Altogether, Viewster attracted 8.3 million unique U.S.-based viewers in February, who viewed close to 200 million videos on the site. That’s pretty impressive for a site that lists titles like Mother’s Day Massacre and Saving Flipper as its most popular titles.

“Clearly, we don’t have the depths of content of a Hulu,” admitted Viewster CEO Kai Henniges during an interview Wednesday. But that hasn’t stopped his company from making inroads with audiences worldwide, thanks to an offering that combines free content with a presence on a wide variety of platforms.

However, Viewster’s business plan wasn’t always about free content. The company, which was founded in 2008, initially looked to make money with B2B services for other publishers. In 2010, it switched to a consumer-facing offering, with the plan to charge consumers for VOD content. Except, no one wanted to pay.

Looking back, Henniges says that paid VOD was “a horrible experience for users.” That’s why the company decided to give everything away for free for six months, just to see what happened. Unsurprisingly, consumers loved it. Surprisingly, content owners were up for experimenting with free as well, as long as they still got paid. “We almost stumbled upon the free model,” said Henniges.

These days, Viewster is still offering paid views for consumers who want to view movies offline on mobile devices, but roughly 90 percent of the company’s views and revenue comes from free, ad-supported content. Viewster offers a total of 6000 titles across its different markets, including fare from Warner Bros. that it licensed last summer for Europe, the Middle East and South-East Asia.

In a way, Viewsters model is similar to that of companies like Viki that utilize content arbitrage to cheaply license movies and TV shows for out-of market viewing. In the U.S., Viewster is starting to focus on Telenovelas, Japanese Anime and other populate niche content. “Internationally, we can be more bold,” explained Henniges, adding that his company was “in the import-export business of content.”

Viewster’s special advantage is that it has a very large device footprint, with apps on 20 connected TV platforms as well as Android and iOS. However, getting the viewers to find and actually use these apps has proven to be a challenge. Social discovery simply doesn’t work on a connected TV, where there’s often no way to discover content without browsing through an app. “They are all like islands, these apps,” said Henniges.

Getting viewers to install mobile apps can be challenging as well, but also very rewarding: Henniges told me that his company is seeing a lot of growth and engagement particularly on tablets. Currently, Viewster gets about 25 percent of its views from mobile, he explained, with only five percent coming from connected devices. But the web is still king, with 70 percent of all views.

That’s why Viewster plans to double down on its web audience through more curation and personalization this year. The company, which currently employs 35 people, also plans for some moderate headcount increase, but Henniges made it clear that he doesn’t want to go crazy. Viewster raised around $3M in funding from Germany’s Creathor Ventures and used that money conservatively. “We can’t spend our money into the market,” acknowledged Henniges. And, judging from the latest audience numbers, it doesn’t have to.

Microsoft made a significant showing in the area of internet VOD, which is industry slang for those 24 or 48 hour video rentals you can get from iTunes, Vudu and others. That segment currently accounts for just 12 percent of total video-on-demand revenue, with 72 percent of the money coming from rentals through pay TV operators. But it’s an interesting segment, in part because it’s not dominated by just one or two players.

Apple’s iTunes does have a strong lead with 45 percent of all internet VOD revenue, according to NPD, but there’s a fierce competition going on for second place: Amazon Instant Video generated 18 percent of the industry’s revenue in this segment in 2012, followed by Walmart’s Vudu with 15 percent and Xbox video with 14 percent.

That’s a pretty strong showing for Microsoft, considering that the company has just begun to put some more muscle behind its own video rental offering. Microsoft just recently unified all of its entertainment offerings under the Xbox brand and is now beginning to promote it as its home entertainment property across all of its Windows 8 platforms, as well as the Xbox 360. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Microsoft surpassed Vudu and maybe even Amazon by the end of this year for internet VOD rentals.

Of course, one has to look at these numbers with a grain of salt: NPD’s home video data focuses entirely on transactional spending, meaning that Netflix and competing subscription offerings don’t show up at all. That’s despite the fact that Netflix now has some 27 million subscribers in the U.S. alone. But subscriptions generally don’t offer access to movies right after they were in the theaters — and that’s an area in which Microsoft, with a pretty big installed device base, is starting to move a lot of media.

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].

