About two weeks ago, I heard about a restructuring under HBO SVP of consumer technology Otto Berkes, who also takes over the job of CTO in March from longtime vet Bob Zitter. The former Microsoft exec and Xbox co-founder was named the top tech figure at the premium cable network at the end of last year, after being the primary developer of its popular HBO Go and MAX Go streaming video offerings.

As part of the changes, the memo of the Time Warner unit said, product strategy and development exec Hans Deutmeyer is leaving HBO.

HBO has been very active in the digital space, increasingly offering its shows on a variety of mobile devices. Earlier this week, at our D: Dive Into Media conference, HBO said its subscribers will be able to stream programming from an Apple iPhone or iPad onto their television via AirPlay.

All the various details are below, in a memo HBO sent to its employees at the end of January:

HBO GO has established HBO as a company that understands the value of technology as a tool for delivering great content and experiences to consumers, and HBO.com has become a primary means of driving broad consumer engagement and awareness of our offerings. We are proud of these achievements and also recognize that we have more ahead of us to accomplish. Over the course of the next several years, our mission is to build best-in-class technology execution capabilities. That mission is central to ensuring that HBO has the tools available to support our business through the ongoing technology-based disruption of media and to support new areas of growth. Like other leading Internet-based video service providers, we will design, build, and deploy scalable products with global reach.

Achieving these goals will require focus and a disciplined approach. Roles and responsibilities must be clear and well-defined to ensure efficient distribution of work and smooth collaboration between groups and people. In order to provide the organizational framework needed to achieve our goals, I am restructuring Digital Products around four functional groups (listed alphabetically):

1. Infrastructure Operations & QA,
2. Program Management,
3. Software Engineering,
4. User Experience & Product Design.

Each of these groups will have responsibilities for both HBO GO and HBO.com as appropriate for the functional areas of each group. This will enable more efficient end-to-end integration and coordination of our design, platform architecture, and infrastructure development.

The attached “Digital Products Organizational Pillars” slide illustrates the roles and responsibilities of each of these four functional groups in greater detail. The leaders of these groups will report directly to me and will continue to do so after my transition to the CTO role.

Donna Stalworth will continue to head up the infrastructure operations and QA efforts in Digital Products. She will also add build and release management to her responsibilities.

Rebekah Calabrese will be stepping into the role of VP of Program Management for Digital Products. She and her team will be responsible for cross-group coordination, project management, budget management, technology vendor relationships, and overall status communication for Digital Products. Rebekah will also continue to provide contract support for Digital Products as well as the other technology groups. Her team will consist of the existing Digital Products program and project management staff and her current reports.

Drew Angeloff will lead all of Digital Products’ software engineering activities in New York as well as in Seattle. Centralizing consumer software engineering in one group under one leader will maximize coordination and the flow of information, and will help ensure a consistent and robust software architecture. This is especially important given geographic distance between the New York and Seattle teams. The engineering staff working on device application development and the GO service currently on Rob Caruso’s team will now report to Drew.

Rob Caruso and the workflow team led by Jason Kui will transition to Diane Tryneski’s organization; Rob will report to Diane. Rob’s new charter is to build software engineering capabilities to optimize digital asset creation, management, and security, and to create technologies that unlock the full potential of software in the digital content area. Rob and his team will collaborate closely with Digital Products to ensure that our digital content technologies and our consumer-facing products inform each other to enable unique and innovative content-driven user experiences. This new role and group will be critical to achieving end-to-end software technology excellence.

Dina Juliano will lead the User Experience & Product Design organization. Her team’s responsibilities will include HBO GO, HBO.com, and HBO On Demand. Dina’s team will conceive, design, and realize new digital experiences in partnership with key stakeholders across HBO. She and her team will incorporate consumer and market insights to create a coherent product vision and roadmap that engages our users. Dina’s team will consist of her existing team and the groups formerly in Hans Deutmeyer’s organization.

Hans has decided to leave HBO to pursue opportunities that better align with his future interests. Hans has been a part of the HBO GO story since its genesis and has played a key role in bringing it to the market successfully. Given the new organizational direction, he has decided that this is the right time for him to pursue other opportunities. I want to thank Hans for his contributions and wish him success in his new endeavors.

Please welcome Donna, Rebekah, Drew, Rob, and Dina in their new roles. The changes in their teams and roles are effective immediately.

I am very excited about the new organization and am confident that we have the right the structure, leadership, passion, talent, and creativity needed to deliver best-in-class digital products to our users.

