By TDG’s numbers 60%, or 95MM consumers in just the US, are “enthusiastic” about TV Everywhere” services. And, about 34%, or 54MM are willing to pay at least $5 extra a month for the privilege. By my calculations, that’s about $3B a year. Even if that’s lower because of households verses individuals, it’s still a big enough number to get your attention.

Yes, it’s early yet. Michael Greeson, TDG partner and author of the report admits the content isn’t compelling at this stage. But I think it does show the interest users have for video. It’s big and growing.

What do you think? Do you want to watch video anywhere on any device? What would you pay for it?

.tv sponsored Diggnation’s live BigDigg Shindigg on Saturday night and our Street Team hit the conference looking for the Next .tv Star. We had some really great entries (over 75!) and a real down-to-the-wire horserace during the community voting period a few weeks ago, and we can now announce the winners of our Next .tv Star contest – Kosher Dillz and Flex Matthews!

As our winners, Kosher and Flex will be flying to San Francisco to meet with Revision3 Producer, David Prager, for a behind-the-scenes tour of Rev3 shows. They’ll also be getting some tips from David for their new roles as correspondents for our new “Best of .tv” web show that will be debuting soon.

Congratulations to Kosher and Flex, and we appreciate everyone who submitted a video or voted during the process.

Google TV in the works? — The Wall Street Journal (and about everyone that guesses on these things) thinks so. They may (or may not) show it off at their I/O conference May 19 and 20 for developers in SF. It’s expected to be on Android and will leverage the wider development community for applications. Rumor has it Intel and Logitech will be partners. I’m informed by those geeks that follow this that the Intel CE4100 provides a platform to put fancy overlays on the screen or rescale the input signal and pass it through. You can basically have a custom sports ticker or stock ticker running at all times regardless of your channel. Another example of old fashion TV and the web merging. Thanks for the pointer on that Neel!

For Another Point of View — Mark Cuban — never one to be shy putting forth his opinion — says the future of TV is TV … the kind that comes in over a cable and isn’t the Internet. I’m completely with Janko Roettgers from NewTeeVee on this one. While it’s still early; 14MM Netflix customers aren’t likely wrong. I can’t guess the exact moment that online video and that black box in your room merge completely…but it will happen.

Justin.tv Gives Advice on Live Video — Michael Seibel, the CEO of Justin.tv has a nice guest blog post on TechCrunch today. We’re fans of Michael here at Watch.tv and have a video of him here. In today’s post he talks about how to fix availability problems (mobile helps a lot) and how to fix the getting viewers problem. Check it out.

Online Advertising Spending is Shifting to Video — eMarketer’s article from May 3 says that online video advertising is growing at 40% and 94% of agency executives planned to spend more on online video in Q1 2010 than the prior year. Thanks Tempy for that article.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences will celebrate the power of television– and specifically, eight programs that have had significant impact on the viewing audience and the ability to spark positive social change.

The honored programs include:
• CSI, “Coup De Grace”
• Glee, “Wheels”
• Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am?
• Explorer: “Inside Death Row” — “Inside Death Row”
• Private Practice “Nothing To Fear”
• Taking Chance
• Unlocking Autism — “Unlocking Autism”
• Vanguard: “The OxyContin Express”

These programs concern vital issues ranging from capital punishment to racism, prescription drug abuse and trafficking, autism, the military escort for fallen service members, physician-assisted suicide and important disability issues.

Dana Delany, star of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, will host the evening.

So the power of video – whether it be on that black box in your living room or the PC on your desk – is amazing and should be celebrated. It’s not much of a prediction to say that the difference between that black box and the PC is blurring and will blur more; so I think a toast to the Emmy’s is in order. Here’s to a voice through video…no matter where it lives. Go to Emmys.tv for more information.

I look forward to catching up with old colleagues and learning new things. Looking over the sponsors, presenters and exhibitors; I think it’s telling that it’s a mix of the big guys (e.g., Google), the old guys (e.g., AT&T) as well as the smaller up and coming players (e.g., Boxee.tv and Blip.tv). That makes for a nice mix, I think.

