It’s not a huge shock to see former start-up CEOs join big companies after the demise of their own. But this move is a bit more surprising: It means Shapiro will be working for one of the companies that helped put him out of work.

That’s because MySpace Music is a joint venture between News Corp. (NWS) and the big music labels, including Universal Music Group. And Shapiro, among others, has pointed to Universal’s copyright-infringement lawsuit against Veoh as one the primary reasons for the video site’s downfall.

But apparently, Shapiro doesn’t mind working for Universal now. In any case, he’ll be reporting to MySpace execs Courtney Holt, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, not Doug Morris. And you could argue that it makes sense for MySpace Music to have a tech guy on board who has intimate knowledge of the big music labels, warts and all.

Plus, MySpace Music needs help from wherever it can find it. The site still boasts some 30 million unique users. And as other free music sites melt away, it is one of the only places to get legal streams without paying for them. But two years after launch, it’s still a mess to navigate, and I don’t know anyone who uses it on a regular basis. Maybe Shapiro can help.

Veoh, meanwhile, never actually went away. Something called Qlipso purchased the site, which had raised some $70 million, for less than $10 million in March.

Does that sound familiar? It should: YouTube has always been at the top of comScore’s (SCOR) tallies. And since last November, Hulu’s U.S. video views have bounced around in the same zone, somewhere between 900 million and a billion views a month.

In other words, Hulu’s growth curve appears to be flattening.

Should Hulu be concerned? Not necessarily. The company–a joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, Disney’s (DIS) ABC and GE’s (GE) NBC–says it is now turning a profit, which few (if any) competitors can say. And it says it’s on a pace to double revenue in 2010 from the $100 million it generated last year.

Still, it looks as if Hulu’s most recent growth spurt came last fall, when it added ABC’s primetime shows to its lineup. Unless the company has a very big partnership announcement up its sleeve, it won’t have a new slug of inventory to show off next fall.

CEO Jason Kilar and company have plenty of other issues to deal with. Like: How to launch that subscription service at a price that makes sense, with shows that people want to pay for and that its network partners feel comfortable putting online.

So maybe this isn’t a huge priority. But a flat growth curve can’t be fun to look at, no matter how well the site is working.

Perhaps both.

The Web video site is getting ready to roll out its much discussed subscription offering of $9.95 a month, the Los Angeles Times reports. That jibes with chatter I heard earlier this week, though I’m not yet convinced this is a done deal.

But for argument’s sake, let’s say the report is correct, and the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC, Disney’s (DIS) ABC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox is about to test a premium plan. If they are doing so at $9.95 a month, it’s possible they’ve ended up with a price that will make both consumers and network TV guys unhappy.

How’s that?

$9.95 a month–$120 a year–is an awful lot to pay for free TV. Industry sources expect the initial plans for “Hulu Plus” to focus on access to a deep catalog from its broadcast TV owners. So instead of just getting the most recent five episodes of, say, “Family Guy”–those will still be available for free on regular Hulu–you’ll get an entire season or more.

If you’re really, really into a couple shows that run on ABC, NBC or Fox, then perhaps a Hulu subscription makes more sense than buying the shows on DVD or downloading them from iTunes.

But if you’re really into “Mad Men” on AMC or “Justified” on FX (which is great), or anything else on cable, Hulu Plus may not do much for you. And at the same time…

$9.95 a month doesn’t go that far once Hulu pays the bills. TV executives expect that Hulu will need to hand over something like $1 to $1.50 per subscriber to each of its network owners. Because that’s the same price the broadcast networks are trying to extract from cable TV operators in “retransmission” fights (see: ABC vs. Cablevision). And that money is worth a whole lot more to them than Hulu subscriptions. Which means the TV guys can’t undercut themselves on the Web.

So Hulu will need to pay out something like $3 to $5.50 off the top for every $10 it brings in. And then it has to shoulder the streaming costs, billing costs, customer service costs, etc.–figure a couple bucks a month more for that stuff. That gets you something like a 30 percent gross margin, which is nothing to brag about.

And what happens if Hulu wants to expand the service and add shows from other providers? It will either have to cut into its thin margin to pay for the programming or raise its rate above $10 a month. Which is already a lot to pay for free TV.

There are a few things Hulu and its owners can do to make Hulu Plus more attractive. Offer the service on more platforms, for one, like Apple’s iPad. And tinker with “windows,” so that Hulu subscribers get to see stuff before the freeloaders.

