Hulu’s owners, including Walt Disney Co., News Corp., and Comcast Corp., are considering various strategic options for the site including a sale. Other firms that have bid or expressed interest in Hulu include cable operator Time Warner Cable Inc., Guggenheim Partners, Yahoo Inc. and former News Corp. president Peter Chernin’s investment group.

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Aereo, which streams local TV broadcast signals over the Web for a fee, is now available only in the New York City region. It could expand its reach significantly if it joins forces with cable, satellite or phone concerns.

Talks between Aereo and telecom operators haven’t yet yielded any agreements. One big issue is the legal uncertainty surrounding the startup. Aereo is battling a suit by broadcasters, which say it is violating copyright law, in part because it reformats and retransmits their signals without permission—and then charges a fee to its subscribers.

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That also isn’t a surprise, since it fits the no-growth trend we’ve seen from pay TV for several years now.

For the record, SNL Kagan figures that the U.S. pay TV industry — cable, telco and satellite — grew by a teeny-tiny 46,000 subscribers last year.

That’s basically negligible given an installed base of 100 million pay TV households. But it’s not a decline.

And it’s also in line with what we’ve seen from the industry for a while, where subscriptions go up and down each quarter — usually up in Q1 and Q4, and down in Q2 and Q3. And as always, it’s important to note that this is for all the pay TV platforms.

You might read today, for instance, that Kagan says the cable guys — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, etc. — lost 1.66 million customers this year. True! But the telco guys — Verizon and AT&T — and the satellite guys — Dish and DirecTV — added the same number. Hence, no growth.

As always, the real debate is about why there’s no growth. There are three standard answers, which don’t necessarily negate one another:

• 100 million pay TV customers is the size of the U.S. market, period. It’s just not going to get bigger.
• The market would be bigger if the economy was better, and more people were buying homes instead of “doubling up.”
• People are ditching pay TV for the Internet and some combination of Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, etc. And/or the population of “cord-nevers” — college grads who have grown up with Web TV and see no reason to pay for cable — is growing.

The last one is certainly worrisome for the pay TV guys, and the ones who used to boast that they see no evidence of cord-cutting are a lot more muted about it these days.

You’ll occasionally hear a top pay TV executive — like Dish’s Charlie Ergen — talk candidly about the fact that there are lots of kids, like his own, who aren’t paying for TV anymore. But as always, for right now, cord-cutters are like vegans — you may know a lot of them, but the rest of the country still eats a whole lot of Big Macs.

FreeWheel won’t spell out the funding amount for this round, but says that it’s less than the $17 million round it raised in 2010, and that it doesn’t need as much money now, because it is “closing in on profitability.”

Prior to this round, FreeWheel had raised about $30 million over the last four years.

DirecTV has also signed on as a FreeWheel customer, which means it is one of the many big broadcasters, cable networks and Web companies that use FreeWheel to manage their video ad business, like Comcast, AOL, Viacom, etc. DirecTV will use FreeWheel to manage the ads it runs on its “TV Everywhere” services.

Over time, FreeWheel has also moved into display advertising, which means it’s not only the “DoubleClick of Web video,” but is often competing with Google’s DoubleClick, as well.

Not coincidentally, FreeWheel’s founding team, lead by CEO Doug Knopper, are DoubleClick veterans.

Why? I asked yesterday, and many of you replied. Thanks!

Your answers break down into two basic schools of thought:*

Al Jazeera wants to be on American cable TV because of optics. That is: Its Qatari owners think being on American cable TV will validate it as a Very Serious News Operation, like CNN — just being on YouTube won’t cut it. So according to this line of thought, Al Jazeera will spend anything to make that happen — even $500 million for a cable network many thought was worth far less. (Note to Al Jazeera/Current completists: I’m told that the deal was $450 million plus debt, which means the $100 million figure we’ve been batting around for Current TV founder Al Gore’s take from this may be a touch high.)

Al Jazeera wants to be on American cable TV because it thinks being on American cable TV is a great business. This is the argument people on Al Jazeera’s team have been making publicly and privately. The nice thing about the argument is that we won’t know for several years how it plays out. The tough thing about this argument is that the odds are against it.

Why? Because while Gore was able to convince most of Current TV’s pay TV partners to keep carrying the network once Al Jazeera bought it, those pay TV deals will expire over the next few years. And as they do, players like Dish Network, Direct TV and Comcast will try to drop the network, or at least push the per-subscriber fees they pay for the network way, way down, as Reuters notes.

SNL Kagan analyst Derek Baine predicts that Al Jazeera may end up having to give up on its subscriber fees altogether to convince pay TV operators to keep the channel on. And if that happens, a profitable operation ends up becoming a money loser quite quickly.

The optimistic version of this argument holds that Al Jazeera America will be able to keep its subscriber fees intact, or even raise them, because pay TV customers value news.

