Ahead of the dinner, Anderson stopped by my office to let me have a peek at his 10 predictions, and we talked them over a bit. All 10 are below, along with some comments from Anderson that emerged from our conversation.

Before diving into the predictions, Anderson tells me there is a grand theme that unifies them all: “Integrating everything.”

What does that mean? “It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated. We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”

As an example, he cites the collaboration between Nuance, the speech software company, and IBM, bringing the Watson computer of “Jeopardy” fame into the area of health care. “For the first time, the idea of evidence-based medicine won’t just be in a magazine article,” Anderson says. “A doctor will be able to pick up his phone and describe four symptoms, and find out what the likely diagnosis is, what the indications are. It’s fantastic.”

So here are those 10 predictions, with additional comments from Anderson:

1. TV becomes the new center of gravity in the tech universe. All the other devices find their niches in the TV galaxy. Microsoft’s attempt to integrate Kinect into TV is a strong if qualified success. Smart phone-TV integration software becomes a new category. Pad-TV integration becomes common.

“Apple will hustle to launch the next version of Apple TV, and it will be a roaring success and be seen as Tim Cook’s first great product success. But what it really will be is Steve’s last product.”

2. 2012 will see tectonic shifts in phone markets. “Nokia will fail to come back, which is pretty clear to everyone except the people in Finland.” Samsung, Anderson says, will retain its spot as the new global leader in mobile phones by volume, and will keep this crown despite the debut of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Meanwhile, Anderson says, Google will lose control over the Android operating system, mainly because unlicensed versions of Android will multiply in type and in installed base, especially in Asian countries. “It’s already a balkanized environment. Now Google loses control of the technology entirely. China is already running an unlicensed version of Android, and I think there will be more of that.”

Finally, the smartphone will finally emerge as the dominant category of wireless phone. “Why would you have anything else? And why would sellers of content and services want you to?” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a rich country or a poor country. This stuff is cheap.”

3. Clouds are for consumers, and for start-ups. Even as a large number of big companies move pilot projects onto external clouds, it will become clear that the real trend is for enterprise to stay away from clouds in all key areas, for reasons of both security and reliability.

“The cloud guys hate this because they want to sell to enterprises,” Anderson says. “But the security issues are becoming really intense. If you’re a CIO, it’s a terrible environment, and you’re a target, for sure, especially if you’re a company with a lot of intellectual property. I’m not implying that things like SAAS (software as a service) aren’t a big trend. But no one is going to put their valuable IP on the cloud.”

4. Security splits the tech world in two, finally getting attention from CEOs. Companies with real IP start to realize they have to “go big or go home” with their security response, and their spending on protecting their “crown jewels” rises dramatically.

5. Siri stuns the world. Siri, on Apple’s iPhone 4S, has sounded the arrival of Internet personal assistants, and the world will spend this year marveling at what Siri and its rivals can and cannot do — and what they can learn to do.

“I think we’ll see a bunch of these things,” Anderson says. “Siri will get much better. It will learn how you learn. We’ve never seen people have long-term relationships with machines before, but it will be a long-term relationship, and she will remember everything, but make good use of it. She will know you learn better by seeing than hearing, or that it takes three times to tell you something. All those things that you have to program today should be learnable. None of that has been done yet. That creates a real friendship. And I think we’re going to start seeing personal assistants not just for everyday life, but for professions like medicine or car repair. Instead of just having Siri be everything, there will be many Siris for different contexts.”

6. We enter the amazing world of Dave and HAL, as voice recognition comes of age. From hospital to car, mobile to home, Kinect to Siri, exercise to play, work to entertainment, remote control to direct action, from Microsoft to Apple, from Tellme to Nuance — the time has come for computers and humans to talk to each other. With lots of funny stories, big bloopers and amazing breakthroughs, humanity at the end of 2012 will be talking to machines in a normal voice, and it will not seem unusual, nor be the cause of unending frustration.

“The voice-recognition part is almost trivial,” Anderson says. “The important part is context-sensitive understanding. It used to be that all the researchers at Carnegie Mellon used to think that all you needed was more computing horsepower to do better at voice. It turned out that was wrong. It was right for a little while, but the real problem is context. And so, if you can build up that database where you can search it contextually for what to expect, that is where you get all the mileage.”

7. E-readers prosper, but pads continue to dominate what Anderson calls the “carry-along” market. Pads and tablets will come down in price and get closer to prices of e-readers. Meanwhile, Anderson says, Amazon’s Fire will move upmarket and evolve into a full-fledged tablet.

“If you look at the specs on the Fire, it’s a tablet, but it’s hobbled,” Anderson says. “So I think that this is part of the whole strategy: Come in and sell at a low price, and then later unveil a more complete tablet. Apple will stay ahead, though. A lot of people are asking me if Amazon will catch Apple, and the answer is no. The way it’s configured right now, there’s no way the Fire will catch up with the iPad.”

8. The consumption world explodes. Get ready for new devices, new content, new bundles, new connection techniques, new distribution channels, new aggregators, new tablets, new phones, new players, new self-published authors, new garage bands, new consumption models riding on social networks. There is nothing but high energy in the content consumer market. People are now ready to spend subscription money, and the publisher response will be huge. “It’s going to be a huge melee of stuff,” Anderson says. “We’ll invent more stuff to consume, and it will be very hard to figure out who the players are from week to week, and how they’re doing. They may not even know themselves.”

9. Governments and corporations focus on intellectual property as though it were their most prized asset. It is. This new global understanding leads to a reevaluation regarding giving critical IP away for nothing versus protecting it. The age of what Anderson calls “IP naïveté” is over, and the question of proper IP valuation is here.

