While the subcommittee panel described Apple on paper as an “egregious offender” that has “sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” it took a very different tone while meeting in person with Cook. “So nice to meet you. I have an iPad,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R.-N.H., said while greeting the Apple CEO — a cordial, but fawning, welcome, surpassed only by that of her counterpart, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. who said simply: “I love Apple. … I love Apple.”

All of this was great fodder for Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” team. As Stewart quipped during last night’s broadcast, “Who are those people? What is the opposite of a Genius Bar?”

“Apparently there is nothing Apple can do to get us mad at them,” Stewart marveled. “We could find out they’re using kitten hearts to power iPhones and we’d be like, ‘Well, if it doubles battery life, I’ll take two!’”

Unlike a TV network, Amazon has asked the Internet to watch and rate its test shows, and has said the input will help the company make its decisions.

And now we’re getting to see some of those decisions play out.

We only have definitive word on one of the 14 pilots Amazon has ordered. That’s because Rhett Reese, the writer/producer behind “Zombieland,” has announced, via Twitter, that it’s not getting picked up:

Our Zombieland series will not be moving forward on Amazon.Sad for everyone involved.

— Rhett Reese (@RhettReese) May 17, 2013

Reese wasn’t done, though. He also complained about people who didn’t like the show — presumably fans of the original movie his series was riffing on:

I’ll never understand the vehement hate the pilot received from die-hard Zombieland fans.You guys successfully hated it out of existence.

— Rhett Reese (@RhettReese) May 17, 2013

Meanwhile, over at Deadline, Nellie Andreeva reports that Amazon has picked up “Alpha House,” its Washington satire starring John Goodman, and “Betas,” a Silicon Valley sitcom.

Neither of those moves are that surprising, since Amazon has seemed bullish on “Alpha House” from the start, and “Betas” sure seems like it would hit an online viewing sweet spot.

That said, a pedigree or concept isn’t enough to keep you on screen, whether it’s on TV or online. Deadline also reports that Amazon is not picking up “Browsers,” a musical comedy about interns at a Huffington Post-style site.

That one featured “Cheers” star Bebe Neuwirth as an Arianna-like boss, and was written by David Javerbaum, one of the main brains behind the “The Daily Show” for many years. No dice.

Also, about the voting: Your vote counts, but it’s not the only thing that counts. Amazon Studios head Roy Price said his team would look at a variety of data as they made their decisions.

For instance: I never voted on “Browsers,” even though Amazon sent me an email after I first watched it, asking me for my thoughts. But I’m sure that Amazon did take note of the fact that I only watched the first 5 minutes of the show, then never returned.

What’s that? You have so much time that you’d like to watch the entire clip? No problem (unless you live outside the U.S. or are watching this on certain mobile devices):

• Alpha House, about “four senators who live together in a rented house in Washington DC.” Written by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, who also made the vastly underappreciated “Tanner ’88” for HBO.
• Browsers, “a musical comedy set in contemporary Manhattan that follows four young people as they start their first jobs at a news website,” from former “The Daily Show” head writer David Javerbaum.
• Dark Minions, an animated series “about two slackers just trying to make a paycheck working an intergalactic warship,” from “Big Bang Theory” co-stars Kevin Sussman and John Ross Bowie.
• The Onion Presents: The News, “set behind the scenes of The Onion News Network.”
• Supanatural, an animated series about “two outspoken divas who are humanity’s last line of defense against the supernatural”; one of the producers is “The Daily Show” star Kristen Schaal.
• Those Who Can’t, “about three juvenile, misfit teachers,” written by three guys Amazon found via its open call for submissions.

Word that Amazon was betting on some of these has already been out in the trade press for awhile, but today is the formal rollout. Will any of them work? Who knows! It’s just like regular TV!

(And, in fact, some of these shows got look-sees from regular TV networks before falling into Amazon’s hands. But that’s standard practice in Hollywood, where someone’s rejections become someone else’s hits. See, for instance, “The Sopranos,” which Fox famously passed on before HBO picked it up.)

The twist here is that you, the Web video viewer, will get to have a say: Amazon will post the produced pilots online, and “viewer feedback will help determine” which ones actually get picked up. Much more fun than leaving it in the hands of network types — and a very clever promotional gambit.

Spoiler: Jon Stewart does not bring up Drunk Nate Silver in this interview, and neither does Nate Silver. It’s still good, though. And Silver does swear here, and Stewart sort of does a Buzzed Nate Silver at the end. So it’s close:

And since we’re all here, let’s use the opportunity to get a teeny bit wiser, by reading Felix Salmon on Nate Silver — it’s not the math, it’s the words.

