Author: Janko Roettgers

Here’s the latest chapter in the broadcaster’s fight against Aereo, the New York-based startup that is streaming over-the-air television over the internet: Fox, Univision, PBS and others are trying to figure out what exactly the company has been discussing in its talks with Dish Networks, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal last week. The broadcasters subpoenaed Aereo as part of the discovery process for their lawsuit against the company, according to a Hollywood Reporter story from yesterday.

The motion seeks to uncover “any ‘actual, contemplated, considered, or proposed’ business arrangements” between Aereo and Dish as well as “offers or expressions of interest by Dish in acquiring Aereo’s assets,” according to passages quoted by the Reporter. Of course, Dish doesn’t want any of those discussions to be public, which is why the company is now trying to quash the subpoena.

Dish’s Charlie Ergen has been very vocal in his support for new TV business and distribution models, going as far as saying that “a lot of customers can live with Netflix and an… antenna, and YouTube.” Dish could possibly use Aereo to build a cheaper TV bundle by bypassing retransmission payments to local broadcasters — or maybe just lower these payments by threatening such a course.

Make sure to check out our paidContent Live conference in New York this month if you want to learn more about Aereo’s potential to shake up the TV industry – I’ll be interviewing Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia on stage, and will make sure to quizz him about Dish as well.

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Intel’s plan to enter the media biz is looking more ambitious by the day: The company applied for a series of trademarks last week that seem to be related to the TV service it is going to launch out of its Intel Media unit. Intel filed three applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for trademarks on “Intel inside & out,” and the services described in these filings all fit Intel’s plans for its TV venture.

And while looking into these filings, I also stumbled across a seemingly related filing made a few months ago in secrecy that hints at possible branding strategies, and further highlights the ambitious scope of Intel’s TV plans.

Intel goes all out for its media service

Intel filed for three trademarks for Intel inside & out at the end of March in an attempt to secure the rights for both the phrase as well as two logo renditions. The applications cover a broad and somewhat random description of devices, including everything from set-top boxes to personal digital assistants, video cameras and media players. However, the description of associated services is a little more telling, and includes “providing text, data, image, audio, video, gaming and multimedia content for a fee or pre-paid subscription.” Also covered are:

“On demand transmission and services of data, audio, video, gaming and multimedia content; broadcasting services; teleconferencing; electronic transmission and streaming of movies, music, video, gaming and multimedia content;”

And it gets even more detailed:

“Entertainment Services; providing a database featuring audio, videos, television programs, motion pictures, games, current events and entertainment news, sports, games, cultural events, social, and entertainment-related programs; electronic games services provided by means of the internet;”

All of these items seem to describe Intel’s plans for its TV service pretty well. The company has been mum on some key details, but Intel Media boss Eric Huggers said in February that he wants to launch a full-blown TV subscription service that competes with cable, offering live broadcast feeds, on-demand content and an iPlayer-like TV catch-up service.

Oh, and the company will also make its own device, which it intends to sell through retail partners as well as on its own website, which is why the trademark application also includes a mention of “online retail of consumer electronic equipment and devices.”

But wait, there’s more

The Intel inside & out trademark applications were filed by Katherine M. Basile, an attorney with Novak Druce & Quipp LLP, a Cupertino-based law firm that has been doing these kinds of applications for Intel for a number of years now. Centrino, Atom and the original Intel Inside were all registered as trademarks by Basile.

But when I looked at her past filings, I stumbled across something curious: Back in September, she filed a trademark for Arlo, which features a description virtually identical to the one that’s part of the Intel inside and out application. Whole paragraphs seem to have been copied and pasted, including key descriptions like the one defining “broadcasting services; teleconferencing; electronic transmission and streaming of movies, music, video, gaming and multimedia content.”

However, Arlo wasn’t filed for Intel, but for an entity called 12307 Company LLC. That company was incorporated in Delaware in 2007, but it never applied for any other trademarks than Arlo. A quick check with the Delaware Department of State showed that its business address is in the famous Corporation Trust Center in Wilmington, Delaware, where it shares a mailbox with some 200,000 other companies. It’s a shell company, meant to hide the involvement of another entity.

