Author: Janko Roettgers

Netflix wants to spend up to 15 of its entire licensing budget on the production of original content within the next few years, according to Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, who said Thursday at the Nomura 3rd Annual U.S. Media & Telecom Summit in New York that the company is going to keep growing its original content output over the next few years, with the goal of roughly doubling the number of titles within the next 18 months.

The company is currently spending around five percent of its content money on originals like House of Cards, Hemlock Grove and the new season of Arrested Development. Asked about that show, Sarandos said that the company had extremely high expectations about the initial viewership of the show. “And it met our expectations, and we are thrilled,” he said.

He added that the viewers also seem to love the show, despite a few early bad reviews. 80 percent of the viewers who watched the show within the first 24 hours rated it four or five stars, Sarandos revealed.

Sarandos also had a to answer a few questions about the company’s decision not to renew its deal with Viacom, which has led to the company removing popular kids shows like Dora, Spongebob and Blue’s Clues. Sarandos defended the move, pointing to some of the other kids content that Netflix has added recently and saying: “I feel like that was the right trade-off.”

Sarandos said that slate deals like the previous agreement with Viacom, which force Netflix to buy a wide breadth of content, often simply aren’t worth the money, especially if the same content is available elsewhere as well. “We value that content for sure. We just disagreed on the value of the content,” he said.

However, Netflix executives have stated in the past that they’d be willing to license some of Viacom’s more popular shows individually, and Sarandos said Thursday that this option is still on the table: “These discussions are ongoing,” he explained.

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Maybe it’s fate: Just two months ago, Hulu moved all of its 500 or so Los Angeles-based employees into swanky new offices in the heart of Santa Monica’s tech hive. The complex now housing Hulu is called the Colorado Center, and is also home to HBO and a few other companies at the intersection of media and technology.

But anyone who recalls the Los Angeles tech scene from back in the days of the Web 2.0 boom will still remember the building as part of the former Yahoo campus. And even if you’re a little rusty on local tech history, you don’t have to go far to find your way to the purple Y. The internet giant still has an outpost next door to Hulu, and another building just around the corner.

Yahoo threw its hat in the ring to buy the video service last week, bidding a reported $600 to $800 million. Yahoo is competing with six other entities that also want to buy Hulu — but I’d argue that Yahoo may just be the best bet for Hulu to survive and thrive (and not just because the two are already neighbors).

A renewed focus on Hulu’s ad business

Hulu’s problem has long been that its corporate owners haven’t been able to agree on its future. News Corp. wants the company to focus on its subscription business, while Disney tends to favor ad-supported videos. Comcast has been a kind of third wheel and can’t exert any influence on Hulu due to merger conditions imposed when the company bought NBC Universal.

Of the companies bidding for Hulu, at least two would clearly follow News Corp’s lead: DirecTV and Time Warner Cable are both more interested in subscription revenue than in free videos that would compete with their pay TV offerings. Both companies might even turn Hulu into a kind of TV Everywhere portal and tie all access to a pay TV subscription, which would more or less spell the end of Hulu as we know it.

Yahoo, on the other hand, wants Hulu for its advertising business. CEO Marissa Mayer made as much clear when she tried to buy French video startup Dailymotion earlier this year with the goal of adding more opportunities to sell high-CPM video ads. Hulu and its content (even if some of that were no longer available through the service after an acquisition) would be a better match for brand advertisers trying to reach their target audience than Dailymotion’s mish-mash of user-generated content and semi-adult fare.

And what’s in it for Hulu? An owner that doubles down on ads could help the company refocus and regain some of the viewers it lost, as well as more aggressively roll out free offerings on platforms that have largely been for-pay only. Why not introduce a free tier for TVs and connected devices, for example?

More support for its international ambitions

Another area where Hulu has been held back is its expansion into international markets. Hulu launched a Japanese offshoot two years ago, and the company has been looking to expand to Europe for some years as well, but its owners wanted to focus on its domestic business instead.

Yahoo knows that there is money overseas — the company makes about 25 percent of its ad revenue outside of the U.S., and its investments in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan have paid off handsomely in recent months.

What’s more, by concentrating on international expansion, Yahoo could deal with one possible downside of acquiring Hulu: It’s likely that after an acquisition, Hulu’s U.S. offering would have less content, or at least less exclusive content going forward. International, on the other hand, is still wide open for content licensing, and a growing number of startups has shown that content arbitrage makes a lot of sense for online video services.

A bigger commitment to original content

Speaking of content: Yahoo is one of the few bidders that actually has any experience producing original content for an online audience. The internet giant has attracted some serious star power for its content efforts, and just recently launched new shows with the help of John Stamos, Ed Helms and Morgan Spurlock. Combine that with Hulu’s original content and reach, and you might just land a few hits.

