The Web giant submitted a bid for the video site this morning, according to a person familiar with process. Other people looking to buy all or a piece of Hulu include:

• Directv,
• Time Warner Cable
• William Morris Endeavor, along with with PE backer Silverlake
• KKR
• Guggenheim Digital
• The Chernin Group

As AllThingsD reported earlier this month, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and COO Henrique De Castro have met with Hulu’s team recently for a get-to-know-you; Yahoo had previously tried to buy a large stake in French video site DailyMotion, but that bid was stymied by the French government.

Yahoo declined to comment.

The question, as it always is with Hulu, is what its owners — News Corp., Disney and Comcast — are actually willing to sell, and at what price. The three media conglomerates provide the site’s most valuable programming, primarily via shows that have already aired on their broadcast networks. Disney and News Corp. have been at odds about the best way to manage the site for some time; Comcast gave up its management rights as a concession to Federal regulators a few years ago. (News Corp. also owns this website.)

In 2011, Hulu’s owners put the company up for sale and were looking for a bid of at least $2 billion; in exchange, they would offer content licenses that would run for two to three years. But they ended up pulling the site back off the sales block after a few months.

Last month, former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin submitted a starting bid of $500 million, with the understanding that he would be willing to pay more for extended licenses. Bloomberg first reported on the KKR and William Morris Endeavor/Silverlake bids today.

Hulu hasn’t had a formal M&A process, but had asked prospective bidders to make an offer by Wednesday. That deadline apparently isn’t a firm one, so it’s worth wondering if the field will grow more crowded before this over.

The network TV guys are really, really good at making the stuff they’re going to cancel in a few months look great right now. But the presentations still drag on, so all of the networks attempt to use a bit of comedy to liven things up during the event.

In the past, NBC has brought on its late-night talent to do live comedy bits, but we didn’t get that today. Instead, it used Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno in a pre-taped video, which references both “Les Miserables” and a video the two men had made a couple months ago, when the network was handing the “The Tonight Show” from Leno to Fallon.

Weirdly, the old video doesn’t seem to be online anymore. And I can’t show you today’s video, because NBC doesn’t usually show the public the stuff it shows to advertisers. Which is a bummer.*

But I do have audio!

It’s not great, because it comes via an iPhone that was parked way back in Radio City’s cheap seats. But if you’re a fan of Fallon, or Leno, or maybe just “Les Mis,” then, well … here you go:

* The one that would be really great to see again would be Alec Baldwin’s awesomely profane Jack Donaghy performance from 2010.

So how about Hulu Plus, the subscription service that runs ads in the middle of its TV reruns? Turns out it is doing just fine: Hulu says its paid service now has four million subscribers paying $8 a month.

That’s not nearly as much Netflix, which boast some 30 million subscribers for its ad-free service (also $8 a month). But that seems awfully respectable to me, considering that Hulu Plus has been around (in one form or another) for less than three years.

Maybe even impressive, since much of what Hulu Plus offers are TV shows you can see for free on broadcast TV, or even on “regular” Hulu.com. The main selling point for Hulu Plus, I think, is that you can watch the service on a variety of screens, including phones, tablets and your actual TV, via devices like Apple TV.

The announcement comes as Hulu puts on a show for advertisers in New York, part of the week-long “newfront” presentations the big video websites are hosting. (Yesterday: Yahoo! Tomorrow: YouTube!)

While Hulu is still best known as the place to watch last night’s TV (or in some cases, last week’s TV), it is interested in promoting the stuff it has that you can’t see on TV.

Like Netflix and Amazon, it is investing in its own original programming; unlike Netflix and Amazon, its efforts have gotten much less attention, a fact that steams Hulu’s management team. So if you want to help them out, go ahead and look at the preview reel for “The Awesomes,” an “animated show for adults,” co-created by Seth Meyers of “Saturday Night Live”; it seems to be the new show Hulu is most excited about.

The good news for Andy Forsell, Hulu’s acting CEO, is that advertisers are already receptive to Hulu’s pitches, both for the reruns it airs and the new stuff it is showing. It looks like TV and Hulu is selling it like TV, and many ad guys like that a lot, especially compared to Google’s more … Googley approach with YouTube.

The bad news for Forsell is that he’s acting CEO, because Hulu’s corporate future is completely unsettled. It’s entirely possible, and probably likely, that the site, currently owned by News Corp.,* Disney and Comcast, will have a different ownership structure by the end of the year, and may have a different agenda, as well.

I’m guessing that doesn’t come up during this morning’s presentation. What I don’t know is whether that matters to advertisers or viewers.

*News Corp. also owns this website.

But here’s the guy to ask: Bill Carr, who heads up Amazon’s digital music and digital video groups, which now include Amazon Studios, the unit that is going to make original movies and TV shows for the e-commerce giant.

Carr doesn’t talk much, but last week I got the chance to sit down with him at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Amazon is as tight-lipped as Apple when it comes to new product discussions — or lots of other stuff you and I would like hear about — so I didn’t even bother asking him about Amazon’s new TV box. (Still: Count on it.)

But if you read between the lines, you should at least be able to get a sense of what Amazon is thinking as it contemplates beefing up its music offerings, and as it goes head to head with Netflix (and everyone else) in digital video. Here’s an edited version of our chat:

Peter Kafka: A couple years ago, Amazon and Google and Apple were all racing to develop music-locker services. But we don’t hear much about them anymore. How is Amazon’s locker working?

Bill Carr: The fundamental things about cloud music storage that works for all consumers is that it backs up everything, it’s in a safe place. I can access it from all of my devices, it’s simple. I don’t have to think about it. People don’t want to manage their music, they want to enjoy their music. Every consumer likes that.

What may have more limited appeal is how many consumers want to pay $25 a year to do that for all of their music.

Are you surprised about the take-up rates for the $25 a year option?

No. I don’t find that surprising.

The locker services seem like part of a larger trend where big platform companies like you, Apple, Google, are trying to get people to move their media into your own clouds, and end up committing to one ecosystem or another.

It may be that other companies think about it that way, because their goal is that you only use their devices. But that’s not our goal. Our goal is to free you up to use whatever device you want. Which is why we support any kind of PC, any kind of Mac, iOS devices, Android.

Our goal is to be ubiquitous on any device people might want to use. It’s a big investment for us to make all those apps avilable. But our goal is not to lock you into any one ecosystem.

Do you think you can keep doing that? It seems like we’re moving back toward a walled-garden world.