But moving windows is a good way to confuse/piss off most users, who don’t have any interest in digital/analog TV economics and just want to watch shows.

Also, access to Hulu on the iPad seems a bit less valuable given that Disney’s ABC, one of Hulu’s owners, is already giving away free access to its shows via a very popular app. Industry sources says Hulu CEO Jason Kilar tried desperately to get ABC not to introduce its free app for this very reason.

But while Disney is a minority owner in Hulu, Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs is the largest individual shareholder in Disney. If you want to connect the dots on that one, you’ll be doing the same thing everyone else in TV Land is doing.

Andrus (pictured here) joins a pair of directors from each of Rhapsody’s large shareholders: Bob Kimball and Mike Lunsford from RealNetworks (RNWK) and Wade Davis and Van Toffler from Viacom (VIA).

Andrus–who mostly worked at MySpace under the tenure of co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe and President and co-founder Tom Anderson–left the troubled social networking site last year.

He had been doing some consulting for Rhapsody and had considered working there too. After deciding against it, since he lives in the Los Angeles area, he said he was asked to join the board.

“I liked what I saw,” said Andrus in an interview with BoomTown. “Rhapsody is really ready to blossom and poised for some real growth.”

The Seattle-based Rhapsody spun off from RealNetworks earlier this month and has plunged into efforts to expand its offerings and become profitable.

These include a price cut for its subscription to $9.99 from $15 and aggressive mobile efforts, such as a Wi-Fi app for Google (GOOG) Android smartphones.

RealNetworks owned 51 percent of the Rhapsody, and Viacom’s MTV Networks the remainder. Restructuring gave both companies a 47.5 percent share. The rest is
allocated to the employee pool and outside investors, including Universal Music Group.

Jon Irwin is president.

For a new company, Rhapsody is one of the oldest in the music space, founded in 2001 by Listen.com.

Listen.com was bought by RealNetworks in 2003, and Rhapsody became its flagship brand as a music service offering.

But Rhapsody quickly lost ground to savvier competitors like Apple (AAPL) and its innovative iTunes service.

Rhapsody, along with Best Buy’s (BBY) Napster, has sold music via monthly subscription, as opposed to Apple’s (AAPL) a la carte download offering.

But Rhapsody has not been able to gain much traction, despite years of effort.

RealNetworks and Viacom’s MTV created a joint venture in 2007 to try to goose it, which did not work either, before the recent formation of the privately held independent company.

Currently, hotter services, such as Spotify, are getting more attention, but Andrus said Rhapsody can compete.

“The company has been through the storm and is ready to win,” he said.

The service, formerly a joint venture between RealNetworks (RNWK) and Viacom’s (VIA) MTV, has two new investors. Real and Viacom each own about 47.5 percent of the company, and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group now owns a minority stake–something less than five percent. An undisclosed investor owns something much smaller than that.

Rhapsody’s managers will tell you that their new corporate structure gives them a better shot at turning around the music service, which has lost money for years and has recently been losing subscribers as well–it’s now down to 675,000. They predict they’ll generate $130 million in revenue this year and turn profitable by the end of 2010.

But consumers won’t care about any of that. The core question about them: Is there any amount of money they’re willing to pay for a monthly music subscription that lets them listen to whatever they want wherever they are?

Rhapsody’s price cut brings it in line with the $10-per-month offering Thumbplay announced earlier this year. If you want to spend less, both Best Buy’s (BBY) Napster and MOG offer $5 monthly subscriptions, but neither supports mobile phones (yet), so they’re only good for people who do most of their listening within earshot of their PCs.

Meanwhile Spotify, the music industry’s great European hope, has yet to make it to the U.S. despite many months of promises and negotiations. And lots of folks insist/believe/hope that Apple (AAPL) will eventually offer some sort of subscription service, or at least some kind of portable option that involves the cloud.

In the meantime, the overwhelming majority of people who do pay for music online do it in $1 increments. Apple is still selling some two billion songs a year via iTunes.

[Image credit: flattop341]

The joint-venture video site–owned by News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC, Disney’s (DIS) ABC and Providence Equity Partners–hasn’t uttered a peep about its finances until this week. But now Hulu wants the world to know it is making a profit and that ad sales are booming.

Hulu says it generated “over” $100 million in revenue last year and turned a profit in the last quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. The company says it will pass the $100 million figure by the middle of this year.