Granted, that all still might not make up for Hulu possibly losing access to some popular broadcast shows. But a Yahoo-owned Hulu could reinvent itself as a more online-focused player, situated somewhere between its traditional TV catch-up offering and the more professional output on YouTube, to become a real force in online video — and not just an experiment with TV content that’s forever at the mercy of traditional programmers.

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Roku has raised an additional $60 million in funding, and the company is now looking to take the jump from its companion boxes straight into the heart of the TV by providing consumer electronics makers with yet another choice for a smart TV platform. The funding round, which was first reported by AllThingsD, is led by new investor Fidelity. Hearst Corp. joins as a new investor, and existing investors BSkyB and News Corp. are back for more as well.

Developing story, check back for more.

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Online video isn’t just growing fast, it’s growing faster than any other type of consumer service offering – and soon it’s going to be even more popular than Facebook, Twitter and Co, according to Cisco’s new Visual Networking Index forecast.

The newest edition of Cisco’s data-heavy report on how we all spend our time and bandwidth points to social networking as the world’s most popular type of consumer service, with 1.2 billion users worldwide tweeting, Facebooking and more around the world in 2012. That’s 66 percent of residential internet users, if you need to know. Cisco estimates that this number will grow to 1.73 billion users by 2017, which will then represent around 70 percent of the also-growing internet population.

Online video services on the other hand had just around 1 billion users worldwide in 2012, according to Cisco. The company estimates that this number will almost double by 2017, reaching close to 2 billion users worldwide. That means that in four years, 81 percent of the world’s internet users will also use online video services. In 2012, that number was still at around 58 percent.

All of those video streams will also have a major impact on bandwidth consumption: Cisco estimates that we are going to see 1.4 zettabytes of global end-user IP traffic in 2017. And here’s the kicker: That’s more IP traffic than the internet has seen in the last 18 years together. Here are a few more of Cisco’s observations and estimates with regards to online video:

• Online video will account for 69 percent of consumer internet traffic by 2017 (up from 57 percent in 2012).
• Mobile video will grow 16-fold from 2012 to 2017, and account for 66 percent of all mobile data traffic during that year.
• Internet-to-TV streaming will grow from 1.3 exabytes per month in 2012 to 6.5 exabytes per month in 2017.
• The number of web-enabled TVs in consumer’s homes will grow from close to 180 million in 2012 to 827 million in 2017.
• Game consoles will become slightly less important as a way to bring internet video to the TV screen, while dedicated streaming boxes will see the biggest growth:

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Angela Waye.

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Palo Alto, California-based TuneIn has raised a new $25 million round of funding, and it plans to put that money to good use. TuneIn CEO John Donham told me Tuesday that he intends to spend a big chunk of his new funding on a monetization strategy that could help radio broadcasters finally make money with their programming online, and in turn transform a $30 billion industry.

To help him with that task, Donham has also brought Axel Martinez as the company’s new CFO on board; Martinez previously worked ten years for Google, most recently as Assistant Treasurer, Head of Capital Markets.

TuneIn is offering access to live and on-demand programming from some 70,000 radio stations, and Donham said that the service has seen a huge uptake on usage in recent months: TuneIn users streamed more than one billion hours of programming during the first four months of this year, he told me, and the company is now seeing more than 40 million active users per month. Growth is especially pronounced on mobile devices, where the company now sees the majority of its use.

TuneIn now wants to make money on all those listeners, but Donham said that monetizing radio isn’t as easy as it may seem. In fact, many broadcasters are utterly unprepared.

“Suddenly, a local radio tower can reach a global audience,” said Donham, explaining that it’s easy for a broadcaster in San Francisco to reach a listener in New York these days. Serving that listener with ads that are actually relevant to him is much harder, in part because that San Francisco broadcaster doesn’t have anyone selling ads for him in New York.

Donham didn’t want to go into too many details about the solution his company is working on, but to me, it sounded like a kind of ad exchange that would allow New York broadcasters to not only sell ad inventory for their own stations, but also that broadcasters in San Francisco who happens to have listeners in New York.

So why not offer broadcasters a way to make money with their content through subscriptions instead? “One of the compelling value propositions of radio is that it is free,” Donham told me, adding that he wants to keep it that way: “We want to further the value proposition of radio.”

Including the most recent round, TuneIn has raised a total of $47 million. The new funding was led by Institutional Venture Partners, with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, and General Catalyst Partners joining in on the round.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  C.P.Storm.

