Today, AOL has mostly bounced back and its CEO Tim Armstrong, who survived an ugly proxy fight last year, seems to feel vindicated. At the Paley Center for Media in New York on Thursday morning, he explained why he bet on a content strategy to turn the company around.

“Silicon Valley is a pig pile ..  Everyone is putting out the same services, the devices have become more commoditized and the platforms are the same,” said Armstrong. He added that, over time, content is what will differentiate the platforms and that AOL’s strategy is to be the content “arms dealer to Silicon Valley.”

To achieve this, AOL is pushing forward with an expensive video strategy that involves, in large part, turning the Huffington Post Live into a new type of cable channel. Armstrong says he sees AOL’s video ambitions as a “Clay Christensen type disruption” and that its potential will only expand as mobile technology improves. He added that AOL will also rely on its cable partnerships to feed the appetite for content.

Armstrong also addressed the future of Patch, AOL’s network of hyper-local sites that have lost a spectacular amount of money and been a punching bag for shareholders and media pundits. He acknowledged that “there’s a lot of dead soldiers on the local hill” and that other efforts, like NBC’s EveryBlock, have flamed out. But he thinks Patch still has a chance.

“The journalism world pounds on Patch,” said Armstrong, but pointed out that the sites have become a fixture of hundreds of local communities and that Patch’s viability should be seen through a long lens. He added that Patch reaches nine percent of the US population but also 20 percent of the country’s commercial markets, and that the sites will be profitable by the end of the year.

In response to a query if AOL’s content appetite might include Time Warner’s magazine empire which is now for sale, Armstrong demurred. “I’m a fan of the brands,” he said, but added that the economics for such a deal wouldn’t work.

AOL’s current feel-good moment is reflected in its share price which is outpacing other media companies and the stock market as a whole (red line is the overall Dow index):

Despite Armstrong’s optimism, however, there are still plenty of reasons to be cautious about AOL. The stock’s high-flying performance is driven in part by a billion dollar patent sale and, for now, AOL still has to prove that it can make its content and ad units profitable. As Henry Blodget pointed out last month, AOL’s revenues may be growing for the first time in eight years but nearly all of its profits continue to come from selling copper wire internet connections to dial-up subscribers.

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The move comes on the heels of earlier news that a rumored sale of Time Warner magazines to Iowa-based Meredith has fallen through. Under the terms of that proposed deal, Meredith would have acquired lifestyle and women’s interest brands like People.

Instead, Time Warner’s magazines will be slotted into a stand-alone corporation last year. In the company’s news release, CEO Jeff Bewkes said the move would be similar to earlier spin-offs involving Time Warner Cable and AOL.

“After a thorough review of options, we believe that a separation will better position both Time Warner and Time Inc. A complete spin-off of Time Inc. provides strategic clarity for Time Warner Inc., enabling us to focus entirely on our television networks and film and TV production businesses, and improves our growth profile,” said Bewkes, adding that current Time Inc. CEO Laura Lang will stay on in the short term for the transition but will soon step down.

The spin-off is likely to mean layoffs or closures at the newly independent magazine entity. In recent years, Time Warner has reaped large profits on its TV content but the magazines, despite their iconic status, have struggled in the face of an ongoing secular decline.

The split also mirrors what took place at media giant News Corp., which last year announced plans to move its publishing assets into a separate company.

According to New York Times sources, the Meredith deal failed to come through after Time Warner could not agree on money nor on what to do with four core titles — Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money — that Meredith did not want to take on.

Time Warner has not indicated how much equity it will retain in the newly spun-off corporation nor whether it will keep the “Time” in its name in the future. Not long ago, the company was known as AOL Time Warner; now, the Warner part is all that is left.

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According to the Fortune article, which cited unidentified sources:

In one scenario, most of the company’s publishing titles, such as People, InStyle, and Real Simple, would be carved out and rolled into an independent company and sold to the undisclosed buyer. Under this plan, Time Warner would maintain control of at least three titles – Time, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune – according to the sources. A Time Warner spokesman says, “We never comment on speculations of this nature.”

The New York Times, also citing unidentified sources, elaborated that “Meredith did not express interest in purchasing Time Inc.’s sluggish news titles.”

In 2012, Time Inc. contributed $3.4 billion in revenue to Time Warner’s total revenues of $28.7 billion — a decline from 2011, which the company attributed to lower subscription and advertising revenues. The publishing division laid off about 500 people — roughly 6 percent of its global workforce — in January.

It’s unclear who a potential buyer for Time Inc. might be. BDT Capital, the bank that Fortune reports is involved in the deal, has ties to Warren Buffett, leading AdAge to speculate that Buffett could be involved in the deal.

This story was updated at 5:00 p.m. ET to reflect reports from the WSJ and NYT that Time Inc.’s potential buyer is Meredith.

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Speaking Friday morning in New York, Bewkes also expressed confidence that the TV business is not threatened by the likes of Netflix or Amazon because these services are largely distribution platforms that don’t own the quality content audiences want to watch. He added that such platforms compete with each other and not with traditional TV companies.

