Kyte on Android

White-label video vendor Kyte is expanding the number of mobile platforms that its customers can distribute videos to, with the upcoming launch of new application frameworks for Android and Nokia mobile devices.

The new app frameworks are designed to make publishing videos from Kyte’s management platform into mobile applications as easy as possible. With these frameworks, the company enables its customers to build native mobile apps with features such as real-time chat, comments, ratings, and the ability to share across multiple social networking platforms.

“Our customers can take a Kyte channel and deliver it as a fully branded mobile app very quickly, and there will only be an incremental increase in cost, as opposed to the cost of building and launching a standalone iPhone app,” says Kyte COO Gannon Hall.

With existing app frameworks for video on iPhone and Blackberry devices, Kyte will soon be able to easily create apps and send videos to four leading mobile platforms. The company also supports video distribution through the mobile web.

Adding support for more mobile platforms plays to the company’s strengths; While other online video platform (OVP) vendors focus primarily on live and on-demand video distribution online, Kyte has tried to differentiate itself with advanced mobile and social features.

Rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures is allowing its fans to stream its new album a week ahead of release, using YouTube as the preferred method of delivery.

The group, which consists of drummer Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters and Nirvana), keyboardist and bass guitarist John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), and vocalist and guitarist Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), has posted all 13 tracks from its upcoming self-titled album on the video site. The songs are also available through an embedded YouTube video player on the band’s official site.

Surprisingly enough, there are no advertisements associated with the YouTube page, other than a pre-order link running across the top banner of the page. A YouTube representative said the company was not involved in the creation of the band’s page.

The fact that the group is posting its songs without associated videos — just static album art — on YouTube marks a bit of a reversal in the way musicians and recording companies approach the omnipresent video site. Many recording companies have used YouTube’s Content ID video-fingerprinting scheme to take down videos or kill the audio tracks of music videos posted without the rights owner’s permission. But that approach has gradually softened, with more content owners using the tool to co-opt and monetize copyrighted music videos posted by YouTube users.

The release also comes as YouTube puts its weight behind Vevo, a joint venture with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment that is designed to create a safe, well-lit place for music videos that the companies hope to monetize.

Them Crooked Vultures did not post the album on its MySpace page, despite the social network being seen as the “go-to-place” for musicians to interact with their fans.

As part of the launch of its 40th anniversary season today, Sesame Street debuted a new series called Abby’s Flying Fairy School featuring a computer-generated version of one of its Muppets. New Jersey animation studio SpeakeasyFX developed 136 minutes worth of animation centered around Muppet Abby Cadabby and a set of new Muppet friends, who fly and even go underwater — near-impossible feats for the long tradition of hand-driven live-action Muppet puppets.

Plus, the CG content — made entirely using Autodesk’s Softimage, according to Speakeasy — wasn’t just developed for TV. In tandem with the 13 segments to be aired and repeated on Sesame Street throughout the season, Speakeasy created content for a choose-your-own-adventure game for kids to play on Sesame Street’s web site. The first game, to be released Dec. 9, is called “Sleeping Bloggy,” about a character who’s part fairy, part troll.

Computer-generated content on Sesame Street comes in a day and age when nearly every kids’ movie seems to be in the Pixar mold. “There’s always a need and an urge to contemporize the show,” said Christine Evans of Sesame Workshop in a phone interview. She would not disclose the relative budget for a CG project versus typical projects for the show but said it was “a big investment on Sesame’s part.”

Scott Stewart, executive director at SpeakeasyFX, said the year-and-a-half project centered on creating a parallel universe to the live-action world. “We tried to distill down the essence of what makes a muppet,” he said. Part of what worked involved building each model as if it was actually being manipulated by a hand inside a Muppet.

A video preview is embedded above. Here’s the preschool-oriented concept: “Abby Cadabby, along with an eclectic gang of new friends, attends Fairy School with Mrs. Sparklenose. Abby and her friends solve problems using rhyme, reason and cooperation.” Sounds just like my life!

I apologize in advance if the tone of this review comes off as frustrated, but here’s the deal: I should love How It Should Have Ended, a recently relaunched series of movie satires produced by Starz Digital. Targeting major blockbusters, the series purports to offer “new” endings for big movies like Terminator and Braveheart. Using relatively well-executed Flash animation to recreate the films, it also mocks them: The director of The Blair Witch Project yelling at his heroine for dropping the camera, for example, or the eponymous Borat thanking America for giving him a dump truck of money. That sort of thing. It’s the kind of satire that usually hits the sweet spot for pop culture nerds like myself. However, as good an idea as it is and as solid as the execution might be, there’s something slightly off about these shorts.

