Yahoo was in talks to buy as much as 75 percent of Dailymotion, with an option to buy the remaining 25 percent at a later date. The deal would have valued Dailymotion at around $300 million — but it wasn’t meant to be: Regulators resisted the idea that Dailymotion would be owned by an American company, and wanted to restrict Yahoo’s ownership to 50 percent. Yahoo declined.

This puts an end to what would have been Yahoo’s first major acquisition since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO last July, and it would also have been the company’s first major attempt to compete with YouTube since it shut down its own video hosting service in 2010.

So where is Yahoo going to look next to boost its online video business? Here are a few ideas:

Blip: Blip is one of the few remaining independent U.S. video platforms, and the service has undergone an ambitious transition from a catch-all for online video to a platform for premium serialized content — the kind of stuff advertisers like. This could be a good match for Yahoo, which has eyeballs, but needs inventory to place ads against.

Ustream: The one area in which YouTube is still vulnerable is live video. Granted, the Google-owned video service has been offering live streaming to select partners for some time. But it’s live video section is a mess, and the only bright spots have been large live events. Ustream could help Yahoo to get a headstart in live video, while at the same time providing the company with a site that already offers offers hosting for recorded videos as well.

PPLive: The Chinese video market is huge, with billions tuning in every month. It’s also not exactly profitable, which has led to consolidation, and could help Yahoo to buy one of the country’s many video providers on the cheap. Standalone video properties like PPLive and Xunlei are the most likely targets, and could help Yahoo to build a video business across Asia and beyond. Of course, there’s that whole China thing, but Mayer has proven that she’s not afraid of unpopular decisions.

Flickr: The Yahoo-owned image hosting site has enjoyed a bit of a comeback in recent months. And guess what: Flickr has been offering video hosting for five years already. Video has been a bit of an afterthought for Flickr, but Yahoo could certainly change that if it wanted to. The advantage of this approach would be that all the resources are already part of Yahoo — and historically, integrating acquisitions has been one of the things that Yahoo has struggled with a lot.

Who do you think Yahoo should buy instead of Dailymotion? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

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The problem is that most things are in silos and there’s precious little in the way of cross-platform continuity for the listener. Which is why Musicplayr, a Berlin/Cologne-based service that offers just that for most free online music, sounds pretty good right now.

Musicplayr users can pull in content from all sorts of free music platforms, both audio and video, to create a unified playlist. The site’s player is itself embeddable, and on Thursday it got a whole lot prettier: audio-only tracks now get accompanying pictures, and the player window can also now be continuously visible. The startup calls it “eye candy for the ears”.

If you want to run off and check it out before reading further, fire off an email to gigaom@musicplayr.com – the first 200 to do so will get an invite. Yes, it’s not entirely open at the moment, but those who are already in can invite others.

“Technically we only store the deep links – we are not altering or caching this content,” co-founder Thorsten Lüttger told me. “We want to make all three parties happy – one party is the consumers, the others are the labels and the producers-slash-artists. All of them have to be happy. The content owner stays in control.”

Avoiding the GEMA trap

The legality of Musicplayr’s approach has been a careful consideration for Lüttger and co-founder Stefan Vosskötter. However, one party Musicplayr hasn’t even bothered approaching is Germany’s much-loathed music rights collection society, GEMA, a.k.a. the organisation that broke YouTube for Germans. As far as Lüttger is concerned, it doesn’t matter too much what GEMA makes of the startup’s business model when the company is thinking about being a global product.

“We can build this model without Germany as well,” he said. “Technically we are a bookmark service – what we are doing is open. The songs GEMA has taken down from YouTube we [automatically] do not play in Germany, but the moment you cross the border into the Netherlands, we play it for you. It’s something where the German consumer has to suffer and it’s not our mission to solve this problem. It has to be solved between GEMA and those providers; we’re just the middleman.”

Brave words. So if Germany’s not necessarily Musicplayr’s main focus, where is? Western Europe and the U.S., apparently. Lüttger believes services such Spotify, which also offers an embeddable player, have given people a taste of the idea already.

However, he pointed out that Spotify’s player is “basically a download link to their app”, whereas people listening to someone’s embedded Musicplayr don’t need to download anything.

“I believe Spotify is opening up people’s minds that you do not need to own music. This all-you-can-eat flat rate is awesome, and I’m glad they’re successful,” he said. “We are going even further, because we help you archive all freely available content.”

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Well, it seems the party has come to an end. The reality check is eerily reminiscent of the decline in attention for social news-reader applications. AppData.com statistics show a sharp decline in the number of daily active users of these services.

