The company, under the direction of publisher Ellen Archer, has been moving in this direction for some time. Last year, it hired former Hollywood talent agent Laura Popper as editorial director of franchise publishing. The goal is for Hyperion to be able to promote its books across multimedia platforms, and it is a lot easier to do that if a book’s author already has his or her own TV show.

The WSJ says that Hyperion will “look for books either linked to ABC television properties or that it believes can be extended to television or other corners of Walt Disney,” citing an unidentified source. Hyperion is already doing this to an extent, publishing books “written by” the main character on the show Castle. It also published cookbooks from the daytime show The Chew and by Jamie Oliver and tie-ins to the soap opera General Hospital.

Hyperion has also had plenty of non-TV-related bestsellers: It publishes Mitch Albom’s books, for example (The Five People You Meet in Heaven), Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, among others. Those big names presumably won’t be sold off, but I’ve asked Hyperion for comment.

The news, which Kilar announced Friday via a memo on Hulu’s company blog, comes after a year of uncertainty about the video site’s ownership and strategy. In the memo, Kilar describes the decision to leave as difficult and explains he and Tom will stay on for a while to manage the transition. He also cited what he sees as Hulu’s accomplishments:

We have grown from a few hundred thousand in revenue in 2007 to generating almost $700 million in revenue in 2012 alone. We have created a video subscription service that is growing unusually fast, adding over 200K new subscribers in the past 7 days alone (a new record). We have proudly generated over $1 Billion for our content partners since we excitedly entered private beta in October 2007.

As reported by my colleague Janko Roettgers, Kilar and Hulu’s corporate owners, including Disney and News Corp, have clashed over the future vision of the site. It’s unclear, for instance, whether Hulu wants to be become a wide open YouTube-type site or instead act as a TV-everywhere type extension that would only be accessible to those who could authenticate with a cable subscription code. These tensions also deepened after a buyout of co-owners Providence Equity Partner last summer.

We’ll have more on Kilar’s departure and the future of Hulu later today. The entirety of Kilar’s note to Hulu employees follows below:

Earlier today, I sent the below email to the Hulu team:

In what is an understatement, this email has proven difficult for me to both write and send.

I’ve decided to depart Hulu in Q1. I am currently working with the Board to ensure there is ample runway to manage this transition.

Rich Tom will be doing the same, with roughly the same departure date. Rich and I have been fortunate to build and innovate alongside each other these past 5+ years and our plan is to do more of that on the road ahead.

It is impossible to state in words how much this team means to me, how much Hulu means to me. But I’ll do my best.

For me, the journey started with a move to California and a walk into an empty office suite in early July 2007. In the weeks afterward, some brave souls that were willing to look past the many naysayers and ClownCo moniker jumped aboard and got about the business of innovating and building. Five and a half years later, thanks to the missionary work of this amazing 600+ worldwide team and courageous, prescient partners, we are fortunate to have collectively built a culture that matters, a brand that matters, a business that matters. Our convictions and our relentless pursuit of better ways have made the difference and will continue to make the difference. We have grown from a few hundred thousand in revenue in 2007 to generating almost $700 million in revenue in 2012 alone. We have created a video subscription service that is growing unusually fast, adding over 200K new subscribers in the past 7 days alone (a new record). We have proudly generated over $1 Billion for our content partners since we excitedly entered private beta in October 2007. Our video advertising service delivers world-class results and sets the pace for the industry. We have authored scores of inventions along the way.

And while the above outputs are impressive and laudatory, the things that have clearly brought the most joy to my heart (and what I believe to be the most important inputs in our business) have been this team and the values and principles we hold dear.

Perhaps the best way to express this is to let you in on a little routine I have followed these past 5+ years. Each day, as I enter the office lobby, I take the time to enjoy the many portraits of our team members that line the walls. From Damon gorging on a 2 foot high cold cut sandwich to Jesse showing off his sweet kicks. Portraits from Beijing to Boston and the other fine Hulu offices in between. Those portraits – along with the What Defines Hulu? document on those same walls – mean so much to me, as it is a daily and vivid reminder of how great this team is and how we bring such passion and principle to what we do. Without fail, I am reminded in those moments of reflection why we do what we do, why this work is a mission and never a job.

I’ve been so fortunate to play a role in this amazing, ongoing journey. My decision to depart has been one of the toughest I’ve ever made. Though the words will fall short of the intended mark, please know how much this team means to me and how very thankful I am to be able to innovate and build alongside you each day.

