This week, news broke that the remaining eight episodes of the ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B In Apartment 23, which was taken off the air in January, would be posted to ABC.com, Hulu and iTunes.

The announcement is a boon for fans of the show, but they shouldn’t get their hopes up that successful online distribution will mean another season of the show; much of the cast has already moved on to other projects.

However, another show may truly get a second life: Also this week, rumors spread that Microsoft is looking at rebooting NBC’s Heroes, which was canceled in 2010, for Xbox and MSN distribution.

As television continues its evolution from a single box that sits in your living room to a multi-platform experience across many devices, resurrections like these are increasingly common — though sometimes they’re less like Lazarus, and more like zombies.

Netflix is of course a front runner in the rebirth business, thanks to picking up Arrested Development (only one more month, Bluth fans!).

But there’s a deep history to this practice. For instance: In late 2009, producer Ashton Kutcher turned to YouTube to screen the unaired five episodes of model drama The Beautiful Life, which had just been canceled by The CW.

However, while the TBL channel is currently at over five million views, not one of the five episodes on it has surpassed a million views.

They’re all still online, along with a plea posted by Kutcher saying that they’d be able to produce more episodes if the channel’s subscriber count hit a certain, unspecified threshold.

Whatever that threshold was, it was greater than 35,000 subscribers — which is the channel’s current standing, four years later. But TBL does deserve credit for being an early example of a show realizing the potential power of digital distribution — arguably ahead of its time in that respect.

The key is transitioning from digital distribution to actually producing new episodes. The most daring and ultimately successful example of this isn’t necessarily Joss Whedon getting to make a feature film follow-up to Firefly or the return of Veronica Mars as a feature — the real kickoff of digital distribution having real meaning for canceled shows comes from the early 2000s, and DVDs.

The Fox animated series Family Guy first premiered in 1999, and was canceled in 2002. But thanks to blockbuster DVD sales of the first three seasons, it was brought back to the airwaves in 2005, and has remained a key part of Fox’s schedule ever since. Creator Seth MacFarlane has even gone on to create at least two other shows for the network.

(Personal anecdote: I was working as a clerk in a DVD store in 2003, and I keenly remember how we couldn’t keep Family Guy box sets on the shelves; they sold out like crazy.)

Sometimes, things need to end. Sometimes, shows don’t work or don’t connect with a wide audience, and those involved are ready to move on. The Onion satirized this beautifully in the aftermath of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign with this piece headined “Stars Of Canceled Show Terrified Fans Will Raise Money For Movie,” centered around recently-terminated NBC sitcom Animal Practice.

The episodes of Animal Practice left unaired after its cancelation are currently available online, though it’s unlikely to come back — a zombie, for better or worse.

But as the industry figures out how to make original content on the web sustainable and profitable, we’ll see more and more examples of Lazarus.

But it looks like this may change soon: Google TV owners who visited NBC.com with the connected device have in recent days discovered a new splash screen, promising that “full episodes of this and other shows are now available for free” on Google TV.

The splash screen redirects Google TV users to Google Play, where the app is reportedly already being made available. However, users are reporting that it wasn’t listed as compatible with any of their Google TV devices — likely a precaution to prevent users from installing it on anything by development devices before it is officially announced.

The app also isn’t included in Google Play search results yet. But it seems like such an announcement could be imminent, given that the app and splash screen are already in place.

However, cord cutters in search for an easy way to watch NBC content for free on their TV shouldn’t get their hopes up too soon. It’s likely that NBC’s Google TV app is going to require authentication, meaning that users will have to log in with their pay TV credentials in order to watch. (One should note that Google TV owners have had the option to buy individual episodes of TV shows for some time.)

Google and NBC didn’t immediately respond when asked for comment for this article.

Piracy is exploding, and NBC is barely keeping up fighting back: That’s the message of the story, which details the work of the studio’s anti-piracy unit at length. Here’s the thing about that notion: It runs counter to some of the common narrative we’ve seen with regards to piracy in recent years. Piracy was supposed to be on the decline, we’ve heard time and again, with Netflix and others offering legal alternatives that are simply more convenient.

And there’s been numbers to back this notion up: In 2010, 19.2 percent of all residential U.S. Internet traffic during peak times was caused by P2P file sharing, according to traffic management company Sandvine. In the second half of 2012, that number was down to 12 percent. Netflix traffic, on the other hand, exploded during the same time.

