Chart/data courtesy of Forrester Research

What has a record company ever done for me but humiliate and torment and drag me down?

– Iggy Pop, on why he decided to sell his new album himself

There are identity thieves, stalkers and people generally trying to take advantage of you.

At least that was one of the things that I took away from a privacy conference last week in Seattle, where the word “creepy” slipped into the conversation as a description of everything from location-based services to more cutting edge Internet businesses.

But advocates argued that the cure for creepy was to make services relevant and useful — not spammy and invasive. In other words, consumers are willing to share their information — age, gender, location — if there’s a benefit to them.

I moderated a panel titled “Building Trust in the Sharing Economy,” which addressed identity issues as people become more comfortable using the Internet to find babysitters, rent out their apartments or lend their car to strangers.

In those cases, honest people typically don’t mind sharing information about themselves in order to be considered a trustworthy consumer or provider. It’s a red flag if they don’t.

Sonny Singh, the VP of sales and business development at Jumio, said it’s not creepy when you show your driver’s license to Hertz when you’re renting a car or to a hotel when you’re checking in. That’s why it shouldn’t be viewed as strange when you use sharing services like Airbnb or RelayRides.

But he said, instead, “they are assuming from your Facebook profile that you are who you say you are.”

Jumio is developing technology that allows users to verify their identity by entering their credit card and driver’s license information using a webcam or camera phone.

Participants in the panel (from left to right in the picture) are: Tricia Duryee, AllThingsD; Drummond Reed, founder, Connect.me; Sam Rosen, co-founder, Scaffold; Xin Chung, CEO and founder, Trustcloud; and Singh.

Here’s a video of the whole discussion, but you can skip to around the 26-minute mark to hear the whole discussion on “creepy.”

That’s according to the latest data from the NPD Group’s retail tracking service. Sales of 3-D TVs in the U.S. grew 74 percent in units over last year, with 3-D TVs accounting for 11 percent of all flat-panel sales in the first quarter of 2012, the report says.

But despite the growth in sales, and the fact that some consumers are wowed by 3-D demos, “just 14 percent of consumers … say 3D is a ‘must have’ feature while 68 percent say it’s a ‘nice feature to have they may use in the future.’”

The obstacles to greater 3-D penetration are the usual suspects, NPD analyst Ben Arnold says. The overwhelming majority of consumers consider 3-D glasses a drawback to the technology, with glasses-free 3-D still far from being perfected; 14 percent say the lack of 3-D content is a deterrent (though that reason is weakening, as more content creators put out 3-D programs).

Cost is also a factor when it comes to newer, souped-up TVs. NPD says the average prices of 3-D TVs in April were 33 percent lower compared to April 2010, but a recent report from IHS iSuppli says that average prices of 3-D LCD TVs actually crept up a teeny bit from December 2011 to April of this year, to $2,492.

So why buy a 3-D TV if you’re not going to use it for 3-D? Well, for one thing, as noted here, “3-D” has been shifting from the main selling point in TV marketing schemes to an add-on feature that happens to be included in high-tech TV sets, so some consumers are buying 3-D-equipped TVs even if they’ve not totally bought into the tech.

And the underutilization of fancy TVs isn’t really a new thing: Turns out that 3-D engagement levels might be in line with some of the data we’ve seen surrounding “smart” TVs, or Internet-connected TVs. Despite the fact that Internet connectivity is often cited as an important factor for consumers making TV purchases, TechNewsDaily reported earlier this year that only half of all people who own Internet-ready TVs have actually gone online through their TVs.

(Image courtesy of Salminari on Flickr; thought bubble courtesy of AllThingsD)

Readers may click through your slideshow, but they’ll hate you a liiitttle bit more than they did when they got to the site. And I bet they’ll feel the same way about whatever advertiser was unlucky enough to get stuck on the page with some stupid thing that a reporter did with a little bit of hate in his heart and fingertips.

– The Atlantic magazine reporter Alexis Madrigal, in a story called “The Pernicious Myth That Slideshows Drive ‘Traffic’”

But over the last several years, the Internet has upheaved the aphorism.

