In this light, the Washington Post is launching “The Fold,” a nightly newscast created specifically with Google TV and Android devices in mind.

It’s essentially a 15-minute recap of that day’s events, with an airtime of roughly 6 pm ET every evening, to capture the segment of the market that wants a curated summary of their news when they come home in the evening. Each show will be made up of features, hard news and analysis produced by a mix of new and existing WaPo staffers.

“While laptops and desktops are under siege because of today’s mobile-first attitude, the lean-back, six-foot experience of the TV isn’t going anywhere,” Vijay Ravindran, chief digital officer of the Washington Post Company, told me in an interview. This is why, he said, the company is first targeting the Google TV set-top device market. As an added bonus, since Google TV is powered by the Android platform, WaPo’s “Post TV” app is able to run on Android tablets, as well.

So yes, it’s like a Webcast for nightly news — only for Android. The pitch, however, is that wrapping the experience into an app allows for some nimbleness not otherwise seen in a regular Web video production. For one, each segment within the app can be split off from the entire show and shared via Facebook or Twitter, bite-sized portions made more digestible for the frenetic flow of news and status updates that fly through our streams on a daily basis.

Cracking this space is, in part, some of the mission behind WaPo Labs, the company’s experimental digital initiative, home to such products as Trove and Washington Post Social Reader, which are applications that rely on social and personalization features to deliver content tailored to users’ personal tastes or, in the case of Social Reader, the top circulating content among friends.

The problem with Social Reader is that WaPo and others producing similar apps are left at the mercy of Facebook’s News Feed for distribution. It’s an app, and, as such, that app is modulated by the tweaks in Facebook’s algorithms that determine how often you’ll see the app activity amongst your friends. Many companies live and die by the feed, and recent news that Facebook is pulling away from this “passive sharing” app model may hurt Social Reader’s distribution and activity.

“Everything is affected by the changes that Facebook makes,” Ravindran said.

So “The Fold” and Post TV are something of a hedge between multiple platforms. Break your program up into chunks that detail segments like the campaign trail and a 59-second digest of the entire day’s news, and it’s more amenable to tweeting or a status update via social streams. Push out the app on Android to reach a widely distributed platform with a rapidly growing mobile market share. Add all of this content onto WaPo’s own site to cross pollinate with the existing Web audience. And finally, attack the segment that still goes for the lean-back experience, by launching the Google TV application.

One issue, though: The Google TV audience just isn’t there yet. Data made public in February suggests that there could be fewer than one million Google TV set-top boxes in living rooms across the country. Even across the industry, connected TV devices aren’t fully taking off — while Apple has moved a few million Apple TV devices, it’s far from a best-selling product for the company.

Ravindran and WaPo director of video Andy Pergam are hopeful, saying the market is still getting its legs.

“We feel that Google TV is on the upswing,” Ravindran said. Price points are a challenge, he notes, but new products are arriving that could address this. Vizio’s $100 set-top box is available on the cheap, while LG and Sony are attacking the high end with options that integrate Google’s service directly into the TV set.

Ultimately, Ravindran and Pergam say it’s a long-term bet for the company, as are the rest of WaPo’s Labs initiatives.

“The Fold” will kick off it’s first night with a bang, featuring an exclusive interview with Dr. Henry Kissinger, and will go up on the Post TV app at 6 pm ET.

According to multiple reports I have received, some employees of OnLive have been walking out of their Palo Alto, Calif. offices over the last few hours laden with boxes.

And some, no surprise, are headed to a nearby bar — The Patio — presumably to drown their sorrows.

The departures from the online cloud-gaming service came after a meeting this morning in which its top execs told staff that it would be letting almost the entire staff go, but without a lot of explanation of what that meant.

While founder and CEO Steve Perlman runs a number of other digital efforts — via his own Rearden Labs — at its Silicon Valley HQ, sources said only fraction of staffers will be left to keep the servers running until a resolution for the assets is found. Kotaku reported that OnLive would be filing an “alternative to bankruptcy called an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, or ABC, in the state of California.”

