Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) still sees value in local newspapers, even if Guardian Media Group doesn’t. It’s buying GMG Regional Media - with its 32 newspapers and websites - for £44.8 million ($70 million), in a deal that had been expected and shows the very different strategies of the two companies...

The cash price is actually just £7.4 million, but Trinity is paying £37.4 million to get out of GMG Regional Media’s existing long-term print contract (after all, it already has its own presses). The announcement says the group made a zero operating profit for the 2009 full year and has gross assets of £8.7 million.

The sale includes GMG Regional Media’s MEN Media (including the Manchester Evening News, 22 weeklies, a metropolitan magazine and a web network claiming 1.55 million monthly uniques) and S&B Media in Surrey and Berkshire (publishing titles including the Surrey Advertiser and Reading Post). But Manchester TV channel Channel M and two local papers in Woking are not part of the deal, prompting likely speculation they may be shut or a buyer sought.

Trinity CEO Sly Bailey, in the release, says it’s a “perfect strategic fit” and “a further step towards our strategic goal of creating a multi-media business of real scale”. But I think this is a better deal for Guardian Media Group, which has needed to do something to safeguard its core Guardian business. Guardian News & Media losses grew 40 percent to £36.8 million (now $57.5 million) in 2008/09.

GMG CEO Carolyn McCall, in the announcement: “We believe Trinity Mirror, as the UK’s biggest regional publisher, is best placed to develop this business.” But exactly how Trinity can make the operation successful where GMG could not is not clear - Trinity’s websites delight few visitors, and Bailey - who speaks of restoring the importance of direct traffic to news brands, rather than finding a place in the search ecosystem -  seems of the belief that newspapers’ current malaise is cyclical.

The irony: whilst running away from the local newspaper business by off-loading GMG Regional Media, GMG’s core Guardian business is embracing local by setting up three experimental metropolitan blogs - in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leeds - with more possibly to follow. That may stick in the craw of GMG Regional Media’s staff in Manchester, the city that was once the heartland for a paper that now has ambitions of spreading liberal journalism globally.

GMG Regional Media has been suffering the same perfect storm as Trinity Mirror’s own titles - migration of advertising revenue and structural media change, compounded by the downturn….

—Annual profit crashed from £14.3 million in 2007/08 to £500,000 in 2008/09, on 21.5 percent worse revenue of £94.5 million.
—Property classifieds ad sales fell by 46 percent and job ads by 34 percent.

The unit cut about 300 jobs early in 2009 at iMEN Media division and S&B Media.

Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

It’s not exactly a great leap from publishing an iPhone app to offering one on the soon-to-be-released iPad - not only will the former will run on the latter; the skillset for developing the latter won’t be significantly different.

So publishers who have already found a degree of incremental revenue from iPhone are now looking for another increment from its bigger brother…

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, whose newspaper shifted 70,000 downloads of its £2.39 iPhone app in its first month despite the company opposing web paywalls in principle, tells Reuters...

“That’s not a transformative thing, but it is a signal that people are prepared to pay on mobile. It’s perfectly possible that the iPad, if we get the right functionality and design, could produce interesting, significant revenue streams.”

“If we can make people pay on mobile, then we should - what I’m against is a universal paywall that puts all your content behind.”

Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

In what could become a significant case in content companies’ battle against piracy in Europe, Italy’s supreme court has ruled that ISPs in the country must block access to Pirate Bay.

Italy had tried to block the Bit Torrent tracker in 2008 by issuing a decree from the deputy public prosecutor. But that failed miserably: the site changed its IP address and the ISPs redirected users to the IFPI’s site. Meanwhile, the Court of Bergamo, on an appeal from Pirate Bay itself, ruled that foreign websites could not be censored for alleged copyright infringement. That meant the block was temporarily lifted. This most recent ruling from the supreme court overturns that decision.

But now lawyers for Pirate Bay are deciding whether or not to appeal the case again, writes TorrentFreak. This would mean the case would go before the European Court of Justice and potentially apply in other countries as well.

No surprise here, but TorrentFreak notes that even with the ban secured, this is not likely to have much of an effect on the millions of downloaders in Italy. Not only can DNS-filtering -  which is the method used to ban traffic by ISPs - be “easily bypassed” but there are also hundreds of other torrent sites that could be used instead of Pirate Bay.

