Today, access to its streaming video service comes bundled with Amazon Prime. But some rumors have emerged lately, suggesting that Amazon could unbundle the service and offer it as a standalone competitor to Netflix or Hulu Plus. That includes a mention from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who wrote in a letter to shareholders that he expects Amazon to introduce the service and price it below Netflix’s own offering.

But Brad Beale, Head of Digital Video Content Acquisition at Amazon, said in an interview Wednesday that the company is unlikely to break out the video subscription offering anytime soon. “The bundle of benefits that come with Amazon Prime make perfect sense to offer to customers,” Beale said. “The way that Prime Instant Video is offered today — we’re going to continue that approach at least into the near future.”

Even before adding the video component, Beale said that Prime was an incredible value. The offering provides free, two-day shipping to customers who pay an annual subscription. We’ve believed for a while that adding video could entice some customers to sign up for Amazon Prime who might otherwise not have — and once they’ve paid the annual subscription fee, they’re likely to take advantage of the free shipping. In that sense, video could be seen as a loss leader for driving more physical retail sales.

There’s also the fact that having a free subscription service could help boost transactional sales through Amazon’s VOD and electronic sell-through offering. While Prime Instant Video has 15,000 titles for free viewing, it doesn’t have many of the latest new release films or in-season TV episodes. For newer content, Amazon offers more than 100,000 titles for rental or purchase. So an Amazon user who got hooked on older seasons of Downton Abbey or Sons of Anarchy on the free service might convert to being a paid user to watch the current seasons of those shows.

As Amazon adds content, it’s also looking to boost awareness of what’s available on the service. That includes placement of a letter from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the site’s homepage, letting the millions of users who stop by every day know what new content is available from Amazon Prime. That kind of promotion is driving awareness and usage, Beale told me. As more customers learn what’s available, and as Amazon continues to improve the offering with even more content, he expects customer adoption to grow even more.

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Be open

The beauty of YouTube, and its greatest strength, is that anyone and everyone can publish to the platform. There’s no hierarchy of decision makers reviewing scripts and greenlighting projects. There’s no need for an agent. And most importantly, there’s no cost involved with participating on the site. All anyone has to do to become a YouTube publisher is to upload a video to the site.

That’s why YouTube gets an hour’s worth of video uploaded to the site every second. And it’s why people keep coming back, despite the fact that YouTube doesn’t have much of the Hollywood content that can be found on Netflix or Hulu. YouTube is a democratic platform for distributing and consuming content. Its stars are discovered not by a studio exec, but elevated and popularized by its own users.

Be global

Another strength of YouTube is that it is available to users around the world, who are able to enjoy all the same content regardless of their location. Anyone with an Internet connection pretty much anywhere can watch the same videos that you and I enjoy. That’s important, especially as most YouTube views come from non-English speaking countries.

It’s also something that Hollywood has been bad at managing as the world has gone digital. Much of piracy occurs simply because digital copies of films or TV shows are available online long before they make it to international markets. By geofencing or geoblocking certain content, today’s media companies are missing out on an opportunity to reach audiences directly that are turning to piracy instead. By being global, YouTube is addressing the largest possible audience at all times.

Be multiplatform

This is different from being global, and speaks more to targeting the wide proliferation of connected devices that have come into consumer’s hands than anything else. YouTube is seeking to make its content available on as many mobile and connected device platforms as possible, which will help its publishers reach audiences regardless of the platform they’re using.

That’s been another failing of today’s entertainment industry. On the studio side, there’s been no easy way to purchase movies that will work across devices until recently. While the UltraViolet initiative seeks to solve that problem, it still has a ways to go. And for the broadcast and cable TV networks, making shows available on new platforms means distributors generally having to secure new rights. That’s led to a hodgepodge of some networks and some shows being available on some devices, while others are not. Once again, the end result is that those publishers are limiting the addressable audience, at the same time that platforms like YouTube are enabling content to be viewed nearly everywhere.

Let’s not kill Hollywood, but offer something better

Some have suggested Silicon Valley should kill Hollywood. I think it’s naive to believe that technology companies can or should destroy the current entertainment industry. But at a time when the technology and media industries are grappling over the issue of piracy, the success of YouTube can be used as an example of how other technology companies could make something better.

