Another possibility: Over time, Apple simply builds an Apple TV set right in front of us, in bits and pieces — so slowly that we don’t really notice it.

Take the remote, for instance. PatentlyApple has its hands on an Apple application for an “advanced TV remote” that would offer some cool features. Like the ability to automatically scan your other devices and figure out the right code to control them, instead of requiring users to use a combination of manuals and trial and error.

At least as important is that, while Apple’s patent, filed back in 2010, could be a standalone device, the application makes it seem much more likely that users will use their iPhones, iPods or iPads to control their TVs.

Which makes sense, because Apple is already offering a “Remote” iOS app that handles some basic functions for its existing Apple TV. That is: There’s a good chance you’re just a download away from owning a bona-fide Apple TV remote already.

This kind of incremental building may be even more important on the content side, which is the real key to an Apple TV: If it’s simply a very nice screen that offers the same content choices that TV viewers already have, then it’s just a very nice screen. And for years, Apple has been making attempts to wrangle different TV choices, at different price points, without much success.

But instead of one grand, sweeping video package, Apple may end up just cobbling together an array of offerings, piece by piece.

To wit: The latest refresh of Apple TV didn’t offer any new content, but it did make it easier for Apple users to buy the content that’s already there. Anyone with an iTunes account can subscribe to Netflix, and soon, Major League Baseball’s MLB.TV service, directly from Apple, without having to pull out a credit card again.

Netflix + iTunes + baseball games won’t make up a full suite of programming choices for most people. But now that Reed Hastings and Bob Bowman have agreed to let Tim Cook handle their billing for them, more media moguls will likely follow in their footsteps. Get enough of them in there, and you could end up with something really compelling.

First of all, Boyden said, Conduit is not in talks to be acquired. The common scenario echoed in many media reports, most of them coming out of Israel (where Conduit runs much of its operations), was that Conduit was entertaining interest from suitors–including Microsoft and Google–and could be bought for more than $1 billion.

“The company is courted by all sorts of people all the time but we are certainly not in active discussions with anyone,” Boyden said. Pressed to clarify, he added, “There are absolutely no discussions that are going on. It’s completely not true. And we haven’t had discussions that were put on hold.”

However, Conduit is indeed buying Wibiya for $45 million, Boyden said, as had been reported by TechCrunch, citing anonymous sources who said a deal could be reached soon. Update: Boyden wanted to clarify that the Wibiya acquisition agreement has not yet been signed, as of Wednesday.

Wibiya also offers toolbars for publishers to make their sites and blogs more social and interactive. It, too, is based in Israel, and has raised about $2.5 million from backers including Primera Capital.

Boyden said Conduit deserves credit for Bing’s recent growth, which follows Conduit making Bing its default search engine at the beginning of this year. Microsoft had 13.6 percent search share in February, up from 12.0 percent in December. “We were much behind that,” Boyden said.

Conduit, which is backed by Benchmark Capital, counts 260,000 app publishers–including Major League Baseball, Time Warner Cable, Univision, Coke Zero and Groupon–and 260 million users. It is expected to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in 2011.

Multiple outlets have reported on the supposed sales talks, and while the company hasn’t confirmed them it has gone on the record saying it won’t sell for less than $1 billion. (The comment came from Shaul Olmert, Conduit’s chief marketing officer who is incidentally the son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.)

Conduit makes significant money from revenue share of search ads delivered from its toolbars, which it switched to Bing from Google in January.

Sources said the San Mateo, Calif.-based company, which runs much of its operations in Israel, expects revenue of close to $300 million in 2011, so a billion-dollar sale price would not be insane.

Whether or not the talks are actually happening, and with whom, we have not yet confirmed.

Companies and brands that have built apps for the Conduit toolbars include Major League Baseball, Time Warner Cable, Univision, Coke Zero and Groupon. (Zynga used to have one as well so that FarmVille players could be alerted when they needed to return to the game to water their crops, though I could no longer find it in the directory.)

The latest numbers from various reports peg Conduit at 260,000 app publishers, 260 million users and 240 employees. Conduit has raised $9.5 million, mostly from Benchmark Capital. The company recently expanded into mobile app distribution across various devices and platforms.

