• Showing TV shows the day after they air, like Hulu does.
• Renting TV shows and movies one at a time, on demand, like Amazon, Apple, Walmart and many others do.
• Renting video games, like GameFly does.
• Getting more people to sign up for its DVD rental service, which is what Netflix used to do.

So what is Reed Hastings trying to do? He explained it again during his company’s conference call Wednesday night, but it’s the same message he’s been delivering for some time: He’s trying to create the Web version of HBO or Showtime.

That is: A premium cable channel that gives subscribers lots of viewing choices — including some stuff they can’t see anywhere else —  but not unlimited choices.

That may disappoint some customers, investors and even reporters. Because the idea of a maverick Internet video service that could upend all of Hollywood and the TV industry sounds pretty exciting. People are still hoping for one, perhaps in the form of a “virtual” cable service – perhaps from Google or Apple – though yesterday Hastings said he doesn’t believe that’s happening, either.

But Hastings’s more modest ambitions are popular enough: He now has 23.5 million Web video subscribers worldwide, which is more than CBS’s Showtime has. And he is creeping up on Time Warner’s HBO, which has around 28 million subs. [UPDATE: Let's make this an apples-to-apples comparison: Netflix has 21.7 million Web video subs in the U.S.; that 28 million number for HBO is US-only, too.]

Still, Hastings will need to keep reiterating his plan for some time in order for everyone to get it.

That’s partly his fault, because he hasn’t always been consistent. Last summer, for instance, he said the company would start marketing its DVD-only business again, but the company has since canceled those plans (and now rarely acknowledges DVDs exist, even though they are a huge business for Netflix). Last fall, Netflix also said it would get into the videogame rental business, but those plans have been scrapped, too.

“We are just another network competing for viewing time with, and licensing content from, other networks,” Hastings wrote in his letter to shareholders yesterday. That’s not quite as compelling as “All the movies and TV you’ll ever need, for $8 a month,” but it’s the truth, and it seems to work for lots of people.

A new deal between Time Warner’s movie studio and Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster will double the “window” for new releases. That means the services will now have to wait 56 days after the discs first go on sale to offer them to their customers, instead of 28 days. [UPDATE: Redbox parent Coinstar now says they haven't agreed to a new deal; see below]

The move is part of Hollywood’s ongoing campaign to bolster flagging DVD sales, and sources tell me the new deal is supposed to be announced at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Warner Brothers executives have already talked publicly about extending the current window.

This is the second time that Warner has been able to get the rental services to wait before distributing its movies.

In 2010, it struck deals with Netflix, and later Coinstar’s Redbox, to wait 28 days before renting its new discs. Coinstar and Netflix later landed similar pacts with most of the other big studios. (Coinstar did up end up in legal battles with Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox, which like this Web site is owned by News Corp.)

Two years ago, Netflix was able to argue that by delaying access to DVDs, it was able to get its hands on more streaming content, and lower prices for the discs it did buy. This time around, though, Warner won’t be granting any additional digital rights to the studios. It will simply be offering them the ability to buy discs in bulk, at a significant discount to retail pricing, like they already do.

Earlier today, news broke that HBO, another Time Warner unit, would stop selling its DVDs to Netflix altogether, but sources tell me the two moves aren’t directly related. Next week’s planned announcement is supposed to be tied to Warner Brothers’ continuing push for Ultraviolet, an industry consortium that’s supposed to allow home video buyers to watch their purchases on multiple machines, in multiple formats.

Reps for Time Warner, Coinstar, Netflix and Blockbuster parent company Dish Network declined to comment.

UPDATE: Coinstar is now commenting, via email. “The current agreement Coinstar has with Warner Bros. is to receive movie titles 28 days after their release. No revised agreements are in place.” The company’s current deal with Warner Bros. expires at the end of January; PR chief Marci Maule referred me to comments CEO Paul Davis made last fall about pursuing “workarounds” if studios try to extend their windows.

The ever-bickering crop of current Republican Presidential nominees dragging themselves to the first Iowa vote in the coming weeks almost makes you wish for a true political character to liven up the proceedings.

Or some nostalgia for the last go-round, which is definitely present in this trailer for HBO’s upcoming adaptation of “Game Change,” the lively book about the 2008 campaign, featuring the always telegenic Sarah Palin.

The former Alaska governor is played this time around by Julianne Moore, who really looks and sounds like the GOP VP candidate.

You betcha, she does:

The two companies say the service will go into a “brief beta trial” and will then be available to all Time Warner Cable subscribers (again, as long as they’re also HBO customers), “in the next month.”