Some of the sessions that caught my eye in a quick scan:

• Did you know that even though the US online video add spend is $1B, it’s still only 1/16th of the overall video add spend (but 1/7 the audience). Hear what’s right, what’s wrong, and how to make those lofty 5 year projections.
• How a quiet revolution was developing with video in the ecommerce arena. This session will talk about how video is redefining the way we buy products (a topic on this blog before http://bit.ly/6ZYOXo ).
• Going Mobile: with all the buzz on iPhone, iPad and Android, video is finally reaching the mobile world (at least here in the US, many countries are light years ahead of us). This session says it will tell us how the world of mobile video will change the future. http://bit.ly/9qzrgsr
• For the geeks in the crowd, there’s a session on HTML5 and web video which we’ve been interested in here at the Watch.tv blog (and Adobe is there to raise the debate to an interesting discussion). http://bit.ly/9mtN91
• There’s some sessions on how online video is changing the traditional TV space such as cord cutting which has all sorts of implications for video.

So anyway, if you’re in NYC next week, stop by. Should be an interesting time.

Twitter held its first ever developer conference “Chirp” in San Francisco on April 14th and 15th, 2010. The conference was attended by 500 developers from all over the world. Twitter believes in an open ecosystem. Ever since Twitter was launched, their API and the platform has been open to the public and developers. Currently there are about 100,000 registered third party applications that were built using their API. The third party application development on the Twitter platform is growing at a rapid pace. Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced that 75% of the traffic comes from third party applications and 60% of the tweets come from these third party apps. Ev admitted that Twitter is too hard and gave an example: if you type in “I don’t get” in Google search box, then “I don’t get Twitter” is number 2 in the list. However, it is Twitter’s highest priority to make this experience “friction free” to users and developers.

For the first time ever, Twitter announced the roadmap of their platform during this conference.

Here are the highlights of the roadmap for 2010:

1) Location API – The current location API provides Longitude and Latitude only. Twitter is planning to allow you to associate city and places to tweets. So, not only you can read tweets from your followers, you can read tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city, whether you follow them or not.

2) @Annotations – Adding location to the tweets was a first step, now with the annotations you can associate any arbitrary meta-data to your tweets when it’s published and you can query back the tweets using the same meta-data. The new annotations open the possibility for making tweets and search much richer.

3) User Streams or Streaming API – So far we have been using their REST API for publishing tweets, searching tweets, following etc. The new streaming API allows the applications to receive tweets in near real-time. So, no more rate limitations, no need for waiting or polling for the tweets. The tweets will be pushed to you automatically as soon as they are received.

4) @Anywhere – The idea of @anywhere is to plug Twitter seamlessly into your own website with a few lines of Javascript code. So, when you visit a website that supports @anywhere, you’ll be able to follow any Twitter account associated with that site without navigating away from that site. @anywhere is analogous to Facebook Connect.

5) Twitter launched http://dev.twitter.com/ during this conference. Twitter promised to keep this website up to date with the information. In fact, the documentation is generated out of the code itself so it will never be out of date.

6) Twitter also announced their long-awaited revenue model which is not about ads, it’s about promoting tweets. Promoted tweets are shown as the top tweets. However, there are still questions how promoted tweets will actually work.

Twitter is growing at a rapid rate, currently Twitter has about 105 million registered users across the world and the investors are expecting this number to rise by half a billion in the next 1 to 2 years. Twitter has about 175 employees, for such a small team their impact across the whole world is enormous.

Watch live video from Twitter Chirp Conference on Justin.tv

Watch live video from Twitter Chirp Conference on Justin.tv

Location services showed up as a big theme, QR codes came up and “green” made the list. On what they’d do a .tv show about, this is a hungry crowd — food and beer was a biggie. And there’s a fun rap video that really amazed me.

At Southby.tv you can pick your favorite of these videos. Voting starts today and runs through Monday April 26th. The winner gets a trip to San Francisco, spends a day behind the scenes with Diggnation Producer David Prager and will show up on .tv in the near future (so stay tuned).

So, go vote now. The winner will be announced on or about May 4th.

