Mobile now accounts for 15 percent of all visits to LinkedIn, CEO Jeff Weiner told investors and analysts on the fourth-quarter earnings call. That’s up from 9 percent of traffic that mobile accounted for about halfway through 2011. Growth is coming in part from improved mobile applications and just more customer adoption from those products.

One thing that isn’t growing tremendously in mobile is revenue, however. That could change in the future, as the company looks to add monetization through advertising on mobile devices. “We were very focused on getting the product right and the user experience right,” Weiner said. “Now that that’s in place, we’re going to start to run some tests with ads within the mobile environment.”

Of course, LinkedIn isn’t the only social network that has yet to monetize its mobile apps. Facebook, for instance, has much higher engagement on its mobile apps, with about half of its unique visitors coming from mobile device. It too, doesn’t place ads on those apps yet, something that Facebook highlighted as one of its risk factors in its recent S-1 filing.

The good news for LinkedIn is that to date, mobile isn’t cannibalizing engagement on the company’s website, which it does place ads against. In fact, LinkedIn is seeing an increase in the connection density it gets from mobile users and the number of connections on the network.

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According to the WSJ, the device is “a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company’s own brand.” It’s reportedly been developed over the last few years from within Google’s Android unit, and could possibly stream other media (like video?) to connected devices as well. But to me, the whole thing sounds a whole heck of a lot like what Sonos already does.

Of course, what’s most significant about the story isn’t the type of device that Google is developing, but that it’s considering making hardware at all. Up until this point, Google’s Android unit has developed software that it offers up to consumer electronics manufacturers and lets them do the actual device making. That’s worked for Android mobile phones, tablets and its Google TV devices.

But with the development of Google’s wireless streaming device, as well as its pending acquisition of Motorola Mobility, it appears the company is shifting away from a pure software play to building its own branded hardware as well. Whether or not that’s a smart strategy remains to be seen — the consumer electronics world is notoriously cut-throat, with low margins and intense competition between device makers. That said, having its own hardware capabilities could enable Google to gain a little bit more control over its own destiny, as it positions its Android software and devices against Apple’s vast iOS platform and ecosystems being developed by CE makers like Samsung.

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Today, access to its streaming video service comes bundled with Amazon Prime. But some rumors have emerged lately, suggesting that Amazon could unbundle the service and offer it as a standalone competitor to Netflix or Hulu Plus. That includes a mention from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who wrote in a letter to shareholders that he expects Amazon to introduce the service and price it below Netflix’s own offering.

But Brad Beale, Head of Digital Video Content Acquisition at Amazon, said in an interview Wednesday that the company is unlikely to break out the video subscription offering anytime soon. “The bundle of benefits that come with Amazon Prime make perfect sense to offer to customers,” Beale said. “The way that Prime Instant Video is offered today — we’re going to continue that approach at least into the near future.”

Even before adding the video component, Beale said that Prime was an incredible value. The offering provides free, two-day shipping to customers who pay an annual $79 subscription. We’ve believed for a while that adding video could entice some customers to sign up for Amazon Prime who might otherwise not have — and once they’ve paid the annual subscription fee, they’re likely to take advantage of the free shipping. In that sense, video could be seen as a loss leader for driving more physical retail sales.

There’s also the fact that having a free subscription service could help boost transactional sales through Amazon’s VOD and electronic sell-through offering. While Prime Instant Video has 15,000 titles for free viewing, it doesn’t have many of the latest new release films or in-season TV episodes. For newer content, Amazon offers more than 100,000 titles for rental or purchase. So an Amazon user who got hooked on older seasons of Downton Abbey or Sons of Anarchy on the free service might convert to being a paid user to watch the current seasons of those shows.

As Amazon adds content, it’s also looking to boost awareness of what’s available on the service. That includes placement of a letter from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the site’s homepage, letting the millions of users who stop by every day know what new content is available from Amazon Prime. That kind of promotion is driving awareness and usage, Beale told me. As more customers learn what’s available, and as Amazon continues to improve the offering with even more content, he expects customer adoption to grow even more.

