Many simply come home and leave OoVoo on in the background as they do homework or watch TV, sort of like an instant messager app. Friends jump on or jump off, checking in with each other and seeing what’s going on. The person who starts the video chats isn’t obligated to stay on. This is not appointment video: it’s ambient video, running in the background.

Video tells the story

That got me thinking about the evolution video. It’s similar in some sense to how pictures have undergone a transformation. We used to take pictures to preserve memories, using precious film to capture significant moments. But with advent of digital cameras and later mobile phones with cameras, pictures became akin to a casual form of communication, giving rise to services like Instagram and others.

Video chatting and broadcasting is also evolving in a similar manner. We used to think about scheduling Skype chats and video conferences.  Uploading a video to YouTube meant you often edited the video or at least reviewed it. But now, we’re seeing that video is becoming this casual, immediate medium that doesn’t have to convey anything special.

Cheaper broadband+free video services

Jackman believes the rise of ambient video is due to cheaper broadband and the growth of free services that allow users to use video with little regard to cost. The fact that video chatting can increasingly be multiparty also lends itself to this idea of video as an emerging background layer to life.

Google is seeing more people leave Google Hangouts on for long periods of time, according to Iska Hain, a company spokeswoman.

“We definitely see that use case, especially at Google where colleagues will jump into a Hangout from remote offices and we all do work together. Sometimes people do like to just ‘be around’ other people. There are cases of folks turning a hangout on while they go about cooking or knitting or painting,” Hain said.

Foursquare has set up a big screen video portal inside both of its New York and San Francisco offices that are constantly on, allowing people to see each other and organize impromptu meetings.

“I can just go up to the screen and shout someone’s name and they’ll come to the portal,” said Benjy Weinberger, Foursquare’s San Francisco engineering lead.  

Increasingly comfortable with live-sharing

It’s not just with video conferencing. People are increasingly more casual with video sharing as well. I was reminded of this when talking to Bill Nguyen, the co-founder of Color. Color, as we wrote recently, has signed a deal with Verizon to put its live video-sharing app on Verizon phones. The app allows users to start recording a video and alerts their friends that a live broadcast has started.

When I first heard about that, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sending out video before having the option to edit it. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen at the end of that clip. But that’s where things are going. We’ve seen that with other live-streaming services: people are increasingly comfortable broadcasting their lives and letting the world see whatever happens.

Gil Eyal, vice president of marketing for Mobli, a mobile photo and video sharing service, said increasingly people are just uploading videos directly to the service without editing out mistakes or taking a look again at what they’re showing.

“We’re seeing more spontaneous video, it’s all raw and unedited,” said Eyal. “It’s just people being real and video becoming this common language.”

Not everyone is ready for this kind of spontaneous, always-on video world. But it’s a natural extension of the trends were seeing in technology and social media. The barriers separating the private and the public are crumbling thanks to social and technological tools that make it easy to share. The same ideas at work behind Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram, will also spur people to be more open and free with video.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tyler Olsen.

That’s bunk, according to Wired publisher Howard Mittman, who said in a recent interview that apps have proven “incredibly profitable” and touts the publication’s 165,000 tablet subscribers (65,000 of these are pure-digital subs). Mittman adds that Wired readers also spend a significant amount of time with the tablet version and that he “missed the memo” about the failure of apps.

So what’s going on? Is there something special about Wired, or have other publishers simply failed to execute correctly?

To understand, it’s useful to consider the key complaints set out by Technology Review’s Jason Pontin in his influential “Why Publishers Don’t like Apps” essay from early May, including:

• expensive developer costs
• difficulty quantifying subscribers
• an unnatural, walled garden reader experience.

Pontin also decried the vulturous 30 percent bite that Apple took from many sales, a figure that exceeded publishers’ own margins. He concluded that he would toss the apps and instead follow the Financial Times’ example by using HTML5 technology to provide an easy cross-platform reader experience. (The FT this week told pC2012 that it didn’t need a marketing boost from the iTunes Store.)

Wired’s Mittman, however, says that Pontin simply “chose one path that didn’t work out” and that “trail-blazing is not for everyone.” He believes that HTML5 will just be part of a “larger app experience” in which an app is a storefront or gateway for readers to have deeper interactions with publishing brands.

One upshot of this may be that publishers need to try harder to make apps work, but it’s also possible that unique factors make Wired an outlier. These include a techy readership combined with corporate and editorial support for a development team that has been building apps longer than most. Condé Nast, its deep-pocketed parent, may also be betting big in the hopes that Wired’s success can be replicated at its other publications.