Depending on how you look at it, the agreement either extends the reach of Time Warner’s “TV Everywhere” program, or fills an embarrassing hole. Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are two separate companies that split up in 2009, so programming deals between the two aren’t automatic, by any means.

But that explanation didn’t do much to appease Time Warner Cable customers who wanted the service. The cable company has 14 million subscribers, making it the country’s second-biggest cable provider after Comcast.

Time Warner rolled out HBO Go this summer to very positive reviews; Time Warner says users have downloaded five million apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android devices. Earlier this month, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said that HBO Go users watch up to 50 percent more of the channel’s programming.

In this case, it’s Madonna’s new pact with Universal Music Group. The New York Post says she’ll get around $1 million an album for a three-album deal, and music industry folks say the paper has its numbers right.

This is a very reasonable contract. Madonna is long past her music-selling peak, and the music industry is a decade past its peak, too.

Still! Reasonable contracts — especially for superstars — are still very new things for the music business. Not too many years ago, Sony handed Bruce Springsteen a reported $100 million, and that was well into the post-Napster slide. So let’s just walk through what each side gets here:

• Madonna gets the kind of money, upfront, that she would have laughed at in the past. A million bucks is what you used to give a hot “baby band” no one but a few hipsters had heard of. But the world’s biggest music company will buy her billboards, etc., and that’s still worth something. Plus, on the off chance that one of these albums does take off, the low advance means she could actually earn royalties on the sales.
• Universal gets bragging rights and one of the music industry’s few living worldwide icons, for what amounts to walking-around money. And, again, who knows? She might still sell some records, perhaps on the back of her upcoming Super Bowl appearance.
• Universal doesn’t get Madonna’s lucrative back catalog — Warner Music Group still has those songs, which it continues to sell, repackage, and sell some more. And Universal doesn’t get a piece of her lucrative touring business — concert giant Live Nation has that. (Remember when Live Nation was also going to be a big deal in the record business? What happened to that?)

But wait a minute. Why does Madonna need a record deal at all? Couldn’t she just sell her music on her own, like Prince and Radiohead and the Eagles and lots of folks?

Sure. But not everyone wants to be Louis C.K., who has just declared his direct-to-fan experiment a huge success. (To play devil’s advocate: Even though everyone who bought one of his concerts blogged about it (more than once, in some cases), he has still only reached 130,000 people — far less than would have seen him had he done an HBO deal or a Netflix deal. And those guys would almost certainly have paid him more, too. Though if you want to be a contra-contrarian, you can note that he could still do that. (Which I have!)

Some people, it turns out, are still happy to take money up front from Big Media companies and hope they can deliver the Big Reach, which the do-it-yourself Web can’t guarantee.

I bought it Saturday night, watched it on the plane Sunday, and laughed out loud, a bunch. You should do it, and there’s a good chance you have — techland loved this story this weekend. Also, again: It’s very funny.

But What Does It All Mean? Not a ton. It’s an evolutionary step, relevant to a select group of people who make entertainment. With one interesting twist.

The part that isn’t new here is Louis C.K. using the Web and doing it on his own. We’ve seen a bunch of that over the years, mostly from entertainers who have already become famous (or at least semi-famous) with the help of mainstream media. Prince and Radiohead sold their own music only after they sold lots of songs for big music labels. Adam Carolla leapt/got pushed from TV and radio gigs into podcasting.

The new twist here is the way his experiment changes video “windows” — which determine when shows and movies show up on different outlets. By going direct-to-fan first, C.K. doesn’t shut off his chance to end up working the Big Media Companies he says he doesn’t want to work with. He’s just making them wait. So the people who really love him can get it right away, and he can capture almost all of that value in the transaction.

We’ll call it the Louis C.K. Window.

It can run for a week, or a month, or however long he’d like to be the sole outlet for his show. But then, if he wants to get more money for his product and reach a different audience, C.K. can sell the program to HBO or Showtime or Netflix for a “pay-TV window.” And then, eventually, to the likes of Comedy Central or FX. At some point, he can retail discs and downloads via Amazon and iTunes, etc.

The Louis C.K. Window is the most gratifying, because it’s cool, and because he’ll keep almost every penny his fans spend to see him. But it’s also likely to expose him to the smallest number of people.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a million people pony up for the concert — basically, that is, everyone who watches his (great) show on News Corp.’s FX channel. (News Corp. owns this site, too.)