So what does all of this mean?

Before we jump to conclusions about these trademarks, it’s worth remembering that companies don’t always act on their trademark filings. It’s possible that Intel filed for an inside & out trademark, and used 12307 Company to secure the trademark for Arlo, but won’t actually use either of them once it unveils its TV service. It’s possible, but somewhat unlikely, that Intel and 12307 Company don’t have any connection at all, and just filed virtually identical trademark applications through the same lawyer by accident. (Yeah, I don’t buy that one either.)

And of course, it is also possible that we are going to see an Arlo-branded TV service, powered by Intel inside & out, emerge later this year. An Intel Media spokesperson declined to comment on Intel inside and out as well as Arlo, instead sending me the following statement:

“We haven’t shared any info on the brand beyond confirming that we will introduce a new and unique brand when our product comes to market later this year.”

However, the bigger point here is that Intel isn’t just content with building a service that streams cable channels to your TV. Huggers told me during an interview in February that he wants to target all screens, and that this is part of a bigger plan to transform Intel. Turn the chip maker into a company that delivers and monetizes services running on those chips.

TV is only one piece of that puzzle, and your TV set is only one of many screens. Some of the other offerings mentioned in the filings, like video gaming and teleconferencing or even the notion of a multiscreen cloud media platform, are the logical next steps. Intel seems to be getting ready to embark on this journey, and in the process reinvent itself — inside and out.

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Vdio, the premium video service founded by Skype co-founder Janus Friis, emerged from private beta Tuesday night with an offering that looks more like Vudu or iTunes than Netflix. The service offers users streaming access to major Hollywood movies and TV shows from all of the major studios, with titles either being available for rent or purchase.

Vdio is at least for now limited to paying subscribers of Rdio, the music subscription service that Friis launched in 2010, and both services are closely joined at the hip.

Vdio: Like Rdio, except pay-per-view

Vdio looks a lot like Rdio, but the similarities aren’t just ending with the design. Vdio requires a Rdio account to log in, and the site also uses the same take on social discovery to surface content. Rdio is known for letting users follow other users whose taste in music they share, and the same users one follows in Rdio also show up in Vdio. The service also displays which of its users have watched a certain movie or TV show, much in the same way that Rdio displays music consumption.

Vdio currently offers movies from most of the major players in Hollywood, including Disney, Fox, Warner Bros. and Universal Studios. The catalog It also seems to have all the big TV networks on board, allowing it to carry shows from NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox as well as Comedy Central, Showtime, the BCC and others. Notably absent is still HBO content, meaning that you won’t find any episodes of Game of Thrones on Vdio. Competitors like Amazon carry episodes from past seasons, while HBO keeps current-season episodes exclusive to its own HBO Go service. Rdio’s VP of Product Malthe Sigurdsson told me Wednesday that the company is hoping to bring HBO on board soon, and that Vdio’s catalog currently consists of “several thousand movies and tens of thoudsands of TV episodes.”

Vdio is currently only available to paying Rdio subscribers in the U.K. and the U.S., but the site’s help section hints at a wider roll-out some time in the future. It also seems like Vdio is going to use Rdio as a promotional vehicle for its service: For its launch, the site is giving Rdio subscribers a $25 credit.

Videos from Vdio can be streamed with a web browser as well as an iPad app, which comes with a curious work-around: The app doesn’t actually allow users to rent or purchase content, presumably to avoid Apple taking a cut for in-app purchases. Instead, it only lets users play content they’re previously purchased on the web.

There is no word yet on apps for connected devices, but one should expect that the service will eventually arrive on the usual platforms as well. Rdio’s music service is currently available on Roku as well as a variety of mobile devices.

The story of Vdio: It’s been a long time coming

The official launch of the service ends a period of secrecy that surrounded Vdio ever since work on the service began in 2009. The company began its operations in stealth mode under the code name Project WBS, and Friis hired an expert team of online video veterans, many of which had been working with him on the failed P2P video service Joost.