As dates and other items get solidified, I will update the team. But in the meantime and for much of Q1, I will be here as we get off to a very strong start in 2013…

Jason

The media conglomerate reported a 24 percent second-quarter profit increase to $1.83 billion Tuesday, driven by strong cable and broadcast ad sales, affiliate fees, licensed Avengers toy purchases and theme park attendance.

Also read: Blame it on Mars – Rich Ross done as Disney studio chief

Revenue for the Burbank, Calif.-based company was up 4 percent to $11.08 billion in the quarter.

Driven by the powerful ESPN cable channel and the ABC broadcast network, Disney’s media networks division saw a 3 percent spike in revenue to $5.08 billion, with operating income increasing 2 percent to $2.12 billion

Revenue from parks and resorts was up 9 percent to $3.44 billion, with a earthquake-induced shutdown of the company’s Tokyo theme park last year making Q2 2012 compare favorably.

Also read: Disney avenges traditional media models

Even with the $1.64 billion theatrical performance of superhero movie The Avengers, revenue was flat in the quarter for Disney’s studio entertainment division. But operating income increased from $264 million to $313 million during the period, with the studio managing production costs on its films better these days.

Operating income in Disney’s consumer products division was also up 35 perent to $209 million.

Losses in the company’s interactive unit, meanwhile, narrowed 51 percent to $42 million, with Q2 comparing favorably with a 2011 quarter that saw Disney buy social game maker Playdom for $743 million.

We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

New studio chairman Alan Horn arrives at Disney’s Burbank, Calif. headquarters as well-regarded as film business executives get, coming off a less-than-a-year retirement from the top post at rival Warner Bros.

Also read: Blame it on Mars – Rich Ross done as Disney studio chief

Under his watch, Warner was the top-ranked studio in global theatrical market share for three consecutive years from 2008-2011, while gestating a slew of multi-billion-dollar blockbuster film franchises that included Harry Potter and the Dark Knight.

For a studio coming off two of the biggest flops in history, with John Carter and Mars Needs Moms both losing around $200 million apiece, o
Iger’s selection of Horn certainly carries the aura of stability.

As for innovation, maybe not as much.

With DVD revenue drying up and the theatrical distribution business no longer growing in the U.S. and Canada, studios like Disney are under increasing pressure to drastically change how much they spend to produce and market their films, as well as how they strategize their release windows.

Also read: Piranha 3D sequel is first 3D film to get early VOD release

To a large extent, that’s what Iger and his constituents had in mind when Ross was hired in 2009. At the Disney Channel, Ross built low-cost TV hits like High School Musical into global properties that could be monetized across divisions ranging from home entertainment to consumer products.

And during his tenure, Ross replaced many of the old-guard film-business veterans working for Disney with underling choices who were equally — if not more — unorthodox than he was, such as short-tenured marketing chief MT Carney, a figure well known on Madison Avenue but a complete stranger to Hollywood.

Fair or unfair, Ross gained a reputation in the movie business as someone who cared less about the films than the marketing. The inevitable backlash in the creative community meant that he’ll be remembered more for the flops that were put into Disney’s production engine before he even arrived than for shepherding The Avengers, which became a massive hit in the weeks after his resignation in April.

As for Horn, he’s often described with what has become the gold-standard compliment in the movie business — “He has good taste,” is the oft-heard refrain.

Whether Horn can continue to parlay that accumen across a business that’s increasingly distributed digitally and marketed socially remains to be seen.

But on Tuesday, traditional media was still working out quite nicely for the Walt Disney Company. The conglomerate posted a 21 percent uptick in profit to nearly $1.1 billion, driven by such ol’ fashioned media forces as ESPN multi-channel carriage fees and theme park attendance.

Disney’s Q2 performance was so strong, it overcame an $84 million hit to operating income rendered upon it by one of the the worst flops in motion-picture history, sci-fi epic John Carter.

And it didn’t even include the biggest box office opening ever for a film, the Marvel Comics-adapted Avengers, which has grossed more than $702 million since it was first released internationally on April 25.

At least for one weekend, the old theatrical model worked just fine

Faced with ongoing declines in domestic movie attendance, notably among young adults, as well as ebbing DVD revenue, Hollywood’s majors have been forced to re-consider the scale of movies like The Avengers, which costs around $220 million to produce and well over $100 million to market worldwide.