Mittman’s bullish stance on apps may also be in keeping with Wired’s famous “Web is dead” cover of two years ago that described how browsers were being supplemented by other types of viewing platforms.

The proof will ultimately be in the revenue pudding, of course. Based on a $20-a-year subscription price, Wired is set to earn $1.3 million on its digital only subscribers (minus any Apple cut). This is hardly earth-shaking but, after just two years, it may be big enough to keep Condé Nast in the app game for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it seems likely other publishers will continue to join instead the “good enough revolution” (a Wired term, by the way) offered by HTML5.

Waterstones lacks an e-reader strategy, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook device had appeared a candidate to fill the gap. Another big UK retailer, WH Smith, has thrown its lot in with Nook rival Kobo.

Now Nook may need to advance internationally with apps on hardware other than its own, and with Microsoft, rather than local high street retailers, as its key partner…

Speaking to me after our panel interview at paidContent 2012, Barnes & Noble’s digital newsstand and emerging content GM Jonathan Shar said:

“We’re excited to look at those (international) opportunities. The recent Microsoft announcement and the formation of NewCo allows us to think even more globally, as Windows 8 is a global platform.

“As we develop Nook experiences and reading apps for Windows 8, we’ve got to think beyond the U.S. and think globally.

“We’re looking at all our options. We think the value proposition we’ve built with the Nook brand translates outside of the U.S. and will look across that.

“In the U.S., we have both the Nook devices but also great Nook reading apps across multiple platforms. We’re looking at that strategy outside the U.S. – what the mix will be is to be determined.

“We’re evaluating the international market in many markets. We anticipate that there will be competition in these markets. We’re prepared for all that.”

Putting Nook in to a new business co-owned by Microsoft will allow Barnes & Noble to deliver Nook apps and services on new Windows 8 tablets.

A solely apps-and-services strategy may be a useful fallback strategy for Barnes & Noble overseas. But it’s not the same as selling the Nook e-reader, the Trojan Horse for those services, as well.

Now Amazon’s Waterstones deal means Barnes & Nobile has lost to its biggest rival the opportunity to sell that device through the UK’s biggest bookseller.

“Operators treat partners like vendors.” That quote comes form Google director of global Android partnerships John Lagerling, who said it during a panel discussion this week at Management World in Dublin, where it was captured by Light Reading. It’s a telling statement, especially coming from one of the most important players in the mobile industry.

Several years ago, operators could have gotten away with treating everyone else in the mobile ecosystem as a mere supplier. After all, they ran the whole show. If your service, device or technology was ever going to make it onto an operator’s network, you had to kiss the ring. A lot has changed in a few years.

These days, Google and Apple have far more clout in the global wireless industry than any individual carrier. Apple’s decisions on which radio technologies to support can cause seismic shifts in the industry. And any new iteration of the Android OS can spur new waves of new service innovation and app development. That’s power that no single operator has ever held.

The mobile industry has evolved, but if Lagerling is speaking the truth, then the carriers haven’t evolved with it. That Bellhead, old-school telco mindset was in evidence at the U.S. mobile industry’s biggest show, CTIA Wireless. The show has been suffering for several years and I believe the main cause for its slow demise is its stubborn focus on carriers. The show simply hasn’t embraced the new reality.

To be fair, the disdain runs both ways. Most over-the-top (OTT) app developers view the operators as mere dumb pipes, which isn’t going to ingratiate with them Verizon and AT&T anytime soon. I’ve heard developers lament the loss of unlimited data plans like old hippies pining for the Summer of Love. Mobile carriers may be treating developers and platform providers like mere vendors supplying the nuts and bolts of their services, but the developers are treating operators like mere utilities into which they plug their apps.

The thing is carriers need developers a lot more than developers need the carriers. And the carriers know it. Wireless analyst Chetan Sharma sums up their conundrum quite eloquently in his latest U.S. market update:

We are at a critical juncture of the industry evolution. The OTT phenomenon is shifting the tectonic plates at a rapid pace. What seemed like a minor irritant only a few quarters back is become a nuisance virus that is eating away the core. Some operators have gone into panic mode while others have stepped back, assessed the situation, embraced it, and will try to exploit the opportunity. The truth of the matter is that the two biggest apps – voice and messaging didn’t really evolve a period of two decades. When the last big invention was interoperability and that too a decade ago, you know things are ripe for disruption. Thanks to the availability of always-on IP networks, new and nimble players are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Operators are now floating the idea of OTT providers fronting the costs of delivering their traffic over mobile broadband networks. (We may even see the first instance of it in the coming weeks from Verizon.) The operators are talking about revenue sharing, and “sharing” implies a partnership of equals.