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Netflix’s next potential customers may be on the Pirate Bay right now, looking for a copy of the latest season of Arrested Development: Copies of the show went up on various torrent sites just hours after Netflix released all 15 episodes of the fourth season on Saturday night in its entirety. Around 100,000 people have downloaded episodes of the show within the first 24 hours alone, according to TorrentFreak editor Ernesto, who has long tracked downloading stats for popular movies and TV shows.

That number is considerably less than some of the numbers he has seen for new episodes of popular TV shows like Game of Thrones, which saw a million downloaders for its April season premiere in a single day. New episodes for shows like Mad Men, Revolution and Teen Wolf all have seen higher download numbers as well, but it’s worth pointing out that many of these shows aren’t available through legal services until the day after they air on TV, if at all. In the case of Game of Thrones, online viewing is restricted to cable subscribers who pay a premium to access HBO.

Netflix on the other hand is available in 36 million households across the US, Canada, Latin America, the UK and Northern Europe, with no need for a cable subscription at all. CEO Reed Hastings has long claimed that Netflix is winning the fight against piracy with convenience and a low price point, and the lower levels of Arrested Development piracy may be an indicator that he’s right.

However, 100,000 downloaders within a day isn’t too shabby either, and the mere existence of these pirates is an interesting problem for Netflix to have. Traditionally, TV piracy has been fueled in part by international windowing. Viewers would download new episodes of US TV shows months before licensing brought them to TV networks in their home countries.

Some of Netflix’s original content is going to be licensed in similar ways, simply because the company is cooperating with multiple partners who all have their own stake in the distribution chain. For example, Sony Pictures Television has been licensing House of Cards on behalf of the show’s production company Media Rights Capital to broadcasters in Australia, China and elsewhere. But as Netflix gets more and more into the original content game, it only makes sense to also play a more active role and use that kind of content itself to lead its international expansion plans.

Case in point: The Australian consumer advocacy organization Choice recently sent an open letter to the company, asking it to roll out its service in the country as well. It read, in part:

“Currently, Australians are prohibited from accessing the Netflix website. (…) This is frustrating for a number of consumers, however more so for consumers who may be fans of your original series, to which you have exclusive broadcasting rights.”

Asked about the letter, a Netflix spokesperson would only say that the company is “busily expanding” into additional international markets. Netflix has said that it plans to expand to an additional European market during the second half of this year – and I wouldn’t be too surprised for original content to play a significant role in that expansion.

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Twitter’s big play in music started in an unexpected place: Stephen Phillips, product manager for Twitter’s new #music app, revealed at the 13th SF Musictech Summit in San Francisco Tuesday that his team worked above an auto body shop in San Fransico’s Mission district for months, intentionally separated from Twitter’s main offices. “We were actually hidden from Twitter,” Phillips said, adding that most people within Twitter didn’t know about the app until right before its public launch.

However, Twitter didn’t keep the development of the app hidden from everyone. Phillips said that his impromptu office above that body shop in the Mission had some regular visitors: Engineers from Spotify and Rdio were working side-by-side in the small office to integrate their music subscription services with the app. That kind of integration also enables users to share across the boundaries of these otherwise siloed services. “We were the first company to seamlessly move between those services,” he said.

Twitter built its #music app with a small team that came to the company from Wearehunted, an Australia-based startup that was co-founded by Phillips and that had been working on social music sharing around five years. News about Twitter buying We Are Hunted broke in March, and the company launched its #music app for iOS in April.

Phillips seemed very bullish on music subscriptions, arguing that the timing is right for access-based music services: “(This) could be the year that subscriptions go mainstream,” he said, adding that Google’s move towards subscriptions adds further momentum to the trend. Phillips added that Twitter also wanted to work with subscription services to enable users to listen to whole songs, and not just sample snippets.

So why not just launch a dedicated music subscription service for Twitter users? “We want to be a sharing experience,” and not a listening experience, Phillips said.

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Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Don’t ask Netflix subscribers: The video service removed Spongebob Squarepants, Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, Blue’s Clues  and other animated Nickeolodeon fare from its streaming library this week as its licensing agreement with Viacom is expiring. Also gone are shows like iCarly, Teen Mom, Jersey Shore and the Sarah Silverman Show.

Netflix had announced in April that it wasn’t going to renew its broad licensing deal with Viacom. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said at the time that his company was in talks with Viacom to possibly strike separate deals for specific shows. A Netflix spokesperson told us Thursday that the company doesn’t have any news to share on that front.