They’ve also had to consider that a growing number of consumers simply won’t go to a multiplex to see a movie anymore, and that maybe a better way to go would be offering these folks an on-demand home-viewing option concurrent with or even before theatrical premiere.

But in just 72 hours, The Avengers seems to have disproven the notion that such old-Hollywood recipes as big-name directors and stars, mixed with hundreds of millions of dollars in TV advertising, can’t get a critical mass of consumers together in a dark room anymore.

The Avengers didn’t just break the movie business’ domestic box office opening record, it obliterated the mark, besting the $169.2 million grossed in the first three days last year by Warner Bros.’ final Harry Potter film with a mind-blowing $207.4 million performance.

About half of the audience was younger than 25, and about 20 percent was in its teens.

The Avengers also negated the notion that audiences are rejecting sequels and remakes based on recycled intellectual property … and that Disney’s $4 billion purchase of comic-book publisher turned production company Marvel in 2009 was a bad idea in the first place.

Released over the last two years under Marvel’s distribution relationship with Paramount, Iron Man 2 ($623.9 million in global box office), Thor ($49.3 million) and Captain America: The First Avenger ($368.6 million) provided set-up for last weekend’s record-breaking Avengers performance, introducing audiences to obscure comic-book characters and priming them for a big, ensemble-cast event that would feature all of them.

Disney and Marvel plan to keep going back to the well, of course: In addition to an Avengers sequel confirmed Tuesday, Disney has third Iron Man film slated for next May and a second Thor movie set for November 2013. Another Captain America movie is scheduled for 2014.

Look for all of these movies to be available exclusively in theaters before they arrive in your home.

Going live with Comcast doubles the number of households with access to WatchESPN to 40 million.

WatchESPN is part of a multi-year deal Comcast and Disney reached earlier this year that combined traditional carriage agreements with multi-platform access. Other channels due to get the “watch” treatment include Disney Channel, DisneyXD and Disney Junior.

Choices

Instead of forcing users to go through XfinityTV.com or the Xfinity TV app, access through WatchESPN lets sports fans zero on programming from across the ESPN network and to take advantage of the ESPN user experience.

But integrating it with Xfinity TV apps also makes it easier for Comcast viewers looking for a way to manage their portable or off-TV viewing experience through a single gateway. That’s also how users will be able to setup remote recording. WatchESPN is a network experience; XfnityTV is programming plus program management.

How does it work

Make sure you’re using the current WatchESPN app update dated May 8. Click on settings and go to “choose provider. Until today, the only options were Verizon FiOS TV and Broadband, Bright House Networks, and Time Warner Cable. Now Comcast is in the list. Select Comcast and you get a white splash screen that explains the requirements — must subscribe to Xfinity TV with access to VOD and must subscribe to the network you are trying to watch. If you don’t get ESPN in your Xfinity package, you can’t watch it through the app or online. That splash screen, which is bigger than those of other MSOs, also includes something unusual — ads from Comcast.

Enter your Xfinity user name and password, and you’re in. I don’t live in a Comcast area but I do tech support for parents who do and tested it with one of their logins. In a matter of seconds, I had access to live streams from ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU, plus replays on broadband channel ESPN3 (nothing live at the moment), ESPN Radio and more.

Comcast Ventures head Amy Banse, one of the architects of Comcast’s multi-platform strategy, will be speaking at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads, May 23 in New York. Here’s how you can join us for the conversation.

That’s the hypothesis of a Bernstein Research report released Friday. Led by senior analyst Todd Juenger, Bernstein said that Providence Equity’s retreat “only underscores our suspicion that the controlling shareholders are increasingly motivated to cut off Hulu’s growth.”

This follows a report Bernstein issued two weeks ago, in which it questioned the longterm commitment of the Walt Disney Company, News Corp. and Comcast/NBC Universal to Hulu, given their strong desire to uphold the traditional multi-channel TV model

How can these companies support the growth of an over-the-top content business, Bernstein wondered, when they’re vested in models like TV Everywhere in which consumers can’t watch video unless they have a cable, satellite or telco TV subscription?

NBCUniversal no longer has board seats to control Hulu following its acquisition by Comcast. However, Bernstein speculates that the decision by Providence Equity to pull out an investment valued at around $200 million may signal that Disney and News Corp. are seeking to gain greater control of Hulu.

