Some of this talk is about the rumored AppleTV; some of it’s about other connected television devices (like the XBox service launching this week); and some is about how platforms like YouTube are changing the economics of production and distribution.

But the thing that is currently, actually starting to disrupt television arrived 20 months ago. As soon as we got our hands on the iPad in April 2010, it was clear that it was the future of entertainment.

The tablet is doing for video what the iPod did for music, giving us more control than any other device over what we watch, and where and when we watch it.

There are, of course, other digital devices that allow us to watch video, lots of them. Various connected TV devices (Boxee, Roku, AppleTV, the XBox and more) as well as computers and laptops all give us a wide range of choice between the Traditional (the film and television programming we get on Hulu, Netflix, iTunes Store, etc) and the New (the huge tsunami of video programming of all shapes and sizes available on the Internet).

But the iPad does the best job of any device to date providing seamless, easy access to the full breadth of what’s available, from the Traditional via apps like Hulu, Netflix, or HBO Go and the New via apps like ours.

And unlike laptops and connected TV devices, the tablet frees us up to watch video wherever and whenever we want. This is more than just a bullet point on a slide, or check-box on a marketing matrix — it’s enabling a whole new psychological and sociological framework for how we watch, just as the iPod changed how we listen to music.

Ask iPad users about when and where they watch videos on their tablet and you’ll start to see interesting trends. It’s a quieter, more intimate device than a laptop or TV — it’s at home in your bed, on the couch, a big stuffed chair, or on the train or plane. I talked to one cable network president this summer, and he waxed on about how he and his wife just used the iPad to watch Netflix and Hulu in bed on their iPad at night (and used the TV less as a result).

No surprise, really. In so many ways, watching video on the iPad is just better. Better than TV, even.

Unlike the laptop, we relax a bit more when we use the tablet; we lean back, not forward. No  keyboard beckons us to do something. So we watch, read, browse, play. Video, on a nice screen at arms length, looks great — crisp, clear, personal.

But unlike the TV, we’re not just passive consumers when we use the tablet. The tap of a finger summons a keyboard, or enables us to share or like something, or to tell our friends about it. So we interact, but in just the right amounts mostly.

Anecdotes from families with both kids and iPads in the house are particularly telling. We have a 15-year-old and 13-year-old in our house, and five laptops, one iMac, and two iPads among us. Yes, we’re at one extreme (a bi-product of my work, mainly). Most video-watching in our house now takes place on the laptops and iPads. The TV is rarely on, or used — this is especially true for our kids, who do all their watching now on smaller, more portable screens.

This is particularly striking given we have two Apple TVs, connected to two televisions. The only time these get used are when we all want to watch the same movie. I think this pattern will increasingly be true for most homes as they acquire a tablet or two.

I had thought that Airplay and the AppleTV might have a bigger impact on our habits, that we might use the iPad more as a remote control. That happens, but infrequently. We use Airplay in our house far more often for music, and much less often for video. But still, even with music, using Airplay to reach the stereo is an occasional thing. The iPod, and now the iPhone, is what I use to listen to music most of the time.

So I suspect it will be with video and the iPad and Airplay connecting to the TV. A nice thing to have on occasion, but a sideshow mostly. Watching on the iPad is so much better, so much of the time.

If it were just the anecdotes, you’d be right to treat this all with skepticism. But there is data, too.

With our iPad app, and others, usage peaks during weekends and evenings — just when people typically turn on their TVs. People use their iPads during prime time. This is a big deal –  the web has historically had a tough time breaking into that time slot.

Session lengths with our app are an order of magnitude longer than your average web visit, and are more akin to the time we might spend watching television. Another huge change.

So this new type of device is already changing our habits. It’s liberated video, and us, allowing us to watch what we want, when we want, where we want. That’s a big, fundamental, and disruptive change.

Maybe the AppleTV that is supposedly coming will be so great, so magical, so awesome that I’ll feel compelled to revise this in just a few months. It’s happened before; technology surprises sometimes. I’ll undoubtedly buy one. But unless I can put that TV under my arm, and take it onto the couch in the other room, I kinda doubt it will be as big as folks expect.

*Mark Suster wrote up this nice post recapping a talk he gave on the Future of Television; he argues that cheap(er) production and distribution of video (primarily through YouTube) is now poised to disrupt the television business. Fred Wilson has been blogging about handheld devices as remote controls (something we’ve thought a lot about with Showyou) and how that is changing our consumption patterns.  And of course people have gone crazy trying to decipher Steve Jobs’ remark about the rumored AppleTV (“I finally cracked it”) and what it portends.

I love our new Showyou app most of all because it’s a joy to use. But I’m also excited about Showyou because it and other similar apps that are sure to follow have the potential to change how we watch TV — and what we watch.