Just like on March 17th everyone is Irish; on St Patrick’s day every site can be .tv. McSorley’s Old Ale House is a famous bar founded in 1854 and sited in Wikipedia as the oldest Irish bar in New York City. They put up McSorely’s.tv for today which is a mash up of Tweets about McSoreley’s. The crowd seems to be having a great time from what I can see on .tv

Me, I’m sipping my Guinness, waiting for my Corned Beef to be done, and thanking my Irish luck.

Happy St. Patrick’s day to one and all.

For those of you that may have missed Friday’s post, we had a lot of .tv activities going on at SXSW. If you didn’t get a chance to go Austin, don’t stress, you can still participate by:

• Taking advantage of the special offer here: http://southby.tv/offer
• Checking out Southby.tv which is our site for the event — a curated, living diary of South by 2010 as submitted by the people who attended.
• Submitting your entry to be the next .tv star and win a prize: We’re not just giving you a chance to have your SXSW clips appear on our site; we’re giving you a chance to win a cool prize package and a shot at being a correspondent for an upcoming Best of .tv web show. The prize includes an all expense paid trip to San Francisco where you’ll spend the day backstage at Revision3 and get a private video production coaching session from Diggnation producer Dave Prager, one of the guys behind one of the web’s most widely watched video series. And of course, you could become a Best of .tv correspondent…Just visit Southby.tv to submit an audition directly (and to learn all the rules and legal stuff, of course.)
• Or, by watching the Diggnation show in the comfort of your own cube here: http://revision3.com/diggnation/sxsw2010?hp

Beside the .tv events, I managed to attend a number of sessions at the convention center. I tried to steer towards the ones on video…this being .tv. HTML5 seemed a hot topic there (hey, they don’t call it geek spring break for nothing). The potential there is really starting to sink in to me, and it should be interesting to see where that goes.

I also managed a few non-video sessions that peaked my interest. I got to hear about Augmented Reality, Web of Things: Connecting People and Objects on the Web; and one of my favorite speakers (Clay Shirky) with a great title for his terrific talk :  Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data

This was my first time there, and I have to say, it’s everything it’s rumored to be. Lively discussion. Tons of networking. Lots of pub crawling. Great music. And, fascinating discussions on the the business we’re all in. I highly recommend it.

Oh yeah,  and I got a t-shirt too (3 of them actually).

Justin.tv Part of Fund Raising in the UK: UK personality Tim Shaw is live on Justin.tv closed up in a box. He refers to it as Man in Box and he’s in there for 30 days unless using Google maps and clues, Brits find him before that. There’s a prize if you find him, and funds raised will go to Help for Heros (a UK organization that raises money for wounded soldiers). An interesting cross between reality tv on the web, helping veterans and .tv. Thanks Justin.tv!

Watch live video from Man In Box on Justin.tv
Cisco’s Predictions on Mobile Video: Cisco recently released one of their reports that tries to predict traffic into the future. They had a number of things about video that I thought were interesting:

• Almost 66 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2014.
• Mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 131 percent between 2009 and 2014.
• Mobile video has the highest growth rate of any application category measured within the Cisco VNI Forecast at this time.
• Video will be responsible for the majority of the traffic growth between 2009 and 2014.
• Overall mobile data traffic is expected to grow to 3.6 exabytes per month by 2014, and over 2.3 of those are due to mobile video traffic.

ComScore Shows There’s Lots of Room for Video Sites: Yes, YouTube gets the majority of the traffic at 26% of time spent, but the next 24 spots only add an additional 22% according to a recent report from ComScore. That leaves over half of all time spent — 52% is in the tail. If you use videos watched as the metric, the second company on that list is already into low single digits (Hulu at 3%); and by the time you get to the 9th position on that list, you’re below single digits (CBS Interactive at .9%). So this story of video on the web is just beginning with lots of changes and growth to come. Great for .tv. Stay tuned.

Half of NetFlix’s Customers Stream to their TV: The Diffusion Group issued a press release on a report they recently did which says 1/2 – yes that’s 50% – of their large base is using the “Watch Instantly” option on their TVs. No, this isn’t the lone college student streaming to their laptop (though they do have that demographic too). This refers to someone who bothered to buy a box to make it easy, or hack a way to get the stream from the Internet onto a TV (full disclosure, I’m one of the box variety). What does this say for the over the top option for video on the web in the near future?