Today, NewTeeVee gets to do something we don’t normally get to do — review the competition. OK, technically The Web Files isn’t competition for us — we’re just covering the same beat using different mediums. In this web series about the making of web series, Files host Kristyn Burtt interviews various players in the online video space every week about the trials and tribulations of creating content for the Internet.

While the opening sequence — shot film noir-style, with Burtt playing the role of detective — seems to imply investigative journalism, Burtt’s focus is on personalities and content, with minimal scoops in sight. The interview with MERRIme.com creators Kaily Smith and David Weidoff, for example, focuses more on their experiences at the NYTVF (where Smith won the best actress award) than on questions like how they were able to secure name cast members like Tony Hale and Tom Arnold, not to mention their $2,500-per-episode financing, though they do make an interesting point about the value of hiring a publicist.

But while the news component may be lacking, Burtt is still a capable host whose years of entertainment reporting make her very comfortable on camera — previously, she’d done hosting work with MSNBC and NBC, among other entities. And her approach isn’t always just a sit-down-and-chat one; when she interviewed the creators of Coma, Period, for example, she combined conversations with supporting crew members with a tour of the production company’s office.

In fact, probably the strongest aspect of The Web Files is that Burtt and director/producer Sandra Payne are constantly changing the format and location of the interviews in an effort to mirror the show being talked about. Examples include speaking with Cabonauts creator Hayden Black inside one of the futuristic cabs from the series (complete with outer space greenscreening) or hanging out with porn star Demi Delia at her house to discuss Mommy XXX.

The choice of subjects so far is pretty limited to the L.A. web series scene (at least 10 of the people who have appeared on Web Files, in fact, are Tubefilter meetup regulars), but so far there’s been enough variation within that community to keep the series from feeling stale. (A major recent get for them: an interview with the executives at Fox TV’s 15 Gigs studios.)

The only problem is that it’s a bit hard to gauge who the exact audience is for Web Files. The aspiring creator looking for tips on breaking into the space? Those already engaged with the web community? Whatever the answer might be, the fact that Files is taking this medium and those working in it seriously is just another step in the web series world attaining greater credibility. So I’m a fan — unless, of course, they scoop us. (Just kidding.) (Not really.)

Boxee will be showing off a prototype of its widely anticipated standalone set-top box at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show, according to a source close to the company who asked not to be named, with commercial deployment slated for sometime in the first half of 2010.

Despite announcing just last week at NewTeeVee Live that it was still working with a consumer electronics partner on creating the so-called Boxee Box, our source says that the company will have it ready for demos at the industry trade show in early January.

The onus isn’t exactly on Boxee to deliver it — it’ll be up to an unnamed CE partner to build and manufacture the set-top box, for which Boxee is just providing the software. Even so, the kind of turnaround with which Boxee is expected to go to market is practically unheard of in the CE industry, and suggests that the company has been working on this project for an especially long time.

Boxee wouldn’t comment for this article, but promised more details and a timeline for deployment at its Dec. 7 event in New York. There, the company is expected to have mockups of the device, as well as more info about its features and maybe even final pricing details. CEO Avner Ronen told NewTeeVee that he hopes to price the box for less than $200, but given the cost of hardware involved, Boxee probably won’t be able to reach the $100 price point that Roku has for its IP video set-top box.

Also at the event, the company will be showing off the beta version of its media center, giving users a preview of the software before it’s officially released in January.

UPDATED: Babelgum is closing down its Dublin headquarters and an office in Nice, according to a report in paidContent, moves that could signal the end is near for the online video site.

Babelgum says the cuts will allow it to streamline its business to “ensure continued growth.” The company told paidContent that it will continue to develop applications from other locations, spreading the operations from its shuttered offices across those in London, Milan and New York. But there are questions as to whether Babelgum will continue to develop technology or keep focusing on content investment.

Babelgum is backed by deep-pocketed billionaire investor Silvio Scaglia; he invested €50 million ($73 milllion) in the company in 2008, and has said he plans to spend €40- €60 million annually on the company over the next 2-3 years. But the recent cuts could mean he’s losing patience while waiting for a return on that initial investment.