It is not clear who actually owns the pricey technology and patents for OnLive, which has raised $56 million in funding from investors such as Maverick Capital, Time Warner and HTC. HTC, the Taiwanese telecom giant, invested $40 million of the total in early 2011.

That’s a lot of dough, so it is not clear what has happened or if Perlman is poised to sell off the entity.

Sony recently bought one of OnLive’s rivals in the space — Gaikai — for $380 million to turbocharge its cloud-gaming service efforts.

One thing is entirely clear: While egregiously denying it was doing so, the gaming and virtual desktop software start-up is effectively shutting down OnLive as it has been previously run.

Earlier today, an OnLive spokesperson denied the obvious situation.

“We don’t respond to rumors, but the service is not shutting down,” OnLive said, while also bizarrely flacking their games.

Last week, I heard a rumor of just this thing happening and asked a spokesperson last Friday via email: “I hear via very good sources it is closing down or cutting back.”

This was the disingenuous response: “The latest rumors have been around acquisitions — this is a new one! Not the case, but officially we never comment on rumors.”

No need for comment, as you can see from the photo above and also here that was just sent to me.

OnLive launched in 2010 as a Web portal for streaming games, which it demoed here, from the D: All Things Digital conference in 2010.

As Lauren Goode wrote earlier: “In addition to its cloud-based gaming platform, which runs on PCs, tablets and now Google TV products, OnLive also offers [Microsoft] Office-based, virtual desktop software for [Apple] iPads and [Google] Android tablets, which got the Palo-Alto-based start up in some hot water with Microsoft earlier this year.”

Mashable first reported on the possible layoffs earlier. Let’s upgrade that to actual.

The pay-TV part, though, is going to seem very familiar: They’ll pay Google $120 a month, and they’ll get a bunch of TV channels, whether they want all of them or not.

Which isn’t to say it won’t be cool. The TV service should offer a bunch of nifty features that will make it easier to find and watch what you want.* And it comes with a free Nexus 7 tablet. And unlike the cable box you have now, it should get better with some frequency, via software updates. Etc.**

But if you were hoping that Google was going to use its fiber project to reorder the TV landscape, you’re going to be disappointed. At least in this incarnation, Google is playing by the TV establishment’s rules.

That is, if you want to get stuff from the cable guys, you have to buy everything they bundle. Discovery’s TLC comes with Animal Planet and the Science Channel. NBCUniversal’s CNBC comes with Bravo, Oxygen and the USA Network. Etc.

And the cable guys are happy to sell Google their shows, because they love having more buyers for their stuff, as long as they don’t break the bundle model they love so much.

Just like they were happy to sell TV to the satellite guys and telco guys. “We view them the way we view [Verizon’s] Fios,” says one programmer who’s working with Google.

Not everyone is in, yet. Time Warner (TNT, TBS, HBO), Disney (ESPN, Disney Channel), News Corp. (Fox News, FX) and AMC Networks (AMC, IFC) don’t have deals with Google. And if Google launches without all of them, the service will look crippled. But the Google folks are saying positive things about getting deals done, and I’ve heard similar murmurs from some of the TV guys.

One exception to the happy talk: News Corp., which owns this Web site, has butted heads with Google repeatedly. The two sides had a particularly unsuccessful discussion about Google TV at CES in January, which led to a Twitter outburst from Rupert Murdoch. So that deal could be extra-hard to nail down.

Then again, Viacom also has problems with Google — you may recall they are still suing them over YouTube. And Viacom has signed on for Google Fiber, too.***

Money solves all sorts of problems, especially when it comes with a promise not to screw up the ecosystem that makes the cable guys fat and happy. Right now, Google’s willing to offer both.

*A lot of these features, by the way, are similar to features Google has been showing off with its latest version of its Google TV software. But this being Google, the Google Fiber service is completely separate from Google TV — they’re handled by different teams, using different hardware, different software. So odd. So Googley.

