But, although the service sees no problem heading to emerging young markets, high costs will keep it out of Germany for the foreseeable future.

“We’re about to launch in France, Spain and Italy,” international VP Nic Jones told Informa Telecom & Media’s Industry Outlook 2013 conference on Tuesday.

“The one missing country is Germany. Germany is very, very hard to gain digital rights to be able to build a digital business.”

License rates required of digital services by royalty collectors are still relatively high in the country.

“They (rightsholders) genuinely believe they are protecting the music industry,” Jones said. “They need to embrace the future without being so scared of it.”

Jointly owned by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media Company, Vevo has so far launched in six countries, including Brazil. Whilst that choice might raise some eyebrows, the territory is growing up fast.

Jones said Vevo aims to launch in countries where people are most passionate about live music: “Actually, there is a market to monetize premium videos in Brazil – and Mexico, too.”

Such expansion will see mobile become Vevo’s primary distribution device.

“UK growth is far greater than on mobile than anything else,” Jones said. “Asia s a bit down the track for us. But we don’t see Vevo as a desktop proposition

“We are talking with various potential partners in India, where Indians many will only ever see the internet as a mobile proposition.

“Eastern Europe is going to be a high priority for us next year- places like Russia are incredibly important.”

But, as mobile becomes the majority, free content operators are posed with a challenge – advertising models are playing catch-up.

“Monetising mobile is much more hard,” Vevo VP Jones told Informa Telecoms & Media’s conference.

“The formats aren’t clear yet. The idea from agencies that mobile should be treated separately is a mistake. There is a view that mobile should be sold at a lower CPM. Most advertisers buying VOD are thinking about the laptop or the PC.

“There is a very big job to educate the advertisers and agencies. Not to educate the users – they are naturally emanating toward mobile.”

The challenge of emerging markets being mobile-first is one recognised by others like Facebook, which conceded in its IPO filing that it is increasingly well used in developing countries on handsets, where its business model is virginal.

But what Jones was also speaking to was a growing grumble I am hearing, from content services, that – even in the west – mobile advertising effectiveness just isn’t yet cutting it.

Jones speculated that Vevo may float on the market “one day”. And he said, in future, it would innovate around presenting live music gigs. He cited an example of a Led Zepplin concert which attracted two million applications for 20,000 tickets as proving there is a ready audience of people to pay for online gig streams.

Roku’s 4.8 firmware, which started rolling out Thursday, comes with an interesting new feature. From the announcement blog post:

“Expanded language support, adding Spanish and German to the user interface (To change your language, just go to Settings from the Roku home screen.)”

Roku previously only supported English and French. We reported earlier this week that Roku’s website contained traces of an expansion to Spain and Germany. A company spokesperson didn’t want to comment on its plans for continental Europe at the time, but Roku definitely took notice: The revealing HTML code snippets have since disappeared.

Barcelona-based Wuaki.tv has content licenses from Hollywood and domestic movie and TV studios for DTO and rental access, offered over the internet and to connected TVs on which Wuaki.tv is present. A “Spanish Netflix” might be one short-hand description.

Rakuten already owned the e-commerce marketplaces Buy.com of the U.S., PriceMinister of France, Ikeda of Brazil and Tradoria of Germany. Last year, it acquired UK physical entertainment retailer Play.com and the Kobo e-reader and e-book store company.

And it recently invested in Russian marketplace Ozon, luxury shopping service AHA Life and led a $100 million investment in Pinterest with eyes on injecting social in to its commerce operations.

What does Rakuten want with video on-demand? Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani (via release):

“The Wuaki.tv management team and technology are both very strong, as is the number and strength of its relationships across the video and hardware industries.

“We saw synergies in the ambition of both businesses to expand internationally while video on demand extends our digital goods offering.

“We also both believe the opportunity for video on demand services across Europe, as well as further afield, to still be in its infancy – particularly when looking at media consumption via mobile connected devices and eReaders.”

Wuaki.tv founding CEO Jacinto Roca (via release):

“We believe that, ultimately, online video will replace traditional pay-for-TV services. This agreement will allow us to expand the successful Wuaki.tv offering, both in terms of services and geographical reach.”

Latin America’s improving economy is creating a new middle class of “digital Latino”, according to these slides from Terra Internet co-founder Fernando Madeira.

Huffington Post to Spain

AOL’s content efforts have launched in Madrid as, yes, El Huffington Post, in partnership with Prisa’s El Pais newspaper.

Spain is next in its global roll-out after UK, Canada, Quebec and France, which also came via a partnership with newspaper Le Monde.

Editorial director is Cadena SER radio presenter Montserrat Domínguez, who got the job after interviewing Arianna Huffington, the latter writes.

Deezer to Latin America

The unlimited-music subscription service, which is rolling out to over 200 countries in a race with rivals in the nascent segment, has opened to 35 countries in the region.

iTunes’ recent emergence there helped grow 2011 global digital music sales.