Please let your manager or me know if you have any questions.

Thank you-

— Otto —

Thus its March return for a third season on the pay-cable channel is cause for celebration. Then war, of course, followed by much machinating.

Here’s a preview:

And here is a very funny “GoT” pie chart:

That said, being in your twenties in Brooklyn as a hipster seems even scarier.

Image copyright Vicki France

In spite of a soft economy, with about 14.5 million unemployed Americans and 8.2 million under-employed, people are still holding onto paid television, and actually consuming more video than ever before. Netflix has crossed over 30 million subscribers in the U.S., Hulu is approaching three million, but only 2.65 million people in the country “cut the cord” from traditional paid TV service. In fact, Americans are still spending about 33 hours a week watching traditional TV (that’s 4.5 hours a day!), compared to 27 minutes a week of streaming video. So where is this TV revolution the pundits have been blogging about??

Maybe we need to stop thinking of cable TV the way we think of phone service. It’s easy for technologists to predict that streaming video will do to cable companies what Skype did to the telcos, but I propose a new lens to filter TV technologies: an App that replaces broadcast television is like saying Yelp should replace Taco Bell.

My contention is that a “TV revolution,” as some are calling it, is not in the cards. Instead, I see a “transformation” of TV taking place, and while transformations are far less sexy to blog about than revolutions, I think this one could be pretty fun and pretty lucrative for tech companies that get it right. First, let’s clarify “transformation” versus “revolution,” in the context of Web services and Internet Apps:

• Revolutionary apps fundamentally overthrow an analog provider with a digital alternative. Examples: Skype is a substitute for your landline. iTunes is a substitute for Virgin Megastore. LinkedIn is a substitute for schmoozing. Match.com is a substitute for my pushy (but well-intentioned) auntie in India.
• Transformative Apps make analog providers a more pleasing or user-friendly experience. Examples: Fandango makes going to movies easy and predictable. Foodspotting makes finding the perfect entree a delightful experience. Mint makes banking more manageable and transparent. Driving from San Francisco to a cabin in Tahoe is a breeze thanks to Google Maps. None of these technologies replace the desired outcome, but they greatly enhance the experience to achieve it.

All evidence and viewership data suggests that YouTube, Hulu or Netflix isn’t a substitute for the experience of gathering around a big-screen to watch the Super Bowl or the latest episode of American Idol. Apps that make the offline experience of watching traditional television better, more fun and more social will be far more successful than those that try to overthrow TV. The Twitter app on my phone, for example, is the perfect TV companion and primary beneficiary of this phenomenon.

There is no question that on-demand, instant access to great shows on the iPad or laptop is one of the coolest things ever, but this is proving to be additive and incremental to traditional TV viewership at the moment. Most consumers still love the experience of watching TV on the TV.

In 2012, the Olympics provided the perfect case study for the transformation that’s taking place. Between the live streams on NBC.com, real-time access to event scoring and the medal count, we have never had this much access to the Olympics in history. Nearly every major event was available online, and usage was tremendous. But what pundits failed to point out this past summer is that we did not give up big screen, traditional television. NBC’s primetime broadcast, which was all taped coverage, averaged 31.1 million viewers per night, which was up 12 percent from the Beijing Olympics in 2008! According to NBC, many people who watched events, streaming live to a Web browser, also watched them again on television.

We have 70 years of consumer behavior patterns established and burned into the American psyche. And on top of that, television is big business. It exists on $65 billion of advertising spending and $60 billion of subscription revenue, and that’s 125 billion reasons why the industry will resist this revolution. In stark contrast to my friends in Silicon Valley who have said that they want to “destroy television,” I strongly believe that television should be transformed. And those of us inspired by the opportunity to innovate in the TV industry should be thinking about the opportunity in a transformational way if we hope to succeed.

Ashwin Navin is the CEO and co-founder of Flingo, the largest publisher of Smart TV software including apps from FOX, A+E Networks, Showtime, the WB, Transworld and TMZ.

Image copyright This Geek

What’s the secret to podcasting’s success? It’s fun, with an air of spontaneity. It’s intimate. It’s engaging. Most importantly, it’s driven by passion. Our industry’s biggest luminaries — my business partner Scott Aukerman, Paul Scheer, Chris Hardwick, Marc Maron, Jesse Thorn, Kevin Smith and Adam Carolla — have created TV shows, appeared in films and continue to perform live shows. But no matter how busy they get, they still do their podcasts every week. Sometimes more than once a week — because they love it, and so do their listeners.

