Editor's note: this is a longer version of ReadWriteWeb Editor-in-chief Richard MacManus' article for the SAY Media newsletter. The newsletter is delivered weekly and features SAY Media's take on media, culture, venn diagrams and the occasional Kubrick homage. You can sign up for it here.

Over half of all devices at this year's CES, the world's largest consumer electronics trade show, were Internet connected. Nearly 60% of those were non-traditional computing devices such as TVs, cars, refrigerators and washing machines. Connected devices are proliferating throughout our homes and the world around us. Which means consumers are about to become a whole lot more connected to the world.

Reaching Consumers in Their Connected Cars

At this year's CES, car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Audi were touting new media and communications features. Commonly referred to as a connected car, the prevailing trend is to integrate smartphone apps into the car's dashboard. This enables drivers and passengers to listen to online music, access news and other content, stream video and more.

To give you an indication of how pervasive the trend of connected cars is becoming, look at the evolution of Ford.

The American firm first introduced Internet technology inside its cars with Sync, launched in 2007. Sync is voice-activated technology which connects your smartphone and MP3 player to your car's dashboard and steering wheel. There are currently 4 million Ford cars in North America that have Sync running. The latest evolution of Sync is called MyFord Touch, an in-car communications and entertainment system which makes it even easier for drivers to consume Internet content.

In short, the connected car is going mainstream. In Ford's newest hybrid car, the 2013 Fusion, one of the main features is its connection to the Internet.

Connected cars are set to ramp up rapidly in the coming years. The GSMA predicts that the automotive sector will account for 1.4 billion (nearly 6%) of the world's 24 billion connected devices by 2020. If you're a marketer or publisher, that's a platform you'll want to be on!

Internet TVs & Personalized Media

For the consumer, it's all about personalizing one's media experience. The TV is another device where this trend is playing out.

While popular TV network shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad will continue to reach a large swath of people, Internet TV opens up opportunities for new types of video content to emerge and become popular too. Formats will evolve. We'll see TV stars and brands creating their own YouTube channels and releasing short bursts of content to the Web. But also, we'll see web applications arise that mix TV content with Internet programming. This is fertile ground for publishers to innovate and for marketers to latch onto to reach niche audiences.

The rise of Internet TV was evidenced at this year's CES by Samsung's announcements.

Samsung is the world's No. 1 TV brand and it launched significant upgrades to its Smart TV product line. Samsung's 2012 model TVs will enable users to consume a mix of traditional TV programming and Web apps. The devices are ready, now it's time for new types of content and apps to bloom.

The next big thing in computing isn't a new model smartphone or laptop. It's the Internet empowering everything else around us. Our cars, TVs and many other devices. Which means we all need to think about engaging digital Internet experiences for the car, TV and every device imaginable - because that's where audiences are heading.

Convergence. Remember that word from the dot com era? Well, it's back and this time it actually has substance. Convergence in the 90s meant combining old media with new media, a.k.a. the Internet. The 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner was a failed $200 billion attempt at convergence. But fast forward to 2012 and convergence is happening for real this time, thanks to Internet-connected devices in the house and a rapidly growing app ecosystem. Entertainment now flows freely through home networks, to multiple devices such as PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and television sets.

According to one research firm, 2012 will be when convergence really hits its stride. A new report by IMS Research states that 2012 will be when the consumer electronics industry "finally realizes the promise of multi-screen content consumption."

It's not just Web connected hardware which is proliferating. Software is also finally fulfilling the long-held promise of convergence. We saw a great example earlier today, with version 3.0 of the video aggregator app Showyou being released. ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell described it as "the remote control for web video."

The beauty of Showyou is that you can watch videos on a variety of devices: PC, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire, Apple TV. While I was eating my lunch today, I sat down in the living room and opened both my iPad and TV. I surfed to a music video on Showyou that I like and pressed the Apple "airplay" button on the iPad to transfer the video to my TV (via Apple TV).