So what’s going on here? Is piracy getting worse, is Netflix winning or is it all just business as usual? The answer probably depends on who you ask, but here are a few points worth considering:

• BitTorrent is still growing, just more slowly. Or in the words of Sandvine: “In absolute traffic level, BitTorrent has risen in volume by over 40%, but the application continues to exhibit a steady downward trend in overall traffic share.” That means people are still downloading growing amount of movies and TV shows via BitTorrent, but Netflix and others are just growing faster.
• BitTorrent’s not the only game in town anymore. Pirates have been using one-click file hosters and streaming sites hosted in countries with more legal flexibility for some time now, and streaming sites, especially, are starting to play an increasing role for TV show piracy.
• The world isn’t flat. Sandvine’s numbers in particular have shown a significant slowdown of file sharing in the U.S., but abroad, things look very different. The existence of release windows has in many countries led to a whole generation of TV viewers who watch U.S. movies and TV shows online, something that was echoed by the WSJ piece:

“Rick Cotton, general counsel of NBCUniversal, who oversees the company’s antipiracy unit, said piracy is a particularly big problem overseas. For example, he said that revenue for its Spanish home-entertainment unit declined 62% between 2009 and 2011, mainly because of piracy, and NBC shut it down.”

• Takedowns don’t equal downloads. That’s an important point that was somehow lost in the Wall Street Journal’s story. The number of takedown notices sent out by NBC isn’t exactly the best indicator for actual piracy levels. Sure, one could argue that the growing supply of pirated sources also indicates a growing level of demand for pirated content. However, the fleeting nature of piracy makes it hard to actually quantify any of this, in part because P2P file sharing works without hosted copies of content. It doesn’t really matter whether ten or a thousand sites link to the same torrent, shared by the same number of people — except if you want to send takedowns to all of these sites.
• Curious timing, anyone? The WSJ story remarked that studios hardly ever talk about their own anti-piracy efforts, but went on to say that “NBCUniversal gave the Wall Street Journal a rare peek inside the cat-and-mouse game its security team plays with suspected pirates.” Of course, one should note that NBC’s corporate parent Comcast just implemented a six strikes copyright enforcement scheme on its own broadband service last week. In light of that step, the story reads a bit like a plea for sympathy: Look, we had to step up our game because takedowns alone weren’t working!

So what’s the takeaway from this? For one, piracy is obviously alive and well, and it’s still a huge headache for studios like NBC. But Sandvine’s numbers also show that piracy’s growth can be contained, especially in markets with compelling legal alternatives. However, expanding these efforts is hard work that takes time, money and the will to change up some of Hollywood’s rules. Expect many more stories about piracy whack-a-mole in the meantime.

Image courtesy of Flicker user Steenbergs.

In a statement, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said that the decision was driven by “our sense of optimism for the future prospects of NBCUniversal and our desire to capture future value that we hope to create for our shareholders.” Roberts also said that he believes Comcast is in a “strong and unique position” to build value in the combined company.

The Comcast deal will not have to be approved by federal regulators, who fined the cable company $800,000 last year for failing to meet some of the conditions it placed on the original purchase. Comcast said it expects the deal to close by the end of March.

As part of the acquisition, NBCUniversal will also buy the buildings that it uses at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York and CNBC’s headquarters in New Jersey for about $1.4 billion. According to the New York Times, a “clash of cultures” was partly responsible for speeding up Comcast’s decision to buy the remaining part of the company.

Comcast also announced its fourth-quarter financial results ahead of schedule, and said its earnings climbed by 19 percent from the same period a year ago, while revenue rose by 6 percent to $16 billion and operating income grew 13 percent to $3 billion. The company said it will increase its dividend by 20 percent and will repurchase $2 billion worth of stock this year.

This story was corrected Tuesday evening to clarify that the deal is not subject to federal approval, as originally stated.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Cedric Weber

The TV business is still based on an archaic business model that forces customers to buy arbitrary bundles of channels. Fans of arts programming, for instance, often have to shell out $5 a month for football shows — even if they hate football.

This isn’t a technology issue. It’s instead the problem of what media doyen Peter Kafka calls the “TV industrial complex” — a cabal of broadcasters and cable distributors that refuse to surrender their bundled TV business model.