Part of it comes down to the fact that they typically fail to live up to their premise. Take, for example, the Terminator short, which finds some clever gags in splicing together the entire Terminator franchise with Back to the Future (setting the Terminator loose in the world of 1955 Hill Valley being the source of most of them). But even looking past the fact that it structures itself as a trailer and not a traditional “final scene,” it’s still just a bit too long and a bit too ham-fisted in its humor. And it fails to really mock what’s actually dumb about the latest Terminator installment — which, speaking as someone who paid money to see it opening night, is a huge disappointment.

How It Should Have Ended is at its best when it’s actually pointing out inconsistencies in plot and overlooked ideas — such as with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which suffers from pacing problems but still gets in some well-aimed barbs about that film’s poorly constructed plot and characters. Or the Lord of the Rings spoof, which offers up with a much more efficient solution for destroying Sauron’s ring than walking around Mordor for nine hours of screen time.

Of course, the Terminator spoof has done very well on YouTube, racking up 1.2 million views over the last month, which is fortunate for the HISHE guys, as it was their first short following a year-long production hiatus (prior to said hiatus, their videos regularly received millions of views). After producing shorts on a sporadic basis since July 2005, they’ve recommitted to a monthly release schedule. The newest HISHE is a Transformers 2 spoof that isn’t quite as well-executed as previous episodes — the animation on Megan Fox’s running legs is pretty atrocious — but is at least closer to the tone of the original premise.

So, despite this uneven history, it’s probably worth continuing to check out this series. If only because 2012, the only major blockbuster coming out this month, begs to be mocked, and these guys might be just the ones to fix that film’s ending.

Sorry, TechCrunch, but Netflix isn’t the bunch of ninnies that you’re making it out to be.

At issue is the possible 30-day delay on new release movies Netflix is willing to accept from Hollywood studios in exchange for lower acquisition costs. According to a Video Business report last week, Netflix has been negotiating with studios to try and get as much as half shaved off the price of films to compensate for the delay in receiving new movies.

Much of TechCrunch’s coverage of the news talks about how a release window will only drive people to piracy. That’s a fair point, but the piece’s characterization of Netflix is a little short-sighted:

What’s really befuddling is that Netflix lacks the vision to see thorough this BS. They don’t seem to realize that longterm it’s going to screw them too. While new movies may not be as core to their business as they are to Redbox (which is suing many of the studios to stop something like this), new movies are the sexy lures that bring in new business.

To be sure, release windows suck from a consumer standpoint. But Netflix hardly lacks vision. On the contrary: It’s losing the DVD battle in order to win the overall streaming war.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has talked about how kiosk-based rentals like those from Redbox are Netflix’s primary competition. Hollywood is split on Redbox and kiosk rental; studios like Sony, Lionsgate and Paramount are for (and are working with) Redbox, while Fox, NBC Universal and Warner Bros. are against it.

The anti-Redbox camp wants to impose a 30-day new release window on Redbox. Redbox relies more on new releases than Netflix, which says that 70 percent of its business comes from its older title business. Kiosks by their nature are smaller and can’t hold a massive library of movies.

Netflix stated in its last earnings call that it was all for a “sales only” window before movies became available for rental. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that. If Netflix can push the release window idea and slow down Redbox’s rapid growth with little (apparent) impact on Netflix’s core business, well, why not?

But Netflix’s move extends beyond the physical DVD.

Netflix claims that 42 percent of its 11.1 million subscribers streamed content in the third quarter vs. 22 percent in the same period the year before. Meanwhile, an outside survey found that 54 percent of Netflix subscribers stream at least one movie or TV show per month. So the number of people streaming content is growing.

The problem with Netflix’s current streaming offering is its small content library, and the company has said over and over how it plans to invest more heavily in acquiring titles for streaming. If Netflix can negotiate half off its acquisition of DVDs, it can funnel that money into acquiring content for streaming to bulk up its library as the streaming service expands to more devices.