I'm not entirely convinced that 2012 will be the year when this multi-screen promise is realized. During my lunchtime, I fiddled around a bit with Airplay before I got it working. Also home networks are not particularly user friendly for non-technical people. 2012 may well be a tipping point, when convergence within the home begins to take off. But we're not at the point of great user experiences yet.

In its report, IMS Research noted that an apps ecosystem for devices like the TV will be a key enabler of convergence in home entertainment. It also pointed to the growing amount of digital content available to consumers and "the changing habits of consumers regarding accessing, consuming and sharing digital content."

IMS Research predicts that the market for IP-enabled CE devices will grow from 2.2 billion devices shipped in 2011 to 3.5 billion in 2016. Note that this is just for home entertainment and portable consumer electronic devices. We reported last week that mobile industry group GSMA is predicting growth from 9 billion to 24 billion Internet-connected devices worldwide. The GSMA's figures include things like connected cars and IP-enabled washing machines.

Have you begun to consume entertainment in your home across multiple screens? If so, let us know in the comments what your current favorite household apps are.

As more and more devices in your home get connected to the Internet, the user experience becomes increasingly important. It's hard enough to use your PC sometimes, let alone fiddle with the remote on your Internet connected TV! So over the coming months we'll be exploring the world of User Experience design (a.k.a. UX design). We'll be interviewing UX experts and reviewing products that get it right - and some that get it wrong. We'll start by looking at how the user experience of televisions is becoming more interactive and what this will mean to your TV consumption habits.

As the likes of Samsung and Sony add even more content to their TVs, via the Internet, it makes no sense to add even more buttons to the remote. The solutions are twofold: make use of other, more natural, UI controls (in particular gestural); and personalize the TV for each user.

In a session at UX Week 2011 last August, Brian Stone from Ohio State University noted that up till now, TV manufacturers have mostly been concerned with hardware improvements: bigger screens, new types of displays (the latest trend being OLED), 3-D, and so on. He argued that what's really required with Internet TV is improvements in user experience. That's because on the Internet, people interact with content and applications a lot more than they do with traditional TV programming.

One solution is to introduce more gestural interactions. Stone showed a project he set up around fantasy football, which used a gestural interface to try and "reduce things to a very simple palette of interactions." [see 7:30 onwards in the video above for a demo]. Indeed, TV manufacturers are already introducing these features. Samsung's new line of smart TV sets feature voice and gesture control, as well as facial recognition.

Another way to make the Internet TV user experience better is to personalize it. Stone showed a project that presented content personalized to the user, allowing them to interact with the TV via their smartphone, tablet, Wii remote or the gestural UI of Xbox Kinect. The navigation in that example was personalized, presenting only channels that the user frequently watches. It also gave her suggestions for relevant content. [see 9:30 mark onwards in the video above]

It's not just TV controls and navigation that will need to improve for Internet TVs to become a success. An increasingly important part of Internet TVs will be the apps that you access on it. Whether they are existing examples like Facebook and Twitter, or new apps built specifically for TV usage, app designers have to get the "10-foot user experience" right (the typical distance between a user and their TV).

While the user experience of Google TV over 2011 was widely criticized, Google has to its credit formulated a good set of guidelines for TV app development.

In upcoming posts we'll explore specific examples of UX design in TVs, as well as a myriad of other Internet connected devices. A great user experience is key to success in this new connected world. You only need to look at Apple for proof of that!

Image credit: alepouda

The project to produce a TV set running Boxee, which was due out before the end of the year, was cut short by Viewsonic. The company cited high costs of production and underwhelming consumer interest in Internet-connected TV's, according to GigaOm's New Tee Vee blog.

The Logictech Revue and Boxee were both originally priced considerably higher than the $99 Apple TV, which has sold relatively well on Amazon, despite only being what Steve Jobs famously referred to as a "hobby" for the company.

Will Apple's HDTV Increase Demand For Smart TVs?