In my post yesterday, Facebook giveth & Facebook taketh: A curious case of video apps, I had pointed out that this was going to be a short-lived bump and the focus for apps cannot be on raw numbers but on retention and usage. That is, and will remain, the hard part of these apps. Finding sustainable growth is not an easy challenge.

As we have pointed out in the past, it is much easier to take and share photos (hence the popularity of Instagram) but capturing, editing and sharing videos is not as easy. Viddy, one of the social video creation and sharing apps, is betting that its roster of celebrity investors and friends would give the company a much needed jump start. Today, Justin Beiber signed up for Viddy and has been sharing his videos.

Socialcam, which had been injecting YouTube videos and sharing them through its player, is now going to have to find new and novel ways to share. The company made some changes today that are less spammy and address many of the issues I had brought up in my post yesterday.

Michael Seibel, CEO of Socialcam, in an email wrote:

1. When you auth the FB app instead of saying Ok, Watch Video it says allow or Go to App (Facebook default language.)
2. When you go to the Socialcam website there is a clear pop up explaining Social Mode.
3. There is an uninstall Socialcam link in the blue Facebook box below the video.
4. On Youtube videos Youtube branding is made extremely clear with Youtube approved logos.
5. Any Youtube video in related is also clearly branded.
6. Social Mode stay off when you switch browsers and/or log out.
7. If you turn Social Mode off on the app or the website it will reflect on the other (it doesn’t display correctly on the app – we are pushing a new version to address this – but it won’t push any Facebook actions.)

Now the hard part begins.

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Some of the other services available on the device will include QTom, a German Vevo competitor and TuneIn radio. Apps will also be available to facilitate music playback, games, VOD and catch-up video playback. Uppleva TVs will also come with an open Web browser, which reportedly is Opera for TV.

Ikea announced its Uppleva TV product, which integrates the TV into living room furniture, in April. However, the company didn’t reveal many details about the inner workings of the device. Here are a few things we have learned since:

• Uppleva will come with an integrated Blu-ray player.
• The TV is being built by China’s TLC.
• It will come with a wireless subwoover.
• Uppleva will be available with screen sizes ranging from 24 inches to 46 inches, and will start selling for around $960.
• Ikea will sell Uppleva in a few select stores in Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Sweden next month, then target additional stores and territories in Europe come fall, and bring Uppleva to the U.S. in 2013.

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Orange says the Xbox service will include 30 channels via the Xbox live platform, including its on-demand and premium channels that it offers through its Orange TV service. It will be available initially only in France. Meanwhile, the Dailymotion service will see Orange launching a new, free 3D channel on the Dailymotion platform. That will be available everywhere, although the content is all in French.

The Xbox service will include the ability for those who have Kinect for Xbox to use voice and gesture controls with Orange’s TV service — perhaps the biggest way that this differs from the other ways you can already access Orange TV via set-top boxes, connected TVs and the Internet.

While there have been a lot of 3D services and devices launched in the last year or so, it remains to be seen whether this is a gimmicky add-on that comes and goes, or whether consumers really have the appetite for such products. The Kinect enablement, however, is a keeper: the technology has provided a huge boost for Microsoft in the past year and it’s likely we will see more competing TV services entering the market in the year ahead.

For that reason, Microsoft has been busily ramping up its own Xbox/Kinect TV offerings: not only is it enabling TV services itself, but it is signing up IPTV providers, in addition to Orange, to the service — most notably, Verizon and Microsoft have announced that FiOS will also be on the platform.

Gaming consoles are a good channel for pay-TV providers to keep tapping: a survey from Nielsen yesterday revealed that video is already a very popular use of these consoles. In the U.S., 14 percent of Xbox 360 time, 15 percent of PS3 time and 33 percent of Wii time is being spent on video viewing, watching channels like Hulu, Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and ESPN.

And IPTV providers really need all the help they can get: they launched services relatively late compared to other pay-TV products from satellite and cable providers, in addition to all the OTT competition. Pyramid Research forecasts that IPTV will be installed in only one percent of all broadband enabled homes worldwide by 2012.

Of course, the Xbox service will also give Microsoft a boost in marketing its consoles in the French market, where France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) is the IPTV leader and will be selling the console in its stores as part of the deal. It looks like it is the only IPTV provider in the market to team up with Microsoft exclusively for the Xbox/Kinect service, at least for now.