I can’t speak to other people, and what decisions they may make that may prohibit us from enabling our app. But we’ll work very hard on behalf of our customers to make sure our app is available on the devices they use.

You first started selling MP3s in 2007, and for a while it seemed like you weren’t making any headway against iTunes, which dominates the business. But now, at least according to NPD, you have 22 percent of the download market. What changed?

We don’t release any details about where we stand. But what I can say is that we have seen customer growth in our service every year. We have year-over-year growth in sales and in customers. And the way we’ve accomplished that is by building more solutions for customers.

Is your locker service helping sell more music? Are Kindle Fires helping you sell more music?

There’s no doubt that with the trend toward connected devices, mobile devices, our customers are realizing that it is super convenient to buy once and play it anywhere, and make it available on any of their devices. That’s working, and driving more sales.

Now it seems like there’s a move away from music sales and toward access — either from subscription services like Spotify, or free Internet radio like Pandora. You guys don’t offer anything like either one of those, but there are reports you are considering them. Should we expect an Amazon version?

We don’t speculate on what we might do in the future. But we’re also listening to our customers about other ways they’d like to enjoy their music. We’ll always look for the next innovation.

But you’re not philosophically opposed to subscription or ad-supported music?

Not at all. As a company, if we constrained ourselves to certain definitions, then we wouldn’t have gone nearly as far for our customers.

What about the idea of bundling music into Amazon Prime, like you do with video? Right now, there’s no connection between Amazon Prime and music.

We’re always thinking about distinctive experiences — how can we provide something for our customers that’s going to solve important problems for them? We’re always thinking about those things.

When it comes to video and Prime, it seems like your approach to your subscription service has changed. From the outside, it looked like, initially, you simply wanted to build up a catalog, and you weren’t very picky. More recently, it looks like you’re focusing on specific titles and catalogs.

The part I would disagree with is that we’ve never been thoughtful, or cared about the content. We have reams of data, based on years of being in both the transaction video business and the DVD/Blu-ray business, to know what our customers want to watch. And we’ve used that information to help bring them the right videos.

I think what has changed is — yeah, obviously, we have been increasing our investment over the last two years that we’ve been in this business. And I think it’s fair to say that increasingly you’ll see more and more content on Amazon that’s exclusive.

Why does exclusivity matter?

I think it’s very important for our customers. In some cases, it’s the only way to get some of the best shows. If we want those shows, in many cases the way that business shakes out is you can either have it exclusively, or not have it. More importantly, we are looking at what our customers like, and we want to have a set of movies and TV shows that are only on Amazon.

Why does that matter?

For the same reason that you can only see “30 Rock” on NBC, or “House of Cards” on Netflix, or “Girls” on HBO. It gives users a reason to tune in and try our service.

Are people watching many videos via Prime? Again, from the outside, it seems like there’s not a lot of use. There was a Sandvine study that showed Amazon very far behind Netflix last fall, and people I talk to who sell you programming don’t think you have a a lot of viewers.

We don’t disclose the details. But I would say we’ve seen strong triple-digit growth in terms of rate of use. We’re very pleased.

In the investor letter he published last week, Reed Hastings set up Netflix as a direct competitor with HBO. Do you also think Amazon is competing with them?

HBO’s a wonderful company, and has been a great partner to us. Our customers love HBO programming. I can’t speak to Reed’s strategy. But we’re building … I don’t think there is a another service like ours. It’s not like HBO. There’s at least three, four different ways to get movies and TV shows that you want on Amazon.

Hastings said he’s competing with HBO for customers’ time and money, but also now for content. Are you seeing that conflict coming with Amazon?

My ambition is to make sure that we create something that is its own service, that is not like HBO, Netflix or any other service, with its own unique value proposition. A lot of companies have a competitor focus. We have a customer focus.

Like Netflix, you are producing your own original programming. Earlier this month, you put up 14 TV pilots and asked people to vote on them. Why are you getting into originals, and why are you doing it that way?

The primary reason is because we’re committed to the idea of reinvention, and that we think that there’s great value for our customers if we get this right. And the reinvention is, “How do we get a lot more feedback from our customers early in the process? How do we remove gatekeepers from the process, so that great ideas can come from anywhere in the world, and get made into movies and TV shows? And how do we create a collaborative environment, where different creators can work in an open environment, to produce more exciting ideas and exciting stories that customers want to hear?”

So you think there’s video out there that could be made, and should be made, but isn’t, because of the way the existing production process works?

A simple example of that is what we’ve done in books, where we’ve created an open platform for any author to submit their books, through Kindle Direct Publishing. That removes gatekeepers from the process, and opens up all kinds of possibilities for people to become authors. So, why can’t there be great possibilities for people who have great stories to tell, whether it’s a script or screenplay?

It’s a journey for us. We’re flexible on the tactics of how we get there, but firm on the strategy.

If you look at the pilots you put out this month, it seems you’ve used a fairly traditional approach, and are working with lots of established talent. Only one of the 14 pilots — “Those Who Can’t” — came in over the transom. And even in that case, those guys were fairly established. Will that change?

Just the fact that that show came in from an online submission — I would consider that to be remarkable. That possiblity doesn’t exist in the traditional system today. And the idea that we’ve put all 14 pilots out for free, for anyone to watch, with the explicit ask for customers to give us feedback — I think both of those things are remarkable.

Are you surprised by any of the feedback you’re getting on the shows so far?

The point isn’t what I think about it. I didn’t spend a lot of time forming my opinions about it. I have shows that I prefer, but my views don’t represent the views of all of my customers. It really isn’t what I think about the shows, it’s what my customers think.

Do you think the comments you’re getting on the shows will be useful?

I think we’re getting really insightful information on all of the shows. How accurate it is is something we’ll discover over time. Because there has to be a feedback loop, and you have to see what happens in the real world.

This is a multiyear process. If you’re focused on reinvention, it requires you to experiment and collect data. And then try new experiments.

She has a very specific agenda in mind. Along with filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, she’s pushing for immigration reform, and to promote “The Dream is Now,” a documentary about “Dreamers” — young immigrants who live in America and would like to become citizens but can’t.

But Jobs and Guggenheim aren’t relying on TV alone — the documentary itself will run on MSNBC this weekend — to get their message out. At 10 pm ET, when “Rock Center” airs, they plan on releasing a flood of Tweets and Facebook posts promoting their movie, and calling for immigration reform.