That’s a wildly optimistic estimate, and it will still be a fraction of the people that HBO, which has some 28 million subscribers, can reach. You can fault Big Media for a lot of things, but it remains pretty good at rounding up Big Audiences.

But that’s the great thing about the Louis C.K. Window. It lets Louis C.K. — and a relatively small group of people with big ambitions, and ardent fans — have it both ways.

Experts Give the New Xbox Raves for Control, Creativity
(Dec. 6 2001)
Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Microsoft sold more than 960,000 consoles last week, with a majority flying off the shelves within a single 24-hour period.

Nintendo also said the Wii had the biggest Black Friday ever, selling more than 500,000 units on the day after Thanksgiving.

At one point during the shopping madness, a shopper pepper sprayed a crowd at a Wal-Mart to get her mitts on an Xbox (although reports now say police are investigating the incident to determine the cause of the attack).

Sony declined to release sales figures for the PlayStation 3 last week, but it is likely benefiting from a recent $50 price cut.

Such strong sales are mind-blowing.

People are lining up for — and in some cases fighting over — hardware that is five to six years old. It’s difficult to imagine any other consumer hardware that could attract that kind of demand after such a long period of time.

All three are nearing the end of their life cycles. The Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 are both five years old, and the Xbox 360 is a year older.

Nintendo announced that it will release a new console, the Wii U, later next year. Microsoft and Sony have not said anything official, but they are both expected to follow with competing launches in the same time frame.

It has long been a pattern for all three rivals to release new hardware at the same time. A European PlayStation executive recently hinted that Sony’s plan was to continue that trend because it was “undesirable” to be significantly later than the competition, according to IndustryGamers.com.

Despite the odds, there are at least three reasons why sales continue to do well.

The lineup of games is as strong as it has ever been for the consoles; all three have tried sprucing up the hardware with accessories and adding downloadable content; and, finally, consumers don’t have a choice — the only alternative is to wait another year.

First, the games: This year, publishers waited until now to release some of the hottest titles of 2011; hardcore gamers in particular will have their choice of any number of blockbuster hits.

Activision’s Call of Duty game is already a runaway success, grossing $775 million in the first five days it was available, to shatter all entertainment records.

Also in the hardcore genre is Electronic Art’s Battlefield 3, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, PlayStation’s Uncharted 3 and Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham City, which are all going head to head this holiday season.

But the consoles don’t just serve the hardcore genre anymore.

Last year, both Sony and Microsoft released motion-controlled gaming systems to rival the Wii’s technology, which has always been considered more family friendly and easy to use.

This holiday season, Sony and Microsoft are offering the most games ever for the Move and Kinect, respectively. Microsoft will have 75 new Kinect games available for the Xbox this holiday, four times last year’s number. Sony said the PlayStation Move is expected to launch 26 titles.

In addition to being used to play games, the consoles are turning into entertainment systems for the living room.

It started with the ability to use the Internet-connected boxes to stream Netflix to TV screens. Now the consoles are turning into media hubs, playing video, music and other content that is readily available over the Internet.

Microsoft and Sony have made entertainment a particular focus between their respective online networks, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.

Microsoft will make a huge push on Dec. 6, when it rolls out a free update to Xbox Live. Users will be able to conduct a Bing search to find games, music and video across several providers. To make it even more family friendly, the Xbox Live user interface will be controlled with voice commands, rather than by the game controller.

By the end of the year, Microsoft expects that nearly 40 TV and entertainment providers — including Comcast, Netflix, Hulu, ESPN and HBO GO — will be available on its system.

All of these reasons added up could keep the pedal on the gas for what in any other segment would be considered ancient technology.

In an interview, John Koller, director of marketing for Sony’s PlayStation, argued that there’s a lot left in the current generation of consoles.

As an example, he said its predecessor, the PlayStation 2, is 12 years old, but continues to be used in homes around the U.S. as a game player and DVD player. Similarly, the PlayStation 3 substitutes as a Blu-ray player.

Overall, the PlayStation 2 ended up reaching nearly half of all U.S. households.

If that can be used as a guide, then the PlayStation 3 still has a very long way to go. In fact, the goal may be unattainable if new hardware is coming around the corner.

To date, Sony has sold 18.7 million PlayStation 3’s in the U.S. That makes up just a fraction — less than 17 percent — of the 112.6 million households, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau figures.

“We are nowhere near where we could be,” Koller admits.

Next year, the true testament will be how the hardware sells as we get closer to the release of Nintendo Wii U and consoles.

The application, called Shopycat, makes product recommendations based on the items people have liked or talked about in their news feed.