Meanwhile, the Dailymotion channel shows how Orange is also using the OTT route to market its own services, and possibly grow its traffic there as well.

The service includes what looks like a selection of content from the carrier’s existing paid 3D channel — which incidentally is also available via the Xbox service. It includes Mag3D, a 30-minute 3D gadget program, as well as some TV and film content. It will also be featuring user-generated content: Dailymotion users have the option of designating their videos as 3D for them to appear in the channel.

As this line-up is designated as “for launch”, there is a chance we’ll see Orange launching more, and possibly paid, services on the channel. It already notes that it will have a mobile version of the service available by February 2012.

Orange, which is a 49-percent owner of Dailymotion, has used the investment to further its business reach online before, including an advertising deal announced earlier this year.

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Vodafone yesterday reported results that indicated that data revenue is still growing strong, rising by 23.8 percent to £3.1 billion across the group. Data now accounts for 14 percent of the group’s service revenue. Similarly smartphones are going gangbusters: in Europe they now account for 21.7 percent of all mobiles on Vodafone networks. Vodafone notes that 58.7 percent of those smartphone users take data allowances with their devices. And in Germany the company has picked up 50,000 LTE customers since launching the service in September.

But in terms overall revenues, which take into account the declines in voice revenues, growth in Europe has slowed right down, with service revenues for the region actually declining by 1.3 percent for the first half of the year.

European countries where Vodafone’s operations have been hit the worst are those being slammed in the current economic crisis: Spain’s service revenues were down by 9.6 percent, while Italy’s were down 2.3 percent. Greece’s revenues are not broken out in Vodafone’s balance sheet (they are listed under “others”) although the company did admit to taking a £450 million ($725 million) charge for that operation.

Not so though in emerging markets, which Vodafone points out are in many seeing higher GDP growth than their European counterparts. Revenues in India were up by 18.4 percent; South Africa’s Vodacom was up 7.3 percent and Turkey up 27.9 percent.

“Vodafone is becoming a little more an emerging market company and a little bit less a European company,” CEO Vittorio Colao said during Vodafone’s earnings presentation (via Guardian).

Overall the company reported revenues up 4.1 percent to £23.5 billion ($37.8 billion), with pretax profits up 2.3 percent rise to £7.5 billion ($12 billion), and increased its dividend payment to shareholders by seven percent: it will pay out £4.7 billion in ordinary dividends this financial year, and an additional £2 billion in January, partly fuelled by earnings at Verizon, which will be paying out a dividend to 45 percent owner Vodafone for the first time in six years.

Vodafone’s focus on and benefits from fast-growing markets outside of Europe is in contrast to some of the recent investments announced by France Telecom/Orange, which appears to be looking to developing new services closer to home as a way of expanding its business, with the start of a VC fund with Publicis and an investment in a French social media company.

Of course, Orange too has extensive holdings outside of Europe, with operations in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, but in the last few days it has proven that it is also focusing on growing revenues at home with a series of new media investments.

Orange has paid €14 million ($19 million) to take a 34.15 percent minority interest in Cascadia, a newly-formed company that holds the web operations for Skyrock, a French radio station targeting 12-24 year-olds.

The deal does not signal a move into traditional radio for Orange; it’s for Orange to get more exposure to young people through new media services, and enhance the services it offers to its existing subscribers — a strategy it has already been investing in with its stakes in streaming music provider Deezer and online video company Dailymotion.

The web operations mainly consist of a blog platform on Skyrock.com, which Orange says is the leading blog platform in France with over one billion page views per month covering some 33 million active blogs. But the company also runs an instant messaging service and is now exploring “future geo-localized and group messaging services for mobile users.”

Orange is looking to leverage the investment with its other holdings from the word go. Skyrock.com and Dailymotion will promote each other regularly, and Orange’s R&D and design teams will work with those of Skyrock.com on new services. Skyrock will also help sell advertising for both Deezer and Liveradio — which, if successful, might prove to be a most direct impact of all on the revenues of these other ventures.

That is not the only investment that Orange has committed to in the last few days: it is also teaming up with the advertising giant Publicis to start a VC fund that the two say digital technology startups.

Among the “likely sectors” are marketing, e-commerce, mobile content and services, online gaming and social networks; as well as related technologies and infrastructures such as middleware, cloud computing, security, and online payments.

The two are jointly putting in €150 million ($208 million) and are looking for more investors to bring the total up to €300 million. The amount invested in each project will vary depending on the stage of funding although the two say that a typical amount for a late-stage investment might be €15 million ($20.8 million).