The office closures come not long after a Babelgum executive detailed plans for an extensive — and expensive — plan to spend many millions of dollars obtaining and developing exclusive, original content. Then-executive vice president and chief revenue officer Michael Rosen told NewTeeVee in October that Babelgum had ramped up operations in the U.S. and that it had a “mandate to launch 10-15 content initiatives per month.” Rosen has reportedly since left the company, according to paidContent.

Babelgum isn’t the only web video aggregator trying to differentiate itself in a market dominated by YouTube, which still delivers about 40 percent of all online video streams in the U.S. Veoh, which was founded around the same time as Babelgum, laid off a number of employees earlier this year as it shifted its focus to developing its video compass technology from that of content. In the meantime others, like Dailymotion and Metacafe, have been trying to cash in on the growing consumption of online video.

Babelgum has also suffered from a lack of strategic focus. On the technology side, the company began as a P2P-based streaming provider, but shifted to browser-based Adobe Flash streaming earlier this year. Like Joost, which also launched as a P2P-based video provider, the slowness with which it moved from proprietary technology to streaming based on a widely adopted video platform may have also held it back from attracting wider user adoption.

Update: Babelgum issued the following statement after our story ran.

This week Babelgum announced to its staff that it would be consolidating its operations into its London, Milan and New York locations. This decision is a natural response to the company’s growing focus on content and viewers, following Babelgum’s commercial launch earlier this year. Despite the current economic climate, Babelgum remains one of the very few aggressive players in the new media arena. In the past two months, Babelgum has: 1) pioneered the release of Sally Potter’s “Rage” – the first time a narrative feature film with A-list talent premiered on a mobile video application; 2) launched the innovative Babelgum Metropolis Art Prize (chaired by Isabella Rossellini)  to seek out the world’s best and edgiest video artists; 3) launched numerous new series – including Hayden Black’s “The Occulterers” – originally created, and exclusively produced, for its mobile and online platforms; 4) premiered the latest Weezer video “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To” as an exclusive; and 5) entered into a partnership agreement with RingTales to exclusively premiere the new Dilbert and New Yorker animated series. The company continues to streamline its approach and improve its cost effectiveness to ensure its continued growth in future years. Other major content and partnership deals will be announced before the close of 2009.

For once, everyone getting on board with an online video trend is a good thing. Following on the heels of Google’s announcement yesterday that it will add automatic captioning to YouTube videos, PLYmedia today said that it will be providing live captioning to video platforms Ooyala, Ustream, Livestream, Brightcove, Kaltura, KIT digital and Kyte.

Unlike Google’s captioning system, which automatically creates captions using speech recognition technology, PLYmedia’s SubPLY offering does live captioning with national court reporter-certified transcribers. Using this human approach, PLYmedia says it can deliver more accurate results (Google even admitted that its system can make mistakes and is rolling the service out slowly.)

PLYmedia’s SubPLY also offers automatic translation into “multiple” languages, transcript generation, real-time keyword tag generation as well as Twitter and Facebook integration. The social media hooks allow Twitter and Facebook users to follow a live event through text updates to their news feeds.

In addition to making live video more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, the addition of captions will help make video more searchable.

thePlatform is updating its white-label video management solution with new features designed to make TV Everywhere-type services easier for service providers and publishers to deploy. And the company says it is seeing results, with a bevy of new programmers and a big cable firm announced as customers today.

thePlatform already provides the technology behind On Demand Online, the TV Everywhere project that parent company Comcast plans to introduce to subscribers next month. But with a suite of new features, the online video platform provider hopes to address authentication and authorization issues that challenge other service providers and media companies when rolling out these services.

Since each ISP introducing TV Everywhere services has chosen to implement a different authentication scheme, media companies need to support multiple login types on their own web properties. To deal with this, thePlatform released a new authentication adapter that enables publishers to verify customer identities across a number of different ISPs. thePlatform has also rolled out tools to map each online video to an individual service provider’s channels, which can then be used to match content available to a given user based on his or her subscription package.

