By Scott Moritz, writer

Seeing no signs that the slowing economy is crimping consumer spending, Verizon (VZ) plans to raise prices on its nascent TV service.

The New York phone giant reported first quarter earnings that met Thomson Financial’s analyst estimate but missed the Bloomberg consensus by a penny Monday. On a conference call following the release, the company blamed the loss of a large former MCI business customer for some of the profit weakness.

The most striking news of all, however, was Verizon’s bullish take on consumer behavior. Verizon said it has been watching for warning signs, like increases in so-called uncollectible or deadbeat customers, but so far hasn’t seen anything to worry about. “I’ve seen no changes,” finance chief Doreen Toben told analysts on the call, referring to a spending slowdown.

Verizon is feeling so confident about paying subscribers that it plans a price hike.

“We will move up prices at the end of this quarter or next quarter,” Verizon executives said on the call. “We are very comfortable moving up the pricing at this point.”

The company said it probably won’t tamper with its $99-a-month promotional offer for its package of phone, Internet and TV services. Instead, officials said they’re looking to hike the price of the company’s a la carte TV service, which launched in 2005 and costs $48 a month.

Verizon has been winning business from cable companies like Comcast (CMCSA), Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Cablevision (CVC) as it pushes its Web video and TV strategy. On the flip side, as the cable companies have started selling phone services, telcos like AT&T (T) and Verizon have seen the decline in landline phone subscribers accelerate. In the first quarter, Verizon’s total phone line count dropped 8.2% from the prior year, a slight increase over the 8.1% pace for 2007. And residential lines fell by an eye-popping 10.9% from the same quarter a year ago.

Raising prices in the face of a economic slowdown is a bold move that borrows from the cable industry’s long-held strategy of continual rate hikes. Two things work in Verizon’s favor here, says one analyst: Phone and TV subscribers aren’t known to be the most vigilant consumers. They may not even notice they’re paying more.

Verizon’s about to find out.

By Yi-Wyn Yen

LAS VEGAS – Last month Veoh, an Internet TV startup that offers shows from “30 Rock” to “The Young and the Restless” online, discovered a telling statistic about consumers. Of the 23 million viewers who visited the site, a whopping 40 percent of them were watching shows on the Web during prime-time hours.

“Given the option, instead of sitting in front of the TV watching cable or satellite broadcasts, they were sitting in front of their computers watching Internet shows,” says Dmitry Shapiro, founder and chief innovation officer of Veoh.

“It’s the dream of every lazy employee to watch episodes of “Lost” at work,” says Shapiro. “But really, the better value is the ability to watch shows at any time. Whether you’re sitting at Starbucks with your laptop or watching TV in your living room, people want access to the same content. And they want it now.”

That message rang clear at the Consumer Electronic Show this week. TV manufacturers like Samsung, Sharp, and Panasonic all announced deals to stream content from companies like Google to wireless televisions in an effort to bridge the gap between TV and the Internet. HP (HPQ), which along with Sony (SNE) began offering Internet-enabled flat-screens in 2006, announced that all future HP televisions will be wireless.

“A big indicator that this is really happening is that three years ago, we went to content providers and studios to talk about wireless TV,” says Alex Thatcher, a product marketing manager for HP’s Digital TV Solutions. “They were pretty lukewarm. They were focused on distributing their content with Blu-Ray discs. Now, we have content providers approaching us and asking how can they get their videos onto our TVs.”

As the technology improves for TV sets to stream content to and from the Internet and Hollywood continues to port digital movies and shows onto the Web, the prediction that viewers will be able to call up every past episode of “Law & Order” or the Spiderman movies in high definition on the tube doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

“In 2018, the idea that you once had to drive to a store and pick up a movie to rent will seem so strange,” says Curt Marvis, CEO of CinemaNow, which sells and rents digital movies and TV shows online.

A number of Internet distributors are racing to offer digital video on the web. Veoh announced a partnership with Viacom (VIA) this week that will expand its lineup to include hit shows like MTV’s “The Hills,” Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” and Nickelodeon’s “iCarly.” Last quarter, CinemaNow struck a deal with HP to provide its movies on HP’s MediaSmart TV sets. Vudu, a newcomer that offers more than 5,000 movie titles on demand with the purchase of a $300 set-top box, will expand its HD service to more than 70 titles next month.

Apple’s iTunes may be responsible for the consumption of digital music, but online video providers say there is still no clear winner in the Internet TV market. “The question is, who’s going to build the right interface and the right model and right set of content where consumers say, `That’s what I want,’ ” says Shapiro.