To do that, they’re using Thunderclap, a startup designed solely to promote mass social media messaging. It works by getting Twitter and Facebook users to essentially hand over control of their feeds in order to broadcast a single message, at a given time, for a specific campaign.

So far, the “Dream” campaign has signed up more than 700 people to push out its message tonight; Thunderclap says they have a collective “social reach” of 1.2 million people.

Does that sound relatively simple, technically speaking? It is, says Dave Cascino, who launched the company a year ago. But while there are other social media tools that allow people to orchestrate similar mass messaging, as part of a broader set of tools, Thunderclap looks like it’s the only company that focuses solely on the idea.

So far, that seems to be working. Cascino said Thunderclap has been used nearly 2,000 times in the last year. Earlier this week, the White House used the tool to promote gun control legislation. For-profit companies are using it too, like when People Magazine wanted to let people know that Channing Tatum was the Sexiest Man Alive in 2012. (Sorry, Mike Isaac.)

Right now Thunderclap is free, but Cascino said the company plans on rolling out a premium version soon with advanced tools. Thunderclap is owned by De-De, a “product development studio” funded by ad agency Droga5.

So it’s advertising on the Web’s most popular music service: Starting tonight, Spotify is running a one-day “takeover” ad on YouTube’s homepage, which you should be able to see now.

The spot, as Spotify folks describe it, sounds pretty clever: The idea is that fans are supposed to “follow” the band Phoenix for a day, via an 18-minute documentary that will roll out in pieces, in what’s supposed to mimic real time.

That is — if you click on the videos early Tuesday morning, you’ll only see a few minutes of clips, but you’ll see more in the afternoon, and the whole thing by the end of the day. The “follow” idea is also supposed to remind you that Spotify has introduced a Twitter-like discovery metaphor/feature, so you can see what your friends, or famous people, are listening to.

The bigger picture is that Spotify, which has grown quickly in the last few years, needs to get much bigger to satisfy investor and management ambitions. Lots of digitally savvy people still don’t understand what the service is, or how it differs from rivals like Pandora or iTunes; plenty of normals simply haven’t heard about it, period.

Hence Spotify’s first real TV ad campaign, which launched last month with big-budget buys on broadcast TV shows. The YouTube homepage isn’t cheap, either — it reportedly costs $400,000 a day.

But what about the fact that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has long argued that YouTube, which offers an unlimited supply of music, for free, is his biggest competition? And that one day, perhaps this year, Spotify may be competing with YouTube when it comes to a paid subscription service?

Isn’t this a little like Fox taking out an ad for “American Idol” on NBC’s “The Voice”?

Sort of! But not really, says Spotify marketing boss Erin Clift: ”We are running an integrated marketing campaign, and when you think about where you get the most reach … YouTube is certainly right up there with television.”

Pres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com

Is News Corp. really going to yank Fox off the airwaves in response to Aereo?

Snap consensus judgement from the various corners of the TV Industrial Complex: No way. At least, not anytime soon.

People I’ve talked to who work in TVland think that News Corp. COO Chase Carey’s comments are just that — comments, not a plan.

It’s possible that over time, if broadcasters do think that Aereo or Aereo-like technology really threatens the fees they get from pay TV operators for their over-the-air programming, they’ll move more of it to cable networks. And, in fact, programmers have already started moving lots of high-profile sporting events from free TV to pay TV.

Near-term, however, people seem to think that both practical and legal restrictions — for instance, deals that Fox and CBS have with the NFL for football broadcast rights — would prevent this from happening. More important: There isn’t any reason to do so right now, since only a handful of people are actually using Aereo to get broadcast TV for free.

All that said, Wall Street seems to like the idea.

Earlier this year, Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger gamed out a scenario where all four broadcasters moved from over-the-air to pay networks, and concluded that it wouldn’t be a terrible idea, at least financially. By Juenger’s thinking, the lost “retransmission fees” and advertising dollars the broadcasters would lose from over-the-air programming would be replaced by even higher “affiliate fees” and advertising dollars they could get on cable.

And Juenger thinks that move might benefit pay TV distributors, too: “There is enough logic here to suggest it wouldn’t be completely crazy for a cable operator to make a pre-emptive offer to broadcast networks in a given market to convert to a cable model.”

In any case, for whatever reason, TV investors are cheering Carey on. Look what happened to shares at Fox owner News Corp. (which also owns this website), ABC owner Disney and CBS this afternoon after 1:30 pm ET, when Carey made his remarks at an industry conference:

The outlier here is NBC owner Comcast, whose shares also moved up after Carey’s remarks, then down again. Perhaps some investors are less comfortable with what this means for America’s biggest pay TV operator.

(Image courtesy of Pres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com)

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

1.) ESPN’s Cunning Plan to Stream March Madness: Head to Bill Simmons’s House

2.) Foursquare’s Yelp Problem

3.) BlackBerry CEO Says iPhone Is Passé

4.) Seven Questions for the Man Shaking Up HP’s Operations, John Hinshaw

5.) Samsung Galaxy S4: Bigger Display and Bolder Software — But Is It Better Enough?

6.) Hey, Remember How Awesome the iPhone Is?

7.) Looking East to Predict the Next Billion-Dollar Mobile Company

8.) Jerry Yang Is Back (And Investing More Than Ever)

9.) Global Platform Head Carroll Departs Yahoo for Go Daddy, While Yahoo News Head Leaves for NBC

10.) Mossberg on Apple’s Rivalry With Samsung and Why the iPhone Is Like Switzerland

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

As I noted in a piece last week about the departure of Yahoo Mail head Vivek Sharma for a new job at Disney, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is likely to see a lot more execs unhappy with the new regime of CEO Marissa Mayer take off after annual bonuses start being handed out in March.

Today, it’s James Carroll, SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo.

In the job, the former Microsoft exec has been in charge of the company’s global R&D centers in China, India and the Middle East and been “responsible for Yahoo’s content, social and membership platforms and the international delivery of all Yahoo! products and services worldwide.” That has included all its efforts at internationalization, international infrastructure development and localization.

Sources said he is leaving to head international at Go Daddy, one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. Go Daddy is led by former Yahoo product head Blake Irving, who had hired Carroll at Yahoo in 2010.

And, as NBC announced earlier today, editor in chief of Yahoo News, Hillary Frey, has taken a job there as editorial director of news at NBCNews.com, which is undergoing a major refurbishment. She had been at Yahoo since late 2011.

Many more to come, I am told, as execs either decide to depart or Mayer continues to clean house. It’s still unclear who will be taking over these key jobs at Yahoo.