It is not particularly flashy. The logo is a picture of a cat sticking its head out of a shopping bag. The tagline reads “the right gift every time.” But the app’s rudimentary design fits nicely with the experimental nature of social commerce. Retailers are just starting to figure out ways to leverage social networks. Wal-Mart is no exception.

Wal-Mart promises that while it looks simple, the technology running behind the scenes is more complex than you might imagine.

The product was built by @WalmartLabs, which was created after Wal-Mart acquired Kosmix, a Bay Area start-up that was tracking social networks to determine people’s interests.

Venky Harinarayan, founder of Kosmix and co-founder of @WalmartLabs, said developing the application was surprisingly difficult. First, they had to find the relevant information on a person’s Facebook page. Then, they had to find products that best matched those interests.

For example, if someone likes Lady Gaga, the most obvious product to recommend is her albums. But a fan would likely already own those. A better gift is something more special — a collector’s item or a limited edition. That’s a more complex problem.

Since gifting is a practice humans naturally struggle with, maybe algorithms can do a better job.

After using Shopycat, Harinarayan learned his wife was a fan of “Game of Thrones,” the TV series on HBO. She has posted several times on Facebook about the show, but he hadn’t noticed. “Facebook is so transient and things flow by. Here’s a way to aggregate it all and put it in one place,” he said.

The technology also sometimes fails. When Harinarayan viewed gift ideas for me, it recommended a number of Sony products. Months earlier, I liked Sony’s fan page in order to gather information for a story — not because of any deep admiration I had for the company’s products. An algorithm would have a hard time knowing that.

“I think it’s a good first pass,” Harinarayan admits. “But there’s areas we should get better at. Right now, it is our goal to give one good gift idea per person. If we do that, then we are successful.”

The application is available to Wal-Mart’s 10 million fans on Facebook if they give permission to install it.

Harinarayan said Shopycat is the mega-retailer’s first foray into using social and promises that more is coming soon, including social experiences in the store and on its Web site.

HBO has put out a new trailer for the second season of the cable series, “Game of Thrones,” which is based on the fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin that are a geek favorite.

It’s clearly packed full of the medieval conniving we all know and love.

Enjoy:

Netflix will foot at least part of the bill for an unspecified number of new episodes, which will be produced by News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox studio (News Corp. also owns this Web site) and will start running in 2013. The new shows will be exclusive to Netflix streaming video subscribers, at least for its initial “window.”

That fits the content strategy CEO Reed Hastings has been laying out for a while: He wants to create an $8-a-month version of HBO, delivered over the Web, stocked with stuff you can’t get anywhere else.

That’s why Hastings has spent the last year or so cobbling together a slate of exclusive movie deals (like a recent DreamWorks pact) and TV shows (like a recent deal with CW), and that’s why he’s already committed to a deal to produce “House of Cards,” a new Kevin Spacey/David Fincher miniseries next year. At the same time, he is losing a Starz deal that gave him access to movies from Sony and Disney.

Netflix has been noodling with the notion of using digital distribution to revive dormant TV shows or extend the life of ones that are about to be canceled, for some time.

Others are contemplating the same thing: Producer Jeff Kwatinetz, for instance, is trying to get financing to film new episodes of two ABC soaps — “All My Children,” which went off the air in September; and “One Life to Live,” which goes off the air in January.

Saving old shows that couldn’t generate enough viewers to justify a broadcast network’s support, but which still have a loyal following, has particular appeal to Netflix. The company’s executives believe they can “algorithmically bring an audience to a show,” using recommendation engines, over an extended period of time.

In this case, the company is bringing back a show that’s been off the air for five years, but which still has a very vocal fan base. In October, show creator Mitchell Hurwitz said that “nine or 10″ new episodes of “Arrested Development” were in the works, which would function as a prelude to a to-be-filmed movie.

J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth reports back from a recent huddle with Netflix managers, and says he thinks they’re done writing checks for a while: “We believe the vast majority of Netflix’s domestic streaming spend for 2012 … has already been announced or committed. Accordingly, we would not expect Netflix to spend aggressively or announce major new deals until management has better visibility on U.S. subscriber growth.”

Anmuth gives himself some wiggle room in his prediction — it’s possible that CEO Reed Hastings still has some whopper deals he’s signed but hasn’t announced yet — but the winking and nudging seems to indicate that the checkbook has gone away.

