The Financial Times now reaches 2.2m people across the world on a daily basis, according to the latest Average Daily Global Audience (ADGA) figures.

Before I continue, a health warning: ADGA is a metric devised by the FT’s own research department in 2009. They are independently verified by PricewaterhouseCoopers rather than the industry’s main auditor, ABC.

The ADGA statistics reveal that the number of people accessing the FT’s online site every day has surpassed 900,000, showing a 36% year-on-year increase.

The paper has also seen a sharp rise in mobile users, with increases of 66% on smart phones and 71% on tablets over the last six months.

The number of people who read FT content on two or more platforms every day has risen to over 300,000, or 14% of the total audience.

To achieve its results, ADGA uses a combination of sources including syndicated national and regional readership surveys, unique user and browser data, FT proprietary research based on large samples of the reader base as well as ABC (NYSE: DIS) circulation figures.

The number is divided into channels as well as regions. Duplicated consumption is removed to produce one global net audience figure.

Anita Hague, the FT’s global research director, said: “FT readers are comfortably moving between platforms to access our content… this means that advertisers who run a cross-channel campaign are maximising their reach.”

Source: FT

After quickly gaining a warm reception and a rapid post-launch investment from BSkyB, the social TV app startup co-founded by ex BBC iPlayer head honcho Anthony Rose is making its first real play at monetisation.

From Thursday, Zeebox is starting to include “click to buy” slots in its iPad and iPhone app and to sell second-screen ads to brands, so that each generates money from people watching TV shows with Zeebox on their laps.

It works like this…

Thanks to speech-to-text, subtitles and other metadata including from Philips’ Civolution fingerprinter spin-off, the Zeebox iPad app already shows users a live stream of info “tags” corresponding to material in shows they are watching on their lounge TV. Right now, they link to Wikipedia articles.

But Zeebox also had always hoped to leverage them to start linking to marketing messaging as well as to purchase options during the commercial breaks between shows.

So, during those breaks, Zeebox will denote actionable tag links with icons for songs, products, travel services etc. Those links will send users through to merchants like iTunes (for music), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) (for DVDs), Tesco (for food) and Boots (for cosmetics) via Zeebox affiliate codes, so that it generates a percentage commission of any subsequent sales.

Zeebox is running the system so far on about 20 percent of UK TV’s commercial break ads, mostly for ITV (LSE: ITV) hcnanle.s

Will it work?

“Our consumer research told us that people want an easy way to buy things they see on TV,” Rose’s co-founder Ernesto Schmitt says in a press release.

Do affiliate links add up to a business model? Not in isolation. Shazam claims to make a percentage of music purchases worth $100 million a year that its app sent to stores last year. But it has tried to diversify its revenue streams.

Using just the affiliate commission model, Zeebox will need to generate click-throughs and actual purchases at a large scale in order to clock up significant total income. But the startup appears to be seeking other streams, too.

The prospect of selling specific second-screen tag ads to advertiser brands is exciting as an innovation. But brands would likely consider this experimental until such time as Zeebox is being used by large numbers of TV viewers.

Zeebox last month claimed “250,000 users” - but simultaneous prime-time users metrics are not publicised.

One route to scale for Zeebox is through BSkyB (NYSE: BSY). The UK pay-TV platform leader in January took equity in the startup with a deal through which it will leverage Zeebox features in a social-centric upgrade revision to its EPG app for its Sky+ PVR.

But, still, the whole prospect, for all such operators, depends on the usage scale of tablets or smartphones as engagement facilitators during TV shows. On that hinges the very notion of the second screen but, so far, much research points to a growing trend there.

It’s been almost a year since former Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPad 2, and according to a new report, the company plans to launch the third version of its breakthrough tablet device around a month from now in early March.

AllThingsD didn’t have an exact date, but said Apple has settled on the first week of March to introduce what most people are calling the iPad 3. Less is known about the device itself, but it’s expected to feature a more powerful processor and a higher-resolution display than its predecessor.

This will be the company’s first major launch event since Jobs’ death last October, as January’s iBooks launch event was a much smaller type of introduction. Apple continues to dominate the market for modern tablet computers, and despite upstarts like Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) finally getting traction for tablet other than the iPad, Apple sold 15 million of the current model in the fourth quarter, far more than any other company.

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Recent roll-outs to new countries of download and streaming services helped Michael Bublé‘s Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) offset physical declines with digital growth in its October-to-December Q3.

—In recorded music (ie. sales of tracks to users), digital revenue grew 15 percent after iTunes’ expansion to 12 new European and 16 Latin American countries in 2011.

—In music publishing (ie. licensing to services), digital revenue grew faster, by 36 percent, on consumer adoption of Spotify, which rolled out to four new European countries and the States, and Deezer, which expanded from France to the UK and announced further globalisation plans.

The digital growth meant total, cross-platform quarterly revenue (both within each division and for their group as a whole) finished flat compared with the previous year - an encouraging achievement for an industry that has long sought the point where digital gains make up for physical’s downfall.

At home, Warner Music Group hit another milestone, as U.S. digital music unit sales surpassed those from physical for the first time. “We’ve crossed the threshold of 50/50 in the U.S.,” new CEO Steve Cooper told analysts. “The rest of the world is still about two thirds to a third.”