It used to be that media was linear. And in that world, content and distribution were married. The HBO channel had HBO content. A New York Times subscription bought you New York Times content. And Vogue and Cosmopolitan each month delivered exclusive and proprietary content from … Vogue and Cosmopolitan.

Until the Internet came along. In every single one of the varied businesses the Internet has touched — from commerce to media to communications to payments — there has been one common impact: disaggregation.

Content and distribution have parted

In the case of the hundreds-of-years-old media business, the Internet has fundamentally separated content from distribution.

Today I can watch hundreds of South Park and Jon Stewart clips, all without a cable box — on my Apple TV, my Android phone, or YouTube on my desktop.

But wait, South Park and Jon Stewart? Content is king, you say. It’s now even more free to reign, unfettered by distribution channels!

No; because content is no longer enough. Content has always been a means to an end. And the end has always been audience.

Content isn’t the goal. Audience is.

When it comes to the business of media, there’s no question: advertisers don’t pay to reach content. They pay to reach an audience.

What’s the first item in every brief from every advertiser? It’s not Target Content, it’s Target Audience.

Media has been slow to adjust to this new dynamic. Companies have sunk billions into content management systems — using CMS as the cornerstone of their modernization — under the impression that they traffic in content.

But they don’t. They traffic in audience. And how much have they spent on audience development systems? Not much, if any at all.

Now that distribution of content to audience is no longer linear, distribution decisions are suddenly more complicated. And, at the same time, they are immensely more important — and more dynamic — to create the impact media companies are looking for: drawing an audience! Social distribution can outperform search, if you use it wisely. Day-parting your postings can boost post performance by 100 percent or more. Packaging can triple the effectiveness of content in reaching an audience.

And yet, few in media have even begun to optimize these decisions.

Who’s your Chief Audience Officer?

Distribution decisions are just as important as content decisions in building and serving an audience, and yet they are being largely ignored. Everyone has an Editor-In-Chief or a Chief Creative Officer. But how many have a Distributor-In-Chief? Or a Chief Audience Officer? A Head of Digital Programming?

The myopic focus on content over distribution is widespread, and it’s a bad business decision. It ignores a critical access of leverage, and one of competitive advantage.

The smartest media companies will do three things to take control of their digital opportunity:

• Put someone in charge of audience development.
  Give them latitude to think about the interplay between distribution and content, so that they can marry the two. Like a head of programming for a cable network, they should be tasked to realize the full potential of your digital channels. They should support the delivery of your content, and they should also provide back pressure to your content creators. Don’t merge it into your editorial jobs — that’s too precarious. Make it its own discipline.
• Adopt an audience development strategy.
  There are three basic components you have to master: insights (know your audience segments, and what each one will like); channel selection (identify the highest value distribution outlets for your brand, whether it’s search, social, YouTube, Hulu, or your own channels); and optimization (use data to create a feedback loop and tune your content, packaging, and timing to what works for your audience).
• Systematize it.
  You have sunk millions into content management systems. But how much have you spent on your most monetizable asset, your audience? You should be as systematic in audience development as you are in content creation, if not more so. Whether it’s with established processes or dedicated algorithms, make audience development a competitive advantage. Get so good at it that you truly know how to maximize every piece of content you create — and multiply your ROI. Use technology for what it does best: Systematize your advantages over your competitors.

With the rise of new distribution platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Hulu, there’s no question that the next generation of digital media is as much about distribution as it is about content. Media companies that orient their organizations to prize audience development above all (with distribution as a key component) will catch the upside of these tectonic shifts. And they will be the ones that survive and thrive in the digital age. After all, audience is the ruler of media companies’ fortunes.

This article by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is an exclusive selection from his Media Success newsletter for digital media leaders. Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

A new Pew survey of more than 2,200 U.S. adults shows that 70 percent of all cellphone owners and 86 percent of smartphone owners say they’ve used their phones in the past 30 days to access immediate information, solve a problem or get help in an emergency.

The fact that cellphones and smartphones are being used as need-it-now devices really isn’t that surprising, since they put the world’s trove of information in our pockets. What’s more interesting is how those situations are categorized — something the mobile ad industry might want to pay heed to.

