Anyone who does more than check email on their home PC is surely going to use more than a single gigabyte in a 30-day spell, but as with its mobile service, FreedomPop is offering ways for users to earn more free data and selling premium data plans with bigger buckets of data. The bottom line though is heavy home broadband users aren’t going to sign up with FreedomPop – these plans aren’t designed for Netflix or file sharing  — but the virtual network operator is making a compelling case to casual data users, selling home connectivity for as little as $10 a month.

FreedomPop is offering four tiers of service, all of which tap into Clearwire’s WiMAX network available in 70 cities (as an MVNO FreedomPop resells Clearwire’s WiMAX capacity today and will soon resell Sprint LTE connections as well). The first tier costs nothing, giving customers 1 GB of monthly data with speeds throttled to under 1.5 Mbps. Every additional megabyte beyond the one-gig cap costs a cent, so going way over that cap could be a mighty expensive proposition. For instance, Streaming a 2 GB HD movie would cost you an additional $20.

But FreedomPop is being perfectly up front that this plan is meant for basic web surfing and email. In any case, the low-speed connection would prevent you from engaging in many bandwidth-sucking activities. As with its mobile service, FreedomPop allows free users to earn more data in 50 MB chunks by engaging the FreedomPop social network, using FreedomPop’s IP services and participating in promotions. It’s not yet clear if FreedomPop will allow customers to share their unused data with other home users like it allows mobile users to swap megabytes.

The next tier up is a $10 monthly plan, which ups the cap to 10 GB while keeping speeds limited to 1.5 Mbps. From there, the cap stays at 10 GB, but for $5 or $8 more a month you can boost speeds to 3 Mbps and 8 Mbps respectively. In the paid tiers, FreedomPop is charging a half-cent for every megabyte overage.

Even still, 10 GB isn’t much for a home connection. In July, my colleague Stacey Higginbotham took a detailed look at how different households consumed broadband, and found even sparse users of streaming services still consumed well over 10 GB each month, to say nothing of 1 GB. But once you turn off that multimedia spigot, usage drops considerably. Stacey interviewed one user in Atlanta who averaged 500 MB a month for three straight months when she took a hiatus from streamed video.

You might think of these of your grandparents’ home broadband plans (though in this day and ages, grandparents are becoming increasingly sophisticated in web communications tools), but FreedomPop seems to be positioning as a means of bridging digital divide, offering cheap, and even the possibility of free, service to people who normally couldn’t afford home broadband or just want minimal connectivity. There are still millions of dial-up users left in the U.S. It would be interesting to see if FreedomPop can reach them with this service.

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Globalization of professional content

The act of taking premium content across borders to reach new audiences has proven to be a boon: It generates meaningful incremental digital dollars through subscription services;  it legitimizes a content experience that previously had been dominated by online piracy; and it builds momentum for content and brand equity for the coming years.

Ironically, it is the home market that sometimes moves the slowest. While not all territories are equally profitable, content is traditionally sold in a segmented manner siloed by language and country. Being able to slowly unfragment these rights through global expansion provides scale and future upside that is worth investing in today; this de-fragmentation will continue the efforts to globalize more professional content at an increased pace.

Monetization via subscription

Subscription will continue to be the dominant business model. Viewers have demonstrated that they recognize significant value in having access to premium content across their continuingly connected digital lifestyle – and are much more willing to pay for convenience of access on devices. This month’s retail activity showed all-time highs in consumer spending towards a personal device experience. Monolithic subscription services such as NetFlix and Hulu, which generate $8 ARPU per month, will be challenged in a market where DirecTV and DISH generate on average $80 ARPU per month.

What hasn’t changed is the demand for professionally produced content, which still costs just as much to create. Today’s market data has proven that users are willing to pay top dollar for traditional Hollywood quality content – but a mere $8 a month simply isn’t enough to support creating it in the same volume as we do now. One of the ways to reach a happy medium then is through targeted channels of in-depth content.

Channels of in-depth content

Channels will become much more targeted and personalized. Over 60 years ago, broadcast television introduced channels 1-10 in the U.S., and, furthering this momentum, channelization provided channels 11-1,000 via cable and satellite in the 1980s. As this decade is earmarked by seismic technology and media changes, the next few years will be laser-focused on creating the next 100,000 channels – delivered across a mix of broadcast, cable, mobile and smart TV apps – each tailored for a set of unique lifestyles.