That revenue total is a gross number, so you can subtract more than half the amount from the top. That’s because Hulu gives anywhere from 50 percent to 70 percent of all ad sales to its content partners, who supply its programming. And bear in mind that the company is footing the bill for at least a billion video streams a month.

But I double-checked with the company, and when it says “profitable,” it means “profitable,” as in net income after all expenses, taxes, depreciation, etc.

So even if the number isn’t huge, a profit is well worth bragging about, because I can’t think of another Web video company that has claimed one so far. And that includes Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, for the time being.

What put Hulu over the hump? Getting CEO Jason Kilar to say anything of interest about his company is pretty much a futile exercise, but I tried anyway, and got this response: “We’re a distribution business. And a lot of that is a function of how you manage your business, and getting scale, and we’ve been very fortunate to achieve both.”

And that’s about as candid as Kilar gets in public.

The downside for Kilar is that his network owners are still not entirely comfortable with the company’s model, and are worried that all the free programming Hulu offers cuts into existing businesses. Hence, the push for a subscription plan, which, as I reported in February, will include an app for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad. More on that later.

So the bookseller has nabbed a magazine guy to run it. Barnes & Noble (BKS) has hired Jonathan Shar, a 15-year veteran of Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. to lead what it is calling its “Digital Newsstand and Emerging Content, Barnes & Noble.com” unit.

Bad name, good idea. Shar has handled print duties–he ran consumer marketing for Sports Illustrated–and digital for Time Inc. Most recently, he was GM for CNNMoney.com, the publisher’s joint venture with Turner.

The characters change, but the script is always the same. A programmer wants more money from a cable provider and threatens to pull its shows. See: Viacom (VIA) versus Time Warner Cable (TWC), News Corp. (NWS) versus Time Warner Cable, Cablevision versus Scripps Networks (SNI), Etc. Etc.

Spoiler Alert! The conclusion is always the same too: Both sides compromise, and cable subscribers get to watch their shows–in exchange for paying ever-increasing fees.

My interest here is whether either side wants to use the Web as a weapon in the fight given that the Internet is an increasingly plausible alternative for TV watchers who don’t want to pay for cable. Last year, for instance, Time Warner Cable showed its customers how to get Fox shows–and everything else–onto their TVs via the Internet (you can still see those instructions here).

The problem, of course, is that by highlighting the Web option, both sides run the risk of undermining their market power in the long run. If couch potatoes really do get used to the idea of consuming their shows using their PCs, it makes it easier for them to tell both programmers and the cable guys to pound sand.

For now, though, both sides are leaving the Web alone while they rattle their swords.

Disney (DIS) reminds Cablevision’s three million New York-area viewers that they’ll still be able to get ABC shows via an old-fashioned TV antenna. But the network doesn’t mention ABC.com or Hulu, its joint venture with Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC. And Cablevision (CVC), at least so far, hasn’t brought up the Web either.

Both sides are clearly betting this gets resolved before Sunday night when ABC is set to broadcast the Oscars–not coincidentally, one of the only programs you really have to watch live.

Here’s Disney’s opening salvo:

[Image credit: Alexindigo]

The merger of France Telecom’s Orange and Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile will create the largest mobile phone operator in the U.K. with about a 34 percent share of the market, just ahead of current market leader O2, which claims about 28 percent. It will also reduce the number of carriers in the country, which critics argue will reduce competition and raise prices.

Orange and T-Mobile disagree, of course, and claim the deal will give subscribers better coverage and improved customer service. We’ll see, I guess.

Oh, no word yet on the combined company’s name.

Digital Window Limited, a joint venture between Axel Springer AG and PubliGroupe, bought the U.K.-based unit. AOL (AOL) didn’t disclose a price, but it’s almost certainly much less than the $150 million Armstrong’s predecessors paid for the company back when parent company Time Warner (TWX) was funding an M&A binge.

To refresh your memory, that buying spree included the likes of Bebo, Quigo, Third Screen Media, AdTech, and Tacoda. And almost all of these purchases have been written down and/or disbanded.

A lot of that happened in the pre-Armstrong era, but the former Google (GOOG) executive is still busy remaking AOL to his own specifications. These include remaking the company’s sales team, as well as selling off other properties–“reviewing the list of AOL assets as they relate to the core strategy,” in AOL PR-speak–to raise cash and/or focus energy.

We’re still waiting to hear who walks off with ICQ, the instant-messaging service the company has owned for more than a decade.