Netflix’s previous deal with Viacom included titles from Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, VH1, Logo and Spike. In a position paper on the future of his company, Hastings said in April that Netflix was using a whole lot of data to evaluate these kinds of deals before deciding to renew them:

“We might pay, for example, $200,000 for a 4 year exclusive subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) license for a given title. At the time of renewal, we evaluate how much the title has been viewed as well as member rating feedback to determine how much we are willing to pay. How many similar titles we have is also a consideration.”

Netflix doesn’t share any of its ratings with the outside world, but the company has made it clear in the past that kids are a very important audience, which even deserved a dedicated UI to further encourage their viewing. With that in mind, it’s possible that there may be hope for Dora or any of the other more popular kids shows to return to the service sooner or later. Fans of Teen Mom on the other hand may have to look elsewhere.

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Music games on consoles may have fallen on hard times, but they’re alive and well on mobile devices: Smule, the company that brought us apps like I am T-Pain and Ocarina, earned $12.6 million in revenues in 2012. The company told Eliot van Buskirk over at Evolver.fm that it is on track to reach $20 million this year.

Smule also shared some other interesting stats with Evolver: Its apps, which have been downloaded over 100 million times, are now being used by 15 million people a month, which have recorded one one billion individual songs so far.

That’s a lot of auto-tuning, auto-rapping and Glee Karaoke renditions. But it also goes to prove that there is money in music gaming – at least on the smaller screen.

Console games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band were once seen as the saviours of the music industry, and Viacom and Activision snapped up the companies behind both titles to cash in on the craze in 2006. However, the genre couldn’t meet these high expectations. Viacom sold off Rock Band maker Harmonix in 2010, and Activision ended up shutting down Guitar Hero in 2011.

Ironically, Smule’s next move is targeting all those guitar heroes left in the cold: Its new iPhone game is all about playing guitar.

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Shazam released a major update to its iOS app Thursday that turns your iPad into an automated log file for every song you listen to, every TV show you watch and every commercial you’re trying to ignore.

This is possibly due to a new feature dubbed auto tagging: Once turned on, Shazam will automatically listen to everything within reach of the iPad’s microphone, generate an acoustic fingerprint every few seconds and ping Shazam’s servers to look for matches. Identified songs, TV shows and ads are automatically sent to a personal queue within the Shazam app.

Users can then browse through these finds, add songs to their favorites, buy them on iTunes or stream them through Rdio. What’s interesting about this feature is that it also works in the background, while you’re doing something in another app or even when the iPad’s lock screen is enabled. iPad users will know that auto tagging is enabled through the red bar on the top of their screen, just like you’re used to seeing when you’re switching to another app during a Skype call.

That red bar is meant to warn users that their microphone is recording sound — but Shazam EVP of Marketing David Jones wasn’t all that happy about that notion when I talked to him Wednesday about the app update. “We are not recording or storing anything,” he said, adding that the app was “just borrowing the mic.”

Shazam’s new iPad app is one of a growing number of apps and devices that always keep the microphone running in order to react to speech, or in this case music; others include the new Xbox One. It’s a concept that will make some privacy-conscious consumers nervous — but Jones said that there are huge upsides to this approach.

Instead of making users scramble to find and activate the tagging app on the mobile device, auto tagging will let them come back to the music they heard throughout a TV show, or even at the end of a day. To illustrate it, Jones told me that he had his iPad in the car a few days ago, listening to radio program while he was driving. And when he got to work, he had a full queue of recognized songs waiting for him. “My entire commute’s music was sitting there,” he said.

Aside from auto-tagging, Shazam is also adding TV content recognition, social functionality and a mapping feature that shows where people are listening to which songs. Shazam has retired its old, standalone iPad app and is rolling out the update as a universal app, but the iPhone will only get the mapping feature for now.

Jones said that the iPhone is going to get auto-tagging later this summer. It’s unclear yet when Android is going to see auto-tagging, but other features of the new iPad app will find their way to the tablet version of Android within the next two months.

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Netflix wants to take on HBO and Showtime with the production of original stand-up comedy, the company’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos revealed in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter this week.

Sarandos pointed to Bill Burr as one example of a stand-up comedian who has seen huge success on Netflix, to the point where he can now tour in countries where Netflix is operating its streaming service. Producing stand-up comedy is “also a great way to cultivate talent for future scripted projects,” Sarandos added.

Asked about his plans for the next phase of original shows on Netflix, Sarandos said that he wants to target audiences that the company has so far overlooked, including tweens, Sci-fi fans and sitcom viewers. Altogether, Netflix could debut as many as 16 originals in 2013, according to Sarandos.

In 2013, Netflix is going to launch a total of 8 originals, including the much-anticipated return of Arrested Development, which will premier on Netflix this coming Sunday.

