The video franchise license application follows an application that Google submitted to the Federal Communications Commission a few weeks ago to build a receive-only satellite farm in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which is about 200 miles away from the Kansas City markets and close to one of its major data centers. Together, the applications point to a serious effort on the part of Google to introduce TV services on top of its fiber broadband plans.

That Google would attempt to enter the video market isn’t totally unexpected: The WSJ reported late last year that the company was out seeking TV rights from major content owners such as Disney, Time Warner and Discovery Communications. But it appears that Google is laying the groundwork to make a serious assault on Time Warner Cable, which is the primary cable provider in its fiber markets.

But there are still some major questions left unanswered, as Google works to pull a video service together:

1. Will Google be able to get content owners on board? Some major content owners, like Viacom and Fox, are notoriously suspicious of Google’s video ambitions. Due in part to the perception that its search business aids piracy — and that YouTube is a haven for unlicensed, copyrighted content — there are some content providers that so far have been unwilling to work with Google. Writing big checks has a way of helping to make friends, but there might be some holdouts… Which raises the question: Will consumers sign up for a video service if some of the major networks are missing?
2. Will Google TV extend beyond the Kansas City markets? Google has been busy promoting the Kansas City deployments, but some believe that there’s an opportunity to extend its fiber ambitions beyond its initial test markets. There’s even some evidence in recent job listings from Mountain View. Check out this listing for a Google Fiber Business Analyst: Google says it’s “building one of the fastest national broadband networks to deliver next generation Internet content to users.” [Emphasis mine] If Google Fiber really is a national project, then we could see Google video services extended to other markets as the company lays down fiber.
3. What will Google’s TV service cost? This is potentially the toughest sticking point as Google negotiates rights with content owners. Most-favored-nation clauses, which are placed in deals struck by existing video operators, do not allow new entrants to negotiate better contracts than those already in place — one reason why the price of content continues to go up with every new deal. That means Google will be paying more than other providers for the same content, and will be unable to offer its TV services for less than existing providers. But! Given the high-speed-data nature of Google’s fiber product, I could see a product in which Google charges a one-time fee for the broadband service and video is an add-on service.
4. Will YouTube be integrated? Here’s a big wild card, especially as Google thinks about what the future of TV looks like. It’s spending big bucks on building TV-like channels of content for YouTube, so why not place those channels alongside more mainstream content from the major cable networks. Given the Gigabit speeds of the fiber product, all indications are that Google’s video product will be delivered via IP, so there’s no reason that YouTube — or really any streaming video content — couldn’t be a part of the broader video service.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Pasukaru76.

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Why drop the .tv from its name? “This was done to distinguish the network’s content from that of traditional TV,” the press release informs us. Because the worst thing that could happen to a web video site is of course that people assume you’re serving up TV content, right?

The move is a little baffling, especially because Blip has gone to great lengths to reinvent itself as a kind of “Hulu for web series” over the last couple of months, deemphasizing the video sharing part of its business and instead concentrating on becoming a distribution platform for web series makers. That being said, the transformation seems to work well for the site, which also said Wednesday that it doubled its revenue in 2011.

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• Brightcove had 3,872 customers in over 50 countries by the end of 2011.
• The company’s 2011 revenue was $63.6 million, compared to $43.7 million in 2010. Its net loss in 2011 $17.8 million, compared to $17.3 million in 2010. It expects to continue to have losses in 2012.
• Brightcove employed 312 people in 9 different countries by the end of 2011.
• Brightcove generated 66 percent of its revenue in the U.S. in 2011.
• Brightcove’s customers served on average 743 million streams per month in 2011. More than half of those streams were delivered outside of the U.S..
• Most of the media is delivered through Akamai and Limelight, but the contract with Limelight is currently up for renewal.
• The New York Times is not only one of Brightcove’s biggest customers, but also a minority shareholder that owns less than 5 percent of the company’s stock.
• Brightcove doesn’t mention any of its direct competitors by name, but mentions YouTube three times in the filing.
• Brightcove will trade at NASDAQ under the stock symbol BCOV.
• The offering is led by Morgan Stanley and Stifel Nicolaus Weisel, and underwritten by RBC Capital Markets, Pacific Crest Securities and Raymond James.

What does the filing mean for the online video space in general? Our own Ryan Lawler summed it up best last August:

“Brightcove deserves kudos for making it this far while other online video companies have either been acquired at fire sale prices or bit the dust. But the modest revenues revealed by its IPO filing show just how hard it is to make money in online video, even while viewers are tuning in droves.”

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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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Vimeo’s new video pages are optimized for viewing with a 960×540 video player at the top and related info — comments, likes, tags, etc. —  hidden below the fold. For viewers who want to navigate other related videos, Vimeo has added a tab for “More Videos” that unveils related videos along the top of the page. By doing so, Vimeo has eliminated a lot of the clutter that was visible on the old site.

The site also has a consistent look and feel, across video pages, category pages and the like, which is designed to improve navigation throughout. Vimeo has also added a new recommendation engine that will enable viewers to find interesting relevant content while browsing videos. It’s also improved the search mechanism and added keyboard shortcuts to make browsing and navigation even easier for its users.

Not all changes are purely cosmetic: While much of the focus has been on improving the site visually, the Vimeo team was also able to speed it up considerably. According to Vimeo CEO Dae Mellencamp, whom we met with a few weeks ago, the site now loads about 50 percent faster than it had previously. Most improvements come from making the site more dynamic and not fully reloading pages whenever someone clicks a new video or requests new content. And that will also improve Vimeo’s ability to make updates to the site as time goes on.

Behind the scenes, Vimeo has made changes to the site to enable faster uploading of video files with a multiple file uploader. And it’s added advanced features that will let users hide their activity streams or block users from being able to comment or otherwise interact with their videos.

Vimeo’s not the only high-profile video site to get a redesign lately. Last month, YouTube unveiled its new site, which added more social elements and an increased focus on a user’s subscriptions and playlists, with less attention paid to the video player itself. By contrast, Vimeo has put the video player at the center of its experience.

“We’re forging our own path, not following anyone else’s path, Mellencamp said. That’s good news for Vimeo’s user base, which tends to appreciate things like a good, clean design. As a result, the update should give its producers even more reason to stick with the site as the place to showcase their creative endeavors.

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“The big thing that has changed… is that just about every media company has an HTML5 player out or on their roadmap,” thePlatform CEO Ian Blaine told me in a phone interview. “I can’t think of a single company that hasn’t adopted HTML5 as part of its mix.”

Blaine says that HTML5 has better cross-device support than other options, especially when you take iOS devices into account. The problem is that, although the HTML5 video tag is widely supported amongst all modern browsers, it’s also rendered differently depending on which browser a viewer is using, and in some cases, on which version of a browser that’s being used. That means that publishers frequently have to put extra effort into setting up HTML5 players to ensure that they work as designed.

It’s that sort of individual browser tweaking that thePlatform hopes to eliminate with video players that will work in any browser. Customers can build players with the thePlatform’s Player Dev Kit and view changes in a real-time preview pane. And once a customer has customized its player, it will work over a number of platforms without any further development necessary. thePlatform’s smart player will automatically detect the device and browser being used and automatically serve up the correct video assets in Flash or HTML5 depending on the viewing environment.

thePlatform’s offering also has one advantage over some other video players, in that it has figured out how to make mid-roll ads work in HTML5, which has proven to be a stumbling block for some publishers. According to Blaine, that meant publishers were either stuck monetizing their content only with pre-rolls — which basically was leaving money on the table — or stitching ads into the videos, which removed the ability to serve up dynamic or targeted video ads, neither of which was an acceptable outcome.

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