After all, they say, look at what Fox News gets (82 cents per subscriber, per month). Or CNN (57 cents). Or CNBC (32 cents). Compared to them, the 12 cents per sub that Al Jazeera is getting right now under Current TV’s old deal is a bargain.

I have a rooting interest in that view being correct, because a big and previously untapped market for serious news and international news is good for the journalism job market. But there’s a reason American TV news avoids serious news and international news.

Meanwhile, as I noted yesterday, Al Jazeera’s embrace of cable means it will have to move away from the Web. As my corporate colleagues at The Wall Street Journal report, Al Jazeera is going to stop streaming its Al Jazeera English broadcast on the Web to placate pay TV owners. The new channel won’t go on the Web, either.

That leaves open the possibility that Al Jazeera’s American audience could actually shrink once it goes to cable, instead of expanding. And that would be a bummer.

*Though we should note that “Peter Kafka is an idiot” was a popular third option.

The company said the programming costs it pays to owners of television channels will increase about 8% next year, according to a post on its customer support Web site.

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TV image via Tomislav Pinter

Such a dramatic transformation provides opportunities as well as challenges for today’s incumbents. It also provides compelling opportunities for innovative new entrants, large and small. When all is said and done, consumers will be the winners.

There are approximately 100 million pay-TV subscribers in the U.S. who receive multichannel video service from providers such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, Dish and Verizon. These subscribers watch an average of almost five hours of live TV per day or approximately 44 billion hours per month. That’s a lot of TV! But video consumption habits are changing. People today want to consume their video content anywhere and anytime, however they choose. They also wish they didn’t have to pay so much for the premium content that they currently pay for and/or don’t actually watch (the average video subscription service costs are approximately $75/month in the US). In addition, consumers have indicated that they might actually be willing to pay for different types or “bundles” of content than studios and programmers either realize or are currently willing to offer. But that’s another article unto itself, in which I’ll provide an overview of what I refer to as the coming “atomization of content.”

All of these changes in video consumption habits and desires — combined with increased broadband penetration and mobile device usage — have led to several evolving dynamics in the pay-TV ecosystem. These include an increase in cord-cutting/cord-shaving (this term refers to a consumer’s decision to completely cancel or significantly reduce their pay-TV package), a dramatic increase in online/Internet TV viewing over the last few years (today, greater than 640 million hours per month) and the creation of a parallel video ecosystem consisting of emerging TV and digital media services platforms as well as OTT/Internet TV Networks.

There are several companies leading the charge on innovation in the pay TV ecosystem. On the digital media services platform front, Roku and Apple TV are the two that have garnered the greatest consumer adoption, with approximately 90 percent combined market share in the US — and each of them has sold several million set-top boxes and a large amount of digital content. However, each one possesses a distinctive value proposition with different price points, content offerings and use cases (a comprehensive review by CNET of both Apple TV and Roku can be found here).

Regarding Internet TV networks, Netflix, Hulu and Google/YouTube have all built significant businesses to date, albeit with different content offerings, business strategies and use cases (combined, they had revenue greater than $4 billion and several hundred million users globally in 2011). Each of these entities, as well as Amazon, has also been quite aggressive at building out online video capabilities, not only by increased licensing of premium streaming video content, but also via the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to creating/producing new video content exclusively for distribution over the Internet.

Other technology behemoths, such as Intel and Microsoft, are also working on their own product and service offerings to participate in and help drive change in the pay TV ecosystem. Intel has had a number of Digital Home initiatives over the last decade, and now it’s intending to launch a pay TV service. The rumors about this effort include claims that Intel will deliver the service via an Intel-designed proprietary set-top box. Microsoft is aiming to have an integrated HW and content services TV offering, using Xbox as its set-top box or gateway in the home, supposedly delivering a wide range of licensed content as well as originally-produced content.

While the big technology incumbents evolve their strategies, a number of young start-up companies are innovating as well. Companies such as DecaTV, Awesomeness TV, Machinima, Filmon and others are essentially growing up as Internet TV networks, channels and/or media companies — each, in large part, developing its own video content focused on specific interest themes and demographic targets. For example, DecaTV is producing original video content for “engaged, affluent and educated women online.” Machinima has emerged as the leading video gaming entertainment network for gamers around the world, showcasing gameplay, original shows, game trailers and news. Awesomeness TV is a new Internet channel focused on teens and tweens, founded by former Nickelodeon and WB producer/director Brian Robbins. Filmon, founded by Alki David, is a global Internet TV network with a host of licensed as well as produced and owned content, and has one of the most extensive international content offerings.