“We are back in baseball,” said Peter Moore, president of EA Sports. “It’s been six years since we’ve had the licenses.”

For a while now, MLB has had a third-party exclusivity with EA’s competitor, Take-Two Interactive. While Take-Two still holds a grip on most games, MLB has turned to EA to make its Facebook game.

This may be an early indication that EA’s decision to fork out $275 million to acquire Playfish, one of the early entrants into the social-gaming space, was a step in the right direction.

Still, there are a whole lot of home runs EA must now hit.

World Series Superstars, which launched today in advance of Opening Day tomorrow, challenges players to build teams, manage clubs and compete in games against friends. The game follows three other branded sports titles: FIFA Superstars, Madden NFL Superstars and Sports PGA Golf Challenge. Like the other titles, World Series Superstars is free to play with the option of paying for virtual goods to advance the game further.

Beyond EA’s licensing deal with MLB, the roll-out of the game also hints at the increasing importance of branded games on Facebook.

To date, much of the industry has been focused on what is called original IP, which doesn’t rely on well-known names to spur adoption. Zynga, for instance, has been wildly successful with its own content, ranging from FarmVille to CityVille and Mafia Wars.

A lot of debate recently, however, has centered about whether brands will dominate as the industry matures.

It’s debatable as to whether Zynga or others have become brands themselves, much like Rovio’s Angry Birds on mobile, but EA’s approach has been to leverage the licenses it has and bring games to market on Facebook, such as Monopoly and other titles.

Before EA purchased the social game maker, Playfish had no branded titles.

“We are very focused on extending some of our key brands onto social platforms. We’ve invested a lot since the acquisition, and we are starting to see the fruits of the labors,” said C.J. Prober, Playfish’s VP of publishing and product management. “Playfish is still really new to EA and we have lots of access to great new brands. The mix of brands vs. original IP will be higher in the near term, but will even out over time.”

Prober argues brands are increasingly more important since Facebook started cracking down on how often a developer can post messages to a player’s wall to attract new users among their friend groups.

Facebook said there’s still a mix of both branded and original titles, but that it is starting to see a shift.

“We are seeing some acceleration on the growth of brands coming to the platform…We are moving from the younger, newer category of games to the branded players that have been established on other platforms,” said Katie Mitic, Facebook’s director of platform and mobile marketing.

In particular, she says branded sports games are among the most engaging and best monetizing games on the platform.

“As Facebook Platform matures, we’re seeing high quality games, such as FIFA Superstars and Madden NFL Superstars, emerge and reach a new audience of social game players who may not have typically played online games before,” she added.

For anyone, it’s a large audience to target.

Mitic said more than 200 million people play games on Facebook each month–translated into sports terms, that’s nearly twice the size of the entire audience of the last Super Bowl.

Still think Facebook can’t be a big player in Web video?

You can watch the game, a pre-season matchup between the Dodgers and the Rangers, right now, for free, via Major League Baseball’s page, for a little while longer — it’s in the bottom of the 8th as I’m publishing this. The game isn’t a nail-biter — again, it’s a pre-season game — and you can’t expand the video beyond the smallish box in the newsfeed.

If you click on the image, you’ll be directed off-site, where you can sign up for a (free) account and watch the game on a full screen. And maybe you’ll end up liking it so much you’ll end spending up to $120 for a season-long subscription to MLB.TV’s digital video package.

Which is really the point of this experiment, says Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB.com, pro baseball’s digital operation. Bowman says the free games on Facebook, which began yesterday and will run until opening day at the end of month, are merely supposed to test Facebook’s promotional power. (The folks behind Ultimate Fighting Championship have been trying the same thing, by showing some of their preliminary matches for free and trying to upsell viewers on a pay-per-view buy offsite).

It’s possible that the league will keep running a single free game a day on Facebook during the regular season, too. MLB.com has tried that in the past on mobile phones, and will be doing it on its own Website this year as well.

But Bownman says there aren’t plans to give MLB.TV subscribers full access to games via Facebook, and doesn’t plan on selling individual games on the site, either.