That doesn’t mean Netflix will suddenly get new releases to stream. The company is sticking with its subscription model instead of an electronic sell-through one, which naturally limits its ability to get newer releases. But if it can create a massive library of on-demand titles and secure more premium content, its subscription streaming offering would become even more compelling and Netflix would maintain a dominant role in the over-the-top video world.

At the end of the day, Hastings is neither stupid nor blind. Perhaps he’ll shed some light on his thinking during his talk at our NewTeeVee Live conference this Thursday.

Many classic sitcoms — Cosby, Roseanne, Seinfeld — were built around a comedian’s standup routine. Today, though, Twitter is the new Chuckle Hut, thanks to CBS’s pick-up of the Twitter account S— My Dad Says (new TV-safe title TBD).

Adapting SMDS as a sitcom makes sense because what creator Justin Halpern does is use each Twitter update as a 140-character character portrait of his father, a man almost Archie Bunker-ish in his crassness — and exactly the sort of modern curmudgeon you can imagine building a sitcom around. The folks developing Texts From Last Night for Fox, meanwhile, have a much tougher gig on their hands, as that site is just a compilation of drunken mistakes. (Funny drunken mistakes, but whatever.)

It’s easy to look at something popular on the Internet and say “Hey, we should exploit that for TV.” But I’ll make my wager now that of these two ideas, it’s SMDS that will actually make it to broadcast — because no amount of Internet buzz can replace a good character and/or story.

MySpace will exclusively host a live-stream of the red carpet activities before the premiere of the new Twilight Saga installment, New Moon, the site announced today. The video goes live at 6 p.m. PT on Monday, Nov. 16.

Can we just say, if the Internet were ever to break under the stress of it all, you can bet the cause would be a lethal combination of Twilight and live video. Which stars will bring which other stars as their dates to the New Moon? Heck, the whole world might come to an end.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Trailer and Premiere Announcement

New Moon Premiere | MySpace Video

MySpace said it will pick one lucky fan to co-host red carpet interviews alongside Anya Marina, writer and performer of the song Satellite Heart from the New Moon soundtrack. Other fans will be able to participate via questions posed online to the stream and later, live chats with the cast during the film’s opening week (it actually comes out to the public Nov. 20).

Red carpets are the hot new category in live-streaming events, with the premiere of Michael Jackson’s This Is It drawing 1.8 million viewers late last month. Though as we’ve said in the past, live access to the red carpet is a painful tease as Internet fans always get cut off when the event actually starts.

We’ve been impressed with MySpace’s smooth and high-quality live streaming for previous events like Michael Jackson’s memorial service, but don’t recall who its previous tech partners were. The New Moon red carpet will be outsourced to Ustream, which is not always the best quality but tends to be reliable (so probably a good choice given the potential volume of interest for a Twilight exclusive). A representative for MySpace said the site was able to get the red carpet live stream exclusively due to a larger deal between MySpace and Summit Entertainment for New Moon that includes extensive promotion on the site’s movies, music and video sections as well as its homepage.

Dish Network has filed for trademark protection of “TV Everywhere,” as the satellite company is evidently looking to use the term for its upcoming Slingbox-enabled set-top box, reports Multichannel News.

“TV Everywhere” has become the industry’s go-to term for describing multi-service operators’ plans to make more premium TV content accessible online to those with a pay TV subscription. Though individual companies will have their own branded flavor of TV Everywhere, the moniker has become a catch-all.

When the broader industry uses the term “TV Everywhere” it describes a relationship between the multi-service operator and its programming partners to deliver content across multiple screens. In Dish’s case, it’s Sling-enabled set-top boxes allow people to placeshift their live or DVRd content.

Last month, EchoStar, which sells hardware and satellite services, started pitching its Sling-based set-top solution to cable companies. According to EchoStar, the placeshifting technology would give MSO subscribers TV Everywhere without the MSO needing to get into all of those agreements with the programmers.

Dish filed for the TV Everywhere trademark with the USPTO on Sept. 17, and the filing covers “television transmission services” and “providing access to electronic sites for remote access, recording, and viewing of television programming via personal computers, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and laptop computers.”

Trademark or no, we’re still going to use the term “TV Everywhere” a lot at this week’s NewTeeVee Live conference.