“It’s a good thing to have more of them,” said Bewkes, adding that multiple universal platforms are good for consumers because they mean the content industry “can’t be held hostage” to a given distributor.

Despite his dismissal of cord-cutting, Bewkes did acknowledge the emergence of “cord nevers,” which are younger people who never acquire cable in the first place. For them, he said it’s not a question of money — “they can afford three Starbucks a day” — but rather different habits and expectations. Bewkes pointed out that the “cord nevers” are not receiving the best content (it will be interesting to see if this argument one day sways them into signing up).

In the meantime, the traditional cable model is under other strains, including the spiraling cost of sports. As Bewkes noted, “half of the population that doesn’t want sports is subsidizing the other half that does” because the former are forced to buy expensive sports channels they don’t want as part of their cable plans.

All of this suggests that the cable industry will finally have to give in and offer consumers a full-blown a la carte model — but don’t hold your breath. As Peter Kafka has pointed out, even a company as rich and powerful as Apple has proved incapable of dislodging “the TV industrial complex.” The simple reality is that the mighty incumbents are going to ensure that a cable subscription remains a toll to get access to things like HBO and the NFL on the iPad.

Finally, there is the question of advertising. According to Bewkes, advertising-only models are not viable for most types of content, pointing to the era of the big three networks as a “wasteland” for TV. He called on companies to make more ads that people want to watch, citing a James Bond trailer or ads in GQ magazine as examples.

Bewkes made the remarks during a chat with Reuters’ Chrystia Freeland at the Paley Center for Media’s “Innovation without Borders” event. (Highlights available here).

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While the lawsuit campaign has been underway for several years, the studio has lately become much more aggressive. A review of court records shows that Warner Bros has filed nearly 50 cases against Amazon sellers in the last three months alone, compared to only a handful of such suits in 2010.

The studio, which is the parent of popular network HBO, appears to be targeting organized rings of bootleg sellers. A complaint filed this week in Ohio, for instance, names Ben James, who does business under the Amazon name Wolverines23. But it also lists “John Does 1-10″ who are unidentified individuals helping James manufacture and sell DVDs.

Amazon customer reviews for Wolverines23 are generally favorable and include comments like “Brand new DVD!” and “Packaged well and in perfect condition.”

None of the recent Time Warner complaints name Amazon directly.

The complaints ask for damages and an order to seize “screens,” “molds,” “machines” and other equipment related to DVD and packaging operations.

Here’s a sample complaint:

Time Warner v Amazon Sellers

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We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

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Users opening the new m.people.com will see a change in content as well as design — instead of a curated news and photo feed created for snacking, the new mobile People offers the complete desktop content. For instance, mobile users will be able to read People.com’s celebrity blogs. And they will see a new ad format for Time Inc., a “snap banner” that sits at the bottom of the page but scrolls down the screen with the user and “snaps” into place when they stop.

The shift in content strategy comes from user behavior as more sophisticated devices emerged, Liz White, general manager of People Digital and Tony Brancato, senior product director, told paidContent in an interview as the site was relaunching. “Call what we had before version 1.5,” said White. “The initial version was us operating on the assumption that people were coming to the mobile phone to snack.” But when 25 percent of mobile users spend 5 minutes or more on the site, they’re coming for more than a quick snack. They also may be visiting from a variety of screens throughout the day.

White says People‘s mobile site has more than 4.5 million monthly uniques, according to Nielsen Mobile, and White says mobile accounts for about 10 percent of all People.com pageviews. People.com claims 13 million unique users a month and more than 1 billion pageviews. The majority come from iOS but Android is gaining. Kindle Fire is “a blip but it we see it growing; market share is picking up,” said Brancato. They’re also keeping an eye on Google’s Nexus 7.

The costs of a redesign make the switch to responsive a little more expensive on the front end, Brancato said, but People will save probably five times the cost in the long run in terms of upkeep and the editors’ ability to manage the site. For White, “The driving force is the unity of the user experience. As responsive design takes hold consumer benefits are huge, as are the brand benefits from making sure the consumer experience is viable on all devices.” Responsive design means the site should be able to adapt to new devices as they emerge.

The new m.people.com is also being edited specifically for mobile with “dayparting” in mind — changing the kinds of content that are highlighted to match or encourage certain kinds of user behavior at different times of day. For instance, Monday morning visitors will be offered a “what you missed” wrap up for the weekend, while evening users will get companion content for primetime shows like The Bacholorette finale. “We know people have more time to linger during lunch, after dinner,” said White. The slide below shows how people are using m.people.com throughout the day.

People has hired an editor for mobile — a first for the magazine and another first for Time Inc., recognition that offering the same content across platform doesn’t equal shoveling the same content. “Like most sites when we first launched, it was basically a feed taken from the desktop site built of a flawed assumption that people want the same kind of content,” White aid. That may sound a little contradictory given that part of this redesign is about making desktop content available. The difference is programming with mobile in mind and a mix of mobile-exclusive content.

White sees it as a way to make use of “found” time — the time opened up by a device that’s in reach and in use most of the day. “The mantra here was not just programming for the device but programming for the moment,” she added, whether it’s a quick check between meetings or during TV.

