This post is meant for a very particular group: the boyfriends of Twilight fans. You guys are a special class of men. You’ve put up with months of preparatory squealing and sighing over Taylor Lautner’s abs and Robert Pattinson’s…OK, maybe you’re not sure what exactly she sees in that guy. But finally the time has come for the special lady in your life to remind you that she went and saw Transformers 2 with you opening weekend and thus you totally owe her one night at the movies, her choice.

But perhaps, as you sit watching the poorly reviewed second installment in a franchise that many consider to be an extended metaphor for abstinence and/or the Mormon faith, you find that you just need a short break from the pouting and melodrama and werewolves. And that’s why this post is here: to give you something to watch in the bathroom, on your smartphone, before you reluctantly return to the darkened theater.

From Babelgum Comedy and Landline TV comes a scenario arguably much more dramatic than a papercut-induced breakup: Edward reveals that there’s more to the vampire curse than Bella knew.

College Humor has also dove in with a parody that incorporates both New Moon and the Internet’s favorite t-shirt.

And the cast of Saturday Night Live tried their hands at this when Taylor Swift hosted the show two weeks ago, recasting the original film with a different Hollywood monster.

So return now to the movie in progress, boyfriends of Twilight fans, having hopefully laughed out your pain. And just remember this — now SHE owes YOU.

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.

BBC Gives Technical Details of Its New iPlayer On the Wii; the U.K. broadcaster has encoded streams using H.264 at a 700 kbps bit rate, compared to 1.5 Mbps for regular TV or even 3.2 Mbps for HD. (BBC) Speaking of British TV, the U.K. version of YouTube debuted its new site section that hosts roughly 4,000 full-length programs. (Variety)

Silverlight 4 Beta Launches for Developers; new features include out-of-browser capabilities, advanced business application development, and native multicast and offline DRM support for video. (Ars Technica)

Sony Announces Plans for Digital Media Store; new Sony Online Service will sell music, movies, books, and other downloadable applications for mobile devices. (BusinessWeek)

Disney Launches Its First Branded Entertainment Channel; “The Possibility Shop” will be exclusively sponsored by Clorox and promote Clorox products. (Ad Age)

Blu-ray, DVD Sales Expected to Stabilize in 2010; high-definition Blu-ray DVD sales have yet to make up for the decline in standard def DVD sales in 2009. (Video Business)

Digiboo Does Partnership with Movie Gallery; deal will put 100 Digiboo movie kiosks (see previous coverage) in retail locations. (Video Business)

Grey’s Anatomy Gets a Web Spin-Off; Seattle Grace: On Call will be a six episode run that’s on immediately after Grey’s is aired. (The Hollywood Reporter)

The online video revolution will be televised, meaning that it will soon show up on TVs, Blu-ray players and other connected devices, a panel of execs agreed at the Future of Television event in New York on Thursday. But the content that’s available on those devices could affect how much consumers think they’re worth. As Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Electronics Association, put it, “Consumers will pay more money for a connected TV if it has premium video content.”

At the same time, there are some limitations to connected devices. In the short term, most of them carry the same content — Netflix, Amazon video-on-demand, YouTube, Pandora, etc. Zach Klein, chief creative officer for Boxee, said that’s because only so many content partners are willing to work with companies like his to distribute online video to devices.

Another issue is that there’s no good way to navigate through that content. “The second [consumers] connect their TVs to the Internet, they’re overwhelmed by choice,” CEA’s DuBravac said. “The next bit of innovation will be in how to organize that information.”

Even so, the availability of content on connected devices should drive more consumers to adopt services, panelists said. According to Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates, the consumer electronics industry is expected to ship about 200 million connected devices worldwide by 2013. For a market that’s still in its infancy, that might seem like a drastic jump in just a few years — but Scherf said the consumer electronics manufacturers he talks to actually believe that estimate is too conservative.

DuBravac said those numbers jibe with his organization’s research. The CEA, which tracks shipments of CE devices, estimates that about 60 percent of all televisions sold in 2013 will have a broadband connection.

All those connected devices will drive some serious transactional revenues for over-the-top media, to the tune of about $3.4 billion by 2013, Scherf said. But in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money to be made off of IP video is still just a fraction of traditional pay-TV services. To put things in context, Scherf said that together, pay-TV and video-on-demand sales will total between $11 billion and $12 billion by that time.