“We’re not building a video game here,” Moriarty said. “It’s news, photos and text.”

For many news sites, HTML5 has become the default form of coding. Even if a publisher is pushing out a mobile app, it’s often an HTML app in a native wrapper. When deciding whether to follow an app or a Web browser model, the decision isn’t a technology one — native code versus HTML5 – instead, it’s a distribution decision, said Mark Johnson, CEO of news aggregator Zite.

For a startup or a company that doesn’t have a well-known brand, discoverability becomes key, so it’s necessary to stake a claim in platform app stores, Johnson said. But when it comes down to implementation Zite is basically building Web pages optimized with a native user interface. There’s far more flexibility in that approach: your Web developers suddenly don’t need to turn into Objective C programmers and you can modify your app on the server without pushing a complete update to the device, Johnson said.

As Zite builds up its own online brand (CNN acquired Zite last year), its dependence on the app store may lessen, but Johnson said the need for a slick UI will keep Zite app-store bound for some time. “People have a very high expectation of what the UI looks like,” he said. “You risk losing a lot of downloads if you forget the UI.”

The Washington Post is splitting the difference. It leans heavily on its own mobile apps, including its Facebook Social Reader, but it also has a big presence in the mobile browser. WaPo Labs chief strategist and editor-at-large Rob Malda agreed with Johnson that the Post has the advantage to leverage a huge well-respected news brand to drive traffic to the mobile Web site. “Discoverability is not a problem,” Malda said, but he added that the Post can just as easily use that same brand to nudge its readers to its apps and other digital media technologies.

Ultimately, whether the Post focuses on apps or the mobile Website, it will continue to lean heavily of HTML5 for its core development, Malda said. “I like the hybrid thing,” he said. “Laying out a newspaper – I don’t want to do that in native.”

HTML5 in a native wrapper has it’s limitations, as well. As my colleague Kevin Tofel has pointed out, the experience on the Facebook Android and iPhone apps sucks precisely because they’re HTML apps masquerading as natives. That led Kevin to start using accessing Facebook solely from his mobile browser where performance notably improved.

This post was updated to correct the name of the Boston Globe’s main news website, which is bostonglobe.com, not boston.com.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

“Rapidly converging technlogies accelerate the benefits of consumer delivery,” McQuivey said, and that benefit is digital content and entertainment. “It’s all about the software,” he said, because software services make the content easy to access across a wide number of devices, such as the 35 million e-readers also owned by consumers. “The big thing happening is a platform promise between device makers,  service providers and consumers.” That’s why the iPad is a hit: It’s a solid blend of hardware, software and ecosystem support.

This “platform promise” is bringing unprecedented use of devices for content, particularly with the iPad. Consumers are looking for a full package; not just a nice piece of hardware. And until others can offer that full, “everything” package, Apple will continue to lead. But don’t count out Microsoft, McQuivey said, given the 70 million Xbox 360 devices connected to televisions.

“The platform is the new throne where content reigns and content is king,” he notes. “And the platform promise can make or unmake a king at any time.” The iPad might be sitting on the throne now, but as competitors build up the promise of their platform, the game of thrones rages on.

Tablets: Not Just an iPad World

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

Verizon didn’t reveal any details about how this high-quality, long-form content would gel with its restricted data plans when the app launches later this month, but I suspect Viewdini may be Verizon’s first venture into the ‘toll-free’ mobile broadband: Rather than charge the customer for the gigabytes of video consumed, it charges the content provider.

Lately Verizon has been talking up the idea of reversing the mobile data business model (as has AT&T), giving its customers unlimited access to any video or over-the-top content service so long as the owner of the service pays the carriage charges. So far Verizon hasn’t implemented any specific policies – that we know of – but if it can secure the cooperation of content providers, it’s only a matter of time.

Viewdini would fit perfectly with that model because video consumes enormous bandwidth relative to other services. If Verizon customers were to make regular use of TV show and movie streaming they would quickly max out their data plans (or enter into throttling territory in the case of its grandfathered unlimited customers). Without any kind of tweak to Verizon’s capping policies, Viewdini practically invites customers to run up huge overage charges, which would hardly be a customer relations coup.