UPDATE: Silver, or someone who looks very much like him, has been spotted wearing a wizard’s hat at a Chinese* restaurant. Still sober, reportedly.

*”Asian”, technically.

Except for this one problem: Lots of people who wanted to see the show, which was available only over the Web, couldn’t watch.

The Rumble 2012 Web site seemed unable to process orders for many customers — the show charged $5 a head — and some of those who did get through reported other technical problems.

What happened? The only word from the “Rumble 2012″ production team was a tweet blaming “overwhelming demand.” But that shouldn’t fly in 2012.

Due 2 overwhelming demand, our servers have been overloaded. We apologize for any inconvenience and we’re working to resolve the issue.

— The Rumble 2012 (@therumble2012) October 7, 2012

The Rumble 2012 Web site, meanwhile, doesn’t indicate that anything is amiss. Instead it promises that you should be able to see a replay of the show “shortly.” It’s been saying that for more than 90 minutes. [Update: As of now -- 11:19 pm ET -- the site's streaming option still doesn't work, but I seem to be able to download the show as an MP4.]

At this point it’s worth noting that the production company credited for this event is something called Nox Solutions, which says it’s responsible for running Web sites for the likes of O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham. Perhaps if these guys try this again, they might want to work with YouTube, which was able to provide some 500,000 concurrent streams during the Olympics.

But to be fair, a quick Google search shows that lots of folks watched the show without much problem. I was one of them: I headed over to the site about 30 minutes in advance, handed over my credit card info and started streaming without a hitch at 8 pm Eastern. The site didn’t require me to provide any kind of password or log in, and the video quality was quite reasonable. And I have ordinary, frustrating/adequate Time Warner Cable broadband.

I will say this for the Rumble 2012 people: They seem to have done a good job at working with YouTube to prevent people from uploading clips from the show. Someone named “MISSUNIVERSEMEXICO” has put up a set of unwatchable screengrabs, but beyond that, this is the best I can offer. I assume it will go away shortly:

UPDATE: Here’s the whole thing, via a frustrated Roger Ebert:

Stewart even got in a Lycos joke, but his real target was the softness of the federal government on all sorts of investigations.

Here is one of the more fantastic appearances by the talented Samantha Bee of “The Daily Show,” on the controversy about Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop’s proposal to ban Israeli products because of its persecution of Palestinians.

Yes, a hummus war.

Oh, just watch:

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

Something seems to have resonated with Jon Stewart and his “Daily Show” writers, who weighed in yesterday. Note that almost all of the footage they use in this one seems to come from a June 1, 2010, CNN report:

Author Walter Isaacson stopped by “The Daily Show” last night for what was basically a spoiler-free interview with Jon Stewart. Then again, if you’re reading this, you’ve likely hoovered up the book already, either in its entirety or via the excerpts flooding the Web.

Still, an entertaining seven minutes, touching on Jobs’s “Zen Stare,” the role of cosmic coincidence in the Apple co-founder’s story, and a requisite dig at Microsoft.

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Oh.

Bad news, LinkedIn. You led “The Daily Show” last night.

CEO Philippe Dauman said that a “substantial bump” in licensing revenue generated last quarter by the company’s TV shows came from “new and renewed digital distribution agreements” — i.e., deals with services like Netflix and Hulu.

The size of the bump may not be that big: BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield did some quick math and figured that new digital dollars added up to $70 million this quarter. That’s a tiny fraction of the overall $2.4 billion Viacom’s cable networks generated in the same time period.

But digital dollars are exceptionally profitable — Dauman said the margin on those deals was upward of 75 percent. And Dauman and his lieutenants took great pains to stress that they’d be signing up new digital pacts, both in and outside the U.S.

Unlike CBS CEO Les Moonves, who listed Apple, Microsoft and Google, among others, as potential buyers, Dauman was a little more circumspect when it came to new prospects — the only one he cited by name was LoveFilm, the “Netflix of Europe” that Amazon owns.

But he also suggested that some of the digital deals would come from cable and satellite companies who are already paying him to show stuff like “The Daily Show” and “Jersey Shore” on analog TV, but would want more digital rights. Both the Dish Network and DirecTV are obvious candidates there.

Again, this is the best-case digital scenario for the TV guys — the one where the Internet doesn’t eat into their business, but supplies it with new streams of easy money. It’s hard to believe it will stay that simple — a lot of this depends on customers deciding that it’s easier to pay for content than grabbing it for free off the Web – but right now it’s a pretty good place to be.

