Sundog has been using short clips featuring billionaire Richard Branson, actress Kate Winslet, actor Gael Garcia Bernal and rapper Dizzie Rascal to draw attention to it ahead of its online release.

The strategy seems to be working: The official Breaking The Taboo YouTube channel has clocked more than 300,000 views since its launch on November 16. But why would Sundog release the entire film for free on YouTube ahead of its TV broadcast? I got in touch with the company to find out, and a spokesperson sent me the following response:

“We have decided to go with a YouTube release as the important thing for us as a company is not monetary gain but raising awareness and spreading the word on global issues — we aim to educate and inspire people and we can do that best through a free, social medium like YouTube where so many more people will be able to access it.”

The movie will be available for free for one month starting December 7. It is part of a larger campaign to change drug policy that has attracted support from a variety of people including Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox, Napster co-founder Sean Parker and Sting.

And so, a report that Spotify plans to release a browser-based version of its service makes a fair amount of sense.

TechCrunch reported Saturday that Spotify–the brainchild of Daniel Lorentzon and Daniel Elk–will release a web service in the near future that will allow users to log in to their Spotify accounts from any PC or Mac to stream music. The report said that the service will likely add a few new music-discovery features as well.

While the apps-vs.-web question may still be an ongoing debate in mobile development (with apps leading the way in most cases), web-delivered experiences have come to define most of what we do on PCs and Macs these days. Going to a browser-oriented version could help Spotify sign up more users and could also make for a more interesting experience when playlists can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection.

Airtime has been very good at keeping things quiet, with very little information leaking out during its closed alpha test this spring. However, here are a few things we already know ahead of Tuesday’s launch:

• Airtime will allow video chat both with people from your social graph as well as like-minded strangers, and it allows a bit of a blind date atmosphere by offering semi-anonymous interaction. The site’s Terms of Service were recently changed, but before revealed: “Your name is not shared when you are paired with a stranger. However, your Airtime and Facebook friends will be able to directly call you and see when you are online.”
• Airtime ties any  participation to a Facebook account and allow users to block others in order to avoid unwanted nudity.
• The company has been conducting regularly-scheduled trials with participants of the closed alpha test every week. A closer look at the site’s HTML code reveals that people who were lucky enough to get access to the private beta were told to “come back during user test time” after a successful sign-up. At times, access was also throttled, with testers being told that “the site is currently full.”
• Airtime was originally called Supyo. The company has raised a total of $33.5 million in funding over two rounds, with investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Google Ventures and a bunch of well-connected including Mike Arrington, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am and others.
• Clear Channel CEO Bob Pitmann is joining the board of the company, according to All Things Digital.
• Airtime’s artwork has been done by San Francico-based graphic design artist Shyama Golden.
• Airtime acquired social event tracking startup Erly two weeks ago. The deal can best be described as an aqui-hire and brings three Hulu veterans, including the video service’s founding CTO Eric Feng, to the Airtime team.
• The launch event will include appearances by a “a seemingly random group of celebs,” as the New York Post put it Monday. A-listers in attendance will include Snoop Dogg, Kristen Bell, Ed Helms, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joel McHale, Olivia Munn and Martha Stewart, according to the paper.

(L to R) Walt Mossberg, Daniel Ek, Sean Parker

It took Spotify two and a half years to enter the U.S. market amid complicated licensing discussions with record labels, and Apple played a role in trying to keep the company out of the country, Spotify director Sean Parker said Wednesday.

“There were some indications that that happened,” Parker said, rescuing Spotify CEO Daniel Ek from having to answer a question about Apple’s role in Spotify’s long march to the U.S. market at the D: All Things Digital conference. “You hear things, people send you e-mails… there is definitely a sense in which Apple was threatened by what we were doing.”

This isn’t an entirely new notion: my former colleague Greg Sandoval at CNET reported in 2010 that Apple was talking smack about Spotify’s business model in discussions with record companies, implying that it could hurt sales of downloaded music. But Parker’s acknowledgment is still quite interesting when considering whether or not Apple ever plans to introduce a subscription service for music, something the company has long resisted but has long been rumored to be considering.

Back in 2011, when Spotify launched in the U.S., Ek told Om that “people tend to overdramatize this tension with Apple.”

Regardless of Apple’s role in Spotify’s negotiations with record labels, Parker said that Spotify has broken through where others have failed because of a focus on the product. “You have to lead with the product, and that informs your licensing,” he said, whereas other services cut the licensing deals first and then got around to building a product.

Image credit Asa Mathat | All Things Digital

In this great video from Paris eG8, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) TV’s Matt Cowan puts Niklas Zennström and Sean Parker on the spot for their past sins, and asks whether a certain such rebellion is necessary in order for entertainment’s ultimate digital transition…