Do you enjoy fly-fishing, building replica battleships, or perfecting your Portuguese? The next 100k channels are all about delivering a deep and targeted experience that was previously not possible, because the audience was fragmented geographically, the high fixed costs of creating a new cable channel were prohibitive, or the behavioral targeting was not possible. Viewers of highly targeted and in-depth content experiences are more than willing to dive in and pay.  These experiences are much more than simple online video delivery and make up a unique social and lifestyle experience.

Redefining e-commerce

There will be significant progress made towards a new monetization model beyond the traditional ad-supported and subscription service ones. The American household spends, on average, nearly five hours per day watching video content. As such it is one of the best methods we know for generating product interest.

However, the one-way push model also happens to be grossly inefficient. Online streaming has the opportunity to revolutionize the way products accompany content, and are ultimately introduced to viewers. The opportunities are boundless when one thinks of how awesome an experience it would be if we can realize the full potential of combining streaming video and e-commerce – a next-generation Home Shopping Network layered on top of any content. After all, what is video but a medium for the aspiration of product, lifestyles and experiences?

Kun Gao is CEO and co-founder of Crunchyroll, Inc., a global video network for Japanese anime and Asian media.

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Even the one supposed bright spot — the long-awaited expansion of Netflix services into Europe — has failed to offset the gloom: gaining a million new subscribers but costing $89 million in Q2 alone.

Things could have been very different, however.

Back in 2004, the company was on the verge of launching in the U.K. when it suddenly decided to pull out. The reason? A complicated competitive situation — primarily a local service called Lovefilm — and a huge spoiler from Amazon which announced a British-focused video service. The combination sent it scarpering to prepare for an all-out war with Jeff Bezos: but had Hastings stuck the course, Netflix would probably be far and away the leader in this market today.

And that comes from somebody who should know: Lovefilm’s founding CEO, Adam Valkin.

Now a venture partner at Accel’s London office, Valkin hasn’t been involved directly with Lovefilm — which was bought by Amazon in 2011 — for five years. But he is certain that Netflix would have got the jump on the local market if it’d had the guts to launch back in the day.

“Netflix decided to come to the UK in 2004 — and honestly, if they came, I think it would have been a completely different story,” he told me.

“They decided the day before they launched to pull out, because Amazon had announced they were going to launch in the UK. So Netflix said ‘well, if Amazon are going to launch in the UK, they’re going to launch in the US, which means we’ve got to go back to the US and worry about the US and let them have the UK.’”

“We had to contend with Amazon, which was a tough company,” he said. “But it was one of 1,000 things they were doing — so we competed with Amazon really well, to the point when they actually sold us their competitor and they ultimately bought back the whole thing. But if Netflix had launched it would have been a different story.”

In the end it was another eight years before the company ventured across the Atlantic again, by which time the situation was very different. In fact, Lovefilm has proven so successful for Amazon that its London HQ is now going to be at the center of the Seattle-based company’s global media plans.

That announcement, one of a sequence of good news stories for startups in the British capital, shows how far the company has come in the intervening period.

“To me it is unbelievable,” he said. “I haggled to buy the domain name Lovefilm for $25,000 from a film production company that used it for surveys. When you deal with all of that stuff, when you have nothing, just an idea and a business plan… I’ve got to say, it does feel like quite a long time ago now.”

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This comes less than a month after Lovefilm signed up Universal, also on a multi-year basis. Similar deals were already in place with Warner Bros, Sony Pictures and others, and now Lovefilm’s customers can look forward to streaming the likes of X-Men: First Class from March next year, while Netflix’s can’t. The TV part of the deal (which is not exclusive) kicks in earlier, with Buffy and more becoming available next month.

“It feels great to announce another major studio deal for Lovefilm,” managing director Jim Buckle said. “Twentieth Century Fox is one of the world’s leading studios, known across the globe for creating fantastic, iconic content. This partnership will give Lovefilm members access to the studio’s huge range of recent movies and the opportunity to revisit some of the best American TV series produced in recent years.”

When Buckle talks about recent movies, he does not of course mean really recent. That’s because BSkyB — in which News Corp is a controlling shareholder — has paid for so-called ‘first window’ rights with all the major studios.

The Competition Commission, Britain’s regulator, finally decided in May that this arrangement was not anticompetitive, partly because Netflix had just joined Lovefilm as a supposed rival to BSkyB. Also, the commission reasoned, consumers don’t really care about getting very recent movies as much as they want a comprehensive offering.

