of wireless products, the company has come to control not only the device but one of the primary forms of content distribution on those devices — its App Store. While carriers are still able to sell users their lucrative service contracts tied in with devices, that App Store, and Apple’s billing behind it, have largely meant that carriers have been cut out of trying to create and develop those content revenue streams themselves.

That’s not a massive business today, of course — contributing, as some believe, only two percent to Apple’s market cap, even if that does work out to a value higher than all of RIM — but the potential and customer lock-in is Apple’s to explore, not the carriers’.

Could Apple do the same in television? Most immediately, probably not. There are some key differences already today, most notably that players in the TV industry already have big, established businesses variously funded through pay-TV, advertising and device sales. In mobile, the fruit was ripe for the picking, given the very low penetration in smartphones — and some would argue a lack of compelling products before the arrival of the iPhone — and relatively low usage of mobile content.

Priced at $99, the current Apple TV has not set the world alight in the same way that its iPhone, iPad and iPod wireless products have been game-changers in their own categories. The last reported sales figures for Apple TV product were from a year ago, when Apple said that it was approaching unit sales of one million.

This new product, from the sounds of it, will be Apple’s do-over, where it will try to incorporate some of the latest TV innovations — gesture and voice controls are already appearing, for example, on Microsoft’s Xbox TV service when a user has Kinect hooked up; and companies like MobiTV have already been offering users the ability to watch their services seamlessly across different devices — but perhaps also work in a few more innovations that have yet to appear in the world of TV technology.

But as the WSJ article notes, one thing that seems to have held Apple back so far are the margins on TVs: they are significantly smaller compared to other new products — the portable, wireless devices — that Apple has added to its portfolio in recent years; and the most expensive TVs are on an order of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive iPhone, which will likely mean less volumes sold for Apple.

Some have estimated that Apple’s gross profit margin for the iPhone 4S could be close to 75 percent.

That seems to imply that if Apple is set to disrupt TV, it may end up doing it on terms different from those that it dictated on products like the iPhone and iPad.

Apple has not made news of its new streaming capabilities official yet, but people have spotted the service working in the UK, Australia, and Canada.

Update: As you might expect with something that has not been officially announced, there have been some patchy reports of this service not actually working consistently in these markets. We will update this post as we learn more.

As with the updated service from earlier this year, now Apple TV users are able to download films directly from their televisions from iTunes, as well as access shows that had been purchased via iTunes previously from another device such as an iPad.

With Apple yet to announce the service internationally officially, there may be more markets being added.

The news comes on the heels of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) announcing updates to its own Xbox gaming and media platform and points to how companies like Microsoft and Apple are competing as much on technology as they are content in their offerings. Microsoft’s update this week included a new voice-based search facility for users of the Kinect for Xbox 360 to find games, films and other content in a user’s own library, as well as items available through the Xbox Live cloud-based system.

But content is significant, too, and Mircrosoft also announced a number of deals to expand its offerings in various markets: they include adding Lovefilm from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Hulu in Japan with Hulu Plus in the U.S., as well as Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and even Verizon’s FiOS TV service. The full content list is here.

In contrast, Apple’s list of non-Apple Garden partners is significantly smaller, consisting of Netflix, MLB, NBA and NHL content, and internet-based aggregators like YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) and Vimeo. A rumored deal for Hulu Plus has yet to come good, and outside the U.S. the list of non-Apple content is very thin indeed, with only MLB and the internet-based content on offer.

With Microsoft’s upgrade arguably more substantial than Apple’s, it puts the ball back in Apple’s court for what it might come up with next: some believe it might be a new take on the TV altogether.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball noticed the new software update this morning. The release notes for the update, version 4.3, read “Purchase TV shows on Apple TV. Shows purchased on Apple TV can be re-downloaded on other iOS devices. Shows purchased on other iOS devices or with iTunes automatically show up as available to play on Apple TV.” The update is rolling out gradually to Apple TV users and may therefore take a while to show up for certain users, and it appears to be a U.S.-only service at the moment, according to Gruber.

Apple TV had previously allowed users to rent television shows from iTunes, but the new update essentially allows them to use iTunes like a storage locker for purchased shows that can be watched at any time. Rentals are still allowed, but part of Apple’s pitch for iCloud has been the ability to access your files essentially anywhere at any time if you’re using an Apple mobile device. Apple TV didn’t really fit into that plan before the software update if you wanted to buy a TV show, as you would have to buy it from your computer or iOS device and stream it to the Apple TV through the AirPlay technology.

All of this only appears to work with the second-generation Apple TV device, according to Apple. The new software also allows Apple TV users to access videos through Vimeo on their devices, adding another source of cat videos in addition to YouTube.

Direct link.