**You can watch the Google guys pitch this themselves, by checking out yesterday’s demo video, starting at the 25-minute mark.

***Boy, did this dummy get that one wrong. Sorry!

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/BortN66)

But it was evident at January’s Consumer Electronics Show that the search giant — and its hardware partners — hadn’t given up on the idea of marrying Internet TV with “real” TV, mainly through small boxes, like Apple TV or Roku, that run Google TV.

And as my AllThingsD colleague Peter Kafka noted a month later, if the new and improved Google TV system works the way it has been advertised, it may actually do a nice job.

Now, TV maker (and new PC maker) Vizio has officially announced availability for its Google TV device, the Co-Star.

Available for preorder in early July, the Co-Star costs $100, comes with a Bluetooth-enabled, touch-friendly universal remote, and includes apps like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and iHeartRadio, as well as access to OnLive’s cloud gaming platform. Vizio also notes that the Co-Star supports 1080p full-HD and 3-D video.

Unlike most set-top boxes that bring Internet connectivity to your TV, the Vizio Co-Star can connect to your existing cable or satellite box, which Vizio says allows you to toggle easily between live TV and Web apps. Bonus: The universal remote means you won’t have to switch remotes, either.

And just yesterday, Sony made a push with its new Google TV player. The NSZ-GS7 — also known as the bland “Internet Player,” take your pick — is a set-top box that runs Google TV and includes apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus, plus access to a Web browser. It goes on sale July 22 and costs $199. It will also be sold in the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Mexico.

LG was the third hardware maker at CES this year to hop aboard the Google TV train, though the electronics maker rolled Google TV into its existing “smart” TV platform, rather than showing off a separate box. LG’s Google TVs are also 3-D-friendly, and include motion-control technology through a “Magic Remote.”

The G2 Series Google TVs hit the market late last month, at $1,699 for a 47-inch model, and $2,299 for a 55-inch set.

A more integrated approach to TV-plus-Web may seem like an easier solution, but keep in mind that, at least in the short term, the market for interim devices like Internet set-top boxes is ripe, with many consumers clinging to their older TV models and looking for solutions to get their Web video fixes.

Vizio’s Co-Star is a third of the price of the original Logitech Revue for Google TV, and lines up with Apple TV in terms of price, though it does cost more than some Roku models.

As long as they keep paying for TV.

But even if consumers go for that deal, the TV guys need to make sure that advertisers buy in, too.

And that won’t happen until the TV guys can get some basic stuff right. Like counting eyeballs, no matter where they watch a show.

That could still take a while. Witness Comcast’s announcement yesterday, made at the cable industry’s annual convention in Boston, that it has been working with Nielsen on a plan to count viewers when they watched video on an iPad*, using Comcast’s Xfinity app.

For various technical reasons, this is much harder than you’d think, and the two companies have already been beavering away at this for 18 months. Now they’re launching a trial, and Comcast executive Matt Strauss is optimistic that they can work the kinks out by 2013, and advertisers could have true “multiplatform measurement.”

But that only works if all of the big pay-TV providers sign on to the new technology. And the media-measurement business is full of different tests and initiatives, all shooting off in different directions.

Last week, for instance, Spanish-language powerhouse Univision announced a “video neutral” deal with media-buying agency Starcom, which is supposed to mean Univision gets credit for its stuff no matter where anyone watches it. But the announcement describing the deal doesn’t explain how Univision or Starcom will track those eyeballs.

Meanwhile, Nielsen’s rival eyeball-counter comScore recently announced that it had its own technology in place to measure mobile devices like phones and tablets. And earlier this year it announced its own “multiscreen research initiative,” where it paired up with AT&T.

But comScore isn’t tracking any traffic on connected devices, like Google TVs, Apple TVs or Microsoft Xboxes. So if any of that really is taking off, that’s yet another headache.

Shouldn’t this stuff be easier? After all, we’ve figured out how to get the video all of these places — why can’t we count it, too?