GigaOM broke the story of Vdio’s existence in late 2011, and in an official confirmation of our story, the company said that it was in private beta testing in the U.K. It didn’t reveal any further details about its business model, but compared itself to Netflix and Lovefilm, hinting at a subscription offering – something that made a lot of sense, given that Rdio is also a subscription business.

I learned in the following months that Vdio was considering to combine a subscription plan with VOD credits, much in the same way Redbox Instant is now offering its subscribers a subscription tier with coupons for DVD rental. But that kind of offering never launched, and Vdio went through a bit of a rough patch. A big part of its team, including its CTO Justin Erenkrantz, Creative Director Priidu Zilmer  SVP of Engineering Sander Striker, were let go.

The remaining staff merged with Rdio, and the company moved key staffers like SVP of Operations Scott Barrow from Los Angeles to the Bay Area to rebuild Vdio from scratch on top of Rdio’s platform. Vdio restarted private beta testing in the U.K. and the U.S. in November, already hinting at a transactional VOD model as well as close ties to Rdio.

Why no subscriptions?

Numerous Rdio users stumbled upon Vdio late Tuesday and early Wednesday, and a question often asked on Twitter was: why doesn’t the service offer any subscriptions? The answer may have to do with the economics behind the subscription business, as well as the huge headstart Netflix already has. Building up a subscription catalog is tough, especially when companies like Netflix and Amazon tie down many titles exclusively, and begin to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into their own productions.

Sigurdsson told me that timing also played a role: The company wanted to launch what it felt was a compelling offer now. However, he told me that some kind of subscription component could still be part of a future offering:

“That is something we would love to do.”

This is a developing story, more to come soon.

Check out the image gallery below for a closer look at Vdio:

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Rovio’s Angry Birds games have been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times, and are played by more than 263 million active users per month. The company is now targeting those hundreds of millions of players with a weekly animated show called Angry Birds Toons, which launched in mid-March.

Rovio has been calling these efforts “one of the world’s biggest video networks,” and Brightcove’s Executive Chairman Jeremy Allaire, whose company is powering Rovio’s video streaming, told me Tuesday that he sees this as an inflection point for video franchises. But what do the famous birds and their disdain for pigs really mean for the future of television?

These birds are up to something

First of all, Rovio’s move into the world of original video programming is pretty ingenious. The company established an audience with its games, and now offers its ad-supported video series through the very same apps — no additional installs needed. “They clearly are in a really powerful position,” said Allaire.

Essentially, the company is using its games as very effective trojan horses, in turn demonstrating how iPads, Android tablets and mobile phones have become an important piece of of the puzzle when you’re in the entertainment business. It also shows how much they’re starting to change the game for the TV industry.

Netflix started its streaming efforts on PCs, but most of its streaming is nowadays happening on connected devices. Game consoles like Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are seeing the lion’s share of use, but devices like Apple TV are growing quickly as well. Netflix owes these devices its success. Without ways to get its content on the TV screen, the company would have never been in a position where it could spend $100 million on a show like House of Cards.

Rovio, on the other hand, is primarily a mobile company. Mobile devices are where people are playing Angry Birds, and it will be where they’re going to watch their weekly episodes of Angry Birds Toons. If the show turns out to be a success (and that’s still a big if) it could turn out to be the first big original programming success story for mobile devices.

And that could have an impact on the industry beyond birds and pigs, by signaling the industry that it doesn’t have to rely on traditional distribution mechanisms anymore. “You can establish a new programming franchise over the internet” thanks to mobile and connected devices, argued Allaire in our conversation.

When pigs fly

However, the flip side of this is that Angry Birds Toons also raises the bar for content companies to stand out and actually reach the consumer. It’s hard to compete with 263 million monthly active users. Heck, it’s hard to compete at all in a sea of millions of apps if all you have to offer is yet another show.

“In some sense, the business model hasn’t changed at all,” admitted Allaire. You still need to have highly compelling content, you still need to market that content effectively — and doing both  effectively is likely going to cost you a lot of money. And if you’re in mobile, you’re going to also need a really good app.

Birghtcove learned that lesson the hard way over the last couple of months when it failed to establish its app cloud offering, which was meant to provide publishers with an easy way to deploy HTML5-based apps with a native wrapper across a variety of platforms.