What is IP naïveté? “When Jeff Immelt stood on the steps of the White House the day after he was named jobs czar, and handed the plans for GE’s most important jet-engine project to Hu Jintao in order to get the permission to be allowed to bid on maybe selling engines to China — that’s IP naïveté,” Anderson says. “Thinking that’s not going to come back and show up for sale in Houston from some Chinese company in about six months is IP naïveté.”

During 2012, he says, companies and countries will start valuing their intellectual property not for its replacement value, but for figures that are magnitudes larger. State-sponsored IP theft will shift from being considered a nuisance and more along the lines of an act of aggression.

10. Amazon gets it all. Between outdoing Wal-Mart online, to beating the booksellers and delivering groceries, and making new inroads in video streaming, Amazon will prove that one company can indeed have it all. Strong Kindle and Fire sales will only be icing on the cake.

When you think of it that way, you might wonder why GE doesn’t already have some kind of operation in Silicon Valley, where all the world’s best software engineers are. Today, the company is rectifying that with the announcement of a software development center in San Ramon, Calif. It will employ about 400 workers.

The reason, says Bill Ruh, GE’s VP and global technology director — he’s the guy who will run the place — is that the so-called “Internet of things” is becoming a reality. This, Ruh thinks, will morph into something of an industrial Internet, which is directly in GE’s wheelhouse. “We will make our devices more intelligent, which will be driven by software, collect that data, and do some high-end analytics on it, and then drive it to our own people and to our customers,” Ruh told me. He joined GE earlier this year, after almost seven years as a VP at Cisco Systems.

Smart devices, he says, are “table stakes,” but what’s more important is the data they generate, and what you do with it. “At the end of the day, the analytics is where the action will be,” Ruh says.

Here’s an example. GE makes a product called “My Engine,” which Ruh describes as a “Facebook for engines.” If you’re the person in charge of maintaining the engines on a particular plane, wouldn’t it be helpful if you could keep track of its status as easily as you might the drinking and dining habits of your friends on Facebook? Of course, the engine and all its parts would need to have some Internet smarts built in. But once that’s done, there’s a lot of data worth tracking and analyzing about where the planes go, the conditions they fly in, which parts tend to fail or need replacing more often, and so on. From there, it’s a short leap to reorganizing maintenance schedules to be more efficient and less costly.

That’s just one example, and GE has a lot of software that’s specifically geared toward its various lines of business. Out of that, Ruh says, come some “big themes” that will apply to outside customers. “If you look at remote monitoring and diagnostics, that kind of stuff is broadly the same, whether you’re monitoring a wind turbine or a CAT scan machine,” he says. “So we have some horizontal plays that we see coming out of this.”

This is the third new software center for GE in recent years. The other two are near Detroit and near Richmond, Va. Design work on the San Ramon site is under way, and employees will start moving in near the middle of next year.

That legacy — and his influence on the lives of people around the world — is inestimable, and we will be talking about him and his amazing, interesting life a great deal in the coming days and weeks.

But as the sun comes up here in New York this morning, still mourning the departed, we are forced to confront more immediate and material concerns. Insensitive though it may seem to consider at this moment, Apple is not simply a great company — it has also proven over the last decade to be a great investment, and as such is one of the most widely held stocks in the world. Its largest shareholders are the big mutual fund companies like Fidelity, the Vanguard Group, State Street Corp. and T. Rowe Price, who among them own more than 15 percent of Apple’s shares.

And as Apple’s value, as measured by market capitalization, has ballooned from less than $10 billion a decade ago to north of $350 billion as of yesterday, the anxiety about the mortality of its founder has regularly caused its value to swoon. Over the seven-year course of Jobs’s illness, Apple shareholders have had to come to terms with the so-called “Jobs premium,” the extra value attached to the company’s shares that existed as long as he was directly involved in mapping company strategy and applying his unique touch to its products.

The conventional wisdom among Apple analysts now is that Apple investors, once known for their hair-trigger reflex to sell on any whiff of rumor, have gained a more complex and reasonable understanding of the situation. Apple, without Jobs, will still be Apple, and for the immediate and medium-term future, there is no reason to believe that its strategy and execution will falter in his absence.

But as I wrote in August, when Jobs resigned his position as CEO, it’s important to understand that Apple’s long-term vision has been deposited deeply within the DNA of the company. There is a script for the next several years. Products are mapped out, schedules are set, components have been purchased, manufacturing deals have been inked. In short, everyone at Apple knows what their job is and will continue to do it without missing a beat. The path ahead is no less clear today than it was yesterday.

No doubt the shares will be volatile as the markets open today. But that volatility will be much less than might have been expected years ago. It wasn’t so long ago that analysts predicted that, upon the death or departure of Steve Jobs, the company would lose as much as a third of its value. That’s no longer likely.

Today, investors seem to understand intuitively that the fundamental reasons to invest in Apple remain unchanged. The growth trajectory and profitability in the sales of its products remain the envy of the industry. There are predictions that Apple will sell more than 100 million iPhones next year, and nearly 30 million iPads in the second half of this year. Mac sales continue to set records quarter after quarter.

For all its strength in North America and Europe, Apple still has significant room to grow overseas. There are already signs of progress. In its most recent quarter, Apple reported revenue in the Asia-Pacific region of $6.3 billion, amounting to 22 percent of sales, and more than triple the sales seen in that region a year ago. One key market — China — remains a strategic priority for CEO Tim Cook and his team. Apple is still something new to the people of China, and introducing them to the brand on an ever-widening scale will be an interesting journey.

If history is any judge, it will be a fruitful introduction. Wherever it goes, Apple’s brand seems to succeed. Ask anyone familiar with it — it is easily one of the best-loved and most recognized brands. And yet when branding experts measure its brand equity, it ranks high but surprisingly also shows room to improve.

