Edmonton-based Smibs today at the TechCrunch Real-time CrunchUp released a set of tools to package webcasts called VideoLobby. The service integrates Twitter and Facebook chatter, as well as a form to ask questions of a host that’s powered by a backend comment moderation system. Today, anyone who wants to produce a live show can sign up to host it on VideoLobby for free.

Instead of competing with the myriad live-streaming vendors in the world, VideoLobby builds on top of them, allowing a publisher to use live video powered by Qik, Justin.tv, Ustream and Stickam’s StreamAPI and format each stream as an episode of a show. The service seems somewhat superfluous, given those companies already integrate comments and social media themselves.

The California Energy Commission just approved measures to ensure new televisions are energy efficient. The proposed standards have been a point of contention with the consumer electronics industry and Hollywood, and a decision had been delayed after extended comments from the Consumer Electronics Association.

The standards will apply only to new televisions sold in California starting in January 2011. Further, they are only for TVs 58 inches or smaller. TV makers, with the exception of Vizio, had opposed the measure on the grounds that they expect to make their TVs greener on a voluntary basis, and the regulation is overkill.

California also thinks that TVs are more of an energy suck than TV makers do; the CEC estimates they account for 10 percent of household power use while TV makers say it’s closer to 5 percent. The CEC says the measure will save 3,831 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2011, at a cost reduction of between $18 and $30 per year, per television.

Hulu keeps trucking along with Plan A, even though its corporate parents and the rest of the market have developed a case of the meanies. As long expected, the site is making a play into music, today announcing a limited distribution deal with EMI and the launch of a Norah Jones music video section.

The market for music is not as wide-open as was Hulu’s opportunity with TV shows a couple years ago. Universal Music Group and Sony Music are working with YouTube on the launch of a new destination site called Vevo, which has been called from the outset a “Hulu for music videos.” Warner Music also just made up with YouTube, allowing for its content to return to the site itself.

The Norah Jones deal includes a library of the artist’s music videos, concert footage and interviews accessible to Hulu’s U.S. users. and accompanied by lovely 30-second pre-roll ads (grr). EMI said artists from its Virgin, Capitol and Blue Note labels will follow Jones onto Hulu.

Hulu’s Andy Forssell, senior vice president for content and distribution, told the New York Times that Hulu has revised its idea of a massive music video library to building “an immersive experience around certain artists.” While a more limited approach is going to seem odd to users, it might be financially prudent; the music labels have been able to extract an arm and a leg for their content from many web startups, and Hulu doesn’t want to give up any more of its limbs.

It’s pretty clear at this point that the secret to success on the Internet is Twilight. Check out the numbers from yesterday’s live web cast from the red carpet of the premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, exclusively hosted by MySpace and powered by Ustream.

The Twilight Saga New Moon Red Carpet Premiere

New Moon Premiere | MySpace Video

The two companies report that they had nearly 3 million total views, to a very nice ratio of 2 million uniques, the latter of which is a new all-time record for a Ustream event. And the Twilight kids easily topped out Ustream’s last big red carpet for the premiere of Michael Jackson’s This Is It, which had 1.8 million total views.

Lately we’ve checked out sites such as Clicker, Yidio and SetJam, and that’s only the video aggregators that have launched or sent us previews in the last week. But perhaps their pretty interfaces, organized channels and personalized recommendation systems turn you off. Maybe all you want is a simple database query of what movies are available online and how much they cost.

Enter Movie Monitor, a New York-based startup which just launched. Search for movies by title or genre, and you get a simple list of links to where they’re available to stream or download on Amazon On Demand, Blockbuster, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, and Vudu. The company says YouTube is coming; I also wouldn’t mind if it indexed libraries from sites and devices like EpixHD and ZillionTV, even if they’re a little harder to access (though not if you use one of the trials Epix gave our readers). But then, this is a no-frills service, and that’s the charm.

In just the few months since it was released this summer, Apple’s video streaming to the iPhone has become a part of many business plans. Two announcements were made on that front today:

Multicast announced full support for transcoding, managing, delivering and displaying content on the iPhone, both live and on-demand. However, the company’s customers tend to be corporate — from internal teams like investor relations, human resources and sales that put on live events — while the iPhone is still mainly a consumer device. Nevertheless, it’s useful to have your main online video platform provide extensions to all sorts of devices.