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Let me tell you a little secret about the way online journalism works: Most news sites, GigaOM included, have a repertoire of just a few types of stories. There’s the short news story, the long thought piece, and the hands-on review, complete with a video featuring lots of close-ups. Attempts to tell stories in new ways are rare – that’s why I was pretty excited when I first heard about Soo Meta, back when it was still in private alpha last October.

Soo Meta is the latest product of the Budapest-based online video startup Dragontape, which has also developed a video curation app called Dragontape. After months of testing, the company is now ready to unveil Soo Meta as a new platform for online video storytelling.

Here’s how Soo Meta works: The platform offers content producers and curators an easy way to mix videos with still images, text, links, music, polls and even RSS feeds. The results look like video slideshows, and can range from simple annotations to complex remixes. Take a look below for an example:

There are a few things that I find especially intriguing about Soo Meta: Each story doesn’t just consist of a video, but also a Storify-like story line. Users can either click play to watch the video, or scroll down and browse through the quotes, photos and other elements that make up the story.

The other interesting aspect about Soo Meta is how easy it is to gather media for your video stories. There is a bookmarklet that lets you grab images, videos and quotes from any website. Alternatively, users can manually add Urls to the content they want to use, or even upload their own images to the service. These different elements can then be organized on a timeline, mixed together and annotated.

Playing with Soo Meta is definitely fun, but I also found it challenging to actually decide on the stories I wanted to tell. Thinking out of the box ain’t easy. Still, I could see this become a great tool for online journalists who want to use video in novel ways, or even just annotate third-party videos and put them into context. Even a Storify-like approach of curation of third-party quotes could work great. For example, why not mix highlights of Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal with quotes from journalists who covered the event?

I could also see annotated and visualized podcasts being a big use case, but the makers of Soo Meta have another idea in mind: The company is betting that a combination of online video and polls will bring in whole new audiences. Dragontape co-founder and CEO Tamás Szakál told me that the inspiration for this feature came from teachers using the service. “For them its a really cool way to give more engaging assignments to students,” Szakál said.

He added that it would also be great for bloggers to engage with their audience, and get measurable feedback through analytics. For this, Szakál argued, people will pay. Soo Meta’s freemium model offers advanced polling features and analytics for a monthly fee. Paying users will also get an option to edit stories collaboratively, and share them privately within groups or companies.

So what’s next for Soo Meta? Szakál said that his team of three wants to improve the mobile experience, and strike partnerships to integrate the platform with tools and sites for educators and others. A WordPress plugin is already available, and a full-blown mobile editor is already in the pipeline as well.

An integration into smart TVs is also a possibility. But for now, the company wants to concentrate on perfecting the tools for creators to get people to use it – and hopefully inspire new types of stories. “The goal is of course to make Soo Meta the platform for digital storytelling that makes it a lot easier and faster for teachers, bloggers and journalists to create more engaging experiences,” said Szakál.

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Microsoft’s new Xbox One has many new features, but one in particular raised some eyebrows Tuesday: The new game console will always be on, and users will be able to launch games, live TV or even a Skype call with simple voice commands, and without ever picking up a controller or remote control. Does that mean, as the Verge mused, that Microsoft will always be listening to each and every word spoken in your living room?

The answer is yes, no, and better get used to it. Microsoft hasn’t actually said how many aspects of the Xbox One are going to work, but the demo it gave at its campus in Redmond, Wash. Tuesday contained some solid hints on the particulars of its voice control. To wake up the device and launch live TV, play a game or do anything at all with it, users will first have to say “Xbox on.”

That’s what people who work on speech recognition call “hot words” – easily recognizable phrases that can be detected by a system without too much effort. Once a user says that magic word or phrase, the actual speech recognition kicks into high gear.

That means that the Xbox One continuously listens for someone to say “Xbox on,” and that everything else that’s spoken is automatically disregarded. Listening for these hot words is done locally and doesn’t require much in terms of system resources. For example, there’s no need to record anything, since all that matters are the hot words. But once those words are uttered, the Xbox One is going to use advanced speech recognition to figure out what users are actually talking about.

Again, Microsoft hasn’t said exactly how this is going to work, but a spokesperson told me that some of the personalization offered by the device is “one of the benefits of Xbox One being connected to and powered by the cloud.” I’d expect that the same is true for speech recognition, much in the same way that Google uploads everything you say to its servers when you use voice search on your Android phone.

 

The use of hot wording to wake up technology from a state of low-level listening to launch active speech recognition isn’t new. It’s also at work in Google Glass, where users get the device’s attention by saying “okay glass.” Google Now simply uses “Google” as a hot word to launch voice input. And the Xbox 360 starts to accept voice commands once users yell “Xbox” at the device’s Kinect sensor.

