The New York cable operator is launching an ad campaign "on behalf of its customers" to target what it sees as unfair price demands by programmers. It argues that these price demands, which usually come around this time of year at the end of programming contracts, can sometimes be as much as 300 percent increases. TWC says programmers make the demands "secure in the knowledge that video distributors are the ones who have to pass those costs along to customers and take the blame."

So what's Time Warner Cable going to do about it? They're going to launch a website -- yes, a website with the catchy URL: www.rolloverorgettough.com. News Corp, Sinclair Broadcasting and cable networks must be quaking in their collective fee-hiking boots.

(For the uninitiated: One way for companies to make money from their shows is to charge cable operators for the privilege of distributing them. Programmers like to raise those fees every so often. When cable operators resist, shows you like have a way of being held for ransom and sometimes disappearing for a while.)

Time Warner Cable's website will allow customers to give their feedback and will be supported by ads in newspapers, TV and the Web.

"We want them to know why we fight so hard on these issues - if we Roll Over, they pay the price. If we Get Tough, they may lose their favorite shows until we reach a reasonable agreement." said TWC CEO Glenn Britt in the press release.

It's not the first time Time Warner Cable has tried to be principled about not overpaying for content. You might remember the great "Why is SpongeBob crying?" campaign of Dec 2008 when Viacom and TWC fell out over rising carriage fees.

Britt's easiest solution to avoid revisiting this issue every year might not be to build websites, but to buy content companies like its larger counterpart Comcast is trying to do with NBC Universal. If nothing else it will give TWC more leverage in negotiations with some content makers -- and they'd have to play nice.

AOL or Aol is, as you likely know, being spun-off from parent Time Warner on Dec 9 to once again be an independent company. It's expected to have a market valuation in the $3 billion range, a tad smaller than the $163 billion market cap it had when it actually bought Time Warner back in 2000.

The company, will unveil its 'Aol' brand identity on Dec 10, the same day it starts trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the 'AOL' ticker (but don't let that confuse you).

Global brand and innovation consultancy Wolff Olins were the clever chaps who decided that losing all contact with the past and coming up with a completely brand new name might be a step too far. In fact, according to Wolff Olins CEO Karl Heiselman, the new logo (below) is "something bold and exciting that sets AOL apart."

Click here to see a corporate video about the new brand identity.

• On Demand Online will launch, as previously hinted, this December.
• Banse says users will be able to watch their favorite shows with authentication even when they're away from home (Is this the death of EchoStar's SlingBox?). It's not clear from this interview if out of home on demand will work when a user is outside the United States.
• Each home will have authentications rights to watch their shows on three different devices.
• One issue Banse acknowledges still needs to be sorted out is the right advertising model to help support this new channel. "We're in the first inning" she says.

Much more here:

While he remained on message (or is that off message?), Jeff Immelt, his counterpart at NBC Universal's parent General Electric, was a little more forthcoming, saying the company is considering its options for NBC Universal which could include keeping it.

In this 43 minute interview, Roberts also talked on a range of other topics including the importance of building faster Internet services and gave a demostration of his company's On Demand Online service which he said will be launching nationally before the end of the year.

In a blog by YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley, he reminisces about how he and co-founder/former CTO Steve Chen made a fun video declaring themselves the "burger kings of media". How sweet.

But on the serious side of the media equation Hurley has some important points about the fast changing world of online video (You could also call it the 'why we won' manifesto).

Hurley says:

• Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly
• Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content
• Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn't our business; it's yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection can share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases they can make a living from doing so

Questions remain about the business model of YouTube, which is being built around the fledgling online video advertising sector. The company is yet to declare a profit. Yet with 40 percent of all online video viewing in the US, according to comScore, YouTube will have a lot of say in writing and re-writing the rules for Web video ads.

On a Credit Suisse call with investors this morning, some online advertising experts questioned whether YouTube has improved materially in their advertising mix though they acknowledged the hard work of the YouTube team to improve the advertising environment. One advertising executive on the call said YouTube has "improved year over year".

Comcast's bid, led by CEO Brian Roberts, is exactly the opposite of what Bewkes has been doing at Time Warner, where rather than buying he's spun off the cable assets and hopes to do the same with AOL by the end of this year.  So Bewkes couldn't resist a little jab at his rival and sometimes partner:

"I don't want to say anything that would discourage Brian from continuing in this pursuit that he has," Bewkes said to laughter from the audience.

Bewkes agreed with suggestions that Comcast might be doing this for a share in the growing cable business. 

"They may have concerns about their future in cable and they may want to hedge into what they think is a better long-term business, which is the branded content business. It’s a good business, it’s one that everybody should want to get in. We’re in it, we’re very nicely placed in it."

But the executive who lived through one of the worst corporate mergers of all time -- AOL-Time Warner -- is far less supportive of the idea of big combinations, especially in the media space.

"It’s probably true if you look at media deals -- not just ours -- in the entire industry. In the last 10 or 15 years there’s a lower percentage of deals that have delievered what they said they were going to deliver and have had an actual return on investment versus  what you would find in other more rationally based businesses where you don’t call the CEO 'a mogul'. So whoever that is doesn’t get lost thinking about what they’re going to write in tomorrow’s paper."

