“TV Everywhere,” the set of new initiatives to make subscription programming available online exclusively to current pay-TV subscribers, could effect the most far-reaching change in the television industry since the introduction of cable. Like community-antenna TV (CATV), as cable was originally known, TV Everywhere has the potential not only to change the way people access television content but to radically reorder the relationship between programmers and distributors.

Its success is far from assured, however. TV Everywhere faces a number of technical and economic hurdles that will need to be overcome before its full impact can be felt, as I detail in a study released today by GigaOM Pro (subscription required) in connection with this Thursday’s NewTeeVee Live conference.

The technical challenges concern authentication, as NewTeeVee readers are likely aware, but also authorization. Given the large number of cable systems in the U.S., and the multitude of specific programming packages to which a person can subscribe, some method for mapping a user’s cable or satellite subscription package to particular pieces of content hosted on various web sites will be essential.

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The challenge and opportunity of live video, the promise of viral distribution as marketing, and the state of fingerprinting technology and the DMCA are some big-ticket questions at the core of the web video business. To try to make some headway on them, NewTeeVee is going to offer up some bonus content for you next week ahead of the NewTeeVee Live conference, in the form of a live-streamed session on the topic of online video copyright and syndication.

Here’s the pitch:

The creation of original content underpins our industry, but Internet video has exploded too quickly for copyright laws to react. Technology and content companies have necessarily developed interim approaches to monitoring, regulating, spreading and monetizing content online. Rarely have these stakeholders had a chance to sit down to talk to one another constructively about where these activities are headed.

To start to address that need, we’re hosting a small event from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. PST on Wednesday, Nov. 11 at our office in San Francisco. Attendees will include content owners, video sites and copyright service providers, such as:

Ethan Applen, director of technology and business strategy, Warner Bros.
Betsy Zedek, counsel, content protection, Fox Group Legal
David King, senior product manager of Content ID, YouTube
Michael Seibel, CEO, Justin.tv
Yangbin Wang, CEO, Vobile

If you’d like to contribute in person to the Video Rights Roundtable, please drop me a note at Liz at gigaom.com. Otherwise, tune in on NewTeeVee for a live feed powered by Livestream.

Of course, the day after the roundtable we’re having a much bigger public event, NewTeeVee Live. If you’d like to join us for a lively day of conversations with thinkers and doers like Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Comcast’s Amy Banse, and the soon-to-be-independent CBS Interactive head Quincy Smith, we still have a few tickets left, so grab yours now.

While revenue from time-shifted TV distribution can only account for part of a monetization strategy, the economics of television are changing for the cheaper, was the message from a group of production executives at the Variety Entertainment & Technology Summit yesterday.

“It used to be the hits would pay for the losers, now not so much,” said Marc Graboff, the chairman of NBC.

Instead, shows like The Office, The Biggest Loser, Prison Break and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are successful based on different factors: strong advertiser support, cheap production costs, online popularity, and international and DVD sales.

Of course, it’s not only increased flexibility of consumption that is driving TV economics down; advertisers just aren’t ponying up like they used to. However the TV execs on the panel said they are none too comfortable with the current state of digital and DVR distribution, especially since measurement techniques are lagging viewership. Read more of this story

It will come as no surprise to NewTeeVee readers that online video is no longer niche. During the last three months, eMarketer predicted that half the U.S. population will be watching online video by next year. Meanwhile, Pew found that more Internet users are watching video online than are participating in social networking. And, for the first time ever, fee-based video is expected to generate more annual revenues than ad-based video in 2009. The third-quarter wrap-up from GigaOM Pro, our sister market research service, shows some of the ways this mainstreaming of the market has impacted industry players.

TV Everywhere is, well, everywhere Fee-based video’s emergence as a viable business is positive news for the growing consortium of distributors pursuing fee-based solutions for delivering premium content online. The growing movement, coined “TV Everywhere,” is an effort to place premium online content behind a subscription wall. While the movement was initiated by the cable operators (specifically Time Warner Cable and Comcast), telcos and satellite operators are also now jumping onboard. Comcast was very active in the third quarter, building up its roster of content providers announcing partnerships with CBS, Starz, Discovery, HBO and Cinemax.

Subscribe to GigaOM Pro for $79 a year, get this report.