Companies like Maker Studios, SkyChannel, Nimble TV, YapTV, Zeebox and others are innovating on the tools, infrastructure and services side. Maker Studios is essentially a one-stop shop for Internet TV development, production, promotion and distribution. SkyChannel is providing the most comprehensive and straightforward suite of tools for content owners to publish and charge for their content libraries on a multitude of devices, platforms and operating systems. Nimble TV is pioneering true “TV Anywhere” service with elastic cloud DVR capabilities as well as place-shifting (e.g., Slingbox-like) functionality. YapTV and Zeebox are two of the more impressive “Social TV” apps that provide a robust multi-screen, real-time viewing experience to consumers.

With the aforementioned transformations taking place in the pay-TV ecosystem, who will be the winners when all is said and done? Anyone who tells you they know for certain is wrong. What I can tell you is that although the incumbents will be challenged in a number of ways, you should not expect them to disappear anytime soon. They have tremendous resources, a history of competing vigorously in the marketplace and have shown the ability to evolve their existing businesses just enough to remain dominant. However, I do expect that there will be some new and innovative companies that will emerge as next-generation leaders in practically every part of the pay-TV ecosystem. I have my own ideas of which companies may be included in this group, but it will be the consumers who will really win — with increased content choices, more advantageous pricing schemes and the true capacity to watch whatever, wherever and whenever they want.

Daniel Leff is a Venture Partner at Globespan Capital Partners, a technology-focused venture capital firm with offices in Palo Alto and Boston. He invests in digital media companies, among other things, and is an investor in and on the board of Roku. He tweets at @dr_daniel_leff.

The satellite-TV company on Thursday is expected to disclose plans to sell broadband, at a speed of between five and 10 megabits per second, for between $39.99 and $69.99 a month for customers who also take Dish’s TV service. Those who aren’t TV customers will pay $10 more a month, a similar pricing approach to that used by cable operators.

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That would be DirecTV’s “Sunday Ticket” package, which gives football fans the ability to watch every single NFL game, without geographical restrictions.

Normally, Sunday Ticket is exclusive to DirecTV, and I know lots of people who get the satellite service solely so they can binge on football every Sunday.

But this year, for the second year in a row, DirecTV and Sony are letting nonsubscribers pay for Sunday Ticket, via Sony’s PS3 game console.

Sony is promoting this primarily as a way for people who already have Sunday Ticket to watch the games on their console, at no extra charge. But it’s also selling the package to nonsubscribers, for $300 — $40 less than last year.

In theory, you’re not supposed to be able to order Sunday Ticket this way unless you’re physically unable to get DirecTV, presumably because of geographical restrictions. But I’m pretty sure that, just like last year, DirecTV won’t really vet this — you just say “no” when the prompt screen asks if you’re able to receive the satellite service, pay up, and you’re on your way.

Of course, if there are lots of people taking advantage of this loophole, you’d see DirecTV shutting it down, because it’s in the the business of selling monthly pay-TV subscriptions, not a la carte football packages.

But it’s fun to imagine a world where you could do this for everything, all the time. Not holding my breath…

Update: If you don’t want to pay for football but do want to watch it legally on the Web, you’ll be able to do that as well this year — for a single game a week. NBC will once again be streaming its Sunday night games online. And, unlike the Olympics, you don’t need to be a pay-TV subscriber to watch the feed.

The search giant is shutting down Google TV Ads, its attempt to create an online marketplace for traditional TV spots. The idea was Google could make ad buying more efficient and Googley, but buyers, programmers and distributors never embraced the notion.

Google sank five years into the project, and eventually boasted that it could reach 42 million households, including agreements with distributors like Verizon and DirecTV. That’s close to half of the pay TV universe, but it’s hard to find evidence that the program really got traction.

Google TV Ads did last much longer than Google’s efforts to leap from digital into newspaper and radio ads. Those programs were shuttered in 2009, and in the case of the radio program, Google took the rare step of actually laying people off. That won’t happen this time around, Google says.

If you want to put a positive — and plausible — spin on it, you could argue that Google doesn’t need to spend any more time trying to break into traditional media, because it’s doing a bang-up job with digital. No need to chase dollars in the old media you don’t own if they’re flowing into the new world you dominate.

But if it is, the numbers don’t show it.

It’s easy to be confused about this stuff, but it’s also easy to clear it up: If you want to evaluate the state of the pay-TV business, you have to include the results from the telco guys, who have been taking share from the cable and satellite guys. And you have to look at numbers for the whole year, not a single quarter.

Once you do that, you end up with numbers that are basically flat, give or take a few thousand subscribers.

Here’s the data from the Reuters story, which uses publicly disclosed numbers from the country’s biggest pay-TV providers, who have been reporting second-quarter earnings over the last few days.