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To set up, Nowbox asks users to specify categories of entertainment that are of interest to them, then to link their YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Once that’s done, they’ll be shown a TV guide-like navigation pane that will look familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a cable channel guide. All of which is the point — Nowbox demystifies the online video experience by serving up channels in the same way most viewers are already used to seeing them.

It has a few other perks as well: for one thing, users are served up a continuous stream of videos, making online video viewing more akin to the type of non-stop stream they’re used to seeing when watching regular TV. Users can swipe back and forth through videos on a particular channel, and since Nowbox pre-caches those videos, they play pretty much instantaneously. Users can star videos as favorites, save them for later or share with friends and followers on social networks.

With more than half a million video views under its belt in less than two months since launch, Nowbox is expanding the app’s feature set to make it even easier to discover new content. For one thing, Nowbox has added a channel of video recommendations based on the categories of content that users signed up for. It’s also added an indicator to highlight new videos as they appear in a user’s channel lineup.

Nowbox is just one of many apps focused on improving discovery of streaming video on the iPad. Other competitors include apps like Showyou, Squrl and the Boxee iPad app. The hope is that Nowbox’s unique channel guide approach, as well as its new features, will extend the play time that users spend with the app. Those users are already showing pretty strong engagement, however: Nowbox founder Thomas Pun told me that users spend 18 minutes with the app per session on average.

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We’ve included a list of the programming Amazon picked up below from Viacom networks such as Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon. Perhaps most interesting in the list are MTV hit Jersey Shore and a wide range of Nickelodeon programming, which could help Amazon enamor itself to subscribers with children.

But the one thing that’s missing from the service is the ability to subscribe without linking the service to Amazon Prime, which gives customers free two-day shipping. While it’s a nice perk, especially to Amazon Prime subscribers like me who overuse the free shipping, not everyone is as interested in that part of the offering. That’s rumored to change, as Amazon could unbundle the video offering from the Prime subscription.

If it ever does roll out a standalone service, Amazon’s quick addition of new content puts it in a position to be a real competitor to Netflix, which is slowly rebounding from last summer’s price increase and customer dissatisfaction around its plans to unbundle and rebrand its DVD-by-mail service. While Netflix’s domestic subscriptions have begun growing again after a down third quarter, the company is seeing increased competition from the likes of Amazon, Hulu Plus and will soon face a new streaming service from Redbox and Verizon.

New Viacom content on Amazon Prime Instant Videos includes:

• Comedy Central: Chappelle’s Show, The Sarah Silverman Program
• MTV: Jersey Shore, The Hard Times of RJ Berger, The Hills
• Nickelodeon: iCarly, Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, Yo Gabba Gabba
• Spike: Deadliest Warrior: The Show and the Aftermath
• TV Land: Hot in Cleveland
• VH1: Love & Hip Hop, Mob Wives

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Interestingly enough, I was discussing the possibility of Apple’s partnering with operators the other day at lunch, before the Bloomberg piece came out. That first piece might seem like a fluke, as it was written based on an analyst note. But with Tuesday’s Globe and Mail story, it seems more likely that the hardware giant is indeed considering some sort of partnership approach to tackling the TV market.

The move isn’t totally unprecedented: After all, Dish Network was one of Google TV’s launch partners, and Verizon has partnered with Microsoft to make its FiOS TV service accessible through the new Xbox Live user interface.

All the content, none of the fuss

By partnering with pay TV operators, Apple would immediately gain access to all the TV content that viewers have come to expect, without having to strike up carriage deals of its own. It is not alone in pursuing this strategy: Microsoft’s Xbox 360, for instance, can be used as a set-top box by AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS subscribers.

