Despite tackling a diverse set of web video projects, 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.

Here’s what our second five presenters had to say about what to expect from the video market.

Matt Cutler, VP Marketing and Analytics, Visible Measures

Summary: The ads from the Super Bowl spread across 6,000 online video clips and led to a similar number of viewers as the broadcast garnered. Online, about 30 percent of the brand views of an ad online came from social activities such as referrals and mashups. However, the top 10 campaigns captured 45 percent of all online views. So we tell our brand advertising clients that they need to figure into the top 10.

The Next Big Thing: The leaders already in social advertising will press their advantage in 2010, and the followers who are still in experimentation mode will realize how far behind they are.

Brent Friedman, president, Electric Farm Entertainment

Summary: We’re looking for the fully immersive experience. We do high-budget, new cross-platform projects or “make cool shit.” The goal has been to create a convergence between video games and television. For our first project, After World, we produced 130 episodes. But it was really hard to monetize, at least in the U.S. The idea of a destination site just didn’t catch on. Our foreign distributor, Sony, offered it overseas in modular bites, web sites with bells and whistles, and mobile content. Back here in the U.S., we used the same model that we used for After World, but didn’t build an integrated destination web site. Sending the viewers on a “digital schlep” was counterintuitive to create immersion. Now we’re returning to the After World model to spend the money on a destination site. But going forward it’ll likely be branded, probably by a network, and it will be monetized. Through the traditional networks we’re getting bigger marketing budget and leveraging the strengths of the media fence. The site will not be a walled garden-type site, and will be much more dynamic 3-D environments. This will create a level of entertainment that is attractive to the whole ecosystem and will transcend the 3- to 5-minute spot online.

The Next Big Thing:

Angela Wilson Gyetvan, VP Sales and Marketing, 3ality Digital

Summary: There are a bunch of TV makers launching 3-D televisions next year as well as some device makers that will make products that will play 3-D. The next opportunity for 3-D will be intelligent advertisements and products that know when you are there. That’s five years out. And now we take a 3-D TV break.

The Next Big Thing: (See video, preferably with 3-D glasses.)

Bismarck Lepe, co-founder and president of Product Strategy, Ooyala

Summary: Ooyala is a comprehensive online video platform with analytics, transcoding and ads — who, what and how people are sharing video on the web.

The Next Big Thing: As we look at 2010 we think that web sites won’t be focused on the licensing relationships with the content partner, but the relationship with the individual user. We will also be able to authenticate and identify each end user to understand what they watch and have access to. Mobile will play a big role in that process.

Jeremy Reed, SVP Content and Editorial, Demand Media

Summary: The next big thing is “little” — short video that people are interested in that have a none ROI. We’ve been profitable since day one. We have a network of media sites, and we have Demand Studios, which is a content creation freelance community. When we built the company we wanted to create high-quality content, but do it at scale, and with voice that serves our community. Brands want useful, actionable content, but there’s a major disconnect between advertisers’ needs and costs to serve that. We’re all struggling with video monetization, and we look at it with a cost we can afford. Marketing today is stuff like search and YouTube — what are those people looking for and how to we create what they want. We’re dealing with very diverse spaces like humor, health and DIY space. We focused our attention on the headline, design and title. We built an algorithm that determines audience and ability to place high on search. After we developed this tool we created this freelance community. What we found is that we attracted filmmakers, which had associated with big brands, had won awards, and had spread out across the U.S.

The Next Big Thing: Next big thing is trying to understand there is an imbalance between supply, need and cost. You need to understand the ROI before you greenlight content. Is it quality and relevant to a community? And increasing the competitiveness — in a search world is a social world.

Televisions are going to transition from having nice pictures to becoming smart, app-filled, interactive machines, Matthew McRae, VP and GM of Advanced Technology Products at Vizio, said at the NewTeeVee Live conference today in San Francisco. Vizio plans to ship a connected television in January of next year. The company has learned from mistakes made by previous broadband television makers, McRae said, and so has focused on creating a good user experience and a developer ecosystem akin to Apple’s App store.

To satisfy that developer ecosystem, the Vizio television will use Flash and the Yahoo Widget platform to provide an easy way for programmers to build applications for the television. Vizio will integrate apps into the TV that can trump all things happening on the television, so tweets could interrupt a movie if the user wants them to, or an email could come through even when you are playing a game.

Vizio also spent time re-envisioning the remote. So the TV will ship with a two-way remote that has a QWERTY keyboard and Bluetooth. Vizio will also eventually develop a software-based remote that could be run using a consumer’s smartphone or other applicable device.