By Josh Quittner

Hayden Black was thrilled—initially—to see traffic start to spike as his online-only sitcom, “Goodnight, Burbank,” found a fan base on Facebook. Then, he tells me, not so much: “Many people erroneously think that the success of your show is determined by how many people go to your website. But watching video on the Internet is an animal in and of itself.”

The problem was that Facebook fans like to stay put on Facebook. Instead of going to blip.tv — the video site that hosts “Goodnight Burbank” and sells ads on its behalf — Facebookers used video-viewing applets to stream the show back to the social network. That may have been good for the series’s popularity, but generated exactly zero income for Black.

So with his latest venture, “Abigail’s X-Rated Teenage Diary” Black built his own social network around his video content. It launched earlier this week. Or rather, he used Ning, the white-label service that lets anyone create a social network. “How do we bring people in? How do we fight the challenge of getting them to leave Facebook for a moment?” Black asks. “I think the best way is to use what Ning is doing — a social network in a box.”

A number of online TV companies are doing the same thing.  Social networks on Ning support, or will soon support, video programs like NextNewNetworks’ “Epic-Fu” and Channel Frederator; the Animation Social Network; Jason Calcanis’s “Maholo Daily” and the popular video podcast “TikiBar.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. We live in a media world; we are awash in the stuff. We define ourselves by the media we choose to consume — that’s partly why people prominently display the books they’ve read. We carry around like flags the magazines we love, and buy “The Sopranos” on DVD because we want to physically possess it. It’s actually kind of shocking that HBO never thought to start a Soprano’s social network.

Of course, none of this is lost on the hungry folks navigating the edges of new media.

Some bigger sites, such as Funny Or Die, are even building out their own in-house social networks. Mark Kvamme, the VC from Sequoia Ventures, which funded the Will Ferrell-backed comedy video site, says that funnyordie.com uses the same platform technology as sister sites mybluecollar.com and skateboard king Tony Hawk’s shredordie.com. Kvamme calls this the “Or Die Network” and says that it will be launching three to five new celebrity-affiliated video sites over the next six months. “We’re building a platform to partner with creative folks to give them best-of-breed web technologies to help them communicate,” he tells me. “We’re baking in our own social networking features.”

Kvamme says that building a social network around a video site is a no-brainer from a viewer standpoint.  “These audiences want to connect and communicate. They want information. We have thousands of people on the newsfeed looking for new videos coming out.”

While Funnyordie had 3.5 million unique visitors in November, Kvamme says it’s yet to turn a profit. “We haven’t figured out how to monetize Internet video yet.”  But social networks, which can demonstrate to advertisers user engagement, among other things, could solve the problem. Kvamme predicts that within five years, “Internet advertising will surpass broadcast television.”

Jeff Macpherson and Tosca Musk live in Vancouver and produce “TikiBar,” an online series about cocktails and the bachelor life. They started their video podcast nearly three years ago as a hobby, and it quickly ramped up into a real business. Currently, each episode is downloaded around 500,000 times a month.

A social network, says Musk, “allows us to really communicate with the audience. Fan scripts and art and music would be e-mailed to us all the time, and very little of it was used. It just sat there doing nothing.” With the launch of the TikiBar network on Ning (still in beta), however, fans can create their own pages and share all that stuff. “Forums are a kind of limited way of expressing oneself,” says Macpherson. “They’re limited to straight, linear text. The social network is a less linear experience — it doesn’t feel like you’re looking at a database of messages. You have your own page, music, photos, documents, and even sets of icons the user creates. It really feels like it comes to life.”

By Josh Quittner

Is Net-based TV ready for its close-up? Television ratings are already starting to plummet, the ongoing writers’ strike shows no signs of ending, and the development schedule for next year’s programming is looking increasingly dicey. While one report suggests that ex-TV watchers are turning to books and magazines, some folks in the nascent Internet TV business say they’re enjoying a sudden uptick in audience.

“We are seeing increased viewership at our top video products - Ask A Ninja, Boing Boing TV and Webb Alert, ” says Chas Edwards, publisher of Sausalito, CA.-based Federated Media, which sells advertising for Web sites. “But it’s hard to say how much is organic growth (the latter two both launched in the past six months) versus the migration of TV viewers to online video.”

The new TV properties are each already serving up around a million streams a month, he said; Ask A Ninja is doing closer to 3 million. Ads for premium video tend to fetch revenue of 2 to 4-cents a stream, notes Edwards, meaning that the hottest sites are starting to show quit-your-day-job-type returns.