Part of the Netflix pitch in recent months has been that it’s going to be spending a lot of money beefing up its streaming video catalog, in part because it won’t be spending it on a Starz deal that gave it access to Disney and Sony movies. And Hastings says that, increasingly, Netflix is going to be paying a premium for stuff you won’t be able to find anywhere else — it’s one of the reasons his content bill is jumping to $3.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year ago.

Recent Netflix deals include a new pact to stream DreamWorks Animation movies, which used to run on Time Warner’s HBO, and a deal to grab reruns from the CW, the broadcast joint venture between Turner and CBS. And the company has made one high-profile commitment to original content, via “House of Cards,” the Kevin Spacey/David Fincher miniseries that will run next year.

Are those kind of deals enough to keep Netflix subscribers happy, or to lure new ones back to the service? We may get some hints from Hastings and company in the next few weeks, as they hit the investor-conference circuit. Netflix CFO David Wells will appear at a Credit Suisse gathering on Nov. 29, and Hastings will speak at a UBS conference on Dec. 6.

Here’s the two-minute version:

And if you’ve got 10 minutes (remember, if you live in the U.S., you get a bonus hour tonight), here’s the whole interview. And here, via the New York Times, is more on his plan to stream his next concert from his own site, passing over not only pay cable but Netflix and iTunes, too.

Of all the fantastic characters on the brilliant HBO comedy series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the one I can never get enough of is JB Smoove, the innovative comic who plays Larry David’s best sidekick, Leon Black.

Here is an insidery, slightly tasteless, but decidedly funny spoof video of Smoove taking over Hollywood’s William Morris Endeavor talent agency on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday.

In it, Smoove decides to “run sh*t!“

And so he does:

You’ll forgive both groups if they’re a tad skeptical.

But if you feel like extending Reed Hastings the benefit of the doubt once more, then pay attention to the shareholder letter he published yesterday — in particular, the part where he explains the company’s content strategy.

In the end, if Hastings does deliver, this is the plan that will let him do it. And it’s a change from the company’s original content strategy, which means some folks haven’t figured it out yet.

Short version: When Netflix was a DVD company, it could afford to offer just about every movie or TV show every made. Now that it’s a streaming video company, it has to pick and choose.

So Hastings is trying to build an $8-a-month version of HBO — a network you pay for in addition to your regular TV package, not one that replaces it. And to make that work, he doesn’t have to have everything — but he has to have stuff you can’t get anywhere else.

Here’s an extended excerpt from his letter:

In television… the networks (ABC, FX, etc.) have long relied upon exclusive content to differentiate among themselves. As video moves online, so too has this practice of exclusive content. HBO has an exclusive license to recent Universal movies that includes its online HBO GO, for example. Netflix has signed exclusive licenses for DreamWorks Animation, for Relativity, and others. In episodic television, exclusives are also the norm. Netflix doesn’t license “Deadwood” from HBO because they see strategic value in keeping it exclusive. Netflix licenses “Mad Men” and “House of Cards” exclusively for much the same reason.

…We don’t have to “beat” Starz or other networks to succeed…We won’t have every movie or TV series; but we do provide enough value that consumers also want to subscribe to Netflix.

Any given consumer will have only one of DirecTV or Comcast, say, for their video service. That is classic either‐or competition. But with premium television networks like Netflix, the more good experiences there are, the more consumers are willing to spend to have multiple channels from which to get enjoyment.

Simple, right? The complicated part is the execution, of course. Hastings and his team have to figure out what their customers, and future customers, will value, and how much Hastings and his team can afford to pay for it.

And if they make the wrong calls — if it turns out that “House of Cards” isn’t interesting to anyone besides Kevin Spacey, or if the DreamWorks movies don’t satisfy people who used to watch the Pixar movies Netflix used to have — then Netflix really is toast.

But Hastings still has some 25 million subscribers, which means he still has plenty of money to keep betting — during his earnings call yesterday, he said the company’s content bill had shot up to $3.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion just a year ago. That’s not enough to pay for an unlimited supply of videos. But it should be enough to build a decent pay TV channel.

The video below gives you the gist: You can control some of this directly on your Xbox via voice control, motion control and a Windows smartphone. Again, the key point here is that you won’t get any of this stuff on your machine unless you’re already paying for it through a cable subscription.

This is incremental stuff but it’s still interesting. A source who’s played with the new service says it’s genuinely cool. Just as important, given that Microsoft has sold some 50 million compatible machines, it has (potential) leverage to do some really interesting stuff.

This is where Google TV would like to be, and it’s why Google is out pitching content guys for a relaunch this fall.

Which sounds cool!