We spend more time watching television than consuming any other form of media. Kids 8-18 years old watch television nearly 4 and a half hours a day — far more than they spend with any other kind of media.

And yet television has remained the most shackled platform, with the least range of choice.  With books, music, magazines and more recently the internet we’ve become accustomed to an abundance of choice. The television, on the other hand, has been locked down for most of the last 50 years, limited (for most people) to a set of channels chosen and delivered by their cable companies, and with programming on those channels determined by a small, select group. Maybe 1000 people, total, determine what most of us watch — or can watch. They’ve offered up some great stuff, to be sure — The Wire, Mad Men, The Daily Show and Colbert Report. But we’ve also gotten a lot of this.  And this. And this.

Despite the growing power of the Internet and social media, television has continued to reign supreme from 8-11PM in most homes. But cracks are starting to show. Data just released this week from the makers of the ReadItLater app shows that the heaviest usage of the iPad during the prime time hours. And we know that streaming from Netflix now accounts for a huge percentage of bandwidth consumed in the evenings.

And now, with Apple TV and  Airplay, your iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch just turned into a new remote control for your TV. New apps like Showyou have the potential to change where we get programming for our televisions, and indeed what we watch.  Now available: tens of millions of hours of programming from the internet, chosen by our friends, or people we follow on social networks like Twitter or Vodpod who have tastes or interests similar to ours. Other platforms from other companies  — Android, Windows, and more — will surely give us more options and more choice still over time.

History shows us what happens when these kinds of disruptions occur. In 1985, when cable TV was still in its infancy, the viewers watched broadcast networks 45% of the time. By 2009, that had dropped to 25%, and basic cable has risen 10-fold, from  a 3.5% share to a 36% share.

Even though online video has had explosive growth the past five years, it accounts for just a small fraction of the time we spending watching television or video. Just like cable in 1984. There is a now an opportunity for entrepreneurs to change all that.

And so a pitched battle is going to be waged for how we get programming for our televisions — and that will be a good thing for consumers.

There is a lot of speculation about what Kilar is really saying, but this part of the post leapt out at me:

The opportunity for content owners.

We believe content owners are in a strong position to make higher returns from TV content distribution in the future than they have historically. If studios and networks license their content to distributors with per-user per-month economics as the model (as opposed to a fixed fee model), then they will be able to extract a higher portion of the total economics their content will generate. We state this given our belief that the majority of the US population (and a material percent of the globe) will be subscribers to some flavor of digital premium content service going forward. We also believe that any number of digital distribution companies have the ability to quickly get to scale; getting to scale is not the hard part about this business. Over the past 4 years, studios and networks have not always insisted on per-user per-month economics in their digital licensing agreements, which has resulted in a regretted under-pricing of their content to digital distributors. That said, we believe that all studios and networks will recognize that it is in their economic interest to insist on per-user per-month pricing in all their distribution relationships (library content and current content).

The added emphasis at the end is mine. In case you missed it, pretty clear that that’s a plea for his partners not to do deals with Netflix… Of the articles I’ve seen, only Ryan Lawler @gigaom seemed to pick up on this. Ryan read it as cheapness — a desire by Hulu not to pay up front fees.

I read it as fear.

Facebook is now the #1 site in the United States as measured in “time spent” with 41 billion usage minutes per month. Google is now in second place, with 39.8B minutes, and Yahoo in third place (37.7B minutes).

It got me wondering: how do YouTube and other video sites stack up in terms of time spent?

First interesting discovery: based on the chart below from Comscore, “video” (meaning, YouTube) accounts for 37.5B out of Google’s 39.8B minutes of usage (math is: 144M unique viewers X 261 minutes usage per viewer). That means almost 95% of the time people spend on Google is spent on YouTube. 95%! Unbelievable.

But it makes sense. The chart above shows Google’s percentage share of minutes spent increasing steadily and rapidly from Q3 2006 onwards — right when they bought YouTube.

Given Google’s mission to capture more display revenues (partcicularly branded video display revenues) the value YouTube has provided is incredible. It was a steal — a steal — at $1.6B.

Wrap your head around that for a moment.

Total time watching video online according to Comscore is 154 billion minutes per month (177M people X 870 minutes per viewer), or 2.6 billion hours per month. Or the equivalent of 4 Facebook’s worth of usage.

While Facebook scores reasonably high in terms of total viewers for video on its site (43M), total minutes spent watching videos pales in comparison to YouTube and Hulu; roughly 866M minutes of usage, compared to 37.5B on YouTube and 3.3B minutes on Hulu and 2.7B on Vevo. (As an aside, I’m curious whether the Facebook measurement includes minutes spent watching embedded videos on Facebook, or just Facebook-hosted videos).

The fact that YouTube accounts for such a massive and overwhelming percentage of time spent on Google services is the thing that boggles my mind. Have I somehow gotten my math wrong?