Apple TV may not be a top priority at the moment, but the company may be playing a more prominent role in our living rooms soon. Apple has long been rumored to be produced a smart HDTV set of its own, which may be on the market as soon as March 2012.

If Apple's impact on the markets for smartphones and tablets is any indication, an Apple-branded HDTV may serve to popularize connected TVs in a way that Boxee and Google TV have failed to thus far.

Few doubt that the future of the living room will be Web-connected, socially-engaged and interactive. In fact, this picture is already coming into focus thanks to mobile technology, social networking and the rise of "second screen" apps. What remains to be seen is how the connected TV market will shake out, and whether Apple will play a significant role in its development.

For its part, Boxee is still putting out set-top boxes. In addition to its D-Link-manufactured Boxee Box, the company has also partnered with Iomega, who will produce a Boxee-powered box with built-in storage of up to 2 TB.

Google joins Yahoo, Amazon and the Dish Network in bidding on the company, but is apparently going above and beyond what those companies are willing to offer. The exact numbers are not known, but Google may well be offering "a couple billion dollars more" than the other bidders, presumably for an acquisition that goes beyond what Hulu was originally offering to sell.

In making an aggressive bid for Hulu, Google appears determined to shore up its holdings in the video content space, where it already owns YouTube, the largest video site on the Internet. Historically, the company has had a somewhat tense relationship with traditional content providers, although it's been extending a few olive branches lately.

An acquisition like Hulu could be just what the search giant needs to revamp its Google TV product, which has been met with a lukewarm reception in the United States so far. In addition to user experience issues, the platform struggled early on as content providers moved to block their content from working on Google TV-powered devices.

That said, if it were to take over Hulu, Google would need to assuage any concerns held by its chief content providers, whose businesses are entrenched in the older, more lucrative distribution model and may be at liberty to pull their content from the site at some point in the future.

Of course, it's still very early in the game and it's possible that Hulu's owners may end up holding onto the site. Whatever ends up happening with Hulu may well foretell the future of Internet TV, if not indicate a few things about the future of the Web in general.

While this is by no means a new development, the trend is continuing unabated as more consumers depend on Web-based, on-demand streaming as their primary means of viewing TV content and broadcast's popularity drops ever-so-slowly.

Tensions between traditional content providers and the Internet companies that seek to alter the way that content is distributed appear to be heightening. Just yesterday, Starz Entertainment announced it wouldn't renew its licensing deal with Netflix, reportedly over the latter's refusal to raise its subscription rates even more than it already has.

It's worth noting that even as users flock to the Internet for their TV needs, broadcast still commands the vast majority of viewers' attention. According to Ericsson's survey, scheduled brodcast TV was the preferred viewing method for 88% of consumers surveryed, a four-point drop from last year.

TV Gets More Social

However they're getting it, people are increasingly supplementing the TV-watching experience with social media. Forty percent of viewers said they use Facebook, Twitter or some other social networking tool to discuss TV shows as they watch.

"This communication adds another dimension to the TV experience, as consumers found an annoying reality show funnier when they were able to comment on social media about 'terrible' singers, 'ugly' clothing or when your favorite team scores a goal," said Anders Erlandsson, Senior Advisor at Ericsson ConsumerLab.

The growth of both social networking and mobile computing (including tablets) have contributed to a rise in the use of social media to augment TV consumption, especially among younger generations, who have grown up connected and are accustomed to using the Internet for social communication around the clock.

The social Web's impact on television can be seen in the rise of "second screen" social TV apps and in the development of Internet-connected TV sets, one of which is rumored to be coming from Apple sometime next year.

Even as the Internet upends traditional media business models, it's possible that the real-time, social Web may help preserve the value of the original broadcast, since those conversations are best had when a given TV show first airs. It's harder to have a Twitter chat with friends about the latest episode of "Glee" when you're watching in on Hulu eight days later.