After all, the advent of self-publishing tools like WordPress or Blogger hasn’t killed the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but has enabled a great number of independent blogs and technology news sites to also be influential in shaping the news. In the same way, YouTube is enabling video publishers to reach audiences at massive scale and creating a situation where in aggregate, those independents can rival the traditional Hollywood regime.

Being open, being global, and being multiplatform really just translates to being wherever the audience is. It’s about enabling viewers access to more content, not less — which is the real impetus behind YouTube’s accelerating growth. That could be a lesson to other tech companies seeking to offer an alternative to today’s entertainment offerings, or it could be used as a blueprint for some more innovative companies in the existing media regime. Take away the limits to accessing your content, and more likely than not you’ll find more people actually consuming it and more opportunity to monetize it.

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Show notes for this episode:

• The Netgear NeoTV was originally priced at 0, but you can find it online for around . More info on the device on Neatgear’s website.
• Netgear had originally teamed up with Roku to distribute a co-branded player based on Roku’s platform, but that partnership only lasted a few months.
• Many of the NeoTV’s apps are powered by Flingo. Check out our previous Flingo coverage.

What kind of features are you looking for in a player like this one? Is not having Hulu Plus a deal breaker, or do you care more about having YouTube? Please share your thoughts in the comments, get in touch with us on Twitter (@cordcutters) or email us at cordcutters @ gigaom.com.

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•  Apple is working on its own TV and it will use wireless streaming to get content. It will use Airplay, a wireless streaming technology developed by Apple.
• Apple has worked on integrating DVR and iCloud.
• Apple’s senior VP Eddy Cue is meeting with media companies.
• Cue is talking about various different technologies that would allow users to pick-up streams of video on different device. Actually that is par for course – Hulu, Netflix and Amazon already do this.
• Apple will use voice commands and hand gestures to control Apple TV and look for content. Well, they did launch Siri on iPhone 4S and it makes most sense that Apple would move SIRI into other devices including television, which is not quite conducive to qwerty-style keyboards. The New York Times had provided hints of this Siri-based television interface in a report published in October 2011.
• Apple is not saying what devices or what specific software it is building on and it is not clear what it wants from the media companies. Hello! Should we be surprised that Apple is being Apple.

My interpretation on the WSJ story is that Apple is continuing to work on its hobby project, making progress and is integrating all sorts of technologies. Apple clearly has to do something or let Google runaway with the Internet TV business. As Janko Roettgers pointed out earlier, Google TV has little or no competition when it comes to next generation TV-oriented operating system. Someday in the future there will be a new device from Apple that manages to overcome the shortcomings of current television ecosystem.

The streaming set-top box market will reach about 12 million in 2011 and Apple will have about a third of that market with 4 million devices, according to research firm, Strategy Analytics.

My own personal bet is that Apple comes up with a newer, even smaller version of its Apple TV with higher end graphics, more processing oomph and ability to seamlessly detect all Airplay enabled devices on a WiFi network.

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The San Francisco company has grown its customer base by about 400 percent this year to 75,000 developers, who build everything from group messaging and conferencing solutions to voice and text message notification apps and web-based distributed call centers. The Twilio platform lets developers plug in the basic communications components that used to come from traditional telecom vendors. Now, developers just pay for what they need and easily integrate a host of services without needing a strong telecom background.

Hulu, for example, was able to set up call centers on multiple continents within one month using Twilio. Twilio’s API is now the fifth most popular for developers, said Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio, and half of all American households are now touched by apps using Twilio.

“We believe in opening up the black box of communication for developers,” Lawson told me. “People who wouldn’t have participated in communication because of steep technological or economic barriers are building things now.”

Twilio has been evolving the platform beyond SMS and voice services that hooked into old copper-based phone systems and this summer began offering VoIP services. It’s showing that it can grow even as old phone systems fade away and developers rely less on integrating text messaging and move to more app-to-app messages. The company got help from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, which established a dedicated 0,000 Twilio micro fund last year and has committed to a second round, this time with matching funding for developers provided by Ron Conway.

Twilio, which is up to about 85 employees, previously raised .7 million including a million round last year. Lawson said the company is looking to hire more engineers and more sales and marketing people. He declined to talk about the financial details but said Twilio has been growing revenues substantially over the last two years.

