SEC filings Friday revealed the executive, who was critical to the development of its Web OS platform, had recently left the mobile device company.

As he moves in, current vice president of engineering Greg Pass moves up to the chief technology officer role. He was a co-founder of Summize, the early real-time search engine the microblogging company bought in 2008.

Companies: Twitter

People: Greg Pass

Part of the investment will go toward cashing out early-stage investors, on top of expanding the company. The round also drew in Battery Ventures.

The new funding marks the company’s explosive rise out of obscurity; Groupon is actually an outgrowth of a three-year old project that was focused on collective action for social change. After a year of trying to figure out a business model for this site, the company’s leadership started experimenting with group buying.

It was a very simple idea: offer people a discount if they sign up for a deal en masse.

And it worked. Groupon has since seen runaway success: It says it has saved consumers about $150 million and plans to be in 100 cities by the end of 2010. That’s not to mention the cohort of its copycats. The company raised a $30 million round in December led by Accel Partners. And now it’s been added to the list of red-hot startups the Russian investment firm DST has dipped its fingers along with Facebook and Zynga.

Here’s the release:

GROUPON RECIEVES $135 MILLION FROM DST AND BATTERY VENTURES
Investment to Support Rapid Growth of Social Commerce Globally

Chicago/Moscow, April. 19, 2010–Groupon, the leading social commerce site, today announced that DST, a leading global internet investment group, will lead an investment round of $135 million in the Company. A portion of the investment will be used to fuel Groupon’s global expansion, and the rest will be used to facilitate liquidity for employees and early investors.

DST comprises the majority of the investment, with participation from Battery Ventures, which is also a new investor in Groupon.

Groupon leverages group buying and social media to provide its millions of customers big discounts on the best local businesses in more than 50 cities across the United States and in Canada. To date, customers have purchased over four million Groupons on deals ranging from spa treatments and golf outings to fine dining and skydiving and have collectively saved over $150 million on these deals.

“Our growth is a reflection of the positive impact Groupon is having on consumers and businesses at a very early stage of the market development,” said Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Groupon. “We are very pleased and excited to welcome DST and Battery as shareholders and we look forward to benefiting from their vast knowledge and experience of the social media sector as we continue executing on our growth plans in North America and globally.”

“This investment underscores our view that social networking and community based activity will drive, shape and define the web’s evolution in the years ahead,” said Yuri Milner, Chief Executive of DST. “Groupon, with its strong management team, offering and vision, is pioneering social commerce and is redefining the local advertising space. We look forward to being long-term partners of a company that is on a path to becoming a global Internet leader.”

“We’ve followed the social commerce phenomenon for many years, and are thrilled to have the chance to back such a visionary management team,” said Roger Lee, General Partner, Battery Ventures. “They saw a massive opportunity very early, and have executed flawlessly to define it and take the leadership position. We think there is a lot of runway ahead, and are energized to support the team in their quest.”

Founded in November 2008, Groupon has been aggressively expanding to cities throughout the United States, with plans to be in 100 cities by the end of 2010. Earlier today Groupon announced that it has launched its service in Orlando, Fort Worth, Tucson and Toronto, its Canadian city.

Tags: social buying

Companies: Battery Ventures, Digital Sky Technologies, Groupon

As Facebook pushes to make its “Like” button a standard on the Internet, not just its own website, Meebo, a smaller startup based in Mountain View, Calif., is trying to solve the problem through a new Web standard called Extended Authentication, or XAuth. And it’s got Google in its camp.

“It’s about giving [users] the services they care about,” said Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg in an interview with VentureBeat. And also, crucially for Meebo, it’s a chance to show users an ad.

Meebo is best known for its online chat rooms, which let people sign on to a variety of instant-messaging services to communicate with each other. But it’s expanded its offerings with an intriguing advertising offering. The Meebo Bar, a toolbar that publishers place on their site, features a persistent ad as well as links that allow users to drag pictures and links to share them with their friends on a variety of services, from Twitter to Facebook on down.

The trouble for Meebo and its publishing partners, which include the likes of Time Inc. and MTV Networks is picking which services to show a given user. One might guess that Digg would work for a site with a young, heavily male audience, or that Reddit would be appropriate for a more tech-savvy audience. Or you could actually figure out which sharing services a user belongs to and only show those.