“What we’re trying to do is figure out who these fans are, whether they like it, and whether they share it,” he says.

So in case you were planning on panic-selling some shares tomorrow: This move doesn’t threaten any established distribution business any more than Facebook’s one-off movie rental threatens Netflix. For now.

Still, just because Bowman and company are starting with a toe-touch doesn’t mean they couldn’t take a deeper plunge later on. And live sports seems like something that lends itself quite nicely to Facebook’s platform — much more so, really, than watching movies like “The Dark Knight”.

And unlike the “The Dark Knight” experiment, there’s no e-commerce angle here for Facebook. Users don’t need to use Facebook Credits to watch the game, and if MLB.com generates some subscriptions, Facebook won’t get a lead-gen fee.

But again, it’s easy to imagine ways that Facebook could participate in this if they wanted to elbow their way in.

For now, though, the site seems content to let developers like Warner Bros, and MLB.com experiment with interesting ways to deliver video — and potentially, all sorts of entertainment — via their platform. Smart. And worth watching.

In an interesting move in the search space, Conduit–a fast-growing start-up that helps publishers make and distribute apps using Web browser toolbars–has entered a strategic partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search service.

In doing so, it is leaving its existing search deal with Google and will instead offer Bing to its network of 260,000 publishers and 200 million users.

It’s a solid win for Bing, which has more incentive to draw customers of its search products and services away from Google.

And every little bit helps as Microsoft strives to put even a chink in the overwhelming dominance of the search giant.

In a blog post today, Conduit said, in part (the rest is below):

“As of January 1st, 2011, our publishers will provide the full Bing experience to their users. Users in the Conduit Network will get all the features unique to Bing, decision tools that go beyond search, and an excellent browsing experience that is constantly evolving.”

More significantly, under the terms of the deal, Web publishers will be able to distribute apps directly in the organic search results on Bing.

Conduit President Adam Boyden said in an interview yesterday that the deal was struck to offer a better user experience for its customers with search, as well as the “long-term potential for app innovation with Microsoft.”

Conduit, which was founded in 2005 and has 190 employees, is profitable, Boyden said, from customers such as Groupon, eBay, Travelocity and Major League Baseball.

The San Mateo, Calif., company has raised close to $10 million, mostly from Benchmark Capital.

Of the shift to Bing, Boyden added, “There is more strategic potential for us with Bing,” he said. “And the same is true for them.”

Here is a blog post from Conduit today on the changeover, from founder and CEO Ronen Shilo and titled “Bing–It has a nice ring to it”:

Six years ago a small group of us founded Conduit with our own money and a vision of empowering the smaller Web publishers out there by giving them the tools to change the way they interact with their users. Many people were skeptical but we believed that we could truly make a difference.

Conduit redefined the toolbar, not as a search vehicle, but as a powerful engagement tool–the Community Toolbar. With so many publishers understanding this potential, Conduit inadvertently established a footprint for itself within the search market, comparable only to major classic search players.

Six years, 260,000 publishers, and 200 million users later, Conduit has proven to be one of the companies making a difference on the Web. Our product offering has greatly evolved and now includes apps, notifications, analytics and a marketplace. In the near future we will be creating new app distribution opportunities for our network of publishers, hastening the fulfillment of Conduit’s ambition to become an industry standard, to be used by all content publishers and available across all platforms.

Today I’d like to announce the next step in our journey–we have entered into a partnership with Microsoft which we believe will significantly improve our offering to publishers, accelerating the growth of Conduit’s massive network. Both companies are highly driven by improving the user experience, and as such, see a strong alignment in our long-term strategies and are looking forward to a mutually successful partnership.

As of January 1st, 2011, our publishers will provide the full Bing experience to their users. Users in the Conduit Network will get all the features unique to Bing, decision tools that go beyond search, and an excellent browsing experience that is constantly evolving.

I would like to thank Google for four years of partnership, which greatly contributed to the growth of the company. I would also like to express my appreciation to Bing and the Conduit team, both of whom worked hard to bring this partnership about.