Tech pundit and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, observing that television viewership “has been dropping as much as 10 percent a year over the last four years, especially among kids,” says that the writers’ strike simply adds fuel to the fire. “The Hollywood writer’s strike fiasco, which is just a huge mess, is killing an entire season of TV shows,” he says, “And quite possibly the next season as well. Which will drive even more people to the net, especially kids.”

Others agree. “We’ve definitely seen a marked increase in traffic over the past few weeks,” says Hayden Black, who produces the popular Net sitcoms, Goodnight Burbank and Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary. (Burbank is a fairly conventional, behind-the-scenes spoof of life at on a local TV news show; Abigail is a more cutting-edge comedy centered on Black, who plays a young girl afflicted with a fake disease that makes her look like a bearded, middle-aged man.) “Without any marketing at all, Abigail is doing about 10,000 streams a day,” Black says. The program, which launched two months ago, is now generating as much traffic as Burbank, which is a year old. Black, 34, who worked for years in network television writing promos, says he plans to keep his day job for now.

Edwards says that, while the near-term effect of the writers’ strike is hard to parse, he believes that in the coming months and years, Net TV will pay off - mainly because advertising dollars will increasingly flow there.

“Premium online video has always sold well,” he says. “Big brand advertisers for years haven’t been able to find enough video inventory that they consider ‘quality.’ I do think stumbling TV ratings (both from the Tivo effect and from the writers’ strike) will drive more video ad dollars online - it literally has to. Ratings that drop fast mean networks are giving advertisers part of their money back, and digital will benefit.”

He believes that much of the new media windfall will go—where else?—to Google. “The big digital video plays will win biggest: YouTube offers huge scale fast, they have moderately believable technologies to filter for scary content, and it’s becoming more than acceptable for brand advertisers to tell their bosses they bought YouTube.”

By Josh Quittner

[Productivity alert! If you expect to get anything done for the next few hours, please read no further.]

[Still reading? Yeah. Slacker.]

I have seen the future of television and it’s an application called called Miro. The app makes it super easy to find and watch Internet TV. It handles HD feeds and seamlessly staples together BitTorrent streams. A free, open-source download, Miro goes into its 1.0 public release today, here.

I never realized that finding and watching video online was a problem. But it is. With the steady proliferation of Net TV shows — not to mention all the things you might want to track on YouTube — organizing your video feeds is increasingly painful. From BoingBoing, to Wired Science, to The Onion, everyone is doing video, and a lot of it is getting fun. Miro gives you a way to subscribe to and organize it all. Since it solves a problem you didn’t know you had, it’s one of those programs you have to use to appreciate.

After installing it, you’re taken through a quick setup that lets you browse the Miro Guide, and subscribe to any of 2,714 of freely available channels and programs. You can add as many channels as you want, or simply add videos you find on the Web to a playlist. (All the major video portals are represented here, including YouTube, BlogDigger, Google Video, Yahoo!, Revver, Daily Motion, Blip.tv and Mefeedia.) You can also auto download programs as they become available on the channels.

For instance, I have become enamored lately of a YouTube auteur, jdarks, whose passion is teaching guitar hacks how to play like Jerry Garcia (one of my many sordid fantasies). With Miro, I simply created a channel for jdarks. Now, I have all his videos organized, and can quickly download and watch whichever clips I want. Miro automatically deletes the files after 5 days, so you don’t chew up your hard drive. You can, however, elect to save your favorites.

Over the past few years, a half dozen folks in Worcester, Mass., who are affiliated with the Participatory Culture Foundation have been hacking away on Miro. “From a consumer point of view, it’s just a really great experience — it’s a trivially easy way to subscribe to and consume high definition content,” says John Lilly, who, besides being the COO of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, is a PCF board member. “It breaks out of the little video box we’re all used to in the browser. Mostly I love it because it just works — no other video on the web is like that.”

People can rate videos and get recommendations of the “if you like this, then you might like that” variety. Likewise, you can post videos to digg, de.licio.us, or reddit. Nicholas Reville, executive director of the project, says that even more social web functionality will be added as the application matures. “We are planning an extension system for version 2.0 that will open up a lot more of these types of opportunities.”

Maybe Marc Andreessen is right. Perhaps, with the writer’s strike and all that talent walking the picket line on the one hand, and on the other, all this terrific, cheap technology for distributing, organizing and watching Net TV, television is about to be reinvented. Something big is going on. GigaOm’s first conference on Reinventing TV, is sold out tomorrow. Luckily, I got a ticket. Now, if only I can tear myself away from learning this Dark Hollow lick…

By Stephanie Mehta 

With the cable industry in the doldrums, at least one consultant expects companies such as Comcast (CMCSA), Time Warner Cable (TWC) and others may be headed for some downsizing. Shahid Khan, partner at IBB Consulting Group, recently said he thinks the big cable operators are going to spend the next two to four quarters focused on “operational efficiencies.”