Mobile live-streaming service Qik announced today that you can download its app for the Droid phone from the Android Marketplace, and sign up for early beta access to a high-res version of the Qik client for the Droid that can capture videos in DVD resolution (720×480). The company says it’s the first live mobile provider to enable DVD-quality video capture.

Qik has also improved its capabilities to help users create shortcuts to make sharing Qik-created videos with your contacts or social media sites faster.

In the battle between the iPhone and the Droid, the Droid wins on the live-streaming front because, well, it actually streams live video. The iPhone lets you record video for uploading later.

After being acquired for a song by Arris in Sept., Digeo released the latest in a string of improvements to its product portfolio today, starting with an HD DVR that can stream live or recorded video to up to three rooms in a user’s home.

In the latest update to the Moxi brand of products, Digeo added a new three-tuner HD DVR, which will allow consumers to record up to three programs at once, while having the ability to watch a fourth recorded program. Or, when combined with the company’s Moxi Mate products, users can now watch up to three live or recorded shows from different rooms in the house.

The ability to stream live programming to the Moxi Mate is also a new addition, correcting one of the biggest things missing from the product. Prior to the latest release, users could only watch pre-recorded programs through their Moxi Mates.

With the addition of new products and functionality, Digeo is lowering the price of its two-tuner Moxi HD DVR to $499, from its previous $799 price point. The company also reduced the cost of the Moxi Mate digital video player from $399 to $299.

However, the three-tuner HD DVR can only be purchased as part of a two-room or three-room bundle. For $799, consumers can purchase a three-tuner Moxi HD DVR and a Moxi Mate that will extend live or recorded programming to a second room in the house. Or they can spend $999 for a three-tuner HD DVR and two Moxi Mates.

This is the third update that Digeo has announced for the product line this year, after adding support for Internet video from sites like Hulu and YouTube in the spring, and announcing the availability of multiroom DVR viewing with the Moxi Mate line over the summer.

Frank Eliason, whose work connecting directly to Comcast consumers on Twitter helped “change the culture of our company,” in the words of CEO Brian Roberts, will be appearing at NewTeeVee Live in San Francisco this Thursday. Eliason’s session is actually a Comcast-sponsored workshop that is separate from Chris’ and my editorial programming of the conference, though we’re totally psyched about it. Comcast says of the session, to be held at 10:30 a.m., “Frank will handle requests live from NewTeeVee and talk about the evolution of social media and customer service.” This one won’t be live-streamed, so if you want to talk to Frank, you’ve got to come to the show.

By the way, if you notice that we’re all-Comcast-all-the-time lately, it’s for a couple of reasons. On the news side, the cable giant is unavoidable, with its proposed NBC Universal joint venture and TV Everywhere trials. But just so it’s clear, we wanted to disclose that the reason the Comcast logo is sprinkled all across the top of our page is because of a sponsorship takeover package they generously signed up for this week.

Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove’s CEO, and I wrote an open letter in January 2008 to the consumer electronics industry that argued for a strategy to get Internet video to TV sets. We made the case that the best approach would be a set of open industry standards similar to the web, but geared to the unique experience of traditional TV.

Apparently the letter was lost in the mail.

Two years later, the consumer electronics industry continues to stumble forward without a real plan. We all want Internet video on our TV, so the question stands: How is it going to happen?

We are moving into a world of Internet-connected TVs (ICTV), in the form of both traditional TVs connected through a networked device (DVD player, computer, set-top box, game console, etc.) and TVs that come with their own built-in micro-computer and Internet connectivity. While most manufacturers are still fantasizing about replicating the success of Apple’s walled music Eden, the iPod/iTunes approach will fail; no single device and software system is going to win the battle for the living room. As a result, content distributors and publishers will have to find ways to get their content onto a wide range of ICTV systems.

Since the consumer electronics industry has not embraced traditional open standards, we are going to end up with the next best approach: a few default standards driven by open source efforts. These “media center platforms” (MCP) will give publishers and developers a way to build experiences and deliver content across multiple Internet-connected TVs. With any luck, the major consumer electronics manufactures will pick one or two of these software platforms and not make every experience proprietary. (Fingers crossed on this.)

The MCP market is already gaining momentum, and it creates a fresh patch of fertile ground for startups. XBMC, which was originally introduced as the Xbox Media Center, has emerged as an open source effort with decent traction. Boxee is the most high profile example of a commercialized version of XBMC. Adobe could easily resurrect Adobe Media Player as an MCP, as well. Undoubtedly there will be others as the race gains momentum.