One thing for sure: I don’t expect a comment from Yahoo PR on the changes.

Image copyright Suzanne Tucker

I make this assertion because if we look closely, we can already see what will cause the decline of Silicon Valley. In fact, the valley’s residents are consciously planting the seeds of the valley’s own demise. What’s more, I believe many of them will celebrate when the valley is no longer on top.

My cheery assessment depends on this sleight of words: Decline is relative, and the decline that Silicon Valley faces will be less like watching Hewlett-Packard slip into irrelevance and more like proudly standing to one side as the rest of the world — eventually even the less-developed world — catches up to it. Thus, the “decline” I claim the valley seeks and will eventually succumb to is a most desirable decline, indeed.

Digital disruption — a force that Silicon Valley gestated and nursed from its earliest days — is now global. Digital devices, the networks that connect them, and the software tools that prod human beings to hanker for more of all these things will soon be everywhere. The long-term effect of rising digital disruption will be to redistribute the benefits of the future across the planet even as it continues to improve the already futuristic valley that started it all. What does Silicon Valley have today that other places will eventually enjoy as well? Access to three things the valley currently has in spades:

• Knowledge. With ubiquitous sensors in every device we own or location we frequent, we will soon collect in a single day far more information than we could have stored in all the hard disks manufactured prior to 2000. But that information is meaningless if we can’t render it into knowledge, which granted the smart people of Silicon Valley an early edge that they are now giving away for free. Analytics available to even the lowest YouTube channel producer now rival the most sophisticated reports CBS, NBC and ABC had available in the 1980s. Apply even better analytical engines to the data from Fitbit pedometers, Google Glass and the myriad of sensors that will listen to the stress in our voices or identify behaviors that undermine our health, and you’ve got an unprecedented depth and breadth of knowledge available soon to anyone, anywhere.
• Tools. Knowing something is nice, but being able to act on that knowledge is even better. Digital disruption depends on the distribution of tools — most of them free or nearly free — that equip anyone who wants to use knowledge to initiate and test a new concept. Kickstarter and its peers provide this opportunity for thousands of people who want to test their ideas; Amazon can make anyone a merchant partner, an affiliate, or an author, all for no cost; and the Square card reader just helped local merchants sell $800,000 worth of goods and services around the Super Bowl on game day in New Orleans.
• Capital. It’s not that there’s money going around. But thanks to the knowledge and digital tools available to you, you need a whole lot less of it to bring your idea to fruition. I recently spoke to Charles Teague, CEO of FitNow, the company behind the wildly successful LoseIt! calorie- and weight-tracking app. A veteran of the startup business from the earliest days at Allaire, Charles described for me with a slight tone of disbelief in his own words how cheaply he can launch and manage a company today compared to even ten years ago. This is partly because the tools are cheaper — you can open your Amazon Web Services account with a credit card — but also because much of the value digital disruptors deliver today comes through software. And as a successful entrepreneur who had sold his company to Qualcomm told me last year, “It’s just software; I can do anything in software for $40,000.”

People fond of wine and cheese will argue that there’s more to valley life than just these three things. That’s certainly true, but when you have more knowledge, tools and capital, some of the other things the valley prizes become common elsewhere as well. A culture of achievement, for example. As only people who have lived in a subculture that keeps them down know, the valley is a unique place where even surfers think they can be the next startup billionaires, leading to the creation of a company like GoPro.

It’s presumptuous of me to suggest that all valley residents will be so happy to be dethroned, even if the decline is only relative to the rise of the rest of the world. Venture capitalists, lawyers and politicians will feel the relative decline the most because their services have long been offered under the presumption that the value they provide is scarce, an assumption that’s now patently false. Other valley residents will be pleased, at least if Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist at Cloudera, is any indication. As he told me in an interview for my new book, “Digital Disruption,” “I don’t subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of the world. I’d much rather create fertile soil for other innovators to plant their seeds in than just water my own tree. “

He actually talks like that. And that’s what makes him and many others like him the planters of the same seeds that will sow the relative decline of Silicon Valley by lifting everybody else up to join it. Even — perhaps especially — Detroit, home of over 250 Kickstarter projects.

James McQuivey is the author of “Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation.” He is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption.

“We will take action on Facebook when we observe malicious behavior on domains and sub-domains that are being shared; however, we don’t comment on specific sites,” a Facebook spokesperson told AllThingsD.

The news comes on the heels of a string of highly publicized hacking attacks on popular websites and companies, including Facebook, Apple and Twitter. All three of the aforementioned sites suffered instances of malware attacks.

NBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While there was certainly a lot of squirming in the broadcast booth, there was plenty of chatter on social networks, even though technically speaking, most people gave the Web the night off.

Anyway, if you didn’t see it last night, here’s the sketch, courtesy Hulu.

And maybe a handful of you will want to do that, for some odd reason. CBS, which is streaming the game, figures the rest of us won’t.

“Our firm belief is that when it comes to the Super Bowl, most people are going to choose the best available screen,” says CBS Interactive head Jim Lanzone.

But Lanzone and his advertisers, who are spending something like $12 million on digital ads today, do want to get some of your attention focused on the network’s site during the game.

NBC made the first foray into Super Bowl streaming last year, with mixed results. A bunch of people checked out the network’s Webcast, but many came away underwhelmed.

If you wanted to spend “second screen” time during the game, chances are you did it the way you always spend second screen time: On Facebook and/or Twitter, both of which logged a record number of comments during last year’s game.

This year, the CBS game plan sounds much better, at least on paper. The network has several features ready that seem like they’ll reward viewers who are ready to split their attention among multiple screens.

For instance, there’s an “all 22” camera angle, which will give football junkies a rare look at the entire field of play — something that’s usually reserved for the likes of NFL coaches.

There’s also what CBS is internally calling its “subservient chicken camera angle,” where a roving cameraman will take cues from viewers, and head to whatever part of the field he’s told to go. And CBS’ player will have the equivalent of a DVR that lets you rewatch a play you just missed.

You like watching the Super Bowl ads? Sure, they’ve got that, too. In many cases the ones that appear on the live stream won’t be the same as the ones on broadcast — CBS has sold the streaming ads separately from broadcast, at prices Lanzone says are higher than the network’s standard Web video pricing.

But CBS says you’ll also be able to watch the broadcast ads on its site, immediately after each one airs.