That’s why upstart Aereo, which uses tiny antennas to stream TV signals to mobile devices, is so intriguing to watch. The company is offering a way for people to watch shows where and when they want — and has so far withstood the TV industry’s lawsuits. Yesterday, we showed off photos of Aereo’s tech. Today, we’re exploring the vision and strategy of the man who wants to kick in the door of the TV industrial complex once and for all.

The quest to end an “abusive” system

Chet Kanojia, who is speaking at paidContent Live in April, is a soft-spoken engineer who likes stylish shoes. At 43, he’s already built an advertising company, Navic Networks, and sold it to Microsoft — and presumably made himself a fortune. When we chatted at Aereo’s site in Brooklyn this week, the first thing I wanted to know is why he picked this fight. Why, that is, did he decide put so much energy into Aereo when the TV industry might crush the company in a second like it has done to others before?

“I had the option to be a VC, to do nothing or to do something really really meaningful,” said Kanojia. “In my heart of hearts, I belive that when businesses are created or preserved with analogue mentalities, they’re artificially constrained and ripe to to be recast in a different way.”

He adds that he loves TV content like 60 Minutes, Parenthood and Downton Abbey. But he is exasperated by the TV industry’s ossified pricing model.

“Why can’t there be a simple way to pay for this? It’s just irrational that it should cost hundreds of dollars a month. It’s an abusive system set up in an artificial way.”

Broadcasters like NBC and Fox, of course, would argue that we need a system that provides revenue to produce the content that people like so much. In recent years, these networks have been leaning on distributors to pay them for carrying over-the-air channels — and presumably think Aereo should too.

Kanojia is having none of it, saying the broadcasters are already making money from public spectrum through advertising and that it’s unreasonable for them to ask for more. Also, Aereo is not part of the regulatory regime that requires big TV companies to offer their channels for sale to cable and satellite distributors; this means that, for now, Aereo is unable to sell channels like ESPN (owned by ABC) to its customers.

Kanojia adds that pure “a la carte” TV is not the only solution to the TV muddle. He would also settle for “rational bundles.”

A high stakes bet

Aereo’s disruptive potential lies in the fact that, unlike other forms of pay TV, subscribers can add or drop it without the hassle of set-top boxes or contracts. For now, Aereo is available only in New York City but is about to roll out to 22 new markets across the country for the same price of $1 a day or $8 a month to watch and record shows. Kanojia believes this will change people’s conception of how we get access to television.

“You can come in five or ten times a year and a pay a dollar. We have lots of habitual one dollar buyers. It’s a massive dent in the psyche.”

For Aereo to have a long-term impact, though, it will still have to survive an ongoing legal gauntlet. On this front, it has a decent chance because investors and lawyers designed the company as a high-stakes bet, counting on a 2008 appeals court ruling that said private remote DVRs don’t violate copyright (you can read the legal details here). After broadcasters sued it last year, Aereo won the first round and the case is now on appeal.

The price tag for the loser will be high. On one hand, media mogul Barry Diller and others have put at least $58 million into Aereo, money that could evaporate if Aereo is shut down. On the other hand, GigaOM Pro analyst Paul Sweeting (who has written about Aereo) said the initial court decision was a “disaster” for the networks and that a loss at the appeal level will open the floodgates.

“If the networks don’t win, what it means is that all you have to do is bounce a signal off a cloud-based DVR and you can do what you want,” said Sweeting by phone.

Whatever the outcome of the court case (which could go to the Supreme Court if courts in New York and California continue to disagree), Kanojia thinks he will have made an inexorable dent in the current tv structure. He also thinks the litigation will help other pioneering TV companies.

“The legal situation is unfortunate, but it forces clarity and that’s a good thing.”

The broadcaster’s former partnership with Microsoft acquired EveryBlock in 2009 for what sources said at the time was “several million dollars” — two years after it was founded by developer/journalist Adrian Holovaty with a $1-million grant from the Knight Foundation, one of the first winners of the now-annual Knight News Challenge (the original code for the project remains open source, as required by the terms of the grant).