The majority of those surveyed — 41 percent — say they’ve used their phones for the basic task of coordinating meetings or get-togethers.

That outweighs the number of people who say they’ve used their phones to look up a restaurant (30 percent), check sports scores (23 percent) and get transit information (20 percent).

Less than one-fifth of those surveyed said they’ve used their phone in an emergency situation in the past 30 days, which is probably a good thing.

Another interesting tidbit: Despite the fact that slightly more women than men now own smartphones, as my AllThingsD colleague Ina Fried reports, men who own mobile phones are more likely than women to look up information during an argument. Some 31 percent of men admit to doing this, compared with 22 percent of women.

Could this be because women are less likely to experience memory loss? Just saying …

(Image courtesy of Flickr/Brenderous)

The popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo on Tuesday deleted the accounts of several users, including that of Li Delin, a senior editor of the Chinese business magazine Capital Week, whose March 19 post helped fuel rumors of a coup in Beijing. The service announced the move to many of its more than 300 million user accounts, thereby turning it into a public lesson in the consequences of rumor mongering.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

They all seem pitched toward the same mythical viewer, presumably the one prized by Internet advertisers, whose mind appears to be occupied with a sticky mix of celebrity gossip, blockbuster movies, video games, zombies, action sports and news of the weird.

– Mike Hale of the New York Times, writing about new channels on YouTube

By my scorecard, the article amounts to the first public comment Apple has made on the subject, period. And it’s very interesting indeed, especially in light of all the flak the company had been taking over what appeared, to some eyes, to have been an inadequate response.

First and foremost, Apple says, it is working on software to detect and remove the malware from an infected machine. Secondly, the company says it is working with Internet service providers around the world to disable the servers that are being used as the “command and control” network that’s basically telling compromised machines what to do.

Apparently it’s this effort that has caused trouble for the security outfit Dr. Web, which originally discovered the vulnerability in the first place: In working on shutting down the C&C servers, Apple apparently got servers that Dr. Web had used to track the spread of the outbreak shut down as well, according to this report on Forbes.com.

The vulnerability that allowed the malware to get through in the first place wasn’t in Apple’s Mac OS X itself, but in Oracle’s Java. Apple agrees with me at least with regard to machines running older versions of Mac OS: Disable it.

Anyway, here’s Apple’s article, in its entirety:

About Flashback malware
Summary

A recent version of malicious software called Flashback exploits a security flaw in Java in order to install itself on Macs.

Products Affected

Java, Mac OS X 10.6, OS X Lion

A recent version of malicious software called Flashback exploits a security flaw in Java in order to install itself on Macs.

Apple released a Java update on April 3, 2012 that fixes the Java security flaw for systems running OS X v10.7 and Mac OS X v10.6. By default, your Mac automatically checks for software updates every week, but you can change that setting in Software Update preferences. You can also run Software Update at any time to manually check for the latest updates.

Apple is developing software that will detect and remove the Flashback malware.

In addition to the Java vulnerability, the Flashback malware relies on computer servers hosted by the malware authors to perform many of its critical functions. Apple is working with ISPs worldwide to disable this command and control network.

Additional Information

For Macs running Mac OS X v10.5 or earlier, you can better protect yourself from this malware by disabling Java in your web browser(s) preferences.

When I first heard about Facebook, in 2005, I thought it was really stupid. And the same with eBay 20 years earlier.

– Reed Hastings, in a talk with Wired staff at its London offices

I’m here attending the Brussels Forum, which has been described to me — I think accurately — as a D: All Things Digital conference for people who care about transatlantic cooperation. It’s put on by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a policy organization that promotes “better understanding and cooperation between North America and Europe on transatlantic and global issues.” It’s about the same size, has similarly high-impact speakers and panels — it even has red chairs on the stage for those speakers.

I’ve never been to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, but people at Brussels Forum compare it to Davos — but without the annoyance of celebrities trying to be photographed trying to look serious. “We’ve been to Davos, but we prefer this,” observed former Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, who was having breakfast with his wife at the table next to mine in the hotel restaurant.