The difference between how the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One approach voice recognition isn’t so much about technology, even though Xbox users probably hope that the new iteration is going to work better. What makes people feel uncomfortable is that the Xbox One, and with it its microphone, are meant to be always on.

However, the always-on microphone of the Xbox One is just a sign of things to come. Voice input is going to become a key component of a growing number of internet-connected devices and appliances in your home, car and office, and many of them will use hot words to switch from low-level listening to active speech recognition.

In fact, you are likely looking at one of those devices right now: Laptops, tablets and mobile phones all contain microphones, and they’re all waiting to become hot words-aware any day now. Google just demonstrated how it is going to add hot wording to search on the desktop at last week’s Google I/O conference, allowing users to start a voice search query by simply saying “okay Google” without touching a single button.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that there are no privacy issues around hot wording and always-on microphones. Companies should make it clear how exactly they’re using the technology as it is becoming more widely distributed, and there should always be a way to opt out and rely on alternative input methods. It may also be a good idea to indicate to users  when exactly a device is reverting back from active speech recognition to a state of passive listening. But I’d expect that most consumers quickly get used to the constantly running mic, always listening for those magic words.

Image courtesy of Flickr user visual.dichotomy.

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Microsoft announced its new Xbox called Xbox One at a press event in Redmond, Wash. Tuesday that puts a heavy emphasis on TV and living room entertainment with a heavy focus on live TV. Don Mattrick, President of Interactive Entertainment at Microsoft, called the new device an “all in one home entertainment system.”

The new device will offer direct access to live TV, which users can start with a simple voice command. The console can switch between games, music, live TV and apps through voice commands as well as through new, universal gestures. For example, to leave a full-screen live TV experience users kind of grab with both hands in thin air and then pull these hands together.

There is also a so-called snap mode will overlay an app over live TV to allow side-by-side multitasking. One of the apps taking advantage of this is Microsoft’s Skype, which will offer group video calls on the TV – something that isn’t possible with any other TV-based Skype integration, according to Yusuf Mehdi, SVP of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. Users can watch a movie and launch a Skype call while the movie continues.

Hardware-wise, the new device didn’t offer that many surprises: The Xbox One utilizes 8 GB RAM and an x86 processor. It comes with a Blu-ray drive, and uses WiFi Direct and USB 3 as well as a completely redesigned Kinect sensor device. That’s in line with earlier leaks, which had already pointed to the two HDMI ports, as well as Microsoft using a more PC-like architecture, with an AMD x86-processor powering the device.

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Microsoft is scheduled to take the wraps off its next Xbox at an event in Redmond, Wash. Tuesday, and the reveal of the new device is likely to not just get gaming fans excited: Game consoles have become the most popular devices to consume Netflix and other forms of online video in the living room, and Microsoft is expected to double down on TV viewing with the new device.

Of course, Microsoft has kept mum on what it is going to announce, but there have been a few leaks and reports that give us a good idea on what the new Xbox is going to offer:

A switch to PC hardware and Windows 8

The next Xbox is going to be based on an x86 processor likely made by AMD (for the specs lovers: there have been reports of an 8-core processor running at 1.6GHz CPU with 4MB of L2 cache), and a pretty powerful GPU to make those next-generation games look good. The device is also supposed to run a special version of Windows 8.

Why that matters: Moving away from ARM and closer to the hardware and software of an ordinary desktop PC should make it easier to develop apps for the platform, which could bring even more entertainment services to the platform. There’s also talk that the next Xbox will allow multitasking, which means you might be able to run Skype while you watch a video on Netflix, or watch TV while you do some casual gaming.

A Blu-ray drive

There have been a number of reports claiming that the next Xbox will come with an integrated Blu-ray player. Microsoft didn’t add a Blu-ray drive to its Xbox 360 game console, and instead opted to offer users the option to buy a drive for the competing HD DVD standard – only to pull out of HD DVD when it became obvious that the format had no chance against Blu-ray.

Why this matters: Blu-ray is a nice add-on for Xbox users who want HD movies without having to deal with yet another box in their living room. But it’s also an admission that physical media will still be around for some time, especially considering that high-quality movie downloads and bandwidth caps don’t mix all that well.

Live TV, courtesy of your cable box

Leaks of key documents about the next Xbox’s hardware have shown that the device will come with two HDMI ports: One to connect the Xbox to your TV, and one to connect your cable box to the Xbox. That’s the same setup used by Google TV and the latest Slingbox, and it allows Microsoft to access your live TV programming and overlay it with its own programming guide, widgets and apps.