But hitting the top 20 sharing sites one at a time would slow page loads to a crawl. XAuth could offer “a lot more performance for the sites,” said Joseph Smarr, a social Web engineer at Google who helped develop the standard.

Supporting the XAuth standard fits well into Google’s strategy of pushing open Web standards. But it also could help Google slow the growth of Twitter and Facebook, both of which are pursuing separate strategies to make their social sharing services integral parts of other websites. By making it easier to include second-tier sharing services — a category that includes the controversial and underperforming Google Buzz — XAuth could make Twitter and Facebook just two easily replaced sharing options, rather than services hardcoded into websites.

Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace, Disqus, and a handful of other players are also supporting the standard. What they all have in common: They’re not Facebook or Twitter.

The challenge with XAuth: privacy. Even though it’s fairly easy to discover that a given person belongs to, say, Facebook or LinkedIn with a simple Web search, there’s something creepy about a third-party site knowing all the services you belong to. There’s the potential for a backlash similar to the one Google faced with Buzz, which turned Gmail users’ private contacts into a public social network. Google had to rapidly change course and make much of the information it exposed about its users private again.

XAuth will have a website, XAuth.org, where users can disable the service altogether. But that means users will have to opt out of the service instead of explicitly opting in.

The Hollywood Reporter, which features the Meebo Bar, plans to adopt XAuth, but the service is not yet live on that website. (A mockup of how it might be implemented is featured above.)

Google’s Smarr acknowledged that XAuth could raise privacy concerns, but pointed out that the service as implemented by Google only informs website publishers that a given user has a Gmail account.

“I always think back to when people got freaked out when they realized you could do a Google search and find out about them online,” said Smarr. “There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of user education [needed].”

And that may be the ultimate challenge for XAuth. Facebook and Twitter’s single-service implementations don’t require a lot of education. You’re already on Facebook, right? Why not share things there?

“There are all these questions that have to be answered,” said Smarr. “The status quo is not good for anyone, because we end up shutting out users who use one of the smaller sites. There has to be some mechanism to experiment to find the right balance.”

With Facebook and Twitter aiming to dominate the sharing of content, experiments like XAuth are becoming an urgent matter for everyone who’s not them.

Tags: Extended Authentication, Google Buzz, privacy, social bookmarking, social sharing, XAuth

Companies: Facebook, Google, meebo

People: Joseph Smarr, Seth Sternberg

Apple is looking to get into the concert and event ticketing business, according to recent patents discovered by Patently Apple. The patent describes an iTunes-based system and accompanying iPhone application called Concert Ticket +. Its aim is to simplify ticket purchasing and usage at a variety of events, including concerts, sporting events, amusement parks, trade conferences, and even weddings.

There’s no telling how this relates to the current concert ticket industry. Everybody hates Ticketmaster, the largest concert ticket company in America, which just recently merged with Live Nation to become Live Nation Entertainment, a veritable powerhouse (and potential monopoly) of concert promotion and ticket sales. Consumer advocate groups are fighting against the merger via sites like ticketdisaster.org, but it was recently given the go-ahead in the U.S. by the Department of Justice, and it also received regulatory approval from Norway and Turkey.

Apple could potentially compete with the Live Nation Entertainment empire by offering lower fees to consumers. And of course, there’s the potential for discounted merchandise and other benefits. But it would still have to work through Live Nation Entertainment to gain access to the majority of event tickets, so it remains to be seen just how revolutionary Concert Ticket + will be.

At first glance, a major benefit of such a system is that it avoids the hassle surrounding paper tickets. A completely electronic ticketing solution means that you no longer have to wait for tickets in the mail, get them printed out, or pick them up at the ticketing office of an event — instead, your iPhone holds your ticket. The patent demonstrates ticket kiosks scanning a bar code from the iPhone’s screen, but also hints at the possibility of near field communication interfaces in upcoming iPhones — technology like RFID which would allow your iPhone to communicate with nearby devices wirelessly.

In addition to ticketing, the Concert Ticket + system also gives users access to bonuses like discounts on merchandise and refreshments, and access to additional media related to your event. Potentially, it could be used to get access to a live recording of the concert you just attended.

