Netherlands-based Cleeng, which we have previously reported on and which facilitates payments through blog CMSes and other suites for outlets including La Tribune, Dailymotion and VentureBeat, is raising a €400,000 ($511,000) investment to try targeting U.S. business.

Amongst the backers is Pascal Cagni — until his resignation this May, Apple’s VP for Europe, Middle East, India and Asia — who says (via release):

“Through my 12 years leading Apple in Europe, I was uniquely positioned to monitor how the digital revolution can be disruptive and make monetization challenging. In the meantime, the proliferation of mobiles devices is on par with the acceleration of content digitalization and has broadened market reach in an unforeseen fashion. The opportunity to offer a simple, straightforward, robust solution to monetize content, being TV programs, videos, or live events is simply huge.”

Meanwhile, central European buffet payment facilitator Piano Media is trying a limited addition of paid video to its system that already charges users to access sections of several newspaper and magazine websites.

The video is from Zuzana Piussi, a Slovak filmmaker who could face two years in prison if convicted for her controversial film about the Slovak judiciary. Her latest film, about Slovak politics, is being distributed only via the Piano-powered paid part of weekly news magazine Týždeň’s website.

“The multiplex cinemas were against distributing the film after the controversy surrounding my last film,” Piussi says (via release). “Therefore, distributing the movie online, for me as the creator, is now the only way forward.”

Piano Media is better resourced than Cleeng for geographical expansion, having raised a €2 million second round in April. But Piano’s three launched countries so far — Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland — are all in Europe while Cleeng already appears to have ambitions of breaking in to the States.

Other Cleeng backers are unnamed private investors.

The outfit is buying software, rights and people from Vienna-based Novosense, whose technology can support New York Times-style metered free-article allowances without logging readers’ consumption count via conventional cookies.

Twenty-five publishers of 66 sites in Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland have put a small percentage of their web content into respective national payment systems operated by Piano Media. Unlike paywalls for individual news sites, which are fast being rolled out around the world, Piano currently charges a single monthly fee for access to all publishers’ material.

But, through the Novosense acquisition, there is an addition coming in December. “Some of our media partners were asking for individual systems,” CEO Tomáš Bella says (via release). Bella will call the added model “Piano Solo.”

While hard pay-or-leave systems are a spiky reader proposition, meters are finding some favor. The New York Times’ 10-free-articles meter has brought the publisher more revenue and a circulation hike without impacting web traffic.

But such meters can notoriously be cracked, for instance, by deleting the cookie files that count articles read by individual visitors. Novosense boasts an “innovative algorithm” that relies on an alternative  method of user tracking, which it does not describe.

The jury is somewhat out on Piano Media’s existing shared-kiosk system until it can disclose how many monthly subscribers it has in each of its three existing countries. But the task of corralling rival publishers into a single system is considerable — and one that would become harder in larger, more competitive countries to which Piano wants to expand.

With Novosense’s addition, Bella says: “Now individual media can move ahead on their own…without having to wait for smaller or more conservative partners to make a similar decision.”

Novosense’s service also includes some data tools for building user profiles. Piano raised €2 million in April. Acquisition price is not disclosed.

“The third country we are launching in July will be much larger than the two we already have combined,” CEO Tomas Bella told me during our on-stage panel discussion at paidContent 2012.

“That will be where we want to prove this can work in bigger countries as well.”

Piano claimed first-month sales of €40,000 ($50,000) in Slovakia and €26,000 ($33,000) in Slovenia. Several major publishers have placed on average up to a tenth of their web content in to the independent system, which costs €3.90 per month in Slovakia and €4.89 in Slovenia.

There is a question mark over whether Piano can replicate even these small numbers outside its own back yard. But Bellas is betting on operating in six or seven countries by next year, as publishers’ willingness to charge continues growing.

“We are struggling to scale the company because the size of one publisher in this (third) country is the size of all the publishers in the other two countries.

“After we prove this in September and October, we still have a lot of demand from other countries.”

And he explained how some Piano publishers are making about a third of their money from payments now:

“Media which put 20 to 30 percent of their content are at three, four, five percent of conversion to paying users.

“The best ones are getting 30 to 40 percent of their online revenues from this source after one year.”