“They’ve had the happy problem of growth,” says Khan. “Now that’s slowing down.”

Indeed, Time Warner Cable, whose biggest shareholder is CNNMoney parent Time Warner (TWX), today reported larger-than-expected declines in video customers, and missed some analysts’ profit estimates. Time Warner Cable’s lackluster numbers come two weeks after Comcast reported similarly uninspiring results, prompting investors to sell off the stock. Both companies’ shares are trading at or near their 52-week lows.

IBB’s Khan says the cable operators are in a bit of a holding pattern. They grew rapidly thanks to the offering of residential voice service and high-speed Internet, bundling those services with their core video product. But they’ve yet to debut the next big part of the bundle (and engine for additional growth): wireless service.

Where’s wireless? The cable operators have a joint venture with wireless operator Sprint Nextel (S) essentially to resell Sprint’s service to cable customers, but according to industry sources, that venture isn’t going well. The parties apparently are squabbling about a number of issues, including responsibility for customer service, among other details. It doesn’t help matters that Sprint is without a CEO. The cable guys also have acquired wireless spectrum but haven’t announced plans to build out a full-fledged network using those airwaves.

Meanwhile, the phone companies such as Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) are not standing by while cable grabs their phone and DSL customers. The telcos are fighting back with video products of their own, and apparently are having an impact in several key markets, such as the New York suburbs, Dallas and L.A.

And so Khan predicts some “network efficiencies” at some cable operators in the coming year. Our experience is that, when cable guys start talking about operational efficiencies, it usually means layoffs.

But he also sees some new products coming online that can help cable grow until their wireless strategies coalesce. He thinks switched digital video, a technology that frees up additional bandwidth on the cable network, will help operators deliver more high-definition channels over their pipes. And more high-def, argues Khan, should help the cable operators fend off competition from both phone and satellite companies touting their high-def offerings to lure cable customers.

Is anyone really watching TV on their mobile phones? At least three million people are, according to the latest subscriber numbers from MobiTV, an Emeryville, Calif.-based company that streams television shows like Nascar events, HBO dramas and the hit drama CSI to cell phones.

Although the bulk of MobiTV’s subscribers are likely in the United States - the company doesn’t break down user numbers by geography, but U.S.-based Sprint (S) is its longest-standing customer - North Americans have been relatively slow to take up watching TV shows on the small screen.

That’s because most of the constraints on the growth of mobile television in the U.S. have more to do with culture than technology, says Michael Wolf, an analyst with ABI Research. Unlike their Asian and European counterparts, most Americans don’t commute on mass transit, and let’s face it, driving is not exactly conducive to watching TV.

“I do still think we’re in the very early phase here,” says Wolf.

MobiTV is trying to change that. But they’re not alone: Qualcomm’s (QCOM) MediFLO service, available to some Verizon (VZ) Wireless customers, transmits television channels to handsets using UHF spectrum. Sling Media, meanwhile, lets consumers watch and control their home TV from select phones.

This rise in service providers, along with an increase of compatible handsets and more premium TV content, are all reasons MobiTV president Paul Scanlan remains optimistic on the prospects of mobile television in the United States.

“This coming year we think mobile television will take a dramatic shift forward,” says Scanlan. “Within the next year or two pretty much everything available on your home television will be available on your mobile.”

By year’s end there will be an estimated 3.7 million mobile TV subscribers in the United States and Canada, compared to 2.2 million at the close of 2006, according to Wolf. And by the end of 2008, about 6.7 million people across the United States and Canada are expected to watch television on their phones.

One of the reasons MobiTV has had some early success with its service is that it works on a broad range of cell phones. What’s more, MobiTV’s basic channel lineup is now bundled in with Sprint’s data plan. That means that any Sprint customer who signs up for data in addition to voice automatically becomes a MobiTV subscriber.

“Bundling has been a huge point of growth,” says Scanlan.

If there’s one thing North Americans are ahead of the curve in, it’s spending money on wireless plans. According to a new report by Informa Telecoms and Media, Americans and Canadians generate the world’s highest monthly average revenue per user from mobile data services. But whether they’ll end up using those data plans to watch television on the tiny three-inch screen remains to be seen.