In terms of other events, the patents show how it could be used for something like Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference, which is slated for June 28th to July 2 this year. It could just be for demonstration, but there’s a possibility that we may see Concert Ticket + in a few months.

[Image via Patently Apple]

Tags: Concert Ticket +, tickets

Companies: Apple, Live Nation, Ticketmaster

True to prediction, Twitter announced that its new master plan for monetization is to copy Google create a search-based ad platform. While it includes a few laudable features, I share the view that Twitter has failed to capitalize on the essence of what makes its service so unique and so popular.

Delivering short bursts of information—or musings, rants, or what have you—in the moment, Twitter does to a certain extent live up to its executives’ claims of functioning like a “global nervous system.” Immediacy is what makes it powerful—not the depth of information it provides. Given the 140-character limit, tweets just can’t provide that much information.

But information is what Internet searchers are looking for. That’s what makes the Google ad model so powerful. Those using it for shopping can find in-depth product information, product reviews, price comparison and even availability via Google search results and Google ads. That’s stuff you’re not going to find searching Tweets. For example, search for—mmm, let’s say “coffee”—on both Twitter and Google. The top result on Google is this ad for CoffeebeanDirect: “Extreme Value Coffee – A pound of ours costs about as much as a cup of theirs. CoffeeBeanDirect.com”. And it includes a $5 off offer. The top result in Twitter is “#welcometoghana, where coffee, tea and cocoa are all called tea… / // that be true waa…lol.” Wow, how useful.

Perhaps this is an unfair comparison. As soon as Twitter’s new platform launches, the first tweet search result will be a promoted tweet from Starbucks. But even so, it will stand alone as an oasis of actionable information amidst a sea of largely useless tweeted commentaries.

I will accept the claims that many people do search Tweets and that that search volume is high, but I highly doubt that search activity is as closely tied to shopping or any other commercially-related activity as is the case for Google. So in that sense, the Twitter ad model is not so much different than contextual or behavioral targeting of display ads.

All this is not to say there won’t be advertisers willing to buy “promoted tweets.” Reportedly Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America have already signed on, and there are sure to be many others willing to dip the toe of their ad budget in the waters so as not to feel left out of the latest social media ad fad.

On the plus side, Twitter revealed that sponsored posts will be promoted up or down in displayed results based on how many users engage with them, i.e., replying, retweeting or favoriting. That’s a good thing. In today’s cluttered ad environment, just having an ad where people can see it is not enough. Engagement beats eyeballs hands down, and the net gives us the tools to measure and track it, which ultimately helps marketers strive for greater relevancy and impact with consumers.

It would have been amazing had Twitter come up with a monetization plan that capitalized on its intrinsic strengths rather than grafting on an approach that is better suited for traditional search. Who knows? Maybe this is just an interim strategy for generating some cash quickly and the big brains at Twitter are busy concocting the truly revolutionary monetization scheme. That would be very cool. As its stands now, it just looks like the most direct and immediate communication pipeline that exists will get clogged with ads.

Mason Wiley is senior VP of marketing at Hydra, operator of a performance-based multichannel digital advertising platform. Mason has more than 20 years of experience in marketing, brand-building, direct response, ecommerce and sales. He has pioneered emerging and alternative media channels along the lines of branded entertainment, wireless, viral and guerilla/street team marketing for companies such as Universal Studios Hollywood, Coca-Cola, Sony, and ABC Networks.

Companies: Twitter

True to prediction, Twitter announced that its new master plan for monetization is to copy Google create a search-based ad platform. While it includes a few laudable features, I share the view that Twitter has failed to capitalize on the essence of what makes its service so unique and so popular.

Delivering short bursts of information—or musings, rants, or what have you—in the moment, Twitter does to a certain extent live up to its executives’ claims of functioning like a “global nervous system.” Immediacy is what makes it powerful—not the depth of information it provides. Given the 140-character limit, tweets just can’t provide that much information.

But information is what Internet searchers are looking for. That’s what makes the Google ad model so powerful. Those using it for shopping can find in-depth product information, product reviews, price comparison and even availability via Google search results and Google ads. That’s stuff you’re not going to find searching Tweets. For example, search for—mmm, let’s say “coffee”—on both Twitter and Google. The top result on Google is this ad for CoffeebeanDirect: “Extreme Value Coffee – A pound of ours costs about as much as a cup of theirs. CoffeeBeanDirect.com”. And it includes a $5 off offer. The top result in Twitter is “#welcometoghana, where coffee, tea and cocoa are all called tea… / // that be true waa…lol.” Wow, how useful.