On the other hand, recall that the iPhone is still a mere five years old, and the iPad is only two. That’s a blink of an eye for the measurement guys, who move deliberately because there’s billions of ad dollars at stake, no matter what they do. But they may still have to speed things up.

*Or, theoretically, on another tablet.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Liewluck)

That is, more people are watching Web stuff on Microsoft’s machine than on the iPad, iPhone or any Android machine, anywhere. And when it comes to home viewing, competitors like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku are so far behind they’re not even competitors.

This data comes from Freewheel, an online video ad company, and it comes with caveats. We’ll get to those below. But first, take a look:

Now the asterisks: Freewheel is only measuring “professional content” that runs with ads, because that’s how it makes its living. So that means it’s counting stuff from companies like NBC, CBS, ESPN and Vevo, but not YouTube cat videos. It’s also not measuring Netflix usage. On the other hand, this isn’t a poll or sample, but data compiled by the company’s own ad servers.

So it’s possible there’s some variance here with the larger Web video world, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is at least directionally correct. At the very least, it gives credence to Microsoft’s claim that Xbox users are spending more time watching videos on the machines than playing games, and that its deals with conventional TV programmers may be bearing fruit.

And it shows you how much ground Google will need to make up as it gets ready to relaunch its Google TV. Ditto for Apple, if and when it ever gets serious about transforming Apple TV into something other than a “hobby.”

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

YouTube is now insisting on the ability to play all videos from content “partners” — video owners that share ad revenue with the site — on all platforms, including mobile phones and connected TVs.

Previously, some video owners have held back their content from some devices, in hopes of making separate deals with other distributors, like Netflix or Microsoft’s Xbox unit.

But now YouTube says it wants to put all its stuff everywhere. The site informed partners about the change at the end of January, and required them to sign off on the deal within a few days, via an electronic “click form.”

The terms don’t affect any of the video makers that YouTube is working with via its new “channels” program, because those companies had already agreed to multi-platform distribution. And there will also be a class of very big media companies that may not have to play by the same rules, either.

Video music site Vevo, for instance, keeps some of its clips off of some platforms, including the YouTube app on the iPhone, because of technical issues like ad servers and branding. That won’t change anytime soon, according to people familiar with the site. I wouldn’t be surprised if big Hollywood studios or TV networks also have carve-outs that won’t get changed.

But there is still a group of video-makers who have millions of subscribers and have generated hundreds of millions of video views, and YouTube’s change will affect them.

The ones I talked to about the new terms — who don’t want me to print their names — say they’ve accepted them reluctantly, because they need the distribution and/or dollars that YouTube provides.

And it’s hard to tell if this actually puts the kibosh on, say, an Xbox deal — maybe Microsoft will still cut them a check. Or maybe Microsoft was never going to cut them a check, anyway.

But it’s certainly good for consumers. There’s a logic behind media companies’ efforts to distinguish a PC screen from an iPhone screen, or a tablet screen from a TV screen. But only if you’re in charge of making biz dev deals for a media company. If you watch video, a screen is a screen is a screen.

So says a Googler I pinged today, after I saw a flurry of posts referencing this cryptic Facebook message from Google TV’s account.

Said Googler says there’s a new Google TV YouTube app in the works, and that we may not have to wait until tomorrow to see it — it could pop out tonight. Update: That was fast — there it is.

That’s about it, though. And it probably won’t change the world as we know it.

Recall that Google was showing off the latest incarnation of Google TV to press, partners and would-be partners just a month ago at the Consumer Electronics Show. So it’d be a bit odd for them to unveil a major new … anything quite so soon.

By the way, the new, revamped Google TV demo I saw last month was pretty impressive. It was a canned demo, and as I recall the canned demos Google showed off when it rolled out the first, ill-fated attempt at Google TV were pretty good, too. So it may not mean anything.

But! If Google TV works as advertised, it may actually do a nice job of melding “TV” with “Web video” and blurring some of those distinctions. Which is very much what Google and YouTube head Salar Kamangar would like to do.