And while many journalists, investors and Wall Street analysts continue to try to decide whether this deal makes sense, Bewkes has a simple test.

 "If it’s a synergy idea that takes a week and nine articles to fully plumb the mysterious depths, you’re probably wrong."

Nice to know someone feels our pain.  

But not Fancast. Despite being owned by the largest U.S. cable TV operator Comcast, it doesn't even make the top 10 video sites in the U.S., according to comScore data. (Hulu is No. 5). One of the ways Hulu became better known was by launching a national TV advertising campaign which kicked off during this year's Super Bowl TV extravaganza. Hulu's user numbers jumped after those ads -- and Fancast hopes for a similar boost.

Fancast has dubbed its debut TV campaign "See It For Yourself" and will feature a series of five spots with recaps of shows including CSI Miami, Glee, NCIS, How I Met Your Mother and Gilligan's Island. Three TV spots will debut on CBS and also on targeted national cable networks. See the Fancast/CSI ad here: The campaign also features an online push and an outdoor drive with interactive bus shelters around the San Francisco area.

In truth, beating Hulu might not be Comcast's biggest prize. It's more likely to have its eye on its On Demand Online /TV Everywhere initiatives, which aim to make popular cable shows available on demand to paying subscribers. Fancast will be one of Comcast's key platforms for that new service when it fully rolls out so building awareness of the site now is important.

(Photo: CSI Miami's David Caruso/Reuters)

But the songs will not be dynamically priced like the rest of the music on Amie Street which fluctuates based on demand. Sony's songs will cost 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29, much like they are on sites like iTunes and Amazon.

In an open letter to the Amie Street community the site's owners said:

We know this is a big change, and we’re confident that it will make Amie Street a better place for you to discover, download, and share new music. We spent hundreds of hours asking members of the Amie Street community whether this kind of catalog belonged on the site, and for most of you the answer was a definite Yes.

But co-founder Josh Boltuch added that the deal with Sony allows the option to experiment with dynamic pricing at its discretion if the music company wants to try it with an individual artist or album release.

In the meantime Amie Street, which was founded by Boltuch and his fellow Brown University graduates, is in middle of raising its Series B round of funding. You may recall that Amie Street closed a Series A round of financing led by Amazon.com in August 2007.

(Photo: Reuters)

Top of the bill is Dave Mathews Band along with Jason Mraz, Raphael Saddiq, Thievery Corporation and many others all performing at the event in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The live webcast will feature on youtube.com/outsidelands and fans will also be able to access an archive of selected performances and highlights on YouTube's Outside Lands channel.

It's the first major music festival on YouTube, though it has previously streamed its own live music event called YouTube Live which celebrated some of the community's own discovered stars and artists.

(Photo: Dave Matthew in Buenos Aires/Reuters)

The problem with this is the lack of precise details. How much revenue is YouTube generating from these monetized videos exactly (even approximately)? And how much does it cost to stream and store those hundreds of millions of videos every week? Google and YouTube decline to provide any numbers other than to say things are moving in the right direction. Wall Street and investors are yet to be convinced.

Goldman Sachs analyst James Mitchell is the latest to have a shot at a respectable estimate for YouTube. He says it will generate around $300 million in 2009. He also thinks the best is yet to come from YouTube -- and that Google will see some benefit.

We believe YouTube revenue will grow at 40 percent year-over-year or faster in 2010 as YouTube is generally under-monetizing its home page traffic versus peers, and as its home page is a natural venue for studios to advertise new movies.

For Google investors, the most important part of Mitchell's analysis is that he thinks display advertising, of which YouTube is a major part alongside DoubleClick, could add 1-2 percent to Google's revenue growth.

In the meantime, the majority of the videos uploaded to YouTube are done so by its users -- and as the world's most popular Web video site YouTube has a lot of users. Over a 100 million in the U.S. alone according to comScore. Goldman Sachs' Mitchell says:

We do not expect serving query-specific video advertisements to represent a substantial business for the foreseeable future given branded advertiser discomfort with unknown content, and given consumer unwillingness to tolerate 30-second advertisements against 60 seconds or less of content; however, Google does not need such advertising to make YouTube profitable given YouTube’s cost leverage against Google’s existing assets and homepage traffic.

YouTube is signing up more so called professional content such as its latest deal with Time Warner on Wednesday with shows like "Ellen Degeneres Show" and "Gossip Girls". For now, most of what they're getting from Time Warner and others like Disney is promotional clips. We asked about getting more full-length shows like Hulu, and executives gave a very 'watch this space' type of response.

YouTube, meanwhile, is working hard to show that getting people to watch more and more video online is not as easy as it looks and involves lots of clever technology and algorithms that its engineers have been working on.  The idea -- as the Wall Street Journal's Digits blog explains -- is to  make sure "people don't just watch one video when they come to  the site".

The company's engineers are looking for ways to predict what topics will pique a user's interest after they're done watching a certain video, based on data about their viewing behavior.