Bennett was only one of the people I recognized here: There’s a handful of people attending from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives: Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire was on a Friday panel about Europe’s place in the world; Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida has been impressing everyone — including me — with his frank and forceful views on the humanitarian crisis in Syria. I’d quote him, but the session was off the record. More on that later.

Syria was top of mind during Friday’s main event here, an address by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark who is now the Secretary General of NATO. He made news by saying that NATO has no intention of intervening in Syria. (See the first video, below.) Meanwhile, there are a pair of Washington-based Syrian activists here (one of which you’ll see in the second video, below), basically pleading for the international community to do something, anything, to help them out just a little.

Syria is a big topic here. The newspapers are buzzing about the sanctions imposed by the EU on Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. While he’s been on a determined campaign over the last year of systematically killing pretty much anyone in his country who thinks he ought to leave power, she’s been saddled with sanctions that ban her — personally — from entering all EU member states except the U.K. (she was born there, after all). Her taste for luxury shopping and travel amid the outrageous slaughter that is taking place in that country has finally proven too much to bear for the EU.

There has also been a lot of chatter about the leaking of some 3,000 personal email messages to and from the Assad household, showing that while the Syrian president is carrying out his campaign to stay in power, he’s concerned about his inability to buy songs on iTunes, and has sought the help of a friend in Lebanon.

The Brussels Forum is not a technology conference, by any stretch of the term. People here are discussing world-changing ideas such as food security, the Iranian crisis, the Arab Spring and President Obama’s strategic “pivot to Asia.” Yet technology hangs in the backdrop of many of the discussions.

Access to technology and the ability to share information and organize has been a core feature of the many changes that have shaken the Middle East during the past year. When Egypt tried to cut itself off from the Internet, it made headlines around the world.

On that topic, I made the acquaintance last night of two people with interesting views. I made Twitter friends with Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament. She serves on the EU Parliament’s committee on Foreign Affairs, and is also a founder of its Intergroup on New Media and Technology. I hope to chat with her about her ideas on making sure that people in Iran — despite the many economic sanctions imposed on that country — still get access to tech tools they need to express themselves and organize politically. She has also been tweeting like crazy about the Brussels Forum proceedings.

My neighbor at dinner last night was Jovan Ratković, the foreign policy adviser to Serbian President Boris Tadić. Ratković was a founder of Otpor!, a Serbian resistance movement that stood against the nationalist government of Slobodan Milosevic. Had Facebook and Twitter existed during the heyday of Otpor!, they would have been excellent tools for that group. As it was, Otpor! — the word means “resistance” in Serbian — used the Internet early and often to organize and get its message out.

Otpor! led directly to the foundation of CANVAS, the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, which has had a direct influence on the protests in Egypt that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. CANVAS, I’m told, has been so influential on the various youth uprisings around the world that it is soon to be the subject of a profile on the CBS TV news program “60 Minutes.” In short, having Ratković walk me through all this made for an interesting dinner conversation, with a not-inconsequential tech theme.

So the question you’re probably have is, what the heck am I doing here in the first place? I’ve been asked to moderate a Sunday morning panel entitled “The Future of Privacy in the Digital Economy”; the panel participants are Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy for Product Engineering at Google, Erika Mann, Head of EU Policy for Facebook, and Alexander Alvaro, vice president of the European Parliament.

Like most of the other panels here — except for those held in the main ballroom — the proceedings will be conducted under “Chatham House Rule,” which is a polite way of saying the discussion will be off the record. I hope to talk about with the panelists in an on-the-record setting, as well, though probably not all together.

The subject of consumer data privacy is certainly heating up on both sides of the Atlantic. On Monday, the U.S.S Federal Trade Commission is expected to lay out a new, wide-ranging policy framework on the subject. Expect lots of references to “do-not-track” mechanisms. And earlier this year, the EU unveiled a draft of a new European Data Protection Regulation. In Europe, the view of privacy is very government-centric, and data privacy is considered a key piece of human rights law. In the U.S., there’s a lot more willingness among policymakers to let companies regulate themselves. One question I’m definitely going to ask my panelists: How do the different legal approaches change how they do business in Europe versus the U.S.? I’ll bring you what on-the-record answers I can.