*Want to watch it on your phone? To do it legally, you’ll need to be a Verizon customer, download an app and shell out $5, because the carrier has exclusive mobile rights. But isn’t an iPad or Nexus 10 mobile, too? Well, yes. But mobile sports rights only make sense to lawyers and biz dev people.

New Super Bowl cliche: You don’t have to wait for the Super Bowl to see the Super Bowl ads — just check YouTube!

Neither one of those are completely truthful, of course. For instance, the most talked-about ad of last year’s game was Chrysler’s, which featured a pre-Obama-chair Clint Eastwood. And that one didn’t run early on the Web.

Still, it’s easier than ever to watch a lot of Super Bowl ads without watching the game, and to watch them before the game airs. Last year’s good example: Honda’s Ferris Bueller mom-wagon ad, which “accidentally leaked” onto YouTube. And increasingly we’re seeing brands simply putting out their in-game ads without any pretense at all.

Here, via Ad Age, is one of the GoDaddy spots the registrar will show off during the game. Of course, as Nat Ives points out, the ad is also an ad for other GoDaddy SuperBowl ads, so it works both ways. Ditto for a Coke teaser campaign.

Note that if you’re one of those weird people who wants to watch the Super Bowl on a browser instead of a TV, and you’re one of the people who wants to see the ads (smallish Venn overlap there, methinks), you’ll be in luck this year. CBS, which is streaming the game on the Web, says that it will also stream the broadcast ads on the Web — something that NBC didn’t do when it streamed last year’s game.

Longtime digital exec Jeff Berman is joining Hollywood production company BermanBraun as its first president.

Berman — who is no relation to BermanBraun co-founder Gail Berman — comes to the firm from the National Football League where he has been in charge of its Web, mobile, social and non-console gaming efforts. While there, he worked on several new initiatives, such as its multi-party video chat for Fantasy Football.

Several years before that, he was a top exec at social networking site Myspace, finally ending up as president of sales and marketing, where he was in charge of branded advertising, sales operations, entertainment, content and marketing. Efforts there by Berman included the now defunct Web-only series “Quarterlife,” which also had a very short life on a major network.

The Yale Law School grad was also on the board of Buddy Media, which was sold to Salesforce.com last year.

He’s an interesting person, then, for BermanBraun, which focuses on content across multiple screens, including big branded Web sites such as Wonderwall for Microsoft’s MSN and also more traditional entertainment shows. Its juicy-looking television series “Deception,” for example, is set to appear on NBC this week. It now has about 130 employees, mostly working at its Santa Monica, Calif., HQ.

“We needed an exceptional leader to manage the company,” said BermanBraun co-founder Lloyd Braun, who was once a top media exec at Yahoo. “And Jeff is someone who has skillsets in a whole bunch of areas and an emotional intelligence that is as important to what we do.”

Braun said Berman would initially focus on his area of expertise — digital — but that he would become more involved in the television and movie arenas over time.

BermanBraun — which considered raising funding last year — is at an interesting juncture in its development, trying to form a new kind of independent Hollywood media company that straddles analog and digital.

Berman said he was attracted to the opportunity there.

“I had a great job, since there is nothing bigger than the NFL,” he said in an interview yesterday. “But Lloyd and Gail have an incredible vision across platforms for entertainment.”

He added that content was just at the beginning of development online, but was finally poised to explode with the popularity of tablets, smartphones, interactive TV and other such devices, as well as social and e-commerce tools.

“The mind reels, there is so much that has happened and can happen,” said Berman. “I don’t know if there is a better time to be at such a place to create these new franchises — [BermanBraun] is a laboratory, where stuff is actually working.”

Image copyright Vicki France

In spite of a soft economy, with about 14.5 million unemployed Americans and 8.2 million under-employed, people are still holding onto paid television, and actually consuming more video than ever before. Netflix has crossed over 30 million subscribers in the U.S., Hulu is approaching three million, but only 2.65 million people in the country “cut the cord” from traditional paid TV service. In fact, Americans are still spending about 33 hours a week watching traditional TV (that’s 4.5 hours a day!), compared to 27 minutes a week of streaming video. So where is this TV revolution the pundits have been blogging about??

Maybe we need to stop thinking of cable TV the way we think of phone service. It’s easy for technologists to predict that streaming video will do to cable companies what Skype did to the telcos, but I propose a new lens to filter TV technologies: an App that replaces broadcast television is like saying Yelp should replace Taco Bell.

My contention is that a “TV revolution,” as some are calling it, is not in the cards. Instead, I see a “transformation” of TV taking place, and while transformations are far less sexy to blog about than revolutions, I think this one could be pretty fun and pretty lucrative for tech companies that get it right. First, let’s clarify “transformation” versus “revolution,” in the context of Web services and Internet Apps:

• Revolutionary apps fundamentally overthrow an analog provider with a digital alternative. Examples: Skype is a substitute for your landline. iTunes is a substitute for Virgin Megastore. LinkedIn is a substitute for schmoozing. Match.com is a substitute for my pushy (but well-intentioned) auntie in India.
• Transformative Apps make analog providers a more pleasing or user-friendly experience. Examples: Fandango makes going to movies easy and predictable. Foodspotting makes finding the perfect entree a delightful experience. Mint makes banking more manageable and transparent. Driving from San Francisco to a cabin in Tahoe is a breeze thanks to Google Maps. None of these technologies replace the desired outcome, but they greatly enhance the experience to achieve it.

All evidence and viewership data suggests that YouTube, Hulu or Netflix isn’t a substitute for the experience of gathering around a big-screen to watch the Super Bowl or the latest episode of American Idol. Apps that make the offline experience of watching traditional television better, more fun and more social will be far more successful than those that try to overthrow TV. The Twitter app on my phone, for example, is the perfect TV companion and primary beneficiary of this phenomenon.

There is no question that on-demand, instant access to great shows on the iPad or laptop is one of the coolest things ever, but this is proving to be additive and incremental to traditional TV viewership at the moment. Most consumers still love the experience of watching TV on the TV.

In 2012, the Olympics provided the perfect case study for the transformation that’s taking place. Between the live streams on NBC.com, real-time access to event scoring and the medal count, we have never had this much access to the Olympics in history. Nearly every major event was available online, and usage was tremendous. But what pundits failed to point out this past summer is that we did not give up big screen, traditional television. NBC’s primetime broadcast, which was all taped coverage, averaged 31.1 million viewers per night, which was up 12 percent from the Beijing Olympics in 2008! According to NBC, many people who watched events, streaming live to a Web browser, also watched them again on television.