But even while AOL is slimming down, it is looking to add bits and pieces when it can. It won’t spend a lot for them–AOL execs have told the M&A community that it won’t be plunking down more than the $36.5 million it spent on video platform StudioNow earlier this year.

But Cablevision says it will let subscribers pull this trick off without extra cables or boxes and promises they’ll love it. The Long Island-based cable company will be testing the technology later this spring, under a clunky but accurate moniker: “PC to TV Media Relay.”

That means you can move anything you can put on your monitor or laptop screen–from streaming video to photos to word processing documents, if you are so inclined–to your TV. Audio, too.

Of course, that’s the idea behind plenty of services and gadgets, from Boxee to Internet-connected TVs to Apple’s (AAPL) not very successful Apple TV box.

And, of course, you can already do this without any of that stuff, and it’s not that hard to pull off. Time Warner Cable (TWC) even showed its customers how during its fight with News Corp. (NWS) over subscription fees for Fox and other channels.*

But the do-it-yourself version still requires at least a couple steps: Figuring out what kind of cord you need to connect your computer to your TV and then, actually connecting it. From a consumer’s perspective, Cablevision’s solution is more elegant, since it’s cable-free; the company says you’ll only need to download one piece of software.

But it’s quite a bit of work on Cablevision’s end, since the company has to port your stuff from your PC through its network and back down to your TV through a set-top box to a channel reserved just for your stuff.

Why go to all this trouble?

If you sort of squint at this for a while, it sort of looks like Cablevision’s version of the “TV Everywhere” idea that Time Warner (TWX) and cable players like Comcast (CMCSA) have been pushing. But in reverse.

TV Everywhere’s offer is that if you pay for cable, you can watch your TV shows on your PC. Cablevision lets you watch your PC on your plasma. But both ideas end up at the same place: They’re meant to give cable subscribers another reason to keep subscribing to cable.

Cablevision (CVC) says the service will launch by June in a “technical trial,” which likely means just a fraction of its three million New York-area subscribers will get to try it. And they’ll have to be Windows users; the cable company says a Mac version will be introduced later.

One thing Cablevision wouldn’t tell me is what it expects to hear from Hulu, the Web video joint venture owned by Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney’s (DIS) ABC.

Hulu’s attitude about people watching the TV programming it delivers via the Web on a TV screen has ranged from disapproving to downright hostile–just ask Boxee.

That’s partly because Hulu’s TV owners want to enforce the idea that Hulu is a complement to TV, not a replacement for TV. And it’s also because Hulu’s owners see Hulu on a big screen as a feature worth paying for.

In any case, Hulu will have a hard time complaining openly about Cablevision’s plan. Because unlike Boxee’s solution, Cablevision is literally just moving what’s on your PC to your TV.

But there may still be some interesting emails flying back and forth from Long Island to Santa Monica in the next few days.

*Now that its Fox fight is resolved, Time Warner Cable has yanked its cord-cutting instructions. But I have thoughtfully archived them for you. You’re welcome!

Rhapsody, along with Best Buy’s (BBY) Napster, sell music via monthly subscription, as opposed to Apple’s (AAPL) a la carte download offering. But neither service has been able to gain much traction, despite years of effort.

Real Networks (RNWK) currently owns 51 percent of the Rhapsody, which it started, and Viacom’s (VIA) MTV the remainder. Restructuring will give both companies a 49 percent share, and “one or more minority stockholders” will own the rest.

There are a few other details, spelled out in the SEC filing below (for instance, Real needs to pony up some cash, and MTV gets released from some of the marketing agreements it signed on for a couple years ago). But the takeaway is this: Both companies get to move the money-losing music service off their books, and the new structure may theoretically give them a better chance of finding a buyer for the thing.

Last month Real’s founder, Rob Glaser, announced he was stepping down from the company’s CEO spot. But this reorg has been in the works for a bit: Real alerted shareholders to a possible move back in November.

Here’s the relevant text from the SEC filing:

On February 9, 2010, RealNetworks, Inc. (“Real” or “RealNetworks”), RealNetworks Digital Music of California, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Real, MTV Networks, a division of Viacom International Inc. (“MTVN”), DMS Holdco, a wholly owned subsidiary of Viacom International Inc., and Rhapsody America LLC, a Delaware limited liability company (“Rhapsody”) and joint venture formed by Real and MTVN (together with the other parties listed above, the “Parties”), entered into a Transaction, Contribution and Purchase
Agreement (the “Transaction Agreement”), which contemplates a restructuring of Rhapsody. Real and MTVN formed Rhapsody in August 2007 to jointly own and operate a business-to-consumer digital audio music service. Real currently owns 51% of the equity of Rhapsody and Viacom owns the remaining 49%.