Turns out that publishers actually prefer to have true native apps that take advantage of each platform’s strengths and features, which is why Brightcove discontinued app cloud in February. “If you want a premium video experience, you got to put your best foot forward,” acknowledged Allaire when I quizzed him about its app cloud.

The bottom line is that Rovio may demonstrate new ways to enter the game — but that doesn’t mean that the rules have changed. To find large audiences, you still need to be big yourself or partner with a bigger platform.

That’s good news for Rovio and companies like Netflix and YouTube – but not necessarily for a startup looking to change the future of television.

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Warner Bros. opened up its Warner Archive Instant service to the public this week, giving fans of vintage titles of the studio unlimited streaming access to movies and TV shows for $10 a month (hat tip to Engadget). It’s an interesting experiment, but the offering in its current form will appeal only to a few hardcore fans: to the casual viewer, Warner Archive Instant feels like a B-movie version Netflix, without any of the new stuff.

Movies currently available for streaming include titles like the Mummy (the 1959 version), Tarzan and the Mermaids and Cat People. TV shows offered include 77 Sunset Strip, Gilligan’s Island and the Adventures of Superman from 1952.

One should mention that this isn’t a big gamble by Warner Bros. on online distribution, but just another way for the studio’s archive operations to get its titles out. And there certainly is a community for this kind of stuff, which previously was mostly available on DVD. Still, one has to wonder whether there could be a bigger audience for these titles on existing subscription services, and whether reinventing Netflix with such a small catalog and specialized is really a good idea.

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Netflix posted a few job offers that hint at further international expansion in late March, including one for “experienced linguists with the ability to translate and customize marketing, UI and content materials for the target market.” The job posting goes on to say:

“We are looking for highly motivated individuals with the right mix of technical, organizational and communication skills to provide localization for the Netflix experience in the following languages: Turkish, Dutch, Hindi, French, and Korean.”

The company is also looking for an engineer to be the internationalization and localization evangelist at the company, further highlighting how important international markets are for Netflix.

Netflix has occasionally looked to hire employees to help with its internationalization efforts in the past, and job postings frequently contain countries that the company may not consider at all, just to make things less transparent for competitors. For example, in late 2011, a job offer listed “Turkish, Dutch, Russian, French, Hindi, German, Italian, Danish, Korean, Finnish, Japanese, and Spanish” as languages of interest.

Needless to say, Netflix hasn’t launched in Russia just yet. However, nine months after that job posting, the company announced plans to open shop in Northern Europe – including Finland and Denmark.

It’s very likely that South Korea, India and European countries such as the Netherlands, France and Belgium are at least under consideration as potential targets for further international expansion. Turkey seems less likely, but it’s certainly possible – the country has a thriving TV and movie industry, and it has seen an economic boom even as other parts of Europe have struggled.

Netflix is currently operating in over 40 countries, including the U.K. and Ireland, the Nordics, Latin America and Canada. It might take some time until we find out where Netflix will go next: executives said earlier this year that the company won’t embark on any further international expansions until late 2013 or early 2014. However, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells also made it clear that they definitely want to expand further, writing in their letter to shareholders:

“Our launch in the Nordics was very successful, confirming our belief in the large international opportunity for our service.”

Map courtesy of Flickr user kcp4911.

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ATHF fans, take notice: Netflix added a number of shows from Adult Swim and Cartoon Network to its catalog this past weekend, including the first seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Robot Chicken and the Venture Bros. Newly added titles also include Cartoon Network hits like Ben 10 and Justice League Unlimited.

The catalog additions are part of a number of deals Netflix struck in January with Warner Bros. and Turner, which will also bring TV shows like the remake of Dallas, Fringe and the Following to the service.

It further underscores how important TV has become to Netflix, where subscribers often binge on entire past seasons of their favorite shows. And Adult Swim’s edgier fare should bode well with the same crowd that will flock to Netflix once the company brings the cult classic Arrested Development back to life in May.