We have 70 years of consumer behavior patterns established and burned into the American psyche. And on top of that, television is big business. It exists on $65 billion of advertising spending and $60 billion of subscription revenue, and that’s 125 billion reasons why the industry will resist this revolution. In stark contrast to my friends in Silicon Valley who have said that they want to “destroy television,” I strongly believe that television should be transformed. And those of us inspired by the opportunity to innovate in the TV industry should be thinking about the opportunity in a transformational way if we hope to succeed.

Ashwin Navin is the CEO and co-founder of Flingo, the largest publisher of Smart TV software including apps from FOX, A+E Networks, Showtime, the WB, Transworld and TMZ.

None of that is surprising, and if you’re trying to figure out what that means for Hulu, you’re asking the wrong question.

The real issue for the site is what its corporate owners — Comcast, Disney and News Corp., which also owns this website — want to do with it. We’ll get to follow that story for quite some time.

In the meantime, we can take a minute and give Kilar credit for building and maintaining an influential, important and valuable site many people pronounced dead as soon as it was born.

As Kilar himself notes, Hulu’s unofficial launch name was ClownCo, because any sensible person knew that there was no way Big Media companies could form a worthwhile joint venture, and zero chance they’d be able to create a decent video site. That’s the kind of thing that you left to the smart tech guys at places like Myspace, Veoh and Metacafe.

Surprise! Those guys are gone, and Kilar and his team ended up building a really great website, and then kept it up and running for 5 years, while generating real money by the end of his run. Meanwhile, the site’s value doubled, to $2 billion.

Kilar’s detractors — and he had many, both at the big media companies that owned Hulu and outside of them — argued that anyone who was given access to programming from ABC, Fox and NBC could turn that into a real business, and that he gave himself too much credit for doing so.

But even today, Hulu stands apart from the rest of the pack when it comes to design and experience, and that was most definitely the case back in the old days. If you can’t remember what NBC’s video offerings looked like in 2007, you’re lucky.

And while Kilar also gets knocked about for not playing well with some of his corporate owners, the fact that he kept the thing together this long shows that he was able to accomplish a very difficult juggling act.

Hulu in 2013 isn’t nearly as exciting as Hulu was in 2007, but you can’t blame Kilar for that. The site’s original corporate boosters are long gone, and in their place are people who aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about its chances, and can’t decide what they want to do with it regardless. You can’t blame Kilar for looking around, cashing out his stake and moving on.

I talked with Kilar about a lot of this stuff a year ago, at our first D: Dive into Media Conference (more on next month’s edition here), and you can see our entire conversation below.

Note that my first question to him was about his long-expected departure; not surprisingly, he didn’t really want to answer that then. So I asked him again, near the end of the interview. His response: “I’m not the kind of guy that dabbles in a lot of things; I tend to go deep. And I’m a big believer in the long term. … It’s highly amusing to read all the stuff that gets written, but all I’d ask … is judge me on my history.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130104/let-jason-kilar-take-a-bow/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121226/hulus-employee-owners-are-just-employees-again-which-means-some-may-be-ex-employees-soon/ http://allthingsd.com/20121226/hulus-employee-owners-are-just-employees-again-which-means-some-may-be-ex-employees-soon/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:00:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=280581

Hulu’s employees used to be owners, too. But those days are over, so they’re going to have to be happy with a paycheck and some bonuses.

That’s the upshot of a new long-term incentive plan I’m told the video site is prepping. It’s meant to replace the equity stakes Hulu’s employees cashed out earlier this fall. And it should be going into effect soon.

The move is small but symbolic: Hulu used to be a start-up, and the people who worked there had the potential for a big payout if things went really, really well. But investor Providence Equity Partners sold its stake in the site in October, and that let Hulu employees sell too. The company’s value doubled, to $2 billion, in five years, so many of them did do well. But not sit-on-a-beach-and-count-your-money well.

Now, it’s purely a Big Media asset — Hulu is co-owned by Comcast, Disney and News Corp. (which also owns this Web site) — and the employees who stick around will be Big Media employees.

So who’s going to stick around? As always, there is plenty of chatter about CEO Jason Kilar’s next move, but that chatter has been going on for years, and he’s still there.

That said, if someone does present Kilar with a great opportunity — say, the chance to run a start-up that’s already up and running, but that has the potential to get really, really, big — he can now head out without reservation. He has taken the company much further than many expected and has also gotten his team paid.

Some of Kilar’s senior team could head out the door regardless. Both Andy Forssell, who heads up Hulu’s content efforts, and Jean-Paul Colaco, who runs ad sales, are frequently mentioned by people outside the company as candidates for new jobs.

Meanwhile, people who have talked to other Hulu employees say some of them either have new gigs lined up or have begun looking for them. After the cash-out in October, Hulu paid out additional bonuses to get some senior managers and key employees to stick around through the end of 2012. But now those payouts are done as well, so it won’t be surprising if you see an exodus in the new year.

Hulu’s corporate owners seem resigned to that notion, and seem confident that they can hire replacements if necessary. As The Wall Street Journal noted last week, the really big issue for the company is that its corporate owners don’t agree about what they want to do with the site going forward. If News Corp. and Disney can’t figure that out, it doesn’t matter who’s still there to run it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121226/hulus-employee-owners-are-just-employees-again-which-means-some-may-be-ex-employees-soon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121217/hulus-year-end-report-were-pretty-darn-big-and-were-not-saying-anything-else/ http://allthingsd.com/20121217/hulus-year-end-report-were-pretty-darn-big-and-were-not-saying-anything-else/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:00:31 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=278518 Hulu has put out its 2012 numbers and, boy, are they good for a company that everyone said would never work: Almost $700 million in revenue, and “more than” three million paying customers for its Hulu Plus subscription service.

And as far as everything else: Nada.

In the past, Jason Kilar has used these state of the company reports to make big declarations about The Future Of TV, or at least the near-term future of Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp., Disney and Comcast (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

Today, there’s none of that. Just the numbers, sir.

And maybe, if you’re into tea-leaf-reading, an oblique reference from Kilar: “So much has changed” since the company’s conception in 2007, he notes.

Which might be, among other things, a reference to big changes behind the scenes with Hulu’s corporate owners, who haven’t had a consistent approach to the site in five years. And/or its employees, who have had a “liquidity event” worth roughly $200 million this fall.

Or maybe it was just some he words he typed up and put on a blog. (I know the feeling!)