But the apps-charging structure provides a clue as to how Verizon might offer that pipe for free. “By simply searching for a title, topic, or star’s name, viewdini will let customers know which services have mobile video for streaming, and whether it is available  at no additional charge, by subscription, to rent or for purchase,” Verizon stated in its press release.

In each case, Verizon could skim a little from the top of each purchase, for instance collecting a portion of a movie rental or purchase fee. In the case of subscription video services like Hulu Plus or Netflix, Verizon could take a share of monthly revenue from every subscriber that used Viewdini or just charge the video providers flat per-gigabyte or per-stream fees.

Verizon plans to expand its initial line-up to movie studios and other TV sites. If it is able negotiate revenue sharing deals with every service it aggregates, Verizon could easily offer Viewdini as completely toll-free app.

That would make a lot of consumers happy, as they’d be free to stream away without worrying about their data caps, but it could have a chilling effect on the application developers. Netflix and Comcast may be able to afford bandwidth fees, but smaller companies may not be able to – especially if they’re offering up their content for free.

Comcast is already facing criticism that it’s running afoul of net neutrality rules for capping residential broadband data while giving a free ride to its own Xfinity traffic. But the net neutrality rules don’t apply wireless, so if Verizon wants to go the toll-free route, there’s nothing to stop it.

But, just as western digital music services like Spotify and Rdio are rolling out to new countries around the world, a similar Indian service, working over HTML5 and latest smartphones, shows India is growing a cloud-centric digital media market of its own.

Dhingana claims 10.5 million active monthly users for its mostly Hindi Bollywood movie soundtracks, boasts of serving over 100 million minutes of music per month and says its mobile apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and, yes, Nokia are downloaded 10,000 times each day.

The service may trade on an offering highly targeted for local tastes, but Dhingana is headquartered in Silicon Valley’s Sunnyvale. Founding brothers Snehal and Swapnil Shinde are product refugees from nearby Yahoo.

“There are two religions in India,” CEO Snehal (pictured, left) tells paidContent. “Bollywood and cricket.

“Unlike in the U.S., where these are two separate businesses, 99 percent of music in India is part of the movies. Hence, the opportunity in India is fivefold compared to the U.S..”

Whilst it may not sound like it, Dhingana, which means a joyous frenzy, certainly looks and feels every inch the modern online music service built in the valley…

Its in-web player remains on-screen as listeners move from page to page, while users can create and share playlists and can rate tracks. Feeding listeners’ habits out through Facebook’s graph  has seen users of the social network listen for double the time.

It could be Rdio, Deezer, Mog, or We7. But Dhingana has the local tunes and the existing market exposure – something western rivals should remember as they weigh whether to extend their current globalisation efforts to India. Dhingana’s 10.5 million active users compares with the 10 million Spotify last disclosed (though this is likely higher now).

Google already launched its first Google Music service, similarly focusing on Bollywood tunes, in India 2010, before doing so in the west in 2011. Other local operators include Nokia, 7digital and Saavn.

Despite the highly local repertoire, only 60 percent of Dhingana’s users are in India. Most of the remaining 40 percent are in America. Dhingana has global rights to stream Bollywood tracks from over 300 labels – rare simplicity in a music business fraught with fractured, territorial licensing.

So what are Dhingana’s prospects?

“The business model is similar to that of Pandora and Spotify,” Snehal Shinde tells paidContent.

“We expect 90 percent of our revenues from branded and premium advertising – banner, rich media, audio and video – and 10 percent via subscriptions.”

(In fact, the majority of Spotify’s revenue is subscriptions, not ads).

The 12-person outfit, which has offices in Pune, India, took a first funding round in February 2011 from Helion and Inventus. Breakeven is targeted for 2014, Shinde has previoulsy said (via MediaNama).

“We will start ramping up our revenue efforts starting Q3 of 2012,” Shinde tells paidContent, without detailing.

“On the content side, we plan to go even deeper into each language and continue to have the biggest legal Indian music content.”

The world’s hottest music markets: a digital map:

Amazon already sells ad-supported Kindles at a discount. The cheapest Kindle is $79 with ads or $99 without. The Kindle Touch WiFi is $99 with ads or $139 without. The Kindle Touch 3G is $149 with ads or $189 without.

AdAge cites executives who seem uncertain about whether the ads Amazon wants them to buy would be used on a discounted Kindle Fire or just thrown onto the regular version. One unidentified exec says, “You’re already paying a premium for the product and then having that unexpected ad experience makes for a worse consumer experience. There needs to be a value exchange.”