Perhaps this is an unfair comparison. As soon as Twitter’s new platform launches, the first tweet search result will be a promoted tweet from Starbucks. But even so, it will stand alone as an oasis of actionable information amidst a sea of largely useless tweeted commentaries.

I will accept the claims that many people do search Tweets and that that search volume is high, but I highly doubt that search activity is as closely tied to shopping or any other commercially-related activity as is the case for Google. So in that sense, the Twitter ad model is not so much different than contextual or behavioral targeting of display ads.

All this is not to say there won’t be advertisers willing to buy “promoted tweets.” Reportedly Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America have already signed on, and there are sure to be many others willing to dip the toe of their ad budget in the waters so as not to feel left out of the latest social media ad fad.

On the plus side, Twitter revealed that sponsored posts will be promoted up or down in displayed results based on how many users engage with them, i.e., replying, retweeting or favoriting. That’s a good thing. In today’s cluttered ad environment, just having an ad where people can see it is not enough. Engagement beats eyeballs hands down, and the net gives us the tools to measure and track it, which ultimately helps marketers strive for greater relevancy and impact with consumers.

It would have been amazing had Twitter come up with a monetization plan that capitalized on its intrinsic strengths rather than grafting on an approach that is better suited for traditional search. Who knows? Maybe this is just an interim strategy for generating some cash quickly and the big brains at Twitter are busy concocting the truly revolutionary monetization scheme. That would be very cool. As its stands now, it just looks like the most direct and immediate communication pipeline that exists will get clogged with ads.

Mason Wiley is senior VP of marketing at Hydra, operator of a performance-based multichannel digital advertising platform. Mason has more than 20 years of experience in marketing, brand-building, direct response, ecommerce and sales. He has pioneered emerging and alternative media channels along the lines of branded entertainment, wireless, viral and guerilla/street team marketing for companies such as Universal Studios Hollywood, Coca-Cola, Sony, and ABC Networks.

Companies: Twitter

First, get over the fact that Twitter aims to be a profitable business and will build or buy features necessary to make its product offering complete. Yes, there will some tension between Twitter’s pursuit of its own business and the well being of all its developers. Welcome to life in a profit-oriented platform ecosystem. But Twitter knows it needs the support of a great developer community, and it will figure out how to manage this tension and still support a vibrant ecosystem. So don’t freak out, just be smart.

For example, look for verticals where some creativity, focus and great product development can create real value. Twitter is going to look to own horizontal layers of the ecosystem; it is really unlikely that, at least in the foreseeable future, it will have the resources or inclination to exploit particular vertical categories.

Focus on the data. This was reiterated several times by my fellow panelists, and I agree. Twitter and Twitter apps generate a treasure trove of data, and Twitter seems keen to share that data with third-party developers. If I were a developer, I would be spending a lot of my time thinking about leveraging this data to create real value for consumers or businesses.

Don’t limit yourself to Twitter. While Twitter is largely responsible for pushing the web from websites to streams, this shift goes beyond just Twitter. Today it is Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. So think about how your product and your business can apply across a range of streams, not just the Twitter stream.

Stay lean and flexible. In case you haven’t noticed, things are moving incredibly quickly these days on the web. Like everyone else, Twitter is going to make some abrupt bobs and weaves along the way, and despite its best intentions, some of these moves will result in collateral damage. Count on this happening, stay on your toes, and be ready to pivot when it does. The better Facebook developers have this as part of their playbook, and so should you.

Finally, don’t be afraid to talk to the guys and gals at Twitter about where they are going and how your vision relates to their direction. If there was one thing to take away from Chirp, it’s that the Twitter team is serious about being accessible to its ecosystem partners. Take advantage of this.