In addition, the company is adding the ability for service providers to “upsell” video services online, with new adaptable content discovery and monetization tools. With these tools, its customers can offer a way for subscribers to purchase programming as an add-on to their existing subscription services, or in a pay-per-view fashion.

The company says it has gained customer traction, with more than 20 new programmers signing up for its services over the past few months.  But the majority of these new customers — including E!, G4, Style, Travel Channel Media, Big Ten Network, and a number of regional sports networks from Comcast Sports — are actually owned by thePlatform’s parent company. The exceptions announced today are Travel Channel Media, Big Ten Network, and a group of regional sports networks from Fox Sports.

In addition to adding new cable programmers, thePlatform also added Canada’s leading cable operator Rogers as a customer, and will provide the backend technology for its TV Everywhere initiatives. With the addition of Rogers, thePlatform serves the vast majority of the cable market in North America, also providing services to Cablevision, Cox, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable.

Despite the large number of white-label video management systems on the market, thePlatform is one of just two major players (the other being ExtendMedia) that have focused on building out the authentication technology necessary to make TV Everywhere-type services work. The introduction of these new features, and the backing of multiple cable operators, puts thePlatform in a decent position to pick up more business from major media companies wishing to deploy these services.

Correction: Travel Channel Media and the Big Ten Network are not owned by Comcast.

Newspapers and magazines may not be faring so well in this economic climate, but consumers are holding onto their entertainment subscriptions, according to a new survey from The NPD Group. The research firm says that monthly per-capita entertainment-content subscription spending rose to $115, which is up roughly 7 percent since last year.

As of August 2009, 81 percent of U.S. households subscribe to a TV service (cable, satellite, etc.), NPD found. The company also discovered that 14 percent of consumers subscribed to a home video subscription service like Netflix, up two percentage points from last year. Additionally,  the increased smartphone adoption has bumped up the number of mobile data subscribers to 9 percent of U.S. consumers, up from 6 percent last year, NPD said.

Subscriptions have been a hot topic this year as networks and studios look for additional means to monetize their content. TV Everywhere plans from multi-service operators will require a subscription to access premium video online; there’s talk of Hulu moving some of its content behind a subscription wall; and Disney is supposedly working on its own subscription service.

Based on these NPD numbers, the good news for those companies is that consumers are still valuing the entertainment they’re getting from their subscriptions. But the less-than-good news is that there are only so many entertainment subscriptions one house needs or can afford. Content companies shouldn’t go overboard and each offer their own subscription service — they’ll need to consolidate to deliver the best value to consumers.

YouTube has launched a new tool, called YouTube Direct, that aims to connect news organizations with citizen journalists producing web video.

Built on YouTube APIs, the tool will provide an easy way for news agencies to collect and broadcast clips that users submit for review. By adding a customizable upload button to their web pages, those organizations can solicit user-produced videos on a variety of subjects.

YouTube Direct provides another advantage for cash-strapped media companies: Because all videos are hosted on the YouTube site, participating companies don’t have to go through the trouble of building out the infrastructure required to ingest, encode, store and distribute videos that have been uploaded.

Already, YouTube has received interest from news organizations such as The Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post for the service.

NPR, for instance, is soliciting user videos that run from 30 seconds to 3 minutes in length for its crowdsourced WonderScope science series. To participate, users can submit videos directly through NPR’s web site, and those that make the cut will be added to the official NPR YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, Politico is asking its readers to submit clips (2 minutes or less) for Project Politico, a program that encourages debate based on a new question each day.  And the San Francisco Chronicle is using YouTube Direct to solicit videos of street performers throughout the city.

The new service will provide a counter to some existing citizen journalist tools, such as CNN’s iReport. The iReport program, which was initially launched in 2006, took off earlier this year as videos flooded into the news agency detailing the political protests in Iran.

YouTube says it’s not asking for any compensation from companies that use the service, but it is using YouTube Direct as a way to increase the number of videos that are uploaded to the site. The video site also suggests that the service has applications outside of newsgathering.

In a blog post, Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics, writes:

“Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call-out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.”

There are people whose brains go in one linear direction, whose ideas make sense and come from a decidedly logical place. Those people are rarely any good at comedy, especially the more absurdist humor that excels online. What I’m saying is that Scott Gairdner’s sketches don’t necessarily make a ton of sense, but that is why they are hilarious.