Neither Hulu or Providence have commented regarding the transaction.

So if Hulu represents a strategic conflict, whey didn’t the conglomerates sell it last year when they had the chance?

“I think the fact that Hulu’s parents are concerned about the strategic conflict Hulu presents for them is exactly why they didn’t sell the asset last year,” Juenger told paidContent. “In somebody else’s hands, Hulu could pursue a direction that would be arguably harmful to the networks.

“With Hulu now completely in their control, they can take whatever direction for Hulu they believe best serves their comprehensive long-term interest, which in our view likely includes decreasing the role Hulu plays in on-demand availability of in-season broadcast content relative to TV Everywhere or enhanced ad-supported VOD services provided by the MVPDs,” he added. “This better positions the networks to argue for higher and higher affiliate fees, while allowing them to continue receiving ad revenue and, eventually, even C3 audience credit for the audience.”

Rees, previously VP for ESPN (NYSE: DIS) Inc in the US, is becoming international digital media VP for ESPN International, overseeing ESPNCricinfo, ESPNScrum, ESPNF1, ESPNSoccernet and other properties.

Gleeson, who had led the cricket site Cricinfo through its acquisition by ESPN, is now consulting for ESPN and working with Rees on the transition.

Amongst ESPN’s most prestigious overseas TV rights is 23 live matches in the UK of England’s Premier League soccer. It also holds mobile highlights rights to all the tournament’s games.

The app through which it exploits those highlights rights, ESPN Goals, was last year switched from paid to ad-supported free by the broadcaster, which also introduced a post-match live web discussion show. ESPN Goals has passed two million downloads.

Rees is a former strategy head of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and will work from New York.

Much attention has been paid to last month’s relaxation of trade restrictions in China, which increased the number of American films that can enter the country each year for theatrical play from 20 to 34, while upping their revenue splits from a paltry 13 percent to a slightly better 25 percent.

However, under the direction of former professional wrestler Shane McMahon — who cut his global media teeth working as an executive under his father, World Wrestling Entertainment impresario Vince McMahon — YOU On Demand is on a trajectory to become an even more lucrative revenue stream for U.S. movie suppliers in the emerging market they view as having the most potential.

The New York-based company — which is in the midst of seeking a listing on the Nasdaq — made headlines last summer, when it signed Warner Bros. to the first ever VOD deal in China. Just within the last month, YOU On Demand has announced similar agreements with Disney (NYSE: DIS), Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF) and Magnolia Pictures, and more big U.S. studio partnerships are expected to be announced soon, a company spokesman told us.

YOU On Demand is just getting started in terms of infiltrating the vast Chinese consumer market, but growth prospects appear promising.

YOU On Demand entered China under a 20-year exclusive contract from the government to run national VOD services. Like other foreign companies entering the Chinese market, its’ doing this via a joint venture — in this case with the Chinese broadcaster CCTV-6 and its pay-TV arm, China Home Cinema. Through that partnership, YOU On Demand’s VOD service is already in 3 million Chinese cable homes equipped with digital set-top boxes via carriage deals with four local cable systems. It is the leading transactional VOD service in China, controlling about 88 percent of the market.

By the end of 2012, YOU On Demand expects to be in 12 million homes with additional cable deals in place. YOU On Demand currently charges consumers anywhere from $1 to $3 per movie rental, but hopes to evolve that to $3 to $5 as more Chinese consumers get used to legally paying to watch American movies. Meanwhile, the company is playing both ends of the business-model spectrum, with plans to also launch a Netflix-like subscription VOD service sometime later this year.

YOU On Demand has been able to entice American studios with a “anything is better than nothing” proposition, given the traditionally rampant piracy of U.S. video content in the region. Going forward, the company projects sizable revenue for its U.S. partners, who provide their video content on a revenue share basis under which they control a majority interest.

This split, of course, beats the 75-25 arrangement the Chinese government has agreed to for U.S. theatrical releases in the country. Also, U.S. VOD suppliers aren’t subject to the same 35-movie-per-year quota that they endure on the theatrical side.

BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield in a blog post Wednesday: “Whether or not YOU on Demand remains the leader in transactional VOD and can successfully enter the SVOD business in China, the Chinese VOD/iVOD and SVOD ancillary revenue market should be an increasing focus of global media investors over the next couple of years.”