Everyblock closed down. That's nuts. They may not have found exactly the right product, but it's clearly the future: everyblock.com

—
Tom Coates (@tomcoates) February 07, 2013

NBC chief digital officer Vivian Schiller told the Poynter Institute that the project was a “wonderful scrappy business,” but didn’t make sense as part of the company’s growth strategy. In a memo to staff, she said EveryBlock provided an engaging user experience, but wasn’t a good fit with NBC’s core strengths (she also pointed out that the media company still owns and operates a former news startup called Breaking News, which it acquired in 2010). Said Schiller:

“As we continue to grow and evolve the NBC News Digital portfolio, we are focused on investing in content, products and platforms that play to our core strengths. The decision to shut down the site was difficult, but in the end, we didn’t see a strategic fit for EveryBlock within the portfolio.”

In a blog post, Holovaty — who wrote a seminal essay on the use of data in journalism in 2006, and created some of the earliest data-driven projects at the Washington Post — said that he was saddened by the news, and added on Twitter that looking through some of the comments about its demise was like “attending my own funeral.” Holovaty left EveryBlock last year, and said at the time that he expected the company to be around for “a long, long time.”

@digiphile @NBCNews @everyblock @adrianholovaty i'm a big believer in Adrian's original vision and the EB team. It was a tough call.

—
Vivian Schiller (@VivianSchiller) February 07, 2013

EveryBlock started as an automated news aggregator that pulled in data from local feeds and databases, similar to what Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org project did, but the site pivoted somewhat in 2011 to focus more on human contributions and community. Other hyperlocal efforts, including the New York Times’ local experiment, have either been shut down or downsized significantly, and AOL’s Patch is also rumored to be undergoing cuts.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Karen Gentry

Media attention to the service has focused primarily on the legal dispute between Aereo and TV broadcasters who have tried, and so far failed, to shut it down. The legal controversy is real but also overshadows the implications of the service for TV viewing and the technological wizardry that makes Aereo work. (Aereo founder and CEO Chet Kanojia will be speaking at our paidContent Live event in April.)

To get a better idea of just how Aereo is serving up TV, we went to the company’s plant in Brooklyn to get some up-close photos. Here’s our tour:

From the Empire State Building to your iPhone

Aereo transmits from the top floor of a nondescript government building on Vanderbilt Avenue on the edge of downtown Brooklyn. You can see it on the right: 

Aereo chose this location for a reason. The floor on which it operates has a direct line of sight to the city’s biggest transmission tower. Here’s a picture of the tower and the view from Aereo’s window:

These direct sight lines make it easy for Aereo to pick up the powerful signals emitted from over-the-air broadcast services like ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and local community stations. Aereo’s technology then transcodes and relays those signals to its customers who can watch TV, change channels and record shows with their phones or iPads:

Tiny antennas for everyone in the city

Aereo works by letting every subscriber rent a pair of tiny antennas. Customers get two antennas so that they can watch live TV while also recording a show or, alternately, to watch live TV on two different devices at the same time. While Aereo created the personal antenna system as a way to comply with copyright rules (you can read about the legal issues here), the antennas themselves are remarkable in that they give Aereo the capacity to serve 1 million New York City customers from the single floor in Brooklyn and an adjoining rooftop.

Here’s a close up look of the dime-sized antennas in action:

Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia explained that the device is a simple copper antenna but that, rather than picking up the entire TV spectrum like a typical cable antenna, it picks up only the 6 megahertz block of spectrum that a viewer wants to see at a given time. He describes it as a “switched antenna” that’s beautiful in its simplicity. The ingenuity, Kanojia said, is that Aereo’s 1.5 inch antenna changes its electrical and magnetic characteristics in order to replicate the tasks of a standard 35 inch UFH or three foot VHF antenna.

The size of the antenna allows Aereo to cram many of them into a small space which is one reason Aereo is able to relay TV to so many people at the same time. Another reason is that the antennas are “multitenant” which means that, when one Aereo subscriber is not using an antenna at a given time, it is available to all other subscribers.

Cheap storage and high-performance fiber

Aereo relies on the antenna system to offer a cheap TV services that subscribers can easily add or drop at any time. But the antenna is only part of the equation. To make the service economically viable, Aereo is also capitalizing on major advances in transcoding technology and cloud storage. It is these advances that now make it affordable for Aereo to translate the over-the-air TV signals into iPhone video streams and to let people store hours of television on remote servers.

According to Kanojia, commercial transcoding costs per stream would have been $8,000 per customer two years ago but now the company can do it for under $20 (these figures relate to capital expenditures, not monthly costs). He also notes that a terabyte of storage, which once cost over $1 million, can now be had for under $100. The new efficiency, he said, is not just in raw storage capacity but better spindle speeds on hard drives that improve transmission times.

