There’s a lot going on in the world of TV/internet convergence. The AOP has this:

A report by Informa Telecoms and Media predicts that global revenue for online TV and video services will increase ten-fold to £3.2 billion in 2012.

Second only to the US, the UK recorded revenues of almost £22 million last year which are set to soar to £708 million by 2012. According to the report the US will be the global leader in online TV and video, expecting revenues of up to $3.94 billion by 2012.

The Informa research points to the increasing popularity of watching online TV and video and states that is wider cultural changes that are creating a new breed of consumer who “find it difficult to align themselves with the passive model of traditional linear TV”.

We’ve already seen the deals done between the studios and YouTube, and this week’s bust up with Viacom.

And there are rumours that the studios are considering building their own site to rival YouTube

But things are heating up. Wired this month has a feature about Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström the geeks behind the P2P network Kazaa who went on to build Skype before selling it to eBay for $2.6bn. It seems they are building their own internet TV model which combines P2P technology, industrial strength DRM and a solid ad model.

Does this point to TV 2.0? Maybe. But there will be a lot more fall out before the dust settles…

Technorati Tags: TV, web, video

A Million Penguins is a novel experiment from Penguin Books to see if collaborative intelligence can achieve a single, authorial voice in a novel. Can’t be worse than Jeffery Archer…

Technorati Tags: social media, wiki

Digg has taken the decision to remove its list of top Diggers from the site. The company says spam and continuing attempts to game the system are the reasons and that there are new developments in the pipeline which will reward the most prolific Diggers in the future. However, speculates Steve Rubel, this could be a tactical error which alienates the community and pushes it into the arms of, say, del.icio.us. Time will tell.

Technorati Tags: social media

Lots of stuff about Viacom’s decision to ask YouTube to remove 100,000 of its clips. Some, like Charlene Li of Forrester see it as a short-term blip. Others, like Jeff Jarvis are less kind – “Viacom cuts its nose off to spite its face”. He goes on to explain why the decision is short-sighted, to put it kindly.

Technorati Tags: convergence , video

Steve Rubel takes a close look at recent offerings from Yahoo! and thinks he spots tell-tale signs of silo-itis in the new media behemoth. Get a Merissa Meyer to sort it out, he counsels.

Technorati Tags: media

Macworld has a think-piece from some-time contributor Glenn Fleishman who argues that a combination of the iPhone, Apple’s recently announced new phone, and broadband services from AT&T could mark the first step towards the holy grail of truly converged devices.

Technorati Tags: mobile, convergence

Jeff Jarvis, again, from Davos – this time reporting on Reuter’s chief Tom Glocer’s views about user generated content.

he doesn’t buy the professional/amateur line. (We’ll be left with no labels and no borders. And maybe that’s the point.) He says Reuters invented user-generated content 50 years ago aggregating trader information and then selling it back. Adler asks him whether professional journalists will lose their jobs as a result of this. “I think there’s only one type of journalism, which is good journalism…. I know some professional journalists who write crappy text and I know amateurs who write beautiful prose.” Asked whether there willl be fewer professional journalists, once again, Glocer says there will be fewer newspapers and that there will be other opportunities for people who want to do journalism to get paid for it.

Technorati Tags: blogs, media

Jeff Jarvis reports on a session with Bill Gates, Caterina Fake (Flickr), Chat Hurley (YouTube), Mike Parker (Nike), Viviane Reding (EU), and Dennis Kneale (Forbes) at Davos. The topics covered the future of television, the role of Government and IPR.

Technorati Tags: politics, predictions

Jeff Jarvis writes about what he is calling the “YouTube Campaign” for the US presidency.

Technorati Tags: politics

Hillary Clinton has posted a question on Yahoo! Answers to find out what Americans’ experience of health care is. Six days in there were 37,583 answers!

Technorati Tags: social media