Google is making it easier for deaf, hard-of-hearing and global audiences to enjoy YouTube today, by announcing features that make adding captions to videos much easier.

The first feature uses the same voice-recognition algorithms found in Google Voice along with the YouTube caption system to create auto-captions for videos. A Google blog post announcing the feature warns, “The captions will not always be perfect,” but it’s definitely a good first step.

Additionally, you can automatically translate captions into one of 51 languages, making videos more accessible to a global audience.

The second caption feature is automatic caption timing. This is a slightly more manual process for adding captions to videos, but it’s still very cool. Creators just upload a text file with all the words in a video, and Google figures out when the words are spoken to create the appropriate captions.

An example of both in action is embedded in the video above.

Google says both features will be available in English by the end of this week. Automatic captions will only be visible on select partner channels to start as the company works out the kinks. The auto-timing feature will roll out globally for all English-language vids on YouTube.

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.”

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.

Brightcove is releasing the latest version of its software today with a slew of new features, such as support for live video streaming and mobile distribution, improved encoding and analytics. But what could really shake up the industry is the introduction of lower-priced, entry-level service packages.

The company has introduced a pricing model, called Brightcove Express, that will target organizations that need a video management platform, but don’t have the budget to spend $6,000 a year for its “Professional” package of services. As a result, Brightcove Express will be rolled out with monthly, pay-as-you-go plans that can be purchased with a credit card.

Brightcove Express plans include:

• A $99-per-month plan, which includes 50 videos, 40GBs of bandwidth, and one user account,
• A $199-per-month plan, which includes 200 videos, 100GBs of bandwidth, and two user accounts, and
• A $499-per-month plan, which includes 500 videos, 250GBs of bandwidth, and three user accounts.

By moving downmarket, Brightcove could put pressure on companies like Fliqz, Veeple, and Delve Networks, all of which offer low-price, pay-as-you-go services to small- and medium-size businesses.

While the introduction of lower-priced packages could help Brightcove attain customers that wouldn’t otherwise buy its services, the company also hopes to increase pressure on the competition with new features and capabilities built into the Brightcove 4 platform.

A new live streaming feature, for instance, will allow customers to mix and match live and on-demand videos in the same Brightcove player and manage both types of video assets in the same management portal. Media companies can also add pre-roll ads to live streams when users first sign on, as well as adding mid-roll ads with its advertising software development kit (SDK).

A new iPhone SDK, which will be released by the end of the year, will enable customers to build and deliver videos to native iPhone applications. As part of this initiative, Brightcove developed a custom video player for the iPhone that enables users to share videos with friends via email and Twitter. iPhone support is just the first step to serving smartphone users, and over time the company will offer additional smartphone SDKs, said Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove vice president of marketing.

On the encoding side, the new product includes improved control over its cloud-based encoding technology, with support for higher-quality default encoding, as well as support for more renditions to ensure high-quality video streams when viewed in multi-bit rate formats. When using multi-bit rate streaming through Adobe’s Flash Media Server 3.5, streams are encoded in six different renditions, ranging from 250kbps to 1.8Mbps.

Along with all the updated features of its video platform, the company is introducing a new chromeless video player. The new Brightcove player supports social sharing through various social networks including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The company worked with Facebook to enable deep integration with the social network, including real-time chat and comments, and the ability to embed Brightcove players and videos into Facebook profiles and fan pages.

What does a company that’s built a thriving business off renting DVDs do in a post-DVD, streaming online video world? At this stage, according to Gary Cohen, the SVP of Marketing and Customer Experience at Redbox, a company that rents DVDs through kiosks at convenient locations, you do a whole lotta testing. Cohen told NewTeeVee co-editor Chris Albrecht at the NewTeeVee Live conference tonight that his company is doing a brand-new digital video test with partners.

While Cohen wouldn’t expand on the test of the partners, he said that the company is doing a variety of tests with technology in addition to digital, like Blu-ray, as well as different types of pricing testing. “We’re trying to find out how to leverage this big digital footprint we have,” said Cohen. “We have a lot of data and a lot of customers and we’re listening to our customers.”