Global revenue from streaming services (36 percent) is growing faster than that from downloads (15 percent). But streaming revenue is still relatively peanuts for WMG compared with download sales - $15 million compared with $205 million in recorded music’s digital revenue. In the latter, digital now makes up 28 percent of recorded music revenue.

“The Deezers are coming on strong,” Cooper added, talking about the rise of streaming to counter the dominance of iTunes-dependent download sales “You will eventually see those lines cross. But, right now, the lion’s share is in downloads.”

WMG was a late convert to the unlimited-subscription model, having negotiated hard with Spotify. But it is now a big exponent, hoping new music subscriptions services and bundled mobile offerings will reduce labels’ iTunes dependency, boost industry growth and restore a payment, if not an ownership, habit in consumers.

“That flow of dollars is substantially greater than the average annual purchases with respect to an iTunes user,” CEO Cooper told analysts, repeating Spotify’s own observation that its subscribers effectively pay a relatively high $120 a year.

“Both downloads and streaming provide us with meaningful economics. I’m personally agnostic - although you can draw your own conclusions from the streaming payments versus average iTunes users’ (payments).”

Despite the company posting flat revenue of $779 million, however, WMG’s Q3 losses deepened by 44 percent to $26 million because interest grew on loans relating to WMG’s acquisition by Access Industries.

Other costs included $3 million spent trying to acquire EMI, which ended up agreeing a break-up sale to Universal Music Group and Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music Entertainment - sales WMG plans to fight.

“It would significantly impair the competitiveness of the recorded music and music publishing business, harming ... songwriters, physical and digital retailers and our emerging digital services,” Cooper said, vowing: “We will continue to share our view with the relevant regulatory authorities.”

Release | Webcast

Virgin Media thinks its new-ish TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) set top box is a game changer. But, whilst the new box - with a big PVR drive, capability for over-the-top services and integrated broadcaster catch-up - is a large improvement on its predecessor, one year after launch, some aspects are more evolution than revolution…

Where are the apps?

In a lengthy meeting with City analysts on Wednesday, company executives re-iterated its belief that the box, which is designed to lure Sky customers and head off the emergence of connected TVs, is “an open platform”. But, if Virgin’s TiVo is so “open”, why does it still carry only 15 handpicked “apps”, compared with the 1,000 Samsung Smart Hub has in Europe? That question specifically was asked by an analyst from Cazenove…

“You will see a few apps every month,” he was told by company COO Andrew Barron. “They will be heavyweight apps, not just fodder. It’s easy to publish all sorts of things to it, because it’s got Flash - but we want to the real heavyweights.”

It was a skilled response to what analysts are now realising - Virgin’s TiVo platform is a step-change from its forebear but still a way’s away from rival boxes and TV sets in this regard, and the big-platform-operator way of thinking is notable by its presence.

Virgin claimed viewers called up 2.4 million app sessions in November, spending 21 minutes a time. The showcase apps are iPlayer and Spotify, whose content tends to run long.

iPad controller delayed

For all its advanced additions, the TiVo box, which comes with an additional £5 monthly premium, still does not include basic features of its predecessor like BBC Red Button, which is part and parcel of free-to-air Freeview. Meanwhile, the iPad controller promised pre-launch more than a year ago is still absent. Again, an analyst quizzed Virgin Media on Wednesday.

“We’ve got it, it works,” Barron told him. “Ninety-nine percent of companies would have rolled it by now - it’s stable, impressive - but we haven’t…

“We wanted to make sure early adopter enthusiasts will love it - but that, when it hits, it goes mass-market quite quickly and is not viewed as some flaky application for enthusiasts but is polished and doesn’t generate calls to support. It shows you our philosophy - we’re a mass-market company.”

This is far from the product development method which many developers nowadays favour - ship first, iterate later.

To premium and beyond

If Virgin’s TiVo hasn’t yet got to grips with “open” as many internet afficonados recognise it or with the full-blown revolution in over-the-top connected TV services that is coming in to view, it is, however, ushering in a step change in viewing habits…

Half of viewing on TiVo is now carried out through its My Shows section - that is, shows recorded on its PVR and personalised recommendations. Virgin, whose TV box has three tuners for simultaneous recording as well as broadcaster catch-up services, is spearheading a big rise in timeshifting, now showing 90 million VOD views per month from customers.

It’s a continuation of a trend the previous V+ box, as well as the rise of broadcasters’ own catch-up brands, had created before it. But, if TiVo is still far opening the gates to over-the-top operators in reality, it is proving to be an excellent platform through which to watch VOD on Virgin’s terms.

The company’s strategy is to frog-march customers from Virgin’s existing broadband and TV services to TV upgrades (TiVo) and faster broadband (speeds are being doubled), while continually charging more for the privilege.

It is working - average customer revenue for Virgin’s TiVo customers is £60 per month compared with £45 for regular customers. Virgin’s TiVo adoption doubled in Q4, taking it up to 435,000, it reported on Wednesday.

But Virgin must be mindful that continually ratcheting up price in this way won’t simply turn customers away.