But charging in local currencies is tricky due to bank challenges. Deezer is pricing its offering to Latin Americans in U.S. dollars or British pounds – $4.25/£3.49 per month for premium (unlimited desktop streaming), $8.49/£6.99 for premium+ (mobile, tablet and IPTV streaming). That is except for Mexico, where the service will cost $69.50 and $139 respectively.

A spokesperson tells paidContent: “Deezer’s payment solution provided currently only accepts payment in USD for all those territories except Mexico.”

Deezer is also not launching in Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela.

Yahoo Shine for Latinas

Yahoo has unveiled a version of its women’s lifestyle content site, Shine, in English for “bicultural” Hispanic women in the U.S.

The site was previously reaching 3.57 million U.S. Hispanics monthly, Yahoo says, adding: “Hispanics are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S., accounting for 16 percent of the nation’s total population with more than 50.5 million Latinos in the country” (release).

Now Madrid-based TapTap Networks, a mobile advertising network operating in Spain, is taking venture capital to build on ongoing mobile media growth.

TapTap is taking a $4.5 million first round from Nauta Capital and CDTI.

The company manages mobile ads on 200 sites including Grupo Prisa, Hearst Group and 20 Minutes.

With the funds, it wants to do international expansion, especially in the U.S. and Latin America, Nauta says (release).

First up, Japan: Kindle could launch there as soon as April, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) reports. Amazon has been been in discussions with Japanese publishers since last year.

Reuters refers to an article published in the Nikkei, which I was not able to access without a subscription. It says the Kindle Touch will be Kindle Japan’s “flagship model” and that Amazon Japan “will team up with NTT DoCoMo Inc. (NYSE: DCM) for wireless downloads of e-books over the mobile phone service provider’s network.”

Amazon already sells physical books at Amazon.co.jp.

Next, Brazil — by June, according to a piece in Brazilian trade publication PublishNews, found via The Digital Reader. Publishing Perspectives reported last month that Amazon had hired a Kindle vendor manager and is beginning negotiations with Brazilian publishers — “initially, only to sell e-books” — this month.

There is currently no Brazilian Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). (Uh, besides the actual rainforest there.) But e-commerce in the country is growing quickly. Brazil’s largest book publishers all offer e-books, though e-books are still estimated to make up less than 1 percent of total book sales.

Last year Amazon launched Kindle stores in Spain, Italy, France and Germany.

Amazon is not shipping the Kindle Touch, which was released in the U.S. in November, to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy or Spain. All of those countries have dedicated Amazon sites. “We’re working to make Kindle Touch available to customers from our international websites soon,” an Amazon spokeswoman told me.

In the U.S. in the last 12 weeks, Apple’s iOS platform accounted for 44.9 percent of all smartphone sales, just edging out the collective power of Android, which took 44.8 percent of sales. In the UK, Android managed to hold on to its lead at 43.9 percent of all sales, while Apple took 34 percent of sales. In the rest of the markets surveyed by Kantar Worldpanel, Android also remained in the lead (see full table below).

But even with Android still at the top, Apple seems to be the one showing more momentum in the top markets, and Kantar’s analyst Dominic Sunnebo notes that iOS overall grew more on average across all the nine markets that it pinpoints as a sales barometer than Android did.

The UK now has a smartphone penetration of 48.9 percent, says Kantar Worldpanel. A corresponding figure was not provided for other markets surveyed.

Drilling down, Apple’s iOS grew its market share more than any other platform maker in both the U.S. and UK, with growth of 22.6 percent and 12 percent respectively. Android, however, continues to show the strongest momentum in other European markets like Germany, Italy and Spain. It also grew the most in Australia, a hotly contested market where Apple is currently battling it out against Samsung over patents and device injunctions.

In what might be worrying news ahead of Nokia’s quarterly results tomorrow, Windows Phone, Microsoft’s OS that is used in Nokia’s new range of smartphone devices, has not managed to break the two percent mark for sales in any single market surveyed by Kantar Worldpanel. The most popular countries for WP7 devices, says Kantar Worldpanel, were the U.S., where it took 1.9 percent of sales; and the UK where it accounted or 1.7 percent of sales.

In some markets, in fact, Microsoft’s old mobile OS, Windows Mobile, is still selling better than the new one. Such is the case in Germany, France and Spain.

BlackBerry: Interestingly, Sunnebo notes that RIM’s smartphone brand remains the “gifting” brand of choice, with 57 percent of all BlackBerry devices purchased in the quarter as gifts, with that number going up to 76 percent in December, with some 55 percent of recipients under the age of 16. That’s an interesting signal of how BlackBerry is already considered something of an entry-level smartphone (and perhaps a confirmation of new CEO Thorsten Heins’ contention that RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) does not have to ‘dumb down’ its line of devices to pick up new users.)

And while we’ve seen some attention in the last couple of days to what is happening in the Latin American and Brazil mobile markets — Apple hiring a new GM for the region, and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) claiming some kind of feature phone supremacy there with the sale of its 1.5 billionth feature phone in the region — Android, too, can lay claim to a strong position there: it took a 28 percent share in Brazil and a 20 percent share in Mexico. In Brazil, Symbian remained the strongest platform, while in Mexico, RIM overtook Symbian as the most popular platform, as Nokia’s older smartphone platform saw big declines in both countries.