So, anyway, that is what I’m doing here in Brussels.

(Image is of the Grand Place, one of the primary tourist attractions in Belgium that I hope to visit.)

The Internet is how we cut through the noise and come together. The first key to organizing is trust, and women want to know how they are powerful — the Internet is how they are powerful.

– Shelby Knox, director of women’s rights site Change.org, on a panel this Saturday called “The Digital Lives of Girls,” moderated by Chelsea Clinton

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.

Roku’s founder and chief executive officer, Anthony Wood, has said that Roku users can expect to see more cable apps from providers like Comcast, Verizon, and others working on the platform, as the Saratoga, Calif.-based company ups the number of apps running on its devices from 400 to around a thousand by the end of the year.

Currently, content from HBO GO and Epix plays on Roku boxes — provided that the user is paying for and can authenticate the apps through cable services like AT&T U-verse, Charter, Cox, RCN and Verizon FiOS.

And on the cable side, providers like Comcast and Verizon have introduced their own apps, which, as my AllThingsD colleague Peter Kafka has pointed out, allow subscribers to stream channels to their iPads while they’re in the home — and not too far away from that cable box.

You’ve probably heard a lot about cord-cutting in recent years — though the data on this trend is still somewhat contradictory. With cable companies launching streaming apps, and streaming device makers looking to cable content, both sides of the TV-content coin are acknowledging the same thing: We’re not entirely sure yet that cord-cutting is a real phenomenon, there’s evidence that consumers want both cable TV and Internet streaming options, and the industry could stand to experiment a little bit while it all shakes out.

But for Roku, which brought the first Netflix-centric device to the market and has since sold around two and a half million boxes, it also means trying to take a greater stake on the hardware side. Basically, Wood said, his idea is that users will be able to get most if not all of their cable needs through a Roku product.

Roku also recently announced a cordless “streaming stick,” which is meant to enable Internet video streaming on a non-connected television set. Despite predictions that “smart,” Internet-connected TVs are set to take off over the next couple years, Wood is taking a long-term view with the streaming stick, targeting the consumers who initially won’t be looking to buy new smart TVs. He has also said that the stick, a flash-drive-sized device that plugs into the back of a TV set, will allow for easier, regular software updates to TV apps.

“While we can’t necessarily compete with gaming consoles, we see it as less likely that a family would have an Xbox paired with every TV in the house. But they might have a Roku device with every TV in the house,” Wood said, referring to Roku’s relatively low cost structure.

Wood’s assertions arrive as the Federal Communications Commission is considering a rule change that would require consumers that patch into low-tier or basic cable channels to use some sort of cable set-top box to do so, rather than access cable wires directly (and for free). One start-up, Boxee — which makes the video-streaming Boxee Box and just threw its efforts behind a Live TV stick that’s meant to provide users with basic cable channels — has openly opposed the potential change, saying that it would harm innovation in the set-top box space.

It’s unclear if or when this ruling will come to pass, though VentureBeat reports that it could come within a few weeks.

But Roku’s strategy to bring more cable apps aboard its platform is a different tack than the one Boxee is taking, since Boxee has marketed itself explicitly as a cord-cutting tool, whereas Roku is eyeing the idea of a holistic TV-watching solution.

I’m told Nicira has just made another key hire, again from Cisco Systems. Bruce Davie, a longtime Cisco employee and a Cisco Fellow, has joined Nicira as its Chief Service Provider Architect.

Davie is pretty well known in networking circles, and is one of the co-inventors of MPLS, or multiprotocol label switching, which is a fundamental basis for the high-end business class Internet service that many carriers deliver.

Davie joined Cisco in 1995, and has been a Cisco Fellow since 1998. Since 1997, he has worked in the Internet Technologies Division at Cisco, and leads a group that represents the company before the Internet Engineering Task Force. If there’s anyone who truly understands how the Internet’s pipes really work, he’s probably among them.

Before Cisco, Davie worked at Bellcore, a.k.a. Bell Communications Research, the old research and development arm of the regional phone companies, or “Baby Bells,” that resulted from the 1982 court-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. Bellcore is still around; it eventually became Telcordia and ended up in the hands of Swedish telecom concern Ericsson, in a deal that closed earlier this month.