It’s the same problem that Netflix (whose CEO spoke earlier today) faces. And Cohen said the same thing that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings did: The DVD is still growing. Redbox, which now has 20,600 kiosks installed nationwide at locations like McDonalds, Wal-Mart and the top 25 supermarkets, said that so far, its customers “are very comfortable with the DVD.” The service Redbox provides is a “convenient, simple and valuable” one, he said. Redbox rents DVDs for a dollar a night, customers can both rent and return DVDs at any of its kiosks.

The business model is so simple, it’s almost shocking that it’s reached such a large scale. In Salt Lake City the company has one kiosk per 3,000 residents and Redbox is installing another kiosk every hour. In terms of content, Cohen, said the company just passed a half a billion movies; it’s done deals with Sony, Lions Gate, Paramount and Disney. But not every content provider wants to be friends with Redbox — the company has been mired in lawsuits.

Michael Gregory, the creator of the YouTube remixing phenom Auto-Tune the News, (if you haven’t seen it, drop what you’re doing and go watch this clip) expects that remixed online videos will eventually lose their current extreme buzzy status and settle down to just another art form (like ventriloquism and yodeling, he joked). But as long as vocoder and Auto-Tune the News is still at the height of hipness, the team and Gregory are going to take advantage of it. At our NewTeeVee Live conference, Gregory said that Auto-Tune the News would be launching a viral video campaign with Sony “very soon.”

While Gregory wouldn’t give too many details about the Sony partnership and the content, he said that it would still include the “absurd irreverent take,” that Auto-Tune the News fans have come to know and love. Sony approached the Auto-Tune crew and asked them to provide their take for Sony content, said Gregory, which he added is a positive contrast to companies that want to work with you but end up “putting you in a box.” The content will also be “interactive,” said Gregory, which he’s particularly excited about.

The idea for the show all started back in September 2008, when Gregory made a musical debate for the presidential campaign using the audio processing software Auto-Tune while he was working as an intern at a music studio. But after making that clip he realized he wanted there to be a way for the debaters to interact. That was when the idea to use current events and news via a remixed song emerged. Shortly afterward, Gregory started distributing content with Barely Political (home of Obama Girl), signed up with Next New Networks for ad sales and partnered with YouTube.

Since then, the videos have caught on like wildfire and have generated praise from the likes of news anchors Rachel Maddow and Glenn Beck. Gregory is just happy to have the business side taken care of so he can keep doing things like “Auto-Tune” Barack Obama and play in his family soul band, the Gregory Brothers.

Nielsen has been tallying TV ratings for years, but with shows and video offerings proliferating online through various distribution points, what a TV audience actually consists of is shifting. At NewTeeVeeLive today, Brian Fuhrer, SVP and Media Program Leader at The Nielsen Company, weighed in on the need to measure video audiences across TV, the web, mobile devices and more.

Fuhrer showed data emphasizing that both television and online video consumption are rapidly growing. He said that as people watch video and television on “extended screens,” including on mobile devices, advertisers are putting increasing pressure on audience metrics providers to deliver accurate numbers.

How can Nielsen accurately measure viewership on extended screens? One initiative that the company is focused on is measuring Internet usage data and TV viewing habits for homes included in the National Television Panel. The hope is to quantify video viewing patterns on TV and online. Fuhrer said that getting to accurate Internet video viewing patterns will take 6-7 months. “It will give us a very robust sample that we think we can do a lot with regarding extended screens,” he said.

In the same way that the iPhone helped sell more Macs for Apple, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told the audience at the NewTeeVee Live conference today that Netflix can help sell more broadband and broadband services. We’re a killer app for broadband data, said Reed. GigaOM founder and interviewer Om Malik explained it in more Twitter-friendly terms: “Netflix is the iPod of broadband.”

Here’s Reed’s logic: Customers don’t upgrade to faster broadband for email or web surfing, they do it for high-bandwidth online video services like Netflix’s streaming video. Over the next 5-10 years, Internet video technology will expand cable’s broadband relevance to customers, said Reed.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. The more connected devices, the more potential customers for the video-streaming service. Over the past year Netflix has been racing to launch its video-streaming service on a variety of connected devices, including, most recently, Sony’s video game console, the PS3. (Reed joked that the Internet Wi-Fi toaster was its next killer device.) Netflix is going to try to wire up every device with its application, he said — Wi-Fi is just a $10 part. “We’re making great progress there,” said Reed. (That may or may not include Nintendo’s video game console the Wii, as Reed wouldn’t comment on Om’s heckling about a Wii/Netflix partnership).