Q2 Video subscriber losses:
DirecTV: 52,000
Time Warner Cable: 169,000
Comcast: 176,000
Dish: 10,000
——————-
Total: 407,000 lost subscribers

Those numbers will likely get worse once we see results from Charter and Cablevision, who report next week. And there are still a bunch of small cable companies that aren’t public, so sussing out those numbers involves some guesswork. For argument’s sake, let’s say those companies followed the trendline of the last few years, and ended up collectively losing another 300,000 subs.

Estimated total: 700,000 lost subscribers

Still, that’s a loss, right? Yes. But as the Reuters piece itself notes, the second quarter of the year is always the worst for the pay-TV guys. College kids move away, people move into new homes, etc.

Last year, for instance, the pay-TV guys lost 442,000 subscribers in Q2. But they still ended up adding more than 200,000 subscribers by the end of 2011. That’s barely any growth at all — something like 0.2 percent — but it’s better than a loss.

This year’s trends look similar. Pay TV added 422,000 subscribers in Q1 – which means they’re basically flat for the year. If recent patterns hold, they’ll have another flat or down quarter in Q3, and then add more again in Q4.

You can argue that the pay-TV industry’s no-growth or barely-there growth is due to a weak economy and lousy household formation numbers. Or you can argue that it’s because people really are swapping out pay TV for Netflix, Apple TV, etc. Or a mix of both, or whatever.

But for now, at least, you can’t argue that the pay-TV industry is shrinking.

One big exception: Netflix does get newish movies from Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM, via Epix, the pay-TV channel Viacom controls. So when you’re cruising the Netflix streaming menu and see titles you recall hitting the theaters in the last couple years, there’s a very good chance they came from Epix.

Right now, for instance, Netflix subscribers can watch “Thor” and the most recent “Transformers” movie, both put out last year via Paramount. Coming up, “Captain America.” Next year, they’ll get “The Hunger Games” and “The Avengers.” All from Epix.

Right now, Netflix is the only online subscription service that offers Epix movies. But that exclusivity goes away at the end of August. Redbox Instant, for instance, will feature Epix movies when it launches later this year. Viacom would love to convince someone like Amazon to carry the movies, too.

So what does that mean for Netflix, which makes a big deal about paying for exclusive content? No big deal, says Hastings. “Epix is not a particularly large source of total viewing,” he told analysts on his earnings call last night. (That call didn’t go too well: Netflix shares are down more than 25 percent today after yesterday’s earnings report.)

But in Hastings’s most recent letter to investors, he’s more enthusiastic about Epix. “Our current feature film offering is better than ever,” he told shareholders, citing “Thor” and “Transformers,” along with non-Epix movies. And my Netflix home screen designates the new “Transformers” as “most popular,” so I guess someone’s watching it.

We’ve seen Hastings try to straddle the fence like this in the past, when Netflix lost its access to the Starz pay channel, and with it, the ability to show movies from Sony and Disney. Netflix said it was willing to pay big money to keep Starz. But when it didn’t get the deal, it told investors that few people watched the movies anyway.

My gut: It really does work both ways for Netflix. Hastings’s users may not spend a ton of time with “Thor” and his super-friends. But I bet their presence on the Netflix menu helps reassure users — See? We really do have big Hollywood movies! — and that’s probably worth quite a bit to them.

If so, Netflix users will be reassured for a while, whether Hastings likes it or not. Netflix has a five-year deal with Viacom that runs through the middle of 2015.

That agreement has to be extended every year, but it’s not a negotiation: People familiar with the deal tell me it has a “put” mechanism, which means it’s up to Viacom to decide whether Netflix gets Epix, at a prearranged price. My hunch is that they will keep cashing Hastings’s checks.

Turns out you’re going to have to keep waiting for that. For a long time.

The feud between the pay-TV programmer and the pay-TV provider ended this morning, the way every single one of these disputes has: The pay-TV provider agreed to pay more for the programming, and will pass those fees on to its customers.

In this case, Viacom got a bump of more than 20 percent for its stuff. As Bloomberg reported earlier this morning, that means that CEO Philippe Dauman will get more than $600 million for his shows this year.

And because those fees will escalate over the course of a seven-year contract, that means the overall deal will be worth more than $5 billion, the programmer is telling Wall Street today. Which is why the company was perfectly content to take an estimated $14 million hit a week while its shows were off the air.

DirecTV can also claim victory, because it’s paying less than Viacom asked for originally. And Wall Street seems just fine with it for both companies, because the prices of their shares are basically flat today.

But weren’t other issues in play here, too, like digital rights and carriage for Epix, Viacom’s HBO-like service? Yes. But also, not really. At the core, this dispute was only about the money DirecTV will pay for Viacom’s shows. The end.

No one ever seriously talked about breaking up the bundles that make up the foundation of the pay-TV business — the ones that mean that people who want to watch Jon Stewart on Comedy Central have to pay for access to Country Music Television, too. Because those bundles work quite well for both sides. And if new would-be players like Apple want in, they’ll have to accept the bundles, too.