So where does that leave us for 2013? Here are my six predictions:

1. More Money
   The revenue trend is decidedly up, led by advertising dollars (70 percent of our revenue comes from advertising). Earwolf surpassed $1 million in revenue during 2012. That’s up from $190,000 in 2011 and $19,000 in 2010. We started with a $30,000 initial investment with no external funding. We’ve paid out $300,000 to our artists — something that makes us proud. We’ve created jobs. However, our pre-tax profit is only $80,000. Not exactly margins that have venture capitalists knocking down the door.

   With more networks and sponsors than ever, the net effect is higher pay for podcast hosts and more profitable networks. As the risk decreases for producers, the pay goes up for artists. More networks equals more competition for talent and downward pressure on costs due to operational scale.

2. More Advertising
   Marketing expert Seth Godin said it’s a bad idea to try and sell something to a stranger. He’s right. For a few years, I chased ad sales from conventional advertisers, but I realized that most people just weren’t ready. So I started focusing on providing better information and service to parties who were interested in sponsoring our shows. The results have been outstanding and get better with each passing month.

   The biggest problem with podcasting ad sales is that by and large, the hosts aren’t great at selling, executing ad reads or reporting to their customers. And no one who actually understands ad sales is using their expertise to tackle such a small, fragmented and immature market. There’s a lack of leadership across the industry.

   I’m working to change that in Q1 of 2013 by launching a low-fee ad marketplace connecting networks and independent podcasters to sponsors. The marketplace will be open to non-Earwolf podcasts. I’m aware that I could be destroying one of the unique benefits of joining Earwolf — making money through ad sales. While that’s scary, it’s not as scary as it would be to watch someone else do it to us.

3. The Rich Will Get Richer
   Networks will grow stronger. There are almost 250,000 podcasts in the iTunes store. It’s increasingly difficult to identify what’s good. Earwolf produces 10 of the top 75 shows in comedy, but it’s hard for others to break through that wall. As it gets easier to start a podcast, listeners will trust the networks more. Perhaps equally important, so will the editors of major aggregators who can’t listen to tens of thousands of shows before deciding what to feature.

   Currently successful independent shows will become more valuable to the networks. Anyone who’s launched a show in the past year knows that the overnight sensations no longer exist. Being early mattered. It’s no longer early. For plenty of new shows, it’s too late to get big fast.

4. New Shows & Innovation
   There’s good news for the independents or the shows that don’t yet exist — there are still too few great podcasts. We need more; maybe you’ll give them to us. Creative innovation is still in the early stages. Just because the networks will get stronger doesn’t mean they are the only game in town, and their weak spot is the up-and-comer, the subversive.
5. The Audience Will Continue to Rule
   Our listeners are the key to our success. Their loyalty and engagement put other media consumers to shame.

   The tech world is gaga over “mobile this, mobile that.” Podcasts are inherently mobile. You listen wherever you are — at home, in the car, on the train, at work, while exercising. Try consuming video that way. It’s impossible. I don’t care how short the videos are. On top of that, the shorter the content, the less engaged and loyal the consumers can be. The less their attention is worth to sponsors.

   The cost of producing audio is two percent of the cost of producing video. But you say, “audio can’t go viral like video.” Great! Let’s build our audiences slowly but with integrity. I’d rather have 10,000 real followers on Twitter than 100,000 transients and bots. Podcast listeners are sticky. And sticky is hard to come by in the 2013 world of media.

   Still, growth is slowing. There are more episodes than ever and not as many new listeners to keep up. In 2012, Earwolf went from 1.8 million downloads a month to 4.6 million a month, but I expect download growth in 2013 to disappoint.

6. Ventures Beyond Podcasting
   Podcasters who are able to extend into other media will win in the long run. Anyone willing to listen to an 80-minute audio file sight unseen will also watch your movie. Or TV show. Or Web series. Or read your book. The reverse doesn’t hold true. Try taking a million subscribers from your YouTube channel where you post two-minute videos and ask them to listen to your 80-minute podcast or watch your 90-minute movie. It’s very difficult. Podcast listeners are willing to mobilize to other content mediums. In a sense, they are platform-agnostic. That is extremely valuable.

At Earwolf, we’ve started a TV development and production entity because of this shift. We’ve sold our first script and are signing a first-look deal with a cable network. So while podcasts are important as standalone content, opportunities to expand into other mediums will continue to grow.