But along with the MCP vendors, everyone else wants a slice of the new value chain, including broadband providers (e.g., Verizon), TV manufacturers (e.g., Sony), the content producers/owners (e.g., Viacom), the content aggregators (e.g., Hulu), the advertising networks and the existing social networks (e.g., Facebook). The fight is on.

The road to Internet TV nirvana is starting to come into focus, even if it still looks a little like a scene from Mad Max. As the new stack of hardware and software technologies settles into the place, the next question will be: Is there a killer app for Internet-connected TVs beyond simply delivering more TV?

Adam Berrey is the former SVP of Marketing and Strategy for Brightcove. He is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at General Catalyst (a Boxee investor) looking for the next big thing in renewable energy, and a blogger at www.startupblender.com.

Joe and Kris Swanberg’s Young American Bodies, a cult hit and one of the great early pioneers in web-distributed drama, has been peeking in on the lives of the young and sexually active since 2005, providing a semi-scripted take on the tangled romances of a group of 20-something Chicagoeans. The decidedly NSFW series, distributed originally through Nerve, launched its fourth season today exclusively on IFC.com; I spoke with Joe Swanberg via phone about his approach to sexuality, his “fantastic” deals with Nerve and IFC, the show’s future, and the increasingly inaccurate title. An edited transcript follows.

NewTeeVee: Young American Bodies has always been known for its frank inclusion of nudity and sexuality. How has the adult content been a part of the show’s evolution?

Joe Swanberg: When we pitched Nerve in 2005, the model we were working on was a show that had a lot of realistic sexual content and a lot of realistic exploration of issues with parents and friends and whatever else. And as it’s evolved [the sexual content]’s remained important to us just because everybody’s sex lives are changing too, with commitment coming into it, and people getting older and thinking about having kids and stuff like that. Your reasons for having sex are starting to change.

There was an HBO show called Tell Me You Love Me that was kind of like this, but it was so bleak. I think that’s generally the way sex has been treated on TV. Like, if you’re going to portray sex realistically, you have to take it super-seriously. So the thing that separates Young American Bodies from like pornography on one side and Tell Me You Love Me on the other side is that it’s not always really serious. It’s able to be really serious or funny or awkward or stupid, all those shades in between that I don’t think TV wants to deal with.

We’ve been lucky in a sense, because we fit perfectly with Nerve and what they were doing then, and then it was great that IFC was bold enough to take us on and get the show out to a much bigger audience than Nerve did.

NewTeeVee: How did the switch from Nerve to IFC happen?

Swanberg: I think Nerve and IFC have always had some sort of relationship or advertising partnership; they seemed really familiar with each other. So the first two seasons were exclusively on Nerve, and then for the third season IFC came in and co-produced it. They basically paid for the third season, but kind of in a roundabout way through Nerve, so [new episodes would] premiere on IFC first and then on Nerve the next day.

Nerve is great, but there’s a much different staff there now than there was when we first started. So with this fourth season I just went straight to the people at IFC and was like, look, I don’t even know who the people at Nerve are anymore, so let’s just keep this relationship going.

NewTeeVee: Have there ever been any product placement or sponsorship issues you’ve had to contend with?

Swanberg: No, never. We got money from Nerve and we made the show with that; now we get money from IFC and we make the show with that. There’s never been any internal sponsorship. IFC does put commercials before the shows, but we’ve always thankfully been left out of that side of it. The show has a lot of sexual content but it’s not extreme about it; I think that would be where we would run into issues, if we tried to put some crazy sex stuff into the show.

So the sponsorship thing is their deal and the making the show thing is our deal. And that’s fantastic. That’s how it should be. We just get money from them and are left to our own devices. We give them rough cuts and there are notes, but we’ve never been strong-armed to do anything. Nerve was even more hands-off; they would just let us do whatever we want. But they were giving us less money, so I think they could afford to be more hands-off.

IFC has been really great about getting YAB out to a wide audience. I mean, the thing about Nerve is that it’s a sex site — a smart, interesting sex site, but still a sex site. But IFC is the Independent Film Channel; it’s a destination for anyone who’s interested in independent or alternative things. I think that’s brought in a lot of casual viewers who might not have been interested in Nerve content.

NewTeeVee: Can you comment publicly on what your budget is like?