This initiative could have serious implications for ad-based video sites such as Hulu. Hulu’s network owners are already exerting their influence on the company by imposing delayed windows on certain content and allowing just a limited number of episodes available at any given time. It is possible that the paid content revival may have significant implications for Hulu as it exists today.

Redbox and TiVo test limits in court In the video rental market, Redbox, the kiosk DVD rental company, continues to make waves. Hollywood has taken issue with its low-cost $1 rental fee, claiming that it hurts video rental and sales revenues. Therefore, some studios have decided to impose restrictions on when Redbox receives new releases, delaying them to the company by 30 to 45 days. Redbox is fighting back, filing lawsuits against offending studios, including 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Home Entertainment.

TiVo also spent the summer in court battling DVR patent infringement. The company has filed suit against Dish, as well as AT&T and Verizon. A decision on the Dish case released in early September awarded TiVo a total of $200 million, far below the company’s claimed damages of $1 billion.

The future of the set-top box The set-top box market continued to evolve in the third quarter as well. Brite-View introduced the low-cost CinemaCube set-top box, and Netgear released its Digital Entertainer Live, a scaled-down version of the Digital Entertainer Elite. Both of these products appear to be in reaction to the economic downturn and consumer demand for lower-cost products. Roku added more content to its set-top device, announcing partnerships with MLB.TV and blip.tv. However, Vudu’s efforts this quarter may be more telling for the future; the company is now bypassing the set-top box and integrating its service directly into the TV. The company had several new wins in the quarter, announcing its service will be included on Mitsubishi and LG TVs.

Despite the continuing difficult economic environment, the third quarter has been fairly positive for online video. Funding continues to flow into the market, with numerous financing deals being announced. Along with other factors, the funding environment indicates a growing interest in services that promote interactivity and the ability for users to deliver their content to any screen in their home. As online video has now reached a sizable portion of the mainstream audience, improving the user experience and access to content are becoming more critical business objectives for players throughout the space.

A more in-depth look at these trends and others is available in the latest Quarterly Wrap-ups in our five focus areas — NewNet, Mobile, Green IT, Connected Consumer, and Infrastructure. These quarterly reviews are available to GigaOM Pro subscribers, along with dozens of detailed research briefings and in-depth articles on specific topics in each of these areas. You can subscribe here.

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

Now that the fall TV season is back in full swing, Mad Men and Wipeout fans aren’t the only ones able to watch new episodes of their favorite shows. But while you were out enjoying the summer, arrangements between networks and distributors were renegotiated, web site navigations changed and new shows came on the air, so finding what you want to watch online may be a bit of a challenge.

But there are some emerging TV aggregators that can help bring all your programming together into one place. As a dedicated online TV watcher, I’ve spent the fall premieres week trying out these various services, and I have some tips.

CastTV: I find CastTV’s guide, whose calendar shows exactly when free episodes from a certain day’s programming are posted online, the most intuitive to use. If I want to watch last night’s episode of FlashForward, for example, I can see at a glance if it’s already posted on Hulu (yes, ABC shows are now on Hulu, so you don’t have to install the Move plug-in to watch them if you don’t want to), zSHARE, MegaVideo and ABC.com.

To be sure, CastTV does index unauthorized uploads, so those who find such a practice offensive might want to go elsewhere. But I appreciate that the index is that much more complete. (However, it also might be worth mentioning that TV Guide has in the past been known to get litigious with those who try to use a grid to display programming.) CastTV raised $3.1 million in 2007.

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While Felicia Day and her web series The Guild may have scored a great deal for distribution on the Xbox and other Microsoft platforms — which involved promotion to a massive audience, a Sprint sponsorship, and allowed her to keep her intellectual property — other web series creators may have trouble following in her footsteps.

We sat down with Ross Honey, Microsoft’s general manager of global content acquisition and strategy in its media and entertainment group, earlier this week in Redmond to talk about the kinds of content the company is looking for, and how web video plays into that. Honey’s answers didn’t make the Xbox Live sound like much of a web content distribution opportunity. As he explained it, the process of cutting deals for web series and securing and inserting ads in them is just too much hassle.

The Xbox doesn’t have a robust ad insertion platform, so instead of individual ads, Microsoft has done overall sponsorship deals as it did with Sprint and The Guild. If a web series can’t attract a major sponsor, there won’t be an easy way for Microsoft to monetize it (the company has done microtransactions for series like Clark and Michael, selling episodes for 25 cents, but that didn’t generate much interest).

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