Just this week, Interbrand, a consultancy that focuses on corporate brands, released its annual survey of the world’s Top 100 brands. Apple is ranked No. 8, one notch above the Walt Disney Company (of which, ironically, Jobs was the largest shareholder), and two notches above Hewlett-Packard; the company had seen the largest year-over-year improvement in the value of its brand. It’s informative to consider some other names that appeared in the Top 10: Stalwart consumer brands like Coca-Cola (No. 1), General Electric (No. 5) and McDonald’s (No. 6).

Yet it’s also interesting to note that among the technology names that appeared in the Top 10 of the Interbrand survey, Apple wasn’t at the top: That distinction goes to IBM (No. 2), Microsoft (No. 3), Google (No. 4) and Intel (No. 7). Rather than a weakness, I think this fact speaks to Apple’s potential.

The story of Apple has never been one of narrow horizons. It has always been about looking ahead. Not just to the next quarter or to the next year, but of seeing how the march of technological progress can be harnessed to make life better in ways we can hardly grasp now. And yet when things like the iPhone materialize, they become part of us and quickly embed themselves into the very fabric of day-to-day existence. They’re not tools so much as extensions of our minds and identities. And that vision, so carefully articulated by Steve Jobs yet revealed only one product at a time, is still incomplete.

And so I find myself writing something that at once seems absurd and yet completely obvious: It may very well be, on this deeply sad day following the death of its founder, that Apple’s best days are still ahead.

Image via Jonathan Mak’s Tumblr.

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Here lies the challenge of Research In Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry smartphones and now, the PlayBook tablet: To conquer the enterprise–which has historically been RIM’s stronghold because of its White House-level security and lack of competition–it needs to sell tablets to consumers.

This isn’t impossible. Apple has had remarkable success selling the iPad to consumers and businesses. In a Forrester survey of U.S. consumers conducted in January 2011, 34 percent of iPad owners reported using their device at work. With enhanced security and dedicated support (“business specialists” at Apple Stores), we’ll see more companies join Mercedes-Benz and GE in buying iPads directly for their employees. But Apple’s success has come precisely because it puts consumers first. A typical statement we hear from executives at firms considering buying tablets is, “We’d really like a tablet that integrates better with our back-end systems, but we’re going with iPads because we want employees to like them.” Businesses care about how workers feel about technology.

Contrary to popular belief, RIM is pretty successful selling its devices to consumers, too. BlackBerry smartphone shipments, subscribers, and revenues continue to rise quarter after quarter, even in mature North American markets. Most important, BlackBerry consumer customers (“BlackBerry Internet Service,” or BIS) now outnumber BlackBerry enterprise customers (“BlackBerry Enterprise Service,” or BES).

But the PlayBook is a complicated product to sell to consumers. For starters, the “BlackBerry Bridge” feature, which displays email and BlackBerry messenger content only when in Bluetooth-range of a BlackBerry smartphone, has security appeal for CIOs but is potentially confusing to consumers. Yes, you can still get Web-based email like Gmail on the device, but there’s no native email application like there is on the iPad—and email is the No. 1 activity consumers do on tablets today. Second, compared with the iPad the PlayBook has relatively few native apps designed for the platform; it supports Android apps but only those designed for Gingerbread, not Honeycomb (not that there are many of those, either). Apps don’t matter to all tablet shoppers, but they do matter to some: 23 percent of consumers considering buying a tablet rank “Number of available apps” in their top-three criteria; 19 percent say the same about Flash support, which the PlayBook browser will have.

Whereas Apple owns its own channel–the Apple Store–to educate and sell the iPad to consumers, RIM will be relying on the Blue Shirts at Best Buy to sell its device, as well as its carrier partners and other local retailers (20,000 stores worldwide). It’s going to be a tough sell. While the PlayBook has dazzling performance and multitasking—for example, the ability to switch apps and keep a video or game running in the background—and solid hardware design, consumers will be comparing a first-generation PlayBook with a second-generation iPad. iPad will dominate tablet sales in 2011. But this is a marathon, not a sprint, and we see a path for RIM to gain market share in 2012. An improved version-two PlayBook must have native email, built-in security and more native apps for QNX, the RIM’s recently-acquired operating system for the PlayBook. To get there, RIM will need to port QNX to its smartphones to expand the platform’s reach and make it more appealing for developers.

Even so, the PlayBook’s appeal is likely limited to BlackBerry smartphone customers, and to win them over, RIM’s marketing execution needs to be flawless. With the recent departure of CMO Keith Pardy, RIM’s new leadership needs to step up and define and execute a vision for this product that puts consumers on par if not ahead of CIOs. Without that vision, RIM will have an expensive product failure on its hands.

Ted Schadler is a vice president and principal analyst and Sarah Rotman Epps is a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

The White House is announcing that Otellini will be named to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt chairs the group, which was created by an executive order in January. Other members are expected to be named in coming weeks.

News of Otellini’s appointment is a highlight of the president’s trip west this week, which kicked off with a meeting Thursday night with tech CEOs that include Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Cisco’s John Chambers. The meeting was held at the Woodside, Calif., home of John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist.

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It’s the show I told you about last month, and I believe it’s the first one the Web video site–owned by GE’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox–has commissioned for itself. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

Just like Hulu said it would be, it’s a Web show about stuff that aired on TV. Nothing wrong with that–showing people clips of last night’s TV on the Web is a useful thing. I like to do it, a lot.

But this one–or, at least, this episode–is a snoozer. I wouldn’t have made it through all five minutes if my job didn’t require it.

