You’re welcome, says Netflix content boss Ted Sarandos.

Sarandos, speaking at a panel at the cable industry’s annual convention in Boston, took credit for the bump, citing Netflix viewership for the show’s repeats.

“These are people who had four years to watch the show, and didn’t,” he said. But after catching up on the earlier seasons, they tuned in for the fifth.

Netflix wants to boast about stories like this, because it highlights the fact that it still has in-demand content, and because it bolsters its argument that it can help TV networks, not hurt them. And there may well be evidence to support that.

But it’s important to note that Sarandos’ comments came when he was defending Netflix from the flip side of that argument — that some networks, like Viacom’s Nickelodeon, may be hurt by Netflix. Both Viacom and Netflix say that’s not the case, but the critique has traction with various Netflix skeptics.

Meanwhile, here’s another data point from the panel that indicates that Netflix customers are watching something on the service: Cox Communications President Pat Esser said 40 percent of his four million broadband customers generated a Netflix  stream in March.

Dubbed Viewdini, the app allows users to search for a particular title, actor or keyword across a variety of video services, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Comcast Xfinity and mSpot.

“We are just seeing a hunger for people wanting to watch video,” Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead said in an interview. Viewdini isn’t a video service in its own right, but rather a portal of content found on others’ services. Still, Mead called Viewdini one of the carrier’s key product launches for the year.

“I think this will capture the audience’s imagination,” Mead said.

The idea is that the ability to stream high-quality video is one of the things that sets LTE apart from other wireless services. Of course, one of the big challenges is that although the service is plenty fast, watching just a handful of hours of video in a month could put a customer over their data allotment.

Mead said that Verizon has plenty of systems in place to keep customers from unknowingly going over their data limit, including text alerts when customers hit 50 percent, 75 percent and 90 percent of their data limit.

“We never want customers to be surprised,” Mead said. However, he added that the company also has competitive pricing for customers who find video they want to watch and choose to go over their original data cap. “We look at it as great flexibility for customers.”

In addition to helping find videos, Viewdini will also have IMDB-style information on the movies and TV shows. Mead said that Viewdini will be limited to Verizon Wireless customers when it launches later this month.

“This is a competitive differentiator,” Mead said.

While Viewdini is Android-only at launch, the carrier said it expects eventually to add support for other operating systems.

Mead said that Verizon is working to spur strong demand for mobile services, as well as enough bandwidth to serve that demand. Mead said that the company is pleased with how its 4G LTE network is being used thus far.

“What we’re seeing is the growth that we wanted to see,” he said. “What we are seeing is customers discovering the breadth of what they can do on the Verizon network. We’re very encouraged by that.”

Only a small fraction of Verizon Wireless customers are on 4G LTE, however, with the vast majority of its customers still using 3G service.

Verizon has been actively pitching the power of what the new higher-speed network can do, through its own efforts like Viewdini, as well as through content partnerships, including its deal with the National Hockey League, in which its 4G customers get added content when using the league’s mobile app.

Next up on Mead’s to-do list is acquiring the spectrum needed to build the next generation of networks. Part of that strategy involves the company’s proposed deal to acquire a swath of spectrum from a group of cable companies — a deal opposed by T-Mobile, Sprint and an organization of rural carriers.

“We view AWS [the spectrum it is seeking to buy from the cable companies] as the spectrum where we will expand our LTE services and capacity going forward,” Mead said. “We’re still encouraged that we’ll have approval to move on later on this summer.”

In short, Comcast is moving from a flat cap to usage-based billing.

It is scrapping its 250-gigabytes a month cap and trying a couple different plans in its place. One version will introduce a 300-gig cap and offer additional tiers of service, with bigger caps, along with the ability to buy more chunks of data. Another version also uses a 300-gig cap and the ability to buy incremental blocks of data as needed.

Comcast, which has more than 18 million high-speed data customers, says it will experiment with the two plans in some of its territories.

It also says that in markets where it’s not trying the new plans, it will scrap its data cap entirely until it settles on a new plan.

The move comes as Comcast has taken heat about the way it treats data on some of its proprietary video services, in particular the Xfinity app for Microsoft’s Xbox console.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has argued that because Comcast doesn’t count data delivered via that service against its usage caps, it is violating “net neutrality” principles. Comcast says it’s in the clear because that data isn’t delivered via the public Internet but on its own network, and doesn’t plan on changing its policy.