But let’s be clear about what this is: An extension of the “TV Everywhere”/“authentication” concept that lets cable subscribers watch programming via alternate delivery systems.

And let’s be clear about what this isn’t: A tool for cable cord cutters or cord shavers.

Bloomberg laid most of this out last month in a story previewing tomorrow’s announcement. Steve Ballmer has been “promoting the Xbox 360 console as a way to switch easily between games, DVDs and pay TV” — not as a way to ditch cable. Which is why cable providers and programmers like Comcast and Verizon are working with him.

Another way to think about it: Look at the iPad and iPhone apps we’ve already seen from the likes of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and ESPN. They let subscribers watch some (though usually not all) of what they can get from their various cable packages on a different device. The Xbox deals should work the same way.

A more direct analogy: This will be an extension of deals Microsoft has already put together with the likes of ESPN, which gives some cable subscribers access to the network’s ESPN3 digital channel via their game boxes. (UPDATE: Readers note that the ESPN3-Xbox deal doesn’t require a cable subscription, but a broadband Internet subscription from particular providers. So it’s theoretically possible for an Xbox owner to get Comcast broadband — but not cable — and still get sports beamed to his TV.)

There’s always a miniscule chance that one of Microsoft’s partners will stray way outside the reservation and actually offer cable-like programming without requiring a cable subscription. One day, for instance, I could see Time Warner finally giving its HBO unit the go-ahead to start selling a la carte subscriptions to the pay service, at the same rates that it’s charging the cable guys.

The cable guys wouldn’t like it, but they didn’t like when HBO, et al, did the same with the satellite guys in the ’90s. There’s not much they can do about it.

But given that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is the chief proponent of the cable-protecting “TV Everywhere” plan, I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

More tomorrow, once Microsoft makes it all official.

Viewers said goodbye to the boys on the series finale of HBO’s “Entourage” in an unusually sentimental ender. Thank goodness, then, for the eighth-season finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” from the increasingly hysterical Larry David.

Anyone who can make comic hay with Parkinson’s disease, swastikas and little boys who like to sew, in 30 minutes, gets my vote.

To get a taste, here’s a compilation by the Vulture blog at New York magazine of some of David’s unwritten laws of society.

Enjoy:

The video rental company is reportedly finishing up a streaming rights deal with DreamWorks Animation, the studio behind “Shrek” and other animated hits. The contract would replace an existing pact with HBO.

The Hollywood Reporter thinks the deal will kick in sometime in 2012, while Bloomberg thinks it will be the beginning of 2012. In any case, this won’t be a flood of films — DreamWorks only produces a handful of movies a year.

It’s also worth noting that it doesn’t appear that HBO tried too hard to hang on to the movies, as it’s letting DreamWorks out early of a deal that wasn’t set to expire till 2014.

Still, the deal has nice a bit of symbolism, since Netflix is increasingly lining up as a direct competitor with Time Warner’s pay TV service, despite CEO Reed Hastings’ insistence that this isn’t so. And every big-name rights deal is helpful for Netflix, which is trying to convince both investors and consumers that it will have enough stuff in its digital catalog to pull off its move from DVD-by-mail company to Web streaming company.

Netflix shares are down more than seven percent from their all-time peak earlier this month, when it announced a 60 percent pay hike for customers who wanted both DVDs and Web streaming. But they’re still up by more than 50 percent since the beginning of the year. The company reports Q2 earnings this afternoon.

Unless they’re Time Warner Cable subscribers.

That company’s 14 million customers don’t get access to the digitized CNN feed, even though just about every other big pay TV provider –  AT&T, Comcast, Cox, DISH Network, Verizon — has signed on.

This isn’t the first time that Time Warner Cable subscribers have been shut out of a Time Warner TV Everywhere service. Earlier this year, Time Warner’s HBO released HBO Go, a very good iPad app, for customers of just about every big cable provider — except Time Warner Cable.

What gives? The short answer is that Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are two entirely separate companies that share a name but nothing else. The two formally split up in 2009, part of a decade-long corporate slim down on the part of Time Warner (also jettisoned: Warner Music Group, AOL, and not nearly as much of Time Inc. as many had predicted).

OK. But what really gives? Here I don’t have a good answer.

Some wags suggest that Time Warner Cable has some sort of theological/business strategy problem with TV Everywhere products that allow people to stream video outside of the home, because Time Warner Cable only sells broadband access to the living room. That is, if you’re streaming HBO Go on your iPad in an airport, using AT&T’s bandwidth, then Time Warner Cable doesn’t really get a chance to participate: It wants you to consume most of your broadband through its pipes, so it can charge you for it.

