Not to pat ourselves on the back, but you know how we know yesterday’s NewTeeVee Live conference was awesome? We’re not exhausted. Typically after an all-day show packed with interviews, on-stage moderating, and shaking hands, you’re pretty wiped out.

But the energy was so great yesterday that we’re just pumped for the year ahead. If you weren’t able to attend, you should check out the video from the day (thanks, Livestream!), but if you’re looking for something faster, here’s a recap of what we learned:

Fireside chats = awesome
We went out on a limb yesterday and built our day around one-on-one chats and short presentations and only had one panel. The result was the ability to have deeper conversations and extract real news from our guests.

Take Comcast’s TV Everywhere To Go
Comcast Interactive president Amy Banse is a charmer who could sell ice to the Eskimos. Talking with her, you literally start thinking “Hey, Comcast isn’t so bad… maybe I should get that triple play package.” While she’s a cagey one, Banse did provide us tasty TV Everywhere nuggets:

• First, it sounds like Comcast’s On Demand Online will be available “by Hanukkah” (which starts Dec. 11).
• You’ll need to download the Move player along with an authentication app, and you can authorize up to three devices in the home.
• Also, contrary to earlier reports — Comcast subscribers will be able to access their On Demand Online content outside the home. So you can fire up your laptop while traveling to catch up on content you may have missed.

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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.

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.

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ZillionTV Signs Paramount; new films will be available via electronic sell-through, while catalog titles will be available for free with ads. (emailed release)

Fox Adds Second Screen for DVD Interactivity; “FoxPop” will debut on Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and via a downloadable app; facts about the movie will appear on a laptop or iPhone in sync with and about the movie. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Netflix on the PS3 = Sucky; experience of loading and moving through streamed films are slow, reports one user. (Business Insider)

Microsoft Taking a Multi-Screen Approach to Ads and Games; company putting ads on its Xbox LIVE platform as well as dynamically delivering ads (including video) to breaks built into games. (MediaWeek)

Chase Sponsoring Oprah/CNN Webcast; 90-minute webcast with author Uwem Akpan happening tonight at 9 p.m. (Broadcasting & Cable)

NCR and MOD Systems Begin Technical Trial; kiosks let you download movies to an SD card (see our previous coverage). (emailed release)

Tudou Looks to Mobile, Despite Lagging Chinese 3G; TechCrunch has long wrte-up about the company’s strategy. (TechCrunch)

UK-based P2P video platform VODO published its second feature film on dozens of file-sharing sites Thursday, hoping that worldwide exposure will bring in donations, subscriptions and traditional distribution deals. David Miller’s documentary In Guantanamo, which is the result of a press tour of the controversial detention facility, has been downloaded around 15,000 times within the first 24 hours, according toVODO founder Jamie King.

The site’s first feature, Us Now, got downloaded around 250,000 times since its release in mid-October. Part of the volume is due to VODO’s relationships with a number of well-known BitTorrrent sites, with Isohunt and The Pirate Bay currently featuring In Guantanamo on their front pages. VODO hasn’t been quite as successful in making money from these downloads, but King hopes that a combination of one-off donations and a subscription level for documentary geeks and movie buffs will help eventually make the site sustainable and provide an additional revenue stream for filmmakers.

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Coinstar, the parent company of DVD-vending company Redbox, reported third-quarter earnings yesterday, with the unit’s revenues up 90 percent to $198.1 million. The company also added 2,700 kiosks during the quarter, bringing its total DVD kiosk count to 20,600 nationwide.

Revenue growth for Coinstar’s latest quarter actually slowed from previous quarters this year, as the LA Times points out. The company’s revenue grew 110 percent in the second quarter and 155 percent in the first quarter.

But, growth is growth, especially when it comes at a time when DVD and Blu-ray sales have dropped and home entertainment revenues are depressed.

Redbox’s growth probably won’t ease the heat the company is feeling from some Hollywood studios, which are none too happy about the kiosks’ cheapo dollar-a-night movie rentals. But not everyone is against Redbox; the company recently signed distribution deals with Summit Entertainment and NCircle Entertainment.

Redbox has also started experimenting with higher rental prices in select markets, in a move that could be an olive branch to grumbling studios, or a way to maintain revenue growth.

And just a reminder that we’ll be chatting with Redbox SVP of Marketing and Customer Experience Gary Cohen at next week’s NewTeeVee Live conference. If you act quick, there’s a $50 discount going on tickets until 5 p.m. PT today.

Netflix has started shipping the discs required to stream its “Watch Instantly” movies on the Sony PlayStation 3. According to a corporate blog post today, Netflix VP of marketing Jessie Becker said the company sent out PS3 discs to 100,000 Netflix subscribers who requested them. Becker went on to say that after Netflix “tune[d] a few more details,” everyone else who requested a disc would receive one in the next couple of weeks. Users will have to use the special disc each time they want to stream Netflix on the PS3 until the service can be integrated into the console hardware.

During its Q3 earnings call, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that his company was going to partner with a CE device that had a “material installed base.” The next week, Netflix announced it would make its streaming service available on Sony’s PS3 gaming console, which has an installed base of roughly 9 million units.

A survey from One Touch and the Praxi Group released yesterday estimated that 11.1 percent of Netflix subscribers (roughly 1.2 million people) had watched the Watch Instantly streaming service through a game console, which up until now, meant Microsoft’s Xbox.

We don’t know how many people in total have requested the special discs, and if any of them are new subscribers brought in by the PS3. Regardless, an initial batch of 100,000 is a good indication that Netflix’s streaming usage will get a nice shot in the arm from the PS3 — and that Netflix is on the right path with the increased emphasis its placing on streaming.

We wrote earlier this week about the fact that NBC is planning to require would-be Vancouver Olympics watchers to authenticate in the U.S. Once users have proved they are paying TV customers in good standing, they’ll also have to download the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight if they don’t have it already. But once you get past the setup, the 2009 Olympics is going to be a state-of-the-art high quality video experience, and you know the content won’t be too shabby either.

Today, the U.S. Olympic video tech team is being formally named (though we’ve written quite a bit about some of their participation already). Here’s the full roster:

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Sixty-two percent of Netflix subscribers have used the company’s streaming service since it launched, new research from One Touch and the Praxi Group indicates. Some 54 percent of 1,000 users surveyed in October say they watch at least one movie or TV show a month (hat tip to VideoNuze for providing the report).

During its most recent earnings call, Netflix said 42 percent of its subs had streamed at least 15 minutes of a title during the third quarter.

Despite the fact that Netflix is embedded on just about any device you can plug into your TV, the study found that more than 60 percent of respondents said they watched on a PC, and 13.4 percent watched via a computer connected to a TV. Game console (read: Xbox) usage was 11.1 percent, DVD player was 5.7 percent, and the Roku was 3.6 percent. As a bonus extrapolation, this last bit of research could indicate that if 3.6 percent of Netflix’s 11.1 million subs watch on a Roku, that would translate to roughly 400,000 Roku boxes in homes.

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Finding what you want to watch on TV is going to be a big problem in the coming years as more video choices crowd into your living room. As a result, recommendations will play an increasingly important role in our video discovery. To that end, NDS, which makes middleware and applications for multi-service operator set-top boxes, announced today that it has launched its Recommendations Engine Partner Programme, and video recommendation service Jinni is the first company to join.

In a recent survey of more than 1,000 U.S. cable customers conducted by NDS, having TV recommendations was one of the top applications desired for their cable service.

Jinni’s recommendations are powered by the company’s Movie Genome and can provide suggestions based on previous viewing patterns, mood-based browsing, or a semantic search like “action with a surprise twist.”

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