Things That Won’t Happen in 2013

• Podcasts replacing radio in car dashboards (it’ll take longer to win that battle than most think)
• Anheuser-Busch as a sponsor (while advertising gets easier and easier, the current structure makes the support of the biggest buyers difficult)
• Disney buying Earwolf (podcasting’s perceived value to established media companies won’t take that kind of leap in one year, and we aren’t selling anyway!)

2012 has been a great year for podcasters and their listeners. Forward strides will continue in 2013, albeit with a few roadblocks along the way. I can’t wait to see what happens.

Jeff Ullrich is the CEO and co-founder of the Earwolf podcasting network. Earwolf has produced 26 — mostly comedy — programs, which are downloaded 45 million times a year. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Continuing Surge of Mobile, Tablet, and Smart Device Sales & Streaming
With the frenzied holiday season, consumers are purchasing the latest and greatest smart devices in record numbers and at lightning speed. According to Gartner, sales of tablets and smartphones are estimated to reach 821 million units for 2012, and predicted to increase close to 50 percent next year, with a forecast of 1.2 billion units sold in 2013. The influx of smart devices has provided a new level of consumer empowerment, and will continue to make it more convenient for audiences to consume streaming content exactly when, where and how they choose. Part of the device owner’s everyday usage will include catching up on shows, watching their favorite sports team live during their commutes, while they are waiting for appointments, and in bed before they go to sleep or start their mornings — this will become more of an expected activity instead of a luxury. We will continue to see stream counts increase across the board and shift from PCs to more accessible smart devices, consoles and IPTV boxes.

With the explosion of new devices, though, there is further fragmentation around the support of content by various service providers. How far away are we from a viewer being able to pick up his or her preferred device and simply search for the content he wants to watch, make any required transactions and immediately begin to enjoy the content? When will a robust Streaming TV Guide be available that simply encompasses all available content? Today’s experience has much to be improved — as a user must first determine if the desired content is even available for streaming, find the service it’s available through, determine if that service has an app for their device, sign up for the service on their PC, and then download the aforementioned app and log in to start enjoying the content.

Next-Generation Content Queuing
2013 and beyond will also up the ante when it comes to queues and watch lists. These are still at the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and the evolution will continue this coming year. Today, there are services that keep track of what you’ve watched, what you’re currently watching, and provide a concierge-type level of service that includes ratings and friend recommendations. A few of these services even allow you to continue watching where you’ve left off across devices (i.e., a user can start watching a program or movie in his/her living room on his console, set-top box or smart TV, resume where they left off on their bus commute via their phone, and finally, finish the episode on their work PC during lunch).

The coming year will also unfold opportunities for you to leverage your social graph more extensively to provide more relevance and personalization, and to curate personal media experiences to be enjoyed with less manual input, ratings and followings. We can look forward to full premium linear channels personally tailored to each viewer that will deliver an experience of the viewer’s favorite content, intertwined with introductions to new content to embrace (think Pandora 2.0 for video).

In order for this to happen, these future channels (and their platforms) will need to span and intermix the premium content currently locked in today’s platform silos (Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, HBO, NBA League Pass, etc). As premium channels start to become decoupled from existing content bundles of traditional cable/satellite packages and subscribed to on an a la carte basis, this vision will get closer to a reality. In the interim, as technology continues to innovate at a much faster rate than media, will services be developed to address the problem by connecting and delivering your subscribed premium content across all of your separate subscriptions from competing platforms? It will be exciting to see who how these services are developed among competitors.

Streaming Content Across Borders
The traditional licensing model of TV broadcast and home video is changing drastically every year, as demonstrated by a flurry of activity in 2012 involving master licensors decoupling rights and increasing availability of content to new markets. This is done by licensing streaming rights to an ever-increasing number of countries and territories, in order to reach a deeper breadth of viewers in an increasingly globalized viewing market.

This practice reaches new audiences across country lines much more efficiently than the required TV and DVD deals which had historically been done show by show and market by market. As the majority of monetization for content is typically made within the home market, licensors are more flexible with new technologies and content strategies outside of these guarded markets. Ironically, international audiences may have better access and viewing experiences than home audiences. With the dramatic growth of broadband penetration and deep vertical content services (which hold international streaming rights), we will also see 2013 hasten major growth and interest internationally while driving incremental revenue, as increasingly demanding audiences connect and leverage their new broadband connections.

In contrast with the old established practice of major services slowly opening up new markets one by one (Hulu in Japan, Netflix in Brazil) or through the acquisition of complementary services in targeted markets (Amazon purchasing LoveFilm), premium deep vertical services will attract paying premium global customers from their beginnings and with each new title release.