That model will continue to work until pay-TV customers actually stop paying for TV in significant numbers. Or, more likely, a couple generations of would-be pay-TV subscribers get out of college, and never get a pay-TV subscription.

But that’s a scenario that’s going to take quite a while to play out. And since deals like today’s pact last for seven years or more (the Disney/Comcast deal signed earlier this year goes on for a decade), it’s going to be very hard to change the status quo.

Jon Stewart came back from a two-week vacation last night and was in excellent form: There was a great recap on Mitt Romney’s Bain problem, a very funny interview with Louis C.K., and a scathing bit where he decried the stupidity of Viacom’s decision to pull its programming — including his show — off the Web.

Except, here it is. You can see the entirety of last night’s episode on the official “The Daily Show” site, and the same goes for Stephen Colbert’s show.

Viacom and DirecTV are still fighting over subscription fees, so it’s unclear what prompted Viacom to change its mind about the Web ban it instituted last week, or whether it will apply to other Viacom shows as well. I took a brief tour of other Viacom sites this morning, and found that I could see old “Jersey Shore” episodes, but was out of luck with “Teen Mom.”

But most of Viacom’s shows are in reruns right now, and Colbert and Stewart are two of its most important online properties. So if it has called off the ban for those guys, it’s kind of the same as calling off the ban.

Then again, the ban for Stewart and Colbert was never going to be particularly effective, since it wasn’t a Webwide ban, anyway: The shows were always going to be available on Hulu.

Or maybe, per Stewart’s suggestion, the Viacom brass was worried that in the absence of “Daily Show” episodes on the Web, its customers might find other distractions, like masturbation. Or books.

Update: Here’s Viacom spokesman Carl Folta with a sort-of answer:

You will remember that we never said we were taking all our full length episodes down, just slimming down our offerings. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were on hiatus, so no recent programs were available. We know their fans have missed them — and sadly subscribers of DirecTV who have not yet switched distributors are still forced to be without all the Viacom networks they love — so we wanted to get them back on our sites as soon as we could.

But you can still watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert online, for free, without breaking the law: Just head over to Hulu, which has about a dozen episodes of each man’s show.

The discrepancy exists because Hulu’s expensive contract to re-air the shows doesn’t tie it to availability on Viacom’s own site. That’s a difference in Hulu’s basic agreements with its three primary owners — Disney’s ABC, News Corp.’s Fox and Comcast’s NBC — which means, more or less, that anything those broadcasters put up on their own Web sites also gets shown on Hulu.

But it’s hard to imagine that it’s going to matter a whole lot to most Colbert and Stewart fans, since most of them watch the shows within a day or two of their original air date. And both shows put out out their last new episode on June 28.

The two-week vacation ends on Monday, and if DirecTV and Viacom still haven’t settled at that point, then, in theory, the fight would be a boon for Hulu. But again, it will be more of a bummer for DirecTV customers, who will have been paying for access to shows they can’t see.

Meanwhile, if you just want to watch some Colbert and don’t want to open a new browser window, we’re happy to oblige. Here’s the June 28 episode, featuring the not-so-camera-shy Aaron Sorkin:

Still, free content providers can’t be choosers, so: No need to provide details on this fight, because it’s just like every other pay-TV programmer versus pay-TV provider fight. Which means that once the two sides figure it out, pay-TV customers will end up paying more. The end.

But from this corner, the interesting part of these fights is the way the two sides use digital video. Because the Web is increasingly important, at least rhetorically, in these disputes.

Pay-TV providers, for instance, often gripe that programmers are increasing their prices at the same time that they’re giving away their stuff online. Or, in the case of Dish Networks, gripe about them selling their stuff via Amazon, iTunes and Netflix. Meanwhile, Fox (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.) briefly tried to pull some of its shows off the Web when it was feuding with Cablevision a couple years ago.

Most interesting to me are the moves that pay-TV programmers make to convince their customers that they really don’t need to pay for TV, after all. Because they can get all the shows they like on the Web.

Time Warner Cable tried this in 2009, when it was fighting with Fox, and offered up a handy instructional video on cord-cutting. Now DirecTV is telling its customers how they “can continue to enjoy your favorite Viacom shows online.”

This one’s not very visually stimulating: Just a couple of drop-down menus that explain that you can watch episodes of “Jersey Shore” on MTV.com, or via iTunes, etc. Or that you can watch “Tosh.0” on, um, Tosh.0. And to be fair, it isn’t overtly suggesting that you dump cable: It gamely suggests, for instance, that if you miss seeing Jon Stewart on your TV, perhaps you could find something to watch on TBS.