UPDATE: One additional observation: unlike Google, minutes spent watching videos is just a small fraction of the time people spend on Yahoo! While Yahoo! is #2 in terms of reach, it’s a laggard in terms of minutes spent; just 755M minutes of usage per month, or 2% of the overall time people spend with Yahoo! services. Clearly an area where they’ll need to make progress if they are to compete for brand dollars in video advertising.

• They focused on providing really great PC support on iTunes, and made the iPod a great device for PCs and Macs (remember, the Mac was not yet ascendant as a laptop); and
• They supported MP3s

People bought (and loved) the iPod because it allowed them to take music they already had (through Napster, or that they’d ripped). The iPod became a dominant force in music by embracing and supporting an existing landscape (the PC, MP3), not by trying to circumvent that landscape (or trying to create an alternate reality right off-the-bat). People forget all this now, but the iTunes Store didn’t arrive until 18 months later; and only the huge wave of initial support for the iPod assured it would be a success. Apple changed the music industry paradigm only after they got tons of people to buy iPods, and they got people to buy iPods by making a great device that worked with MP3s they had on their PCs.

Turn to today’s launch. This was Steve Jobs’ lede today at the iPad unveiling:

You can browse the Web with it. It’s the best browsing experience you’ve ever had.

Indeed, the Internet should be without doubt the killer app (initially) for the iPad.  What a joy to sit on a couch, or bed, or plane, or train with an iPad, using natural touch gestures to navigate and browse the web. I would buy this thing in a heartbeat if I could do that — everything else (iBooks, movies and video, games) would be gravy.

So what gives? Well, turns out you can’t truly browse the web with the iPad.

By ignoring Flash, Apple has basically made most of the web broken, as so clearly illustrated by the screenshot of their demo of the front page of the NY Times! It’s not just 10,000s sites which provide their videos in Flash (Hulu, yes, but also CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Comedy Central, BBC, and many, many more), but it’s the millions of flash widgets and other interactive elements on the page.  To get a sense, try this experiment — remove Flash from your computer, and start browsing around. If your web experience is unimpaired, maybe you’ll like the iPad. But I think most people will think: “Who broke the damn Internet?”

The iPad did, that’s who.

Now, I’ve seen some arguments today that this misses the point — that Apple isn’t just satisfied with replicating your standard web video experience, that they want to transform the entire video business.  Ryan Lawler at NewTeeVee argues:

The iPad will cause ripples in multiple industries — including news, book publishing and gaming — but at the end of the day, I’m betting that what the iPad will be used for more than anything is watching video. Like the iPod, it’s only a matter of time before the iPad becomes the defining product with which to consume that type of media.

Could be. But they have to sell a ton of iPads first. And, by not embracing the existing landscape — the tens of thousands of video sites that provide hundreds of millions of videos encoded in Flash — they’ve cut off a natural, intial reason to buy and to use the device (and yes, I know all about HTML 5 video, and no the iPad is not going to cause a stampede to that overnight). If I have to choose between a lightweight, fully functional wireless enabled laptop that works well on every web site and that allows me to watch videos from Hulu and Netflix and a gazillion other places, and an iPad that doesn’t support Flash or any site that  uses Flash and only lets me watch videos from iTune and YouTube, which am I gonna use?

Simple. I’ll stick with my Macbook for now, thanks.

On Friday, Fred posted an interview with Robert Scoble where he asked for a “del.icio.us for video.”  Real-time maven that I am, I would have seen Fred’s note, it would have caught my attention, and I would have tweeted him right away. For I know of such a service!

But, very happily for me, I was very off the grid for three days here:

Now I’m back, refreshed, and should update the record. Del.icio.us for video? Already done.  Called Vodpod. Been around for over 2 years. And indeed already pretty popular! You can see my video bookmarks on the right. Heck, you can even watch them there!

Vodpod:

• Provides a handy browser bookmarklet (or extension if you prefer) so you can bookmark a video from any site that offers Flash video + an embed code (9500+ sites and counting)
• Makes it easy to share the videos you bookmark in an infinite number of ways through our widgets, RSS feeds, API, hosted video sites, applications for Facebook and Twitter and FriendFeed, and more
• Normalizes the video playback across thousands of different Flash player types, with consistent sizing and handling of auto-play (as best we can, anyway)
• Makes lovely thumbnails for the videos you collect
• Provides handy Flickr-like organizer, so you can order your collection as it grows

And more. The team gets an A for building an awesome service; I get a more critical mark when it comes to evangelizing the product among the technorati.

So @Fred — check it out! It’ll even work on your Boxee:-)

Turns out people were right to focus on Hulu, but they paid attention to the wrong thing.