Davie has a B.E. from Melbourne University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Edinburgh University. He is the author of three books on networking, and lots of technical papers. He is also an active participant on both the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Research Task Force; a senior member of the IEEE; and has, in recent years, been a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Davie would appear to be the eighth person at Nicira (by my likely incomplete count) with a Cisco connection. Its CEO is Steve Mullaney, a veteran networking executive who has worked at Palo Alto Networks, ShoreTel and Cisco. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. on the technology the company plans to bring to market. Its other founders, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, are electrical engineering profs at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively. Last January, the outfit also hired Rob Enns, a veteran of Juniper Networks, as its VP of engineering.

There’s still no official word about what Nicira is doing, but all these hires are making it look ever more interesting by the day. Nicira is working on technology aimed at “virtualizing the network.” Data center networks today are too inflexible, complex and costly, especially in the age of the cloud, when everything is on-demand, flexible and cheap. Nicira’s Web site says the product is a software solution that runs on existing networks, requires no new hardware and is aimed directly at large-scale cloud data centers. Interesting, indeed.

One of LG's new Cinema 3-D Smart TVs: Glasses still required.

LG Electronics is no exception to the trend, as the company today unveiled a new line of high-resolution 3-D TVs — part of its Smart TV line — and a 3-D TV with an 84-inch screen.

But what about that glasses-free 3-D? It may come sooner than previously expected, says Seog-ho Ro, LG’s head of global strategy for home entertainment. LG already sells a not-exactly-cheap, 20-inch, glasses-free 3-D monitor and will display another small 3-D screen this week at the annual tech show in Las Vegas.

The company tells AllThingsD that it will have a 55-inch pilot version of its glasses-free 3-D display technology ready for 2013 and hopes to bring it to market by 2014. While it’s too early to know an exact price point, LG confirmed that it will be “expensive,” despite the fact that the company considers its current 3-D TV line to be cost competitive.

Toshiba, which has brought glasses-free 3-D gaming to laptops, has also confirmed that it plans to make “big” glasses-free 3-D TV screens available in the U.S. sometime early this year.

Because of technical obstacles, glasses-free 3-D TV has been relatively slow coming to large screens — it can be hard to experience the 3-D effects from viewing angles other than directly in front of the screen.

Until glasses-free, or autostereoscopic, 3-D becomes mainstream, companies are looking to convince consumers that 3-D glasses really aren’t all that bad (we’ll let consumers speak for themselves on that). LG, for instance, is pushing its new “passive” 3-D glasses that are 20 percent lighter than previous versions and can snap on the front of regular spectacles. LG says it has realized that consumers don’t want to pay for relatively expensive active-shutter 3-D glasses and that it is “getting aggressive about passive.”

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
• HP’s Former CTO: Ultrabooks Are Nothing New, webOS Still Has Life Yet
• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
• Verizon Wireless: We Want to Connect Five Devices for Every Subscriber
• Ultrabooks From HP and Lenovo That Are (Kinda, Sorta) Different
• Walt and Katie Take a Tour of CES (Video)
• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
• T-Mobile Expands Bobsled Messaging Service
• Intel Shows Just How It Plans to Get Into Phones (Video)
• Motorola CEO: We’re Going to Release Fewer Phones This Year
• Kinect Helps Keep Aging Xbox at the Top of Its Game
• More From T-Mobile CEO: On Pricing, LTE and That Ever-Elusive iPhone
• Exclusive: New Boss Acknowledges Windows Phone Still Has “Awareness Problem”
• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
• Interview: T-Mobile CEO Says No Second AT&T Deal Out There
• Grover Is at CES and I Am Missing It
• BlueStacks Bringing Android Apps to Windows 8
• Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon
• Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways
• Dynamic Dual Coverage: Ballmer’s Last Act in Vegas and the BCS Championship in 3-D
• Microsoft Phoning In Its Last CES Keynote
• Myspace — Yes, Myspace — Says It’s Going to Sell You Web TV
• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
• Nokia Unveils That LTE Windows Phone It’s Been Dying to Share
• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
• LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum
• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
• CES Notebook: The Constant Search for Power and Vegas’ Worst-kept Secret
• Belkin Bringing Mobile TV to Lots of Cellphones, Will Anyone Tune In?
• Acer Introduces “World’s Thinnest” Ultrabook and a “Me-Too” Cloud Service
• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
• CES 2012: Snooki and Bieber Are In, Gaga Is Out!
• Coming to a Smartphone Near You: Gorilla Glass 2
• RIM Hopes Next PlayBook OS Will Impress at CES
• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Microsoft Pulling Out of CES After Upcoming Show
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