In five years’ time, CEO Neil Berkett told analysts, Virgin will have retired its ghastly old Liberate system, will have all its customers on TiVo and will be scouting for “son of TiVo”.

When the consulting firm’s logo appeared routinely in Six Nations rugby broadcast graphics this weekend, James Cridland was amongst the viewers to ask: “Accenture advertises on BBC Sport - how?”

Sponsorship on the license-funded BBC in the UK is strictly forbidden. But the workaround, for Accenture, was to build a mobile app…

Back in January, the RBS 6 Nations tournament anointed Accenture with “official technology partner” status. That’s a relatively new trend, but not entirely - 12 months ago, the Barclays Premier League gave Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) the same status.

To earn the status, technology partners must each provide a service to the tournament. EA provided match data. Accenture built the official Six Nations mobile application, with tournament news, live scores, squad lists, tables and video highlights.

Broadcasters are frequently bound, by the terms of their contracts with tournaments they air, to show the brands of these supposedly integral tournament partners. EA got to show its logo alongside live on-screen match facts on Sky Sports. Accenture’s logo is displayed along with rugby scores broadcast to by the BBC, Ireland’s RTE etc. Many other broadcasters do the same for many other sports.

What’s interesting here is Accenture is not just providing a private partner service to the tournament but, through the mobile app, is itself providing to the tournament’s end audience the same kind of content media consumers might expect to obtain from an organisation like the BBC

BBC Sport gave paidContent this statement…

“Accenture are the official data supplier for The Six Nations and as a technology company are responsible for providing the statistics for The Championships. This ‘facility’ is available to all partners/media covering the event.

“The relationship is between ‘Six Nations Rugby Limited’ and ‘Accenture’. In accordance with BBC and EBU guidelines (which provide for the crediting of official data processing and timing suppliers) the BBC credits Accenture as official data supplier on a number of occasions throughout the match.

“For television, a corporate logo accompanies a select number of statistical match graphics. This is common practice, industry wide, and should not be confused with reflections given to event title sponsors.”

We run this story in the interest of clarification and curiosity and not necessarily as a BBC-bashing piece.

How come the BBC are allowed to show the Accenture logo during the stats coverage in the rugby? #sixnations #England

— Toby Morris (@tobym20) February 4, 2012

How did Accenture advertise on BBC Sport, when the Editorial Guidelines specifically prohibit it? More: mediauk.com/tv/discussions…

— James Cridland (@JamesCridland) February 4, 2012

News Corp surpassed analyst expectations in quarterly earnings announced today, but the numbers reflected two wildly divergent trends.

On one hand, the company posted impressive growth in its TV, cable and movie businesses. These segments resulted in a $210 million year-over-year quarterly earnings increase and adjusted earnings per share of $0.39 which is better than the $0.34 analysts had predicted.

At the same time, the company announced a 43 percent decline in its publishing business and a quarterly charge of $87 million related to the UK phone hacking settlement.

On an afternoon earnings call, News Corp executives said that about 85 percent of the charge was for lawyers and advisers and the rest for legal settlements. They added that they could not go into details about future settlements but that the “priority is to make this right.” The company says it spent $104 million in 2011 on costs related to the investigation.

The hacking-related charges were not included in the publishing category where the company’s UK and Australia newspapers are experiencing collapsing revenues. The company also said it expected income from its UK newspapers to drop $150 million in the coming year.

Publishing reported second quarter segment operating income of $218 million, a $162 million or 43% decrease compared to the $380 million reported a year ago, reflecting lower advertising revenues at the Australian newspapers and the integrated marketing services business, as well as the absence of contributions from the closure of The News of the World in the U.K.

Analysts, however, appeared less interested in the scandal than in the company’s surging TV and entertainment businesses. The strong performance in these segments was driven in part by the popularity of Fox (NSDQ: NWS) News, FX cable and hit movies like Rio and an Alvin and the Chipmunks.

News Corp also enjoyed strong results from its affiliate BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) which posted improved quarterly income of $174 million compared to $109 million one year ago.

The company also said it expects a reinvigorated performance from Dow Jones as a result of a new CEO, a strong brand and new digital platforms.

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Yes, it’s true: We are joining GigaOM. And the combined group will be a powerhouse, with more than 20 writers and editors, a strong presence on the East and West coasts and in Europe, and coverage of everything from media and big data, to the cloud and mobile, to book publishing and online video—not to mention the startup scene in various markets.

It’s a very exciting development for us, as ContentNext and GigaOM share so many of the same goals and have such similar cultures. We both believe fundamentally in the power of breaking news and smart, useful content across different platforms, and we both have a core conviction about practicing truth and fairness in our journalism. We also both happen to believe that you can build very profitable businesses if you can execute on those principles.

We have other things in common, too: Both companies’ founders—in our case, Rafat Ali, in GigaOM’s case, Om Malik—turned influential one-man blogs into vibrant media companies by being way ahead of the curve. (A side note: The two founders have also long been close friends.) The chance to work with Om is one that anyone would leap at. He is a true visionary with a unique understanding of technology and a gift for communicating that knowledge. He’s also stacked GigaOM with talented writers and editors who, like him, have a deep curiosity about the intersection of technology and business, particularly innovation. (You can read Om’s post on the sale.)