I spent a bit of time the past week looking at and parsing the data, and these numbers jumped off the screen and grabbed me by the throat:

Simple, very important, lesson here: videos embeds = distribution. Both YouTube and Hulu expand their reach by using embed codes.  Their users are their distribution channels.

Hulu has effectively quadrupled its reach — it gets only 5 million people to Hulu.com, but more than 20 million watch Hulu videos around the web. Put another way: it gets only 1/10th the traffic of the Turner properties (mainly CNN.com), but gets more more overall reach (traffic) to its videos. Astounding. And very much under-reported.  But perhaps not surprising if you were reading Umair Haque in 2005 and 2006.

The data above gets even more interesting when I cross-reference it with the most recent version of our Vodpod Sitegeist that we posted just last week. This lists the top 100 sites from which our users — tens of thousands of bloggers, Facebook members, Myspace users, Twitterers, and so on — collect video. Not one major media brand website is represented in the Top 10. No MTV, no CNN, no MSNBC, no ESPN. The closest is Hulu, which has risen to #13 (and which I firmly expect will crack the top 10 later this year).

Instead, in addition to YouTube, Google Video, Myspace, you see scrappy folks like Daily Motion, blip.tv, and Vimeo in the Top 10. They have figured out the 21st centure equivalent of cable carriage.

This is all very ironic given media giants like Viacom and Turner were distribution, not programming, empires first and foremost. They hustled for space and got carriage for MTV and CNN on the nascent cable nets, then worried about filling in their channels with programming and advertising.

As I wrote on the Vodpod blog last week, some media companies are getting in the game. Viacom has at least begun making strides to understand this.

Turner Networks and Disney, though, seem stuck in the stone age. Particularly sad is CNN; they appear to understand the idea of allowing their users to redistribute their videos, they offer something that looks like an embed code — but it’s a crippled version of an embed code, it doesn’t really work, and so they get very little re-distribution. With the exception of ESPN, most Disney sites (for example, ABC News) don’t even bother to offer embed codes.

Maybe it’s just not a priority for them. I’m sure there are strong voices inside both organizations who view things like redistribution through viewers and users as just one more instance of Web 2.0 fluffery. But the world of video is going to evolve and change far more rapidly and dramatically in the next 10 years than it has in the past 10. The cable and satellite television business is going to look like the newspaper business by 2018, and maybe even by 2012.

Media companies like Turner and Disney need to figure this out now; or other folks are going to have taken their place.

*The Comscore “MediaMetrix” service  measures US visitors to a specific domain; its “VideoMetrix” services measures reach to all videos from a specific source, including reach to videos both the source domain (Hulu.com) plus embeds.

Real naming chutzpah here; makes me think of this list of operational code names.

These two posts have the analysis about right, I think.

I’d  go further: the embed code is the new hyperlink for video. Not having an embed code for your video is like not having a hyperlink for your site or web page.

Now go wrap your mind around that idea. Something we’ve been doing that the past 6-8 months over here at vod:pod!

Oddly, many bloggers are simply doing Google’s bidding by simplistically portraying NBC and Viacom as VERY BAD and Google/YouTube as VERY GOOD . When, in fact, this is really a pure and naked power struggle between a rising media behemoth (GOOG) and two old media empires whose golden years are, most likely, behind them (Viacom, NBC).

Many in the commentariat seem to think that the best possible outcome for us is to have all video available on YouTube. And that media companies are idiots for not recognizing YouTube as just a nice, wonderful free promotional engine for video programming. (“Damned fools”, cried one prominent blogger in exasperation).

It all sounds so seductive and alluring if you think about it for only a second; but if you think about it longer than that, it’s not at all clear to me that having all the video on Google (it’s not YouTube, it’s Google), so that it consolidates its position as the dominant place to search for AND watch video, will ultimately benefit us the people.

Google has been perceived as a benign and even helpful power in the search space because their search results bring people to your site. Not true with YouTube. You find the video on YouTube, you watch the video on YouTube.

The declining media powers know that if all their content is available on YouTube — and everyone else’s, too — YouTube will be in an unbelievable position of power and leverage, as we’ve discussed before.
So I have a simple way of framing the choice. Which of these two options is better:

1. All the video we want available on one site, YouTube, owned and controlled by Google?

2. All the video video we want available on millions of sites, owned and controlled by hundreds of thousands of entities?

I think the answer is pretty straightforward.

The complaint with NBC and Viacom shouldn’t be that they’re forcing YouTube to take down their content, but that they aren’t doing more to make more (or all) of their video available online, for free.

And in the end, as we’ve said before on this blog, we think that the trend will be towards distributed, decentralized availability of video, and ultimatley there will be hundreds of thousands or even millions sites that provide video that is “shareable” — probably using flash, probably with an embed code. Why would we expect video, after all, to be any different than other media types on the web?