Swanberg: At this point with IFC, it’s like a couple thousand bucks an episode.

NewTeeVee: What’s it been like juggling the web series with your work in features?

Swanberg: It’s been good — basically the web series serves as a project I can fit in between the features. It keeps a camera in my hands and keeps me active. For me and Kris it’s also one of our main sources of income. Often the money from YAB goes directly into the features. But I consider YAB just as important a part of my body of work as the features.

NewTeeVee: Previous seasons of YAB have run eight to 12 episodes — what’s behind the decision to do a slightly shorter season this time?

Swanberg: Our feeling is we’d rather do six episodes and then do another six in a few months, rather than do 12 and have a year-long gap between them. When we’ve done 12 we’ve been so exhausted by the end of it that we’re always like, “Never again.” This is the first time when I’ve finished a season and feel like we have more stories to tell and more interesting things to shoot.

NewTeeVee: Do you have a target release date for the next six?

Swanberg: We’ll probably start working on them next spring, so probably sometime next summer. My perfect schedule would be six episodes every six months.

NewTeeVee: Given how long the series has lasted already, it definitely seems like it has that kind of longevity.

Swanberg: Yeah, we’re up for doing it as long as people are interested in watching it. I think the title Young American Bodies is gonna be a little silly if we’re well into our 30s, but that’s one of the nice things about the episodic format vs. feature films, is the ability to follow characters for a really long time. It’s one of my favorite things about television, feeling like you’re growing up alongside characters — your life is changing as their lives are changing.

I would love to do it for another 10 years. As long as all of our schedules permit and as long as everyone remains interested, we’ll keep going with it. The only threat is that as our actors start getting married and having kids, no one’s going to want to keep on doing a web series where they have fake sex with other people. That will be ultimately what spells the demise of the show — everyone feeling like “enough of this.”

NewTeeVee: What do you think has been the key to making YAB successful and sustainable?

Swanberg: I think people are interested in seeing other people going through the same problems that they have. Hopefully there are moments where people keep tuning in because they recognize themselves in them. The show is not for everybody. But the people who have liked it and are still tuning in have identified themselves with one of these characters, and have found someone else who sees the world the way they do.

“TV Everywhere,” the set of new initiatives to make subscription programming available online exclusively to current pay-TV subscribers, could effect the most far-reaching change in the television industry since the introduction of cable. Like community-antenna TV (CATV), as cable was originally known, TV Everywhere has the potential not only to change the way people access television content but to radically reorder the relationship between programmers and distributors.

Its success is far from assured, however. TV Everywhere faces a number of technical and economic hurdles that will need to be overcome before its full impact can be felt, as I detail in a study released today by GigaOM Pro (subscription required) in connection with this Thursday’s NewTeeVee Live conference.

The technical challenges concern authentication, as NewTeeVee readers are likely aware, but also authorization. Given the large number of cable systems in the U.S., and the multitude of specific programming packages to which a person can subscribe, some method for mapping a user’s cable or satellite subscription package to particular pieces of content hosted on various web sites will be essential.

From a technical perspective, in fact, it’s likely to prove an even knottier problem than the issue of authentication, where at least some specific proposals are already being batted around, because authorization is likely to require a degree of data-sharing on subscribers that will no doubt make some service providers uneasy.

From a business perspective, though, authorization may be more important than the authentication piece, because it will directly affect the bottom lines of both service providers and programmers. As I explain in the report:

[U]nless individual subscription plans can be mapped to specific video assets hosted on multiple sites, TV Everywhere could be ripe for abuse. Why pay your cable provider for a premium programming tier, for instance, if a basic subscription can grant access to online resources containing both basic and premium content?

Economic Hurdles Ahead

Beyond the technical challenges, however, the most vexing questions facing TV Everywhere are economic. Is there a business model to sustain the incremental costs of making the vast library of pay-TV content available for streaming and maintaining the authentication system?

For now, cable MSOs are planning to offer TV Everywhere as a value-added service to their subscribers at no additional cost. That may be fine as long as subscribers are using the same MSO’s broadband service to access content online. But it may be less than fine when subscribers want to access their cable channels outside the home, like on their laptops while traveling or using a wireless handheld device.