Gairdner, named the “King of Dot Comedy” by G4’s Attack of the Show, is a solo act who’s been creating web comedy since 2006. After his first spoof shorts went viral, Collegehumor began commissioning pieces; his stuff has also been featured by YouTube and FunnyOrDie. It’s deserved attention, as his work represents some of the best in pop-culture parody (with a heavy emphasis on video games), enabled not just by Gairdner’s solid acting and directing chops, but technical skill as an editor and effects artist, which helps him to nimbly parody MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 and imagine CNN’s hologram technology getting disturbing real-world applications.

But it’s Gairdner’s unique POV that helps his shorts stand out in an admittedly oversaturated marketplace for sketch comedy. Today, for example, he released one of the most perfectly bizarre shorts to grace the web recently, a third installment of Tiny Fuppets. Conceived as Portugal’s rip-off of the classic cartoon Muppet Babies, this episode shows the “Fuppets” trying to become Internet millionaires — which (cue sarcastic voice) isn’t hard at all.

Plenty of Muppet Babies parodies have been done (being as it was popular during the 1980s, the formative years of Internet comedy’s current target audience). But in Portuguese? With the appropriately mis-translated subtitles? It’s a spin you couldn’t predict, and makes an otherwise stale concept pleasantly fresh.

Tiny Fuppets’s crude animation and out-there comedy covers up a very real mocking of the idea of becoming wealthy thanks to the Internet. It’s a point that must strike home for Gairdner, whose videos regularly achieve viewcounts ranging in the five and six digits on YouTube, but has yet to be scooped up by any major entity. But after four years, he’s still producing web content — while he definitely counts as a talent I’d love to see break out into the mainstream, it’s nice to see that for now, at least, he’s still having fun here.

Color us surprised. Not only is would-be cable killer Sezmi not dead, the company announced today that it has received $25 million in new funding from existing investors and it has launched a pilot program in Los Angeles.

Sezmi’s two-part set-top box solution consists of a receiver that receives over-the-air transmissions (Sezmi leases spectrum to broadcast content) and a 1TB DVR that stores shows and aggregates broadband content.

To get Sezmi, customers will either rent the equipment for an undisclosed amount, or purchase the equipment outright for $299. Ongoing service fees are $5 a month for broadcast-only channels or $25 a month for a broadcast/cable combo. As the service expands, it is supposed to be available through retail channels and through small and medium telcos and ISPs.

While Sezmi has pulled together a lineup of cable channels including Bravo, CNN, MTV, TBS and more — it still lacks any channels from FOX or Disney, including ESPN, severely hobbling its content selection.

The LA Times points out that the company is being a bit cagey about the HD it will offer. Sezmi didn’t say how much HD content it will deliver and told the paper, “The most popular content on the most popular networks will be in HD as available.”

With the influx of new capital, Sezmi has raised $71 million by our count. But the company will need the cash to establish and explain itself to the market. We still think its solution is too complex for most people (even though it’s not that complex) to grasp quickly, which could turn potential customers off.

If you live in L.A. and want to try out Sezmi for yourself, you can sign up here. Let us know how it goes.

When the space shuttle Atlantis takes off for its STS-129 mission to the International Space Station later today, space exploration enthusiasts will have a few options for where to watch online.

The launch, which is set to happen at 2:28 p.m. ET, will be covered by NASA TV, the official online video station of the U.S. government’s space exploration program. NASA TV will stream its coverage in Windows Media format, with archived videos from the launch available later on NASA TV’s official YouTube channel.

In addition to NASA TV’s coverage, Spaceflight Now will have live video from the launch beginning at 10 a.m. ET, with commentary from former CNN reporter Miles O’Brien and former astronauts Bob Crippen and Mike Foale. Spaceflight Now, which is a privately owned site devoted to providing live launch countdowns and other space news, is streaming its coverage in Flash with help from live video startup Livestream. With the recent introduction of iPhone streaming from Livestream (which was launched at NewTeeVee Live last week), viewers will be able to watch the video on their iPhones at http://iphone.livestream.com/spaceflightnowmobile.