Comcast executives referenced the debate as they introduced the new plans today. “There has been a little bit of noise along with the Xfinity Xbox plan,” said Comcast EVP David Cohen. But Comcast also insists that only a small handful of its users come close to using the 250-gig cap today. The company says median usage runs around 8 gigabytes to 10GB a month.

Other broadband providers, notably Time Warner Cable, have also moved to usage-based pricing. If you take the companies at their word, they’re doing it because they need to charge more money to provide more bandwidth because “our network is not an infinite resource, and it is expensive to build it,” as Cohen says.

But usage-based pricing is also a useful tool to have available if cable TV users really do stop subscribing in large numbers, and replace their pay TV packages with Web video. That gives the cable (and telco) guys a way to replace the video revenue they lose with more broadband dollars. A bonus for them: Broadband subscriptions are much more profitable than video subscriptions.

[Shutterstock/Janos Levente]

That is, more people are watching Web stuff on Microsoft’s machine than on the iPad, iPhone or any Android machine, anywhere. And when it comes to home viewing, competitors like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku are so far behind they’re not even competitors.

This data comes from Freewheel, an online video ad company, and it comes with caveats. We’ll get to those below. But first, take a look:

Now the asterisks: Freewheel is only measuring “professional content” that runs with ads, because that’s how it makes its living. So that means it’s counting stuff from companies like NBC, CBS, ESPN and Vevo, but not YouTube cat videos. It’s also not measuring Netflix usage. On the other hand, this isn’t a poll or sample, but data compiled by the company’s own ad servers.

So it’s possible there’s some variance here with the larger Web video world, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is at least directionally correct. At the very least, it gives credence to Microsoft’s claim that Xbox users are spending more time watching videos on the machines than playing games, and that its deals with conventional TV programmers may be bearing fruit.

And it shows you how much ground Google will need to make up as it gets ready to relaunch its Google TV. Ditto for Apple, if and when it ever gets serious about transforming Apple TV into something other than a “hobby.”

So why did the number of pay-TV subscribers increase in just the last three months?

They didn’t grow much — a modest 422,000 subscribers, for a very modest 0.2 percent growth rate — but they still grew.

Those numbers come from Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett, a longtime skeptic that “cord-cutting” is a real and pervasive problem for the cable guys (at least for now). It’s not the first time he’s shown evidence of barely-there growth for cable TV — last quarter, for instance, he gathered similar numbers.

But his numbers do conflict with other reports that show evidence of cord-cutting. Earlier this month, for instance, Nielsen said that pay-TV subscribers had shrunk by 1.5 million in 2011.

The easiest way to reconcile Moffett’s numbers with other reports is to note that almost all of the analyst’s data comes from the publicly traded pay-TV providers themselves — like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — in the reports they offer up to shareholders. Most of the other stuff you’re seeing comes from polls and surveys.

Here’s his data. You’ll need to click the image to enlarge it:

But what about all of you folks who tell me, over and over, that you’ve ditched cable for some kind of combo of Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, or even pirate streams? Surely I’ll hear from some of you again, just as soon as I publish this.

And I believe you folks, too. I can certainly imagine many scenarios where tech-savvy people — and even not-that-tech-savvy people — are able to satisfy their video urges without paying for a TV subscription. But my operating theory, for now, remains my vegan analogy: “They’re real, and they’re out there. They’re particularly notable in certain places like New York, the Bay Area and college towns. And they over-index at certain Web gathering places, like this one. But McDonald’s sales are still chugging along.”

Eventually they settle, and you, the pay-TV customer, ends up paying more.

And that’s what’s happening in the latest dustup between Dish Networks, the satellite TV service, and AMC Networks, the programmers now best known as the guys who bring you “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad.”

The slight twist here: For argument’s sake, at least, Dish is saying that because AMC is selling digital versions of those shows to other outlets, its hit shows are worth less to Dish subscribers. “It’s actually devalued,” says Dish chairman Charlie Ergen.

The fact that networks are selling or giving away their stuff online has been a minor but growing issue in carriage fights for a while now. But this is the biggest stink that a cable/pay TV provider has made about it, at least in public.*

Dish first brought this up via a press statement last week, but Ergen went on about it at length today during the Dish earnings call.

It’s worth reading. I’ve cleaned up his comments just a bit for clarity (note that AMC Networks includes multiple channels, including AMC, IFC and Sundance):

We have very, very specific viewer measurement. Much more granular than somebody like Nielsen might have. So we’re able to watch our customer base and — we realize we skew a bit more rural — between [AMC Networks] programming, they have very, very low viewership, outside of a few obviously popular [shows] on AMC.

