Here’s a proof point: Discovery Communications, parent of the Discovery Channel, has purchased Revision3, a Web video start-up that makes and distributes its own shows, like “Tekzilla” and “Epic Meal Time.”

Discovery isn’t disclosing a purchase price, but multiple sources familiar with the transaction tell me the cable guys will pay around $30 million for the start-up. The company ended up raising about $10 million during its six-year lifespan, with the last chunk coming from a group of investors that included Mark Cuban.

All of Revision3’s 50 employees are supposed to stay on, and there’s a chance that they could end up pulling down sizeable earnouts. But they probably won’t, because that’s the nature of earnouts.

TechCrunch reported the deal talks earlier this week.

This deal isn’t an “acqhire,” as Discovery intends to keep Revision3 operating out of its San Francisco headquarters. The idea is that Revision3 will continue to make its own Web shows, which generate some 100 million streams a month, and that Discovery will eventually figure out ways to sync up some of its own stuff into the mix.

“We want them to continue doing what they’re doing, and to continue developing native digital talent,” says Discovery’s digital boss JB Perrette. To date, Discovery hasn’t done a lot with Web video, and has traditionally kept most of its cable programming off the Internet. That has changed a bit recently, via library deals with Amazon and Netflix, and may ramp up a bit more in the future.

The deal comes as big Web players are trying to convince advertisers that their video stuff is just as good as TV — see Google’s big show in New York last night.

But Discovery thinks there’s still a distinction between TV and the Web — which is why it wanted to buy Revision3 in the first place.

“We produce content on a $500,000 to $750,000-an-hour scale,” Perrette says. “Producing something at a tenth of that cost means it has to be very different.”

Meanwhile, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, who used to write blog posts with titles like “Cable TV Is Screwd,” now says there’s life in the cable business, after all. “One’s not going to destroy the other,” he says. “I don’t think any new media destroys the other. I think it just creates its own path.”

The voluble entrepreneur and investor, who made his fortune off Web video during the first Internet boom, is dabbling in it again: He has put money into Revision3, the Web video studio/network best known as the home of Diggnation.

The investment was part of a small round of funding Revision3 raised last year, which it hasn’t disclosed until now.

That wouldn’t be that noteworthy, except that Cuban, again and again, has argued that ever-rising expectations for Web video were overblown, and that the technology wouldn’t displace TV. Which happens to be where Cuban is betting heavily, via his HDNet network.

A very brief summary of his argument:  Internet infrastructure can’t support TV-scale viewing; Web advertising can’t support TV-scale programming; people like TV.

And some representative blog posts where he make his case: The Great Internet Video Lie; Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid?;  The Future of TV Is…TV.

And here’s a representative counter-argument: Cable TV Is Screwd. It was written two years ago, by Cuban’s new partner, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback.

So what gives? Is Cuban finally backing down? Not at all, the billionaire says. He’s merely investing in a potential source of content for his TV network.

The dollars he’s putting into Revision3 will give him what amounts to a first look on the video site’s programming, and the chance to turn some of it into TV shows.

“I think Jim can make some money from this. I don’t throw money away,” Cuban says via email. “But this investment really confirms my position on web video. While Revision3 will make some money on the web, the real money is [in] TV. And I wanted HDNet to have the option to be that outlet.”

Louderback, for his part, seems fine with a less than total endorsement of his industry–he’s the one highlighting Cuban’s investment. “I like to think that we’re doing some pretty innovative stuff, and [the investment] gives him a broader visibility into that space”, he says.

And since Revision3 won’t say how much money Cuban invested in the company, or the total size of the round–Louderback will only say that it was “relatively immaterial” for his company–it’s impossible to gauge what any of this really means from the outside.

In related can’t-really-judge-what-this-means news: Revision3 says its revenue, which it won’t disclose, grew 80 percent last year, and that the company turned a profit in Q4 of 2010. Louderback defines profitable in this instance as “EBIDTA-profitable,” and says his company should be “solidly in the black” by the middle of this year.

Here’s a whole lot of video from a panel discussion about the future of online video that BoomTown moderated last week in San Francisco.

Held at the offices of CBS (CBS) Interactive, it was organized by Andy Plesser, the kingpin of Beet.TV, the online video news site. Plesser moderated the second half of the two-hour (!!!) session, and I did the first hour.

One tweet of the event noted: “The Beet.TV just started and @karaswisher is already terrorizing the panelists.”

I beg to differ! I was strafing the giant panel in order to tame it!

The group assembled included Gregg Colvin of News Corp. (NWS) digital unit Fox Interactive, Karin Gilford of Comcast (CMCSA), Revision3′s Jim Louderback, Anthony Soohoo of CBS Interactive, Adobe (ADBE) exec Jennifer Taylor, and many, many others.

Topics included advertising, creative, innovative business models and much more about the online video space.

Here’s the full video, as well as an interview with me about my bad video practices (yes, I look exhausted, but the panel did last forever).

And I added a third video, which is a part of the longer one, in which I asked what devices or companies the panelists thought were the most promising.

The answer, for the most part: Those from Apple (AAPL), including its iPhone, iPod and, even before launch, iPad. Not surprisingly, however, given the Flash feud, Adobe’s Taylor picked the Google (GOOG) Nexus One mobile phone.

Here are the videos:

Last month, Web video studio/distributor Revision3 said the plummeting economy had caused it to cut staff and stop making and distributing some of its shows. Today, the company has a different message it wants to get out: Things are great!

The company, which is best known as a side project of Digg masterminds Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, has put out a press release that is largely information-free. It dutifully lists the company’s accomplishments: six million show views per month, 60 ad partners, 140 million “minutes of engagement” per month, etc.

The one metric the company really should be boasting about isn’t included in the release: Revision3 will have tripled its revenues, to $3 million, by the end of 2008, a person familiar with the company tells me. Even better, ad sales ticked up significantly in the fourth quarter, even as the Web ad market began sputtering. Revision3 is on track to book more than $1 million in the last three months of 2008, I’m told.

Those results alone won’t be enough to keep Revision3 afloat: Web video remains a novelty for many advertisers, and the stuff that Revision3 makes–podcasts designed to be downloaded and watched on your PC or iPhone later on–are particularly challenging for advertisers to get their heads around.

A marketer who pays for an ad impression on Hulu, for instance, can be reasonably sure that someone actually watched it. That’s because the joint venture between GE’s NBC (GE) and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox only offers up video for on-demand streaming, and doesn’t allow you to fast-forward past ads. But if you download an episode of Diggnation, the company’s flagship show, from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes, there’s no guarantee you’ll actually see Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht endorse something called Brain Toniq.

But so far, at least, the pitch seems to be working. Here’s an example of what Revision3 advertisers are actually buying–a typical example of Diggnation, in which Rose and Albrecht sit on a couch, drink beer and talk about nerd things they like (Twitter) and things they don’t (Star Wars games).

And I only had to ask nice once after I complained in a post here that the online video show was not viral. Horrors!

Malik hosts the interview show weekly with lawyer Joyce Kim. Now you can see me talking with them about my thoughts about Dow Jones under new owner Rupert Murdoch, as well as on topics like blogging, traditional journalism and the doings at Facebook and Yahoo.

The video also includes a session before mine with Ryan Block of Engadget. Plus you get to see a rare, limited-edition Walt Mossberg “Craplets!” T-shirt.

Thanks Jim! (And also for paper-airplane-sitting Louie, while I blabbered away.)

Here’s the video:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.