Update: As BTIG’s Rich Greenfield notes (registration required), Viacom appears to have responded by pulling down some of its full episodes from its sites — a move that affects not just DirecTV customers but everyone on the Web. (See video below.)

And again, neither DirecTV or Viacom thinks the blackout is permanent. This is just the part of the negotiating phase during which DirecTV’s customers don’t get the TV they’re paying for. Which is followed by the part where DirecTV’s customers see their bills go up.

But wouldn’t it be something if DirecTV’s customers actually took the company at face value and decided that they didn’t need to pay the TV guys to watch TV anymore?

Maybe one day they will.

I don’t know how to say this any other way, so I’ll be direct: Please stop with the spam.

I’m talking about crud like this, which you left in the comments of one of my stories:

Personally I’m done with Netflix. They became too much of a hassle, too confusing, and with the price hike, kind of expensive for what I was getting out of it. I have the Blockbuster Movie Pass now, and I like it a lot more. Now I realize I could be called biased since I’m a long time subscriber — and more recently an employee — of DISH Network, but Blockbuster costs less, at $10 a month, and includes streaming to my receiver and computer, DVD’s, Blu-rays and video games (which lets me cancel my Gamefly account too, saving me more money), plus 20 movie channels. And it’s all on the same bill so it’s easier too. So for me it’s a no-brainer.

Now, this pitch, written by “Andrew_K_Anderson,” does disclose that “Andrew” works for you guys. And it’s on a post about Netflix and Dish and Blockbuster and that new rental service you’re launching. So it wouldn’t seem like a completely obvious piece of spam, except that “Andrew” left the comment yesterday. And I wrote this post back on Sept. 23.

Who leaves comments on two-month-old posts? Sometimes it’s a bona fide reader who just happened across something they’ve never seen before. More often it’s a spammer.

In this case, Disqus, the commenting system we use at AllThingsD, makes it quite easy to figure out that “Andrew” is the latter. Because it tells me that “Andrew” leaves the same kind of comment on sites all over the Web.

Here’s another one he left yesterday, on SlashGear:

Now that I’ve had some time with both services, I have to say that I like the Blockbuster Movie Pass a great deal more. It simply provides more options. There’s no additional charges for Blu-rays, you can rent games (a huge bonus in my book) …

Etc.

I don’t know what else “Andrew” does for you, but he was sort of busy yesterday. He left the same comment, taking time to tweak each one by just a few words — I gather this was to defeat the Disqus spam filter — on six other sites, too: The Atlantic; VentureBeat; CNNMoney; the Washington Examiner; and two Time.com sites.

This wasn’t a one-day binge for “Andrew.” Disqus tells me he’s left 188 comments using the same account and, as far as I can tell, they’re all promotional pitches for Dish, Blockbuster, etc. Last month, for instance, he found a four-year-old blog post complaining about Dish competitor DirecTV, and chimed in on that one.

So who is “Andrew”? Disqus tells me he signed in to their system using the name “Ender Chadwick” and a Dish Network email address. Somebody on Facebook named “Ender Chadwick” says he works at Dish, so maybe it’s that guy.

But who knows. Andrew/Ender signed on using an IP address owned by Dish. It’s the same one used by people named “Rose” and “Monica” to write Dish love letters, too, as Gizmo Lovers pointed out last month.

And this gets to one of the reasons this stuff is such a downer: Look at all the calories burned on this petty little exercise, on both sides of the equation. What a waste.

I asked Dish about this yesterday, expecting them to explain that whoever was leaving this stuff probably wasn’t a Dish/Blockbuster employee. Maybe an over-zealous contractor, and that “the wires had gotten a little crossed.”

That’s what Blockbuster marketing head Kevin Lewis told me back in September, when I asked him about a story that seemed to involve the Blockbuster Twitter account offering a free year’s subscription to people who would tweet about dumping Netflix. (I wasted a bunch of time and energy on that one, too. Never bothered to post it. Glad I kept my notes!)

But Dish PR head Marc Lumpkin didn’t try to apologize for Andrew/Ender/whomever, at all.

“We require our employees who post about DISH products to identify themselves as a DISH Network employee,” Lumpkin told me via email. “This appears to be an informative posting describing the options consumers have for getting entertainment and is posted in a discussion of a similar topic.”

Really? I asked. You sure you want me to print that?

“It looks informative to me and appropriate for those Web site discussions. I’m fine with the response.”

Okay. So, Marc, Kevin, Dish Network CEO Joseph Clayton, et al. — we don’t really need to spell out why this isn’t “informative” or “appropriate,” right? Because we don’t need to explain why you shouldn’t show up at funerals for people you don’t know and hand out flyers for term life insurance, either. Right?

But think about it this way: Stuffing BS comments onto Web sites is the kind of thing that low-rent scammers do. You? You’re a big, publicly traded company. You have 14 million satellite TV subscribers, a left-for-dead video-rental brand you want to revive, and big plans to launch a new Web TV service.

