About Those 99-Cent TV Episodes Being Sold On Amazon; Amazon still has to pay the contracted rates for electronic sell-through TV shows, so it’s taking a loss on all 99-cent videos sold. (paidContent)

Sezmi, Amazon Team Up to Sell TV 2.0; Sezmi is partnering with Amazon to make its television service immediately available to viewers in 36 markets across the U.S. (The Wrap)

IAC’s Vimeo Doubles Growth with Non-Commercial Fare; the video sharing unit of IAC has more than four million registered users and 30 million monthly unique visitors, nearly doubling those numbers over the past six months. (Beet.TV)

Skyfire Submits Flash Video Enabled Browser to App Store; the startup will try to break through Apple’s Flash blockade with the submission of its mobile browser that transcodes Flash into HTML5 in real time. (ReadWriteWeb)

Ranking the Digital Living Room Barbarians; the clear winner in Apple TV is Netflix, which has navigated the digital entertainment landscape better than anyone. (ZDNet)

Exclusive Deals Make 3-D TV Audience Even Smaller; avid sports fans can watch 3-D broadcasts of live sporting events, such as the U.S. Open, but exclusive distribution deals limit who gets to see what. (CNET)

5min Media Partners With IGN Entertainment; IGN Entertainment has joined the 5min Video Games Channel to semantically match short-form videos such as game reviews, instructions and news from top gaming brands across the 5min network of more than 800 sites. (press release)

Disney and Time Warner Cable have settled their retransmission negotiations, finalizing a deal that will keep ABC, ESPN and Disney networks on Time Warner Cable and Bright House Network cable systems. But the big news from an online video perspective is that Disney is creating its first authenticated, TV Everywhere-type broadband video service for its ESPN networks as part of the deal.

As part of the deal, Disney will establish an authenticated service enabling Time Warner Cable subscribers to view linear and on-demand content from ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU networks online on their PCs and, at some point in the future, through mobile devices like the Apple iPad. According to earlier reports, online video was one of the key sticking points in the negotiations of the deal, which we now know includes the introduction of a TV Everywhere-type service for the ESPN networks.

It’s important to note that the new ESPN TV everywhere service is separate from Disney’s ESPN3 offering, which is not authenticated and doesn’t have a network equivalent. The ESPN3 broadband service has long been available to subscribers of some pay TV providers, like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, that had affiliate deals with Disney. This deal will mark the first time that Time Warner Cable subscribers will also be able to access ESPN3.

While the establishment of the new ESPN service is clearly important, the more pressing issue was keeping Disney, ABC and ESPN programming on Time Warner cable systems. As part of the deal, Time Warner Cable will continue to carry ABC Family, the Disney Channel, Disney XD, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPNU, ESPN Classic, ESPN Deportes, and SOAPnet, as well as ABC affiliate stations in New York, L.A., Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville and Toledo. The agreement also adds Disney Junior, a new basic cable channel for preschool-aged children that will begin in 2012.

The deal also includes wide-ranging additions to Time Warner Cable’s video-on-demand services, including ABC On Demand, a VOD service that disables fast forwarding and ad skipping, local sports programming on demand in major metropolitan markets, a subscription VOD service for Disney Family Movies and a new pay-per-view VOD service for select Disney and ABC content. The deal also includes the launch of ESPN 3D on Time Warner Cable and Bright House Network cable systems.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: How Online Video Is Shaping the Next Round of Retrans Fights (subscription required)

There’s been an interesting debate going on in the web series community over the last day or so, sparked off by a strongly-worded TwitVid of former UTA agent and consultant Barrett Garese, about whether or not the web series as we currently understand it is doomed to be “derivative television.”

There has been some great discussion on the topic, including Gold creator David Nett’s Facebook response and Garese’s expanded thoughts, that are worth reading. No matter what side you agree with, if you’re looking for a recent example that defines the concept of “derivative television,” here you go: Alloy Entertainment’s First Day, a Kmart-sponsored web series that premiered this Tuesday.

Alloy, the production company behind youth-skewing TV series like Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, has brought TV-level production values to this tale of an awkward adolescent girl (Tracey Fairaway) forced to repeat the first day of school over and over again. (Groundhog Day? What’s that? Kids born the year Groundhog Day came out, after all, are now 17 years old.)

While to watch First Day on the official site is to be barraged by Kmart-branded ads and graphics, the actual show is relatively free of branding. And though I’m not totally sure that First Day has its finger on the pulse of today’s modern teen (Um, do high school students still have journals? And re-enact the bus scene from Forrest Gump in the cafeteria?) it looks good, has a fast pace and an engaging lead actress in Fairaway.