But those particular channels are also available to our customers on a variety of other sources, like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on.

One of the things that programmers have done is that they’ve devalued their programming content by making it available in many multiple outlets. So, when someone asks for price increases …

We just look at it. Our customers are not really saying “We want to pay more money,” they’re saying, “We want more flexibility in our programming, and we don’t want to pay more.”

And when you look at that from a timing perspective, that’s just a contract that we can change. And we believe that the product is actually devalued. Not that there’s not some good programs, but that they’ve been devalued, because you can get it in multiple ways. And customers are asking for more flexibility, or have more flexibility to get the programming. So it’s not quite the same as something that was exclusive.

So we look at it and say, “This is a good opportunity to make a good business judgment call.” And obviously there’s a price where an [AMC Networks] product makes sense. We just don’t think that’s where we are today.

First things first: Obviously it makes the most sense to dump all of this into the “posturing” bucket, and treat it accordingly. The easy money here is to bet that, yet again, Dish and AMC will strike a deal, which Ergen, at the end of his remarks, explicitly says is on the table.

That said, a couple of points:

• Most of the big TV programmers seem to agree with Ergen’s point when it comes to free repeats of recent shows. Which is why they have been taking stuff that they’ve been giving away via outlets like Hulu, and either pulling them off the Web entirely, or requiring that customers “authenticate” — prove that they’re paying for cable or satellite TV —  in order to see them without delay. Note that Dish was the first pay-TV service to participate in the Fox authentication plan last summer. (Fox is owned by News Corp., as is this Web site.)
• TV programmers don’t seem to think that iTunes’ and Amazon’s a la carte sales of shows that aired the night before are devaluing their product. Because they’re still selling them, and by all accounts there doesn’t seem to be a ton of volume for those episodes. If there was, advertisers would squawk long before pay-TV providers would.
• The really touchy subject here is what happens to prior-season episodes of AMC hits like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. Netflix has been arguing that these episodes are big draws for its customers, and that this is good for networks like AMC, because people discover the old shows on Netflix and then watch the new ones as they air. There is some evidence for this, too.
• But there is also evidence that Netflix repeats hurt some cable programming — like kids’ shows — too. And that leads to speculation that Viacom and Disney will pull back their shows from the service or raise prices when their contracts expire — even though Netflix is already paying big dollars for them. Netflix will have its hands on “Mad Men” and other AMC shows for at least a couple of years more. But it will be interesting to see what Dish’s complaint means for the renegotiations.

*There is also a wrinkle involving a lawsuit between Dish and a former AMC subsidiary, but that’s par for the course, too. All of these guys sue all of these guys, all the time. No recession, ever, for TV attorneys.

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

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

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

TechCrunch reported the deal talks earlier this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The company is pulling back the covers (a bit) on its plans to produce kids’ shows and sitcoms via its “Amazon Studios” unit, which has already been dipping a toe into the movie business. Word of the new push leaked out earlier this year, via hiring notices — such a useful way to track a secretive company! — and now Amazon is ’fessing up.

A bit. Amazon Studios head Roy Price won’t discuss his budget, or the number of shows he intends to make, or a timeline for getting them on the Web. But he is willing to sketch out a couple of notions:

• Like the movie effort, Amazon is soliciting scripts for new productions via the Web, and will pay out modest fees — $10,000 for an option, $55,000 if a show gets produced, plus possible royalties — for stuff it likes.
• The big difference between his TV effort and his movie effort is that Amazon intends (with some exceptions) to actually make the shows, and distribute them via its own “Amazon Instant Video” offering. (For the movie effort, Amazon is feeding scripts it likes to Warner Bros., which will decide what to do with them.)
• Price says the shows he does make should look and feel like “real” TV shows, with commensurate production budgets.

Lots of wiggle room in all of this. So the big news is that Amazon is formally declaring that it’s in the original video business — just like Google, Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo and lots of other tech guys.

Not surprisingly, Price doesn’t want to talk about Amazon’s place in that newly formed constellation. But he does point out that this isn’t the first time the company has started making its own media. Amazon has already launched its own book-publishing business, and has started poaching “real” authors for that effort, and that has traditional book publishers terrified.

Hard to see Hollywood freaking out about this right now — particularly when they’re making a ton of money selling Amazon their old shows. But if this ever takes off, that could change.