For an idea of the enormous opportunity for streaming content globally, connect to a BitTorrent tracker of any premium video content (Homeland, UFC, Breaking Bad, etc.) and look at the vast breadth and depth of international IP addresses demanding the content. This kind of accessibility has arguably helped to produce a huge fan base for the shows, and demand is evident. The challenge, though, lies in how best to window the content and collect payments for premium content on a country-by-country basis.

With the irony of content owners being more progressive and flexible with their content internationally, will major shifts and evolutions of streaming content come here from overseas, as opposed to the other way around?

Brady McCollum is EVP and COO of Crunchyroll Inc., the leading global video network for Japanese anime and Asian media. Through its secure video platform for simulcasts and multilanguage content distribution, Crunchyroll delivers officially licensed content from leading Asian media producers directly to consumers.

The company, backed by Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, plans on Wednesday to start taking preorders for an $89 device to offer home broadband service using fixed WiMax service powered by Clearwire.

As it does on the mobile side, FreedomPop will offer a chunk of data free each month, with low-cost options for additional gigabytes. With the home product, customers will get 1GB of data free each month, with a $10-per-month plan offering enough additional data to meet the typical consumer’s needs.

In an interview, FreedomPop CEO Stephen Stokols said that the average U.S. household pays upwards of $40 per month for home broadband even though more than half of users consume less than 6 gigabytes of data.

“It’s going to be extremely disruptive,” Stokols said.

FreedomPop says the home router will deliver far faster speeds than Clearwire’s mobile devices and that FreedomPop will only offer service to addresses where the company can deliver speed equal to or faster than those offered by DSL.

Stokols said that the company had planned to wait until later to move into the home broadband market, but was encouraged by its early results on the mobile side which showed a substantial number of customers opting for FreedomPop’s paid services.

“We’ve always kind of planned to go after the home market pretty aggressively,” he said. “We’re accelerating that.”

In the first couple of months of offering an iPod Touch sled, USB stick and mobile hotspot, Stokols said that more than 20 percent of users have switched to a paid plan while more than a third of customers are opting for one of the company’s existing value-added services — such as notification of when one is about to hit their free limit.

“We’re getting much better traction … than we ever imagined,” Stokols said.

On the home side, the broadband plan is also a gateway to also offer additional services, including VoIP calling, among other things.

Synacor is a behind-the-scenes technology company that provides authentication services, Web-based TV solutions — and now Zynga games —  to 45 cable, satellite and telecom companies.

Starting next year, Synacor’s customers will be able to offer their subscribers access to games from their homepages. Additionally, those providers will be able to include Zynga’s in-game currency as part of their subscription offerings. In other words, they can now bundle together TV + telephone + Internet + FarmVille Cash.

Synacor’s customers include a variety of providers, such as Verizon, CenturyLink, Broadstripe, Charter and US Cable, and claims to reach 24 million households in the U.S.

Zynga has inked other distribution deals in the past, such as a rewards program with American Express that enables people to earn virtual currency when they spend money in the real world. This is the first TV-and-games mash-up for the social game company. It may take awhile before it becomes a meaningful business, if it ever does become meaningful, but at least it shows the company’s dedication to finding new subscribers, wherever they might be.

A lot of the details are still being hammered out, like how customers will navigate from an operator’s homescreen to a game. Customers may be redirected to Facebook, Zynga.com or another network, like Google+. Clearly, if the customers are already existing players, they will likely want to play on the platform of their choice. Customers will receive a discount code in order to redeem the currency inside the game.

It’s still not clear how much in-game currency customers will be offered, and, in theory, it could fluctuate based on the subscription package. A Zynga spokesperson declined to disclose terms of the deal.

At our D: Dive into Media conference in February, we’ll be talking to people who make amazing content, the people who make a living selling amazing content and the people who help distribute all of that stuff.

But if you want to figure out the future of media, you also have to talk to the people who make the boxes and gadgets you’ll use to consume all of that content.

That’s why we’re very happy to hear at Dive into Media from two heavyweights with important new roles: Intel’s Erik Huggers, corporate vice president at Intel Media, and Samsung’s David Eun, executive vice president for global media.

Intel’s chips have been powering entertainment boxes for a long time. Now the company is reportedly getting ready to plunge directly into the pay-TV business itself by trying to cut deals with cable programmers and rolling out a next-generation set-top box of its own.