But Netflix is still banking on its mail-order business, and will continue to do so in the short term. Reed said that the company is spending $600 million a year on postage for its mail-order business, a figure it expects to grow to $700 million. But clearly, over the long term, broadband is the future for Netflix. Reed says that the company is expanding internationally and that in some international locations it will launch with its streaming video business only.

The race to bring the flexibility and variety of online video delivery to the comfort of your couch was taken to a whole new level in 2009 — soon, the content you want to watch will be accessible wherever and whenever you want. With that in mind, the theme our third annual NewTeeVee Live event is TV Everywhere. Join us today here at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco as we talk to some of the industry’s key players to learn about the future of this increasingly exciting industry. Our livestream — which includes a chat feature — will start at 9 am PT, and we will be live-blogging the onstage sessions throughout the day. The Twitter hashtag is #ntvl. Enjoy!

Live blogs of today’s sessions:

• What’s Next for Redbox in a Post-DVD World
• Panel of VCs Sees Bright Prospects for Video Industry
• PBS Is Not Just Your Grandma’s Network
• Roku Readies Channel Store
• How Obama, CNN and Facebook Brought Change to Social TV
• Will Broadband TVs Connect With Consumers?
• YouTube Adds Support for 1080p Videos
• Quincy Smith’s Official Exit Interview
• Auto-Tune the News to Hook Up With Sony
• Nielsen Eyes Extended Screens
• Adobe CTO: HTML 5 Is “Trying To Do What Flash Already Does”
• Netflix CEO: Why Netflix Is the Killer App for Broadband
• Comcast’s On-Demand Online to Be Ready by Hanukkah
• Cisco Sees Video as a Market in Transition
• How NFL.com Scores With Fantasy Football
• Comedy Central Gets 500,000 Online Viewers From HuffPost
• What’s the Next Big Thing in Video?
• Get Ready for the Boxee Box
• YouTube Star Ryan Higa Doesn’t Think He’s Famous
• Xbox Live to get More Social Nov. 17

Online video and copyright have been through a lot in the past few years, evolving from a highly contentious relationship to more a transactional partnership. But media creators and technology companies have learned about each others’ businesses largely in conference rooms and in courts. Today, at the NewTeeVee HQ here in San Francisco, we’re holding an event aimed at bringing the discussion into the light, giving stakeholders the chance to talk to one another constructively. Participants today 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; and Yangbin Wang, CEO, Vobile.

We will be live streaming the event, starting at 9:30 am PT, for two hours. We hope you can join us — please leave your thoughts as to what’s being discussed in the comments section. And for those who want to talk about it online, the Twitter hash tag is #NTVL.



To follow along via liveblog and get access to post-game analysis and video interviews with attendees, head over to GigaOM Pro. Sign up today with the discount code “BUNKERNTVL″ to get an additional $20 off our $79 annual subscription price.

Rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures is allowing its fans to stream its new album a week ahead of release, using YouTube as the preferred method of delivery.

The group, which consists of drummer Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters and Nirvana), keyboardist and bass guitarist John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), and vocalist and guitarist Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), has posted all 13 tracks from its upcoming self-titled album on the video site. The songs are also available through an embedded YouTube video player on the band’s official site.

Surprisingly enough, there are no advertisements associated with the YouTube page, other than a pre-order link running across the top banner of the page. A YouTube representative said the company was not involved in the creation of the band’s page.

The fact that the group is posting its songs without associated videos — just static album art — on YouTube marks a bit of a reversal in the way musicians and recording companies approach the omnipresent video site. Many recording companies have used YouTube’s Content ID video-fingerprinting scheme to take down videos or kill the audio tracks of music videos posted without the rights owner’s permission. But that approach has gradually softened, with more content owners using the tool to co-opt and monetize copyrighted music videos posted by YouTube users.

The release also comes as YouTube puts its weight behind Vevo, a joint venture with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment that is designed to create a safe, well-lit place for music videos that the companies hope to monetize.

Them Crooked Vultures did not post the album on its MySpace page, despite the social network being seen as the “go-to-place” for musicians to interact with their fans.