But that seems a bit of a stretch, particularly since Time Warner Cable subscribers can use some TV Everywhere products — just not the ones from Time Warner. Time Warner Cable customers can use ESPN’s excellent ESPN Watch app, for instance, and stream live sports anywhere they can tote an iPhone, no matter whose bandwidth they’re consuming.

Another theory: Time Warner and Time Warner Cable’s executives simply don’t like each other, a residue of the divorce proceedings. That also seems a bit of a stretch — in the cable business, nobody really likes each other. They just tolerate each other because they spend all their time negotiating incredibly complicated, expensive carriage deals, that ultimately let both sides make a bunch of money.

Still, if anyone can shed any light, I’m all ears: Neither Time Warner Cable nor Time Warner wanted to comment for this one.

Nonsense, says a new report: The Diffusion Group’s survey of Netflix users finds 32 percent of them planning on cutting at least part of their cable bill — either because they can’t afford it, or because they’ve got plenty of stuff to watch online. That’s up from 16 percent a year ago. (Thanks to VideoNuze for flagging).

This jibes with both common sense and other anecdotal evidence we’ve seen. Like Roku’s surveys that show that up to 40 percent of its customers have cut some or all of their cable service after buying a box from the company, presumably to watch Netflix.

And again, because it’s not necessarily about cord cutting, but cord shaving, the Diffusion Group study also fits with statistics that show cable subscriptions holding steady even as Netflix adds millions of subscribers per quarter.

Start paying Reed Hastings $8 a month and you may not be ready to rip out your cable box. But you might be willing to drop down a service tier, or say goodbye to HBO.

Some cable company executives will indeed acknowledge this, but not around people who will quote them on the record. And even when they’re chatting on background, they’re still likely to argue that their company will make it through just fine — it’s the other guys who are screwed.

Meanwhile the Netflix folks, a disciplined bunch, continue to insist that they come in peace. And they keep writing those checks that the content guys are happy to cash, even as they worry about what’s going to happen about the cable business. One day.

With only a week to go before the ninth D: All Things Digital conference debuts in California, we’re announcing the addition of Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky to an already heavy-duty line-up of speakers.

One of the five Microsoft presidents–it’s kind of like the kingdoms in HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” but without big, clangy swords–he runs the flagship Windows and Windows Live division.

More importantly, Sinofsky is the guy who overhauled Office and then led the team that bailed Microsoft out of the Vista debacle.

The longtime company veteran–who joined Microsoft in 1989 as a software design engineer–will talk about the future of Windows in the era of all kinds of new devices and the cloud.

If you want to get some insight into his thinking, Sinofsky also wrote a book about the making of Windows 7–titled “One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making”–that’s a very compelling read well beyond management wonk types.

We expect Sinofsky to be just as interesting onstage at D9 too, along with other top tech and media speakers including Google’s Eric Schmidt, Bob Iger of Disney, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen, Netflix’s Reed Hastings and more.

While there has been a report on a boxing news site that Yahoo Americas head Ross Levinsohn was leaving the Internet giant to run HBO’s sports unit, it’s not so.

Trust BoomTown on this one–I have all top Yahoo execs embedded with Apple iOS and Google Android location tracking devices.

Apparently, calling to ask about such a big move is tough one-two for BoxingScene.com, but Yahoo confirmed the non-departure and Levinsohn did too in a brief phone conversation.

“I’m not leaving,” he said.

He’s full of good will, too! No surprise: The Netflix CEO has always tried to present his company as an ally to Hollywood and the TV guys. So everything should be cool from here on out, right?

The reality is that the studios and TV networks aren’t quite sure what to do about Netflix: They’re happy to take Hastings’s checks, but they’re worried he’s using the money to disrupt their businesses.

So let’s hear Hastings make his case in his own words, via an interview I conducted with him on Tuesday. That’s a day before Bewkes made his latest comments about Netflix and other Web video services. But I don’t think Bewkes said anything that would have changed Hastings’s answers.

I used my time to focus primarily on Hastings’s approach to the TV business, but we touched on some other topics as well, including his take on competition from Amazon and Hulu.

Alas, right after I finished up with Hastings, I realized I had forgotten to ask him about Apple’s new subscription rules and what impact they would have on his Web service. I tried following up, but it was too late: Hastings, via a PR rep, declined to comment.