Hulu says this is a preview of the show, and that the joint video venture would like to “develop and evolve the show with your input.”

So okay, Hulu. Here’s my input: You say your inspiration for this show was the Keith Olbermann/Dan Patrick-era “SportsCenter” on ESPN, from way back in the early ’90s.

But go back and watch those shows. See how the anchors are both praising sports and, with a wink, making fun of it? The way they’re telling you that yes, we know you’d watch this stuff all day if you could–so would we!–and yes, we think it’s silly too?

Your show scans a whole lot more like the modern-day “SportsCenter,” which also has clips, and jokes, but without any real self-awareness or bite. So I’d like some more of that, please.

Or put it another way: You know how your first set of TV ads were sharp and funny? Make your show like that!

For whatever reason, I can’t find classic “SportsCenter” clips on Google’s YouTube or anywhere else on the Web. But here’s something very similar: Olbermann doing sports for L.A.’s KCBS in 1989, courtesy Twitter’s Matt Graves:

At issue is a condition proposed by the Federal Communications Commission that would require Comcast to offer NBC programming to any online video service that has reached a similar deal for content from at least one of NBC’s competitors, such as Walt Disney Co. or News Corp.

Lobbyists for both Disney and News Corp., along with Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes, have been voicing their concerns this week with the FCC, worried that such conditions could undermine their own efforts to profit from the nascent online video industry. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.

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The Dallas-based telecommunications company said Thursday it would now recognize gains and losses in the year in which they are incurred, using a practice called mark-to-market accounting, rather than spread them out over several years.

The accounting change clarifies one of the more volatile aspects of a large employer’s financial results, better tying performance to the current economic state. It would eliminate the “smoothing out” of gains and losses over several years. Under the old system, some of the pension-plan losses recorded during the stock market decline in 2008 would still be on the books for 2010.

AT&T joins a number of large U.S. corporations including Honeywell International, General Electric Co. and International Business Machines Corp. in revamping pension-accounting practices.

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That’s my translation of comments from Turner Broadcasting’s Phil Kent today. The head of Time Warner’s cable network told the crowd at a Citigroup investment conference that his company had pulled out of bidding for reruns of “Modern Family” because the show was “a little too prevalent on the Internet.”

The sitcom runs on both ABC.com and Hulu, so I’m not clear if Kent was talking about one or the other, or both. Either way, those comments have to simultaneously please and dismay “Modern Family” creator Steve Levitan, who has complained that giving away streams of his show on Hulu doesn’t do him any good and probably does him harm.

Levitan isn’t the only one who thinks that way: There are plenty of TV people who worry that free streaming on the Web is hurting their business, either by sapping ratings or cutting down on the appetite for DVDs and syndication. In this case, the supposed value shrinkage hurts News Corp., which produces the show and owns the rerun rights, more than it does Disney’s ABC, which airs the initial run. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

That’s one of the fundamental tensions Hulu has to deal with, and the primary reason why taking the joint venture public remains such a long shot–until all of its owner/partners are willing to make long-term programming commitments to the site, it’s hard to see the long-term value in the company.

Still, it’s important to note that Kent didn’t abstain from bidding–he simply dropped out. The Los Angeles Times’ plugged-in Joe Flint estimates that Turner was willing to pay about $1 million per episode, which isn’t as much as the winning $1.4 million bid, but isn’t immaterial, either.

Oh. And the winner of the bid? GE’s NBC Universal–one of Hulu’s three owner/partners.

So what does that mean for Hulu, which has already locked up exclusive rights to NBC’s Web video?

A couple of possible answers: Perhaps Federal Communications Commission head Julius Genachowski is trying to put a fork in Hulu. Or maybe the conditions he wants to place on the merger are so toothless that they don’t really count as conditions at all.

Background: Each of Hulu’s three partners/owners–GE’s NBC, News Corp.’s Fox and Disney’s ABC–has agreed to mutual exclusivity pacts. If you want to watch one of their shows for free online, you can see them on the networks’ own sites, or via Hulu–either on the main site itself, or via other sites that are taking Hulu’s feed. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

But one of the primary conditions Genachowski wants to place on FCC approval for the Comcast-NBC deal is that Web competitors will get access to NBC’s shows, according to the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Here’s the WSJ:

Comcast would be required to offer NBC Universal programming to any online video provider that has reached a similar deal for content with some of NBC’s competitors, such as Walt Disney Co. or Fox Television, a division of News Corp.

That’s a bit vague, so we won’t really know what Genachowski intends until he goes public with his proposed rules. But there are basically two ways to interpret what the Journal is reporting here. Either:

• The FCC wants to make sure that NBC doesn’t prevent Hulu from syndicating its content out to third-party sites, as it’s already doing with Yahoo, AOL and…Comcast. If that’s all Genachowski wants, that’s no big deal, and not really  a restriction at all. Because Hulu’s business plan is predicated on wide distribution. Or….
• The FCC is telling NBC that it has to offer its shows directly to other Web sites. That’s potentially devastating news for Hulu. If, say, Yahoo can license “The Office” directly from NBC, it may not want to bother cutting a deal with the joint venture site. And to be clear: The overwhelming majority of Hulu’s traffic comes from people watching shows from its big three partners.

So which is it? The FCC held a farcical press conference yesterday where it wouldn’t answer any specific questions about the deal. But it would be nice if it could clear this one up soon.

Completists will still need to hear from the Department of Justice, which is also reviewing the transaction, but since both Comcast and NBC announced yesterday that they expected the deal to close in January, it’s hard to imagine there’s much in the way of a surprise coming.

It would be great to tell you what restrictions the FCC wants, but the government agency won’t say so publicly, at least for now.

