Today the the CTIA, the wireless industry trade organization, got behind the president’s plan in a big way, and suggested that the proposed spectrum auctions could bring in billions of dollars more than the president said. Using data from 13 prior spectrum auctions as a model, the organization today released the findings of a study conducted in partnership with the Consumer Electronics Association saying that an auction of 120 MHz worth of spectrum could produce revenue in the range of $36 billion to $48 billion.

The study also found that only in the top 30 markets in the continental United States will TV stations actually have to exit certain spectrum ranges to clear up sufficient spectrum for wireless broadband. In most cases, TV broadcasters will probably be satisfied with incentive auctions that give them some portion of the proceeds raised from the auctions. In a few cases it will be trickier, and the study suggests a few options like channel-sharing and repacking. Broadcasters outside the top 30 markets should not have to give up any spectrum, the study says.

The point of the study, CTIA president Steve Largent told me, is to help nudge Congress toward passing a law that will allow the Federal Communications Commission to hold incentive auctions that can help spur TV broadcasters who currently have the licenses for the spectrum. So far, broadcasters have signaled that they’re not yet entirely willing to go along with this plan. “We think this can be relatively painless for the broadcasters, but it’s still going to take a lot of work at Congress and at the FCC to get it done,” Largent said.

That the wireless industry would be getting behind Obama’s plan is no surprise given their exploding spectrum needs for data services, so there is a bit of a grain-of-salt element to the study’s findings. However it’s also a solid signal that the wireless carriers are willing to bring serious cash to bear for spectrum, which is, generally speaking, good news for all concerned.

Broadcasters are understandably taking a cautious line. In a statement issued last week in response to Obama’s speech in Michigan, Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters said, “Let’s not forget that broadcasters returned more than a quarter of TV station spectrum to the government less than two years ago, and that much of that spectrum has not yet been deployed. NAB is not against the President’s plan. We will work to ensure that incentive auctions remain truly voluntary, and that broadcasters who don’t volunteer to return spectrum–and the millions of viewers that we serve–are held harmless.”

“We think the rest of the studios will see the light and get on board pretty fast,” Steve Jobs said earlier this month of the TV studios wary of its new 99-cent iTunes TV rentals initiative. And while it’s never wise to bet against the Apple CEO, it’s beginning to look like “pretty fast” was an optimistic choice of words. Because in a flurry of public comments recently, a growing number of TV execs have decried the 99-cent rental model, which they say undervalues their content.

At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference last week, Viacom (VIA.B) CEO Philippe Dauman said of it, “The 99-cent rental is not a good price point. It doesn’t work for us. We value our content a lot. We don’t think Apple has it quite right yet.”

And during his appearance at the conference, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said pretty much the same thing. “We do not think 99 cents is the right price point for our content,” he argued. “We thought it would devalue our content.”

Then there was Warner Bros. Entertainment Chairman Barry Meyer, who trashed Apple’s (AAPL) effort at the
Bank of America/Merrill Lynch 2010 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference. “We just don’t think the value proposition is a good one for us,” Meyer said, adding that he’d rather sell season passes to the studio’s TV series and $1.99 and $2.99 per-episode downloads than “open up a rental business in television at a low price.”

And now Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes has come out against 99-cent iTunes TV rentals. Speaking at the Royal Television Conference in London, Bewkes echoed the comments of his colleagues, warning that the new model Apple’s pushing will threaten sales of TV shows to network television. “How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents an episode and thereby jeopardize the sale of the same shows as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free?” he asked. “These new entrants must meet a few criteria: They must provide consumers with a superior TV experience, and they must either support or improve the overall economics that funds and creates the programming in the first place.”

Early reviews suggest that Apple has met Bewkes’s first criteria, but given the statements above it’s looking like it may take a bit longer than expected to meet the second, or convince the studios that it has.

Nielsen says 13.3 percent of Americans who watched the Oscars also used the Web during this month’s telecast and that 14.5 percent of those watching last month’s Super Bowl did the same thing (see table below; click to enlarge).

These numbers are both up from last year, and the only surprise here is that they’re so low. But remember: Not everyone spends as much time on the Web as you do–a third of the country still doesn’t have broadband.

Nielsen says that online/offline viewers spent the majority of their Web time at Facebook, Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), which isn’t surprising. It’s a little bit interesting that Twitter.com doesn’t crack Nielsen’s list of Top 10 domains for simultaneous viewing. But perhaps most people who Twitter during TV time are doing so from their phones.

Speaking of which, many thanks to all of you who have refrained from Twittering during and immediately after “Lost” this season–my stream has been nice and quiet so far. Or perhaps no one’s watching “Lost” anymore. I wouldn’t blame them; this season has been frustrating even by the show’s frustrating standards.