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YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley piggybacked on YouTube’s April Fool’s Day Monday by using it to tease a new site called MixBit as a possible replacement. Of course, one has to take this announcement with a grain of salt, given the date, but it looks as if this is going to be the collaborative video site Hurley briefly mentioned at SXSW.

MixBit currently only hosts a placeholder site, which reads:

“YouTube is shutting down. Instead of sitting around, we thought you’d want a new site to not only watch cat videos, but create them… together!”

The site further promises that the “future of video is launching soon.” The Verge, which spotted Hurley’s tweet about MixBit first, also found a (now-disabled) test pages including one featuring a “looping mp4 video featuring YouTube co-founders Hurley and Steve Chen.”

MixBit is being developed by Avos, the startup co-founded by Hurley and Chen that also bought Delicious.com in 2011. Recently, GigaOM spotted a still-unannounced Delicious offspring called D.me built by Avos.

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You don’t need a cable subscription to watch ABC, CBS or NBC – but don’t expect to learn about alternatives if you’re a Charter customer. Over-the-air antenna maker Antennas Direct recently wanted to buy some air time on Charter‘s cable channels to explain how TV viewers can access these channels without a pay TV subscription.

“We thought it was a fairly benign message,” Antennas Direct President Richard Schneider told me Thursday. Charter disagreed – and rejected the spot for competitive reasons.

The spot was part of a bigger marketing campaign that Antennas Direct is currently running for its products, with six different spots already airing in 15 markets and plans to show them in two dozen additional markets soon. Here’s one of them:

Antennas Direct has been one of a number of antenna manufacturers that has profited from interest in cord cutting. And over-the-air TV has also started to find its way into new technologies, including Boxee’s cloud DVR and Aereo’s TV streaming service. (Speaking of which: I’ll be interviewing Aereo founder and CEO Chet Kanojia at our paidContent Live conference in New York next month. Check out the full program for that event on the paidContent Live site.)

Schneider told me that the company’s early customers were mostly home theater enthusiasts interested in getting uncompressed HD TV signals. Then, some 18 months ago, more and more average consumers started to look for antennas – a trend that he largely attributes to the growing popularity of online streaming services. “Hulu and Netflix are helping revive antenna sales,” Schneider said, adding: “Over-the-air digital is really the new basic cable.”

Consumers would increasingly watch the basic broadcast channels for free, and then pay for catch-up and on-demand viewing, he argued. Of course, cable execs tend to argue that cord cutting doesn’t exist, even though people like Dish’s Charlie Ergen disagree. Asked about these arguments, Scneider responded: “Someone is buying all these antennas.”

Antennas Direct’s sales have nearly tripled last year, and the company is expecting to generate close to $15 million in revenue in 2013 – even without those ads on Charter.

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Now this is cool: A group of web hackers has built a P2P-based CDN that crowdsources the delivery of data on a website with the help of a bit of Javascript. PeerCDN as the project is called, is based on WebRTC, an emerging technology that’s been built to facilitate real-time communication like voice and video chat in the browser without the need for any plugin. From the PerCDN website:

“PeerCDN automatically serves a site’s static resources (images, videos, and file downloads) over a peer-to-peer network made up of the visitors currently on the site. Offloading part of the web hosting burden to site visitors reduces bandwidth costs.”

The project also made a screencast to explain their approach – check it out:

PeerCND uses WebRTC’s data channel protocol, which was designed to allow developers of real-time communication applications to have their participants exchange data other than audio or video. Think of a file transfer during a teleconference, or a multiplayer game based on WebRTC. And in the case of PeerCDN, it sends files of a website directly from visitor to visitor.

The downside of this approach is that WebRTC is still in its infancy. The data channel protocol has been implemented in Chrome as well as nightlies of Firefox, which means that it will be available to the average Firefox user some time in the near future. Both browsers together “account for 58% of global browser usage,” as the PeerCDN site points out.

However, disputes around the way forward for WebRTC have complicated an implementation in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and there is no word yet from Apple whether it will support the technology in Safari. Still, site owners don’t necessarily need all of their visitors to buy in, especially since PeerCDN can be combined with a traditional CDN.