But there’s absolutely nothing about it that makes it feel like content destined for the Internet, beyond the fact that if I like Cassie’s BONGO plaid shirt in episode 2, there’s a link to buy it right beside the video player.

The major concession to the show’s destiny is the casting of Molly McAleer, Internet famous as the video-blogging Molls. McAleer, in a phone interview, said that while she doesn’t watch a lot of television herself, the people who follow her online adventures are also big fans of Gossip Girl and other Alloy programming, which got her interested in joining the First Day cast as Cassie’s cruel science teacher. “[Teen dramas have] that wholesome irony we all love, like watching Saved by the Bell,” she said about why her fanbase is drawn to the genre. “It’s a little bit more cheesy than real life, but there’s something comforting and fun about it, it’s totally a guilty pleasure.”

Alloy’s launching two other web series this fall, one of which is an adaptation of a young adult novel series (Alloy’s bread and butter), the other of which, a drama/reality hybrid, sounds slightly more interesting. Both promise to please teen audiences (and older folk who enjoy indulging in teen fare). But it feels like more of the same — and lacking in innovation.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Fact or Fiction: Where Is Branded Online Video Going?

I have a Google Nexus One phone on T-Mobile’s network, so I can use the handy T-Mobile MyAccount app to keep track of how many calls I’ve made during the current billing period. The app also tracks text messages and lets me pay my bill. But that doesn’t mean there’s not room on my phone for an app that provides much more information about what my phone has been up to.

PhoneUsage is a free utility that tracks phone calls, text messages, and data use and plots everything in a series of charts.

On the home screen, you can click the tabs for Today, This Week, last Month, or 2 Months Ago to see your information at a glance. But things get really interesting when you hit the Calls, Texts, or Data tabs. That’s where you can see detailed charts showing your incoming and outgoing calls plotted by day of month, time of day, or day of week. You can also see the top people you’ve communicated with by volume.

You can tap the “Period” button to adjust the time frame for the carts, and PhoneUsage also lets you tap on any chart to see it in full-screen, landscape mode.

My only complaint is that you have to use PhoneUsage for a little while before you’ll get the most out of this app. When I first loaded it, the app managed to track my recent phone calls, but it didn’t notice incoming and outgoing text messages or recent data usage. Once I started using 3G data after installing the app, the data chart started to fill in.

I suspect PhoneUsage also doesn’t know the difference between in-network and out-of-network calls, which means you might not want to use this app as your sole guide of whether you’re about to go over your monthly minutes. But it can definitely give you a pretty good idea of how you’re using your Android smartphone.

PhoneUsage is available as a free download from the Android Market. There’s also a Pro version that runs £1.49 (about $2.29) which will alert you when you’re about to break user-defined usage limits. The Pro version also includes Home Screen widgets.

This post republished from Mobiputing.

Since posting Kevin Tofel’s demo of Flash video on his Nexus One handset, we’ve received a ton of comments: some pro-Flash, some anti-Flash, some anti-Apple, some even anti-Kevin. One of the more interesting aspects of the debate is that many readers posted response videos, showing their own experiences with Flash on Android mobile handsets.

Michael Panzer, a reader from Germany, for instance, posted a video of his experience with Flash video on his Galaxy S. Unlike Kevin’s experience, movie trailers from Metacafe — including the HD trailer of Alpha and Omega — loaded just fine, despite a few stutters along the way, as did the trailer for the latest Resident Evil film, also in HD. However, Panzer didn’t record his attempt to watch videos on ABC.com or Fox.com, which were the sites that gave Kevin the most trouble.

Reader Dennis Forbes also posted a video response of his own. Using his own Android phone, he watched Kevin’s video on NewTeeVee (which is only slightly meta), debunking some of the claims of what mobile processors are capable of when compared to other processors, before moving on to watch some video on the device.

Forbes admits that he tried to duplicate Kevin’s experience with videos on ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe, but lays the blame on Kevin for “trying to play video streams that were too complex and has too high of a bit rate that the device just can’t handle.” He compares the mobile experience to one his son had on a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz PC that had been handed down: “I recall having similar problems; it was the same sort of deal… It simply couldn’t keep up.” Instead, he showed off how he’s “come to rely on [his Android handset] for some relatively low-grade needs,” including short videos from Zero Punctuation.

The strongest counterpoint comes from developer Paul Yanez, who recorded a video and posted a response on his blog entitled, “Video: Flash on Android Is Shockingly Great!!!” Yanez said he was surprised by our piece because he recently bought a Droid 2 and had had no problems with it playing Flash.