Which route is likely to yield better returns for the two carriers: more investment abroad or drilling down at home? It will be interesting to see which approach proves the more successful.

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The announcement follows on from last week’s news that Deezer would be extending its service to the UK, headed up by new MD Mark Foster, who has had a long career in the music industry, with executive positions at Warner Music and other labels.

According to the release from Orange, Orange will be the exclusive partner for Deezer Mobile, a service that gives users unlimited access to the whole of the Deezer catalog of 13 million tracks on their phones.

Orange will be using the service as an incentive to would-be customers: those who sign up for Deezer independently will need to pay $9.99 per month to access music tracks, albums, radio channels, recommendations and supplementary content. But those who sign up for Orange’s Pay Monthly “Panther” tariffs — price: between £25 and £80 per month on a 24-month contract — will get a mobile-only version of the service bundled into those phone deals. It’s not clear whether T-Mobile, as Orange’s partner in Everything Everywhere, will have access to offering the service as well.

As it does in France, Deezer will also offer its radio station service — where a user cannot choose which specific tracks are included — free of charge.

Will this deal bring in the masses? We have seen a number of partnerships between mobile operators and streaming music companies — Music Station was an early mover with deals with Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) and others (and has more recently moved into a music streaming service with RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) on the BBM social network); and Spotify works with 3UK, Telia and Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) — but it’s unclear whether any of these have hit the high notes everyone was expecting.

But given the current buzz around cloud-based media services and the growing ubiquity of smartphones, we are likely to see more partnerships anyway.

This is not the first time that Orange and Deezer have worked together. In 2010, Orange took a minority stake in the company and the two have been offering a music service since August 2010 in France. While the two have not revealed how many subscribers they have today, the partnership picked up 500,000 in the first six months of operation — a number that is likely to have grown, as the service is bundled into Orange’s broadband and mobile content offerings in France, where it is the most dominant player on both platforms.

Deezer says that overall it has a total of 20 million subscribers worldwide, with services not only across France, but also Germany, Italy and Spain. Of that 20 million, there are 1.2 million taking premium packages. The rest listen using the Deezer’s free radio stations.

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The new design features a revamped home page, as well as new category, search and show pages all designed to better show off the wide variety of independent web series content that is available through the site. With the goal of highlighting its shows, each featured web series has a thumbnail image on the front page, alongside a 16×9 screenshot of a featured video. Shows that make it to the front page are editorially picked by the startup’s programming team.

But there’s more than just the front page — individual show pages allow video producers to customize the experience by adding their own series art, as well as highlighting episodes that they think viewers should catch up on. For scripted shows, that will probably mean the first episode of the series and the most recent episode, so that viewers can start a series from the beginning if they’re not familiar with the show, or they can tune into the most recent episode if they’re already fans.

Finally, Blip.tv has revamped category and search pages. Category pages bring up a whole-page ‘theater’ approach to displaying videos, and launching a video brings up a lean-back type playlist of relevant content from that category. And an improved search experience means that viewers will be able to find the shows they want to watch even faster.

Blip.tv began work on the redesign after talking with a number of web series creators and viewers and finding that one thing holding back the independent web video world was that many found it too chaotic. While broadcast shows have Hulu as an aggregation point for browsing and watching TV content, there’s no comparable destination site for the independent web video creators. As a result, the redesign could change the way web series creators think about Blip.tv, not just as a platform for shipping their shows out to other sites — like YouTube — but as a destination in and of itself.

“A lot of people love the idea of finding great web series, but they didn’t know where to go,” Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack told us in a phone interview. Later, he said: “There has been no place to showcase original web series. So we think this is a really important step in moving industry forward.”

That said, not everyone is getting the new treatment: Of the 50,000 producers that use Blip.tv for distribution, only about 1,800 shows will actually be featured as part of the new destination site. Explaining why, Hudack said that Blip.tv wants the new site to highlight the best of what it has to offer, and compared its philosophy of series selection as the difference between the Apple App Store, which requires approval to become a part of the ecosystem, and the Android Marketplace, where anyone can publish an application.

So what determines which shows become a part of the new Blip.tv? Hudack said the company is not trying to make judgments about what’s going to be popular, but instead looks at how much work creators have put into their series, makes sure that they have a certain quality of production value and also that shows are regularly producing new content. Shows that aren’t part of the new design will still be supported with legacy show pages. And Hudack said the hope is that creators who aren’t part of the launch will be able to work with the programming team to improve their shows and be added later to the revamped site.