Meanwhile, Stickam, the live video community site, today launched an iPhone SDK of its own. The idea is that other companies, for instance partner 211me, which works with celebrities, can build their own iPhone apps that include Stickam live streaming and chat. 211me’s first Stickam-powered app will be for Twilight star Peter Facinelli. Competitor Kyte already simplifies this process even further, enabling stars and their entourages to make video apps for various mobile platforms.

In other recent iPhone video news, Brightcove pre-announced an iPhone SDK and Livestream added iPhone streaming last week at our NewTeeVee Live conference.

Adobe will on Tuesday release developer betas of Flash Player 10.1 for the web and AIR 2 for the desktop. Both runtimes are to be released to the public in the oh-so-very narrow and specific time frame of “the first half of 2010.” Key to plans for the next year is compatibility on netbooks and smartphones — first up for Adobe is full Flash functionality on x86-based netbooks, then the Palm OS, then Android. RIM has also said it will bring Flash to BlackBerries in 2010, and AIR is also due for mobile later next year.

A side benefit of these mobile optimizations is that Flash on Windows desktop will in turn get hardware decoding of H.264 video and graphic acceleration, said Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager, Adobe Flash Platform. Adobe has also added support for multitouch and gestures for both phones and Windows 7. Update: Some mobile devices will also get graphics acceleration; it is not available for PCs.

There are also neat new features like microphone access from within Flash — so developers can access binary data from wave forms from a computer’s microphone and manipulate them. Guess what that means? Opportunities for developers to create in-Flash Auto-Tune and karaoke. (Whoo!)

Also, as expected, the beta will support client-side file based encryption, HTTP streaming, in-browser DRM and improved buffering — though those will be more fully appreciated as we get closer to the actual product releases and developers are making things for real audiences.

Somewhat left out of this push is televisions, which can only get Flash Lite for now, but Barclay said to expect fuller support later next year.

In a non-exclusive content deal YouTube is heralding as one of its most comprehensive, Univision will provide both short-form and long-form content to the video site starting early next year. The most popular U.S. Spanish-language network is to offer both new and catalog programs including Nuestra Belleza Latina, Cristina and Don Francisco Presenta; will participate in YouTube’s Content ID program for user uploads; and will make use of the site’s pre-roll and overlay advertising.

YouTube has seen 80 percent growth in Spanish language visitors in the past year, up now to 6.5 million per month, said Chris Maxcy, YouTube’s new head of content partnerships, on a conference call announcing the deal. Kevin Conroy, president of Univision Interactive Media described the U.S. Hispanic online community as fast growing but under-served audience in terms of web video. In part due to a recent court decision regarding streaming rights, the deal does not include Televisa content, Conroy noted.

Along with the prediction that the Internet will not destroy pay TV because consumers will demand a high-quality experience across their various platforms, Sam Blackman’s Elemental Technologies launched its parallel processing video server at our NewTeeVee Live conference yesterday.

In a further conversation with Stacey from GigaOM on the show floor, Blackman predicted the cost of computing would be less than the cost of caching within three years, which would change the business of how people store and transcode content to make it more flexible. Here’s the video; for more, see Stacey’s post on GigaOM.

We’d like to thank this week’s NewTeeVee sponsors:

• thePlatform: What’s Your TV Everywhere Strategy?
• Server Beach: Save 30% by switching to dedicated hosting by Server Beach

Forgive us for having a wee bit of trouble focusing on the day after NewTeeVee Live, will you?

Meanwhile, it’s well worth distracting yourself with this video: CollegeHumor’s Prank Wars skydiving edition: “Amir launches the first aerial attack in the war’s four-year history.”

The #NTVL Twitter hashtag got a lot of love yesterday, but some of our attendees and live-streamers went to a little more length in their reports from NewTeeVee Live ‘09. Here’s a list of coverage; if we missed anything, please add it in the comments.

