The Beginning of the end of the Web TV Pirate Days

Two interesting pieces of news - firstly, Hulu, Apple and Netflix are estimated to be sharing $800m of streamed Web TV revenues by 2013:

By the end of this year, an estimated 2 million households in the U.S. will have abandoned TV for the Web, cutting the cord with their cable companies. This estimate comes from Convergence Consulting Group, a Toronto-based research firm with a new report on The Battle for the American Couch Potato. That 2 million is up from the 1.6 million it was estimating a year ago, but it is still rather small and the number of cord cutters may very well have peaked last year as cable companies begin to fight back with TV Everywhere offerings.

Nevertheless, the big beneficiaries of cord cutting are Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV. They benefit even if people keep their cable but add Internet TV streaming or downloads to their viewing repertoire, as is much more common.

Note the lack of YouTube in that analysis. The second newspiece is that Google is spending $100m on bringing Mountain View to Mohammed (It's initial approach of bringing Mohammed to the mountain's view with Google TV didn't work, the search based program navigation failed):

The company is planning changes to the homepage that would highlight sets of channels around topics such as arts and sports. YouTube is looking to introduce 20 or so "premium channels" that would feature five to 10 hours of professionally-produced original programming a week, one of these people said. Additional channels would be assembled from content already on the site.

It is planning to spend as much as $100 million to commission the creation of original content for the premium channels, the people familiar with the matter said.

Good luck to YouTube, they will need it - its profitability always seems around the next corner, and every which way we run the numbers we can't see how they can make money sustainably without some "interesting" assumptions of Ad rates.

But big picture, it is yet more evidence that the "Pirate World" of Web TV is starting to morph into a "New TV" world as players shake out into winners (make money) and losers (still need subsidies). That 2008 prediction (see chart above, a more detailed slide pack is over here) is starting to firm up nicely.