ComScore (SCOR) says Hulu generated 856 million video views during the month, second only to Google’s (GOOG) YouTube in the U.S. This makes sense given that Hulu is driven in large part by broadcast TV, which starts running new shows in the fall.

And if Hulu didn’t post record numbers after adding ABC’s shows to the mix, there would be some real head-scratching. But it will be very interesting to see what happens to these numbers next year if Hulu does move ahead with some sort of pay service.

As always, note the huge disparity between YouTube and everyone else. And it’s also worth noting that while Hulu generates more views than any of its non-YouTube competitors, its reach isn’t quite as deep:

All of which is less relevant than the joint venture’s performance, which is still the subject of much debate. People familiar with Hulu tell me it is “close to break-even,” but I worry about putting much stock in words like “close” (or “break-even,” for that matter) without seeing numbers.

And in any case, that’s only half the issue for its owners these days; just as important are the performance of its parent companies and whether all the free stuff on Hulu is helping or hindering their networks and studios.

But more on that after the holiday. For now, here’s wishing you and yours a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

The cable provider is promoting a “Roll Over Or Get Tough” campaign, which asks consumers to…well, it doesn’t ask them to do anything, really. But there is a Web site where the company makes its case–its programming partners want more money, because that’s what they always want–and says that at some point, consumers will be able to “vote” on…something.

The thing is, the cable providers are at least half right: Cable programmers do want more money, because that’s what they always want. And now broadcasters like CBS (CBS) and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, which traditionally haven’t been paid for their programming–at least not officially–want money, too.

But boy oh boy, is it going to be hard to gin up sympathy for the cable guys. When’s the last time you felt anything remotely warm and fuzzy toward your local operator, which may well have an effective monopoly in your neighborhood, and certainly acts like someone who has a monopoly?

And in any case, it’s hard to see what consumers are expected to do here: Left to their own devices, they might well elect to pay for just a handful of cable channels they want instead of subscribing to dozens of ones they never, ever, watch. That might well drive down cable bills, dramatically. Which is why programmers and providers don’t want that to happen.

That’s one conclusion you can draw from a new survey showing that people who own Apple (AAPL) handsets are more willing to pay for stuff than the average Internet surfer.

It’s a U.K. survey, conducted by the Olswang media law firm, but my hunch is that you’d see similar results in the U.S. And given that consumers look much less likely to pay for stuff than publishers and distributors would like, it’s worth chewing on. Guardian:

The survey showed that 58% of people would pay to access online a film just released in cinemas, 52% would pay for access to a film that will not be on DVD for at least two months and 40% would pay to access a film which is already on DVD or pay-TV. Looking at solely iPhone users, however, those figures jump to 73%, 67% and 54% respectively….

News content, however, remains a tough online sell. The survey asked how willing consumers would be to buy a newspaper article or column which could be read on a computer or portable device such as a phone or e-reader. Only 19% of respondents expressed any willingness to pay–though that did increase to 30% among iPhone users.

I’ve repeatedly been skeptical that consumers will pay for something solely because it’s on a mobile device–this is the key idea behind the magazine industry’s digital plans–but I do think there are some cases where this might work.

My own anecdotal confirmation: My household just dropped $6 for three Pixar shorts for an iPhone 3G in a desperate attempt to provide some electronic babysitting/soothing. This, despite the fact that everything we bought is also available for free on YouTube. When you need the stuff, you can’t be dependent on a wireless connection.

Here’s one of the clips we spent $1.99 on:

Personally, I think this stuff needs to be a lot shorter, like the industry satire that CollegeHumor put together a while back. But whatever. It’s amusing enough, and it’s not aimed at me, anyway.

Which is a good reminder that despite what armchair ad critics like me have to say, a lot of the rebranding efforts that Yahoo, and now, AOL, have underway aren’t aimed at us anyway: They’re aimed at a relatively small number of ad buyers, planners and other pros who decide where marketing money goes. But we’re still going to enjoy assessing them.

And yes, while we’re at it, let’s note that this video is running on YouTube, which is owned by Google (GOOG). What does Carol Bartz plan to do about video, anyway?

What exactly did Adconion buy? Some of Joost’s technology, as well as its trademark, and about a dozen of the company’s remaining 25 employees, a spokeswoman says.

So what does that leave? Does any part of the original Joost survive as an operating company? “I believe so,” says the spokeswoman, who is going to get back to us about that.