Bonus factoid: When this segment aired on the East Coast last night, @ladybigmac — whose profile describes her as a “political junkie that likes to watch golf and NASCAR races” — had 19 followers. As of 7:44 am, she has 1,397. She may not be aware of her newfound celebrity, though: She’s been tweeting to @cnnAM all morning, but has yet to acknowledge her national shout-out.

Except for the part about it not working.

On Aug. 15, Fox will stop distributing its shows on Hulu and Fox.com a day after they air, and will make most Web surfers wait eight days to see them. The only legal way around this, for now, is to pay for a subscription to either the Dish Network or Hulu Plus.

Expect ABC to follow suit, and then NBC. CBS is a reasonable bet, too.

I walked through the networks’ rationale for this last month, when word first got out that Hulu’s broadcast owners — Disney, Comcast and News Corp. — were going to start requiring “authentication” in order to watch shows online the next day. You can read an excerpt at the bottom of the post if you don’t want to click through.

The problem with the networks’ logic: Sidereel.com. And Sceper.eu. And Twitter. And Google. Etc.

All those sites will lead you, quite quickly, to anything the networks air, for free, on the Web. And you don’t have to wait eight days to watch them, or even a single day. You can see them within hours, or less, of their original airtime.

Video piracy is nothing new, of course. But if you haven’t tried watching a TV show from a rogue site recently (and I’m not advocating you do so for any reason other than a professional one — I don’t want a “Wolverine” incident) you might be astonished to see just how fast, and easy, it’s become.

As BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield pointed out to Wall Street earlier this year, it’s now a cinch to download pirated copies of any movie you’d like, in very high quality, using free online storage lockers.

But it’s equally easy to grab TV shows, and you don’t have to worry about downloads if you don’t want to clog up your hard drive: Sites like Videobb.com will offer free streams, without commercials, the same night they air on TV.

Here’s a screenshot of last night’s episode of “MasterChef,” available a couple hours after it aired on Fox (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.).

And here’s a grab of Tuesday night’s “The Daily Show,” which I was able to watch less than 30 minutes after it finished airing on Comedy Central.

Downsides? Sure. The streams aren’t HD quality — if you got it onto your 42-inch LCD, you’d be disappointed. And the sites seem to require Flash, so they won’t work on an iPhone or iPad. And you may still need a bit of trial and error to get a working version.

And they’re illegal, of course.

But again: They are free, totally serviceable, and very easy to find for anyone who’s remotely motivated.

That was the case before the Great Free TV Web Pullback of 2011, too. But back then (as in, now) if you were a middle-of-the-road TV and Web video fan, it was easy enough to head over to Hulu to watch last night’s “MasterChef.” You’d even put up with commercials.

Now Fox, and very likely the rest of the broadcast TV business, are telling non-pirates to go ahead and grab what they like, when they like. I think they’re going to find lots of takers.

—–

So why do the networks think this is a good idea? They probably don’t. But it’s a way to prop the business up in the short term, at the expense of the long run.

From my June 23 piece:

Why would Hulu’s owners push to make the service less attractive? The justification I’ve heard is that most Hulu viewers are paying for TV anyway, so this really wouldn’t be a big deal.

But the real answer is that this is meant to appease cable TV providers who are paying Hulu’s owners — via “retrans” deals — for the rights to provide the shows that Hulu is giving away on the Web. And it’s also meant to protect the value of broadcast TV advertising, since the ad business still doesn’t value a Web eyeball as much as one that watches on a TV.

Again, this is the kind of tension between business models that has been a problem for Hulu almost from the get-go. And it has been the source of many of the disagreements between Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and his owners for some time.

Still, Stewart did spend eight minutes on the story last night. Here he is on Rupert Murdoch’s visit to Parliament. And, of course, Wendi Deng’s pie-deflection.

Which segued to this bit on some News Corp. properties’ … restraint in covering the story.

And for good measure, here’s Colbert’s contribution from last night — a chat with the New York Times’s David Carr, who does most of the heavy lifting.

And what’s particularly great/terrible about this clip from last night’s “The Daily Show” is that Stewart and correspondent John Oliver don’t need to do much more than simply recite the main points of the PhoneGate scandal to date. The facts are awful/funny enough on their own.