For 2012, they are focusing on making TVs “smarter” by enabling them to connect to the Internet for apps and video services on the Web.

But that doesn’t mean 3-D is going away. It’s just riding shotgun with smart TVs.

Smart TV is not a new concept, of course. Up until now, it has been defined as Internet-connected television achieved through a separate box or device that connects to the TV and streams Internet content, or via a computer-like processor built directly into the TV.

On the showroom floor in Las Vegas next week, electronics makers including Samsung Electronics, Sony and LG Electronics are expected to show off more television sets that bring Internet connectivity to entertainment centers for the home. Yesterday, Google announced that LG will join the list of companies supporting Google TV; Samsung, Sony, and Vizio Inc. have also adopted Google’s Internet TV technology.

With Apple rumored to have a possible Internet-connected HDTV in the pipeline, TV makers are making all kinds of pushes to bring to market devices that offer consumers a full range of options. For many consumers, the answer for now will still be external devices that offer easy, upgradable solutions, like the Microsoft Xbox, Apple TV, Google TV and even Roku’s latest gadget.

Analysts believe that Internet-enabled TVs will begin to take a larger share of the market by default, eventually becoming a check-off item for consumers, rather than a special feature. Some 60 percent of new televisions being sold in 2012 are expected to have Internet connectivity. According to NPD’s DisplaySearch, connected-TV shipments are expected to reach 138 million globally by 2015, accounting for 47 percent of all flat-panel TVs.

So where does 3-D fit into all this?

TV makers will still be touting 3-D at CES 2012, as many smart TVs will also include 3-D capabilities. Samsung Electronics, for instance, says that more than half of its 2012 TV models will support 3-D. “Our commitment to 3-D is only deepening,” says Ethan Raisel, director of communications at Samsung.

Tim Alessi, Director of New Product Development at LG, estimates that around 20 percent of all LG TV units will support 3-D, and notes that 3-D is featured in 50 percent of the company’s lineup for this year.

But despite the fact that 3-D TV sales in 2011 showed some encouraging gains — with an estimated 21.5 million 3-D units reported to have shipped last year and sales showing significant gains from quarter to quarter — the forced exuberance over three-dimensional screens has been tempered a bit.

That’s likely because it doesn’t matter how well 3-D TV units are selling — for the consumer, anyway. “It’s not really the penetration that matters, it’s the use,” says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey. “You’d be hard pressed to find a 3-D TV owner that actually uses it in 3-D mode even once a week. That’s not a formula for building consumer momentum.”

For TV, 3-D presents a three-headed monster: To start, there are the technical and psychological obstacles of those pesky 3-D glasses — and while autostereoscopic (glasses-free) 3-D technology is being worked on in many R&D labs, industry experts all agree that quality 3-D without glasses is at least a few years away.

Secondly, 3-D presents a chicken-and-egg dilemma that doesn’t exist with smart-TV features — the question of where the viewable content will come from. Many content creators have been holding off on making 3-D programs. The Discovery Channel and ESPN made headlines two years ago when they announced 3-D channels; but in terms of sports, 3-D has been relegated to key events, due to high production costs.

An increasing number of 3-D movies are available on DVD, but moviemakers that hopped aboard the 3-D train early — think Pixar Animation Studios and DreamWorks Animation — were likely doing so to plant a flag in the ground for when 3-D finally does hit critical mass in the living room, says Scott Steinberg, head of strategic consulting firm TechSavvy.