Price? Your guess is as good as mine. But I’m guessing it’s not going to be very much, and nothing close to what investors like Sequoia, Index and Viacom (VIA) were hoping when they plowed $45 million into the company more than two years ago. Index, by the way, is also an investor in Adconion and led an $80 million C funding round in February 2008.

In any case, this is all a matter of “i” dotting and “t” crossing, as Joost has officially been in hospice mode since June, when the company laid off most of its employees and replaced CEO Mike Volpi. Prior to that, Volpi and his investors had been trying to broker a sale of the company, hoping that they could convince a big infrastructure player like Comcast (CMCSA) or Time Warner Cable (TWC) to bail it out.

No dice, though Time Warner Cable did end up hiring some technical help from Joost.

ADCONION MEDIA GROUP ACQUIRES JOOST ASSETS

New Capabilities Provide Advertisers, Content Owners and Publishers with an End-to-End
Cross-Channel Video Solution

SANTA MONICA, CALIF. – NOVEMBER 24, 2009 — Adconion Media Group (www.adconion.com), the largest independent global audience and content network, announced today that it has acquired certain assets from privately-held Joost, the online video service. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Video is a top priority for our company, and through the acquisition of the Joost assets we will be able to provide advertisers, content owners and website publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution,” said Tyler Moebius, CEO, Adconion Media Group. “This acquisition immediately brings additional scale and content to the Adconion video pre-roll network for clients who are looking for a safe, cost-effective alternative to achieve the maximum value of online video advertising. We’ll also continue to operate Joost.com, providing clients with a destination site to showcase and distribute their branded entertainment content.”

In June, Joost announced a change in its business strategy to focus on providing white-label video platforms, and Adconion plans to pursue this strategy. On Friday, Adconion announced its first long-term licensing partnership as the exclusive display and video ad-serving solution for the Goldbach Media Group in Europe.

The acquisition of Joost assets adds many dimensions to Adconion’s existing video services and further will solidify its position in the online video and content syndication market. Prior to the acquisition, Adconion offered targeted distribution of content, including video and television commercials, to audiences around the world via Adconion.TV; as well as customized branded entertainment solutions for clients through its exclusive relationship with the digital studio RedLever. Through the Joost acquisition, Adconion.TV will add to its library of professionally-produced video content available for targeted pre-roll advertisements across 2,000 premium publishers.

Janus Friis, co-founder of Joost, said, “Over the past few months we have been actively exploring strategic options for Joost, and have concluded that the sale of certain of its assets to Adconion is in the best interests of Joost. Adconion has a strong technological platform and a compelling business model, and we believe that both businesses will benefit as a result of this acquisition.”

A leader in advertising innovation, targeting and distribution, Adconion reaches nearly 300 million unique users on a monthly basis. Prior to the Joost acquisition, Adconion was serving more than 80 million video streams per day to targeted audiences across 2,000 global websites.

The breakdown: The company did well overseas, where revenue jumped 17.8 percent after factoring out currency effects, and poorly in the U.S., where sales dropped by 7.4 percent. Digital, which grew by 11.5 percent (excluding FOREX), now makes up 21.4 percent of Warner’s (WMG) revenue.

Operating income dropped by 18 percent, to $54 million, but all of that decline stems from the severance charges. Factor those out and operating income would be up slightly to $68 million.

For years, the music industry has watched music sales drop while music publishing–money generated by the underlying compositions of songs–has increased. But this time around that’s not the case. Warner says recorded music sales were up 3.7 percent (net of currency changes) and that music publishing revenue was up 11.7 percent.

But all of the publishing increase stems from a one-time gain of $25 million “from an agreement reached by the U.S. recorded music and music publishing industries, which will result in the payment of mechanical royalties accrued in prior years by record companies.”

Bertelsmann is looking for an investor to buy some or all of Scoyo, which it launched in Germany in January of this year and previewed in the U.S. in September, the company confirmed via email. It says that while it hunts for new money, it is keeping the German site up and running but has put development of the U.S. site on hold “as it will be a decision of the new investor how to deal with the US portal.”

I’ve been told that the company has invested as much as $30 million over two years into the project, but Bertelsmann declined to comment on that figure.

I’m not in the target market, and I’d be unable to use Scoyo even if I were, as it only runs on Windows machines. But here’s the way the U.S. site describes the service: It is “targeted to the supplemental and homeschool markets, [and] will deliver high-quality educational content for children in Kindergarten through 8th grade across a variety of subjects and disciplines.”