The assumption: Consumers will eschew their ever-improving home entertainment systems and actually go to a theater again if you can provide them a value-add like 3D. But as the uneven performance of premium-priced 3D theatrical releases has shown over the last few years, that assumption hasn’t always proven correct. Meanwhile, the install base of 3D TV sets is actually growing.

So, for the first time ever this weekend, a release window for a 3D movie is going to collapse, with the Weinstein Company’s tongue-in-cheek horror sequel, Piranha 3DD, getting released through both cable/satellite and internet VOD on the same day it debuts in about 75 theaters.

Produced by Weinstein horror label Dimension Films, the movie will be distributed into the VOD market by Starz Media, with premium channel Starz with the company’s digital distribution arm renting the film via VOD for $6.99 ($7.99 for 3D) starting Friday through cable, satellite and telco TV service providers. (Purchasers have 30 days to watch it.)

The movie will also be rented through Amazon Instant Video, Facebook, Google Play/YouTube, iTunes, PlayStation Network, Vudu, and Xbox Live

Such “day and date” VOD releases are becoming pretty common in the independent film world. These days, in order to successfully mobilize a critical mass of moviegoers to 1,000 theaters or more on the same weekend — a so-called “wide release” — you need big marketing resources, and you need to create tremendous “brand awareness.” (It’s the reason why Hollywood’s studios are releasing so many sequels, remakes and reboots – when you put out a film based on a popular comic book, best-selling novel or board game, a lot of that heavy promotional lifting is already done.)

A low-budget adult drama based on obscure source material, for example, will now be released in a handful of big-city theaters — just enough to generate some prestige factor for the film, giving it a current-event feel for where the real money will be made, on cable and internet VOD.

Pretty rare for bigger films

Still, while some media analysts see so-called “day and date” VOD releases as the preferred motion-picture release model, the strategy is rarely employed by larger studios like Weinstein, which released this year’s Oscar Best Picture winner, The Artist.

The major studios have tried to get close, of course — last year, for example, Universal wanted to release its Ben Stiller comedy-action film, Tower Heist, on VOD just three weeks after its theatrical premiere. It backed off the plan, however, when several major exhibition chains threatened to boycott the movie.

For certain kinds of high-profile projects, however, the strategy has been less controversial. For example, Fox’s Get the Gringo — produced and starring the man who right now constitutes Hollywood’s most radioactive element, Mel Gibson — eschewed theatrical release all together when it was released earlier this year on DirecTV VOD.

As for Piranha 3DD, the model seems to make a lot of sense, too.

The film it follows up, 2010′s Piranha 3D, was an undersold remake of an eponymous 1978 low-budget horror movie. Produced for $24 million, the film and its director, Alexandre Aja, received solid reviews from critics. But the movie underperformed domestically, grossing just $25 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters.

Most of its money was made overseas and in the domestic home entertainment market.

Aja, who took great care to convert the 2010 film from 2D to 3D, isn’t around for the follow-up, however. And with heavy-on-ham appearances by actors like Baywatch star David Hasselhoff and Gary Busey, the sequel’s reviews aren’t nearly as good, either.

Should Piranha 3DD justify is modest production cost with its VOD performance this weekend, look for distributors like Weinstein to find other ways to exploit the day and date model.

“We believe that Cablevision is looking to launch a service similar to Comcast’s Streampix  later this year,” Greenfield blogged Thursday, shortly after Cablevision reported the addition of 7,000 multichannel subscribers during its first-quarter earnings call.

Now, Dolan (pictured) didn’t say anything during Thursday morning’s call about this — in fact, in his blog, Greenfield griped that Dolan didn’t respond to any of his questions or concerns.

But as supporting evidence for the assertion that an SVOD platform is on the way, Greenfield noted that Cablevision referenced “unspecified software investments” during the call.

“While timing is uncertain, we believe Cablevision is concerned about the coming Verizon/Redbox joint-venture that is expected to launch (in beta) this summer,” he added. “We want to understand how much capital Cablevision is planning on spending on the project and how it will be marketed to consumers.”

As for that earnings report, fortunes seem to be picking up for Cablevision on the multichannel side, with the company adding more video subscriptions in the New York metropolitan area than in any quarter since the early recessionary period of Q2 2008.

And as it is for most cable companies these days, broadband services are growing, too, with the company adding 41,800 high-speed data subscriptions in the second quarter.