Sony Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer even said recently, regarding the company’s 3-D TV push, that he hadn’t realized all of the challenges in getting 3-D content in place.

And the third issue affecting the uptake of 3-D has been the cost of the sets. On average, the cost of 47-inch to 50-inch 3-D TV sets is $400 more than similar HDTVs, according to a 2011 report from Retrevo. And while the entire consumer electronics industry has been hurt by a weak U.S. economy, TV sales have been hit particularly hard.

Steinberg says that for the average American household, television purchasing is about being practical right now. “It’s much more important to have the maximum-value TV with Internet capabilities and apps, than to invest in a still-unproven technology like 3-D.”

A December 2011 report from Parks & Associates on consumer purchasing intent also indicates that smart TVs are what’s grabbing the interest of consumers right now.

Even that report points out that smart TVs won’t deliver the killer blow to 3-D. As smart TVs are punched up with even more features — from apps to motion remotes to voice-command capabilities — more middle-class households looking to purchase smart TVs may buy in to 3-D, whether they’re actively looking for it or not.

Whether consumers actually want to sit in their living rooms and wear 3-D glasses to watch TV remains to be seen. For now, TV makers will still insist that they do.

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
• HP’s Former CTO: Ultrabooks Are Nothing New, webOS Still Has Life Yet
• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
• Verizon Wireless: We Want to Connect Five Devices for Every Subscriber
• Ultrabooks From HP and Lenovo That Are (Kinda, Sorta) Different
• Walt and Katie Take a Tour of CES (Video)
• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
• T-Mobile Expands Bobsled Messaging Service
• Intel Shows Just How It Plans to Get Into Phones (Video)
• Motorola CEO: We’re Going to Release Fewer Phones This Year
• Kinect Helps Keep Aging Xbox at the Top of Its Game
• More From T-Mobile CEO: On Pricing, LTE and That Ever-Elusive iPhone
• Exclusive: New Boss Acknowledges Windows Phone Still Has “Awareness Problem”
• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
• Interview: T-Mobile CEO Says No Second AT&T Deal Out There
• Grover Is at CES and I Am Missing It
• BlueStacks Bringing Android Apps to Windows 8
• Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon
• Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways
• Dynamic Dual Coverage: Ballmer’s Last Act in Vegas and the BCS Championship in 3-D
• Microsoft Phoning In Its Last CES Keynote
• Myspace — Yes, Myspace — Says It’s Going to Sell You Web TV
• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
• Nokia Unveils That LTE Windows Phone It’s Been Dying to Share
• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
• LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum
• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
• CES Notebook: The Constant Search for Power and Vegas’ Worst-kept Secret
• Belkin Bringing Mobile TV to Lots of Cellphones, Will Anyone Tune In?
• Acer Introduces “World’s Thinnest” Ultrabook and a “Me-Too” Cloud Service
• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
• CES 2012: Snooki and Bieber Are In, Gaga Is Out!
• Coming to a Smartphone Near You: Gorilla Glass 2
• RIM Hopes Next PlayBook OS Will Impress at CES
• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Microsoft Pulling Out of CES After Upcoming Show
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

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.

“We’ve built the system and had it on a shelf waiting for more legal certainty,” said Gordon Medenica, the director of the New York lottery, which is planning to start selling lottery tickets on the Internet next year. “We’re pleased for the opportunity this gives us.”

A number of statehouses and lotteries in search of new revenue have recently considered proposals to allow some form of online gambling. Washington, D.C., voted this year to allow its lottery to operate online poker, but the law hasn’t yet been implemented. Five state lotteries already offer modest Internet-based subscriptions for lottery drawings. Both Illinois and New York have drawn up more expansive plans to sell tickets online to their lottery drawings.

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What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard.

– Mark Pagel, fellow of the Royal Society and professor of evolutionary biology, in conversation with Edge.org

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry.

– From an open letter to Congress signed by 83 Internet engineers expressing their opposition to SOPA and PIPA

Separately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on corporations to do “human-rights due diligence” before making sales in new markets.

“In recent months we’ve seen cases where companies’ products and services were used as tools of oppression,” Mrs. Clinton told a conference on Internet freedom in the Netherlands.

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