The beta is free, and the site was supposed to launch a subscription service next year.

The company’s revenue climbed 7.4 percent in the 12 months ending March 31, the company disclosed (via PaidContent).

The rise is due to increases in both the sale of recorded music and publishing revenue; increases in the former are particularly rare these days. And these numbers ought to bump again in the coming year given that they’ll include dollars/pounds generated by the re-release of the Beatles albums.

Alas, since EMI owner Terra Firma is deep in the midst of negotiations with Citigroup (C), which lent it billions to buy the company, it’s not handing out any other details about the company’s performance, so hard to tell what’s really going on there.

Still, we do know that music has been in decline for a decade, and EMI’s bump up is the first, no matter how modest, in many moons (click on table below to enlarge).

But Spotify has yet to make a key expansion: To the U.S., where the big music labels worry that consumers will love everything about the site except paying for it. That’s bad, since Spotify is supposed to work best as a subscription service.

Most Americans have never heard of Symbian, though it remains the biggest player in the global smartphone market (as long as you use a broad definition of smartphone). But it’s telling that Spotify made a point of making its service compatible with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Google’s (GOOG) Android handsets first.

In any event, Spotify is only available via mobile to paying subscribers, who shell out around $16 a month in the U.K. (and less in some countries). They key question for the music business is how many subscribers there are.

Spotify won’t release statistics, but one number that I’ve heard from people close to the company is 100,000, which works out to less than two percent of the company’s overall user base (free users can listen to the service only on their PCs and have to endure a small smattering of ads). But U.S. music industry executives worry that the subscription number may be even lower than that.

The two sides continue to chat, and conventional wisdom is that the service will indeed get to the U.S. one day. But at one point, Spotify was talking about coming to America in 2009, but that looks just about impossible. Now, CEO Daniel Ek is talking about the first half of 2010.

Someone named Justin Bieber, who apparently is a teenage singer, was supposed to appear at the Roosevelt Field mall on Friday, but stayed away because the crowd had become too unruly. Police asked a record label executive to help disperse the horde using the messaging service, and claim he didn’t cooperate. More from Newsday:

Police arrested a senior vice president from Bieber’s label, Island Def Jam Records, James A. Roppo, 44, of Hoboken, N.J., saying he hindered their crowd-control efforts by not cooperating.

He was in custody Friday night, pending charges that could include criminal nuisance, endangering the welfare of a minor and obstructing government administration, Smith said.

“We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message,” Smith said. “By not cooperating with us we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk.”

Slightly confusing, because Bieber’s Twitter account–presumably the one the cops wanted Roppo to use–does indeed show that he asked his fans to leave at 4:30 pm Eastern:

But apparently that was too late:

Here’s what a mall full of unruly Justin Bieber fans looks like, by the way. Not sure how helpful Twitter would have in the face of this:

Condé has a demo video it has been showing to advertisers, employees and plenty of other people, including me. The demo gives you a pretty good overview of what the publisher and Adobe (ADBE), which is building the software to produce and view the magazines, have in mind. But the publisher has turned down my request to show the clip to my readers.

This doesn’t mean you can’t see it, though. If you’re in New York City, you can troop down to the promotional “store” Wired magazine sponsors each year, located this time in the Meatpacking District (keep an eye peeled for the Betaworks guys). The publisher is showing off at least part of the clip there, and you can see some of it in this YouTube clip below (thanks to Brian Chen for spotting):

Obviously, it’s a much better experience if you can watch the video directly, instead of through someone else’s video camera. Also, I think you’d prefer to see it outside of the store, where you’re not subjected to slit-your-wrists techno music. So perhaps this will prompt the Condé folks to put the entire clip out in public.

In the meantime, here’s a gallery of “Saturday Night Live” cast members and other sort-of-famous people checking out last year’s store.

Want to watch YouTube on your TV? There are plenty of devices and services that let you do that, with more on the way.

But starting next month, at least one gadget is getting its YouTube feed shut down. Syabas Technology, which makes a line of set-top boxes called “Popcorn Hour,” says Google’s (GOOG) video site has told it to remove YouTube content beginning December 2.