Instead, I’m focusing on the ones that promise to bring me the TV I want to see, when I want to see it, without charging me a fortune. And without making me pay for stuff I don’t care about.

Try it yourself. See? Things get quiet in a hurry.

All that other stuff that everyone is talking about right now — new ways to get Web video onto your TV set, new ways to chat up your friends while you watch TV, etc. — is sort of interesting. Maybe it eventually turns into something really interesting.

But none of it solves the problem that regular people have with TV right now. Because they actually like TV quite a bit, and watch tons of it every week, and they’re okay paying for it, too, even if they say they’re not. They just want to pay less for the stuff they want.

Making that happen will require a lot more than using AirPlay to throw video from your iPad to your LCD, or making it easier to search the Web via a Google TV. It means fundamentally overhauling the TV business.

And while it can look like the TV business is loosening up dramatically — look at all those shows the networks are putting on the Web, for free! — it’s actually tightening up considerably — it’s getting harder and harder to watch that stuff, it turns out, without paying for cable, or going rogue.

Even the most interesting stuff I’ve heard about — selling TV “over the top,” via the Web — still contemplates buying bundles of channels from the programmers, which means that over-the-top TV will look just like cable TV. Just like satellite TV and fiber TV do.

“I think there’s not a lot wrong with the business models,” says Myspace owner Tim Vanderhook, who wants to launch his own over-the-top service this year. I’m not at all confident that he’s going to pull it off, but I’m sure the programmers are happy to have a chat. They love the idea of more buyers ponying up for their stuff.

One interesting variant you’re hearing more about right now involves keeping bundles intact, but buying less of them. If you don’t pay for ESPN, then you’re not going to get anything from Disney, including ABC Family and the Disney Channel. But if you can live with sports or kids stuff, you could save an awful lot — or put the money into other programming you do care about.

That’s not nearly as sexy as The End Of TV As We Know It, but it is doable. And I’ll definitely holler about that one, if and when we see it.

There are a whole lot of people who want to be in that game, and Blair Harrison is one of them. His Frequency, which launched last year, has gone through an overhaul, but its gist remains the same: It wants to let you pick and choose feeds of stuff you know you like. It wants to show you stuff your friends like, too, by incorporating cues from your social networks.

Harrison, who made his money and reputation building iFilm and selling it to Viacom during the beginning of the Web 1.0 boom, raised $3 million last year, and since then has rounded up another $1 million.

More important, his new Web site is slicker, and now features a dashboard that you can program with feeds you select, along with ones that use suggestions from Facebook, Twitter, et al. And the service now offers an iPad version, as well as one that will be featured on some Samsung TVs. Here’s what it should look like on the big screen:

Harrison’s challenges also remain the same: He needs to convince people that they should use a Web video hub, period. Facebook already does a great job of surfacing cool videos my friends think I should see (thanks for the Wilco clip, everyone), and Twitter is getting better at it.

And if I am inclined to use a Web video hub, chances are I’m already doing it via Google, at YouTube.

Google is particularly interesting for Harrison, since it’s both competition and de facto partner. YouTube is in the process of dividing itself up into niche channels that will work particularly well with Frequency’s new scheme — if you like the indie music that myISH serves up on YouTube, it should be easy to bring that feed right into Frequency.

But Google would very much like to be the program guide for Web video, too, via Google TV. That means, for instance, that some Samsung models will feature Frequency, and others will feature the one from the giant company with enormous resources. Tough fight.

Harrison isn’t asking consumers to fund his fight, either. The Web sites and apps are free, and the only ads that show up on the videos are the ones that the original distributors add in there, so right now Frequency is revenue-free.

Harrison says he needs to build scale and can figure it out later, but there are some obvious sponsorship/customization routes that he can try, just like Flipboard is trying out with magazines for its Web app reader. In fact, if you said that Harrison was trying to build Flipboard for Web video, he wouldn’t stop you.