But people are still watching a whole lot of TV — perhaps as much as ever. So the more nuanced answer is that some people are swapping out the Web for TV, some of the time. And other times Web video consumption may end up leading to more TV-watching.

Here’s some evidence supporting that idea: New data from Bernstein Research that tracks TV viewing habits for Netflix streaming subscribers. It shows a drop in kids’ TV viewing — but an increase for networks like AMC and FX. Presumably that’s because Netflix users are discovering old episodes of shows like “Mad Men” and “Sons of Anarchy” on Netflix, which is prompting them to watch new episodes of those shows on cable.

This chart shows a dropoff for programming on kids’ networks like Disney and Nickelodeon:

And this chart shows spikes for AMC whenever the network shows new episodes of shows that have old episodes on Netflix:

Bernstein put its research together using data from TiVo users. So on the one hand the numbers are pinpoint accurate, since they’re tracking actual TV usage. And, on the other hand, it may not be representative of the entire country.

Still, it makes intuitive sense, and certainly syncs up with the way the Web gets used in our house: Our kids are unaware you can do anything with an iPad other than watch “Backyardigans” and “Dinosaur Train.”

Meanwhile, I just plowed through the first four seasons of “Breaking Bad” on Netflix (and iTunes) last month — and am going out of my mind waiting for the fifth season to start on AMC this summer. Let’s cook!

And that’s the explanation for last night’s stock swoon, which followed a solid-to-good Q1 earnings report from the video company.

Specifically, Wall Street doesn’t believe Reed Hastings’s prediction that his company will add seven million customers to its U.S. streaming-video service this year. For a couple reasons:

• That’s the same growth rate that Netflix had back in 2010. But back then, Netflix was growing from a much smaller base. At least as important: Back then, it had the subscription streaming-video business more or less to itself. Now it is facing competition from Hulu, Amazon and Comcast, with more — like a Redbox/Verizon service — on the way.
• Hastings says Netflix can pull this off, even though next quarter’s growth will be much slower than Wall Street was expecting. Netflix has a complicated explanation for this, involving “seasonality” and the size of the company’s subscriber base. Short version: Trust us, it will all work out in the end.

These are the kind of arguments that Hastings used to win, because Netflix was one of tech and media’s most amazing growth stories, and Hastings had the aura of a man who could see around corners.

But 2011 changed all that. Now, if Hastings tells Wall Street that he can see the future, he’s going to get plenty of pushback. Yesterday’s conference call was dominated by questions about his 2012 growth predictions. The first one set the tone: “Why are you so confident?”

That one will take about eight months to explain. Let’s see if investors are that patient.

First look at Netflix numbers: A loss of $0.08 a share on revenue of $870 million. Wall Street was expecting revenues of $855 million and a loss of $0.27 a share. The crucial number: 23.41 million domestic streaming subscribers. Netflix had told investors to expect 22.8 million to 23.6 million.

Netflix had previously said it might lose money throughout 2012, but now says things could get better sooner, and predicts that it may turn a profit in Q2. “The improvement in the outlook is a result of continued member growth (both domestically and internationally), as well as increased efficiency of our content and marketing spending,” CEO Reed Hastings writes in his shareholder letter.

But the market isn’t happy with something — shares are down 16 percent — so we’ll try to figure out why. Perhaps this: “Q2 net adds will be below those of 2010, despite Q2 gross adds following the traditional seasonal pattern, and despite us expecting to match 2010 in annual net additions,” Hastings writes. He adds: “We see nothing new or particularly concerning this quarter to date in our member viewing, acquisition and retention. All are healthy.”

Someone disagrees.

(Update: OK, here’s Citi’s Mark Mahaney’s take on the market’s reaction. As I suspected, it is about the paragraph above — Hastings is saying subscriber growth will slow next quarter, but net out just fine for the year, and Wall Street doesn’t believe him.

“We believe this is due to concerns over the company’s Domestic Streaming Net Adds outlook — 500K Net Adds in Q2 vs. the Street at 1.2MM. NFLX is, however, laying out an outlook for 7MM Domestic Streaming Adds in 2011. This is higher than our 5MM estimate, and we believe is in-line with or higher than most Street estimates. The issue is market skepticism that NFLX can reach this level given the June Quarter guide.”)