Back to the numbers: Hulu will do $695 million in revenue this year. That’s up 65 percent from the $420 million it did last year, when revenue was up 60 percent. And that three-million-plus number for Hulu Plus is two times last year’s tally (Hulu competitor Netflix has around 27 million paid subscribers worldwide).

In the past, Hulu has said that it expects subscription dollars to make up more than half of its total revenue. It doesn’t spell that out here, but I believe it’s still the case.

So that’s all good and bow-worthy for the Hulu team. The questions about how it works with its content/partner owners, and who at Hulu will be around to work with them, we can tackle some other time.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121217/hulus-year-end-report-were-pretty-darn-big-and-were-not-saying-anything-else/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121217/giving-mobile-tv-another-go-with-dyle/ http://allthingsd.com/20121217/giving-mobile-tv-another-go-with-dyle/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:00:59 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=278252 When you “watch TV” on your iPhone or iPad, you’re probably watching premium TV content you’ve purchased or rented from a service like iTunes, Netflix or Amazon Instant Video.

What I’ve been testing over the past week is different from that. It’s called Dyle, and it’s a mobile TV service from a group of broadcasters that include the Fox, NBC, Telemundo and ION networks. (Fox, one of the broadcasters in the Dyle group, is owned by News Corp., which is also a parent company of this Web site.)

Dyle turns some mobile devices into mini TVs, ones with an actual TV tuner, so that you can watch local news and a few basic channels on the go the same way you would watch television at home. This TV content is free, and you don’t need a cable subscription for it, though you will need to pay for the hardware that lets you watch it. Unlike streaming video from Web services, Dyle doesn’t use up your cellular data or even require Wi-Fi.

Live TV on mobile has been attempted before — and has received a fuzzy reception in the U.S., figuratively speaking. Qualcomm tried and failed with MediaFLO. A company called Aereo currently offers live TV directly on mobile devices and PCs for a small monthly fee, but it only works in New York City and is currently caught up in a legal battle with TV networks.

In fact, the group behind Dyle has been pushing live mobile TV for a few years now, though its hardware options have been pretty limited.

But, based on my experience with Dyle, I’m still not enthused about this kind of live mobile television.

Dyle doesn’t broadcast in HD, and doesn’t include DVR options. I didn’t have access to more than five channels, and the service was spotty. While Apple mobile users can access Dyle through a $100 accessory made by Elgato, Android users have fewer options. With the exception of the $459 Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G phone through MetroPCS, which has a TV tuner built in, Dyle currently isn’t running on Android devices. Dyle says the group is planning more Android devices with Dyle capabilities in the new year.

While it’s notable that there is now a solution for Apple devices, Dyle just wasn’t compelling enough for me to carry around the Elgato dongle and continue to use the TV service on a regular basis.

I tested Dyle in both New York City and San Francisco, two of the 35 U.S. markets in which it’s currently available. There are a couple of different ways to access Dyle, and the app names can get confusing.

First, there’s the Samsung phone from MetroPCS that I mentioned earlier. It has an extendable TV antenna built into the phone, and a Dyle-branded app comes preinstalled.

Then there’s the accessory from Elgato that works with the iPhone and iPad -– this app is called EyeTV, not Dyle. The dongle, which also has an antenna, plugs directly into the bottom of Apple devices with 30-pin ports. If you have the new iPhone 5 or the iPad mini, you’ll have to use an adapter.

After fully extending the antenna on the Samsung phone or the Elgato dongle, I was ready to watch TV. In New York, I had access to five channels, including NBC, Fox and Telemundo. The programming is framed by a very basic channel guide, which doesn’t offer much additional information beyond the show name. I watched local news in bed one night, and part of an NFL game on EyeTV using my iPhone 4.

In case you’re wondering, you will have to sit through commercials, just as you would with “regular” TV — and, nope, you can’t fast-forward through them.

The picture looked a little bit scrambled at times, and when I changed the size of the video to fit my screen, the audio would sometimes cut out. And the video didn’t fully extend to fit the screen of the regular iPad or iPad mini. Still, compared with my experience in San Francisco, Dyle worked pretty well for me in New York.

On the West Coast, the service was inconsistent. I tested Dyle on the same three devices. On the Samsung phone, I was initially able to pull in five channels: NBC, Fox, My 36, Telemundo and Qubo, a cartoon network. I tuned in to the evening news on Fox, and placed the phone next to my laptop so I could listen to the local news while I was doing work.

At one point, as I was changing channels, the signal cut out for me on the Samsung phone. It later came back, and Dyle TV says there may have been a service outage at that time. But after that I was never able to successfully access all five channels.

On the iPad mini with the Elgato dongle, I was only able to watch the Qubo channel. This was especially disappointing when I woke up one morning and wanted to check out the news on the iPad instead of turning on the TV. All I could watch were cartoons.

Another drawback about Dyle is that you can’t record or store content. So, when I was preparing for a couple flights this week, Dyle wasn’t part of the equation. If I wanted to watch a TV show or movie on my iPad during the flights, I’d have to download the content in advance from another service.

Dyle says that it’s working with more hardware makers to bring the service to all kinds of devices, including more mobile phones, tablets, and even screens in the back seats of cars. The company envisions that it could work as a cable-authentication service, providing a way to let you access your cable service from your mobile phone if you’re paying for a cable subscription.

But, for now, Dyle is just a niche thing for consumers who really like to watch local TV on their phones, and its content is still too limited to make it appealing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121217/giving-mobile-tv-another-go-with-dyle/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121207/excited-about-apple-tv-dont-watch-this-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20121207/excited-about-apple-tv-dont-watch-this-video/#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2012 14:13:30 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=276039

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Lots of Apple watchers listened to Tim Cook’s NBC interview last night and concluded that the company has big plans for the fabled Apple TV.

After all, Cook said TV was an area of “intense interest.”

But that would be bigger news if Cook hadn’t said the same thing back in May, speaking to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at our D10 conference.

See for yourself, courtesy of Rich Greenfield and Walt Piecyk, the smart guys at BTIG who mashed up the two interviews:

So what does last night’s interview really mean? Well, it means that Tim Cook is very good at staying on message. But we already knew that. What’s more relevant is what Tim Cook is actually doing.

We know Apple has tried out various permutations of an “Apple TV” product with the Television Industrial Complex in the past — sometimes it’s a programming offering, sometimes it’s a cable box alternative.