Here’s an edited and condensed transcript from our talk:

Peter Kafka: There’s been a lot of rumbling from Hollywood about slowing down your growth by delaying or cutting off your access to content, and Time Warner has been the most vocal about this. What happens if they follow through?

Reed Hastings: We license only a small part of our streaming content from Warners today, and we hope to be able to license more as we go. We’ll see what their perspective is on it. But we’re doing great, even though we haven’t licensed essentially any Time Warner streaming content.

But beyond streaming, they could make it much harder for you to distribute their DVDs, too. You have a distribution agreement with them now, but it will expire this year.

Discs I think we should set to the side, because we’re mostly focused on streaming. And on streaming we only license a few shows from them today. It’s a very tiny amount.

And [because they're] not licensing to us, they’re missing out on a lot of revenue, and we’re putting that revenue into their competitors. We spend a lot of money with News Corp. We spend a lot of money with Viacom. That’s a choice that they’re making.

Do you think Jeff Bewkes is more concerned about your impact on his Warner Bros., or his HBO pay channel?

I’m not sure. You’d have to ask Jeff that.

I ask because in the ongoing cord-cutting/cord-shaving/cord-nevers debate, there seems to be a growing consensus that services like Netflix are most competitive with premium TV like HBO.

We compete with HBO like baseball and football compete. We sell to the same person, we deliver some of the same emotion, but it’s not direct competition. People subscribe to both. And the people who love us often subscribe to HBO.

They don’t have any of the same content we have, and we don’t have any of the content they have. So it’s a pretty indirect competition for time and money.

How many Netflix subscribers also have HBO?

The last time we checked was a couple years ago. It was about a third.

Again, there really isn’t a direct competition. We’re creating this new market where consumers get to choose what they want, and it’s on demand, and it’s a very different experience.

In your last shareholders letter, you specifically referred to competition from Amazon and Hulu Plus. Do you think those are your two biggest threats?

What we said is that they’ve entered the market in the last year, and that we’ve continued to prosper and grow.

You’ve been focusing more energy on acquiring TV programs. And while you keep saying you’re not interested in providing TV shows the day after they air, like Hulu does, many people think that’s what you’ll do sooner or later. How do you look at TV programming?

TV content on DVD was about 20 percent of our viewing. And on streaming it’s about half. The difference between “Terminator” 1, 2 and 3, and episode 1, 2 and 3 of a TV show is not that large. We’ve always been consistent that movies and TV shows are what we do, and we haven’t changed.

We’re not focused on same day [TV shows], because what we really want to do is spend that money on prior. You can buy two or three prior season shows for the price of a same day show. You can get same day on cable, satellite, pretty easily.

What about when you have more money? Would you get into same day then? Or do you always want to be an archival business?

I wouldn’t call it archival. [Comcast CEO] Brian Roberts’s phrase was “rerun TV.” And there’s a lot of great reruns, because you might not catch everything when it’s new and fresh. At least for the next five years, we’re really focused on that rerun model on television, and the pay [TV window] model on movies. And we have our global expansion, which we’re putting a lot of money and time into.

But you are paying for the first run of “House of Cards,” and possibly other shows. That seems like you’re edging closer to premium content.

We like premium content. We just did a big deal licensing “Glee,”and a big deal licensing “Mad Men.” And “House of Cards” is similar except that it’s premiering on Netflix.

So it’s a little bolder and a little riskier than other shows, but we’re not really in the original content business. We didn’t create that content, we didn’t find the script, we didn’t put the cast together, we didn’t talk Kevin Spacey into it. And it’s a small part of what we do, as a test.

If it works, will you build out a staff to find more of this stuff, or develop it?

If there’s a market of buyers, then those shows tend to get developed. We’ll take it year by year and see what happens.

We tried an experiment a couple of years ago with Red Envelope entertainment, where we bought films out of Sundance and similar festivals. And it was very fun, but we lost $10 million, and then we stopped. So we’ll see what we find.

So you don’t see yourself producing originals in the way that HBO does?

Very unlikely, especially given my background. What we’d prefer to be is the buyer of prior season, or expired season, like an “In Treatment.” Or have all the episodes of “Dexter.” We think if we focus on prior season, we can help build audience for current season.

Speaking of expired season, I’ve heard some networks talk about extending the life of shows they were going to cancel if you’re going to pay them to keep going. Does that make sense?

Yes. For example, “Friday Night Lights” wasn’t going to get continued two seasons ago on NBC, and DirecTV did a deal to extend that show. So we can see ourselves doing something like that–extending a season of something that was doing well on Netflix.