Per usual, Hastings notes competition from Amazon and Hulu, and now Comcast’s Streampix offering. Also per usual, he says he can’t see any near-term effect from those services on his business, but promises to “watch them carefully.” And again, he argues that his long-term competition comes from the cable guys, and the promise of their “TV Everywhere” strategy.

Hastings also said the company’s expansion into U.K. and Ireland is promising. But he acknowledges what many Wall Street analysts have already concluded: Latin America will be a challenge. “The odds of us building a large, profitable business in Latin America are very good, but it will take longer than we initially thought.”

Again, here’s the “cheat sheet” from Citi’s Mark Mahaney so you can try to interpret the numbers yourself.

We’ll find out this afternoon, when the company releases its Q1 numbers. And the easiest way to tell will be by looking at one key metric: The number of U.S. streaming-video customers.

Netflix has told investors to expect something between 22.8 million and 23.6 million subscribers. And if the stock veers wildly immediately after the earnings hit the wire today, it’s likely because of that number.

If it’s high, then Netflix bulls get some vindication: Turns out that people still like paying $8 a month for all-you-can-eat movies and TV shows, streamed to any device they want, just like CEO Reed Hastings has been saying.

If it’s low, then Hastings’ doubters can argue that the loss of high-profile movies from Sony and Disney, and increased competition from the likes of Amazon and Hulu, are big problems that aren’t going away.

There will be plenty of other numbers to dig into as well, and Citi’s Mark Mahaney lays out his helpful intrepretive cheat sheet for them, below (click to enlarge). We’ll tear into those, along with Hastings’ quarterly shareholder letter, after 4 pm ET. See you then.

The bad news: As everyone who pays any attention to the company knows, the company’s stock got hammered. So Hastings’s Netflix holdings did, too.

His 4.4 percent stake in the company was worth around $437 million at the beginning of 2011, when NFLX was trading at $175. By the end of the year, the stock was worth $69, and Hastings was down to a mere $172 million.

Netflix stock has climbed back a bit and is now at $106, and that puts Hastings back at $265 million. But that news has a flip side, too: Late last year, Netflix gave Hastings a pay cut for 2012 and cut his stock awards for the year in half, to $1.5 million.

In short: The company, which has been steadily ramping up its lobbying presence in Washington, says the PAC — which allows them to make contributions to individual races — is a logical next step.

But it says it is primarily interested in topics like video privacy laws, which prevent it from integrating with Facebook. And not with hotbutton issues like SOPA/PIPA.

So here you go.

“PACs are commonplace for companies that lead a big, growing market and Netflix is no exception. Our PAC is a way for our employees to support candidates that understand our business and technology.  It was not set up for the purpose of supporting SOPA or PIPA.  Instead, Netflix has engaged on other issues including network neutrality, bandwidth caps, usage based billing and reforming the Video Privacy Protection Act.”

Reminder: Netflix has been particularly vocal about the VPPA since last summer. Last year it boosted its political spending significantly in an effort to change that law.

The gap between the individual and the household is perhaps most evident and annoying on personalized recommendation sites, like Netflix and Amazon. The person who loves “Yo Gabba Gabba” is not always the one who watches every Jennifer Aniston movie or the one who can’t be budged from the Criterion Collection. But then, we watch movies and TV together, or sometimes we’re just in the mood for something different from our usual taste.

Netflix is asked to address this personalization problem all the time by analysts and users. On Netflix’s most recent earnings call, CEO Reed Hastings said to expect “multi-account options” within the next year. The company has talked about making this a premium feature, where customers pay extra to maintain multiple user accounts on one bill.

Single-user accounts are certainly more straightforward to manage for both companies and users, but they ignore the reality that we live together and depend on each other. If a personalization system doesn’t even understand the difference between two people, then it’s not very good, is it?

A very interesting Netflix developer post from this weekend about the company’s recommendation system noted that the company already implicitly tries to acknowledge different users in a household. “It is important to keep in mind that Netflix’ personalization is intended to handle a household that is likely to have different people with different tastes. … To achieve this, in many parts of our system we are not only optimizing for accuracy, but also for diversity.”

Because of this focus on diversity, the “Top 10” recommendations on each user’s personalized Netflix homepage are really for each household, wrote Netflix personalization engineers Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico.

Really? Because when I log into Netflix on my joint account with my husband, I see “Top 10 for Michael.” It doesn’t exactly make me feel acknowledged.