Includes shout-outs to Tumblr, Vimeo, bit.ly, YouTube, Groupon:

But it’s also a pretty easy problem to solve. Ask John “I’m a PC” Hodgman, who stopped by “The Daily Show” to explain last night.

Not bad, but I’m certain I’m not the only one hoping that somehow “Saturday Night Live” gets in on the action by reviving its old “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketch from a few seasons back. Perhaps Sean Connery could hack Watson’s programming? You know what would happen.

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Bonus: You can see a bit of the way the Daily Show’s comedy sausage gets made, via a shot of Oliver’s script/marching orders that Dan Frommer at Business Insider grabbed.

Another (small) bonus: If you have very sharp eyes, and a lot of time on your hands, you’ll be able to spot two brief glimpses of me and Ina Fried at the Verizon presser. Technically, the back of our heads. But still, we get to say we were on the Daily Show, which is pretty cool, right?

Staying at 499 shareholders or fewer is something Facebook has worried about since at least 2007, and sidestepped by creating a special kind of restricted stock unit for new employees and making small talent acquisitions that avoided, when possible, awarding start-ups and their investors with Facebook stock.

Now that that’s over, Facebook’s acquisitions team may get the go-ahead this year to pursue larger and more complicated deals.

As is now widely known, SEC rules mandate that a company with more than 500 shareholders at the end of a fiscal year must report financial information, something Facebook didn’t want to do as a private company. But if you read the fine print, as BoomTown’s Kara Swisher first reported, Facebook has 120 days to disclose from the end of the fiscal year in which it crosses 500 shareholders.

That means the end of April of 2012, by which point Facebook has said in paperwork for its Goldman Sachs funding deal it expects to file to go public.

Basically, Facebook has exorcised a curse hanging over its head by outlasting it. Like a nightclub bouncer, the company had been letting one shareholder out of the room before allowing another in. And now that’s over, as long as Facebook goes public next year.

(Though at this point, many of the company’s financial details are already leaking out as part of the troubling Goldman Sachs deal.)

For now, Facebook is still being cautious about adding shareholders; the Goldman deal (which we’ve heard still hasn’t closed) was structured to combine Goldman’s wealthy clients into a single entity to avoid adding too many shareholders.

Facebook’s corporate development team has said publicly that part of why it likes doing “acqhire” deals of small, early-stage start-ups is because they are relatively uncomplicated, financially speaking. Wherever it can, Facebook tries to cash out an acquired start-up’s shareholders instead of giving them stock. In the past, if a start-up had too many shareholders, it might not have been an attractive acquisition candidate.

Facebook doesn’t always get its way on that preference; sometimes it pays in stock. For instance, Facebook bought two start-ups that had taken investments from RRE Ventures: Hot Potato (in August 2010) and Drop.io (in October). In the first case, Facebook paid RRE in cash, but the second time around, RRE was able to negotiate for stock.

But now that Facebook seems to basically be giving itself the go-ahead to surge past 500, who gets to be shareholder number 501 or even number 1,001? It’s possible they could be the employees and investors in larger, more complicated M&A deals. Facebook’s name has come up in acquisition discussions for companies like Twitter and Foursquare, but now it may actually start closing more of those deals.

To date, Facebook’s largest acquisition has been FriendFeed for $50 million in cash and stock in 2009. The first time many tech watchers heard of the 10 tiny start-ups Facebook acquired in 2010 was when the deals closed.

But now that big deals are on the table, the question is, who’s next?

Here’s Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” last night ranting about Facebook avoiding making financial disclosures:

Please see my own disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly in the midst of a media bonanza.

Aside from all the heat over its recent investment whatever with Goldman Sachs, the young entrepreneur has been touted on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and been selected Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Oh, yes, and that movie–”The Social Network”–which you just know is going to win some Oscars on February 27.

Now CNBC has just aired a documentary on the huge social networking site, titled–appropriately–“The Facebook Obsession.”

There is no new interview with Zuckerberg, and it’s essentially the same story about the Silicon Valley wunderkind, told yet again. But all the old video clips and photos collected all together on another television show are nice.

Also, I always enjoy the Winklevii spouting off hambone arguments about why they are owed more than $65 million for Zuckerberg’s kneecapping of them back at Harvard University.

And, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-me appearance, I also make a showing, apparently as the grumpy one.

But I did not see it, as CNBC did not deign to post the entire report online, as “60 Minutes” so kindly did.

CNBC did do a preview and provide some clips, which are embedded below, as well the the much funnier Jon Stewart take on it all on “The Daily Show,” titled “The Anti-Social Network”: