Despite tackling a diverse set of web video projects, from encoding to monetization to content production, the 10 companies chosen for our “NewTeeVee’s Next Big Thing” list all have one thing in common: They are rapidly gaining traction in emerging and increasingly important aspects of the business. And so we’ve put our trust in them to see into the future. At NewTeeVee Live, our third-annual conference on Nov. 12 in San Francisco, each company from the list will offer one prediction about the future of video. Taken together, their forecasts will provide a layered and thorough look at where we’re all headed.

The 10 companies we’ve chosen for this honor affirm our conviction that online video has a promising future as a business. Join us at NewTeeVee Live to hear what they have to say in person — tickets are available now. In the meantime, here (in alphabetical order) are our picks. If you think we’ve left someone particularly deserving out (and we undoubtedly have given that our limit was 10), please tell us in the comments.

• 3ality Digital
• Boxee
• Demand Studios
• Electric Farm Entertainment
• Elemental Technologies
• FreeWheel
• GestureTek
• Inlet Technologies
• Ooyala
• Visible Measures

“For a long time, people have been moving away from TV — we’re trying to reaggregate that audience,” said NBC.com general manager Steve Andrade. He was speaking on a panel Wednesday in North Hollywood as a nominee for the interactive media Emmy awards. NBC dominated the honorees — it seems to have this digital Emmy thing down — accounting for four of the six nominees, with one of the remaining going to sister channel Bravo’s Top Chef. So, what is NBC Universal doing right on the web?

For one thing, it sounds like NBC has made digital a much more integrated part of the whole series life cycle, from story development to sales. It’s been a learning process, Andrade explained, and only after years of experimenting online are things now normalizing. The network has had success online with The Office in particular, which was kept on the air in the early days in some part due to its popularity on iTunes. Plus, the show runners are getting younger and more digital-savvy, said Andrade and his NBC compatriots. For example, Dan Harmon, executive producer of new NBC show Community, was a co-creator of the Channel 101 web series festival. For him, webisodes just come naturally.

NBC’s four interactive media Emmy nominees this year are its “digital experiences” surrounding Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live, The Office and 30 Rock. The winner will be announced with the rest of the Emmys later this year.

Andrade said that NBC.com has been able to operate as a successful business by combining forces with NBC sales. Advertisers are able to buy across both TV and the web, gluing back together the audience that has splintered off into different viewing habits and mediums. And NBC.com now has a track record of working with repeat advertisers like Sprint. Andrade said the network has moved away from worrying about making content for a particular device — smartphones, TV widgets — because it’s too often an expensive diversion. The emphasis now is on centralizing output in order to recruit an audience — “anything that makes people watch in real time is a good thing,” he said.

It all comes back to The Office, Carole Angelo, NBC Universal VP of digital content and development, said on Wednesday’s panel. Because many of the actors on the show are also writers, it comes naturally for them to play their characters online — for example, the characters Kelly Kapoor and Ryan Howard, played by Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak, now play out their on-again, off-again relationship in real-time on Twitter.

For the coming season, NBC will be launching Twitter accounts for characters on 30 Rock, said Angelo. The network now has a practice by which junior writers can test out the voice of show characters by portraying them online and “extending the creative fiction of the show,” she said. It’s not possible to control everything that goes out to social media — especially when it comes to actors like the popular Twitterer and Office star Rainn Wilson — but “shows know to check because they will get slapped down if they go rogue,” said Angelo.

The Office also just wrapped another webisode series, due later this year, which gives more minor characters a chance to shine and cast members a chance to direct. These are the follow-ups to the webisodes that writers of The Office prominently decried during the writers’ strike, since they weren’t getting paid to make web content at the time. Now, apparently, everybody loves doing them.

To be sure, NBC might also just be good at winning Interactive Emmy nominations. While all its entrants centered around online marketing and derivative content, Andrade said that the online originals coming from Cameron Death’s NBC Universal Digital Studio also have been quite financially successful. Those include Ctrl and Gemini Division, both shows which have baked in sponsors to a blatant — but also artistically consistent — degree. As long as originals make money, NBC will keep making them, Andrade said.

When EQAL told us earlier this month that it was getting out of the original webisodic entertainment game to focus on creating digital experiences for established brands, we took note. These were, after all, the guys behind Lonelygirl15, arguably the most successful original web series ever. If they didn’t see much of a future in original web content, who does?

EQAL’s move followed ABC shuttering its new media studio, Stage 9, and 60Frames closing down, both of which were built around the idea of creating original episodic content for the web.

Even the companies that are still making original web series increasingly seem to have some kind of old media hook attached to their productions. Crackle brought onboard Ed Brubaker and Zoe Bell for Angel of Death, and told us that it’s looking to spend more on talent both behind and in front of the camera on its productions. Electric Farm Entertainment, which previously worked with Rosario Dawson on Gemini Division, is partnering with MTV for the upcoming vampire series Valemont, and cast Jon Heder as the lead in its zombie comedy Woke Up Dead.

With so many creators looking to old media for its new media inspiration, what does the future hold for straight-up original web series?

To find out more, head over to GigaOM Pro, where I expand on this topic with views from execs at Electric Farm Entertainment, Crackle, and MTV Networks. GigaOM Pro is our subscription research service where you can get access to deep dive articles and original research reports from top analysts on a wide variety of topics including the connected home, mobile technology, green IT and infrastructure.