But Netflix isn’t the only one. A household or “inner circle” setting makes sense for any online content seller, from the New York Times to iTunes. For instance, the household finance manager, Mint.com, has no household account option. Two people who use the service have to associate the account with one of their emails and a joint password. I don’t have high expectations of the wide range of banking and utility bill sites, but they suffer from the same problem.

Or how about counting multiple devices as members of a family? Family mobile data plans are finally supposed to arrive in the U.S. this year.

I’d propose that these sites and services create a level between billing account and user account. They should understand and design around the idea of a household and allow users to switch between profiles — like players on gaming consoles — without logging in and out each time.

PandoDaily writer Hamish McKenzie seems to be thinking along some of the same lines in a post today suggesting that Pair, the new app that helps romantic couples share their days with each other, could become a platform for joint management of calendars, travel and bank accounts. I think he’s getting at a similar concept — but this is probably a setting that would be better done by each service individually, rather than an outside authenticator.

These joint household accounts would present challenges — and opportunities. It’s not as simple as designing for just one person or the general public.

For one thing: privacy. Are you as a household member allowed to see everything your family watches, reads, listens to, pays for, etc? I’d say generally it makes sense to be open within a household, but there are reasons to build in secret or incognito activity. For instance, I don’t necessarily want my husband to be able to anticipate what I’m giving him for his birthday by seeing the purchase pop up on our joint Mint account.

There could also be interesting design around the Venn diagrams of multiple users. I was chatting about this topic with investor Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures, who suggested a Netflix interface where people sit down to watch a movie and tell the service who is in the room — kind of like a check-in. Then, Netflix would be able to recommend something for the group, and also capture better data about how to make recommendations for each person in the future.

I’d be interested to know what you think, and whether you’ve seen examples of people doing this well.

Here’s a screenshot of the Netflix CEO’s most recent post, where he gripes that Comcast won’t let its subscribers watch HBO Go — the pay channel’s “TV Everywhere” app — via an Xbox 360, and goes on to talk about the way the cable provider enforces its broadband usage cap.

Both of these complaints are the kind of thing that most people don’t care about, but vex a certain kind of technically savvy user. They are important, though, because they underscore some of the tensions between programmers and providers that have made “TV Everywhere” more conceptual than it ought to be, nearly three years after Time Warner and Comcast announced a grand launch plan.

Still, this is one of those stories where the form matters more than the content — it’s just interesting to see the head of a public company handling company business on Facebook. Then again, Hastings happens to be on Facebook’s board of directors.

Also note that Hastings doesn’t just gripe about Comcast on Facebook. Here he is a couple days ago, praising the company’s new Xbox app, and complimenting/wooing Comcast executive Sam Schwartz. And then he gripes, just a tiny bit, about Streampix, Comcast’s sorta-kinda Netflix-killer.

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.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is also a Facebook board member, is backing a bill that would change the law. Right now, it’s tied up in the Senate.

But if it passes, don’t expect Netflix subscribers to thank him. They have absolutely no desire to learn what their Facebook pals are watching.

That’s the no-doubt-about-it conclusion from a new survey commissioned by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney: He finds that seven out of 10 Netflix subs are “not at all interested” in “seeing what [their] FB friends have watched on Netflix.”

Here’s what that looks like in a bar chart:

As Mahaney notes, it’s possible that the folks he surveyed just don’t know how cool it will be to learn that their pals are watching “Mad Men” or “Dora the Explorer” or whatever. And that if it becomes possible, they’ll change their mind.

But it’s worth noting that Hulu has synced up with Facebook (I’ve never really understood why it’s not constrained by the same law, but whatever). And so far I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Facebook pal tell me what they’re watching there.

There are a bunch of ways to explain that nonscientific observation away. But my gut is that people are actually sort of private about a lot of their video viewing, and don’t want to automatically share it with the Web.

It’s not like Spotify, where even though you may not be proud that you were listening to .38 Special, you don’t really care if anyone knows.

Yes, lots of people will tell you — on Facebook or Twitter, or maybe even one of those TV check-in services — about a specific show they’re watching.* But that’s a lot different from a deluge, which is what Facebook seems to want.

And Netflix users, at least, want no part of it.

*I just finished season 4 of “Breaking Bad” this weekend. So great. I literally yelped in delight at the end of the last five or six episodes.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

That’s the first time Netflix has handed off its customer billing to a third party. And it’s a significant step for Reed Hastings and company.

For starters, it will make it that much easier for Netflix to sign up more users. But it also sets up a model for a possible Netflix-cable provider deal.