It's this contract with Starz that gives Netflix the ability to legally stream a trove of movies from the likes of Walt Disney, Touchstone, Columbia and Sony, among others. If talks don't resume, that's a sizable chunk of content that will be missing from the service. In response to the news, Netflix's stock price dropped 9 percent in after-hours trading.

This move is just the latest example of tension between traditional content providers and the Internet companies who seek to revolutionize the way entertainment, news and other media are consumed. With Netflix, legacy players have long been nervous that the service's all-you-can-eat media consumption model would erode DVD sales, cable subscriptions and other traditional sources of revenue.

The Starz announcement happened to come on the same day Netflix officially rolled out its controversial new pricing plans. The company is eliminating its $9.99 plan that enables customers to both stream content and recieve DVDs by mail. To continue to do both, customers will have to pay $15.98 per month, an increase that was wildly unpopular when it was first announced in July.

The latest report convincingly argues that although use of mobile devices will dramatically increase, there will still be "much high-value use" on desktop PCs. "One size UI does not fit all screen sizes," the report somewhat obviously points out. The details though are worth looking at, as it shows how user experiences across devices and screen sizes will increasingly differ.

Regardless of how much value people derive from PCs compared to mobile, the reality is that most companies these days require both a website for PC viewing and one for mobile viewing. Nielsen sensibly advocates a different design for PC and mobile devices.

By mobile, he means both smartphones and tablets. Many companies may want a separate design for each, although that isn't a focus of this particular report.

Finally, Nielsen touches on 3 emerging areas of usability: TVs, very small screens (such as items with embedded RFID chips) and very large screens (such as smart buildings). According to Nielsen, each will need its own UI.

Most companies won't need to focus on designing for the 3 emerging screen types. Television is the one most likely to need attention in the near future. Currently, writes Nielsen, "designing for TV is relevant primarily for companies in the entertainment or consumer electronics industries." However he thinks that if interactive TV usability "improves substantially," then more companies will need to pay attention to that platform.

Mobile and desktop are the 2 user experiences that most companies need to worry about. The other 3 are dependent on what industry you're in. Regardless of how many screens targeted, Nielsen recommends that companies factor in these two things: create "separate and distinct UI designs for device categories that are sufficiently different" and retain the feel of a product family across devices.

"We are not your enemy and we want to help," said Schmidt, who delivered the annual MacTaggart address at the Edinburgh Television Festival. He stressed the need for cooperation between Google and the TV industry and refuted claims that Google works against the interest of content owners.

Schmidt responded directly to criticisms commonly lobbed at the search giant from publishers and other legacy content companies. "We respect copyright," he told the crowd before outlining the measures Google has taken to combat piracy and copyright infringement. He cited the company's removal of copyright infringement-related terms from their search engine's auto-suggest feature, as well as the various tools made available for reporting copyright infringement.

Google's average response time to copyright infringement claims is four hours, Schmidt said. He touted the company's Content ID technology, which is used to automatically check audio and video clips against a large database of copyrighted material to determine if it's in violation of the law.

If audio or video hosted on YouTube is determined to be protected by copyright, it's up to the content owners to decide what to do about it. Some demand that it be removed immediately, while others would rather keep it up and earn ad revenue from it. Schmidt said he preferred the latter, but said the company respects the wishes of content owners either way.

"There is content behavior that none of us want to encourage," Schmidt said, adding that technology-oriented solutions should come before legal regulations, which have a tendency to stifle innovation.

He cited the example of Facebook, asking audience members to imagine if the social networking giant had to face similar regulations as the television industry. The result, Schmidt joked, would be different versions of Facebook for different regions and strict restrictions on "poking."

Rather than focusing on regulations, Schmidt said the UK government should strive to encourage innovation and that content businesses should learn to behave more like Web companies.

"The decisions made in the next year will determine the longterm health of your industry," Schmidt said.

Photo by Charles Haynes

Flingo is the latest social TV service to hit the market. It has the ambitious goal of merging your television watching with your Web activity, in real-time. This works two ways: Web content is adapted according to what you're watching on TV, and your TV screen gets Web features such as checking in and tweeting.