It’s worth watching how Le Huffington Post develops, since AOL (NYSE: AOL) and the Huffington Post Media Group are following the partnership pattern with other non-English launches later this year.

The blog will team up with El Pais in Spain for a Spanish edition, which is coming online in March. And — as we first reported last week — it will also launch an Italian site with L’Espresso.

It’s not known how AOL structures its business relationships with HuffPo partners, but paidContent understands that the French groups all share equal equity in the Le Huffington Post. None of the parties have confirmed this, however.

The original, HuffingtonPost.com, has become one of the most popular news sites in the U.S., and one of the most-visited of all sites. Figures from June 2011 showed that it had actually surpassed the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) as the most popular news site in the country. We have contacted comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) for more recent figures and will update this post when we get them.

Update: comScore tells us that in fact in the month of December, HuffingtonPost.com was visited more than any newspaper site in the U.S., with six million more unique visitors than the next-biggest brand, the New York Times — although if you added in other properties like NYT’s About.com, the New York Times’ group would have about 76.5 million uniques. Meanwhile, in the UK, HuffPo.co.uk is at number-11 at the moment. The full tables ranking popular sites in the U.S. and UK are at the end of this post. [original post continues below]

Before today, HuffPo had launched two other international editions — both in English — HuffingtonPost.ca in Canada, and HuffingtonPost.co.uk in the UK.

Both of these were launched on HuffPo’s own steam, without a helping hand from a local partner. That may have been easier to do: given the common English language across the three territories, it’s likely that Canada and the UK were already bringing in some traffic to the U.S. site, and so were natural first-efforts in an international strategy.

Some have wondered if HuffPo could succeed in the UK, however, because the many established UK national dailies already have a strong culture of opinion-led journalism — the kind that has become a popular mainstay of blogging and forms a cornerstone of HuffPo’s success in the U.S. (one other being a lot of aggregation, a one-stop shop for news; another being a sheer proliferation of content, much of it written for free).

It’s perhaps unfair to compare HuffingtonPost.co.uk against other news sites, only six months into its existence. Worth pointing out that AOL, citing figures from comScore, says that traffic on the UK site has been growing steadily since launching in the summer of 2011:

“HuffPost UK currently has 4.1 million 3.5 million unique visitors,” a spokesperson told paidContent in an email, “and has grown nearly 50 percent since it launched six months ago. The site has a large, vibrant group blog, with an expanding roster of 2,500 people who have used its blogging platform, including Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt, Noel Gallagher, Liz Hurley, Joanna Lumley and Ricky Gervais. Engagement is also strong and growing, with users posting a record 7,000 comments on a single day last week.”

Update 2: That 4.1 million figure is higher than comScore’s numbers detailed below because it includes incoming traffic from outside the UK, while comScore’s numbers measure only UK-based traffic. [original post follows below]

HuffPo first announced its partnership with Le Monde and LNEI in October 2010 — meaning that it is moving quick on getting these products to market once making them public. This is only one part of the company’s Francophonic strategy, though: the Canadian HuffPo is apparently also launching a Quebec edition of HuffingtonPost.ca this month, too.

Source: comScore

Orange today is introducing a new Android tablet, the first to come with Orange’s own branding instead of that of the tablet-maker. Called the Tahiti, the device, Orange tells me, was built by Huawei, sports a seven-inch screen and runs on Android Honeycomb, Google’s tablet-optimized version of the platform.

Possibly the most unique selling point — or at least the one that Orange is touting above others — is its price point. The 3G and WiFi-enabled tablet will cost users a mere £69.99 ($108), in addition to a commitment to a 24-month, £25/month contract. That sounds potentially reasonable until you work out the total cost: £669.99 ($1,036). That includes two gigabytes of data, 1 GB of which is during “quiet time” when fewer people use Orange’s network.

Prior to this, Huawei had developed two of its own-branded tablets to-date; both have seven-inch screens like the Tahiti. The IDEOS S7 is marketed as a content-friendly device, while the higher-specced MediaPad was the company’s first foray into using the Honeycomb OS.

By comparison, the Tahiti looks very much like the MediaPad (pictured) in its button-free face and camera positioning in the upper corner of the device. It may well be the MediaPad but under a different name. That would be a clever way for Huawei to shift stock further than its own retail steam might allow.

Orange tells me this is the first time it has launched an own-branded tablet in the UK, and the first time that it is selling this specific product. But that does not mean that it is new to the game. The company launched another own-branded tablet last year, which it distributed through its operations in Spain, Poland, Romania and Slovakia around the concept of offering inexpensive tablets against pricier branded products like the iPad.

That first tablet was a rebranded IDEOS S7, Orange told me at the time. Clearly that did well enough for them to try the concept out again with a more expensive tablet in a more developed market.

The Tahiti looks anything but exotic, so why the name? It could be a play on a type of fruit, the Tahiti Orange, AKA the Persian Lime. The other connection: Orange already has a line of own-brand handsets named after various destinations (San Francisco, Rio, Monte Carlo, Barcelona and Atlanta).