Which is why the deals Lovefilm is striking these days are all for the ‘second window’ – effectively one rung above terrestrial broadcast when it comes to urgency. The films that can be streamed over the service from March 2013 will have been on the big screen in the UK during 2011. It’s the kind of complexity that makes content consumption even more confusing for the average Joe, but Fox is happy:

“We are delighted to be partnered with Lovefilm on this new window for Fox films in the UK,” Fox EVP Gina Brogi said. “This film and series agreement enables us to give UK fans yet another avenue to enjoy the great stories and characters they have come to know and love from our studio.”

If the antitrust regulators are right, Lovefilm’s customers will be delighted with the breadth of the service’s catalog, if not its freshness. It may not be enough to tempt people away from getting their recent-cinema fix from the — cough cough — darker corners of the internet, but it certainly makes Amazon’s service even more attractive than Netflix than it already was.

Netflix said last week that it would try to outbid BSkyB for those tasty first-window rights over the next year. If it fails, it said, it will ask the Competition Commission to reconsider whether BSkyB’s deals are so fair after all.

Of course, that’s if Netflix is still around in the U.K. in a year’s time. Its movie range there is pretty skinny, while Lovefilm’s just fattened up yet again. Maybe Britain wasn’t such a great springboard for the European expansion after all.

Update: Clarification added to make it clear that even though Netflix does not have early rights on 20th Century Fox movies, it does have access to TV content. We have also corrected News Corp’s relationship with BSkyB to make clear that News Corp holds a 39.1% controlling share in the company.

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When Verizon first unveiled Viewdini last week, I speculated that Verizon might make the app the first to implement ‘toll-free’ data policies, meaning that content providers would pay the network carriage charges instead of their customers. That turns out not to be the case.

Viewdini is subject to the same data metering as any other app (or throttling restrictions in the case of Verizon’s grandfathered unlimited customers). It also just so happens that Verizon is ending its double data LTE promotion next week, which means new customers will have to settle for its normal, and rather pricey, mobile data tiers.

It’s easy to see how customers can run up some hefty data bills using the service – full-length TV shows and movies can consume enormous amounts of bandwidth. The service itself, though, seems pretty innovative as it aggregates content that would normally be trapped behind specific apps. Viewdini lets you view video from the services to which you subscribe and allows you to buy or rent other content.

You can check out The Verge’s review here, which while generally positive found the absence of major streaming sources such as Vudu and HBO Go disappointing. Verizon has said it’s still in negotiations with other content providers and plans to add more video sources, including its own FiOS TV, in the future.

As for data restrictions, I wouldn’t be surprised if Verizon is still in discussions with these content providers about revenue-sharing deals that could offset the cost of delivering their video. It would be quite a compelling service if all or part of the content was off the meter and certainly a differentiator for the content providers that agreed to it. I’m not quite sure if Netflix and Hulu are ready to open up that Pandora’s Box though. For now Netflix seems more interested in helping its customers get around data caps by avoiding cellular entirely.

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With more and more customers moving off carriers’ old unlimited data plans to tiered data buckets, streaming any reasonable quantity of video is all but impossible without incurring major overage charges. In its latest update to its iPhone and iPad apps, though, customers can toggle on and off 3G/4G connectivity. It may mean sacrificing Netflix access everywhere, but it could help them avoid rather unpleasant phone bills at the end of the month.

There are still a few unlimited options out there for iPhone users. You can stream to your heart’s content on Sprint’s 3G network. There are still millions of customers grandfathered into Verizon and AT&Ts’ old unlimited plans, but both operators have begun throttling back speeds once customers hit unspecified – and seemingly arbitrary – thresholds, making video streaming all but useless.

What’s more, Verizon is doing everything it can to coax, cajole and boot customers off their unlimited plans this summer. Unless the carriers firm up some kind of revenue sharing pact with Netflix – which Verizon may well be in the process of cementing – it looks like streaming movies is going to be primarily a Wi-Fi affair.

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Verizon didn’t reveal any details about how this high-quality, long-form content would gel with its restricted data plans when the app launches later this month, but I suspect Viewdini may be Verizon’s first venture into the ‘toll-free’ mobile broadband: Rather than charge the customer for the gigabytes of video consumed, it charges the content provider.

Lately Verizon has been talking up the idea of reversing the mobile data business model (as has AT&T), giving its customers unlimited access to any video or over-the-top content service so long as the owner of the service pays the carriage charges. So far Verizon hasn’t implemented any specific policies – that we know of – but if it can secure the cooperation of content providers, it’s only a matter of time.