Yanez demonstrated the same episode of Bones that Kevin had trouble watching due to “seconds per frame” instead of “frames per second” being displayed during playback. In Yanez’s video “there’s no stutter, there’s no choppiness, the audio is synced up” when playing the 43-minute Bones episode, which leads him to conclude that “there’s nothing wrong with the Flash player” on the Droid 2. In his experience, the Flash player is stable, very powerful, and “there’s no difference between the Flash player in this mobile phone than on a desktop.”

What you need is optimal code, according to Yanez, who placed the Bones video on a blank HTML page before playback. As a result, he blames the Fox website for the issues that Kevin experienced during his demo, not the Flash video player itself. All Fox has to do to improve the experience for end users, according to Yanez, is make the video an image and launch the video player in a new window.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Lynn Wallenstein.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps (subscription required)

While most of the tech world was focused on the Apple event yesterday, Sony announced expansion plans for its streaming media service, Qriosity. Qriosity’s been around in the US for a few months, offering on-demand movie titles to consumers who own Sony connected devices. This week’s announcement adds five European countries to the distribution list, and includes the debut of a new “cloud-based” streaming music service, Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity.

If you’re wondering what the Qriosity expansion means, well, you’re not alone. In theory, Sony is taking on the iTunes ecosystem, but its approach is underwhelming. The company’s on-demand video library consists only of films (no TV), and while Sony has been talking about eking out a space in the home entertainment platform business (beyond hardware) for years, it’s had relatively little traction. On the music side, Sony is up against serious competitors, not only from the likes of networked music providers like Apple and Sonos, but also potentially from those in the Internet radio space, including Slacker, Pandora, and Last.fm. And it’s been a long time since Sony’s Walkman dominance.

The crazy thing about Sony is that it has all the pieces to be a major media service provider. It’s got Sony Pictures and Sony Music on the content side, and CE gear for virtually every facet of your digital media life. But having all the pieces doesn’t mean you can make a coherent whole. And I haven’t seen convincing evidence to date that Sony can put its pieces together.

So is Apple TV still only a hobby for Jobs and company? Because if it isn’t, then I’m missing something from yesterday’s presentation when the new iteration of Apple’s set-top device was unveiled. The new Apple TV is smaller, cheaper and sexier, I’ll grant it that, but what else does it really have going for it?

Let’s start with rental only. That’s right, you can only rent content from the Apple TV, not purchase it. It makes sense given the device’s lack of onboard storage, but does it make sense for a buying public that’s only just now moving past the point of physical media ownership? All of a sudden, not only do you not have a disc you own when you pay for content, you also don’t even have a file. Instead you get a window of opportunity.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like archiving my material and I like to have it available whenever I want to review it, or just revisit a favorite scene to make sure I remember it correctly. True, as Steve Jobs said in the presentation, I’ll be able to rent it multiple times for cheaper than I’d be able to buy it, but then I can’t lend it to friends and family, pass it on to my kids or view it again 50 years down the road when its gone out of print.

Putting aside the tyranny of streaming-only, at least you can access your media on your computer, where it is comfortably stored, right? Well, only if you’ve adhered to Apple’s way of doing media, and haven’t strayed to any of the other terrific and much more popular video formats out there. Apple TV remains closed, and as a result, any machine running Boxee hooked up to my TV remains a better option, even considering the price differential for the original purchase.

Speaking of price, let’s look at that $99 tag Jobs dangled in our salivating faces. It’s almost an impulse buy at that point, and I know a few people who indulged that impulse. But you know what else is a good price? $10 for a fancy razor with replaceable heads. Those heads will cost you $40 for a four-pack, sure, but that’s later. Apple isn’t going to make most (if any) of its money on the Apple TV itself (though without much onboard storage, it’s cheap enough to build), but on the gobs of media you’re almost forced to purchase from them as a result.

The inclusion of Netflix is one of the few genuinely impressive things about the new Apple TV. It means that people who already have a subscription don’t need to go in for Apple’s pricier rental options, and the implementation looks pretty impressive as compared to its counterparts on other platforms.

But even if you exclusively use the Netflix option, which means being behind in terms of release dates on TV and movies, you’ll end up paying much more for the hardware than you probably would if you opted for a media PC (or Mac mini, even) purchase and just depended on free streaming from network websites. Occasionally you’d still run up against content you have to pay for, but you can own it, and you options for sourcing that could equate to a much better per purchase price.

In general, I’m willing to deal with Apple’s closed systems and devices because of the trade-offs I get in terms of quality. But third-party apps and desktop software make it possible for me to still use Apple hardware with my own content, regardless of format and point of origin. That’s not likely going to be the case with the Apple TV, and until it is, it won’t find a place in my living room, regardless of cost and cosmetics.