McRae then turned to prediction, saying that we will see a new generation of technologies targeting the television, such as 3-D or ultra high def. He also expects that Internet TV will become the primary source of content on the television as opposed to pay TV. However, the TV may never become a replacement for the PC when it comes to surfing the web. McCrae says he’s trying to keep the television application focused, rather than deliver a browser inside the TV. In his opinion, a TV-specific web browser and a better remote control will be necessary before we browse the web on the TV. He also predicts that the distribution of consumer electronics like TVs will consolidate. “Wal-Mart will become more like a Best Buy and get smarter about how they sell electronics,” he said.

There are simply too many ways to view video right now, said Murali Nemani, director of service provider video marketing for Cisco, at our NewTeeVee Live Conference in San Francisco today. Content providers are putting more content online and consumers, as a result, have more to choose from than ever, but that’s leading to fragmentation. As the market fragments it’s creating friction for consumers who have to figure out which device and which service they want to use to consume video. Business models are also changing as a result of the fragmentation. For example, what’s the value of a Simpson’s episode? On broadcast television it’s still three times more valuable than it is on a service like Hulu. So content still has value, but figuring out how to capture that value is in flux.

Video also monopolizes bandwidth, said Nemani. Cisco expects that some 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic will be video by 2013 and 60 percent of that will be online video. And it predicts that online video and pay television will eventually come together. In order to address consumer fragmentation and create viable business models, said Nemain, they have to — otherwise we’re stuck in a world where we have to watch movies on our Roku box or certain content on Hulu or VoD from a cable provider.

We’re now moving to a third wave of video, to an era of IP video in which online and pay-TV converge, Nemani said. The first wave was the proprietary cable model, but it was a closed infrastructure. The second wave was IPTV, which was all IP — but still followed a fairly closed infrastructure like the original cable model. So the third wave is the convergence of online and pay TV in a model that is open and works on a variety of devices. We’ll need web-style, open, standards-based protocols, client architectures that work on a variety of devices — from TVs to phones — so people can use them to watch anything, anywhere. We’ll also need a way to play the video inside and outside of the ISP network.

But Nemani said that in order to support this, the business model needs to change. We need a two-sided model, he said. The classic model is service providers build services and deliver them to consumers for a subscription fee. Cisco thinks the future model is two-sided: Consumers will pay for access to the pipe and content creation companies will then offer revenue-sharing with the pipe owner because the ISP offers so much value and information about the end user.

Cisco, which has predicted that video will drive incredible traffic growth for the web ahead, released data today based on information from 20 of the world’s ISPs that shows video usage hasn’t yet become the driver of broadband growth. The equipment maker said that worldwide, a broadband-connected household consumed 11.4 GB of data per month with 4.3 GB of that being video, social networking or collaboration. the content included in the 4.3 GB doesn’t include P2P video, although Cisco noted that P2P traffic as a percent of broadband traffic is on the decline.

Cisco did not break out the video data specifically, but said that for each connection each day, this amount is roughly the equivalent of approximately 20.5 short- form Internet videos or approximately 1.1 hours of Internet video, whether streamed on its own, embedded in a Web page, or viewed as part of video communications. For more, see the story at GigaOM.

Fresco Microchip, a chipmaker that builds semiconductors destined for televisions, has raised $10 million from Celtic House Venture Partners and Ventures West. The secret to the company’s success so far is that it makes a small, cheap chip that filters image distortions from radio, analog and digital signals. Fresco is banking on the fact that consumer device makers, which are always keen on lowering their expenses, will use Fresco silicon instead of higher-cost options from competitors.

Fresco’s chips can go inside televisions, DVD players, converter boxes and set-top boxes, and being able to make them cheap counts for a lot. The company is profitable and has raised $30 million since its founding in 2004. It competes with Panasonic and NXP, smaller vendors such as Microtune and Xceive, as well as Silicon Labs, a $400 million public company, which sells about $25 million in tuners every year.

Cisco today offered to buy Tandberg, a Norwegian company that makes video conferencing equipment, for $3 billion in cash, a move that would give it a broader customer base, a bunch of legacy gear as well as a name in the teleconferencing market.

And why wouldn’t Cisco love video conferencing? It’s an application that requires a fast network and a lot of bandwidth, something the communications industry is increasingly able to provide, not just at the high end but even to average consumers. And with those network expansions, Cisco wins, because it provides the underlying equipment to the service providers, as well as the video conferencing hardware and software to tweak the experience. Cisco sees video as a $20 billion revenue opportunity.