At the closing of the transactions contemplated by the Transaction Agreement, Rhapsody will be converted from a limited liability company to a corporation, and the Parties expect that Real and MTVN and one or more minority stockholders will hold the outstanding shares of Rhapsody such that Real and MTVN will own slightly less than 50%, but an equal amount, of such outstanding shares. Real will contribute $18 million in cash, the Rhapsody brand and certain other assets in exchange for shares of convertible preferred stock of Rhapsody, carrying a $10 million preference upon certain liquidation events. A portion of Real’s cash contribution is to repurchase the international radio business that was previously contributed to Rhapsody. MTVN will contribute a $33 million advertising commitment in exchange for shares of common stock of Rhapsody, and MTVN’s previous obligation to provide advertising of approximately $111 million as of December 31, 2009 will be cancelled. In addition, both the Stockholder Agreement, dated as of August 20, 2007, between Real and Viacom International Inc., on behalf of MTVN, and the Limited Liability Company Agreement, dated as of August 20, 2007, among the Parties will be terminated, including the put and call rights held by Real and MTVN and MTVN’s rights to receive a preferred return in connection with the exercise of Real’s put right.

Real expects that the transactions contemplated by the Transaction Agreement will be completed late in the first quarter of 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. At the closing, the Parties will enter into a Stockholder Agreement that contains provisions regarding the governance of Rhapsody, stock transfer restrictions and approval of certain corporate transactions. Rhapsody will
be initially governed by a Board of Directors with two directors appointed by each of Real and MTVN and one independent director appointed by mutual agreement of Real and MTVN. At the closing of the transactions, the Parties will also amend certain existing agreements, including the expansion of the technology and intellectual property licenses from Real to Rhapsody relating to the core technologies for the Rhapsody audio digital music service to provide worldwide, perpetual licenses and certain rights for use of the core technologies in business-to-business audio music services.

Upon the completion of the transactions contemplated by the Transaction Agreement, Real expects that it will no longer consolidate Rhapsody’s financial results with Real’s consolidated financial statements.

What gives? It’s sort of simple: The band would prefer that you watch the video via Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, but EMI won’t let Web users like me embed the YouTube version of the clip.

The band explains why this is so here, but it’s a story we’ve heard before–in a nutshell, it’s harder to sell ads against embedded videos.

That’s supposedly going to get better with Vevo, the “Hulu for music videos” joint venture that EMI is licensing its stuff to, so perhaps this kind of thing won’t be necessary in the future.

(That said, the band’s account is well worth reading, as it is a clear and even-handed assessment of the music industry’s attempt to wrestle with Web-era economics. Excerpt: “We’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.”)

Meanwhile, the Vimeo situation is a bit confusing: EMI is suing the site because it encourages users to upload “lip dubs”–what you and I would call “music videos”–that use copyrighted songs without authorization. In this case, OK Go is the entity uploading the songs/videos, so I suppose that makes the legal situation more palatable (note the big copyright notice at the end). But I’m still not sure how or why the licensing/advertising issues that put the kibosh on the YouTube video don’t come into play here.

In any event, here’s the song, followed by a YouTube version of the one that made the band sorta famous:

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

It has fixed its tech problems and is doing just fine, thank you very much. Vevo says it is generating around 20 million video views a day, which puts it on track to generate some 600 million views a month.

Some context: ComScore (SCOR) says that Hulu itself generates some 900,000 video views in the U.S, making it the second biggest video site after YouTube. And Viacom (VIA), the current No. 3, generates 500,000 views.

If you want to compare apples to apples, though, you have to cut Vevo’s 600 million down to 300 million since about half its views come from outside the U.S. Still, that’s enough to qualify Vevo for eighth place in comScore’s rankings, placing it above AOL (AOL) and CBS (CBS).

And when comScore’s December video numbers are released at the end of this month, Vevo’s numbers will come in below 300 million since it didn’t launch until Dec. 9 and because comScore’s numbers are usually lower than any site’s internal numbers.