Pack it up, Gregory Brothers. Stop printing, Zazzle t-shirts. The Double Rainbow meme is dead, and it was assisted suicide, thanks to Microsoft.

Over a month after Paul “Bear” Vasquez’s reaction to a double rainbow reaching “all the way across the sky” in Yosemite National Park went viral, Vasquez is now starring in a commercial for Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery. The double rainbow is there too, likely with the help of some VFX.

You can’t necessarily blame Vasquez for cashing in on his completely accidental fame, and you have to give points to Microsoft for swooping in just as the meme was about to go stale, but this ad just feels forced. Because you know what? The power of the Double Rainbow video was how completely genuine Vasquez’s reaction was. When you watched it, you wished that you’d one day have an experience “so intense.”

But you know what’s never left me with that profound sense of wonder? A single, solitary Microsoft product.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): The Dos and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

AOL and Google announced an updated and expanded agreement, which will ensure that Google remains the default search engine for AOL users for five more years. The deal will also be instrumental in adding a new source of video content to YouTube, as AOL has agreed to distribute its videos through its online video site.

AOL users watch a good amount of video, and the company was regularly featured as one of the top ten video properties in comScore’s (s SCOR) Video Metrix;  that is, it was until the measurement firm changed its methodology for counting unique viewers and viewing sessions. However, much of that content comes from distribution partners that syndicate content to AOL’s videos site.

Details of the YouTube portion of the deal are limited, so we’ve reached out to AOL for clarification. It’s not clear, for instance, if AOL will distribute its partner videos through YouTube as well, or if the deal includes only AOL original content. If it’s the latter, it will be interesting to see how much video that entails: how many AOL videos it has in its library, and how many it produces on a daily or weekly basis, as opposed to how many come from distribution agreements. If syndicated content is included, it’s not clear how distribution partners will be compensated as part of the deal, especially as many of them have deals with YouTube of their own.

We also don’t know if AOL plans to break its YouTube distribution into branded channels for different sites or video verticals, or if all videos will exist solely on a single AOL video channel. It would make more sense for AOL to focus on verticals, as it would be able to break out videos about travel, sports, entertainment and other subjects and target advertising accordingly.

Finally, the search deal includes a revenue-sharing component, which will include Google ad formats being added to AOL sites. I wonder if the revenue-share agreement also extends to the YouTube portion of the deal, and if so, which party will be selling the ads that run up against AOL videos on YouTube. If it’s AOL doing the selling, the YouTube deal could certainly bring more eyeballs to its original content, but will it come at the expense of CPMs because the videos are appearing on a site known for its UGC videos? That will be an important point, especially as AOL’s advertising revenues have been in freefall lately.

While there are certainly a lot of questions left unanswered, the YouTube deal could bring some significant volume to AOL’s video properties. We’ll update this post once we hear back from AOL and know more.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: New Business Models For Pay TV Services (subscription required)

Plex is a media center application for Mac based on XBMC. The latest version, called Plex/Nine for the Mac was released this week, and in addition to the desktop software there’s also a new iOS app. The mobile app promises to act as a remote control for your desktop as well as a way to watch your videos. Since all the organization is done on the Plex desktop software, the iOS app doesn’t have to do much other than stream content.

First, I ran the Plex/Nine software on a Mac Pro using a library of under 100GB. The Plex Media Manager, when first loaded, goes online to get metadata about your collection so you can find movies or TV shows by director, year, genre, and more. It took about an hour to grab all the data for the library.

While the desktop software for Plex is free, the Plex iPad app costs $4.99. The interface is very basic – there are no left and right panes here. There is just one list that lets you navigate your videos, music, and other plugins. You can connect to multiple Plex libraries – so if you have files on different machines, you can access them all via the Plex app. Read the rest of this entry »

--ANT Reports Higher H1 Revenues, Lower Losses--BBC Outlines iPlayer Design Strategy--Evolution Digital to Incorporate EBIF into its DTA's--Harmonic Reveals Exhibit Plans for IBC--IMPALA Welcomes BBC's Decision to Open Source its MHEG+ Toolkit--Netgem Posts Strong H1 Financial Results--Sony Launches Qriocity OTT VOD Service in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK--Interactive TV Company, Two Way Media, Launches Web Game on Virginmedia.com

--LG Electronics to Unveil "Smart TV" at IFA

--Company Delivers Interactive TV Lab Environment to Indonesian Government Agency

--Online Participants to be Rewarded with Offline Prizes

--Brightcove Tapped to Power Online Video Initiatives for Telefonica O2 Ireland

News Round-Up
InteractiveTV Today [itvt]
Evolution Digital plans to use EBIF as a quasi-middleware layer within its one-way DTA's, in order to support customizable user interfaces and video apps, ...