Anyway! No point in writing about Web video without showing Web video. Here are a couple of clips Frequency tells me my friends think I would like:

Now-65-year-old David Bowie, from way back in 1973, via Facebook:

And, for whatever reason, a weather balloon, via Twitter:

The Internet giant said Thursday it has lined up LG Electronics Inc. to join its roster of TV makers supporting Google TV. It also provided additional details about plans for the first products from Samsung Electronics Co. and Vizio Inc., which had previously said they would adopt the Google technology.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Today, the company is unveiling plans for its Roku Streaming Stick, a flash-drive-sized dongle that plugs into the back of television sets to enable the same streaming capabilities as a Roku box.

The Streaming Stick will deliver HD streaming video and feature Wi-Fi capabilities, a processor and upgradable software. The Stick won’t require any cables or a separate remote. It will, however, work only on TV sets with HDMI ports that are enabled for Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL).

Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood said the company plans to continue making Roku set-top players. But as the television industry shifts more toward smart TVs that connect to the Internet without use of an additional device, Roku wants to be the solution that TV manufacturers look to in the interim.

The connected TV category is forecast to grow at a 30 percent compound annual rate between now and 2014 — up to more than 123 million shipments, according to a report from DisplaySearch earlier this year. The report also predicts continued complexity in the market, with a variety of streaming video services available to consumers, and tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft — in addition to smaller companies like Roku and Boxee — offering boxes for streaming Internet media.

Wood points out that despite the growing number of smart-TV shipments, Roku believes the actual connectivity rate on those TVs is still relatively low. Consumers, he said, are still looking for devices that can be easily upgraded when it comes to getting the Internet on their television sets.

Roku hasn’t yet determined the price of its Streaming Stick, but Wood said it would likely cost between $50 and $100, and will ship in the second half of 2012. While Roku hopes to partner with television manufacturers to bundle the dongle with TV purchases, the Streaming Stick will at first be sold individually, as well as alongside Insignia brand TVs from Best Buy.

California-based Roku launched in 2008 with the introduction of the first Netflix streaming player. Its lineup of devices now includes the Roku LT, the Roku 2 HD, the Roku 2 XD and the Roku 2 XS, which have around 400 channels and apps, including Netflix, Pandora, HBO GO, Vimeo, Hulu Plus, and Amazon’s streaming video service. The Roku 2 XS also offers Angry Birds, which can be played using a Roku XS remote.

Wood said sales of Roku players are up 300 percent over last year, with around 2.5 million Roku devices sold. He added that the company has been focused recently on casual games, with the introduction of Pac-Man and Jeopardy game apps on Roku, in addition to Angry Birds. Roku is also broadening its retail presence to more than 13,000 storefronts across the U.S.

Roku isn’t the only small set-top box maker shifting its strategy to adapt to the growing market for smart TVs. Boxee, maker of the Boxee Box, recently said it would offer a Live TV dongle for watching TV programming through the Box. Shortly afterward, the start-up also said it would be releasing its last software update for its PC-based application, as it focuses more on TV-compatible devices.

An expected software update on a slow day at the end of December is hardly big breaking news. But for start-up company Boxee, it signals a shift away from its software for PC browsers and a focus on Internet-connected TVs: The company says version 1.5 of the software will be its last Boxee update for PCs, Ubuntu and Mac computers.

It will be launched along with a Live TV dongle for the Boxee Box later in January.

Version 1.5 of the downloadable software on the Web will include better file support, a new onscreen display, search functionality, HTML5 WebKit-based browser, and will support multiple languages. It will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and higher, Linux Ubuntu 11.10, and will be available on Boxee.tv through the end of January.

And for those who would rather develop their own software for Boxee: The company is also releasing an open source version of its software.

The update won’t, however, offer PC users access to the same apps that are available on the Box, such as Netflix, Pandora and VUDU.