What's most intriguing about Flingo is the developer platform. Via a public API, the company is positioning itself as "the world's largest enabler of applications for your Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players and Set-top boxes." The company says it is already the largest publisher of smart TV apps.

Ashwin Navin, CEO of Flingo, spoke to NBC News Bay Area recently about Flingo and the future of TV:

To bring this vision to fruition, Flingo has built up an impressive array of partnerships with entertainment networks (including CBS, Fox and MTV) and technology companies (including Samsung, Google and LG). The company claims that "most smart TVs sold today are already enabled with Flingo."

Flingo isn't just relying on software embedded into Smart TVs. It's working with a leading TV manufacturer to create a new type of television set, due out by the end of this year. As Technology Review reports, the set "has built-in software and hardware that send data about what is on-screen to an Internet server that can identify the content."

But wait, there's more! Flingo also offers a 'watch later' service similar to the Boxee one we reviewed last week. Available at Flingo.org, you can save videos from your browser to watch later on your TV. Or, to use Flingo's parlance, you "fling" Web content to your TV. This is an open source project, hence the .org domain.

The company has been operating since 2008, but only just came out of stealth mode in July of this year. The co-founders, Ashwin Navin and David Harrison, were early employees of popular file sharing service BitTorrent.

Flingo is an intriguing service with big goals. One to watch! Let us know in the comments whether you've used it and, if so, your impressions.

Not all viewers have the patience, it turns out. In the absence of a free, immediately-available streaming option, many of them are turning to piracy, according to an informal study performed by TorrentFreak.

While it's a pretty small sample of data, the results shouldn't come as a shock. For years, people have used peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to find and download music, television shows, movies and other content. As on-demand streaming services like Hulu and Netflix have risen to prominence, the drive for consumers to acquire content through less legal means has decreased. Meanwhile, a growing number of Americans have come to rely on the Internet to stream their favorite television shows, even if it means waiting until the morning after the show originally aired.

That consumer demand still exists, even if the networks have begun to decide to scale back their online offerings in the hopes of encouraging more people to view the original broadcasts and to make the most out of traditional, and frankly more lucrative, content distribution relationships.

If viewers want to see the most recent episode of Master Chef, they're going to see it. As more of them shift to watching TV online, they become conditioned to finding content there. If it's not readily available on legal streaming services, they'll find it elsewhere.

That could be through a file-sharing service like BitTorrent or simply by uploading episodes to YouTube, where grateful fellow fans thank one another for making the content available.

"There is no doubt that the Hulu delay is not in the best interests of TV-viewers, " writes TorrentFreak. "Although it might be a good business decision in the short term, one has to doubt whether driving people to 'pirated' content is a wise choice. To many viewers it is clearly a step backward."

For their part, networks are hoping to make the most out of traditional arrangements since the Web has not yet offered a clear-cut, lucrative way to monetize this type of content.

I've always wanted to have an Instapaper-like service for videos, an application which would allow me to save videos so that I can watch them later. Preferably when I'm relaxing on the sofa at the end of a long work day. Because who has time to watch videos during the day? Indeed, maybe your work place forbids that. Earlier this month Internet TV service Boxee launched an iPad app, along with a bookmarklet to put your daily video finds in a queue to watch later. It takes a bit of setting up to get both working properly, but it's worth it. Here's what to do.

The first thing to do is create an account at Boxee. Don't worry, you don't need to have it connected to your TV.

2. You'll then need a central app to use as your Boxee home. There are a few options. The Boxee Box, an appliance that connects to your TV, is probably the easiest method. It costs about $200 and enables you to stream Internet content from your computer to your TV. Alternative products include Apple TV and Roku (which are in many ways just as good, we're just using Boxee as our example in this post).

If you don't want to spring for the Boxee Box, no worries. You can download the Boxee app to your computer for free, or "make a Boxee" by installing it for free onto a secondary computer that connects to your TV. I tried to make a Boxee using an old computer, but the cable and adaptor required would have cost nearly as much as a Box. So for now I'm just using the PC app version.