Mike Hirshland is a General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners. He blogs at vcmike.wordpress.com. Mike represents Polaris as a director on the boards of Automattic (WordPress), Hangout Industries, KISSmetrics, LolApps, Quantcast, Sproutbuilder, The Start Project (where Mike is a co-founder), and Thing Labs, Inc. (Brizzly).  Mike led Polaris’ investments in Black Arrow, Q1 Labs, and Stickybits.  He formerly served as Chairman of Ucentric Systems, which was acquired by Motorola.  Mike also was instrumental in Polaris’ creation and launch of Dogpatch Labs.

Reviled and closely-watched Demand Media enlists Goldman for an IPO: The Financial Times reported that the media company, which uses algorithms to study search patterns and automatically assign stories and which many journalists are freaked out by, may file for an initial public offering as early as August. The offering might value the company at about $1.5 billion.

AMD’s earnings trail Intel’s: Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the world’s second-largest microprocessor manufacturer, revealed that its sales were growing more slowly than rival Intel’s amid a global economic recovery. The company saw revenue rise 34 percent to $1.57 billion, compared to Intel’s gains of 44 percent.

EA founder Trip Hawkins says “spammy isn’t going to cut it” anymore in social games: The gaming legend, who recently founded startup Digital Chocolate, said social gaming companies like Zynga and Playfish need to retool their offerings and build genuinely entertaining games. Facebook’s recent changes to communication channels between applications and users have forced gaming companies to go back to the drawing board, he said.

Google streamlines printing from any web app: The search company, in an effort to commoditize all devices and operating system, announced Google Cloud Print. It’s a way for any application on the web, desktop or mobile device to print to any printer, without requiring drivers.

Gmail adds drag-and-drop file attachments: This is pretty self-explanatory but man is it cool. Chrome and Firefox users will be able to drag and drop attachments into e-mail without doing manual file uploads.

MySpace public relations head Dani Dudeck stonewalls TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington: The MySpace vice president (pictured), who has been with the company since it was run by Chris DeWolfe, refused to answer any questions on camera from the tech blogger. It’s an uncomfortable but hard-not-to-watch minute and a half of video.

Another fun Steve Jobs e-mail: A perturbed developer in Switzerland bugs Jobs about the delayed international launch of the iPad. The Apple head responds: “Are you nuts? We are doing the best we can. We need enough units to have a responsible and great launch.”

Companies: advanced micro devices, Demand Media, Digital Chocolate

People: Trip Hawkins

[Disclosure: my company, Transpond, provides social engagement apps for numerous media companies including CBS and NBC.]

Hulu — a joint venture of NBC Universal, News Corp., and Disney — has had a good thing going. The ad-sponsored video site carries numerous TV shows through agreements with the broadcast networks. And for the past year, it’s made good money selling ad space on network shows and luring in viewers with its quality streaming. But that’s all about to change.

The Hulu value proposition as a destination for premium online video was always doubtful given that Hulu is owned by content companies that stream the same content from their own websites. Sure, there was a window of time there when it was very difficult to stream good quality video with a modern player, but that window is long gone. The networks now all offer excellent streaming high-definition 1080p players (although some properties such as AmericanIdol.com could definitely benefit from a phone call to Brightcove or Ooyala for a player and streaming upgrade). On top of that, with Comcast’s acquisition of NBC, the content itself is now owned by the folks delivering the pipe.

CBS never allowed Hulu to syndicate its content, in a very prescient decision on its way to becoming a top 5 video destination. Viacom recently pulled its popular “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” shows off of Hulu, really letting the air out of the balloon.

Hulu sells ads on the video it streams, meaning that Hulu’s ad sales team competes with the networks’ own ad sales teams. Hulu’s sales pitch to the networks was, “let us compete with you on your new content and we will help you monetize your older assets”. But Hulu hasn’t been able to monetize the older TV shows it runs. Pull up any TV show over two years old on Hulu, and all of the ads are public service announcements. (Although Google, ever the expert on remnant ad inventory, bought up all of this inventory for a pittance over the Christmas holiday season to play precursors to its Super Bowl ad.) So the Hulu trade off is not working. Yes, it’s profitable, and yes, the number of streams served is growing, but the number of unique users has been flat for almost a year.

If Hulu is not going to be the solution for premium content owners, what is?