Spaceflight Now’s coverage will also include photos from the launch, a frequently updated status center blog and a Twitter feed.

Though NASA’s live footage of bombing the moon last month wasn’t quite as dramatic as we might have hoped/feared, it did result in the major discovery of a “significant amount” of water. Today’s launch isn’t expected to be quite as exciting — the mission is a simple equipment and crew delivery and trade — but it will be live, so you can see for yourself.

Update: The shuttle launch can also be viewed on Spacevidcast.com, which is powered by Ustream.tv.

When web video juggernaut Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog debuted last year, it inspired fan-made contributions to the world of the series almost immediately — something the Whedon family encouraged by soliciting supervillain applications to be included on the official DVD. But more than a year later, a group of Houston-based fans has taken things to a whole new level.

Horrible Turn, a fan-made prequel to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog, is a full hour of music, comedy and supervillain angst. Set in the early 1990s — allowing for plenty of Compuserve and giant cellular telephone jokes — Turn teases the early origins of the Evil League of Evil, including the first reported attack of Bad Horse, while also introducing the characters of Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer as pre-super adolescents whose fates are not yet determined. I mean, they don’t like each other very much, but young Dr. Horrible/Billy Buddy is more focused on making it happen with his Australian dream girl (a deliberate reference to the Dr. Horrible lyric “But her tears will dry/As I hand her the keys/To her shiny new Australia”) and releasing a potion that will make all the people of the world love each other.

What’s interesting is that in both versions Dr. Horrible is coming from the same Nietzschean-ubermensch place, believing that “the world is broken and he just needs to fix it.” How he lost his faith in love and turned instead to power as a solution is the film’s arc, which ends on a note that could potentially allow for sequels (though what do we call a prequel-sequel? Prequel Part 2?).

When evaluated as an independent production, not a fan film, Turn is competently directed and written, with traditional musical numbers smoothly integrated into the narrative and a cinematic look, enabled by a 35mm lens adapter according to director Chance McClain. Some of the dialogue suffers from repetition, and scenes overall could be more tightly condensed. But the song lyrics are cleverly constructed, and the young cast is solid, including Tyce Green as Billy/Dr. Horrible. Perhaps ironically, however, Green is overshadowed by Jacob Buras, whose Nathan Fillion/Captain Hammer impression is, well, impressive — especially when it comes to delivering punchlines. And he throws himself into the musical numbers, including the standout of the film, I Am Handsome, an exuberant celebration of narcissism.

Turn is an entirely self-funded production that, once completed, was sent to Joss Whedon prior to its release. “He hinted at familiarity with it in an artfully Jossian manner during a recent interview, calling it ‘itsy kitsy goodsy’ as long as we didn’t try to sell it,” McClain told EW. (Whedon’s comment is a bit patronizing, but there might be a good reason — brother Jed has written a prequel of his own in comic book form, which will be released in stores Nov. 18.)

So while McClain and his partners have no chance of making back their investment on this one, hopefully Horrible Turn drums up some interest for the team’s future projects. Given the energy and creativity they’ve brought to someone else’s story, it’d definitely be interesting to see what they’d do with their own.

As evening began at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco today, some big money movers weighed in on the video industry. Allen Delattre, managing director of Electronics and High Technology at Accenture, moderated a panel discussion featuring a number of heavy-hitters from the venture capital community. They included:

• Bill Gurley, general partner, Benchmark Capital
• Chris Hollenbeck, managing director,Granite Ventures
• David Horowitz, managing director, Comcast Interactive Capital
• Dan Beldy, managing director, Steamboat Ventures

The last event of the day was one of the most interesting, and the VCs were mostly positive about the prospects for online video.

“Five years ago very few people were watching video online,” said Horowitz, in response to a question about why the venture capital community should care about the video space. “Now you’ve got YouTube and billions of streams per month.  I think 10 years from now we’ll find other places to watch video.”

Also sounding a positive note, Beldy said that “even in a recession, broadband isn’t what people cut,” and noted that they’ll continue to consume online video despite financial challenges.