PeerCDN was built in part by Feross Aboukhadijeh, who is famous for some of his HTML5 exploits. Recently, Aboukhadijeh built a website that automatically filled up its visitors hard discs with gigabytes of cat pictures. Before that, he built a YouTube search site called YTInstant.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  Tsahi Levent-Levi.

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Quick: What’s the first thing that pops in your head when you think of Opera? If you’re anything like me, it’s probably the company’s desktop browser. But there’s more to Opera: The company has been hugely successful in mobile, bringing in more than $400 million in ad revenue in 2012 alone, and it’s now getting ready to repeat that success story on the TV.

Opera has been active in TV for some time. The company’s browser software-development kit has been powering TVs and connected devices from Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp and Philips as well as the new Boxee TV, just to name a few. Frode Hernes, VP of products and connected devices at Opera told me during a phone conversation last week that consumers already use an estimated 30 to 50 million TVs and connected devices that are powered by Opera.

But Opera’s role on your TV may get a lot bigger soon. Last year, it launched the Opera TV Store, a HTML-based app store that is now shipping with Sony’s Bravia TVs and coming to other vendors soon. And Hernes told me that it plans to launch advertising for TV apps before the end of the year.

These ads will include offers to try and install certain apps within other apps, much in the same way advertising is working on mobile phones. “We have done the technical integration,” Hernes told me, but the inventory just isn’t there yet. “It’s a little bit early,” he said. “We hope to have significant income next year” from TV ads, he added.

The company has also been adding additional features to its app store, including the capability to display apps side-by-side next to live TV and other content, and it is getting ready to switch its rendering engine from Opera’s own browser engine to Chromium to keep up with the latest in HTML5 development.

However, some of these changes might not find their way onto TV sets until 2014, simply because consumer electronics manufacturers take their time with integrating new software. “This is not like the mobile market,” Hernes said.

Consumers have often been on the flip side of those long release cycles, getting products that are already outdated as soon as they’re getting on the shelves of retailers, often with no chances for any product updates.

However, this could change once ads add additional monetization opportunities to smart TVs: Instead of operating on razor-thin margins and simply moving from one generation to the next, companies could actually be incentivized to add features and services to existing devices already in consumer’s homes, Hernes predicted. “This is one way of keeping the device relevant after it is sold,” he said.

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Boxee is rolling out a firmware update to its Boxee TV that brings DLNA functionality, 3-D streaming of Vudu titles, a more traditional TV guide, improved DVR scheduling and other features to the device. Owners of Boxee TV devices were notified of the update late Tuesday and told that it would be available to them within the next three days.

DLNA will enable Boxee TV owners to play files stored on their computers or network-attached storage drives, a feature that was at the core of Boxee’s original Boxee Box. Boxee TV also functions as a DLNA digital media renderer, meaning that users can beam music and videos straight from their mobile device to their Boxee TV, much in the same way as one would stream a video via Airplay to an Apple TV.

Boxee TV combines apps for online media services like Netflix, YouTube and Spotify with live over-the-air television and a cloud DVR that offers unlimited storage for recorded shows.

Cloud DVR functionality is currently just available in a limited number of markets, and it looks like Boxee was trying to iron out some bugs and add some much-needed features before rolling it out further. One example: Boxee TV users can now schedule recordings directly on the device. Previously, users had to go to Boxee’s cloud DVR website to schedule a recording – a step that seemed overly complicated for a pretty basic feature of a DVR.

Check out my Boxee TV unboxing video below:

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Our upcoming paidContent Live conference will highlight some of the biggest names disrupting the media business. To get warmed up for the show, we’re kicking off a podcast mini-series featuring in-depth discussions with creators in film, online content, ebooks and other forms of digital media who are successfully building their own independent empires. And who better to start that series than filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky, who created the critically acclaimed first feature-lenth documentary about indie games, Indie Game: The Movie?

With this podcast, we’re at Inception-level “indie”: talking with indie filmmakers who used indie financing to make a film about indie game developers.

If you like this chat, then you’ll definitely want to attend paidContent LIVE, happening in New York City on April 17.