The redesign also includes some enhanced ways of sharing content. In addition to the now-routine Twitter and Facebook sharing, m.people.com users can share via SMS text message if they want to send a link to a sister or friend. White was shocked to realize how few sites offer that option.

Imagine how many texts might been sent the day People.com broke the news that Katie Holmes wanted a divorce from Tom Cruise.

People already has a mobile sales director embedded with the sales team. Motorola is the first sponsor using the new “Snap Banner”. While White didn’t provide actual costs of advertising on the mobile site, she said the new ad unit has a premium of 25-to-30 percent over People‘s usual mobile ads.

“The other major initiative as part of this is to build a very robust advertising experience,” White said. In addition to selling advertising, the site also is a marketing tool for subscriptions so users will see “touts” offering subscriptions.

People also will offer standard units and full-page interstitials within the context of how various ads come across on different devices. “When you have a screen size of three inches, you have to be really mindful of the difference,” she said; that does away with “the idea that we can just take the standrad banner and slap it on the page.”

The snap banner is their way of pushing the envelope by claiming attention for a advertiser on a long-scrolling page.

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The parting is in the “it’s about us, not them” mold. Put another way, the PGA Tour wants full control. Paul Johnson, the PGA Tour’s SVP of strategic development, digital media and entertainment, explained in the carefully crafted announcement:

With the speed in which the digital landscape is changing, we feel it is important to control all aspects of the business directly. This does not reflect upon Turner, which has done a wonderful job and has been a great partner; it is about our overall strategy regarding our fans, players, sponsors and other stakeholders, and our desire to control those elements directly out into the future.

Turner keeps its separate relationship with the PGA of America for PGA.com, managing operations and ad sales, plus its exclusive sales arrangement for advertising on the Golf section of Yahoo Sports. (Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital also has Yahoo Sports ad exclusives for NBA and NASCAR.) The PGA Tour is selling all of its own 2013 ads and will take over operations in January.

Turner Sports currently has operating and sales partnerships with NBA Digital and the NCAA for March Madness and NCAA.com. A similar deal with NASCAR was restructured to end in January but Turner Sports will continue to handle ad and sponsorship sales across the NASCAR-branded platforms with unique users rolling up into Turner’s metrics through 2016.

Turner’s short-lived partnership with Time Warner sibling SI.com ended last year.

TV matters

While it’s tempting to look at this as Turner losing partners, an industry insider familiar with the situation suggested instead that Turner probably was losing money — at least on PGATour.com. Also, that the racing partnership might be more valuable without the costs of developing an managing the platforms. NASCAR bought out the remaining two years of digital rights but left its advertising because with 6.6 million monthly uniques, according to Sports Business Daily, it doesn’t have enough volume for ad sales.

What’s the difference between the NBA and NCAA deals and those with the PGA Tour and NASCAR? TV. Its TV deal with NASCAR was for a handful of mid-season races; for the PGA Tour it had some Thursday-Friday rights but not the more lucrative weekends or the majors. Neither provides the volume of TV inventory that comes from NBA.TV and season/post-season games on TNT or 60+ games of March Madness (Turner and CBS are partners for the NCAA with the former responsible for the platforms.)

More details in the release.

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“We think Hulu authenticating makes sense,” he added. “We think Hulu is heading in the right direction now and it might continue to be viable.”

Bewkes was responding to a question on rumors that Hulu will start requiring users to prove that they have a cable TV subscription before using its service.

HBO Go to more platforms soon

HBO Go is having “a significant positive impact” on Time Warner’s business and 93 percent of users say Go makes them more loyal to HBO, Bewkes said. Consumers using HBO Go are watching HBO more than they used to, Bewkes said, and HBO Go will launch on more platforms soon — it will “become widely accessible on connected TVs.” Microsoft’s Xbox Live added HBO Go in March.

Ultraviolet added 1 million registered users in last four weeks

Bewkes said that UltraViolet, the digital cloud initiative being jointly launched by Hollywood’s major studios — Time Warner’s Warner Bros. division included — is still in its early stages, “but consumers are downloading and streaming in very large numbers,” Bewkes said. “More than 2 million accounts have been created and 5,000 titles are available. [It took five months to gain]the first million registrations, then we added 1 million more in the past 4 weeks.”

Choosing what to stream

“We’re more than happy to work with SVOD [subscription video on demand] companies to license our content,” Bewkes said. “Our overarching goal is simply to maximize the lifetime value of the content.”

He cited CBS sitcom hit “The Big Bang Theory” as a show that is “likely to have multiple cycles” and is “unlikely … to go to SVOD anytime soon. We’re trying to balance the value of the later cycles.”

“For older content that has either gone through several cycles, or for shows that are serialized and work better on a VOD basis … those are the kinds of things you can be more efficient with when you put them on SVOD,” Bewkes said. “Take the CW deal we did as an SVOD sale to Netflix. Those shows had more efficient and higher value in an SVOD service, with a little earlier availability, than we thought we could get in traditional syndicated buy-ins. It really depends on the nature of the programming.”

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