“When Hulu and Boxee got together, they woke up all the giants,” noted Benchmark Capital’s Gurley. “Since that day, everyone has been paying attention and people with billions of dollars are starting to march around.” Online video giant Hulu’s content was the most popular format on the open-source media center platform Boxee, when Hulu suddenly asked to have its content removed from Boxee. Since then, Boxee users have employed workarounds to continue to watch it. Gurley also alluded to Hulu possibly being forced toward a subscription-based model for its content, although his comment was vague.

There was a lot of talk about mobile applications focused on video. “One interesting thing about mobility is that I think it creates new viewing hours,” said Hollenbeck from Granite Ventures, which is backing makers of iPhone apps, among others. “That mobile device is with you all the time.”

Gurley also noted that technologies associated with computing are moving rapidly into digital entertainment devices. “Ethernet and some form of OS and a menu stack are being put in every TV, every DVD player, and every game machine,” he said. “Those of us who are old enough remember when that same thing happened on the phone stack. It’s going to be fun to watch. “

PBS isn’t just about Antique Roadshow anymore, PBS Interactive SVP Jason Seiken told the audience at our NewTeeVee Live conference today. But he’s the first to admit that PBS isn’t really the hippest brand around. The average age of PBS television viewers is “pushing 60,” he estimated. Consider that countless Elmo-addicted toddlers actually bring that age way down, and you start to understand that PBS has a bit of an age issue.

That’s a problem that the network wants to solve with an online video platform it launched this spring, and Seiken was happy to report that these efforts are starting to pay off. Forty-eight percent of PBS Video visitors are under 35, he said, and the youngsters seem to dig PBS programming as well. Viewers tune into a stream for 26 minutes on average, which is far longer than many commercial platforms. PBS is clocking 12 million uniques a month for its video site, and video views are growing 80 percent month to month.

One of the more interesting aspects of the site is that it’s also a content repository for PBS’ 357 local member stations. These stations can take shows like Frontline or NOVA and combine them on their own sites with small-town news and other local programming. PBS wants to make this relationship a two-way street next year with the launch of the site’s next version, which will automatically syndicate locally produced content and present it to a national audience.

So what’s the secret of the site’s success? Failure, actually. Seiken said that performance reviews at PBS Interactive now track the times an employee failed at their job, with the goal being not to punish, but to reward failed experiments. “Our engineers actually really love this,” said Seiken.

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.

At NewTeeVee Live this afternoon, YouTube announced plans to improve the quality of video streams available on its site, upgrading the maximum upload encoding streaming quality from 720p to 1080p.

The site will roll out 1080p video over the next few days, said Hunter Walk, director of product management at YouTube. In addition, the company is in the process of re-encoding all previous 1080p-capable videos, and is about halfway done that process, Walk said.

The move comes as the Google-owned site is attempting to ramp up monetization of videos from premium content partners. But the uploads are not limited to premium content providers; all users will be able to upload videos in the highest-quality format, Walk said.

The number of high-definition videos that are being uploaded to YouTube has increased dramatically since the company enabled 720p videos. A year ago, about 1 percent of videos were uploaded in HD; that has grown to about 10 percent in recent months, Walk said.

Walk wouldn’t comment on how many viewers currently watch content in HD, but said that the company has been an aggressive promoter of HD video, optimizing for viewer preferences and defaulting to high-quality video when it finds that users have chosen HD over SD streams.

Walk also wouldn’t comment on the effect that the move to 1080p video uploads would have on the company’s cost structure, both in terms of storage and bandwidth. “There’s a lot of speculation about our infrastructure. We make these decisions in an intelligent matter, and we’re able to scale quite gracefully,” he said.

Corrected: 1080p is the new maximum streaming quality.

At our NewTeeVee Live conference today, Om kicked off his fireside chat with Quincy Smith, CEO of CBS Interactive, saying: “This is the official exit interview of Quincy Smith leaving CBS interactive. Somebody better take some notes.” OK, here goes!