The TV networks always complain when they are not in control of when and how a viewer watches their content. They complained about VCRs, and then DVRs, both times because users could skip the commercials. It took a long time for DVRs to finally make the networks money. Nielsen had to start tracking who was watching time delayed commercials, and advertisers had to agree to include these views if they occurred within three days. Video streaming, on the other hand, forces users to sit through commercials. The trouble is, there was no system in place to track the number of views, making it hard for network TV’s ad sales teams to pitch the inventory to advertisers.

The good news is, in January of this year, Nielsen announced that it would start combining TV and online viewing of shows into a single rating. With Nielsen’s move, the networks have an independent auditor that can verify that viewers are watching a particular show. This presents an opportunity to integrate Internet distribution into their existing business model, which they have not been able to do even with on demand video on cable. So from here, we’re going to see some real evolution taking place in TV. It’ll no longer be something simply ported into the online world. Instead, we’ll see the networks fully move online and develop new business models for broadcasting to an internet-based audience.

Following is a prediction of five steps we’ll see these networks take in the coming months:

(1) Allow content to be streamed online at the same time as or within an hour of when it is broadcast over the air. For three days these streams are counted by Nielsen just as if a viewer watched the show live or on a DVR.

(2) If the video is played in fullscreen mode, show all the same commercials as in the broadcast version, just like a DVR, but also force the viewer to watch the commercials. If the video is played within a browser window, use shorter, online-style, 15 second commercials, and place sponsored engagement features such as quizzes and polls below the video player.

(3) After three days, replace the commercials with different commercials that are sold outside of the upfronts. This presents an opportunity to sell popular “season catchup” packages and other such products, so the online ad sales teams continue to have a unique product to sell.

(4) Allow the network’s streaming players to be embedded on any site, so that a thousand Hulus like Boxee, Windows Media Center, AppleTV and TV.com can blossom and help increase ad views for a small cut of the revenue. Since the network’s commercials are now being propagated, companies like Boxee can be harnessed as part of the syndication solution.

(5) And the thorniest issue: affiliate stations. It used to be that if you wanted to watch CSI in San Francisco, you could only see it on KPIX, CBS’ local affiliate. Now you can wait a few days and see CSI online from CBS.com. The local affiliates will need to be cut in on the Internet action, and they will also need to adapt to changing times. With cable, satellite, and now Internet streaming, there is no real compelling reason to have the same content broadcast over the air. In fact, it is a disincentive — Disney makes far more money per subscriber from cable systems on ESPN than on ABC, since they are simultaneously broadcasting the ABC content for free. Network affiliates are now differentiated by local ad sales and local programming, not last-mile content distribution. Although it will require some infrastructural changes for both the networks and the affiliates, the networks can extend their ad platform so affiliates can place ads for viewers within their geographic areas that stream shows. In addition, broadcast affiliates should be able to stream the shows from their own websites with additional, local engagement features surrounding the show.

This model I’ve outlined above will enable the networks to sell ads over the air, on cable, via DVR and online at the same time and have them all measured by Nielsen in a single rating number. Affiliates are included in the model since they can also distribute their ads to their local markets. Online ad sales teams can sell additional ads after the initial viewership period. And all the content is embeddable and monetizable across the web. The unique aspect of web content is that it is easy to create engagement — and particularly social engagement — around that content, which accelerates content uptake.

THE COMMUNITY RESPONDS:
–Ben Elowitz, CEO Wetpaint

Hulu succeeds because they absolutely nail their relationship with a constituent even more important than their network partners: the consumer. The Hulu experience commands (according to Compete.com) 8 times the total attention NBC receives, double the average stay of Fox, and 3 times the visit frequency of ABC. The networks would be foolish to take their traffic and go home, as they would round to zero once those fractions are blended in with their massive broadcast businesses.

It is inevitable that in the digital future, consumers will watch what they want, when and where they want it. As advertisers reach their targets ever more precisely and cheaply, premium content will increasingly need to be paid for directly by consumers. The networks that survive that transition will be the ones who get their content distributed broadly. Those content owners may lose short-term dollars by allowing distributors like Hulu to show content with limited advertisements and to take a cut of the profits. But they will make up for it with long-term billions by building outstanding brands that consumers will pay for.

–Mike Ramsay, venture partner at NEA and co-founder of TiVo.