That’s a whole lot to take care of. And spending time and money on tacky, clumsy astroturf seems like it won’t help, and could probably hurt. This article, for instance, doesn’t go in the “win” column, right?

Meanwhile! Here’s “Explosion,” by Eli “Paperboy” Reed, which I learned about from your newest ad campaign. It’s great. More of this, please.

[Image credit: Christina Richards/Shutterstock (litter crew);
Wikimedia (Sisyphus)]

Here’s the company’s story in an almost-easy-to-understand chart. Pay attention to the parenthetical numbers, which denote subscriber losses. The two to focus on are the video subscribers — down 128,000 for the quarter — and the total subscribers — down 16,000.

And, as usual, there are plausible explanations for the loss which don’t have to include people ditching their TV subscriptions for some kind of Apple TV/Hulu/Netflix combo. The most obvious one is that Time Warner Cable is dealing with competition from telcos like Verizon and satellite guys like DirecTV.

One counter-argument for the cord-cutting crowd: Time Warner Cable’s broadband data subscribers numbers increased — by 89,000 — even as video subs declined. Again, that doesn’t have to be a cord-cutting signal — it’s possible, for instance, to use DirecTV for video and Time Warner for data. But if you’re inclined to think otherwise, that’s what you’re going to do.

Meanwhile, a warning for the advertising business: The company said that “soft advertising” trends it saw last quarter were continuing this quarter.

Cable providers like Time Warner don’t typically have a robust ad sales operation, because it’s a minor point of the business, so you don’t want to make too much of this. But that heads up does sync up with other murmurs about Q4 ads I’ve been hearing from other companies, in other industries, so worth keeping an eye on.

The company held a 40-minute press conference in San Francisco to unveil its new Blockbuster branded service, and by the end, many folks, including myself, were left scratching their heads.

But best as I can tell, this is a service that might appeal to some Dish satellite TV customers who are paying for Netflix and want to save some money — they can get more or less what Netflix offers, at the price Netflix used to charge before its 60 percent price hike.

That’s not a terrible thing for Dish to offer. And if it does cost Reed Hastings and company some subscribers, then that’s certainly not a good thing for Netflix.

But Netflix — and its investors — have known for a long time that they’d be fighting new entrants in the streaming video game. If this is as tough as the competition gets, they’ll be quite happy.

Though Dish is trying mightily to differentiate between the two, they seem quite comparable, except that:

1) The service is only available to Dish customers, and only to a subset of the satellite service’s 14 million subscribers, those who have the correct boxes/tech connecting their sets.
2) The Dish service will give people the ability to pick up movies directly from a Blockbuster store instead of waiting to get it in the mail box.
3) Dish will offer a much smaller selection of titles for on-demand streaming than Netflix: 3,000 movies available for streaming to TVs, and 4,000 for streaming to PCs; Netflix has roughly 20,000 movie and TV titles.
4) The service will include videogame rentals via mail, which Netflix doesn’t offer yet but plans to roll out via its new/old Qwikster spin-off.
5) It costs $10 a month. That’s $6 less than a comparable Netflix disc + DVD combo, but $2 more than the Netflix streaming-only package. (Like DirecTV and its Sunday ticket package, Dish will also use the service as a promotional freebie for new sign-ups.)

I think as we have a little more time to delve into this, we’ll get a better sense of how the services really stack up: Does Dish/Blockbuster have access to the same kind of “long tail” content that Netflix says its customers value? What about Apple and Android apps? Etc.

But so far, at least, investors have taken a look at what Dish has to offer and shrugged: NFLX shares up 1.73 percent for the day.

[Image via rick seeney / Shutterstock.com]

Phew! The NFL kicks off tonight, on schedule, on NBC, when the Saints play the Packers. Which means that some of you, for various reasons, are going to watch it on the Web.

And you can! Even better, you can do it legally, for free: Comcast’s broadcast unit is offering a complete stream of the game, via NBCSports.com, along with additional camera angles and other digital goodies. From the press release:

Sunday Night Football Extra employs a full HD-quality player, which includes a draggable picture-in-picture feature for any of the online-only cameras, plus full DVR functionality allowing the user to pause and scroll back-and-forth – even review plays in “slo-mo.”

After tonight’s game, NBC will offer the free streams for every game it broadcasts this season, every Sunday night.

It’s the fourth season in a row that NBC has done this, and I’m always surprised that more people don’t make a big deal out of it. NFL TV rights are the most valuable thing in video, and they only get more expensive each year — Disney just agreed to pay nearly $2 billion a season for Monday Night Football rights.

So the notion that a broadcaster would put this stuff up for free on the Web at the same time seems counterintuitive. (Note that Monday Night Football, for instance, is one of the only things you can’t watch via ESPN’s excellent new iPad/iPhone app.)