Beyond that is TV Everywhere’s potential to shake up the relationship between cable programmers and distributors. With retransmission fees increasingly vital to programmers, it’s hard to imagine they won’t look to hike those costs as cable and satellite providers seek to distribute the content online, adding further heat to what often have been tense negotiations.

Programmers may be compelled to seek higher fees for the additional exploitation rights to comply with talent deals, collective bargaining agreements with the creative guilds, music clearances and other contractual obligations involved in producing TV programming.

The report offers a comprehensive overview of all TV Everywhere trials being conducted by major MVPDs and analyzes the strategic and business-model issues confronting programmers and service providers as they try to respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by digital distribution platforms. It also addresses questions related to audience measurement on digital platforms and potential regulatory developments that will affect how TV Everywhere ultimately evolves.

Paul Sweeting is an analyst for GigaOM Pro and author of the latest report, “TV Everywhere.” Attendees of NewTeeVee Live will receive a free copy of the report via email; others can access it by subscribing to GigaOM Pro directly.

1 vs. 100, the interactive trivia hybrid video game/show from Microsoft Xbox LIVE and Endemol, is one of the best examples we’ve seen so far of real-time entertainment. We’ve devoted more than a few words to the show’s first season, with an extended profile for our GigaOM Pro subscription service. If you missed out, or are raring to play again, we now have an appointment for the launch of season two: Nov. 19 at 5 p.m. PT. As we wrote in September:

What’s significant about “1 vs. 100″ is that it combines one of the best aspects of a TV show — the moment of people joining together simultaneously to watch a live event unfold — with the best of a video game — interactivity and competition. And because “1 vs. 100″ piggybacks on Xbox Live, it’s incredibly popular, making it a shining early example of a massive communal participatory experience.

Microsoft also said today that the 14-week second season will be accompanied by “1 vs. 100 Extended Play” weeknight trivia on topics like song lyrics and vampires. The first season of 1 vs. 100 had a high of 114,000 simultaneous players in North America, with close to 3 million downloads and an average of seven live games played per user.

Forrester Research is bringing some visibility to the fast-growing market online video platform (OVP) market with a new report issued Friday. But while some OVP competitors got positive marks for their offerings, the vast majority of players were noticeably absent from the research.

“The Forrester Wave: US Online Video Platforms” ranked a handful of OVP vendors according to 37 criteria that could be broken down into three “high-level buckets”: current offering, strategy, and market presence.

Brightcove and Ooyala both ranked favorably in the report, and both issued press releases touting their rankings as “leaders” of the OVP segment. But there’s only one problem — Forrester evaluated only six vendors (Brightcove, Fliqz, Kaltura, Ooyala, Twistage, and VMIX), overlooking a large percentage of the overall market.

That’s not to say that Brightcove and Ooyala don’t measure up well against competing offerings. Brightcove is clearly the early leader in the space, and Ooyala has gotten a good amount of buzz and attention since it launched two years ago. (NewTeeVee also sees good things for Ooyala, naming the company to our Next Big Thing List for our NewTeeVee Live conference this week.)

But clearly there’s more competition than the Forrester report lets on. Research firm CDN Quote tracks 62 white-label video management providers; VidCompare, which calls itself a “free comparison service for business decision makers looking for an online video platform provider,” tracks 60 OVP companies. With just six platforms evaluated in its report, Forrester is missing out on the vast majority of companies operating in the space.

In a blog post, Forrester analyst Bobby Tulsiani defends the narrow scope of the report, stating:

“While the number of companies in the space is certainly larger than six, we decided to focus on a set of vendors that serve a variety of clients, regardless of size or industry.  For that reason, some vendors that primarily focus on high end media companies, such as Digitalsmiths, The Platform, or Move Networks were not included.”

Fair enough. Not everyone has the need for the type of all-encompassing, TV Everywhere-type video offering that is being pitched by companies like thePlatform or ExtendMedia.

But there’s no explanation for why Forrester left out companies like Delve Networks, Episodic, KIT Digital, Kyte, Unicorn Media, or any number of other OVP players that serve media and enterprise customers, and offer similar services to those that were included in the report. (Note: I fully expect a rash of emails asking why I didn’t include the other 50 or so vendors in this story.)

The good news is that a report like this, from a leading analyst firm, brings attention to an increasingly competitive space like the white-label video management market. The bad news is that by including only a small number of players competing in that space, the report overlooks just how competitive the segment has become.