In the FiOS case, the program data and channel lineup will be deeply integrated with the Xbox Live service and Bing search engine, which will let viewers discover live TV and video-on-demand content alongside streaming content from services like the Zune Marketplace, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Vudu and YouTube.

I could see Apple’s doing something similar by allowing operator partners to build integrated apps into the new device, which could be used to control channel lineups and program discovery. For Apple, such a move would give it the content it needs to be relevant but allow it to control the overall user experience of search, discovery and navigation.

But what would the operators get out of it? Well, for one thing, integration with the Apple iTV could potentially give them a competitive advantage over their peers. In the U.S., Apple already has relationships with AT&T and Verizon, both of whom could stand to benefit from having the best new iDevice available for customers as they pitch their IPTV services against the more traditional cable offerings. Those operators could be incentivized to push the iTV to their customers and could act as an additional distribution outlet, on top of Apple Stores and the company’s existing big box retail partnerships.

Could AT&T help you buy an iTV?

There is even the possibility that Apple could bring the same subsidy model that exists in the mobile space to TV operators. To a certain extent, carriers already subsidize TV hardware by making set-top boxes available to customers. Assuming an Apple TV product would enable those carriers to deliver cloud- and IP-based programming guides, it could act as a set-top box replacement. Whatever money was being put toward that hardware could be committed to reducing the cost of an Apple iTV purchased by subscribers.

A carrier subsidy could potentially boost adoption for an Apple device’s being launched in a market with traditionally long replacement cycles. Some believe that any introductory Apple TV product would be sold at a premium over existing smart TVs, and a recent Best Buy survey lends some credence to this belief, polling users if they would spend $1,499 for a 42-inch Apple TV device. I personally doubt that Apple would introduce a new product priced so far above existing products, but if there is any premium a subsidy could bring products within parity. And if there isn’t a premium, a subsidy could make the product all that more attractive.

ITV is not just for partners

I don’t believe that any operator partnerships Apple strikes would be exclusive. In the U.S., Apple would likely partner with multiple providers, since their services are only available in certain geographies. As noted above, AT&T and Verizon are the most likely partners in the U.S., but I don’t think Apple would shy away from the same type of deal with a company like Comcast.

Nor would the Apple TV be “broken” if purchased direct from a retailer or if a consumer doesn’t subscribe to an Apple partner. She will get all the same third-party apps and TV coming from her set-top box. There is even the possibility that non-partners could build their own apps for device search and navigation, in the same way that Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others have built iPad apps that can be used as remote controls. But it won’t have the same tight program guide integration. And if there are subsidies involved, it wouldn’t be as cheap as it would be from Apple’s partners.

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Flingo’s software is embedded on 7.8 million Smart TVs and other devices from manufacturers including Samsung, LG, Vizio, Sanyo, Insignia, Western Digital and Netgear. Its technology can be used for building apps that bring streaming Internet video to the TV, while also providing automatic content recognition that knows what program is playing when a viewer is watching live TV.

With that content recognition in place, Flingo can enable broadcasters to build second-screen applications that can send relevant content to a viewer’s TV, laptop, tablet or smartphone. It can also enable on-screen apps so viewers can share what they’re watching with friends and followers on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The company has been bootstrapped since being founded in 2008, but co-founder and CEO Ashwin Navin told me in a phone interview that Flingo had reached a point where it needed additional capital to invest in infrastructure, personnel and for international expansion.

On the infrastructure front, Flingo fingerprints live TV as part of its automatic content recognition scheme, and wants to drastically ramp up the number of channels it indexes. Navin said he wants to be able to fingerprint thousands of channels simultaneously, which will require a fair amount of new infrastructure.

Part of the reason it’s looking to do thousands of channels is that it sees a large international opportunity. Flingo technology today is embedded on devices in 118 countries worldwide. The hope is that it will be able to leverage that footprint by striking deals in more countries. To that end, Navin is spending the next few weeks in Asia, looking to make key hires to expand the startup’s presence there.