At a time when so many content companies are groping for sustainable business models, GigaOM has a dynamic approach to making money. Its multiple revenue streams extend from site advertising to conferences to subscription products and beyond; from its online audience of more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, to its leading events like GigaOM Structure and GigaOM Roadmap, to GigaOM Pro, which provides research on emerging technology markets from over 110 independent analysts. GigaOM has built a suite of products that can serve a variety audiences, all of which congregate under the GigaOM brand. And now that will expand to include our sites, newsletters and conferences.

For readers of ContentNext’s sites—paidContent, MocoNews, paidContent:UK and ContentSutra—there’s nothing not to like about this deal. You’ll still be able to attend our stellar conferences and enjoy our trenchant posts about the industries we cover. You’ll still be getting all the content you know from the writers that you’re used to getting it from. But now you’ll be getting something else, too: more smart voices on different and vital topics, and even more news and analysis.

Under the terms of the purchase, Guardian News & Media (GNM), which bought ContentNext Media in 2008, will take a minority stake in GigaOM. GNM joins existing GigaOM investors including Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. The sale is the culmination of a process that began back in the fall, with multiple bidders for ContentNext. The New York investment bank Coady Deimar Partners advised GNM on the deal.

“With our shared commitment to journalistic ethics, GigaOM and paidContent are a natural fit,” said Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM. “paidContent is the leading voice covering the evolution of media, an area that is very important to us. Integrating our teams will enrich our editorial coverage and expand our footprint immediately in two markets that are critical to our growth – New York City and the UK.” GigaOM, which was founded in 2006, is based in San Francisco. ContentNext, whose roots go back to 2002, is based in New York.

The sale ends ContentNext’s three-and-a-half-year run as part of Guardian News and Media. When GNM had bought ContentNext, part of the idea was that it could help the UK publisher gain mindshare in the U.S. as the Guardian expanded there. In recent months, GNM has been focusing its investment activity in the U.S. around the buildout of a new site. “paidContent has a fantastic presence in the tech/media space, and the match with GigaOM, itself a really smart and pioneering company, is a good one. We are delighted to become shareholders in GigaOM as part of the deal,” said Andrew Miller, CEO of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of GNM. “The Guardian’s focus in the U.S. is on building guardiannews.com, but we look forward to seeing paidContent thrive and grow in its new home and wish its staff all the very best for the future.”

We thank the Guardian for their stewardship, and can’t wait to start working with our new colleagues at GigaOM. 

See GigaOM’sannouncement of the deal for additional details.

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After building up Lovefilm and selling it to Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), CEO Simon Calver is leaving for an unusual new challenge in retail, as CEO of parent-and-toddler chain Mothercare.

COO Jim Buckle, who has run both Lovefilm’s commercial and financial operations since 2006, will take over from Calver in the “coming months”, the company says (Calver’s blog).

The change happens at an interesting time. Whilst its likely Calver simply wanted a new challenge, Lovefilm may also be at a cross-roads…

In its looming fight with Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), should it remain a standalone brand or should it be re-badged under Amazon, which has its own U.S. movie and TV service but which is lacking a full such content line-up in the UK?

Lovefilm has over two million customers across Europe (ie. mainly UK and Germany), was formed out of amalgam of several DVD rental businesses and recently introduced an online-only tariff that, at least in the short term, undercuts Netflix’s own in the UK.

The rival pair are busy trying to acquire content rights.

Mail Online may have overtaken The New York Times’ website for global audience, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) - but, in reality, the two are still an ocean apart.

The macho, competitive ethos of London’s old Fleet Street, on which newspaper executives celebrate beating each other’s circulation, has spilled over on to the web and is being fought across the Atlantic. Mail Online’s meteoric rise, which the company on Wednesday said gives it almost 100 million monthly uniques. is rightly admired.

But that dead-tree machismo is not necessarily the right lens through which to look and comparisons are not helpful. A&N Media’s fast-growing news and pictures vehicle is no more competing with The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) than Coca-Cola is with cod liver oil…

• Different content: One is laden with celebrity gossip, bikini photos and outrageous news and features written so expertly succinctly that readers just have to click. The other is a sobre, reflective and, some might say, banal examination of the machinations of American public life and culture. (While NYTimes.com’s U.S. page led with Court Strikes Down Ban on Gay Marriage in California this week, Mail Online’s was splashing with ‘My adoptive father poured hot sauce in my ears, glued my eyes shut and starved us’).
• Different businesses: If the two titles aren’t chasing the same audiences, they also aren’t fighting for the same advertisers. While NYTimes.com runs campaigns for $500 handbags, Manhattan apartments and Indian bridalwear, Mail Online advertises WeightWatchers, home telecom services and discount wine.

So, the Mail may now be operating in the same U.S. geography as the Times, but the pair aren’t necessarily competing head-on.

Although they each occupy the “online news” space together, observers of that sector who draw linear conclusions from Mail Online “overtaking” NYTimes.com’s traffic have got it wrong.

For one, the handover must be seen in two quite distinct but important contexts…

• NYTimes’ introduction of metered charging early in 2011 has, naturally, negatively impacted upon its web visits.
• Mail Online likely has not gained NYTimes.com readers but has acquired its new audience under its own steam from what was a flat start.