Here is a look at Kanojia standing in front of Aereo’s proprietary transcoding devices and a close-up of the servers which act as a private cloud service and on which Aereo customers store thousands of hours of TV to watch later:

To connect the antenna system with the transcoding and recording devices, Aereo relies on multiple 10 gigabit fiber links that look like this:

Aereo also relies on leased fiber networks in different spots around New York City to deliver TV content to its subscribers. This system means it doesn’t have to rely on content delivery networks or other middlemen.

“What’s the point of long-hauling something when you’re already 80 percent there?. There’s no CDN’s. It’s a local to local product,” said Kanojia.

Next: the man who would break the cable industry

Aereo wants to overturn the current TV business model in which viewers shell a hundred dollars for a bundle of channels, many of which they don’t want to watch. Aereo’s challenge comes by way of its technology but also in the form of Kanojia himself, who is picking a fight that many have lost before (iCravetv, ivi, etc) — and is so far holding his own. You can now read our follow-up account of Kanojia’s vision for the future of television.

As Eliza Kern described in her post on the rumors, Bluefin’s technology allows broadcasters — and more importantly, brands — to see where and when their content is being discussed on social networks and elsewhere on the web. The company was founded by MIT scientist Deb Roy, who began by collecting every sound his young son made during a 3-year period and then used algorithms to detect patterns in that data (Bluefin’s CEO will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Television is where the money is

Twitter’s decision to concentrate on TV-related features and partnerships isn’t that surprising. As we’ve described before, the company has been coming under increasing pressure to generate meaningful amounts of revenue in order to justify a market value that is estimated to be in the $10 billion range, based on recent sales of its shares on the private market. And while Twitter has been building up its “promoted tweets” and other advertising-related features, the most obvious and lucrative source of revenue is still television and other video-related content.

Twitter's true strategy? If they are 2nd screen for TV, and take over TV audience measurement, they control both social and TV advertising?

—
Nova Spivack (@novaspivack) February 05, 2013

Twitter’s moves in this direction started with partnerships for specific events like the Academy Awards, where it helped broadcasters filter and aggregate tweets about the content, and then expanded with deals related to things like NASCAR and the Summer Olympics, where the company created customized portals or hubs and had its own staff of editors curating content related to the event. After the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media partnerships bragged about how much traffic the service drove to NBC’s programming, and it’s clear the company wants more of those kinds of relationships.

Even the launch of Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter recently acquired, can be seen as another extension of this focus: while most people have been using the app to share short clips of their cats and other ephemera, there have already been advertisers and brands taking advantage of the new format — including The Gap — and it’s easy to see how those clips could become mini-advertisements.

Our 2nd @vineapp experiment: stop motion 1969 denim. What should we #Vine next? vine.co/v/bJ6QQYKuDgz

—
  (@Gap) January 28, 2013

It’s not just a desire for revenue that has driven Twitter into the arms of television, however. As Eliza noted in a post about the use of Twitter during the Super Bowl, the fact that the network works as a “second screen” for such events has been obvious for some time — and it makes sense for Twitter to capitalize on that in whatever ways it can. And as Peter Kafka pointed out at All Things Digital, adding analytics to its video-related partnerships via Bluefin would allow Twitter to make a better case for why brands should care (it also has a partnership with Nielsen).

Twitter should be about much more than just TV

So what’s wrong with Twitter getting into bed with NBC and other broadcasters, or becoming a handmaiden to traditional television? A couple of potential pitfalls showed themselves during the Olympics: one was the fact that Twitter’s content hub was unavailable to non-U.S. users because of geographic restrictions that its partner NBC was subject to. By now, we’ve grown used to Twitter content being unrestricted — except in special cases such as Germany’s request to remove Nazi tweets, when changes have to be made for legal reasons. A geo-gated Twitter just seems wrong.

Acq of Bluefin Labs by Twitter feels like their equivalent of the "offline cookie" - how to close the loop w advertisers re: effectiveness

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) February 05, 2013

The other incident that occurred during the Olympics was Twitter’s decision to shut down a journalist’s account after he criticized an executive at NBC and posted what the company said was a private email address. Twitter later admitted that this was mis-handled, but it raised the question of whose interests the company would be likely to protect if push came to shove: will the needs of broadcast partners take precedence over the needs of users? In some ways, they already have.