While Smith didn’t give us much of an “exit interview,” he did give us some insight into what CBS and other TV networks are looking for in the push to get content onto the web. In reviewing the last three years at CBS Interactive — and a look ahead at the next three — Smith gave his “one man’s opinion” that “the future of TV is video. It doesn’t matter what screen you watch Ghost Whisperer on on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.” What matters, instead, is that it’s viewed, those views are counted, and the people involved in making and distributing that content get paid. “That’s the next focus of the next few years,” he said. “It has to work for the user, and it has to count.”

CBS has been a high-profile partner in the push for TV Everywhere initiatives, and while Smith pointed out that there are plenty of players — from MVPDs to content companies to the “third-party referees” like Nielsen, not to mention aggregators, streaming partners and other distribution platforms — he stressed that there are critical issues for all the potential implementations of the technology: “The speed is linked to the success of how good this initiative is going to be.”

In part, he points out, that’s because of increasingly sophisticated, easy-to-use tools for acquiring content illegally. He pointed to the increasingly slick, accessible sites from which consumers can download torrents. TV Everywhere initiatives will need to compete with the ease and convenience of these sites. Given this focus on ease and convenience, Om pushed Smith to explain why he’s a Hulu hater.

He quickly denied being a Hulu hater, praising the site’s success and appearance and calling it the best place to watch streaming content online, but stressed that the business model just isn’t there yet. “Before you go putting [your content online] in full episodes, you gotta take it to the audience and make sure they know that it’s on this screen,” he said referring to the need to encourage viewers to watch broadcast television.”For now I have to enforce the big screen, because that’s where the money is.”

Despite the big-screen boosterism, Smith talked a lot about his desire to find ways to exploit the web — IP delivery of video — as a new medium. He pointed to a few examples to describe what he meant, at various points in the discussion, citing Google, fantasy sports and MySpace. MySpace’s return to its music-focused roots garnered his praise: “Discovery [of new music and new bands] is like the fantasy sports of music,” he remarked, noting that discovery tools tend to make consumers more of a fan — a bigger consumer of music, ephemera, concert tickets, merchandise and more. “We’re a media company, so how can we do something like that?” he asked.

He stressed that everything CBS does is aimed at this view of online video, though the discussion was light on examples. Om interrupted to ask the next, obvious question: “So, if its so great, why are you leaving?”

Smith’s response was that he’s not fully leaving CBS. “CBS is my first client,” he said. “[But I'm convinced] I can do more from outside than I can from inside at this point.” He noted the broad team that is now in place at CBS Interactive and CBS’ position as a top 10 Internet site in terms of worldwide visitors. “The 9 above us are all pure-play Internet companies. Nos. 11, 12, 13, 15, 22, 28 are Comcast, NBC, Viacom, Disney, the New York Times.” The challenge is no longer attracting an audience — it’s about monetizing that audience and getting paid.

Key to achieving that goal, he repeated frequently, is metrics. “Now that the web is growing up, it’s as much about target-ability and ROI as it is about mass distribution,” he said. Fortunately, “the beauty of the web is it’s an infinitely quantifiable new medium. We have to translate that into reach and frequency.” Whether through super-syndication online, TV Everywhere initiatives or other distribution strategies, Smith said CBS’ goal is the same: “Make sure your core content gets seen, gets counted, and gets paid for.”

The ultimate goal? “One day soon, I hope to be able to deliver to [Comcast Interactive Media's] Amy Bance one stream. She puts it on the air, online, on demand, wherever.” Describing ad integration in all those distribution formats, he said the ideal would be to see integrated ad delivery across platforms  — online ads for Diet Coke, say, paired with a mobile ad for 99-cent sodas at the corner store nearby. “That’s what we all want, even if we have different ways to get there,” he said.

That’s where the content companies want to get, but where does Smith want to go, come Jan. 1, when he leaves CBS Interactive?  “I might be an investment banker for the rest of my life,” he said. He denied raising a fund, and suggested that there’s a need for bankers in the Valley. “There’s a whole generation of entrepreneurs out there…that don’t fully appreciate what a banker is. That’s a bad word for people.” But for Smith, there’s a need for bankers who understand and are passionate about the technology. “Bankers put two things together and try to make ‘em work.”

Related research: TV Everywhere (subscription required)