None of this is to denigrate Mail Online’s journey. Whilst some criticise the website’s sensationalist bent as much as the newspaper’s political tactics, it has shown how to build a big online news audience in a new country.

But Mail Online isn’t benefitting because it’s eating NYTimes.com’s dinner, and it doesn’t necessarily matter that one’s traffic has surpassed the other - in a still-growing market like the internet, all boats rise.

It is truer to say mass-market U.S. newspaper websites (National Enquirer? New York Post?) face a greater threat from Mail Online than NYTimes.com does. But it may be even truer to wonder if the U.S. as a whole has ever quite seen anything like Mail Online.

Whatever, one must at least compare apples with apples.

Last week, we highlighted how Facebook is already using mobile devices for commercial services—enabling people to buy Facebook Credits and charge them directly to their mobile bills. Now, it’s increasingly looking like that may just be the beginning: today, UK-based mobile billing and analytics specialist Bango (AIM: BGO) announced that it had signed a deal to provide unspecified services to the social network.

This is a significant deal for Facebook on two separate fronts:

—It ties Facebook up with one of the bigger companies in the area of mobile billing: Bango is the payments provider for RIM’s App World, which yesterday once again laid claim to being the second-most profitable app storefront after Apple’s—largely because of the fact that it has a strong business in paid apps and that those apps are billed directly to users’ mobile bills in 34 countries. RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) yesterday claimed that 13 percent of its App World developers earn in excess of $100,000, which is massive considering how many developers earn next to nothing.

In December last year, Bango also secured a deal with Amazon.

Like the Facebook announcement that deal provided no detail about what it was that Bango would do for the company—although that, too, could be an opportunity for Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) to build carrier billing into its mobile apps. A spokesperson contacted today declined to comment on the details of either the Amazon or Facebook deals, although she did confirm that Amazon was an active customer.

The use of carrier billing also begs another question: for what? That could point to Facebook offering richer mobile services on its web platform. The could include paid content apps or the ability to pay for other goods and services, perhaps linked up with location-based deal offerings. As the FT points out, that’s something that Bango itself started to promote, coincidentally just when news began to leak out of Facebook’s own HTML5 push, code-named “Project Spartan.”

It could also mean Bango working alongside or in place of other billing partners: Bango competes directly with Facebook partners Zong and Boku.

—The other significant side of Bango’s business is in the area of analytics for mobile web sites as well as apps. This is a service it already provides various high-profile publishers like CNN, Fox (NSDQ: NWS), and EA Mobile, among others—as well as to mobile ad agency AKQA—to help track how mobile content is used and consumed. That helps the publishers not only track what content “works” but also can be used to build profiles to sell advertising and marketing services.

If reports are true, that is another area where Facebook is going to have to start doing some serious tracking, too: the company is reportedly going to start inserting “sponsored stories” into mobile users’ feeds, which would represent Facebook’s first big foray into offering marketing services to brands since filing for its IPO last week—where it pointedly mentioned it had yet to start offering such revenue-generating services.

Facebook is holding an advertising confab at the end of this month—its first high-profile foray into wooing Madison Avenue—where it may well announce more details about how its mobile plans are progressing.

The other point to be made here is that it is interesting that Facebook is taking the road less traveled by companies like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and exploring routes to align itself with carriers as it expands what it does on mobile. It’s not the first time: Facebook has a whole swathe of non-smartphone users that can update their statuses by mobile; many of those feature phone Facebookers are using SMS, which also require carrier interconnections to operate.

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• Facebook May Not Be Into Mobile Ads Yet, But Plenty Of Others Are
• Facebook's Next Step In Mobile Domination: A Feature Phone App
• Update: Facebook Has A Mobile Card Up Its Sleeve In Addition To Advertising

UK pay-TV and broadband telco Virgin Media clocked its first annual profit in 2011, as its TV set top boxes continued to be an engine of video on-demand viewership.

For the year, the company swung to a £75.9 million net income from a £141.4 million loss a year earlier, as annual revenue rose three percent to £4 billion.

Virgin doubled sign-ups to its new TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) PVR, now at a total 435,000 - but, though it increased its TV subscribe base between October and December, it lost 0.4 percent of its TV subscribers compared with the previous year.

The TiVo box is a big improvement from its predecessor but is still suffering from some quirks, still doesn’t offer some baseline features its predecessor did (like BBC Red Button) and is slow to roll out promised over-the-top services except for Spotify.

Virgin TV customers are now averaging 90 million VOD views per month on their set top boxes through a combination of recordings and hosted on-demand services, exceeding a billion total in 2011 (up 14 percent from 2010).

The company’s strategy is to cater to what it says is growing, voracious demand for digital entertainment and information - in part through its TiVo box and in part by increasing speeds of its broadband service, with which it has a competitive advantage against most copper-wire services by virtue of being fibre optic.

Release.

Today brings news of yet another round of capital-intensive cost-cutting for the challenged mobile phone maker Nokia: the company today announced that it would be transferring smartphone assembly from factories in Hungary, Finland and Mexico, and putting the operation in Asia.