Boxee first launched in January 2010 as a Web application for watching Internet video online. In November 2010, it launched its awaited Boxee Box device, which came with a nifty Qwerty-style remote and offered a variety of apps — but it launched amid a growing market of Internet-connected TV boxes, including Apple TV, Google TV, Microsoft’s Xbox and the competitively-priced Roku box. At the time of the Boxee’s hardware launch, about 1.5 million people were using the Boxee software.

Boxee explained its shift away from Web software by saying it believes the future of TV will be driven by Internet-connected boxes, connected TVs and second screen devices like tablets. “While there are still many users who have computers connected to their TVs, we believe this use case is likely to decline as users find better alternatives,” Boxee wrote.

The company also said that the lack of premium apps on the downloadable version of Boxee was due to extensive DRM and certification requirements.

That’s Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s prediction, anyway.

Evidently, Schmidt views Logitech’s decision to abandon Google TV after a costly misadventure as confirmation of the platform’s consumer appeal and not its ill-starred future.

Speaking at the Le Web conference Thursday, Schmidt said Google TV, which is currently available only in Logitech’s now-abandoned Revue set-top box and Sony’s Internet TV, will sweep the television industry next year, penetrating its every corner.

“By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions that you see in stores will have Google TV embedded in them,” Schmidt said.

Really?

To pull that off Google will have to ink deals with a number of other big TV manufacturers — LG, Samsung, Sharp, and Philips — some of whom already have their own proprietary smart TV platforms. Indeed, LG, Philips and Sharp announced a joint platform in September. So either Schmidt knows something we don’t — i.e., a bunch of OEMs have already signed Google TV deals — or he’s just talking nonsense.

Hollywood and Google have been circling each other for years, as each side tries to figure out what to make of the other. Now they’re finally starting to link up in a serious way, via YouTube’s new “channels” strategy.

Which means it’s a perfect time to hear from YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar. And if you’re at D: Dive into Media in January, that’s what you’ll be able to do, as one of the world’s most important Googlers joins us onstage.

Getting Kamangar out of Mountain View and into the public eye would be a big deal under any circumstances, because — while he keeps a very low profile — he has enormous clout: He’s one of Larry Page’s most trusted lieutenants, a position he has earned by joining the company as hire No. 9 in 1999, then helping to build the AdWords product that has generated a vast majority of Google’s revenue.

Kamangar has been formally running YouTube for the past year, but in reality he had been overseeing the world’s largest video site for some time. Kamangar is also in charge of Google’s broader video plans, including Google TV, which is now making a second stab at inserting itself into the world’s living rooms.

So there’s going to be plenty to talk about when Kamangar joins a lineup of media heavyweights Jan. 30 and 31 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, an hour south of Los Angeles. Previously announced speakers include Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey, Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull, and VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff.

We’ll announce more in the weeks to come. If you want to make sure you get a seat, you should sign up now.

Google TV or a child of Google TV or the grandchild of Google TV will happen. The integration of television in Internet is inevitable. But the idea that it would happen overnight in Christmas 2010 was very misguided and that also cost us dearly.

Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca during his company’s analyst day this week, describing his company’s failed Google TV/“Revue” boxes as a “mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature”

With its decision to end development of mobile Flash, Adobe is also abandoning its goal of establishing the platform as the common runtime software on connected TVs and set-top boxes.

“Adobe will continue to support existing licensees who are planning on supporting Flash Player for Web browsing on digital home devices and are using the Flash Player Porting Kit to do so,” the company said in a statement given to GigaOm. “However we believe the right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a Web browsing experience, and we will continue to encourage the device and content publishing community down that path.”

We believe the right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a Web browsing experience.

What does that mean for Google TV, “which includes Flash Player 10.1 integrated directly into the Google Chrome browser delivering the full Web to consumers on their television sets”?

Who cares? Know anyone with a Google TV who actually uses it?

Didn’t think so.

So, Adobe — which once hoped to make Flash the de facto multimedia platform on PCs, mobile devices and TVs — no longer sees that as a viable strategy. Its new tack: Push developers to create native apps for connected TVs using the AIR framework.