Why this matters: Microsoft wants users to always consume TV through the Xbox — even if the actual TV programming comes from traditional cable, and not an Xbox Live app. This shows how important TV has become for the Xbox, but the somewhat cumbersome setup also goes to show how complicated it is for even someone like Microsoft to get access to the content that matters most to consumers.

No little sibling

Last year, rumors surfaced that Microsoft was going to offer two separate Xboxes: A full-blown game console, and a lighter and cheaper device that would focus on video and TV viewing and only offer casual gaming. It now looks like we won’t see that Xbox mini any time soon.

Why this matters: A cheap, and lightweight companion device like the Roku or the Apple TV could be a good way for Microsoft to address new audiences. But getting these devices right is challenging, which is one of the reasons why the existing Xbox 360 and PS3 have been so much more popular than any of the streaming boxes.

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Pay TV had a really bad first quarter this year, with cable companies losing an estimated 263,735 subscribers from New Year’s Day to the end of March, according to the Leichtman Research Group. Satellite TV providers and phone companies with a TV business gained some subscribers during the same time period, but fewer than in previous first quarters, and one of the culprits seems to be cord cutting.

A bad first quarter is notable for the industry because that’s when it is usually the strongest. The industry added an estimated 445,000 subscribers in Q1 of 2012, and 470,000 in Q1 of 2011. But even with additions from satellite and phone companies, this year’s first quarter was only up around 194,000 – not enough to make up for previous-quarter losses.

From April 2012 to March 2013, the industry lost a total of 80,000 subscribers, according to Leichtman Research. That’s the first time the research company has ever seen subscriber losses over a 12-month-period, leading president Bruce Leichtman to this assessment:

“First-time ever annual industry-wide losses reflect a combination of a saturated market, an increased focus from providers on acquiring higher-value subscribers, and some consumers opting for a lower-cost mixture of over-the-air TV, Netflix and other over-the-top viewing options.”

That’s quite a statement, especially considering that Leichtman has been an outspoken skeptic of the cord cutting phenomenon. In a 2010 New York Times story, he famously called cord cutters “really just a bizarre breed of people, usually in New York or San Francisco, who don’t watch a lot of television in the first place.”

Three years later, he rightfully cautioned that the numbers don’t necessarily point to a “more dramatic near-term market decline,” even though we can expect further losses in Q2. But there’s reason to be nervous, and a closer look at Leichtman’s numbers shows why:

Cable has been bleeding for years, and it’s no surprise to see this continue – even though many had expected a stronger showing for Comcast and Co. But really concerning is the slowing growth in the satellite TV segment, which is where price-conscious consumers have been fleeing to in previous years.

DirecTV added 184,000 subscribers in Q1 of 2011, and 81,000 in Q1 of 2012. This year, it only gained 21,000 new subscribers in the same time frame. Things didn’t look better for DISH, which dropped from 104,000 subscribers in Q1 of 2012 to 36,000 in Q1 of 2013.

That’s a sign that people aren’t just looking for a cheaper pay TV option anymore, but actually want to get rid of the traditional pay TV bundle altogether.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Jason Rosenberg.

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San Francisco-based Dijit launched the web version of it’s NextGuide app Monday, and after playing with it for a while, I have to say the company may be onto something here.

Dijit launched an iPad version of NextGuide last summer, aiming to reinvent the traditional TV guide with universal search for movies and TV content across live TV and iPad apps from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and others. Users of the app can also define searches for very specific interests and get recommendations for any content related to their hobby or their hometown.

It all makes sense – but I just don’t find myself frequenting the iPad app very much. Maybe it’s the fact that I just don’t feel like I don’t have enough choices for things to watch. Maybe it’s due to my binge viewing habits: while I’m burning through a new show (mind you, burning a very relative term if you have a job and a family), I  don’t look for much else, and don’t need to know what’s on. Or maybe it’s just that the app is a bit too complicated for its own good.

But there’s something about NextGuide’s new web app sibling that is very intriguing. For one thing, it is a lot simpler than the iPad app, and it feels less like you have to turn thousand nobs before you get good results.

But the app also feels a lot more social, thanks to its Facebook integration: Users can easily browse the movies and TV shows any of their Facebook friends have liked on the social network, no matter whether these contacts are using NextGuide or not. The results are displayed in a Pinterest-like fashion, inviting you to aimlessly browse around and check out what your friends like to watch.

Once you find something that catches your interest, you’re able to see which services it is playing on, add it to your own Watchlist or subscribe to email alerts to be notified when new episodes are available online, or on the air. Essentially, it turns your friends’ Facebook likes into your TV guide, and that’s pretty cool. Oh, and you can also compile a list of your own favorites to display to the world.