But since a document with the FCC’s proposed restrictions is currently being circulated to officials at Comcast and GE-owned NBC, the information should get out sooner than later.

The FCC also held a “background” press conference on the deal this morning, in which it asked participants not to quote government officials directly. That’s not uncommon in Washington, but that doesn’t make it any less astonishing: The FCC knows about Twitter, right?

Still, in this case, that works out just fine, since FCC officials didn’t provide direct answers to any questions.

But don’t expect to use Netflix to watch shows that aired last night, or even in the last few weeks or months. In most cases, Netflix is adding shows that are a year old or more.

And in the case of the handful of shows that Netflix does run in the same season they appear on TV, it is increasing the “window” between their air date and the time they show up on the company’s streaming service.

Netflix previously had the ability to stream some Disney Channel shows, like “Wizards of Waverly Place,” the day after they aired. But now it will wait 15 days to run them, says Netflix content boss Ted Sarandos. The flip side: Netflix will get access to other Disney/ABC-owned shows that it hasn’t had in the past, like “Scrubs,” and in some cases it will get a deeper catalog, like more episodes of “Lost.”

Which makes this deal similar to other deals Netflix has cut in the past year with movie studios like Sony and Time Warner’s Warner Bros. for their offerings: Netflix writes a big check and agrees to wait longer to distribute some content, in exchange for the rights to more content, overall.

So what if you want to watch TV shows that ran last night? There are plenty of other places to get that, like Hulu, Apple’s iTunes or video-on-demand offerings from cable providers.

“Day-after broadcast is not core to our strategy. We’re not in that business, particularly,” Sarandos says. “I highly value completeness over freshness. For our customers, it’s much more about being able to watch the entire run of a show, as it is about being able to see time-shifted episodes.”

Translation: Hey Hollywood and TV executives! Don’t believe what you hear and read–we don’t want to blow up your existing distribution models. We just want to write you big checks for stuff after you’re done with it.

Earlier this fall, Netflix announced a similar deal with GE’s NBC, and Sarandos says he thinks his agreement with News Corp.’s Fox is fairly robust (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

Which means we should expect to see something from CBS down the pipe, too, right? “We’re constantly in talks” with other content owners, Sarandos says.

Translation: Hey Les Moonves! We’re no Google. How much do you want for “The Mentalist”?

But! You only know English.

Solution: ViKi, a site that shows videos from around the world and provides captions in 100 different languages.

Cool, right? And capital efficient, too: The two-year-old start-up gets all of its translation for free, courtesy of some 100,000 volunteers. Hence the name–”Vi” for video and “Ki” for Wiki.

ViKi has relatively modest traffic, and is just starting to ramp up revenue, via third-party ad network sales. The company says it’s looking at a $1 million run rate, but that’s a gross number that doesn’t account for the money it has to pay out to content owners as well as to distributors like Hulu. (The site also puts out some of its stuff on Google’s YouTube, but there’s no revenue in that relationship, for now.)

Still, the pitch has been compelling enough for the company to round up $4.3 million in funding in the past 18 months, from lots of bold-name investors like Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.

But now that the company is talking publicly about the money it’s raising, and the money it would like to make, won’t its army of volunteers start asking for a cut, too?

Probably not, argues CEO Razmig Hovaghimian, a veteran of GE’s NBC Universal. He says ViKi has already approached some of its most senior and prolific volunteers with offers to pay them, but they haven’t wanted cash–they’re doing it for fun.

“We are creating a playground for them,” he says. And if that works, great: ViKi needs the money to acquire online distribution rights. But I wonder what happens if its free workforce starts asking for a check.

Stay tuned!

Plans are underway for a Hulu-only mini-show slated to run on the video site daily, offering up zippy commentary about TV and pop culture.

Some limited details: The show, which is casting now, will run five minutes an episode Monday through Friday. It’s supposed to offer “a quick and humorous survey of the past 24 hours of Media and pop culture.”

In other words, think of all of the TV shows that do something like this already–pretty much everything that runs on E! and half of what runs on VH-1–and shrink it down to a bite-size Web creation. They’re not reinventing the wheel here.

You can glean a tiny bit more about the show, via a casting call ad, at the bottom of this post. An actress who auditioned last week tells us the sessions were “mobbed.”

(Of course! But note that anyone who does get the gig won’t be hitting the jackpot–$1,000 a week, leave your SAG card at home.)

I’m assuming that “HD Films,” the show’s producer, is the same studio that is already producing “The Jace Hall Show,” a Web show about videogames, which runs on Hulu and other sites. Jace Hall is listed as a producer on this one, too.

Hulu rep Elisa Schreiber declined to discuss the show, telling me via email that “we’re not sharing any details because it’s still in the early stages.”

So why do we care? Because Hulu’s primary purpose in life, for now, is to provide a place for people to watch bona fide TV shows on the Web–and primarily shows from its three broadcast TV owners: News Corp.’s Fox, GE’s NBC and Disney’s ABC. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

But it has also been dabbling in Web originals over the past year or so: See “The LXD,” and “If I Can Dream.”

Hulu now has an original show in the works starring Whitney Port (who was on “The Hills,” Google tells me), designed to promote Mattel’s Ken doll (really). And there’s something coming from Ford and the producing team behind “The Amazing Race.”

The through-line behind all of this stuff: Webby takes on reality shows, which are cheap to produce for conventional TV and  even more so on the Web (again, note the union-free note on the casting info below).

Nothing revolutionary, but it does point to an interesting question: At what point does the line between the best Web video and mediocre TV disappear?

No one thinks the Web is going to replace TV at its best–expensive original fare like “Lost” or “Glee,” or big-time events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars. But there’s not that much high-end, original stuff on TV.