“We think Hulu authenticating makes sense,” he added. “We think Hulu is heading in the right direction now and it might continue to be viable.”

Bewkes was responding to a question on rumors that Hulu will start requiring users to prove that they have a cable TV subscription before using its service.

HBO Go to more platforms soon

HBO Go is having “a significant positive impact” on Time Warner’s business and 93 percent of users say Go makes them more loyal to HBO, Bewkes said. Consumers using HBO Go are watching HBO more than they used to, Bewkes said, and HBO Go will launch on more platforms soon — it will “become widely accessible on connected TVs.” Microsoft’s Xbox Live added HBO Go in March.

Ultraviolet added 1 million registered users in last four weeks

Bewkes said that UltraViolet, the digital cloud initiative being jointly launched by Hollywood’s major studios — Time Warner’s Warner Bros. division included — is still in its early stages, “but consumers are downloading and streaming in very large numbers,” Bewkes said. “More than 2 million accounts have been created and 5,000 titles are available. [It took five months to gain]the first million registrations, then we added 1 million more in the past 4 weeks.”

Choosing what to stream

“We’re more than happy to work with SVOD [subscription video on demand] companies to license our content,” Bewkes said. “Our overarching goal is simply to maximize the lifetime value of the content.”

He cited CBS sitcom hit “The Big Bang Theory” as a show that is “likely to have multiple cycles” and is “unlikely … to go to SVOD anytime soon. We’re trying to balance the value of the later cycles.”

“For older content that has either gone through several cycles, or for shows that are serialized and work better on a VOD basis … those are the kinds of things you can be more efficient with when you put them on SVOD,” Bewkes said. “Take the CW deal we did as an SVOD sale to Netflix. Those shows had more efficient and higher value in an SVOD service, with a little earlier availability, than we thought we could get in traditional syndicated buy-ins. It really depends on the nature of the programming.”

On Thursday, Redbox’s parent company, Coinstar, reported a 34 percent uptick in revenue to $568.2 million during the first quarter, driven by 39 percent earnings growth of Redbox to $502.9 million.

In January, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said his company would no longer invest resources into growing its DVD operation. The result of that posture may have emerged just three months later. On Monday, during its own first-quarter earnings report, Netflix revealed that it had lost over 1 million DVD/Blu-ray subscribers in the quarter and that disc-rental revenue had gone from accounting for 52.4 percent of total earnings in Q4 to just 45.4 percent in Q1.

Redbox, however, seems to have become the beneficiary of Netflix’s strategic moves regarding DVD/Blu-ray dating back to July, when Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix controversially upped prices on online disc rentals.

In an Oct. 12 research note reported on by Home Media Retailing, for example, Michael J. Olson, senior research analyst with Piper Jaffray, noted that web traffic to Redbox.com was up 46 percent year over year during September, when the price change took effect.

“Search trend data from Google supports a dramatic uptick in web activity surrounding Redbox as consumers look at alternatives to replace or supplement new-release movies from Netflix,” Olson wrote.

It is using its rights to place the Grand National horse race, London Marathon and the Boat Race on the global version of its iPlayer service.

Although iPlayer in the UK offers free catch-up programming transmitted over the last seven days via multiple platforms, BBC Worldwide’s international version, available on iOS only, charges a monthly fee for a smörgåsbord of archive and recent programming for which BBC Worldwide has rights.

It will make these three sporting events available “within days” of their first UK broadcast. Since sport tends to trade on its live-ness, this will make the proposition challenging. The Grand National will be available on iPlayer in highlights form.

Global BBC iPlayer GM Matthew Littleford (via release): “Our subscribers wanted iconic British sport, and here they have it.”

BBC Worldwide still isn’t releasing figures indicating how well used the global iPlayer is, though Littleford tells StrategyEye it has hit its own targets. It still isn’t available in the U.S..

Washington, DC-based SnagFilms offers ad-supported, free-to-consumer streaming access to a library of about 3,000 indie movie titles, mostly documentaries, for viewing on over 100 types of digital devices. It also offers a select number of its titles, mostly the newer movies, through transactional VOD on a wide variety of cable, satellite and telco pay TV services. Since January of 2011, the company — founded four years ago by Ted Leonis — has announced three rounds of funding collectively worth $27 million, served mainly by the company’s groundfloor backers, New Enterprise Associates and Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) Interactive Capital. Individual investors include not only Leonis, but Steve Case and Terry Semel.