(Download the Indie Game podcast)

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San Francisco-based video startup Crunchyroll now has more than 200,000 paying subscribers to the premium tier of its service. The company surpassed that milestone just six months after announcing 100,000 paying subscribers, and Crunchyroll co-founder and CEO Kun Gao told me during a phone call Monday that he attributes the growth to entering new markets as well as getting onto additional devices.

Crunchyroll has been specializing on bringing Anime shows to the U.S. and other countries the day after episodes air on Japanese TV. The company has also been branching out to carry Korean drama and Asian live action content, and it’s been exploring ways to add additional content verticals.

However, Gao told me Monday that content is only part of the picture for the company. Crunchyroll launched an expanded e-commerce operation in January, offering subscribers access to special deals for merchandise from their favorite Anime shows. “We’d like to use the membership more like a Costco membership,” he said.

Check out an interview I did with Gao a few months ago below:

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Video hosting site Blip has come up with a new way to make more money with advertising: The site, which has been specializing on web-exclusive serialized content, is going to turn on preroll advertising by default for all of the content hosted on its site in early April. Blip shares its ad revenue 50/50 with publishers.

Publishers will have an opportunity to opt out of ads for up to five videos in order to keep short clips and trailers ad-free, but after that, all fo their videos will be preceded by preroll ads. The changes were announced a few days ago in an email to producers that read, in part:

“Blip’s mission is to be the place to discover the best in original web series. We support this mission by selling advertising against the content that you, the Blip Producer community, create and upload. The technology and bandwidth required to deliver your shows to a wide audience is paid for by advertising, similar to television.”

That’s a notable change from Blip’s previous take on advertising. The company described its advertising program in the past as “entirely voluntary,” noting on a still-active support page that producers “can use almost all Blip services without accepting advertising.”

The email now sent out to Blip’s producers tries to quell fears that ads could drive audiences away:

“We know that for some long-time Blip producers running advertising on your content will be unsettling. Rest assured that all of the available data in the market shows that audiences have become acclimated to pre-roll ads. In many cases, a prominent brand in front of an episode actually increases the perceived value of the show.”

Blip started out as a video hosting site that competed directly with YouTube, and changed its course two years ago to focus exclusively on serialized content made for the web. The company distributes content to a variety of platforms, and opened a studio in Los Angeles to produce its own content last summer.

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Looks like the folks over at Delicious may have a case of Digg envy: I stumbled across a seemingly new site called D.me today that serves up a continuous stream of stories in a design that looks a lot like the recently-relaunched Digg.com, with a bit of Pinterest mixed in for good measure.

The site offers users to access content sorted by media types (articles, products, videos, music and photos) as well as through a free-form search. All of this can be combined, enabling you filter results to just photos and videos related to a certain subject. There even seems to be an element of personalization, offering users to display “more links like this.”

However, currently, only articles and a very small number of videos are on display, and search doesn’t seem to work at all.

There’s no about section on the site, and nothing that directly connects it to Delicious. However, the AVOS team, which acquired Delicious two years ago, also bought the D.me domain, and in fact briefly used it as a kind of link shortener and email forwarder for Delicious. And a look under the hood reveals that D.me is in fact powered by the Delicious API.

At this point, it’s very unclear what the future holds for D.me. An email inquiry to the AVOS team went unanswered. It’s possible that D.me was just a test for the AVOS platform, which the company describes on its website as a “common technology stack we’re building to underpin shared features across the AVOS product portfolio.”

However, there’s also a chance that AVOS learned a lesson from its botched attempt to reinvent Delicious after it acquired the site. A number of features, including the idea of curated collections of links dubbed “stacks,” were eventually rolled back.

Maybe AVOS decided to leave Delicious alone, and experiment with more innovative ideas for content discovery on a separate site.

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Finish a mobile game level in record time? They why not share a video of your accomplishment will all your friends? That’s the idea behind Everyplay, a new service that wants to bring video capturing and sharing to mobile gaming. “You can’t spell video game without video,” punned Applifier CEO Jussi Laakkonen, whose company is behind Everyplay, when he gave me a demo of the technology at our San Francisco office Wednesday.