I see a lot of companies that are trying to aggregate video so you can see it anywhere — on your PC, your TV, your mobile phone. No one has quite cracked the code yet. Two other factors will affect the outcome. The first is distribution deals. Life is more complicated than you might think in this industry, as I learned at TiVo (though I’m speaking here as an observer, not on behalf of TiVo). Take, for example, the TV Everywhere initiative put forward by Time Warner and Comcast, where they will make video available via their broadband connection to your PC as long as you subscribe to their cable network. That’s great, because you get all this video if you subscribe. But on the flip side, it leaves players who are not part of that out in the cold (it’s not clear if Hulu is involved in that or not). They don’t get distribution. The cable companies want to control distribution just as networks do broadcast. It remains to be seen what happens there.

The other big issue is figuring out how to make streaming-video content delivered to the TV. Boxee has been one of the most innovative. They tried to put Hulu on TV. Hulu tried to shut them down, Boxee got up again… I’m not sure if it ended in a place where it’s great for consumers. At Demo, when Hillcrest Labs intended to show Hulu full screen on TV, Hulu shut them down. They’re worried they’ll lose control if broadband content is put on television. Hulu has a lot of financial backing, and it has consumers behind it, and it’s probably going to figure out how to survive. But it has to figure out how to play in a world where the big players are trying to manipulate things to their advantage. Should Hulu be disruptive, or go with flow?

–Jeremy Allaire, CEO, Brightcove

I have mixed reactions to some of the assertions in the editorial. Hulu is clearly overall a stunning success in terms of consumer adoption, as well as overall financial model. Many scoffed at these pre-launch, including myself, and have been proved wrong. The piece, however, makes a couple of key points — that there are structural challenges to the relationship model between Hulu and its parents, that delivering an exceptional experience that integrates into “omni-bus” ad sales strategies anywhere online is becoming easier. To me, the principal question facing Hulu is whether they can convince both their programming partners and the traditional TV distribution affiliates (e.g. cable, satellite, telco) that they should be a trusted domain for exhibiting TV content, so long as they play by the rules of authenticated subscribers. I think that they should and they will, and that in addition to expansion in catch-up TV content on broadcaster websites, Hulu will remain a critical aggregation point for premium online video.

Peter Yared is the founder and CEO at Transpond, and has 15 years of experience helping companies adapt new technology platforms. Peter was most recently the founder and CEO at ActiveGrid, a commercial open source company delivering the LAMP stack to the enterprise. Previously, he was CTO of Sun Microsystems’ Liberty Network Identity initiative. Peter was also CTO of Sun Microsystems’ Application Server Division. Before its acquisition by Sun, Peter served as CTO of NetDynamics, which pioneered the then-leading J2EE application server. Earlier, he was founder and CEO of JRad Technologies, an enterprise Java company acquired by NetDynamics.

Companies: Hulu

Google responded to VentureBeat’s request for comment by saying the documents have nothing to do with the lawsuit and criticizing Viacom for “trying to litigate this case in the press.”

The main document that Viacom highlights is a “content acquisition strategy update” from 2006, where Google Video team members cast a critical eye on the competition. They write: “YouTube’s business model is completely sustained by pirated content. They are completely at the mercy of companies not responding with [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] requests.”

The presentation includes another statement about YouTube that raises questions about Google’s motivations for buying the site: “The YouTube business model is also not monetizable. They are an AdSense publisher, so we have a good sense of their rate of monetization.”

And a third passage suggests that Google was concerned that YouTube could provoke copyright holders to push for a repeal or modification of the DMCA, a law which largely insulates Internet service providers from copyright claims stemming from the activities of their users: “The DMCA law could be overturned if the media industry engages in sustained lobbying efforts (it was written before the viral video craze took off) and it is risky to build an entire business model on this law.”

To Viacom’s other allegation, about Google planning to coerce content owners, Viacom points to a business strategy document from the same period, where Google said, “We may be able to coax or force access to viral premium content… use threat to get standard deal sign-up.”

Previously, court briefings from Google stated that Viacom was actually interested in acquiring YouTube before Google bought it up.

I’ve embedded the two main documents shared by Viacom below. The quotes are from page 20 in the first document, and page 26 in the second.

Content Acquisition Strategy Update

BizOps Google Video Strategy

[image via Wired]

Tags: YouTube

Companies: Google, Viacom