Pre-populating a video discovery service with data from Facebook certainly isn’t new – but there’s something about this kind of Pinterest-like approach that just invites browsing. And TV fans will appreciate that their friends’ likes, which are otherwise scattered on Facebook, are all brought together in one place.

Sure, there’s still room to improve NextGuide on the web. Recommending the right resources to play content is one of those things. For example, for a show like the Daily Show, it only recommends Hulu, Amazon and iTunes, even though full episodes are also available on the show’s website.

But even with those shortcomings, I have to say that I enjoyed playing with the website, and I can see myself coming back to it much more often than to the app.

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Redbox Instant by Verizon is going to bring its streaming service to Google TV devices soon: The company demonstrated a prototype of its app at Google I/O Friday, and a representative told me that the app will launch in earnest within the next few weeks. After that, the company is going to launch a channel on Roku media streamers.

Check out a photo of the app UI below:

Redbox Instant by Verizon’s prototype app was on display on an LG Google TV that ran the next version of Google TV that is based on Android 4.2.2 aka Jelly Bean. That version will come to Google TV devices in the third quarter of this year, but I was told that the Redbox Instant app will be available before that, and that is going to work just fine with the current version of Google TV. However, the service won’t be available on Google TV devices using an Intel processor, which means that owners of the Logitech Revue and other first-generation devices won’t be able to use it.

Redbox Instant first launched on select Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players as well as PCs and mobile devices in March. The joint-venture between Redbox and Verizon has since added support for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 as well as select LG Smart TVs. I was told by a representative Friday that the company is looking to add support for Roku players soon after rolling out the Google TV app.

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YouTube announced this week that it is going to roll out its new channel design to all of its publishers at the beginning of June. All channels that still use the previous design will automatically be converted on June 5 — but the new channels are just the first step towards a bigger goal of unifying YouTube’s design across all platforms.

YouTube Senior UX Designer Josh Sassoon and his colleague Tom Broxton, who leads the Monetization UX team at YouTube, gave a sneak peek at the multi-screen design principles that will guide YouTube’s future looks during a session at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thursday. The big theme was eerily familiar to anyone following our I/O coverage this week: YouTube wants to unify its experience across all screens, the duo explained, while paying attention to the specific use cases for each and every screen.

The duo showed off some design concepts during their presentation, with some featuring the same kind of tile-based design that has been dominating Google’s mobile design language lately brought to the desktop, and at least one playing with the same kind of multi-column design that Google just launched with Google+ for a possible redesign of YouTube’s homepage.

Many of these things were just presented as examples of the design process, which is very data-driven and based on both A/B testing and traditional user research. Fun fact: YouTube has been passing out paper assignment booklets to select users, asking them to track when in the day they’re accessing the site and with which devices.

However, Sassoon and Broxton also shared a few slides of what they called sneak peeks — not necessarily final versions of what YouTube will look like, but definitely explorations that hint at where things are going:

Worth noting in this shot is that YouTube is trying to unify the subscribe button across platforms — which makes a lot of sense, given how much of a focus the site has put on channels.

Also, take a look at how gorgeous this TV UI looks. And once again, there’s a theme of unification across its desktop, tablet, Android, iPhone and ultimately TV platforms.

As for the current redesign: YouTube first introduced the newly designed channel page, dubbed One Channel, in February, and the site said that it has seen a 20 percent growth in page views on participating channels. All in all, more than 100 million channels have already opted in to the new design, according to a post on the YouTube Creators blog.

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WebRTC, the new technology that enables plugin-free voice and video chat within the browser, should be available on more than one billion unique endpoints (think: desktop browsers and mobile devices) “within a week,” according to Google’s WebRTC engineering lead Justin Uberti, who gave an update on WebRTC’s progress at Google I/O Friday.

WebRTC is going to reach that milestone thanks in part to Firefox 22, which was just released this week. The new version of Firefox comes with WebRTC enabled in its beta version, which should add a large number of users to the addressable market for WebRTC developers.

Uberti also said that WebRTC is going to come to iOS devices soon: Apple hasn’t joined the efforts to implement and standardize WebRTC yet, but Google wants to nonetheless give developers a way to address users on iPads and iPhones through the release of a native toolkit.

Of course, there is another holdout: Microsoft has been pushing forward with its own version of WebRTC, which some have seen as an effort to torpedo the standard. Uberti had a much more optimistic take on the differences Friday, saying that Microsoft has been “a great participant in the standards.” He added: “I’m very optimistic that we are going to see a version of (Internet Explorer) that supports this technology in the not-too distant future.”

Image courtesy of Flickr user  Tsahi Levent-Levi.

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