The plants will remain operational now for “smartphone product customization.” The news comes amidst unconfirmed reports that the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the release of the next model.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) says that the transfer will result in the loss of 4,000 jobs in total, and the reductions will take place through the end of 2012.

Nokia does not outline how much the move to Asia will mean in terms of money saved, but this is a decision that has been some time in the making: these were plants that were spared in the last round of cuts under CEO Stephen Elop.

Since then, Nokia has reported yet more declines in its smartphone shipments, mainly around its legacy Symbian platform. The company is now gradually moving to making more of its smartphone portfolio based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

Now, Nokia says that the move is being made to put the manufacturing bases closer to where the different components are being made for those smartphones. That is a move we have seen from many other companies—and was the subject of a series of stories recently concerning Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in China and the role of Foxconn in that business.

The move to make these plants focused on customization, meanwhile, points to some focus that Nokia does seem to maintain on its software and services for its devices—a crucial part of the company’s differentiation as it moves more and more to a platform being used by its competitors as well. Others that make Windows Phone devices include Samsung and HTC.

The news comes amidst other reports about Nokia that claim the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the next model comes out.

Symbian is gradually being phased out for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, but Nokia had originally said it would support the OS until 2016, and that could still be the case even if it stopped making devices based on it. Nokia transferred the operation of Symbian to Accenture last year.

A spokesperson from Nokia told paidContent that the article was “speculative at best” and would not comment on device rumor or speculation:

“As we have previously said Symbian continues to be an important part of our portfolio and going forward it will play a more focused role as we accelerate our transition to Windows Phone,” he said. “We remain fully committed to the platform through 2016, which means on-going software support as we go forward.”

The company is currently rolling out an update to Symbian, Belle, and the devices remain popular in the Middle East, Russia and India, even as they have lost out to Android-based devices, Apple’s iPhone and even RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) in other markets.

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Mail Online’s annual revenue growth rate has accelerated to a high of 70 percent following its big push in to the U.S., its publisher DMGT reported in Wednesday’s interim disclosure for its October-to-January earnings.

The site clocked a whopping 99 million unique browsers in January, it said, citing its own Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) logs - 77 percent up from the previous year and 15 percent up from the previous month. It is not yet profitable, thanks to growth investment.

Relative to its burgeoning audience and relative to rivals, Mail Online’s income has often appeared small. Though actual figures were not given on Wednesday, Mail Online and stablemate Metro.co.uk together made £19 million through 2010/11, according to a previous disclosure. But that is partly because, unlike peers, DMGT reports the sites’ results separately from a whole set of supporting classifieds sites that make the bulk of its digital money and which make Mail Online look small in isolation.

Those classified sites - including Jobsite, Motoring.co.uk and the Digital Property Group - appear to be recovering from the economic downturn’s battering they faced in 2011, with eight percent quarterly revenue growth and a “solid performance” from the property sites, DMGT says.

Across formats, revenue for Associated Newspapers, the national division in which the Mail sits, is now stable compared with last year, helped by the digital growth off-setting a “weak” print ad market.

But, in DMGT’s Northcliffe regional newspaper division, revenues fell nine percent because the publisher has moved some daily titles to weekly and because ad revenue is a tenth below 2010 rates. The publisher finds itself hiking cover prices to make up for lost sales and continuing to cut costs - it lopped off 12 percent of costs in the last year, including shedding three percent of its staff.

DMGT’s real engine is B2B, not consumer, information, whose revenue rose three percent.

Magazine and web publisher Future has hit a key milestone in the media industry’s great transition - UK digital revenues made up for print revenue falls between October and December.

Digital circulation and advertising revenue growth of 51 percent from the previous year came thanks to Future having pushed 65 of its titles to iTunes Store upon Newsstand’s launch early in October.

The result is finally an encouraging sign of light at the end of the tunnel for legacy media businesses which have spent years attempting to transition their efforts from analogue to digital.

Future CEO Mark Wood: “We are starting to see a significant change in the shape of the business as our digital innovation enables us to reach entirely new consumers in global digital markets.”

Future’s UK revenue for the quarter still fell by two percent, but that was mostly from the loss of a separate customer publishing contract, Future reported in Wednesday’s interim earnings disclosure.

Now, for some, the reality may be dawning that, despite many digital products reaping owners dimes rather than dollars when compared with print equivalents, publishing them at scale can nevertheless return a company to pre-digital revenue growth rates.

As paidContent reported in January, Future’s free container apps for its tablet editions have been downloaded nearly 10 million times since Newsstand’s October launch, generating individual sales of over 430,000 magazines during the period.

Forty percent of tablet edition sales are subscriptions, but some of them may be short-term renewals.

“Print sales will be challenging, but we expect digital revenue to maintain a vigorous growth rate,” the company added in its market disclosure on Wednesday.

In the U.S., Future has been more challenged by the more rapid evaporation of print magazine circulations. But, after the board jettisoned CEO Stevie Spring and its finance director in October, replacement Wood has tackled the problem by selling Future’s U.S.-facing music magazines for up to $3 million and by committing to launch U.S. versions of its Radar web portals, starting with TechRadar. Cost cuts have now offset U.S. revenue falls, Wood reports.

The company did not specify print circulation trends.

As it lays off another 75 staff and faces questions over CEO Sly Bailey’s salary, Trinity Mirror’s Mirror Group Newspapers is relaunching its Mirror.co.uk website on Wednesday with a stripped-back new look that accentuates the newspaper’s brand and core content.

In this video for paidContent, digital publisher Matt Kelly, digital MD Chris Ellis and digital product director Malcolm Coles discuss the impetus behind the relaunch…

The new site will employ content recommendations from Rummble Labs, automatic content tagging from OpenText, Facebook accounts for reader login, and was redesigned by &&&.

The Mirror’s separate celebrity gossip site 3am.co.uk - previously so distinct from the rest of Mirror.co.uk - is gaining the Mirror masthead for the first time and, Kelly tells paidContent, last week hired new staff despite layoffs elsewhere in the company. The separate MirrorFootball site is not yet getting the refresh.

In December 2011, Mirror.co.uk’s daily average user count rose 44 percent from the previous year to 726,653, but fell 4.2 percent from November. All national news sites pulled fewer December readers than in November except Independent.co.uk, which surpassed Mirror Group thanks to growth following its own redesign.

The Mirror’s red-top rival The Sun has not had a web refresh in some years, with publisher News International seemingly stopping to take a breath amid its ongoing crisis and reports it will launch a Sunday edition.

Here is a round-up of some of the latest executive-level hirings and exits in the world of digital media business…

—Telegraph Media Group: Amid up to 30 job losses geared at digital re-investment, digital editor Ed Roussel becomes digital executive editor; Sky News’ James Weeks becomes head of video and Conrad Quilty-Harper becomes interactive news editor.

—We R Interactive: The social games producer is adding former C4 business development head Paul Whitehead as global commercial director.

—Briefing Media: Now that it has taken on private equity to buy out two UBM divisions, the B2B upstart is hiring PoliticsHome publisher Dods’ CFO Rupert Levy as its own finance controller. Release.

—Turner Broadcasting System: The CNN International and Cartoon Network operator is adding RTL CEO Gerhard Zeiler as its international president, with 3,800 staff across Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

It took one allegation of download bots on a message board, very little in the way of actual confessions, and a whole lot of murmurs, but Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is showing that it will respond swiftly if anyone starts messing with its App Store. But further investigation into the practices reveals that it may be hard to pin down who, exactly, is to blame for the practice when it does take place.

It all started with a report from last weekend, penned by a developer on the Touch Arcade forums, alleged that that some app publishers are using download bots to boost their rankings.

The services, it said, are being offered by third parties who will give your app the download bot treatment for as little as $5,000, and that many apps in the top rankings are using them already—pictured here. Some were also offering services to place favorable reviews on apps.

While Apple yesterday at first issued a “no comment” to paidContent when asked about it yesterday, overnight the company changed its tune and posted the following on its developer site, cautioning developers against manipulating rankings on its charts.

Notably, it doesn’t mention download bots specifically, but what it does do is suggest that the practice of using them, and any other services that inflate an app’s standing, will get that app the boot:

Adhering to Guidelines on Third-Party Marketing Services
Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership. Get helpful tips and resources on marketing your apps the right way from the App Store Resource Center.

The question is, however, how hard it will be to substantiate who, exactly, uses these kinds of services, and who is ultimately culpable for how marketing is implemented.

One of the bigger app developers named in the original report, CrowdStar, spoke up in the Touch Arcade forum comments twice. With the name of the company offering the service redacted in the original report, the company never firmly denied (or confirmed) whether they used that marketing company’s services, but it did deny creating or using “farms or bots for downloads or reviews.”

Later, co-founder and CEO Peter Relan later told paidContent in an email that his company allocates “significant six- and seven-figure budgets on advertising through channels such as iAds, Flurry, Chartboost and many others, and also do direct developer cross-promotion partnerships.”

But he also admitted that some of this is slightly out of its control (the italics are mine): “Ad networks keep their ad partner information confidential, but we hope that none of the partners ever use farms or bots. If there are policy issues identified by the mobile platform, ad networks should adapt… We ask all our ad partners to uphold platform policies and stay abreast of changes.”

He also said that CrowdStar has had to resort to terminating relationships with marketers who cross the line only once before. “We found that an ad partner could not satisfy our queries about bots and we stopped using the partner,” he wrote.

It remains to be seen whether Apple will actually start to take down apps that it deems to have used these tools—and how, exactly, it will be able to track that the practice.

It’s also worth wondering how and if Apple will go after the numerous companies offering these services.

One that I contacted (as a would-be potential customer), says that his services to add reviews and ratings to apps range in price from $99 to $499; he also offers 100 iTunes accounts for $499 to be used for “data entry” and potentially other services, like downloads. He’s just one of many, a developer told me.

The discovery issue is a thorny one for the world of apps, and with the total number of apps now standing at over 1 million, that problem’s only growing. App stores like Apple’s are becoming increasingly harder to navigate and for users to discover apps, and some developers will be looking for any opportunity they can to game that situation.

There have been some examples of other practices that result in boosting downloads—namely Tapjoy offering users free credits in a game in exchange for downloading another, which Apple also forbade—although this was a much more open system, never hiding what it was doing, and was arguably was also good for app discovery and advertising revenues.

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Research In Motion is undeniably on the ropes at the moment, with the mobile handset maker weathering a decline in global market share, delays on new products, and the departure of its co-CEOs/founders in the last month after several bad quarters. But at a developers’ conference that kicked off today in Amsterdam, the company’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins plus several others put on a brave face and laid out some milestones marking out where RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) is growing—a foundation, of sorts, for how the company hopes to build itself back up in the months ahead.

On a wider-market level, there is good reason for RIM to be hosting a developer conference in Europe: it’s a market where it has had some mixed success of late, but that includes some key wins: data from GfK last week indicated that, in fact, BlackBerry is the most-purchased device brand at the moment in the UK. (Others say Android was the most popular, and still others claim the iPhone ran away with the market.) Thorsten Heins, in his keynote today, noted that 65 percent of the population of Europe, Middle East and Africa are still using feature phones. And that, despite everything, still spells opportunity for RIM.

RIM today said that it now has 60,000 apps in its App World applications storefront—still miniscule compared to the millions that live collectively on the Android Market and Apple’s App Store—but a significant improvement on the 17,000 that were in App World last January. Collectively, the store has seen 2 billion downloads as of last month, with 6 million downloads per day.

The company’s VP of developer relations, Alec Saunders, also repeated a claim we’ve heard before from the company: after Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), AppWorld is the “most profitable” of mobile platforms. This is based on the company claiming to have more paid downloads than Android’s Market, where the vast majority of popular apps are free to download. Part of RIM’s approach has been to enable carrier billing to pay for app downloads—meaning that the apps get charged directly to a users’ bill. That is something that is still nascent on the Market. (Apple handles billing itself via iTunes.) RIM says that it has now enabled carrier billing in 34 different countries

What’s interesting is that Saunders also spelled out a bit of detail on how much money developers are making on the platform: apparently, 13 percent of all app publishers have made $100,000 or more through AppWorld. That detail sparked off some responses:

“On the other platforms, virtually no one covers their investment as anything more than a hobby,” one developer, Matt Baxter-Reynolds, tweeted to me earlier. “That metric is just not believable.” That kind of thinking underscores the idea that apps and app stores are really just there to drive more stickiness to a platform and encourage more hardware sales.

But another raised the point that in fact RIM most likely attracts a different kind of app maker than those who have swarmed to iOS and Android. “I’d say [that is] reasonable,” noted another developer, Shaun Austin. “BB doesn’t seem a platform as likely to attract hobbyists in the way Android/iOS does.”

Of the apps that are selling best, four out of the top 10 on App World are games for the PlayBook tablet, RIM said. You can read that as a vote for engagement for a tablet that has been less than successful against the iPad and Android-based tablet makers.

Last week, RIM released an updated SDK for the BBM Social Platform, a newish area the company has been exploring, leveraging the wide usage it already has for its BlackBerry Messenger service. Today it noted that it now has 50 million people engaging on that platform through various apps, with the most-used of them being the BlackBerry version of Wikitude, an augmented-reality search app.

Looking ahead, it’s products like the BBM Social Platform that are perhaps where RIM should be putting more of its focus: it is, after all, an experience that is unique to RIM and helps set it apart from other handset makers. The company is gearing up for two significant platform updates in the months ahead, with BlackBerry 10 for handsets and PlayBook 2.0 for the tablet, and all eyes will be on how dynamic and easy these will be to use in creating services. RIM has already said that it will be looking for close integration of the BBM Social Platform with BlackBerry 10, which will the see the company doing more in social gaming on the OS.

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Global holiday-quarter books revenue dipped by 3.8 percent at Hachette operator Lagardere Publishing despite booming western e-book sales, the Lagardere group reported, as it warned it would write off almost €1 ($1.3/£0.83) billion against other group activities.

For Lagardere, which operates several imprints including the flagship Hachette, e-books grew to make up six percent of total 2011 publishing sales. In the October-to-December Q4, that was 20 percent in the U.S., 10 percent in UK.

Hachette’s total U.S. book sales revenue grew 12.8 percent thanks to strong bestsellers withstanding Borders’ bankruptcy. But even Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, for which Hachette has some territorial rights, did not stop UK sales slipping 4.5 percent - something Lagardere blamed on the collapse of Australia’s Borders operator, REDgroup.

Lagardere said the U.S. sales growth was “despite the impact of e-books, which generate lower net sales per unit but higher margin”. It did not specify sales numbers by volume.

In contrast, the publisher reported: “In France, new e-readers were launched in the autumn but have not triggered a breakthrough in the market yet.”

Lagardere group revenue fell 0.2 percent (like-for-like), with stable performances from its magazine and TV businesses and from its print news distribution business, plus 10 percent growth from its talent management division thanks to the upcoming Euro 2012 and Olympic Games events.

But Lagardere forecasts a profit fall of up to 12 percent for the full year. And it said the worsening economy plus an expected poor autumn performance from its talent management division and a dip in shares of its Canal+ TV company will force it to record full-year impairment losses of around €900 ($1173.78/£745.29) million.

Release