With the redesign, Blip.tv has expanded its content team, which is now eight employees and growing. Headed up by Senior Director of Network Programming Eric Mortenson, that team is tasked with identifying promising web series and shepherding them through the process of updating their show pages to match the new format. It is also splitting up product development into two teams: one to work on the consumer-facing video site, and another to continue improving the producer dashboard and backend technology.

The redesign also sort of brings Blip.tv back around full circle: The site launched back in 2005 as a place for web series creators to upload and highlight their shows. But the company soon realized that what creators really needed was a way to build an audience across the web, so it built a distribution network that enables web series creators to send their shows out to other syndication sites. Later, it built a sales force to help monetize their shows.

Blip.tv has a 50-50 ad revenue split with creators that use the platform, and some are making serious cash through distributing and selling ads with Blip.tv. Hudack said some creators made more than half a million dollars on Blip.tv last year, and it expects to have some making more than a million this year. The site redesign will hopefully help accelerate viewership and monetization, by creating a clean, well-lit place for web series to be discovered and viewed.

That will also hopefully create new advertising opportunities for Blip.tv’s sales force. T-Mobile USA is the launch sponsor of the new site, and the company said that there’s an opportunity for whole-site takeovers, individual channel sponsorships, as well as regular display ad opportunities as part of the redesign.

While the market is still extremely fragmented, Blip.tv’s plans to create a destination site for independent web video series could come up against some serious competition soon. YouTube has created an entire category page for web originals, and is investing heavily in independent producers with its YouTube Next program and Creator Institute. And there are reports that YouTube’s next step will be to create channels of content which could highlight independent web series. But YouTube and Blip.tv aren’t alone in courting independent producers: Hulu is increasing the amount of made-for-the-web content it distributes, and Vimeo and Dailymotion are also working hard to sign up independents.

For Blip.tv, the competitive advantage may just be that it serves up only independent web series. While other sites host a mix of professional, semi-pro and even UGC content, with its redesign Blip.tv is telling the world that it is solely focused on bringing out only the best video content made strictly for the web.

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Marcus led Dailymotion’s North American operations since being launched her way back in 2007. In that time, Dailymotion has seen some pretty fantastic expansion, growing into the second-largest video site in the world behind YouTube. Prior to her role at Dailymotion, Marcus also held executive roles at Time Warner, Barnesandnoble.com and MTV.

Taking Marcus’ place will be Roland Hamilton, who’s served as SVP of Sales for Dailymotion US for the past two years. Hamilton has more than 15 years of experience working for media companies such as CBS, NBC, and Fox, among others.

While YouTube has spent its time partnering on non-exclusive revenue-share distribution deals with video creators, Dailymotion has taken a bit of a contrarian approach, striking exclusive deals for content with web video series creators. Although Dailymotion is based in France, about 80 percent of its viewership comes from outside that country. It also has some multiplatform distribution, with iPhone, iPad and Android apps.

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The key here is that Orange needs to augment its TV business with online distribution before someone else disrupts it. Dailymotion, which many refer to as the YouTube of Europe, will give Orange entrée into the international online video market, giving it more options for serving up content in places where consumers are likely to view it. Like Comcast’s purchase of Fandango — which was at the heart of its Fancast online video portal and now its Xfinity TV Everywhere service — Orange’s stake in Dailymotion is designed to accelerate its ability to serve content to a web audience.

Furthermore, the deal gives Orange access to an increasingly multiplatform and international distribution mechanism. In addition to its web presence, Dailymotion also has iPhone, iPad and Android apps for mobile distribution. The video site will also enable Orange to reach a wider international audience. Approximately 80 percent of Dailymotion’s audience exists outside of France; for Orange, which operates in 32 countries worldwide, the deal gives it instant access to millions of new viewers worldwide.

Dailymotion is currently the second-largest video site in the world behind YouTube, with revenues reported to be around €18 million. According to investor Fred Destin, the site also reached breakeven in 2010. For Dailymotion investors, this is a pretty favorable outcome, with the deal valuing Dailymotion at approximately €120 million ($163 million), after they had invested about €47 million ($64 million) in the company over the past several years. The deal will look even better if Orange picks up its option in 2013 to acquire the remainder of Dailymotion, which could happen at a valuation of up to €200 million ($272 million).

While that pales in comparison to the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube by Google years ago, at least Dailymotion can say it survived the web video shakeout that claimed Veoh, Joost and other video aggregation sites — and it’s at least profitable, which is something that YouTube still can’t say.

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