Finally, there’s the possibility of some expansion through acquisition. Navin noted that there’s a large amount of talent in the social TV space, and that market segment in particular could see a shakeout soon. “I want to be able to acquire talent and teams” if that happens, he said.

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All of the surveys leveraged Survey Monkey to poll respondents, but the most complete of the three polled the Survey Monkey Audience (SMA) network, racking up 1,124 responses. About 70 percent of respondents from the SMA survey said their spending on entertainment wouldn’t change if priced in the $20-$25 range. But while the majority of users predict no change, the number who say they would spend more outnumber those who predict they would spend less by three to one.

According to Greenfield, that group appeared to be price-sensitive and more likely representative of today’s average consumer that respondents from the other surveys. Those who expected to spend more would be doing so because they saw cost savings from concessions and parking outweighing the difference in price and convenience of watching at home. In addition, some respondents suggested that they were unhappy with the current moviegoing experience.

In aggregate, the survey shows that Hollywood studios would likely make more revenue with the collapse of movie windows. More importantly, those sales would come with better margins since they wouldn’t be sharing with exhibitors. The fear seems to be that putting pressure on the theatrical window could cause some exhibitors to go out of business, which would in turn destroy that distribution channel.

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According to data from Quantcast, Taboola has reach of more than 110 million unique visitors a month. Of those viewers, more than 65 million are in the U.S. alone. As a result, Taboola generates more than 300 million recommendations every day, CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me by email.

While Taboola, which provides a widget for recommended videos, has traditionally been used by news publishers like the New York Times who are trying to expand their available video inventory and advertising revenues, it’s been tapped by two new partners in the live streaming vertical. Ustream and Major League Gaming now both make Taboola recommendations available to their viewers.

With the move to provide recommendations for live streaming viewers, Taboola has had to add capabilities beyond just the contextual targeting that it typically uses to match up video recommendations for users. Because videos are live, the recommendations engine doesn’t have as much data to go on. So Taboola is providing recommendations based on behavioral targeting while viewers are watching live streams.

Outside of the live video market, Taboola has also added new partners. Those include BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, Food Network, The Hollywood Reporter, Daily Caller, Ask Men and Gannett’s Navy Times. With some of those publishers, the Taboola video widget is on every page of their websites.

As publishers try to expand their use of video, they need ways to highlight the content that they’ve produced. Taboola can not only provide recommendations, but can also expand the amount of video available to viewers by recommending those from other publishers and sharing revenues between them.

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The latest version of Showyou includes new ways to navigate content by category or by the social network that they’re pulled in from. There’s also a way for users to search and see all content curated by hashtag on Showyou and via Twitter. Finally, the update provides more information about others that you follow and gives you the ability to see what they’ve been sharing b clicking on a user’s avatar.

The trick to what makes Showyou work is that videos play in-line, without users having to exit the app. That reduces the amount of time it takes between finding videos, and there’s always something interesting being shared in the grid. Showyou displays videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Break Media, some Viacom shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as videos from The Verge, TED and other Internet publishers. Altogether, the Showyou app pulls in about 5 million videos a day, according to Remixation CEO Mark Hall, or about 150 to 200 each second during peak times.

That’s led to huge amounts of user engagement for its users. While session times on most video sites typically run less than 10 minutes, Showyou users watch about 35 to 40 minutes of video whenever they open the app, or about eight videos per session on average. Online video needs better discovery mechanisms for users, and apps like Showyou are helping to increase viewership and keep users tuned in.

(Disclosure: Remixation is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

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YouTube is betting big on original programming, reportedly spending more than $100 million on 100 channels of professional content. Those channels are mostly being focused on various verticals: action sports, for instance, or food or fashion. But while it’s investing in quality, Kamangar told the audience at the D:Dive Into Media conference this week that it’s still too hard to find the stuff people want to watch.

To fix this, YouTube also redesigned its website to highlight content that is relevant to its users. The idea behind the redesign, according to Kamangar, is that once users have selected channels that interest them, they will be shown the newest videos of interest to them. In the same way that viewers typically pick between a handful of favorite TV stations, allowing users to self-select channels could potentially keep them coming back.

It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not perfect. As I’ve noted before, the biggest issue is one of discovery: Once users have chosen the channels that they’d like to subscribe to, it’s difficult to find new content that might be relevant to their interests. Suggested channels — including its featured new channels — are hidden off to the side and below the fold.

Kamangar admitted Tuesday that discovery is still a problem for YouTube. “Google historically has been a search company, so for us to get the discovery and recommendations right, it’s a big challenge. But it’s the kind of challenge that the engineers at Google absolutely love,” Kamagar said.

YouTube is the second-biggest search engine in the world, behind parent Google. But it’s one thing to serve up the right video when a viewer searches for it. It’s a whole other thing to anticipate what a viewer wants to see and help them find it. That’s something YouTube will need to get better at, especially as it tries to increase the average session time that users are staying online for.

The site has a massive number of users stopping by the site every day, but few of them stick around for very long. That’s something the company has been struggling with since its inception. If it’s going to become a bigger competitive threat to traditional programmers, it’ll need to step beyond the hunt-and-peck process of video search and provide better discovery tools.

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Klip users can decide who is in their circle by selecting other users. When it comes time to shoot or upload a video from their camera roll, they can then choose to share the video publicly to the Klip network or privately, just to members of their Circle. Then, members of the Circle videos can have private conversations without worrying that they’ll be viewed by the general public.

Even if a video is originally marked as private on Klip, it can still be shared by the original uploader on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, email and SMS. That said, uploaders can’t switch videos from public to private, or vice versa. They’ll need to re-upload the video if they want to change its status.

While social video sharing apps like Klip have grown in popularity, few of them have tackled the privacy issues associated with sharing everything everywhere. Apps like Socialcam and others are great for sharing videos to a wide audience, but not so great at giving users control over exactly who can see them.

Klip isn’t alone in trying to solve this problem. Vmix’s Givit, for instance, has also released a website and mobile apps for sharing videos privately among friends.

The latest version of Klip — version 2.2 — just became available on the iTunes App Store and can be downloaded now. In addition to private video sharing, it’s also added new features, like the ability to browse all the videos you’ve liked, as well as the ability to broadcast your Klip activity to Facebook through the social network’s Open Graph.

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In laying out the current marketplace, Kamangar estimated that about 20 percent of all video revenues — both online and off — come from sales or rentals, with 40 percent coming from subscriptions and the final 40 percent coming from advertising. It’s his belief that the amount of ad spend will grow as a percentage compared to some of the other business models.

YouTube isn’t totally ruling out the possibility of launching subscription capabilities that content partners could leverage, however. Kamangar gave an example of being able to sign up for individual yoga channels, for instance. While he warned that it’s a bit premature and that YouTube doesn’t currently have a product to announce, it’s definitely something YouTube is thinking about. “We’re a media platform want to be biz model than media partners demand,” Kamangar said.

That comes as YouTube begins to rethink how it positions itself and as it is investing heavily in more than 100 channels of original programming. Kamangar said YouTube is making that investment as a way to catalyze something that’s going to happen and to make it happen more quickly. In that way, he compared YouTube’s funding of original channels with how Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers is catalyzing iOS app investment with the iFund.

“What we’ve learned from our experience with YouTube is that you can’t predict what’s going to be big. We’re trying to place our bets far and wide,” Kamangar said.

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In what is likely his final interview before leaving Warner Music, Bronfman defended Spotify’s ability to drive more value for artists and labels. “Everywhere we look, Spotify is incrementally positive,” Bronfman said. Later in the discussion he noted that the streaming music startup is “a real and growing revenue stream.”

That said, Bronfman noted that part of the success comes from a deal that Warner Music helped to negotiate that passed on more value to labels and artists. “They have Warner Music to thank for a much better economic deal. We insisted on a much stronger deal and refused to sign unless we got that deal,” he said.

In addition to adding additional incremental revenue to the music industry, Bronfman said that Spotify’s model also provides longer-lasting value than some of the other offerings on the market, because consumers access music for longer periods of time than during the usual sales cycle.

“It’s important to note that [Spotify] has a much longer shelf life than downloads,” he said. “In Spotify, a song can live in the streaming world for a long time.”

Bronfman was not as keen on other platforms for distributing music. For instance, unlike all the other major labels, Warner Music doesn’t participate in streaming video service Vevo. “We have a fundamentally different strategy,” Bronfman said. “Vevo aggregates artist content and accrues that value to something called Vevo… We aggregate our content and accrue that value to our artists.”

As for Google Music, which Warner Music also doesn’t participate in, Bronfman said, “Google has to decide if it wants to have a content platform and if it wants to have a platform that’s competitive with other content platforms.”

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At the D:Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday, Kilar highlighted that the company’s content offering is much bigger today than it’s ever been, with more than 330 content partners, not just the three (Fox, NBC and Disney) that hold an ownership stake. He said there’s more content for users, more users and a lot more usage of the site now than at launch.

But while that growth could be seen as a positive for the industry, there’s been some worry that services like Hulu, Netflix and others could eventually eat into existing business models. In response, Kilar likened the onset of Internet video to the invention of TV. When movie studios first looked at that new invention, there was some fear that TV could be a potential threat to their existing business models. And yet, TV created a huge amount of value for the industry.

In the same way, while Internet video is seen as a potentially cannibalizing force to existing models, Kilar theorized that it would grow to become a huge opportunity for Hollywood as time goes on. The important thing is that those media companies should not be blind to consumer behavior and demand as it evolves. “You need to balance that existing business while also planting seeds that can bear fruit as time goes on,” he said.

He also had a very positive view of the online video ecosystem beyond just his own business. “There’s going to be many winners in this space in the next 10 to 15 years,” he said.

Some other takeaways from his interview:

• Kilar said that the $420 million in revenue that Hulu announced at the end of 2011 was not a revenue miss. He said the board plan for the year was for $408 million, but in the first half of the year the company was pacing well above that, which led to the forecast that Hulu could near $500 million for the year. But in the third quarter the ad market softened and pricing changed.
• Hulu expects to spend $500 million on content next year, but won’t need to raise additional capital to pay for it, Kilar confirmed.
• When discussing the various online, mobile and other connected device rights that Hulu and others need to secure, he said it wouldn’t be surprising for our grandkids to look back and chuckle about how a laptop with keys is seen as different from a mobile phone, which is different than a tablet.

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Elance has grown pretty dramatically over the past few years, as more and more jobs move online and work becomes more virtual. To provide more value to its users, the company wants to do more than just connect employers and contractors. That’s why it has a virtual workroom that enables collaborative work and communications tools between them.

In their virtual workrooms, contractors can send messages, submit invoices, respond to to-do lists and other features. And now, Elance has added a new video chat feature to enable more “face-to-face” contact between collaborators, without users having to enter a whole different application to connect.

According to Elance VP of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Ved Sinha, the addition of video chat to the virtual workroom will reduce the friction that comes when employers and contractors work together. While many had previously interfaced through other applications, building the chat window directly into a contractor’s dashboard enables instant communication with the click of a button.

To do this, Elance uses Tokbox’s OpenTok video chat client, which enables businesses to embed video chat into their websites. While there are plenty of video chat offerings available on the market today, Sinha told me by phone that OpenTok was the only solution that allowed Elance to build video chat directly and seamlessly into the virtual workroom.

That was a big advantage for Elance, which wanted to ensure its users didn’t have to open a different client or application to get in touch with one another. And for its clients, the feature should enable better coordination and more productivity.

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