Streaming Media: NewTeeVee Live 2009: Looking Back, Looking Forward

KRON4: Local TV news coverage and raw interviews

ComputerWorld: YouTube Goes High Definition with 1080p Videos

Reuters MediaFile: Comcast’s TV Everywhere might actually work everywhere

Washington Post Tech: Comcast’s online video bet clearer, benefits for users unclear

Video Business: Xbox Live moves to Zune Video Nov. 17

PCMag.com: Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm to Hit Xbox Live

DSL Reports: Comcast TV Everywhere WILL Work Outside the Home

CNET WebWare: YouTube to get high-def 1080p player

VentureBeat: Three reasons TV is about to get a facelift, Boxee box to be unveiled December 7

Gizmodo: Comcast TV Everywhere Goes Online Next Month for Free

Engadget: Comcast TV Everywhere launch details: December, free for existing subs, really goes anywhere

Associated Press: YouTube to support 1080p high-definition videos

Vator News: Ryan Higa, YouTube star just a normal dude , YouTube announces 1080p video on the way, Clicker, the TV Guide of the Internet

TV News Stream: NewTeeVee Live: Quincy Smith (CBS), Amy Banse (Comcast), but no Jason Kilar (Hulu)

DailyFinance: Comcast to Boxee: Bring it on, we’re ready for the competition, Google pumps up YouTube with better HD and recommendation tools

Tech Radar: Full HD1080p streaming coming to YouTube

Hacking Netflix: Reed Hastings at NewTeeVee Live Conference Video

Broadcasting & Cable: Comcast OnDemand Online Still Set For December Launch

Good Morning Silicon Valley: A new resolution from YouTube

Sci-Tech Today: Comcast Will Offer TV Everywhere on Multiple Devices

Just as I got off the stage at NewTeeVee Live with CNN Worldwide VP of Digital Marketing and Development Andy Mitchell, I saw a report that CNN is cutting back on its web video newscasts. The company laid off its four CNN.com Live anchors as well as “several production staffers,” according WebNewser.

CNN.com Live launched as a free service in 2007 to replace the paid web service CNN Pipeline, which failed to gather many subscribers. Up till today, it had its own staff of anchors completely separate from the cable TV channel.

I followed up with Mitchell in the green room to ask about the layoffs, and he said that CNN is in no way pulling away from online video. However, linear, anchor-led broadcasts are more appropriate for television than for the web. He emphasized that CNN.com is all about web video, citing its recent redesign.

Mitchell said CNN expects to expand its coverage of major live events, which is exactly what we’d just been talking about onstage. A memo obtained by WebNewser said CNN expects to hire seven original video production staff by the end of the year.

When I interviewed him along with Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg this afternoon, Mitchell said to expect a major collaboration between the two companies next year around an event they hope will rival the success of the Obama inauguration, which had 1.3 million simultaneous viewers at peak and 25 million total streams on CNN.com’s live feed accompanied by Facebook status messages. He and Zuckerberg declined to provide further details about the project.

Yidio, an 18-month-old startup that has acquired 4 million unique visitors and 32 million page views per month through word-of-mouth, is making a splash today at our NewTeeVee Live conference with the announcement it’s raised an angel round. The company aggregates premium web content to help viewers find TV shows and movies online. Clearly a lot of people are feeling a need to find an clean and well-organized place for web video so strong they want to create companies around it; Clicker is also launching today at our conference.

The funding, which was led by Appolicious’ Alan Warms, was “in the 500,000 range,” he said. Yidio founder Adam Eatros said the key to the site’s early success has been its self-explanatory episode guides. The company sees itself as a search engine, so it doesn’t shut out unauthorized content, which has probably helped with its traffic as well. After a recent refresh for the site, next up is introducing a discovery engine that uses collaborative filtering to make recommendations, said Eatros.

Clicker, a young company we’ve already written about a few times, is launching to the public today only a couple months after it started giving out beta invites. CEO Jim Lanzone is planning to take the lid off the site later this morning at our NewTeeVee Live conference.

Clicker is shaping up to become a significant brand in web TV, with the promise that it will shepherd and expose people to content they want to watch and help them organize it into a familiar playlist format. The site is building a massive index of video content available online: 400,000 episodes from more than 1,2000 sources, including online originals, and more than 30,000 from Netflix and Amazon. During the beta period, it added features like Facebook Connect logins, better recommendations and user comments. Clicker has a number of competitors, including giants like TV Guide and also a bunch of startups like SetJam, Yidio and CastTV. It has raised $8 million from Redpoint Ventures and Benchmark Capital and recently added Sling founder Blake Krikorian to its board and investor list.

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!