Still, that’s a lot of eyeballs, and it’s more than the joint venture between Sony (SNE), Vivendi’s Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media Company expected. But the fact that Vevo began with a huge audience, rocky start and all, shouldn’t be a surprise.

In fact, I said so last month. No need to type it twice:

While everyone has rightly been flocking to Vevo.com itself for a look-see, it’s not the most important Web site for the joint venture. That would be YouTube, where most Vevo users are actually going to encounter–and watch–Vevo videos, without even knowing that they’re watching a Vevo video.

To be clear: When Google’s (GOOG) video site agreed to help Universal Music Group (and later Sony) launch a new hub for music videos, it didn’t mean it would be sending its users away from YouTube.

When you read about Vevo launching with 400 million video views in the first month, understand that the majority of those aren’t coming from the new site but from YouTubers who are watching music clips the same way they always do, on YouTube. But Vevo will get credit for those eyeballs and any ad dollars they generate.

That is: If you’re watching a Ke$ha video on YouTube, there’s a good chance you’re watching a Vevo video.

So. Next question. Can Vevo turn all those views into dollars?

We’ll see. CEO Rio Caraeff tells me his sales group continues to bring in high-profile advertisers–the latest, last week, was Procter & Gamble (PG)–and has been able to get between $25 and $30 for every 1,000 impressions. That’s a whole lot better than videos traditionally earned on YouTube, and as good as some TV shows.

But it’s relatively easy to announce that you’re selling your initial batch of inventory at a high rate. It’s much harder to sustain that over time. So it’s hard to read too much into those numbers just yet.

In the meantime, the site is going to get much bigger in the near future.

For one thing, it should start showing videos from EMI Music Group within a few weeks, which means that it will have clips from three of the four big music labels. Warner Music Group (WMG), the lone holdout, has its own deal with YouTube.

And in March, Vevo should start syndicating its clips to other big properties, starting with CBS and AOL, meaning it will have plenty more eyeballs to sell. The challenge will be proving that the JV’s thesis–music videos alone are attractive to advertisers–is worth the effort.

Meanwhile, here’s a primer on Ke$ha, whom I didn’t know about until the other day. She is apparently big with the kids these days.

Gawker’s Doree Shafrir explains this to the rest of us. And if you don’t like words, here’s the clip:

Here’s another e-reader clamoring for attention in a Consumer Electronics Show full of e-readers: The Skiff Reader, produced by a company funded by publisher Hearst Corp. and supported by Sprint.

I’d go into detail about the device that Skiff is producing, but the company isn’t providing many crucial details.

Skiff won’t tell us when the Skiff Reader will go on sale, for instance, or how much it will cost. Or which “major consumer electronics company” is actually manufacturing it. And while Skiff is happy to show the device off to the press, it won’t let us photograph it.

So trust me on this when I tell you that the Skiff Reader appears to look and work a lot like Amazon’s Kindle DX. At least from the brief glimpse I got.

But in many ways, the Skiff Reader’s specs are beside the point, because the real point of its parent company isn’t to produce e-reader devices at all.

Skiff will indeed sell a gadget, whose price will likely vary depending on how many publications consumers agree to subscribe to. And Sprint (S) will provide users with a built-in wireless connection to download periodicals.

But the driving idea behind the company is to create a platform for producing, distributing and selling magazines and newspapers on a variety of devices.

In theory, at least, the publications Hearst distributes and sells should work on any gadget, whether it’s a smartphone like Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, one of the many tablets coming on the market, or even a rival e-reader like Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle. And Hearst doesn’t want to sell just its magazines and newspapers, but those of any publisher.

Does this sound familiar? It should because this is also the supposed goal of the “Hulu for magazines” consortium that Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. created last year. And Hearst is a member of that joint venture.

So either Hearst’s company is going to compete with the platform the JV is supposed to create or Skiff will become part of the JV. Ask the various publishers in the group what they think will become of Skiff and you’ll get confusing responses, all of which sound like a muttered version of “I don’t know.”

That said, it seems likely that someone–perhaps the consortium, or perhaps a consortium member like News Corp. (NWS), which also owns this Web site–will end up buying at least a piece of Skiff.

At a minimum, Hearst officials are fairly candid about being interested in finding someone else to invest in the company; I’ve been told the publisher has plowed some $35 million into it to date.

I asked Skiff president Gilbert Fuchsberg about that prospect, and he politely demurred, as he did when I asked him about other Skiff specifics. But he was polite and good-natured about it, as you can see in this video: