You’ve been able to get Funny or Die clips on YouTube before, of course, but only with some effort–until now, the site has tried to keep views on its site or with its proprietary player.

That only worked in limited doses, though, so it makes plenty of sense for the site to expose its videos to a much larger audience. But note that even Funny or Die is trying to preserve a “windowed” approach to video distribution: Its clips will still premiere on the Funny or Die site before moving over to its YouTube channel.

This isn’t nearly as important as deals Google’s (GOOG) site has already struck with providers like CBS (CBS), Disney (DIS), Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner, and Sony (SNE).

But it does provide me with a chance to run a YouTube clip featuring Will Ferrell. Warning–Mark Wahlberg drops a couple F-bombs in the last 30 seconds of this one:

At a TVWeek conference in Manhattan, Bewkes repeated arguments he has made in the past: Chiefly, that big media mergers have a lousy track record and that he couldn’t see how Comcast (CMCSA) could unlock any value by buying a majority stake in NBC Universal from GE (GE).

“Somebody has finally noticed that these things don’t work out so well,” he said, adding “We love to see our competitors taking risks.”

But just to hammer that point home, Bewkes compared the proposed deal to the one his company made nine years ago when it embarked on an ill-fated merger with AOL. That deal (made when Bewkes was running Time Warner’s HBO unit)  “basically made no sense” at the time, he said.

The main talking point in favor of that transaction–that connecting Time Warner’s content with AOL’s Internet distribution would create synergy–was “nonsensical,” he said. But “these kind of arguments, you’ll hear some of them this week, in the other merger that we’ve been talking about,” Bewkes said.

Clear enough?

Wall Street, by the way, remains unimpressed with the proposed deal as well: Comcast shares are down about 10 percent since word got out.

In other reiteration news, Bewkes also said, again, that he doesn’t plan on selling his Time Inc. publishing unit. Though he left himself a tiny window of wiggling room by noting that “no public company can ever say that it wouldn’t consider restructuring some part, whether it’s Warner, HBO, whatever.”

But Bewkes insisted that Time Inc.’s best-known magazine brands, including “Time, People, Sports Illustrated, InStyle,” are holding their own as print products and that the challenge will be turning them into online successes.

“We have basically a healthy business in terms of our relationship with readers. These brands mean something and they’re evolving…,” he said. “If you can’t take the leading titles that people have known for decades, and use the new world to make them relevant, really, shame on us.”

Discovery joins other big names like CBS (CBS) and Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO and Turner, in Comcast’s (CMCSA) “On Demand Online,” which launched last month in a few thousand homes. The program is designed to convince Comcast subscribers to stay on as subscribers, since only subscribers will get Web access to the programming. It’s an answer to Hulu’s offering, which makes shows from News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC and soon, Disney’s (DIS) ABC available to anyone with Internet access.

It’s a variation of the “TV Everywhere” program Time Warner has been touting, and similar to ones that other cable providers, like Time Warner Cable (TWC), and telcos like Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) are pursuing.

Like most of the other networks that have linked up with Comcast for the On Demand test, Discovery isn’t handing over its top-tier stuff. You can’t see “Deadliest Catch,” the network’s show about grumpy Alaskan fishermen, for instance.

Meanwhile, some of the stuff you can get will be “windowed”–the industry’s term for holding shows back from viewers to maximize TV eyeballs. Episodes of something called “Verminators,” for instance, won’t be available until a week after they air on TV. But! Comcast subscribers will be able to watch episodes of “Man Vs. Wild” and “Swords,” which will be available the day after they air.

And any full-length programming that Discovery puts on the Web is a change for the cable network, which has held off from doing so precisely because it didn’t want to upset Comcast, which pays it a hefty fee for its programming.

Related note: I hate the “On Demand Online” tag Comcast uses to describe this strategy. And the Comcast people hate it when I call this “Web TV you’ll pay to see.” Their point is that you’re not paying any additional fees in order to get this stuff on the Web; my point is that only paying Comcast subs can see this stuff, as opposed to Hulu’s free-for-all (for now) offering.

So, can anyone suggest a different name? Give me a good one and I’ll use it.

Meanwhile, here’s a “Man Vs. Wild” clip featuring a pesky porcupine:

CBS (CBS) will join previously announced partners Time Warner (TWX), which is offering up programming from its Turner channels and HBO; Liberty Media’s Starz; and smaller players like Scripps, Rainbow and A&E. The twist is that CBS is the only broadcaster to sign up for the trial.

I noted that this was in the works last month, and it makes plenty of sense: For one thing, CBS would like to tie up with Comcast (CMCSA) as a way to extract “retransmission fees” from the cable company for the rights to carry its programming, which it currently doesn’t get paid for. The broadcaster also needs a big ally, as its broadcast competitors at GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC have already tied up with Hulu.

Comcast’s trial program, which is supposed to start this month and which parallels plans being promoted throughout the cable industry, is in many ways a response to Hulu, which has unnerved the pay TV business. The industry is worried about the specter of “cable cutters” who dump their cable TV subscriptions and watch free Web TV instead. So it’s trying to convince subscribers that if they keep paying up, they’ll get to see whatever they want online, legally.

CBS, meanwhile, passed on the chance to join with Hulu early on, and has since been complaining that the joint venture’s business terms undermine broadcasters’ chances of making real money on the Web.

CBS and Comcast aren’t talking about what the economics of this tie-up look like, but given that it’s a trial, it’s likely there isn’t much to talk about yet. But ultimately, CBS imagines a world where cable companies pay it for the right to put its shows on the Web and where it can charge Internet advertisers the same rates it gets for on-air TV.

That’s a long way off, but this is a start. “This is about extending the economics of the television market to an already independent, healthy online market,” says CBS digital boss Quincy Smith.

UPDATE:  Comcast has a few more programmers on board. In addition to Scripps, A&E and Rainbow, which I’ve written about before, but which have not been formally announced, Comcast is bringing in BBC and MGM Impact, a VOD channel it runs with MGM.

Here’s the release.

CBS TO PARTICIPATE IN COMCAST’S ON DEMAND ONLINE 
NATIONWIDE TRIAL

As the First Broadcaster To Participate, CBS Agrees to Test Standards and Principles for
“TV Everywhere” Model

NEW YORK and PHILADELPHIA, July 14, 2009–CBS Corporation (NYSE:  CBS.A) and Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) announced today that CBS is the first broadcast network to participate in Comcast’s technical trial of On Demand Online. The new service will significantly expand the number of top-rated TV shows available online and across platforms at no additional charge to Comcast’s cable customers while delivering increased advertising value to content owners. During the course of the trial, CBS plans to test various types of current and library content.

“CBS and Comcast share the same vision of giving consumers more–more content, in more places,” said Matt Bond, Executive Vice President of Content Acquisition, Comcast Cable. “On Demand Online is a major step in extending consumers’ television experiences online, and ultimately across platforms by giving any television network, including top brands like CBS, the ability to make their content available on the Web.”

“CBS is very supportive of initiatives that help extend our content to new platforms in such a way that we gain new audiences and additional value for our advertisers,” said Quincy Smith, Chief Executive Officer, CBS Interactive. “Comcast is already a trusted platform to distribute CBS content on air as well as on demand; expanding this relationship online is a logical step. In addition, CBS’s strategy has always been about open, non-exclusive distribution of our content in a consumer friendly way, which is a core tenant of TV Everywhere and On Demand Online.”

CBS’s participation in Comcast’s technical trial comes on the heels of last month’s joint announcement between Time Warner Inc. and Comcast which introduced a set of principles called “TV Everywhere.” Developed by the two companies, the principles are designed to serve as a framework to facilitate deployment of online television content in a way that is consumer friendly and pro-competitive.

Comcast will begin its technical trial of On Demand Online with approximately 5,000 customers from across the U.S. in the coming weeks–the first national trial of its kind. A major focus of the trial is to test Comcast’s new “authentication” technology, which will allow Comcast customers to receive the same content online for free that they subscribe to on TV. The service will utilize a simple log-on system for streaming content and, in the future, will allow for download content to go. The On Demand Online service will roll-out in phases, adding new features, functionality and content over time to provide consumers with a new way to watch television.

On Demand Online is part of Comcast’s Project Infinity, the company’s long-term vision to give customers an ever growing amount of video content on multiple platforms, whenever they want.

No, not really.

While an earlier version of the story went on to include a graph depicting BloodCopy’s Web traffic and several theories that might explain Gawker Media’s purchase of a vampire-themed blog, the Alley Insider post has since been revised. It now explains that the news site was snookered by a “PR firm contracted by Gawker [that] sent us a release with the news.”

Said news is actually part of a promotional campaign for “True Blood,” the vampire show entering its second season on Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO .

More details about BloodCopy, the fake blog that HBO runs to promote the show, as well as other marketing stunts the cable network has rolled out, are available here. But if you don’t have time to read a whole blog post, do be aware that this anti-vampire rights group is a fake. So is this pro-vampire rights group. And so is this synthetic blood beverage.

Disclosures! I used to work for Alley Insider, whose parent company just raised a bunch of money, which makes me happy.

Does that sound like progress to you? It should.

That’s because Carolla’s old gig, which ended in late February when CBS Radio (CBS) pulled the plug on his show, made him just another guy trying unsuccessfully to fill Howard Stern’s shoes.

But the comedian’s podcasts are something else, and they don’t sound like anything else on the radio: Unedited, rambling conversations with a single guest that often sound more like monologues than an actual interview. They’re profane, they run an hour or more, and they make me laugh out loud. (You can get a small taste of what they’re like via the video clip at the bottom of this post. Be warned: There is a smattering of R-rated language in that one).

I’m not the only one. Carolla has been podcasting every weekday for the past month and a half, and an average show finds an audience of about 400,000 people. His most successful ones have nearly doubled that total.

That’s nothing compared to his last radio job, which was broadcast out of Los Angeles and syndicated in a dozen other markets. But in the world of podcasting, that qualifies as an instant hit, and it’s enough to keep his show at or near the top of Apple’s (AAPL) most popular podcast list at its iTunes store.

The other top podcasts, by the way, are all spinoffs or repackagings of shows made by big media companies–NPR, Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO and Discovery Communications (DISCA). But Carolla’s show is created from scratch: It’s just him and a handful of assistants who help him record the show and upload it to the Web. He started off taping the shows in his house in the Hollywood Hills; now he’s moved it to a garage he rents in an unlovely industrial stretch in the San Fernando Valley.

All in all, Carolla estimates he’s spending about $3,000 a month to produce the show, primarily on bandwidth bills. Revenue: Zero.

That’s primarily because Carolla can’t make any money from his show until the end of the year. He’s still getting paid–very well–by CBS, and his contract has a noncompete. But it’s also because it’s unclear how Carolla could actually go about making money from his podcast even if he wanted to.

The basic options: Try to charge his listeners or try to sell advertising. The former hasn’t been done before, and the latter hasn’t made other podcasters much money so far.

“I think that he’s going to have a tough time,” says Marc Horine, VP at ESPN Digital Media, who oversees a stable of podcasts that were downloaded about eight million times a month last year. Even at that volume, Horine says, ESPN has only been able to turn that into a “7-figure-plus” business–and that’s with a large sales staff and the ESPN brand name.

The problem is that podcasts are still considered “experimental” buys for advertisers. And until podcasts can aggregate bigger audiences–and provide marketers with better ways of tracking their ads’ performance–they are probably going to stay that way.

But I’m going to be slightly more optimistic than I usually am on this one: I think that Carolla’s profile, combined with a dedicated audience, could convince a handful of advertisers to take a flyer and sponsor the show. That still won’t come close to replicating his radio money or the money he’ll make if CBS decides to pick up the sitcom he’s working on for the network.

But as Carolla notes in the interview below, entertainers don’t have any choice but to be on the Web. And figuring out how to make good stuff people like is much harder than figuring out how to make money from it.

Apologies for my stammering and stumbling midway through this interview, by the way: Sounding cogent while you ask questions is a lot harder than it looks.

And here’s a sampling of what a Carolla podcast is like: A snippet of his recent podcast with writer Dana Gould. Again, be warned that there’s a light dusting of cursing here.

Thanks to all the readers who set me straight. It turns out there’s an easy answer for MegaVideo’s popularity: It’s a really good way to watch pirated movies and TV shows online.

The trick, it turns out, is not to go to MegaVideo itself to look for “The Dark Knight” or HBO’s new “Eastbound & Down” show. Instead you head to sites like movietvonline.com or sidereel.com, and they’ll direct you to one of MegaVideo’s streams. The stuff generally appears to be pretty good quality, and it’s much easier to access than a BitTorrent download–if you can use Hulu, you can use this stuff.

Apologies to anyone who finds this old hat. It’s obviously becoming more and more common for many of you. Again, take a look at this comScore (SCOR) growth chart. This is how you move from obscurity to the 10th-most popular video site in a year’s time (click graphic to enlarge):

Can’t Hollywood try to crack down on sites like MegaVideo and the sites that showcase their streams? After all, Google’s (GOOG) YouTube was once a piracy haven, and is much less so now. Same thing with DailyMotion, etc.

Sure. But the Chinese government has, um, a mixed record when it comes to IP protection. And in any event, we’re certainly going to see more of these coming down the pike, and it’s only going to be more commonplace.

All of which means that Hollywood, network TV and the cable companies have no choice if they want to keep viewers from turning to the pirates: Give them easy access to whatever they want, whenever they want it.

It’s the same scenario the music guys faced at the end of the 1990s, and they screwed it up. Look at them now.

Right now some of the players are talking a good game–“We think everything on television should become available to you on broadband for free,” Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes said yesterday at an investor conference. He doesn’t really mean free, by the way–he means free to cable and satellite TV subscribers.

The industry can hash out payment plans later. But first, those who make money creating and distributing video need to move very fast to get their stuff in front of viewers, wherever they want to see it. Because MegaVideo is already doing it.

So this can’t be good: Cable giant Comcast (CMCSA) turned in a fourth-quarter report card this morning that beat Wall Street’s revenue and earnings expectations. But it lost more basic subscribers than analysts had expected, and added fewer higher-end digital subs than expected.

Also out the window: Guidance for the year. “There’s a bit less visibility in the business than usual,” Comcast Chief Financial Officer Michael Angelakis told The Wall Street Journal. ”We intend to grow the business in 2009, but we are very focused on expanding our conversation with our investors and shareholders instead of just providing a couple metrics that everyone focuses on.”

The numbers: Excluding a $600 million write-down on Clearwire, Comcast posted earnings of 27 cents a share on revenue of  $8.77 billion; Wall Street had been looking for 22 cents a share and $8.63 billion.

The problem: Comcast lost 233,000 basic cable subs; analysts had been expecting something closer to a 150,000-sub loss. More worrisome, the company added only 247,000 high-priced digital subscribers, which is less than half of what Wall Street was expecting.

And it wasn’t as if Comcast’s customers were ditching HBO and MTV and programming their own TVs via Web services like Hulu and Boxee, either: The company only added 184,000 high-speed data subscribers; Wall Street was looking for 250,000.

I can attest that the streaming service is indeed excellent–enough so that I’m likely to drop my subscription to Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO very soon. What I can’t tell you is the number of Netflix subscribers who are actually using the service, because Netflix (NFLX) isn’t offering up any real data about the program–only that “millions” used the service in the last quarter.*

But! That data point alone is enough to suggest that more than 20 percent of the company’s subscribers are using the service.

Here’s the algebra, courtesy of Barclays Capital’s Doug Anmuth: Netflix ended the quarter with 9.4 million subscribers. If “millions” means at least two million, than that means at least 21 percent of the company’s customers use streaming–while continuing to use DVD and Blu-ray discs.

That strikes me as a fairly astonishing number, given that it’s still not a simple process to get Netflix’s stuff on your TV, where you can best appreciate it. There’s now a handful of devices, like Roku’s specialized box and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360, designed to get the company’s movies and shows on your big(ish) screen, and more on the way, like LG’s TVs that come prewired for the service.

But most of this stuff is getting viewed on viewer’s laptops, Netflix says. Just think of what the adoption rate will be like when that switches to TVs.

*A reader suggests that Netflix may not mean millions of viewers, but millions of views, or some other obfuscation. I thought about that one, too, and double-checked Hasting’s remarks, via Seeking Alpha. Here’s the relevant excerpt: “Our existing subscribers are watching instantly in ever greater numbers and in just the last month millions of our subscribers got more value from their Netflix subscription by streaming.”

Bear in mind that these are his scripted remarks, pre Q&A. So it seems to me he was being very deliberate here — he’s got a lot of folks using his Web service, and he wants to brag about it.

[Image Credit: jeffgunn]

Here’s HBO’s clever attempt: Use an existing video that’s already popular on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube and try to piggyback off of that.

Time Warner’s (TWX) pay cable channel’s “Flight Of The Conchords,” its comedy series about two Kiwi slacker/musicians trying to make it in New York, is already a YouTube sensation. So no need to reinvent the wheel: To promote the new season of the show, the channel is asking the site’s users to lip-synch their own versions of one of the show’s most popular clips.

The carrot: The best versions, collected here, will get mashed into a best-of compilation clip that will air after one of the new shows next year. To get things moving, Deep Focus, the interactive ad agency running the campaign for HBO, bought ads on a handful of video Web sites that specialize in comedy clips. And those sites in turn created their own versions, using sort-of-well-known folks like Andy Dick and College Humor’s Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld.

The promotion just kicked off last week, so it’s too early to tell whether any of the new clips will take off–and more important, bring HBO more viewers and/or subscribers. But at least give the channel credit for trying to harness the audience that YouTube and others have aggregated.

Here’s the original version:

And here are some pre-seeded takes…
College Humor (note the MTV crew in the background):

Funny Or Die:

My Damn Channel:

To spell that argument out: Just because people aren’t paying $10 to $17 for a CD anymore doesn’t mean that people aren’t interested in music, and in some cases willing to pay for it.

Even if that’s true, it won’t do very much for the people who run big music companies like Vivendi’s (VIV) Universal Music and Warner Music Group (WMG), who are still stuck selling CDs and will be for years to come.

But nimble competitors think they can carve out a niche for themselves by working outside the labels and selling small batches of music-related stuff, if not CDs. That’s the premise of Topspin Media, a start-up headed by Ian Rogers, an entrepreneur who briefly ran the music unit of Yahoo (YHOO). Topspin sells a suite of tech tools designed to help artists (and/or their business people) who want to sell their product and manage their careers on their own.

The company is just creeping out of stealth mode, so it’s too early to tell whether Topspin’s prospects are any more or less promising than the future of the music business. But Rogers is a persuasive guy, so it’s best to just step aside and let him make his own pitch.

Here’s a slide from a recent presentation Rogers gave at a music industry event in Seattle that sums up his “people like music” argument. (Click on the image to make it bigger.) His larger case, which, of course, includes a role for Topspin, can be found here. Or if you just like slides, here.

Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack was one of the 20 20-somethings who appeared in “the video”–the now sort-of-infamous lip synch clip made by a bunch of vacationing Web kids.

And no, Hudack doesn’t feel bad about it or the brief blogstorm the clip created.

In any event, Hudack has real-world worries, like how to keep his video distribution site afloat.

The thesis behind Blip.tv, and every other video site, is simple: Lots of people are spending lots of time watching Web video and advertising will eventually follow.

But there are lots and lots of video sites out there (there will be fewer, soon), and advertisers have yet to really embrace Web video. Those who do buy Web video ads generally view them as experiments.

And experiments are hard to justify during a recession.

The good news, Hudack says, is that Web video only gets cheaper to produce and distribute–he says bandwidth costs have come down 40 percent in the last year. He’s now paying about a penny every time someone views one of his videos.

And the number of views keeps increasing: In September, Blip.tv said it had served up 51 million video views, up 250 percent year-over-year, and Mike says that number bumped up to 55 million in October.

And since Blip.tv only distributes clips made by pros and semi-pros, he can attach ads to most of those views, unlike YouTube, the Google (GOOG) video unit which can only monetize a small fraction of its inventory.

And the really good news is that Hudack has a new slug of cash to keep him afloat and allow him to expand. He won’t disclose the size of his newest round, led by Bain Capital Ventures, but I’m told it’s in the $3 million to $5 million range.

(Irony alert: Hudack doesn’t mind showing up on a widely distributed vacation video, but he won’t go into his company’s financials).

[This is normally the point in the post where I'd play you a clip of a video interview I've conducted with Hudack. But since the Amazon (AMZN) "Next Day Shipping" feature apparently just means "give us an extra $19 and we'll get it to you when we feel like it," MediaMemo is still camera-less.]

Instead, take a look at this episode of “Political Lunch,” a Blip.tv-distributed show and note the way that sponsor HBO has been integrated into the clip.

The hosts give the Time Warner (TWX) pay-cable channel a shout-out at the beginning. Then, there’s a brief overlay ad early in the piece, followed by a preview of an HBO show at the end of the clip.

It’s a good example of what Web video can offer an advertiser–a chance to get right in front of viewers, when they’re already engaged in the screen, without being too obtrusive.

Now the trick for Blip.tv, and everyone else in Web video, is convincing a lot more advertisers that this is worth their while.