For me at least, getting into bed with television broadcasters and defining success as driving traffic to their programs is not as interesting a use of a global, real-time information platform as something like the “networked journalism” we saw during the Arab Spring and other events. Obviously, Twitter can still do things to help encourage that kind of activity as well, but if it doesn’t generate the same kind of revenue as a TV deal, how much attention will it get? Not much.

I am as much a fan of discussing shows like the Super Bowl on Twitter as anyone, but I don’t really need another way to find out about the latest NBC sitcom or reality show. I would much rather Twitter focused on filtering and curating the broader universe of discussion around important issues than boosting the viewership numbers of The Biggest Loser. Unfortunately, that’s where the money is.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K

[UPDATE: The news became official Thursday morning:

“I am thrilled,” says ex-NBC Universal chief and next #CNN president Jeff Zucker. on.cnn.com/Ya29uK

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) November 29, 2012

The choice of Zucker, whose impending hiring was first reported today by the LA Times and then by the NY Times, to lead CNN seems at first blush to be a strange choice by parent company Time Warner.

Although he presided over the long-running success of the Today show, Zucker has been away from the news business for a decade and away from NBC for two years. At a time when TV is being disrupted by new platforms and social media, Zucker very much fits the mold of an old-line TV executive — such as his new boss at Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, who has repeatedly downplayed the threat of so-called cord-cutters to the business.

This doesn’t mean Zucker will not succeed. It just means he will have to navigate waves of disruptive technology while also finding an identity for CNN.

The network has floundered in recent years and can only pull in an audience for brief spurts during a major news event like a war or presidential election. In the meantime, rivals like Fox and MSNBC have carved out a role as partisan squawk boxes for liberals or conservatives. Here’s some Twitter reaction:

My Old Boss is my New Boss RT @brianstelter Jeff Zucker new president of CNN Worldwide, people close to him & CNN say nyti.ms/WXBxf4

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) November 28, 2012

CNN overall has its most profitable year, despite disaster of its US flagship nyti.ms/U1ywTZ I love CNNi & CNN.com

— Rosental(@Rosental) November 28, 2012

“They don’t want to be Fox and they don’t want to be MSNBC. Fine. But neither nor is not an identity.” –@jayrosen_nyunyti.ms/Tl6PWU

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 28, 2012

(Image by Katherine Welles via Shutterstock)

The site has just launched and for now contains only a handful of photos, but this screenshot of photos submitted to Electiongrams by Georgia politicos gives you the basic idea:

The significance of Electionsgrams for NBC is that it gives the network another news tool for election night. But, on a broader level, the site also represents a new phase in citizen reporting.

It’s true that media outlets have long drawn on the voice of their viewers through Twitter or tools like CNN’s iReport. Electionsgrams, however, means that NBC and others can easily tap into photo-based reporting on an unprecedented scale. The flood of photos on the site provides a cheap and near-frictionless way for NBC to add color to its coverage and keep up with real time events.

According to Ryan Osborn, VP of Digital Innovation at NBC News, these new citizen submission tools are not a replacement for people on the ground but a “nice complement” to existing coverage.

Mass-scale photo reporting offers a new form of coverage but also creates new challenges for traditional news outlets: how to find the good stuff in the deluge of photos? And how to screen out the mischief-makers who will try to spam the system with ads, fake news or worse?

In the case of Electiongrams, NBC is relying on a start-up called Chute that provides back-end tools for large-scale photo management to brands and large media companies. Chute helps its clients pull in photos that people share through email or sites like Facebook, but also offers human and automated moderating tools.

According to CEO Ranvir Gujral, the Chute moderation tools are part of an enterprise solution for brands and big media companies that are trying to swim through the massive new stream of user photos flooding the internet.

A quick look at NBC’s Hurricane Sandy photo-sharing site, Stormgrams, shows the moderation is working – sort of. The state-by-state storm collages are largely free of ads but do contain a fair number of irrelevant pictures like this one:

This doesn’t mean NBC is on the wrong track, though. The company appears to recognize that sites Twitter and Instagram have come to influence major news events as much as any desk anchor or gumboot-wearing weatherman, and is responding appropriately.

NBC’s Ryan says sites like Electiongrams are part of a larger process in which news companies are using people-based platforms to news gather. “We use them as an early barometer,” he said, “and then the work for journalists begins.”