Boxee PC app

3. Find some friends to connect to. Boxee is a social Internet TV app and this will come in handy later. Also you may want to connect to Twitter, Facebook and other social networks - although this is mainly for sharing purposes. That is, you can share what you're watching to your social media accounts.

4. If you're an iPad owner, go to iTunes and download the Boxee iPad app (which we reviewed earlier this month).

Boxee iPad app

5. Back to your PC now, where you'll want to install the 'Watch Later' bookmarklet to your browser. Do this by dragging this link to your browser's bookmark bar; see illustrated instructions here on Boxee's website. Note: I had to manually give the bookmarklet a title, as it didn't come with one (to do this, right-click the bookmarklet and press 'edit').

I'd also recommend installing the bookmarklet onto your iPad's Safari browser, so that you can save videos while you're surfing the Web on the iPad. It's a bit more of a hassle to install the bookmarklet on the iPad, but instructions are here.

6. Now go to a site where you know you'll find a good video to watch. The TED Talks website is packed with inspiring videos, or check out Vimeo for music videos and the like. One warning: as we noted in our initial review of Boxee's iPad app, a lot of Web videos still use Flash - which the iPad doesn't run. So some YouTube videos, for example, won't work in Boxee's iPad app. Still, there are plenty of great non-Flash videos on the Web.

When you find a video that you want to watch later, click the Boxee bookmarklet in your browser's bookmark bar. It takes a couple of seconds to fire up, but you should see a message pop up at the top of the webpage indicating that the video has been saved. The message disappears pretty quickly, mind!

7. Now open up the Boxee iPad app, or turn on your Boxee Box to watch on TV.

On the iPad app's homepage, there is a column called 'Watch Later.' To refresh this, put your finger anywhere in that pane, hold it down and drag it to the right. You should see the video you just added refresh in that pane.

Also check out the 'Friends' pane, which is populated by videos shared by your friends that you connected to in step 3. Finally, there is a 'Featured' tab which is content curated by the Boxee team.

The Boxee iPad app has other features, such as the 'My Media' tab which allows you to watch videos downloaded to your computer and streamed to the iPad. That requires a separate PC app, the Boxee Media Manager, which I had a bit of trouble setting up. But that's outside the scope of this post.

For now, just enjoy the 'Watch Later' feature. It's a relatively small thing perhaps. But anything that helps get you out of your desk and into your sofa or elsewhere has got to be good, right? That's the Web world we're increasingly living in, it just takes a bit of adjusting to as services like Boxee figure out the optimal user experience away from the computer.

Let us know in the comments other hints or tips you have about watching online video on tablets, TVs or smartphones.

Image credit: Andrew Scott

The network's new system enables Dish Network and Hulu Plus subscribers to watch new episodes online shortly after they air, but requires everybody else to wait. Subscribers can watch brand new episodes on Fox.com by authenticating with their Hulu or Dish Network account credentials.

As Fox backs away from the free, quickly-available Web TV content model, ABC has indicated it's ready to do the same, according to a post on AllThingsD.

"We'll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a subscriber." Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger said in an earnings call recently, citing a desire to preserve the company's existing relationships with traditional content distributors.

That means that, come Fall, people may need to wait several days before watching the most recent episode of shows like Modern Family, Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives.

These moves come as little surprise as content providers have sought to maximize the profits made from television content, something that hasn't proven simple to do as viewers increasingly shift to the Web to watch shows.

Hulu, which became profitable in 2009, is expected to earn as much as $500 million in revenue this year. Even so, the revenue seen by content providers from Internet streaming services like Hulu doesn't come close to what they've made from their more traditional content distribution relationships.

The challenges experienced by television networks are somewhat akin to those faced by newspapers and magazines in recent years. While it provides a more timely and interactive mode of distributing content, the Web is slower to offer a business model that compares to these businesses' traditional models, which tend to erode more quickly than the new ones can take shape.