Amazon has likely already thought of that. The company prides itself on customer service above almost anything else, and it probably wouldn’t start including ads on the Kindle Fire without a widely promoted discounted price. The Kindle Fire software is probably already able to support ads (since on the ad-supported Kindle e-readers you can pay $30 to turn the ads off) so Amazon wouldn’t have to launch an entirely new Kindle Fire model to have it be ad-supported.

All the company has to do is decide how much cheaper an ad-supported Kindle Fire will be. The Kindle Fire is $199 now. The company could knock off $30 or go for a bigger discount in preparation for the 2nd-generation Kindle Fire rumored to launch later this year.

Urban Airship (see disclosure below) is investing big in its infrastructure, scaling its push messaging service to deliver 100,000 messages in a single second. As Airship begins to refine push marketing to take into account location, time and context, it becomes of critical that the company not only deliver massive volumes of messages simultaneously, but also to deliver them in as near real-time as possible, according to the company.

In Urban Airship’s blog, Director of Architecture and Delivery Erik Onnen wrote that the company has quadrupled its capacity and is now capable of pushing simultaneous IP missives to huge gatherings of people, a feature that will come in handy when Airship launches its Segments service this quarter. Using technology from its SimpleGeo acquisition last year, Airship will be able to customize push updates based on location and prioritize based on relevancy.

“Specifically, we now have the capability to send a message in one second to every fan seated in the biggest stadium in college football, Michigan Stadium,” Onnen wrote in the blog.

Coincidently ESPN happens to be one of Urban Airship’s biggest customers, so the example is quite apt. At CTIA I sat down with Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke and he explained that context and speed will be both key to both Airship’s future and the evolution of IP push beyond a mere marketing and notification tool. He said AirBnB uses Airship’s push for closing room transactions, so it’s critical that messages move at the speed of negotiation.

In the football example, a sports media brand like ESPN, which sends millions of score and news updates a day, could send you a completely different set of stats and information if the app was aware you were actually a spectator at a game, Hieggelke said. A Michigan fan might have set his preferences to receive updates every time a touchdown is scored. But if actually present at the game the app could automatically feed him play-by-play info and player profiles. Because the customer is experiencing the game firsthand, it’s of vital importance that the update is immediate, Hieggelke said.

“The possibilities are endless,” Hieggelke said. “The New York Times could detect I’ve left Portland and have arrived in New York and start sending me local restaurant reviews. Walgreens can detect you’re near a pharmacy and have a prescription that needs to be refilled. It then sends you an alert.”

Urban Airship just pushed its 20 billionth notification, and its growth trajectory is only getting steeper. To achieve that kind of scale, Airship is doing a lot of tinkering with its HBase and Hadoop database and analytics platforms. It’s rolling out new elements – with codenames like Gooey Buttercake and Metalstorm (my favorite) – that will manage associations between applications, devices and tags; parse location and presence information for millions of users; and assemble that information along with data from multiple outside databases into the notifications themselves. (If you’re curious, Onnen goes into much more detail in the blog post.)

Keeping the push name unsullied

In my conversation with Hieggelke, he also revealed that Urban Airship plans to start an industry education initiative called Good Push with the aim of reining in bad marketing practices using IP messaging technologies.

“For instance, location has been talked for a while as walking through a mall and having offers pushed to you left and right,” Hieggelke said. “That’s a terrible idea. We need to establish a certain level of trust.”

Push messaging is still a relatively new format, and it doesn’t yet carry the negative associations most customers have with other digital marketing formats like e-mail or pop-up ads. When downloading an app and prompted to allow push updates to an app, most customers give permission. But an increasing number of apps are abusing the practice, though Hieggelke wouldn’t name names.

It’s easy to guess at the biggest offenders. There’s been an increasing backlash against companies like Airpush that send ads directly to an Android smartphone’s notification bar, often without even referencing the installed app that’s generating the ad. The danger here is that questionable and covert practices like these will sully the entire push marketing ecosystem. The worst thing that could happen is if consumers start automatically refusing permission to apps to receive updates, Hieggelke said.

“If the consumer starts thinking of this like spam, it’s a shame because it’s such a powerful and useful tool,” Hieggelke said.

So far Good Push is only in its infancy. Airship is working with the Mobile Marketing Association to create a set of best practices for marketers, that Hieggelke hopes will establish a baseline standard for the industry.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.