Huggers, who used to run the BBC’s digital efforts, is heading up that push, but hasn’t talked about it publicly yet. For now, the company says his efforts are “focused on exploring new ways to access, interact with and share the latest in digital entertainment.” We’ll get a chance to figure out what that really means when he gets on our stage.

And Samsung is already a huge deal in the media world, given its position of power in both the TV and mobile markets. Eun, a tech and media veteran (Google, Time Warner, NBC, AOL), is supposed to leverage that clout to bring software and services to his company’s devices.

Now he’s trying to expand the company’s presence in Silicon Valley, where he’s opening up a new outpost in an effort to build out digital content and services. His Dive appearance will be his first public opportunity to make his case to tech and media hotshots.

Huggers and Eun are joining an all-star lineup in February. Here’s who we’ve told you about so far: Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, Hearst Magazines president David Carey, Google chief business officer Nikesh Arora, Facebook partnership vice president Dan Rose, HBO co-president Eric Kessler, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen and Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith.

And we’ve got more great names to announce very soon: Watch this space. In the meantime, head here to find registration information for the conference, which will be held Feb. 11 and 12 at the stunning Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California.

The reality is a lot more complicated, for a lot of reasons, but the upshot is that right now you can only watch a bit of what’s on cable on devices that aren’t your TV. And if the cable guys are going to convince people not to cut the cord, or to sign up for the cord in the first place, that’s going to have to get better.

One nice counterexample to TV Everywhere’s struggles is ESPN’s great WatchESPN app, which really does let you watch whatever you want, on just about any device, anywhere, live or on demand. That’s particularly useful for ESPN, since there are lots of cases where you can’t be in front of a TV but really do want to watch a game.

But even mighty ESPN can’t quite deliver on the TV Everywhere proposition. At left is what happened to me on Monday, when I wanted to check in on “Monday Night Football” on my phone, from my couch, at the same time we were catching up on “Homeland”* on the biggish screen.

The problem, says ESPN PR, is that Verizon has an exclusive on NFL mobile rights, so ESPN can’t deliver the game to me on my iPhone, even when I’m at home, on a Wi-Fi connection (which is the way that lots of mobile video gets consumed).**

That makes sense in a biz-dev sense, but that’s hard to explain to a sports fan who simply takes ESPN’s pitch at face value and expects to watch what they want, when they want.

And it makes even less sense to anyone who tried to do the same thing I did on Monday night, but used an iPad instead of an iPhone. Because that would have worked just fine — for whatever reason, the iPad isn’t considered a mobile device.

Again, trying to argue that some rights apply to a 9.5-inch screen but not a 3.5-inch screen is the sort of thing that makes sense to lawyers and deal-makers, and no sense at all to normal people.

You know, the people you want to keep paying for cable.

*This says a bit about what has happened to “Homeland” this season. During Season One, there was no way I was doing anything but staying glued to the set. Now I still watch it — and pay CBS for the privilege – but it’s become a one-eye program, and I don’t feel bad about checking email, Twitter, etc., while Carrie and Brody are up to their high jinks.

**This is also likely why NBC and Fox can’t deliver football via their new Dyle mobile service, even though that one relies on broadcast TV rights they should already have completely sewn up.

So, once again: Does that mean people really are ditching Comcast, Verizon and Dish, etc., in favor of Netflix, iTunes and Hulu?

And, once again: Maybe. But you can’t prove that based on last quarter’s numbers.

As we’ve pointed out before, there’s a seasonal cycle to the pay-TV business: The cable, telco and satellite guys usually add a bunch of subscribers in Q1, lose a bunch in Q2, lose a few more in Q3 and then gain some back in Q4.

Tally up the first nine months of 2012 and the pay-TV guys are basically flat — just like they have been for the past couple years, notes Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett (click chart to enlarge):

For the past few years, the pay-TV guys could point to the cruddy economy as the reason for their nongrowth. But now that argument doesn’t work as well. Moffett: “Household formation, while still anemic, is showing signs of recovery. Pay TV industry subscriber metrics are not. Pay TV penetration of America’s households is therefore falling, even while the number of Pay TV subscribers is still inching higher.”

So, if you’re in the “everyone I know uses the Web instead of cable” camp, that sure sounds like the data supports your argument. Moffett is still unconvinced, though: He figures the net losses come from subscribers who simply can’t afford to pay for TV or the Internet, and are getting their fix from old-fashioned rabbit-ear antennas.

Plausible?

The quarter’s loss of $87 million, or 87 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $85 million, or 79 cents a share. Revenue increased 3.9 percent to $1.88 billion.

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