See why Tandberg’s solution was so attractive to Cisco (think: middle management) in my full story over at GigaOM.

“Comcast Plans to Bring TV Shows to Your Phone,” a Reuters story trumpeted yesterday, which had many of us here at GigaOM really excited — me especially, since this is exactly the sort of thing that I’ve said the cable guys should be doing if they want to launch wireless products. However, a quick look at the transcript of the executive comments that prompted the Reuters story shows that Comcast isn’t bringing TV to wireless phones anytime soon. Nor is voice of interest when it comes to the cable provider’s wireless efforts, as the Reuters story also stated. So far Comcast’s wireless plans are centered around delivering data, mostly to mobile computers.

Read the whole story over at GigaOM to find out what is really going on.

Qualcomm’s MediaFLO mobile television network hasn’t met the chipmaker’s expectations, according to COO Len Lauer, who spoke with me at the Mobilize 09 event last week in San Francisco. He said of Qualcomm’s FLO network for broadcasting mobile television, “We’re not where we need to be. We’re not meeting our expectations.”

He blamed the lack of success so far on the few  FLO-enabled devices available and the long wait for a nationwide network. While he was optimistic that FLO would be on more devices and noted that as of the DTV transition, Qualcomm had a nationwide network, he was also quick to portray the FLO network as more than a television delivery network. Yes, boys and girls, it’s a platform.

If mobile TV isn’t the right use for the separate network that Qualcomm has built at a cost of more than $800 million, Lauer thinks it might be used by carriers to help offload demand for video on the 3G and 4G networks, something I’ve mentioned as a possible strategy on how carriers can keep profiting on their mobile networks (GigaOM Pro, subscription required). “The reason we built this, and we’re starting to get more and more interest from network operators, is for network offload,” Lauer said. He said data usage on carrier networks is up by about 400 percent, more than half of which is streaming video, such as content from YouTube. Lauer said that they can help carriers use the FLO network to deliver broadcast or commonly accessed content to the handset and then cache parts of regularly accessed web sites on the device.

However, the FLO network may not be the only game in town for network offload. With this use case in mind, the GSM Association last week endorsed Integrated Mobile Broadband or IMB as one that might also work for offloading video, and one that’s likely to win more favor among carriers, according to telecommunications analyst Chetan Sharma. That’s because it uses spectrum the carriers already own and makes more efficient use of that spectrum for delivering video, as opposed to the FLO network, which is a completely different network operating on Qualcomm’s spectrum. IMB was also developed in conjunction with several carriers such as Vodafone, Telstra, T-Mobile, Orange and SingTel.

Stacey's skinny upstream pipe

Internet Service Providers are beginning to focus on upstream speeds as subscribers change their online behavior from consuming online content to producing it. Upstream demand is on the rise thanks to online storage services, video uploads and yes, file sharing, but for consumers to truly pay attention to their upstream pipes someone needs to build products that get everyday consumers to experience true pipe envy.

Video is boosting upstream data, which is why Cisco is so pumped about its purchase of the Flip camera maker Pure Digital (more demand for bandwidth on the upload and download side means Cisco can sell more gear), but what else is out there? These aren’t the dot-com bubble years. Operators won’t invest in upstream capacity unless users want to pay for it.

In a long view article I wrote over at GigaOM Pro (subscription required), I list some services that may get consumers to both demand (and pay for) fatter upstream pipes such as broadband burglar alarms, home telepresence, and medical monitoring, but what will make you upgrade?

Comcast has filed its appeal of an FCC decision issued last August that censured the cable company for blocking P2P files, arguing that the commission doesn’t have the authority to impose the broadband principles that define network neutrality in the U.S. absent a federal law or a full public hearing to make those principles binding as regulatory policy. Indeed, Comcast’s appeal will test the FCC’s ability to enforce network neutrality without either of those things.

Comcast’s intent to appeal the FCC’s ruling was announced last September, but initial briefs, which it filed July 27, are just now hitting the courts. Comcast initially got into trouble in October 2007, after an Associated Press investigation revealed the company was forging packets that would cause BitTorrent connections of some users to drop and failing to inform them of the practice — a serious net neutrality no-no. For more, keep reading over at GigaOM.

Qualcommm’s (QCOM) MediaFLO mobile television service has the potential to reach 40 percent more people once the DTV transition occurs on Friday. The switch from analog television signals to digital television signals had been scheduled for mid-February, but concerns that a subset of the population weren’t adequately prepared for it led Washington to legislate a four-month delay. That hold-up effectively stopped Qualcomm from launching service in 15 new markets, among them San Francisco, Houston, Miami and Boston, where it owned rights to the analog spectrum being used by local television stations to transmit their signals.