Recreating the experience of the full-size version of Boxee would be impossible on the iPad, given the widespread use of Flash-encoded video on the Web and Apple's refusal to support it. Instead, the app was thoughtfully designed to make the most of the features that are most appropriate for the iOS platform.

Watch Videos From Twitter and Facebook Friends

Boxee's iPad presence is decidedly social. The "Friends" stream, which pulls video links from your network's Twitter and Facebook posts, is also a feature on the television-sized version of Boxee, but it's more front-and-center on the iPad. In a sense, it's like Flipboard for video, but with more limitations on what content can be displayed.

For example, Wired's Tim Carmody shared a link on Twitter to the latest episode of the FX comedy "Louie." It showed up in our feed, but when we tapped through to watch the video, it couldn't be displayed because it came from Hulu, which utilizes Flash and notoriously blocks Boxee from accessing its content anyway. Attempts to load Hulu videos from the Boxee app result in a prompt encouraging users to subscribe to Hulu Plus and download their app.

The feature works beautifully with YouTube videos, which are displayed natively within the app itself. Other HTML5-friendly videos can be opened in Boxee's in-app Web browser, which is still a relatively seamless experience.

It's Like Instapaper For Video... Sort Of

To help bridge the gap between the desktop and the tablet, Boxee has a bookmarklet, which lets you send videos to Boxee from the browser. It's a great feature, doing for video what Instapaper or Read It Later do for text. Of course, video formats and compatibility are not quite as universal as text; so, once again, this feature doesn't work with all video content. We tried to add a video from The Daily Show's website to Boxee and watch it on the iPad, but were shown an error because the video was encoded with Flash.

To be fair, Boxee can't be blamed for these limitations. Either The Daily Show and similar sites need to better encode their video content for iPads or, less realistically, Apple needs to change its uncompromising refusal to support Flash content on its mobile devices.

Like the "Friends" stream, the "Watch Later" feature works great with videos from YouTube, Vimeo and any other source that has non-Flash video content. And even if you end up saving a few Flash videos for later, you can always watch them on your desktop or television set, since the queue of content is synced with your Boxee account.

Stream Videos From Your Computer

In its most wholehearted attempt to circumvent the limitations of the iPad, the Boxee app lets you stream locally-stored video content wirelessly from your computer, which eliminates the need to convert that content into an iPad-friendly format. This process requires the Boxee Media Manager, an additional piece of software for the desktop, which lets you queue up local media files to be streamed to the iPad.

With those statistics in mind, it's interesting to look at how the entertainment industry is utilizing online media channels more and more. A great example that we came across recently is a web video series called Ruby Skye P.I., aimed at the tweens age group. It's like a television series, only it's made specifically for the Web and utilizes "transmedia" channels for content delivery and viewer interaction.

The web series was shot over 15 days in August 2010 and launched in late October. The storyline is about a Nigerian email scam, which Ruby - a 15 year old girl - sets out to solve. The main website features all 12 videos, supplementary material about Internet scamming, recipes and games. Episode one is embedded below.

Ruby Skye has a strong social media profile, including a Twitter account (1,100 followers), a Facebook Page (948 likes) and a YouTube account (17,401 channel views, close to 100,000 total video views).

The show's creator Jill Golick said in a promotional video that this isn't just a web series, but a "transmedia franchise." She mentioned HaileyHacks.com (a sister site which appears to be offline currently), a book series and a planned iPad app.

So has Ruby Skye P.I. been a success? Statistics from the social media accounts suggest that it hasn't.

The web content and transmedia features are solid, if not terribly innovative. However the video production is slick and the storyline educational. Also the lead actor, Madison Cheeatow, is excellent and has a promising future.

Ruby Skye P.I. is just one example of entertainment being delivered over the Web instead of traditional TV. A second series of Ruby Skye P.I. is on the way, called "The Haunted Library." Do you think this is a pointer to the future of Internet TV?