The six-part series A Day With the Hiltons will follow a mother-daughter duo that won an all expenses-paid trip to L.A. to spend the day with Paris, Kathy and Nicky “while they visit a salon, attend an intimate brunch and spend the afternoon shopping.” Not exactly my thing, but an interesting example of a new media distribution partnership nonetheless.

The idea and execution all took place over a period of several weeks. The people behind Kathy Hilton’s My Secret fragrance, friends of FYI CEO Paul Kontonis, came up with the idea for a contest, and Kontonis suggested a web series. FYI brought on TV Guide for digital distribution and was soon in L.A., shooting. “No one else was willing to handle it in a three-week turnaround,” Kontonis said of TV Guide in a phone interview. “It came down to the wire and we were very impressed.”

TV Guide Broadband, which delivered 8.7 million plays in March, has 30-day exclusive distribution rights for the web series, after which it will enter wider distribution. According to Kontonis, rather than a rev share, TV Guide paid an upfront fee for the rights. The series will be promoted tonight on Extra, which owns exclusive rights to video of the brunch; People has exclusive rights to the photos, which it will run in its May 18th issue. “It was interesting for us because we do distribution. We struck a deal with [TV Guide] because we knew we could get much higher traffic through them.”

TV Guide Broadband will syndicate the series through their existing partnerships with Hulu, YouTube, Veoh and other TV Guide Broadband affiliates with which they have existing advertising deals.

Hanging out with Paris has its moments. “The best thing about it was the pure insanity of the paparazzi once we hit the streets,” Kontonis said. But he also said he liked experimenting with what he called “the future of advertising.” As he put it :”It’s a series built for a brand, but it won’t feel like a brand.”

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“We just want to get the technology into people’s hands,” Swarmcast CEO Justin Chapweske said in a phone interview. “I hope that with this product we can provide the platform that solves the quality problem for online video and allows developers to focus on innovating the user experience itself.”

Above: Full Screen 720P Video Using Autobahn HD for Flash

In a demo, the video quickly shifted up to a fluid, high-quality stream on a shared wireless connection. Autobahn is capable of 720P HD, and the combination of network acceleration, multisource streaming and hardware acceleration that comes with the latest Flash release makes for a great viewing experience.

Swarmcast, which was founded by Chapweske in 2001, is best known for powering MLB.com’s Mosaic, which enables high-quality, live streaming of up to six games simultaneously. The company is privately held and funded by a pair of Japanese companies, Bridge Capital Fund and Nippon Venture Capital.

Swarmcast’s network acceleration works by distributing content over multiple CDNs, using the intelligence in the downloaded client to determine the most efficient routing and appropriate bitrate. “What we’re doing with this product is basically eliminating rebuffering, which allows higher quality and high-definition, full-screen video,” Chapweske said. “Breaking large files into small pieces — that’s the technology that underlies our network acceleration. The new pieces are the adaptive bitrate streaming and the fact that we’re bringing this to a Flash environment.”

While a number of companies have begun to offer higher quality video, most are prohibitively expensive to all but the biggest media companies. Move Networks, which powers ABC’s online video portal, similarly uses a downloadable client to provide the best possible quality for the end user, but it requires specialized encoders and is a very high-end solution. Speedbit offers a similar video accelerator that improves online video playback, but it’s not open source, is limited to specific sites and does not support adaptive bitrate streaming.

Hulu recently announced plans to offer HD content, as did Vimeo, but both deliver content in a single, high-bitrate stream across a single CDN, meaning that without enough bandwidth, user experience suffers.

If it can gain widespread acceptance, this release will result in a better viewing experience for consumers of online content all over the web, not just on mainstream media sites with big dollars.

Disclosure: Swarmcast is a NewTeeVee sponsor

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Representatives from Disney/ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV, and the BBC joined new media companies including Heavy Joost and blip.tv in a discussion over the disrupted industry that is television and where new media is taking us. Questions abound as to how UGC will be monetized — especially since it seems ad companies are most interested in servicing professional video.

The key, according to MTV’s Kenny Miller, is that UGTV needs to be good TV. Most content consumed online is professionally produced. Joey Jodar of Heavy.com said that the TV category remains the most viewed area of that site.

While there is a massive amount of UGC online thanks to the democratization of production and distribution, promotion is the one area in which mainstream media still has a strong advantage.

Shelly Palmer, who runs the Emmy’s Advanced Media Committee and produces a video podcast, was the only true UGC producer on the panel. Time, these days he said is the only real barrier to entry for content creators. To edit together a daily podcast takes time, and creating a five-minute video that looks good takes skill. Palmer believes that passion is what will set successful content creators apart.

For the mainstream media companies, their aim is to increase interaction. One of the ways MTV is doing this is with a feature called “vomments”, viewer comments which show up as pop-up messages overlaid on video. Users on the-n.com can interact with everyone watching or to limit vommenting only to their friends (screenshot below; see our coverage from MTV’s presentation at another New York video event).

Heavy.com, despite getting the most traffic from TV content, has successfully monetized UGC and is proud of it. Heavy generates interest with innovative contests and sponsorship option such as its Canadian Contraband battle of the bands, which Virgin Mobile is sponsoring. The advantage for aggregated content sites like Heavy is that the most-watched videos drive views of other content, and thus other ads, improving the overall bottom line.

The vast majority of independent content producers will never reach an audience large enough to monetize their content in the same way that mainstream media does, but they won’t need to. As UGC provides more specific content, it will allow greater opportunities for marketers to get closer to the people they most want to reach, and that will be far more valuable than traditional advertising.

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