Google’s (GOOG) video site says it has collected 11,000 questions from its viewers and will ask a small fraction of them during a live sit-down with the president at 1:45 Eastern. No word on who’s actually going to deliver the queries to POTUS, but YouTube insists that “neither the President nor his staff will know which questions will be asked ahead of time.”

The YouTube part aside, there’s not a ton of novelty here: Asking citizens to send in questions for a political Q&A isn’t a new idea. The fact that the Q&A will be streamed live is more interesting to me, since it signals the site’s increasing interest in real-time events (see, for instance, U2).

Today’s Q&A did prompt me to scan YouTube for something apposite, but disappointingly, clips from Bill Clinton’s MTV “choose or lose” appearance are hard to find. And I can’t find any version of Tabitha Soren’s famous “boxers or briefs” query. Did turn this one up, though:

But TV executives and advertisers haven’t caught up with you. Advertisers still pay less for a cable TV eyeball than for one watching something from a broadcaster. And programmers still cling to the belief that a broadcast TV viewer has different habits from someone watching cable.

Makes no sense, but there’s a lot about old media that doesn’t make sense and that takes a long time to change. Worth remembering as you watch ad dollars trickle ever so slowly to the Web.

Still, maybe this will help the industry figure it out. Look what happened when GE’s (GE) NBC replaced its 10 pm dramas with Jay Leno. For some reason, executives at CBS (CBS) and Disney’s (DIS) ABC figured viewers who liked to watch stuff like “ER” or even “Southland” would automatically move over to their offerings.

But as Pali Capital’s Rich Greenfield (registration required) points out, citing data from MediaLife, NBC’s viewers didn’t move to other broadcasters when they didn’t like what they saw at 10 pm. They went to the cable guys:

The cable network original programming push continues to gain momentum, with the notable increase in overall cable network ratings at 10 pm so far this TV season likely leading to even more significant programming investment in the year ahead–cannot be viewed positively for broadcast networks as higher quality original cable programming will drive continued viewer fragmentation.

While originally we expected networks such as TNT (TWX) and F/X (NWSA) to be the prime beneficiaries of the Leno move on NBC as they focus on 10pm dramas similar stylistically to what NBC used to air at 10pm, we believe the impact has been quite fragmented, helping a wide array of cable networks that air original programming at 10pm (including networks owned by DIS, DISCA, SNI, VIA/B).

And here, to underscore the point quite nicely, is broadcast’s Jay Leno interviewing the cast of cable’s “Jersey Shore,” the MTV show that, for better or worse, is one of this year’s big hits:

(Quasi-apology for making this the second “Jersey Shore” clip on All Things D today. But then again, The Situation is The Situation.)

You get a lot of video streams. Close to 10 million, says YouTube, adding that Sunday’s live Webcast of U2′s Rose Bowl concert was the single largest event it has streamed so far.

Granted, Google’s (GOOG) video site only started streaming live events last year, and doesn’t do them very often. But this was a pretty good muscle-flexing event, and by all accounts it went pretty well–I read some gripes about the site limiting transfer speeds, but many more raves about the quality of picture and sound.

That 10 million number, spread out over two-plus hours, doesn’t really tell us how many people watched the concert or how many did so concurrently. YouTube’s first attempt at live streaming, its weird “YouTube Live” concert/award show, may have attracted a peak audience of 700,000.

For some context, consider that last week’s episode of “The Mentalist” on CBS (CBS) drew 11.8 million viewers, which made it the 20th-ranked show in the U.S. But the fact that YouTube is even playing in the same league gives you a sense of the site’s reach.

And recall that YouTube boasted this month that it is now streaming more than one billion streams per day, which means that the overwhelming majority of its users were watching something other than Bono and company on Sunday.

You can see an amazingly high-quality version of the concert here, though it isn’t embeddable. But here’s a clip of a fake U2 concert from a couple of years ago.

The numbers come from Nielsen’s quarterly “Three Screen” report, which measures eyeballs watching video on TV, on the Web and on mobile devices. And just like the report Nielsen put out three months ago, it shows that even while Americans gobble up more online video, they’re still watching as much TV as they ever have. More, even: The number of viewers increased by 0.9 percent, while the time they spent watching TV increased 1.5 percent.

Here’s how the numbers break down (click tables below to enlarge):

Total number of viewers:

Time spent viewing:

Two different theories, which are not mutually exclusive, may explain the ever-increasing amount of video we’re supposedly gorging on:

• We’re out of work or underemployed, and we’re filling those hours with sitcoms and dogs-on-skateboard clips.
• We’re multitasking and gorging on all of this stuff at the same time.