And lots and lots of your programming grid is filled with repeats, which the Web can do just fine. And then lots of less exciting, and less expensive, fare like “The Biggest Loser” and the like, which the Web hasn’t done. Yet.

But there’s no reason that it couldn’t. And when and if that starts happening with some frequency, there will be even less reason to keep paying for expensive TV packages….

Here’s the text from the casting notice (click to enlarge):

Now Flipboard, a social news-reading app based around Twitter and Facebook, is adding publisher feeds.

One thing’s clear: There’s a lot of excitement and energy going into how the iPad can re-create content consumption.

Flipboard is launching a beta test with eight publishers, including, full disclosure, All Things Digital.

The other publishers are ABC News, Bon Appétit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SFGate, Uncrate and the Washington Post Magazine.

Participating advertisers, through a partnership with OMD, include Pepsi, Gatorade, Infiniti, the CW Television Network, Showtime, Levi’s, Dockers, Hilton Worldwide, GE, Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Project (RED), Standup2cancer.org and Charity: Water.

They are contributing full-page ads that are inserted into longer-form articles.

During the beta period, no money will change hands between any of these parties, including our site, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.

Later, McCue said he expects to add many more publishers to the Flipboard app, and perhaps help publishers create their own “iPadified” content experiences to distribute themselves.

Instead of prompting users to go to the iPad’s Safari browser to read full versions of articles, as it has done to date, Flipboard will now import partner publisher content and lay it out automatically. For these stories, Flipboard formats images, divides them into pages and offers different layouts for portrait and landscape modes.

McCue said Flipboard users’ No. 1 most requested feature is the ability to add content through RSS feeds.

But he’s not giving them that with this update. Users can still only subscribe to publishers through Twitter accounts and lists. The reason, according to McCue, is Flipboard is dedicated to the social aspect and beautiful design of content, and RSS contains neither of these things.

McCue speaks of scrolling through Web pages with advertising units and side bars as a relic of the early Web and crappy Internet connections, saying Flipboard represents a return to the pagination and image emphasis of print.

Unlike print, though, Flipboard doesn’t work offline; that’s a future feature, said McCue. He also said his team is still singularly devoted to developing for iPad, and will divert focus to Android tablets only after they have an established user base.

By the way–more full disclosure–seeing ATD content get iPadified in McCue’s demo wasn’t as fun and glossy as you might imagine, especially given our small images.

And in what might be a problem for other content publishers like us, the quick blog posts we often write are not as easily transferable to this layout, given Flipboard does not yet differentiate between short stories and longer articles.

Who’s interested in that? Plenty of people, according to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. He says the service, which formally left its beta phase a couple of weeks ago, has “exceeded expectations” and has already hit its year-end subscriber goals.

Cool! So how many people is that? Kilar won’t say, of course–the joint venture between GE’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox is awfully selective about the data it releases. (Disclosure: News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

But Kilar is willing to talk broadly about the service, and the way subscribers are consuming it: While Hulu Plus lets you watch video on mobile devices like Apple’s iPhone and iPad (but not Google’s Android handsets) most viewing is happening on TV screens, he said.

And most of the time, the service is getting to the TV from the Web via Sony’s PlayStation 3 console, one of several devices Hulu is working with (not included, so far: Google TV and the Boxee Box). So that’s interesting.

But why pay for Hulu Plus at all? Why not simply connect your PC to your TV with an HDMI cable, and watch regular Hulu, for free?

You can! And Hulu’s efforts to persuade you not to do so illustrate a key problem for the service and the Web video business in general.

Because while consumers may not see any difference between the stuff they watch on the Web and the stuff they watch on TV, advertisers and programmers do. The first kind of video is much less valuable than the second.

That’s going to change over time, but for now, Hulu has to do its best to make sure that anyone who watches Hulu on a TV screen “pays twice”–by both watching ads and handing over a credit card.

Let’s let Kilar explain in his own words, via an interview I taped at Hulu’s New York office yesterday. Note the storyboards for Hulu’s excellent Alec Baldwin-is-an-alien ad behind him.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/pay-for-web-tv-no-problem-hulu-plus-exceeding-expectations/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101122/goodbye-free-tv-on-your-ipad-for-now/ http://allthingsd.com/20101122/goodbye-free-tv-on-your-ipad-for-now/#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2010 02:05:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26237 The only surprise here is that it took this long: A federal court has put the kibosh on a Web site that served up programming from broadcast TV networks for free, without their permission.

A federal judge in New York has issued a temporary restraining order against FilmOn.com, which has riled up the U.S. TV industry for a couple of months. The four broadcast networks–News Corp.’s Fox, GE’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and CBS–had asked for the order on Nov. 9.

FilmOn argues that the U.S. copyright act allows it to redistribute broadcast programming; Ivi Inc., a Seattle-based company that offers a similar service, makes the same argument.

FilmOn offers a free service that’s supposed to work on conventional PCs, as well as on mobile devices like Apple’s iPad. As of Monday evening it wasn’t clear whether FilmOn had actually taken down the streams, or if the service was simply misfiring, as it has been prone to do.

UPDATE: Here’s FilmOn’s response, issued Tuesday morning:

FILMON.COM, INC. ISSUES RESPONSE REGARDING NEW YORK SOUTHERN DISTRICT COURT’S RULING ON CBS BROADCASTING, INC., ET AL v. FILMON.COM, INC., TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER

Los Angeles, CA – November 23, 2010 –FilmOn.com Inc. CEO and Chairman, Alki David today issued the following statement regarding the ruling made by the New York Southern District Court, which issued a temporary restraining order, in effect pending the court’s decision on if it will issue a preliminary injunction.