SnagFilms CEO Richard Allen described the company as “modestly profitable” in the fourth quarter of 2010. Since that time, however, he said SnagFilms has made substantial investments in technology, marketing, content and staffing. He expects a return to profitability in late 2013.

For SnagFilms, the challenge right now is ubiquity — to be on as many devices and platforms as, say, Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), so it can be the channel of choice when it comes to viewing indie film.

The addition of Dish Network’s nearly 14 million subscribers — coupled with an agreement made earlier with DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) — means that SnagFilms’ pay-per-view service now comes as a bundled VOD option in the more than 33 million American homes that subscribe to satellite TV.

Meanwhile, the agreement with third-party pay-per-view and VOD service provider iN Demand puts SnagFilms onto the VOD programming menus of the nation’s No. 4 multichannel operator, Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC), as well as No. 10-ranked multichannel service Bright House Networks. SnagFilms already has existing VOD distribution through not only DirecTV, but top multichannel provider Comcast and Verizon FiOS.

In addition to VOD through multichannel services, SnagFilms continues to proliferate across web-based viewing platforms and devices, signing a deal with Sony’s male-targeted video portal Crackle, which itself has broad-reaching syndication deals with YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), Hulu and Microsoft’s Xbox Live, among other viewing platforms. SnagFilms is also working on an agreement to supply nearly 1,000 titles to AOL’s new video portal. Device-wise, the company plans to roll out an player app for Vizeo smart TVs; this follows the earlier release of Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Panasonic smart-TV and Blu-ray player apps.

The inclusion on these devices and services follows the recent launch of SnagFilms on Xbox Live and Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) transactional internet VOD service Vudu. And under a deal that was announced earlier, the service will also soon debut on the Samsung Media Hub.

In addition to new distribution agreements, SnagFilms has also announced several key executive hires:

– D. Scott Karnedy has been named to the position of chief revenue officer, where he’ll lead sales and marketing efforts for SnagFilms’ ad-supported web and mobile platforms, as well as the internet news site the company also runs, IndieWire. Karnedy most recently served as chief sales officer and executive VP for Premiere Retail Networks.

– Manik Bambha has been appointed to the position of chief technology officer, where he’ll oversee technology initiatives, product design and development of the SnagFilms and IndieWire websites and mobile offerings, as well as their entries into social media. Bambha previously spearheaded technology initiatives for MySpace and Fox (NSDQ: NWS) Interactive Media.

– Gary Hahn has been hired as executive VP of marketing, where he’ll lead marketing and branding efforts for SnagFilms. He previously worked for XM Satellite Radio.

Ofcom, which handed the role of VOD co-regulator to ATVOD in 2010, will conduct its first biennial formal review of the agency, to assess whether ATVOD is “an appropriate regulatory authority”, whether it is meeting its obligations and whether there are any problems.

ATVOD executes the European Commission’s 2007 Audio-Visual Media Services directive, which said “TV-like” services “must not contain any incitement to hatred based on race, sex, religion or nationality”; “must provide appropriate protection for minors against harmful material” and “sponsored programmes and services must comply with applicable sponsorship requirements”.

But the body has proved controversial:

• Three quarters of ATVOD’s planned £426,388 first-year running costs had to be met by the very services ATVOD wanted to regulate, meaning it set out to identify a specific 150 services to regulate, all of which had to self-identify themselves.
• Large national publishers must pay between £10,350 and £25,000 a year to come under ATVOD’s auspice.
• Small-scale operators complained at being crippled by ATVOD’s first-year rates, but they won concessions for year two.
• ATVOD believed it had to regulate the web video activities not just of broadcasters but also of publishers whose core activity is not video. After being admonished by ATVOD for not self-identifying, newspaper and magazine publishers who post some videos online complained strongly.

After all, the legislation under which ATVOD was handed responsibility states: “The scope of this Directive should not cover electronic versions of newspapers and magazines.”

So ATVOD agreed an about-turn on the issue after News International won on appeal to Ofcom.

Now Ofcom has opened a consultation ending May 31, and it specifically wants to hear from those publishers which ATVOD thinks it regulates.

In latest cases, MTV last month lost an appeal against ATVOD’s decision that its Viva music channel’s web video should pay to be regulated, and an adult website called Bootybox.tv was told it must screen out access by under-18s.