At its core, Everyplay is taking the idea behind game video sites like Twitch.tv to mobile, casual gaming, with an interesting twist: Instead of getting users to record their games with dedicated capturing software, Everyplay partners with iOS game developers to add its SDK to their games.

20 games with Everyplay are already available on the iTunes app store. Some of them allow instant replay and sharing of key scenes, while others just continuously record a video of everything you do, ready to share at any time. Users can share these videos on Everyplay’s own website put them on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. There’s also some basic social networking functionality built into Everyplay itself.

Everyplay’s SDK is currently just available for iOS, but Laakkonen told me that his team is actively working on an Android version, which should be available soon. He also showed me a demo of an upcoming version of the SDK, which makes it possible to record the player with the phone’s front-facing camera in a kind of picture-in-picture style, which could lead to all sorts of neat meta-commentary about games.

Interesting about all of this is Amplifier’s business model for Everyplay: The company is making the SDK available free of charge, and will even provide free links to each game on Everyplay.com, allowing users to click through and install the game after they watched a video recording of it. Laakkonen stressed that this would be a great, free way to promote games, and pointed to the Paper Planes creators NimbleBit, whose videos of their upcoming Nimble Quest game have already clocked thousands of views on Everyplay.

So how will Everyplay make money? That’s where the company’s core business comes in: Finland-based Applifier started out as a Facebook game developer all the way back in 2008. Then Facebook deemphasized games in people’s stream, and the company shifted towards cross-promotion of games. That evolved into a full-blown game advertising network. Adding ads to Everyplay, which launched late last year, will be the next step. But Laakkonen said that he’s in no rush. First, he wants to build an audience for the service, and he’s already talking to some large publisher to come on board.

In the end, Laakkonen said, Everyplay is about getting back to Applifier’s roots to produce things for gamers that also help developers. Something that gets individuals excited, and doesn’t reduce them to being a data point in someone’s plan to move a lot of referral traffic. Said Laakkonen: “I am not traffic. I can’t tell you how much I hate that term.”

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M-Go, the online video service that was founded by Technicolor and Dreamworks, signed a licensing agreement with Lionsgate to get access the studio’s catalog. The deal includes all previous seasons of Mad Men, as well as next-day access to new episodes as the show gets back on the air next month.

M-Go customers will also be able to rent and buy Lionsgate movies like the Hunger Games, the Twilight series and the Madea movies. All in all, Lionsgate’s catalog consists of 15,000 movies and TV show episodes, and the deal will eventually bring that entire collection to M-Go.

M-Go’s CEO John Batter told me during a call Wednesday that M-Go currently has 10,000 titles available, and that the company plans to add between 1000 and 2000 additional titles every month.

M-Go launched its public beta at CES in January. Check out my interview with Technicolor CEO Fred Rose about the service below:

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As more data is moving to the cloud, customers often have to make a tough choice: Do they want to make use of the most advanced offering, or do they want to rely on standardized solutions that offer them an easy way to move their data to another provider if necessary? “You have innovation, and then you have standards,” CloudSigma Co-Founder and CTO Robert Jenkins remarked at GigaOM’s Structure:Data 2013 conference in New York Wednesday.

William Gerhardt, director at Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group agreed, adding that the lack of portability also holds back investment in the cloud. “Once I go down a path, it’s hard to change my path,” he said, adding: “Data portability is critical.”

So how can cloud services make data more portable? Jenkins said that other industries have tackled similar problems before. For example, service providers established internet exchanges. Eventually, cloud providers would have to offer similar exchanges to allow customers to easily move data from cloud to cloud.

Gerhard also pointed that governance around data portability has to ultimately be about the consumer as well. “Today, the consumer is unaware of how their data is used,” he lamented, adding that consumers should eventually be able to have insights into and get value of the use of their data. “If the consumer is not part of that process, it will be a big problem,” he said.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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There’s a new kid in town, and it’s racking up video views: Zurich-based online video startup Viewster is set to announce Thursday that it managed to break into comScore’s list of the Top 50 U.S. video properties for the first time in February, attracting more unique viewers than Sony’s Crackle and the video sites of both ABC and Fox.

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.

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