As the app boom grows, it’s back-end infrastructure providers like Twilio that continue to thrive as they help enable more and more of the mobile apps flooding the market.

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BuddyTV

BuddyTV got its start by building a TV news and community site, but has expanded to create mobile apps built for personalized recommendations of TV shows. By taking into account which shows viewers have checked into, as well as those they’ve rated, BuddyTV can suggest new TV shows that are airing whenever they open the app. And since it tracks viewership, it will surface shows users already have shown an affinity for when those shows are on air.

Dijit

Dijit’s mobile app was launched primarily to be used as a remote control for a wide range of devices. Paired with the Griffin Beacon IR controller, Dijit can be used to control anything from your TV to your Blu-ray player to your Roku streaming media box. But in addition to the channel grid, which can be used to search and navigate what’s on TV at any given time, Dijit has added a social layer on top, allowing viewers to check in and comment on their favorite shows. It also provides social recommendations based on Facebook integration, suggesting new shows for users to watch.

Fanhattan

While it’s not necessarily used to find or watch shows on the TV, the Fanhattan app provides a way to search for content within applications from services like Netflix and Hulu Plus on a user’s iPad or iPhone. With a universal search functionality, users can search TV shows and movies without having to jump in and out of different apps for the information they want. It also provides a wealth of cast and crew data, ratings and multimedia assets related to the content users are searching for.

Fav.tv

While most people are looking for the best content available when they turn on the TV, some want to know when their favorite shows air. Enter Fav.tv. The startup’s iOS and Android apps offer the ability to keep track of when new episodes are airing and mark off episodes they have already watched. The app also provides news about shows from around the web, as well as the ability to share comments about shows with their friends within the app.

Yap.tv

Yap.tv has taken a decidedly social approach to aggregating TV listings, showing its users which shows are most popular, while also letting them set favorites and see what friends are watching. Its guide is also a lot more visual than most other TV apps, highlighting cover art for each of the shows represented. Once viewers choose a show, they can take polls, see tweets from other viewers and participate in live chats as well.

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Seven gift ideas for cord cutters

Roku

Roku’s family of media streamers offer a lot of value for price-conscious consumers. The Roku LT intro model only sets you back , and offers access to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon’s VOD services and a bunch of other content channels. Spend more, and you’ll even be able to play Angry Birds on your TV. And the best thing: It’s really easy to use, so your parents will have fun with it as well.

Boxee Box

Boxee’s media streamer is a bit more expensive than a Roku, but the money is well spent if you want to find the perfect gift for the geek in your life: The Boxee Box integrates with Twitter and Facebook, plays video from Netflix and VUDU and comes with more than 200 apps for additional content. It also features a full-fledged web browser to watch video on almost any website and one of the coolest remote controls on the market. And the Box is gonna get even better soon: The next system update will feature a complete visual overhaul as well as an option to add free live over-the-air TV through Boxee’s interface.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire

No, the Kindle Fire doesn’t replace the iPad – but for 9, it’s a great value, offering access to both Amazon’s VOD titles and Prime Instant video subscription service as well as to Netflix. With the integrated web browser, you can easily watch videos on YouTube, and Android apps like Plex are going to offer access to your local media and countless other online video sources as well.

HD HomeRun

Turning your computer into a DVR for free over-the-air HD content is great, but plugging a bulky rabbit ear antenna into your laptop is not so hot. That’s where the HD HomeRun comes in: This TV tuner can be placed next to your home router and then stream live HD TV programming to any PC in your house. And software like Elgato’s EyeTV can even beam your favorite TV shows to your iPad, where ever you are. It’s TV Everywhere, but without the subscription fees.

WD Livewire powerline adapter

Watching HD video streams is no fun if the local Wifi network can’t keep up with the action. That’s where a powerline adapter set like the WD Livewire comes in: One adapter gets plugged into the home router, the other one connects to the Roku, Boxee Box or game console – and the data flows through a home’s electric circuitry. The WD Livewire adapter with its four Ethernet ports is especially handy for advanced cord cutters that have more than one device to connect, and its HomePlug AV standard is good enough to stream even uncompressed HD video.