But so far, there haven’t been any signs that the company has made any real headway on the content/services side. Until we hear otherwise, hard to get too excited about a couple words.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121207/excited-about-apple-tv-dont-watch-this-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121203/the-hardware-guys-meet-the-content-guys-intels-huggers-samsungs-eun-coming-to-d-dive-into-media/ http://allthingsd.com/20121203/the-hardware-guys-meet-the-content-guys-intels-huggers-samsungs-eun-coming-to-d-dive-into-media/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:00:15 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=274373

At our D: Dive into Media conference in February, we’ll be talking to people who make amazing content, the people who make a living selling amazing content and the people who help distribute all of that stuff.

But if you want to figure out the future of media, you also have to talk to the people who make the boxes and gadgets you’ll use to consume all of that content.

That’s why we’re very happy to hear at Dive into Media from two heavyweights with important new roles: Intel’s Erik Huggers, corporate vice president at Intel Media, and Samsung’s David Eun, executive vice president for global media.

Intel’s chips have been powering entertainment boxes for a long time. Now the company is reportedly getting ready to plunge directly into the pay-TV business itself by trying to cut deals with cable programmers and rolling out a next-generation set-top box of its own.

Huggers, who used to run the BBC’s digital efforts, is heading up that push, but hasn’t talked about it publicly yet. For now, the company says his efforts are “focused on exploring new ways to access, interact with and share the latest in digital entertainment.” We’ll get a chance to figure out what that really means when he gets on our stage.

And Samsung is already a huge deal in the media world, given its position of power in both the TV and mobile markets. Eun, a tech and media veteran (Google, Time Warner, NBC, AOL), is supposed to leverage that clout to bring software and services to his company’s devices.

Now he’s trying to expand the company’s presence in Silicon Valley, where he’s opening up a new outpost in an effort to build out digital content and services. His Dive appearance will be his first public opportunity to make his case to tech and media hotshots.

Huggers and Eun are joining an all-star lineup in February. Here’s who we’ve told you about so far: Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, Hearst Magazines president David Carey, Google chief business officer Nikesh Arora, Facebook partnership vice president Dan Rose, HBO co-president Eric Kessler, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen and Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith.

And we’ve got more great names to announce very soon: Watch this space. In the meantime, head here to find registration information for the conference, which will be held Feb. 11 and 12 at the stunning Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121203/the-hardware-guys-meet-the-content-guys-intels-huggers-samsungs-eun-coming-to-d-dive-into-media/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121130/nbcs-brian-williams-gets-a-sit-down-with-apple-ceo-tim-cook-interview-to-air-dec-6/ http://allthingsd.com/20121130/nbcs-brian-williams-gets-a-sit-down-with-apple-ceo-tim-cook-interview-to-air-dec-6/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2012 03:25:23 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=274249 NBC is more than a little excited about its upcoming sit-down interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook.

And it is a coup, considering that Cook has followed his predecessor’s footsteps in limiting his public appearances. Cook’s appearance onstage at our D10 conference in June was really the only major interview he has done, aside from those tied to product launches.

But, as “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams notes, there are some differences between the two Apple chiefs.

“Unlike the man he replaced, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook was able to walk all but unrecognized across the central floor of Grand Central Station,” Williams said in a video clip teasing the forthcoming interview. Williams said that Cook did get a ton of praise and attention once he set foot inside the station’s Apple Store.

Hopefully the interview itself will provide some juicier info. Williams said NBC will preview the interview on “NBC Nightly News” next Thursday, and the full piece will air on Williams’s “Rock Center” show later that night.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121130/nbcs-brian-williams-gets-a-sit-down-with-apple-ceo-tim-cook-interview-to-air-dec-6/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121119/dyle-brings-legal-live-tv-on-your-ipad-with-many-strings-attached/ http://allthingsd.com/20121119/dyle-brings-legal-live-tv-on-your-ipad-with-many-strings-attached/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:00:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=270747 Want to watch live TV on your iPad? You don’t have many options.

A handful of networks, including Disney and ESPN, will stream shows to your tablet, but you’ll need a cable subscription to make them work.

And if you live in New York City, Aereo will let you watch programming from broadcast networks. But since it isn’t paying the networks for that programming, the networks are suing to shut Aereo down.

So here’s another choice: Dyle, which launches for Apple’s iOS devices today. You’re probably not going to love it.

Dyle is backed by a consortium that includes NBC, Fox* and a lot of broadcast station owners, and it does have some things going for it:

• Dyle is free, for now.
• Dyle doesn’t require Wi-Fi or wireless service, because it’s beamed over the same airwaves the TV stations (still) use to send signals to TV sets. That means you can watch all you want, without worrying about data caps or charges.
• Since Dyle is backed by (some) of the networks and TV stations, there’s no legal gray area: It’s 100 percent legit.

On the other hand:

• You’ll need a $100 adapter — basically a combination antenna and battery — in order to use Dyle on Apple devices.
• Dyle only provides you with a handful of programming choices in the 35 cities it operates in — basically, whatever’s on most NBC and Fox stations, and a smattering of other channels.
• Dyle doesn’t offer any DVR functions, which means you have to watch in real time or not at all. And you can’t fast-forward through commercials.
• One of live TV’s biggest selling points is sports. But a rights blackout means you can’t watch NFL games on Dyle. (That’s the only programming hole, though: An earlier version of the service did let users watch NBC’s Olympics broadcast, and Fox’s World Series games this year.)
• If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to buy an iPad mini because it doesn’t have Retina display, you’re not going to want to come near Dyle, which doesn’t broadcast in anything like HD. The picture looks okay on an iPhone, but by the time the image gets blown up to an iPad-size screen, it’s quite grainy.
• Dyle’s backers can’t promise that the service will remain free after the end of this year. It probably will. But, for whatever reason, they won’t say that out loud.

That’s a lot of hurdles to put in front of a consumer pondering a purchase. So why is Dyle bothering at all?

Dyle’s backers won’t come out and put it this way, but this appears to be a proof-of-concept test instead of a full-fledged product launch (Dyle has already been on the market for a few months, via MetroPCS’s Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G, which comes with a preinstalled app and a built-in antenna).

You can imagine a future where Dyle would make more sense: It would offer TV from all the broadcasters, and the hardware it needs would get built directly into the gadgets themselves; it would also offer features like recording capabilities.

And at that point the Dyle guys could play around with different business models: They could charge a monthly fee for service. Or bundle it for “free” with a cable TV subscription.

But in order to get to that point, the Dyle guys need to prove that there’s demand for what they’re already offering. It’s a tough chicken-and-egg problem, but you can at least give them credit for trying.

*Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

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