Reuters reported yesterday that Hastings was looking to bundle his service with pay-TV operators, and to deliver movies and TV shows through cable providers’ set-top boxes. But people familiar with his thinking tell me the Apple TV model is a more plausible tie-up: Netflix would be happy to let cable operators take care of billing, but wants to send its video over the Web, just like it always has.

That assumes that the cable guys buy the argument Hastings has been making for some time — that his service isn’t for cord-cutters, but for people who like watching lots of video, and don’t mind paying another $8 for what is essentially another cable channel.

How much would Netflix be willing to pay to let a third party market its service and take on billing duties as well? I don’t know.

But I have a hunch that that it’s less than the 30 percent per month that Apple has previously required from subscription services that want to let users sign up via its iOS devices.

One hint: Though you’ll now be able to sign up for Netflix using Apple TV, you still won’t be able to do that with Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods. Those devices will still require you to sign up somewhere else before you can stream video on their screens.

Worth noting that Netflix isn’t the only outside service handing over billing to Apple. Major League Baseball is doing the same thing with its app, and presumably we’ll see more down the line. Curious to see if Hulu Plus joins in.

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But Google’s Web video giant is also very happy to run good old-fashioned TV shows, if it can get its hands on them.

Here’s a reminder: Nearly 70 videos from Disney’s Disney Channel, many of them full-length episodes, are all free.

The videos have gone up in the last few days, but neither Google or Disney has said much about them. They’re there because of a programming deal the two companies cut last fall.

Coverage of that pact focused on the fact that Disney was going to create original short videos for YouTube, and would also allow YouTube to post a selection of user-generated stuff that incorporated Disney characters, etc.

But the deal also allows YouTube to run full-length shows. They’re even fully embeddable, as you can see below, if you’ve got 22 minutes to catch up on Zack and Cody’s suite life.

I’m not an expert on this flavor of kids’ programming, but I gather these are relatively old clips. But I do know that kids don’t really care about the vintage of their Web videos — they’re generally happy to watch whatever they watch, over and over again.

That’s why kids’ videos are so important to Netflix, and why they’re potentially very important for Google. That long-running, never-ending copyright lawsuit means that YouTube can’t get its hands on all the kids’ stuff that Viacom controls, but the Mouse House has plenty of its own. The fact that Disney distributes its stuff quite widely on the Web doesn’t diminish its value to YouTube boss Salar Kamangar.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has distributed full TV episodes, or even full movies, owned by Big Media, for free. (See more here and here). But it is a good reminder that it is very happy to show more of them, as soon Hollywood is ready to play along.

But you don’t need a YouTube deal, or YouTube’s money, to launch a channel with nice-looking content.

You can do it the old-fashioned way, and get an advertiser to foot the bill.

That’s what Outrigger Media, a Web video sales start-up, has done with Tumi, the high-end luggage company, and Road Bite TV.

Road Bite TV is a mashup, conceptually speaking, between TV’s Food Channel and Travel Channel. Outrigger doesn’t work with either cable channel, but it is leaning on one of their stars, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, to launch the thing.

Outrigger is piggybacking on Bourdain’s globe-hopping shows by getting producers Zero Point Zero, who put together Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and “The Layover,” to shoot a series of behind-the-scenes vignettes. Tumi underwrites the series in exchange for prominent placement in the clips (see below), as well as pre-roll ads and other promotional spots. (Zero Point Zero wants to make it clear that while Bourdain is on camera, he’s not part of the deal. Here’s more clarification from the producers: “There was no deal between Anthony Bourdain and Outrigger to launch Road Bite TV. Zero Point Zero Production was commissioned to create the content for Outrigger with a separate production crew.”)

Outrigger CEO Mike Henry says the first eight clips (he’s got another eight in the works) cost something in the “low-mid six figures” to produce. That gets him around half an hour of content, which makes it expensive by Web video standards, and dirt cheap by TV standards.

The finished product sort of straddles the line between the two. Interesting, but you’re not going to watch 30 minutes in a row.

What I’m really waiting for is the moment when “No Reservations” — or something like it — appears as a Web-only show. That is — something that’s as good as a good reality TV show, but which just happens to be running on the Web.

Free Web video sites still don’t generate enough money to support a TV-quality reality show (subscription services like Netflix are a different story), but those costs should keep coming down. And if YouTube is successful, ad dollars will go up, and we’ll get to that point sooner than later.