This one is a straight he said/he said: Syabas, via a blog post from COO Alex Limberis, says it has an agreement to use YouTube’s clips, but that YouTube had changed the terms of the agreement recently. YouTube won’t address that claim directly, but offered this statement:

Since July of 2008, YouTube’s Terms of Service has restricted implementations for televisions based on our APIs. YouTube has been in active discussions with various developers on how best to implement YouTube on set top boxes and TVs. There are several companies, however, that have deployed solutions, like video scraping technology, to circumvent the rules and violate YouTube’s Terms of Service.  Companies that have negotiated agreements to use our APIs, like TiVo, Sony, Panasonic and PS3 are not impacted.

The first-gut reaction here is to draw a parallel between this move and Hulu’s attempt to prevent video software start-up Boxee from using its stuff.

But in that case, at least, Hulu was trying to restrict access to a data stream it was making freely available to the rest of the world. Here, both sides agree that YouTube requires a contract before it will release its API to commercial partners.

So, the real question is: Did the two companies have an agreement, and what if, anything, has changed recently.

Gentlemen?

[T-shirt image courtesy of Zazzle.com.]

But what do Oprah’s plans mean for the TV business? Not that much, argues JP Morgan (JPM) analyst Michael Meltz. Short version of his note published this morning: It’s not bad for OWN, the cable network Oprah co-owns with Discovery (DISCA). But it’s also not terrible for CBS (CBS) and Disney’s (DIS) ABC, the two broadcasters currently in the “Oprah” business.

That’s because while the move makes for unpleasant “optics”–bizspeak for “looks bad”–for broadcast, it turns out that Oprah didn’t make that much money for the business. (But plenty for herself, obviously.)

Medium-sized version of Meltz’s argument:

• The show made $50 million a year for CBS, which syndicated the program. CBS would rather have that money than not, but losing it will amount to a “rounding error” in 2012.
• The show was a big ratings hit for local TV stations, but they paid a lot for it–upward of $200,000 a week in big markets. That made it a loss-leader for most broadcasters, Meltz says.
• And yes, the show provided a big lead-in audience to local TV news broadcasts, particularly in top ABC markets. But given that it’s not going to end up on a rival broadcast channel, “it is conceivable that station audience/ad share won’t change much for the day-part.”

Okay. Back to the crying and teeth-gnashing.

The Web is full of chatter about yesterday’s game, but video is hard to come by. Again, this appears to be a case of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube flexing its ContentID system on behalf of copyright owners, in this case the European sports marketing company Sportfive.

This is a theoretical victory for content creators, who want to be able to control how and where their stuff appears on the Web. But since there doesn’t seem to be an approved video, it’s not really a solution. If it’s a story that’s attracting most of the world’s attention, someone’s going to find it, somewhere.

For instance, a bit of searching did yield these two, at least for now: A high-quality YouTube version of what appears to be a French broadcast, via the Los Angeles Times, and what appears to be a German highlight reel, via DailyMotion and FootyTube, which consistently has great soccer highlights, legal or not (thanks to Zen Web Solutions for the reminder).

For the record, the deal theoretically values Imeem at something like $8 million, but most of that comes in the form of accounts receivable and debt obligations, and isn’t relevant to MySpace, which won’t be dealing with that stuff. And it’s not relevant to investors like Sequoia and Warner Music Group (WMG), which pumped at least $25 million into the venture.

In retrospect, Warner’s move to write off all of its Imeem investment in May was 100 percent accurate.

In September, I visited Caldwell in his San Francisco office. He looked like a guy who has had a very hard year, but he was confident that the company had gotten through the worst of it. If Imeem executed on plan, he argued, it would be able to survive. It wouldn’t be a home run, but it could at least sustain itself–no mean feat for a digital music start-up.

So what happened? “Things can change very quickly,” a person familiar with the company’s story told me yesterday. The short version of the story is that Imeem quickly and unexpectedly ran out of cash. Here’s the longer version of that story, which I’ve pieced together from various sources:

• As Om Malik reported, the company was hit with a copyright lawsuit by music publisher Orchard Enterprises (ORCD). Fighting the suit or settling it would require significant resources.
• Efforts to raise another funding round fell flat. If you want, you can blame the fact that Sequoia declined to pour more money into the company, which acted as a blinking red warning light for other potential investors. Or you could point to the fact that Web music start-ups of all stripes have been flailing for a couple of years.
• Ad sales, which had been perking up throughout the year, fell short of Q4 targets.
• All of the above meant that Imeem was struggling to meet payroll and payments on its debt, which it racked up when it built out its own content-delivery network.

So in retrospect, it’s easy to see why the company sold: It had no choice. And it’s sort of easy to see why News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace bought Imeem: It’s hard to pay less for talent.