Amazon Prime Instant subscription

Amazon’s Prime subscription started off as a way to get two-day shipping for a flat yearly fee of , but the company added access to thousands of TV shows and movies earlier this year. Amazon has been buys adding new content to its Prime Instant service, including shows like The Tudors and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The company recently also added the ability to borrow thousands of books for free, and free two-day shipping for all your cord cutting needs (or anything else from Amazon) is still included. Amazon doesn’t offer an easy option to buy a Prime subscription for someone else, but you can always give someone a gift card.

Netflix subscription

Netflix may have taken some heat in recent months, but it’s still the best premium online video service out there. Not only does it offer access to tens of thousands of movies and TV shows online, but the company is also increasingly investing in exclusive content, like a whole new season of Arrested Development. And the best thing is: Netflix makes it easy to give the service as a present by offering gift certificates for subscriptions of up to one year.

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This week, Bravo.com premiered the first episode of Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen, an online-only series in which two chefs, eliminated from the TV show, compete head-to-head in one final challenge. The winning chef each week goes on to cook against the next eliminated chef; this proceeds until the finale, when the remaining chef will be able to rejoin the competition.

Last Chance Kitchen is fine, on a creative level — it’s a well-paced and professional package that adheres closely to the show’s format (overly dramatic music stings and all). But as a case study in integrating web content into a pre-established series, it’s a potential disaster, largely because of its distribution.

I will not make fun of the fact that the Bravo website, in lieu of embeddable video, is offering a widget to distribute Last Chance Kitchen — because I am kind, and also because the series is thankfully also available on Hulu.

But while super-fans may already be subscribed to Top Chef on Hulu or visiting Bravo.com on a daily basis, for most of the show’s 1.6 million viewers, the only way they’ll remember that Last Chance Kitchen exists is if the show uses precious ad minutes to nag them into going online and watching. As the Los Angeles Times’s John Horn complained, “you have to get up from the TV, start up your laptop and (of all the indignities!) be forced to watch the commercials.”

If Last Chance Kitchen were Hulu Plus and available on phones, tablets or other connected devices, that would be a significant improvement. Unfortunately, it’s note. In fact, Hulu’s note about Bravo programming is one of the more peculiarly-worded ones I’ve seen: “Hulu can offer a select number of full-length episodes from Bravo’s lineup each calendar month. The episodes featured and when they are posted are at Bravo’s discretion.” In short: Don’t blame us. It’s Bravo that’s being stingy.

Last Chance Kitchen also proves problematic when you consider how it changes the competition. Let’s say the winner of this first Last Chance Kitchen (no spoilers) goes on to dominate each subsequent episode — competing against chefs who were eliminated later and are thus, by the logic of the show, better chefs. While winning 12 cook-offs against arguably more talented cooks is an impressive feat, it’s an entirely different experience than the challenges the actual cheftestants will be going through — challenges meant in theory to evaluate each chef’s skill in handling a variety of situations. And so when the winner of Last Chance Kitchen re-enters the competition after not having been on television for potentially weeks, he or she will be altering the narrative of the show.

Top Chef has been nominated for Emmys for its efforts to integrate the web and TV in the past — some of the work they’ve done with online polling and Twitter is groundbreaking. In theory, this is what convergence culture creates: the blurring of lines between television and web to tell a story richer than the sum of its parts. But Last Chance Kitchen may well be a major misstep for the show.

That’s because, when creating an experience on multiple platforms, you either have to make sure that each element can be enjoyed separately with no consequences, or make sure that all elements of the experience are easily accessible. For Last Chance Kitchen, neither of these things is true.

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That data point comes on the heels of an announcement earlier Thursday that YouTube is now available in IsiZulu and Afrikaans, two languages spoken in South Africa. The site is now available in 51 languages total, with YouTube offering a localized experience including an own top-level domain and country-specific video recommendations in 35 countries around the world.

YouTube has previously said that it clocks more than three billion video views every day. This means that at least 1.8 billion of those views come from people whose primary language is not English, no matter whether they reside inside the U.S. or not.

This kind of diversity represents a huge opportunity for YouTube: Premium content services like Netflix and Hulu are subject to contractual restrictions that turn international expansions into a slow-moving process. YouTube on the other hand already has a global audience, and it has begun to monetize a significant part of it. A localized version of YouTube’s partner program is now available in 25 countries.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Horia Varlan.

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Here’s our very first episode of Cord Cutters, published on October 19 2010:

Hey you, how do you watch TV?