“We respect the Court’s decision in this matter and have temporarily ceased retransmission of free network television on FilmOn. In the few weeks FilmOn provided free access to basic television on consumers’ mobile devices, it received more than 30 million individual users. We also garnered dozens of positive reviews about our free service’s quality and ease of use. We have, in essence, shown full proof of concept of the FilmOn delivery system–proving that millions of viewers will watch our superior television service online, all with commercials, adding millions of extra impressions that enhance network’s value to its viewers and advertisers.”

“FilmOn has succeeded in securing partnerships with several independent broadcast channels to be able to keep a compelling live offering online in the near future. Coupled with our own library of content and that of our partners, FilmOn will remain open for business. “

We do expect to bring the major networks back to our lineup in the near future, all in a legitimate and collaborative business model. We have already begun very positive discussions with TV networks affiliates and other content owners to provide our delivery service and measurement analytics to stream their live content online.

Scott Zarin, Zarin & Associates P.C., legal counsel for FilmOn added:

“In addressing FilmOn’s argument that it is exempt from copyright infringement liability as a cable system, the court indicated that it was not convinced–on the facts currently known to it–which this is the case. Although the court issued a Temporary Restraining Order, it is providing FilmOn with an opportunity to elaborate upon its ‘cable system’ argument more thoroughly in a hearing on the Networks’ request for a preliminary injunction.

“FilmOn will be drafting papers in opposition to the Networks’ motion for a preliminary injunction in the coming weeks, with which it expects to submit to the court the opinion of an expert on FilmOn’s technology in order to demonstrate that FilmOn is indeed a cable system. If FilmOn successfully opposes the Networks’ motion for a preliminary injunction, the court’s Temporary Restraining Order–which by law can only remain in effect for a short duration–will be dissolved.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101122/goodbye-free-tv-on-your-ipad-for-now/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20101117/hulu-plus-cuts-its-price-after-all-by-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20101117/hulu-plus-cuts-its-price-after-all-by-2/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:18:57 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25946 Hulu, which had considered cutting the fee for its premium service in half, then launched out of beta at full price, has gone ahead and cut it after all–by 20 percent.

In a blog post announcing the move, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar doesn’t explain the rationale for the price cut, which comes less than two weeks after the service’s formal launch.* So feel free to make your own guess.

But the announcement highlights the core tension facing Hulu, which is jointly owned by Providence Equity, GE’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox: The best move for the online service is often at odds with its owners’ strategies for their businesses.

In this case, Kilar has been pushing for a price cut while the networks have been trying to effectively establish higher prices for their programming, in the form of new fees they’re demanding from cable providers (see: Fox. v. Cablevision, etc).

The new $7.99 per month price should make Hulu Plus more competitive with Netflix, which offers DVD rentals along with all-you-can-eat streaming for $8.99. So will another move to add more programming from NBC Universal, which Netflix got access to in September.

Hulu Plus is supposed to appeal to customers who want access to a deeper catalog than Hulu’s free service, and who want to watch the shows via devices like Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Xbox 360–all of which support Netflix.

Hulu says it will provide $2 credits to existing Hulu Plus subscribers who signed up during the trial phase this summer, and is also offering a few other promotional bells and whistles to push the service. From Kilar’s post:

• One free week trials for all new subscribers. In addition, current subscribers who joined during the preview period will receive a credit for one week of Hulu Plus toward their next month’s subscription.
• Two free weeks of Hulu Plus for both current subscribers and friends they invite through our referral program. Subscribers can learn more by clicking on the “Referrals” tab on their Hulu profile page.
• 11 weeks ($20 worth) of free Hulu Plus with the purchase of a Sony BRAVIA connected TV or Blu-ray player through January 31, 2011. (See sony.com/huluplus.)
• One free month of Hulu Plus with the purchase of a Roku device through December 15, 2010. (See roku.com/hulu.)

*Hulu points out that Hulu Plus only formally came out of beta today; two weeks ago it dropped the invite-only requirement for the service.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101117/hulu-plus-cuts-its-price-after-all-by-2/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101110/a-web-video-truce-free-hulu-goes-away-from-boxee-replaced-by-hulu-plus/ http://allthingsd.com/20101110/a-web-video-truce-free-hulu-goes-away-from-boxee-replaced-by-hulu-plus/#comments Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:45:06 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25725 The Hulu-Boxee war is over! The terms of the truce: Boxee, which makes software that makes it easy to get Web video on TV, will remove links to Hulu’s free service–but will give users the ability to use the Hulu Plus paid service.

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen is scheduled to make the announcement tonight at an event celebrating the release of the Boxee Box, his company’s first move into the consumer electronics business.

The arrangement with Hulu, which is primarily owned by News Corp.’s Fox, Disney’s ABC and GE’s NBC Universal, marks the end of a conflict that dates back to February 2009. That’s when Hulu insisted that Boxee take down links to its service, then tried severing the connections itself.

Hulu said it made the move at the insistence of its network partners (an argument that outgoing NBC U boss Jeff Zucker said was not true). But recently it has stopped complaining publicly about Boxee.

And as I noted earlier this week, the big networks have warmed to Boxee in the last year or so. And with the appearance of Google TV, which offers something similar to Boxee, they appear to be more amenable to working with Ronen and company.

Boxee will also have other content partnerships to announce tonight, I’m told, including a deeper relationship with Netflix. More details on that, as well as timing of the Hulu move, as I hear about it.