If you have questions, ideas, suggestions, we want to hear from you. Write to us at: contact_us@conduit.com.

Here’s the list of publishers Apple (AAPL) says “deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad”:

CNN
Reuters
New York Times
Vimeo
Time
Major League Baseball
The White House
Virgin America
Sports Illustrated
Flickr
People
TED

Apple acknowledges that this isn’t a complete list of iPad-compatible sites–both NPR and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are overhauling their pages for the gadget–and it’s unclear whether Apple has any criteria for calling out these sites in particular. (For the record, I’m told that All Things Digital should work just fine, too).

But for whatever reason, the list appears to be particularly heavy on sites owned by Time Warner (TWX). CNN makes the cut, as do Time Inc. magazines Time, People and Sports Illustrated.

One other note: Check out the description Apple uses for each of the sites it calls out and you’ll see that “iPad-compatible” doesn’t mean “completely free of Flash.”

In many cases, Apple can’t say that all of the sites’ videos will play on the gadget. Just “most” videos, or “recently published” ones.

That’s the core of Twitter’s pitch, of course, and it has helped the microblogging service raise $155 million, a $1 billion valuation, and forge partnerships with Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). Not surprisingly, investors are looking to place money on related bets, from search engines that parse real-time data to location-based social networks with real-time updates, and even real-time photo-sharing sites.

The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet.

But that hasn’t prevented the Brooklyn, N.Y-based company from raising about $1 million, sources say, in a round led by First Round Capital and RRE Ventures. A group of smaller investors, including Betaworks, the incubator that specializes in real-time companies, and Ron Conway, the angel investor best known for his Google bet, are also backing the company.

Hot Potato is led by Justin Shaffer, an eight-year veteran of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, pro baseball’s well-regarded Web unit. Shaffer has recruited three other MLB.com employees (one of whom subsequently left to get an MBA at MIT) to join him.

Shaffer wouldn’t comment about his funding round, but was willing to discuss his start-up’s general plans. They are finishing an iPhone app and plan to submit it to Apple (AAPL) in the next few weeks, he said, and will open their doors once that’s approved.

The big idea is an interesting one. People are already using Facebook and Twitter to converse about events in real time–think about Barack Obama’s inauguration, or Balloon Boy, or last night’s Yankees-Angels game.

Shaffer’s critique of those platforms, though is that “they break at scale–there’s no good way to filter the chatter so that  you, your friends, and a group of strangers with something relevant to say can all connect. Hot Potato, he says, will offer a “curated stream” in real time of all the data coming out of the event in real time. What we’re really focused on doing is bringing together the entire audience of an event, whether they’re at the event or watching at home.”

Business model? TBD, of course. But there are a couple of obvious ways to go. For instance, Shaffer thinks people who opt-in to a particular conversation–say, about an NFL game or a U2 concert–would be okay with seeing “in-stream” ads, as long as they were relevant.

But that’s a problem that’s best tackled once the service is up and running. We’ll check back then.

The Twitter co-founder will give a speech at Webster University in St. Louis the morning of Sept. 18, then throw the opening pitch at the Cardinals-Cubs game that night.

“I’m practicing every day!” Mr. Dorsey said in an email exchange.

The school did its homework, confirming through his old tweets that he was originally from St. Louis and a fan of the local team.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Bob Bowman, CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media–pro baseball’s standalone digital media company–tells me iPhone and iPod touch users will soon be able to buy individual games. The feature will be added to the company’s existing MLB.com app and will roll out as soon as Apple (AAPL) finishes approving the update, which Bowman expects to happen within the next few days.

As far as I know, that will make baseball the first pro sports league to sell mobile access to live games on an on-demand, a la carte basis.

The current version of the MLB.com app, which sells for $9.99, gives users the ability to watch a couple of live games each day, but MLB.com selects the games. And those who own both the app and subscribe to baseball’s MLB.TV–an all-you-can eat subscription service–can stream any live game they want to their phones. iPhone and iPod touch users have bought about 250,000 downloads of the app.

Bowman, not surprisingly, says he’d prefer to sell the app-plus-Web subscription together, but says he’s offering the games a la carte as an experiment to gauge demand. The test will run through the rest of the regular season, which ends Oct. 4.