NewTeeVee has covered the future of video since late 2006. We often focus on the business aspects of reinventing television, simply because the story behind the ascent of companies like Netflix and Hulu – and their recent struggles – is fascinating.

Of course, we’ve also paid attention to the consumer side all along, covering new devices like the Roku, the Apple TV or the Boxee that bring online video content to the TV screen. However, we didn’t want to become yet another gadget blog. Instead, we wanted to get a sense of how people were actually using these devices, and what difference they were making in their everyday lives.

We briefly contemplated visiting people at their homes and taking tons of photos of their setups. But then we realized that it isn’t just about the boxes you stack under your TV and the cables you use to connect them – even though, for geeks like us, that can be a lot of fun as well.

No, there is something more fundamental going on, something that’s at least as disruptive as the introduction of the DVR in 1999. With online video maturing from cat videos to long-form content, people are watching TV on their own terms, liberating themselves not only from the schedule, but also from a single category of devices, and finally from a bunch of previously pretty much mandatory services. Some people watch whole movies on the iPad, others stream Hulu content to the Xbox, while others again rediscover over-the air-television as the best HD signal there is.

We’re a nation of Cord Cutters

A big part of this has been cord cutting — as the act of giving up your traditional pay TV subscription is now known. The economic crisis has forced many of us to take another look at monthly expenses and pay TV providers are starting to feel the consequences. Pay TV subscriptions were down for the first time ever in two quarters of 2010. There was a slight rebound earlier this year, but things aren’t looking too good for the rest of the year. Some predict that nine million households won’t have cable by 2016.

We decided to devote a whole show to this trend not because we hate cable companies (even though everyone else seems to), or because we don’t think that the traditional 0 a month cable bundle is a very good deal for consumers (which it isn’t).

We did it because because we noticed that those cord cutters were the very people who were at the forefront of reinventing television. The folks in the trenches, who take their TV viewing back into their own hands and experiment until they find a solution that works best for them – and not the one-size-fits all approach that’s still at the core of pay TV.

And there was something else we quickly noticed: Cord cutters are everywhere, including at GigaOM. Check out this video we did late last year with a number of our employees:

Here’s to the alpha geeks

Granted, not everyone is ready to cut the cord and give up on cable or other forms of pay TV. Most households probably never will be – and working on Cord Cutters has given us a lot of invaluable feedback on why people stick with Comcast or U-verse. Sports is still a big reason, falling in love with a certain show or network that aren’t available online is yet another.

However, cord cutting still matters. Not only financially, as pay TV providers see their slim growth margins breaking away, but also to innovation in this industry. Tim O’Reilly has long been talking about the alpha geeks –  the people who impact our collective future by inventing and crash-testing it today. Cord cutters are the TV world’s alpha geeks. Watch them watch TV, and you’ll get a sense of where all of our TV consumption is going.

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a misconception, leading many people to believe that alpha geeks all work at some hot Silicon Valley startups. It’s true that folks in tech seem to be most vocal about cord cutting and many other tech trends. But if you look at the history of technology, it’s more often than not folks outside of the Valley that got the ball rolling.

Minorities, and not startup CEOs, were the first to really embrace cell phones in the U.S. Teenagers in Europe were getting blisters from texting long before mobile messaging became fashionable stateside. And farmers in rural Kenya have done mobile commerce long before you and I even heard about Google Wallet.

It’s not about geeks vs. have-nots

Why does this matter? Because with cord cutting, some industry insiders want to differentiate between the tech-savvy and the economically depressed, arguing that most people simply give up on pay TV when things are tough, only to sign up again once the economy recovers.

But at least judging by the feedback we’ve gotten from people of all ages and backgrounds who watch Cord Cutters, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Cord Cutters are general contractors, priests, politicians, retirees, teachers, students, liberals, conservatives and libertarians – and they’re all united by a desire to watch TV differently.

Helping our viewers to make that happen – and learn a whole lot about the future of TV in the process – has been the most satisfying part of producing Cord Cutters. We can’t wait to see what’s next.

Check the embed below for some of the more recent episodes of Cord Cutters, or visit the show page to browse our entire archive.

We would like to hear from you: What do you want to see on future episodes of Cord Cutters? What else should we do, or what should e do differently? Do you want more product demos, more tips & tricks, or more meetups? Let us know in the comments!

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