UPDATE: Alas, no details from Boxee on either–just confirmation that Netflix will come to Boxee by the end of the year, and that Hulu Plus will come “soon.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101110/a-web-video-truce-free-hulu-goes-away-from-boxee-replaced-by-hulu-plus/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101105/how-to-watch-free-broadcast-tv-on-your-ipad-right-now/ http://allthingsd.com/20101105/how-to-watch-free-broadcast-tv-on-your-ipad-right-now/#comments Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:27:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25574 The broadcast networks only put their stuff on the Web under very specific conditions. So this is exactly what they don’t want: Free, live streams of their stuff delivered to your iPad, via the browser.

You can get it right now, by heading to FilmOn.com, where you can get streams of several local L.A. TV stations, which means you can get whatever NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox are broadcasting. You can also get a few cable channels, like Time Warner’s CNN International, as well as a couple of porn feeds.

It’s incredibly easy, and it’s a very high-quality feed, with very little lag. This screenshot of NBC’s “Today Show” isn’t very exciting, but it is current–I took it a few minutes ago.

You can also get FilmOn via a conventional PC, but that requires a download, so it’s not quite as convenient. But it’s still very easy, and while FilmOn has said it would charge for the service, it’s free for now.

How is this possible? It shouldn’t be, according to the networks, who are suing FilmOn and founder Alki David. They’re also suing ivi.TV, which is doing something similar with feeds from Seattle TV stations.

Both FilmOn and ivi are arguing that they’re within their rights based on an interpretation of FCC rules that allow “secondary transmissions” of broadcast signals.

The networks, of course, will work very, very hard to shoot down that argument, for obvious reasons. Ivi and FilmOn have been out for several weeks, but a note from industry analyst Rich Greenfield (registration required) this morning is going to increase the attention the two companies have been getting.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see how Apple plays this. Steve Jobs has big plans for the TV business, but they generally involve working with the networks and studios so that they can charge money for their shows on his devices.

On the other hand, since FilmOn is getting to the iPad over the free Web, instead of an Apple-approved app, I’m not sure how Jobs could stop the transmission. Even if he wants to.

UPDATE: Ivi’s Hal Bringman wants us to know that in addition to Seattle, his service also offers streams from New York broadcast stations, and will start offering from L.A. this weekend. Up next–Chicago and Philadelphia. Bringman says his company also has an iPad app in the works, but that one will require a $4.95 monthly fee.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101105/how-to-watch-free-broadcast-tv-on-your-ipad-right-now/feed/ 18 http://allthingsd.com/20101104/hulu-plus-opens-up-doesnt-go-on-sale/ http://allthingsd.com/20101104/hulu-plus-opens-up-doesnt-go-on-sale/#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:10:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25517 If you’ve been waiting to pay $9.99 a month for Hulu Plus, but haven’t been able wrangle an invite, your wait is over: The service is now open to the public. If you’ve been waiting to pay half that price for the video service, which gives you a deeper catalog and access to devices like Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Xbox 360–keep waiting. While CEO Jason Kilar has pushed to cut the price of the service by 50 percent, not all of his network partners/owners–Disney’s ABC, News Corp.’s Fox and GE’s NBC–are on board. So it’s full price, for now. Have at it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101104/hulu-plus-opens-up-doesnt-go-on-sale/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101022/networks-block-web-programs-from-being-viewed-on-google-tv/ http://allthingsd.com/20101022/networks-block-web-programs-from-being-viewed-on-google-tv/#comments Fri, 22 Oct 2010 07:00:52 +0000 Sam Schechner and Amir Efrati http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31398 ABC, CBS and NBC are blocking TV programming on their websites from being viewable on Google Inc.’s new Web-TV service, exposing the rift that remains between the technology giant and some of the media companies it wants to supply content for its new products.

Full-length episodes of shows like NBC’s “The Office,” CBS’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and ABC’s “Modern Family” can’t be viewed on Google TV, a service that allows people to access the Internet and search for Web videos on their television screens, as well as to search live TV listings. Logitech International S.A. and Sony Corp. began selling devices running the software this month.

Spokespeople for the three networks confirmed that they are blocking the episodes on their websites from playing on Google TV, although both ABC and NBC allow promotional clips to work using the service. ABC is owned by Walt Disney Co., CBS is part of CBS Corp., and NBC is a unit of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101022/networks-block-web-programs-from-being-viewed-on-google-tv/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/hulu-plus-take-two-hows-4-95-a-month/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/hulu-plus-take-two-hows-4-95-a-month/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:47:45 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24979 Hulu is considering cutting the price of Hulu Plus, the subscription service it began testing in June, sources tell me. I’m told the video site is talking about slashing its $9.95 per-month fee in half, to $4.95.

Hulu Plus was supposed to be the video site’s strategy to generate a second revenue stream to complement the free, ad-supported site that launched in 2008.

The idea is that paying subscribers get access to a deeper catalog of TV shows and movies than what the free service offers, as well as the ability to watch Hulu on devices like Apple’s iPhone and iPad, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game machine and Internet-connected TVs from Samsung and Sony.

But a price cut would indicate that consumers haven’t bought in to the pitch. That shouldn’t be a shock, considering the other video options that consumers have, and the limits that Hulu’s content providers have placed on the service.

At $8.99 a month, for instance, Netflix subscribers get access to a very deep catalog of movies and TV shows delivered on DVD, and a growing number of titles delivered to their PCs, phones or iPads.

But Hulu Plus is limited primarily to current  broadcast shows from its three owners–Disney’s ABC, GE’s NBC and News Corp.’s Fox–as well as other shows that have stopped running on TV. (News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

And tensions between programmers and cable providers mean that Hulu won’t give subscribers access to current cable shows from those same partners–even though some of them are (barely) available on conventional Hulu. “It’s a broadcast-focused service,” in the words of CEO Jason Kilar.

Hulu declined to comment about the service, which is still officially in beta mode.

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