On that last theory: Nielsen says 57 percent of us are spending at least an hour a month watching Web video and TV at the same time. We’re much more likely to turn on the TV while we’re Web-surfing than vice versa, though.

No surprise, by the way, to see that people are spending more time watching Web video. But interesting to note that while the universe of mobile video watchers has increased, they’re spending less time watching.

For what it’s worth, Nielsen says that short-form clips–like those from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube–make up 83 percent of Web video viewing, while “name-brand TV network content” makes up the majority of mobile video. Note that Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney’s (DIS) ABC, doesn’t have a mobile option, so it can’t claim credit for those eyeballs.

Too many numbers! Time for video. Here’s a clip of the Minnesota Vikings’ (!) Brett Favre from this week’s “Monday Night Football” game. This one has been seen more than half a million times, but there’s no way it’s legal. So it will go down sooner or later–both the NFL and ESPN are pretty zealous about this stuff.

But right now it’s promoted for all to see on YouTube’s homepage. Which means there are still some kinks in the company’s vaunted “ContentID” program.

The Pali Capital researcher has rethought his prediction for Viacom’s 2010 U.S. ad sales and now says they’ll drop by three percent. He previously estimated an increase of two percent.

His logic is straightforward: The cable network conglomerate (MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, etc.) has had a hard time hanging onto viewers, and advertisers are following suit. Greenfield:

The risk to our estimates has increased substantially… particularly with Viacom’s ratings remaining mostly down year-over-year during Q3 qtr-to-date… If Viacom is able to turn its ratings positive over the next couple of quarters and the economic rebound begins to meaningfully impact cable network industry ad spending, Viacom could conceivably grow ad revs in calendar 2010 (as we had been forecasting), however, that feels aggressive.

In Futurama, our characters are thoroughly inundated by advertising, especially subliminal advertising that comes out of your pillow into your dreams.

– Futurama creator Matt Groening, February 1999

How do you persuade TV viewers to watch advertisements when the DVR has accustomed them to skip through them? That’s the dilemma facing television and cable networks today, one that’s so far defied a solution. But perhaps not for much longer.

The Times Online reports that the evil geniuses at Keystream have developed a new overlay advertising system that scans video content for open spaces–an unadorned wall, for instance–and slaps an ad on it, embedding it directly into the programming.

“There’s a lot of potential,” said Simon Fell, head of future technology at ITV, a company that’s testing Keystream’s technology on its ITV Local site. “If there’s a scene in a program where there’s time, then it could give us a chance to get an ad away. But obviously on television you won’t be seeing one of these appearing at a crunch point in a drama.”

Really? In this age of product placement? Ever see the list of brands plugged in the “Sex and The City” movie?

If ITV’s tests prove successful it’s only a matter of time before we begin seeing Garmin GPS ads etched into the beaches of “Lost” or Levitra logos popping up willy-nilly on “Desperate Housewives.”

In Futurama, our characters are thoroughly inundated by advertising, especially subliminal advertising that comes out of your pillow into your dreams.

– Futurama creator Matt Groening, February 1999

How do you persuade TV viewers to watch advertisements when the DVR has accustomed them to skip through them? That’s the dilemma facing television and cable networks today, one that’s so far defied a solution. But perhaps not for much longer.

The Times Online reports that the evil geniuses at Keystream have developed a new overlay advertising system that scans video content for open spaces–an unadorned wall, for instance–and slaps an ad on it, embedding it directly into the programming.

“There’s a lot of potential,” said Simon Fell, head of future technology at ITV, a company that’s testing Keystream’s technology on its ITV Local site. “If there’s a scene in a program where there’s time, then it could give us a chance to get an ad away. But obviously on television you won’t be seeing one of these appearing at a crunch point in a drama.”

Really? In this age of product placement? Ever see the list of brands plugged in the “Sex and The City” movie?

If ITV’s tests prove successful it’s only a matter of time before we begin seeing Garmin GPS ads etched into the beaches of “Lost” or Levitra logos popping up willy-nilly on “Desperate Housewives.”

This morning the video site, which is jointly owned by NBC Universal (GE) and News Corp. (NWS) (which also owns Dow Jones and this site), said it will offer full episodes of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and the “Colbert Report” beginning today. The deal, which brings the popular late-night satirists to the site just in time for the presidential election, is something of a surprise, since Comedy Central parent company Viacom (VIA) has so far refused to sign on to Hulu.

But that may change if this first tentative experiment bears fruit. “I think with success breeds success. It could open some other doors,” said Erik Flannigan, executive vice president of digital media at MTV Networks, the Viacom division that runs Comedy Central. “Hulu in many ways may put the shows in front of some people who might be more casual viewers but who might be interested in what’s going on with the elections.”