But the end is in sight for Qualcomm, which has the equipment in place, the power turned on, and is ready to send more television to more places the second it has access to those radio waves once the DTV transition occures on June 12. It expects its signals to reach 200 million people, about 60 million more than it reaches today. This is a positive step for Qualcomm’s service, which has seen relatively slow adoption on mobile devices, based on outside over-the-air mobile TV viewing numbers provided by comScore. In addition to increasing its availability to more people in more cities, Qualcomm earlier this year signed an agreement to get MediaFLO on more devices. It inked a deal with Audiovox to build MediaFLO access into its in-car entertainment systems, as well as one with with ProTelevision Technologies to make devices that can attach to a cell phone, and allow that phone to receive the MediaFLO service. Together they should help Qualcomm address the limitation of having MediaFLO built into relatively few handsets. Will they be enough? Stay tuned.

Cisco said today that the web will continue its breakneck rate of growth to hit 56 exabytes of data per month by 2013. In 2008, IP traffic accounted for 9 exabytes per month, according to the company’s second annual visual networking index. Cisco, which stands to profit by selling its communications gear to ISPs and businesses trying to handle the growth in bandwidth, notes that most of the increase in traffic will be related to video — in fact, by 2013, 90 percent of web traffic will be video, it forecast, from services like Hulu to video-on-demand via the local cable provider.

Video comprises a large amount of the total traffic because video files are many times larger than text files and web pages, and because video is slowly moving from being delivered via RF (cable TV) and over the air (broadcast) to being delivered as an IPTV service. People are also carrying around more video-capable devices, such as mobile phones that can capture video and personal camcorders such as the Flip, whose parent company was recently purchased by Cisco. Once that video is captured, people are inclined to share it via the web.

Today’s news mirrors Cisco’s findings in its first survey issued last year that estimated video would be 90 percent of IP traffic by 2012. By 2013 the biggest driver of traffic will be Internet video delivered to the PC, according to Cisco. It expects total data consumed by newteevee to double between 2011 and 2013 to 13 exabytes per month. that video consumption will surpass the amount of data consumed by P2P file sharing in 2011. However, Cisco doesn’t have a lot of faith that people will have access to a lot of Internet video on oldteevees. Cisco sees a spike in delivering web video to TVs in 2011, but by 2013 that type of traffic still only amounts to around 2.7 exabytes of data per month. For more on the data check out the story over at GigaOM.

A report out today from Nielsen shows why Internet Service Providers and telecommunications equipment vendors are increasingly demonizing video. It consumes a lot of bandwidth, and could compete with an ISP’s existing video businesses, but the worst part is that it’s rapidly becoming more popular to the average consumer. Get the stats and the full story over at GigaOM.

The Open Mobile Video Coalition said today that it will begin broadcasting over-the-air mobile television to devices in Washington, D.C., later this summer. Also today, Qualcomm, which operates a competing over-the-air television technology, said it’s licensed its FLO software to ProTelevision Technologies (formerly Philips TV Test Equipment). That means Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology could become available in more devices than the five or six cell phones that can currently receive the signal. While both announcements are big news for competing efforts in the nascent mobile television industry, the success of each venture may depend on which effort can win the rights to broadcast hot content to mobile watchers. For more, check out the post over at GigaOM.

When it comes metered broadband, most consumers don’t understand how its implementation could affect what it costs them to download content. So I decided to compare how much, depending on which of the nation’s top ISPs’ metered bandwidth plans you choose, it would cost to rent the teen vampire flick Twilight. And what did I find? That in almost all cases, the decision to download the movie will cost more than just the $3.99 rental fee — between 65 cents and $20.60 more. For more on the math and the costs under each ISP, check out the story at GigaOM.

Broadcom said today that it would make sure content from Chumby, a nascent widget syndication effort for televisions, would run on its chips for digital televisions and set-top boxes. Shriraj Gaglani, a senior director of business development for Broadcom,  thinks Chumby will get consumers psyched about accessing the web through their TVs.

He likens the Chumby platform to a cell phone’s application store and says, “What we’ve felt we lacked in the ecosystem is the critical mass of apps and services that can leverage broadband televisions.”

For anyone who recalls the Chumby as a countertop device for accessing widgets, you’re thinking of the right company. It’s merely joining a growing pack of those looking expand its efforts beyond hardware to become a platform. In January it signed a similar integration deal with Marvell to get its widget platform onto digital picture frames. For more on bringing the web to televisions check out the full story on GigaOM.