News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner, the two networks that own the rights to the baseball playoffs and World Series, have a Web blackout for the TV broadcasts of those games. (Bowman says he is working with both networks to offer a compromise to iPhone app users–a “four screen” version with live, stationary feeds of the game–so that, for instance, you may be able to see the dugout, etc. Pricing, if any, still undetermined.)

There is one other restriction to the offer, and it’s the same one that exists with the Web subscription service: You can’t watch games that are broadcast in your home market. That is, I can watch the Minnesota Twins play on an iPhone if I’m in Brooklyn, but not in Minneapolis.

Alas, you’ve got no choice but to remember that last part. It has disappeared from the Web, apparently at the behest of Major League Baseball.

Stewart dissected the media hubhub about Obama’s pitch–and in particular Fox News’s analysis of it–on his July 15 show. But if you watch the archived version of that show at Viacom’s (VIA) “Daily Show” Web site, you’ll find that the bit has been cut out of his opening monologue. It once ran for two minutes and 43 seconds, but now the archive stops short at the 55-second mark.

And if you try to watch that episode on Hulu, the Web site owned by News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney (DIS), you’ll find that it’s gone altogether, replaced by a message blaming “rights issues” (click image to enlarge):

What happened? The story, via Viacom officials, is that pro baseball officials contacted them this week and told them to take down the Obama footage, which it owns.

The argument, I’m told, is that the MLB was fine with Stewart (and every other TV show in the country) using the clip under “fair use” terms–the footage itself was a news story, and Stewart was adding value via his commentary, etc. But it balked at the notion of the footage remaining in Viacom’s archives, and circulating on the Web, forever.

None of that makes any sense, of course: There’s no reason that Stewart’s use of the clip should be okay, but only for a limited time. And if Viacom wanted to spend time fighting MLB on this, it certainly could have.

But presumably, the company figures it wants to use its legal resources elsewhere–like fighting the never-ending copyright lawsuit it filed against Google (GOOG) and YouTube. Remember that one?

In any case, I’ve reached out to MLB to make sure I’m not missing anything here. And of course, you can still find all sorts of footage of the pitch, along with other anchors making fun of it, all over the Web. Like this one:

Here’s an edited version of the beginning of the July 15 episode of the “Daily Show.” Before you click on it, note the title of the clip, and it’s original running time.

I’m told that an edited version of the show will show up on Hulu again later tonight or on Thursday.

The job: Figure out how to turn some of Hearst’s cash into a  portfolio of digital properties. Hearst owns chunks of cable networks like Lifetime, A&E and Disney’s (DIS) ESPN; produces syndicated TV programming; and runs a newspaper syndication business, but has very little exposure to the Web. Kliavkoff’s job is to change that.

At NBC, Kliavkoff’s chief claim to fame was helping the company launch Hulu, which he ran briefly before the JV brought on Jason Kilar as CEO. At his new gig at Hearst, he says he plans on both building and buying properties and that he has some M&A candidates in mind. “I do think it’s a good time to be acquiring digital media properties, because they’re well priced compared to where they were a couple years ago,” he said.

The move may cause some head-scratching among Kliavkoff’s peers since it looks like he’ll be doing the same thing he was doing at NBC, but with a smaller group of assets.

The positive spin: He’ll have more freedom to get stuff done at Hearst, both because it’s a private company with more patience than his last gig and because he’ll have more authority. While Kliavkoff gets credit for helping NBC cobble together Hulu with News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, he didn’t have as much clout there as some of his digital peers at other big media companies enjoyed. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

The deal will bring two veterans of GE’s (GE) NBC together, though neither worked for the broadcaster at the same time. Kliavkoff came to NBC after running business development at Major League Baseball’s digital operations, in 2006; Sassa worked as a top programmer at NBC from 1997 through 2003.

Sassa later took a stab at running Friendster, the granddaddy to social-network sites like MySpace and Facebook, and briefly ran Uber.com, a bloggy/Web 2.0 start-up that shuttered last year.