Viewdini would fit perfectly with that model because video consumes enormous bandwidth relative to other services. If Verizon customers were to make regular use of TV show and movie streaming they would quickly max out their data plans (or enter into throttling territory in the case of its grandfathered unlimited customers). Without any kind of tweak to Verizon’s capping policies, Viewdini practically invites customers to run up huge overage charges, which would hardly be a customer relations coup.

But the apps-charging structure provides a clue as to how Verizon might offer that pipe for free. “By simply searching for a title, topic, or star’s name, viewdini will let customers know which services have mobile video for streaming, and whether it is available  at no additional charge, by subscription, to rent or for purchase,” Verizon stated in its press release.

In each case, Verizon could skim a little from the top of each purchase, for instance collecting a portion of a movie rental or purchase fee. In the case of subscription video services like Hulu Plus or Netflix, Verizon could take a share of monthly revenue from every subscriber that used Viewdini or just charge the video providers flat per-gigabyte or per-stream fees.

Verizon plans to expand its initial line-up to movie studios and other TV sites. If it is able negotiate revenue sharing deals with every service it aggregates, Verizon could easily offer Viewdini as completely toll-free app.

That would make a lot of consumers happy, as they’d be free to stream away without worrying about their data caps, but it could have a chilling effect on the application developers. Netflix and Comcast may be able to afford bandwidth fees, but smaller companies may not be able to – especially if they’re offering up their content for free.

Comcast is already facing criticism that it’s running afoul of net neutrality rules for capping residential broadband data while giving a free ride to its own Xfinity traffic. But the net neutrality rules don’t apply wireless, so if Verizon wants to go the toll-free route, there’s nothing to stop it.

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“These guys have the pipe and the bandwidth,” Ars Technica reported Aragon as saying. “If they start capping things, it gets difficult.”

At issue isn’t just the 250 GB monthly cap that Comcast has imposed on its residential broadband customers, but the fact that it’s making exceptions to that cap. Content streamed to Comcast’s Xfinity app in the Xbox is off the meter, while content coming from other providers is counted against that monthly allotment. While Netflix , Sony and other over-the-top video providers aren’t happy with the situation, my colleague Stacey Higginbotham writes that Comcast may be well within its rights, since it’s using its own infrastructure to deliver the Xfinity service and can therefore treat it as a special case.

However, as my colleague Daniel Frankel at paidContent proposes, Comcast may be biting the hand that feeds it. Providing broadband services, which in turn bring third-party content into the home, is turning out to be a much better business model for cable operators than providing that content on their own. Cable providers are losing video customers and finding their programming margins squeezed, but those same customers remain willing to pay big bucks for raw broadband access.

Picture courtesy of Flickr user brizzlebornandbred.

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Quantenna specializes in high-performance Wi-Fi silicon and is already selling its 802.11n chips to router makers like Motorola and NetGear. Utilizing four antennas to deliver four parallel streams of data over the same 5 GHz frequencies, Quantenna boasts it can deliver speeds of 600 Mbps, ideal for supporting multiple HD-streaming video channels in the home — the market the vendor has primarily focused on.

But truly ridiculous speeds will emerge with its next generation chip, which uses the new 802.11ac standard and promises bandwidth as high as 2 GB by aggregating all of the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies available for public Wi-Fi. As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham points out a 2 Gbps connection is a bit useless in a home, because no residential broadband connection supports such enormous speed. But once you take the technology out of the home and into the wild there’s a lot more potential for bandwidth mayhem.

Mobile hotspot providers with access to the fiber connections could take advantage of 802.11ac technologies to build commercial Wi-Fi networks with truly stunning levels of broadband capacity. Mobile operators are getting Wi-Fi religion, and chips like Quantenna’s could be used to shunt enormous quantities of traffic off their overtaxed 3G and 4G networks. The key is getting those high-performance chips not just into the routers but also laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Fremont, Calif.,-based Quantenna has already gone through multiple funding rounds, closing a $21 million Series E round in September of 2010. Today’s $79 million oversubscribed round includes its existing major vendors Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Sigma Partners, Southern Cross Venture Partners and Venrock Associates, as well as new investors Rusnano and Bright Capital. Rusnano, which will invest up to $40 million, isn’t just bringing cash, but also a lot of expertise in the form of nanotechnology research. The firm is an arm of the Russian government tasked with investing in and coordinating efforts between Russian nanotechnology ventures.

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