The only conclusion I can draw is that there just aren’t that many people watching the live streams — because really, if you have the option, you want to watch this on your big HD set, right?

OK. So what about the rest of the season? Well, you can watch that on the Web, legally, too. But it will cost you: Head over to DirecTV to see how much they’re charging for access to their “Sunday Ticket” package, which now includes unlimited access on your laptop, as well as iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, etc.

(FYI: If you’re willing to shell out for Sunday Ticket but don’t want a two-year DirecTV commitment, and you have a Sony PS3, try out the game device’s new service, which will let you order a season’s worth of football for $340. Pricey, but it will give you more flexibility and you don’t have to worry about installing a dish. Hint: When it asks you if you are able to receive DirecTV where you live, say “no.”)

I don’t condone stealing this stuff off the Web, of course, and those of you who want to do that don’t need my advice, anyway.

I will note, however, that readers who live outside the U.S. and want to stream the games can buy what appears to be a very reasonably priced package directly from the NFL. It looks like $150 for a basic package with all the games, though that may change depending on what country you live in.

*I’m not supposed to do this, because it violates some serious ethical rules, but here goes: Go Pack Go! Except when you’re playing the Vikings. And if you think I’m the only Minnesotan with conflicted Wisconsin loyalties, well — you’re wrong.

Initial bids are due by Wednesday, with suitors expected to submit proposals with wide price ranges based on what types of television shows Hulu would license, when those shows would become available on Hulu and how long the agreements would stretch, people familiar with the matter said.

Some bidders are likely to indicate a range of about $500 million to $2 billion, according to one of the people. Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and DirecTV are among the companies expected to bid, other people said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

That will end the first step of a sales process that began in late June, when the video site hired bankers and started chatting up other media companies. Next up: A more complicated discussion about what, exactly, buyers would be buying.

People familiar with the process think Hulu’s owners — Disney, News Corp., Comcast and Providence Equity — are expecting bids of at least $1.5 billion for the site and its licenses. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

Hulu’s original investors valued the company at $1 billion back in 2007; bankers floated a $2 billion number when they floated an IPO last year. But the final purchase price could move around, depending on what Hulu ends up selling.

It’s possible, for instance, that some of Hulu’s owners could hang on to their stakes, which could push the purchase price down. Alternately, a buyer could ask the company’s network owners to increase the length of Hulu’s exclusive online license, and end up paying even more for those rights.

News Corp. COO Chase Carey alluded to some of the uncertainty during his company’s earnings call yesterday, when asked about the sale (emphasis added; transcript via Seeking Alpha):

I’m not going to speak too much of the way Hulu’s running the process. We’re obviously partners, so I think probably they are the right ones to speak to. It is obviously ongoing, and I think, progressing largely according to plan, but for us, I think we’ll see where it ultimately ends up. And I think for us, it’s still a decision to see where — what it looks like at the end. Does it make sense to pursue that path or does it make sense for us to stay in an ownership position and continue to have it driven by content owners. But I think it’s on course and on schedule, but I’ll let Hulu speak to it in more detail.

Assuming there is a sale, my hunch is that Yahoo is still the most logical buyer. The list of potential buyers, of course, is a very big one, with everyone from Google to Apple to Amazon taking a look-see. Here’s a rundown of the players from last month.

CEO Philippe Dauman said that a “substantial bump” in licensing revenue generated last quarter by the company’s TV shows came from “new and renewed digital distribution agreements” — i.e., deals with services like Netflix and Hulu.

The size of the bump may not be that big: BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield did some quick math and figured that new digital dollars added up to $70 million this quarter. That’s a tiny fraction of the overall $2.4 billion Viacom’s cable networks generated in the same time period.

But digital dollars are exceptionally profitable — Dauman said the margin on those deals was upward of 75 percent. And Dauman and his lieutenants took great pains to stress that they’d be signing up new digital pacts, both in and outside the U.S.

Unlike CBS CEO Les Moonves, who listed Apple, Microsoft and Google, among others, as potential buyers, Dauman was a little more circumspect when it came to new prospects — the only one he cited by name was LoveFilm, the “Netflix of Europe” that Amazon owns.

But he also suggested that some of the digital deals would come from cable and satellite companies who are already paying him to show stuff like “The Daily Show” and “Jersey Shore” on analog TV, but would want more digital rights. Both the Dish Network and DirecTV are obvious candidates there.

Again, this is the best-case digital scenario for the TV guys — the one where the Internet doesn’t eat into their business, but supplies it with new streams of easy money. It’s hard to believe it will stay that simple — a lot of this depends on customers deciding that it’s easier to pay for content than grabbing it for free off the Web – but right now it’s a pretty good place to be.