Italy is taking a harder line than some other countries when it comes to trying to secure the rights of content companies. It is proposing a law that would require online video sites to be treated like broadcasters, picking up licenses for their service and becoming liable for any illegal content hosted on their sites. This law is supposed to come into effect later this month.

In 2009, Italy fined 54 people behind illegal music downloading sites to pay €2.4 million (£2 million) in damages for copyright infringement after a six-year investigation.

Related

• YouTube Could Get Hit With Italian Broadcaster Rules
• Broadband Content Bits: Italy Blocks Pirate Bay, Plurality Trumps Interactivity
• Italian Court Orders MP3 Pirates To Pay €2.4 Million

The UK government politely refused some of the boldest proposed late changes to the Digital Economy Bill, as the House Of Lords finally finished debating the bill on Tuesday night.

Conservative Lord Ralph Lucas had proposed guaranteeing rights to format-shift, link to websites, fair-use protection for search engines and a fairer deal for artists whose material is used by rightsholders that take equity in online services like Spotify (see our full story detail yesterday).

But the government’s Lord Bryan Davies, who is steering the bill through Lords committee stage, briefly rejected the whole shebang in a late-night debate, forcing Lucas to withdraw his amendments.

—On format shifting: “We have concluded that a UK-only solution will not be able to deliver the kind of access and use which private individuals would like while, at the same time, respecting the needs for rightsholders for appropriate remuneration,” Davies said. “A solution for the digital age can only be delivered in an EU-wide context; we’ve got more work to do in this area.” Enshrining a right to copy legally owned content from one format to another was a recommendation of the Gowers IP review but the government already said in October it would seek Europe-wide implementation of such a right.

—On linking: Lucas said “assertions by some major groups that to link to their material on the internet is to breach their copyright” are “an extremely undesirable development and one which we should state we will take action against”. “It merely starts to balkanaise and destabilise the web,” Lucas said.

—On search engine immunity: “What a search engine does by taking a small extract of material should be regarded as fair usage and a proper part of the way in which the system and the copyright holder interact,” Lucas argued in the house. His amendment would have given Google (NSDQ: GOOG) unlimited protection to excerpt news websites.

But the government’s Davies countered on both points: “Interfering with the balance of rights and exceptions currently in place would have far-reaching consequences for those running web services, rightsholders and consumers. There’s a danger of unintended consequences when legislating for technology-specific issues. The amendments may legislate some aspects of unlawful filesharing, so would conflict with some of the aims of this bill. We don’t think it would be right to legislate further in this area without exmainiang fully whether an exception is necessary.”

The debate happened so late in the House Of Lords that nobody was much interested in arguing the points in detail, so Davies said he would write privately to Lucas with fuller explanations, but all the ideas are off the agenda for now. The Lords have now finished debating the bill at committee stage - it will go to report stage within 14 days, before third reading and passage to the Commons for another series of perusals.

Hark, the herald angels sing! Total UK ad spend will rise this autumn, after nine consecutive quarters of annual decline, according to an Advertising Association and WARC forecast.

The rise is modest - Q3 2010 is predicted to be 2.8 percent up from the year before. But it’s heartening after last year, when total ad spend fell 12.7 percent from 2008 in the worst ad recession since 1982, according to the AA and WARC.

Internet ad spend finished the year to September up (4.2 percent) - but far less than in previous years, and by less than cinema (10.2 percent). They were the only two media to attract more ad money in 2009…

In fact, the internet’s share of total UK ad spend rose by exactly the same amount as newspapers lost (4.2 percent). Coincidence? Probably not -especially in time of recession, brands that wanted to keep on advertising flocked to a medium with greater guarantees and more metrics…

—Sky ITV (LSE: ITV) stake: BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) has sold a 10.4 percent share in broadcaster ITV for £196 million ($307 million), following a two-year battle with the UK regulator over its stake in the company. The figure represents a loss of about £348 million ($544 million) compared to the price Sky paid originally for that share. Sky said in a release it that intends to keep a remaining 7.5 percent stake “and to remain a committed shareholder of ITV,” which recently appointed a new chief executive.

—VOD in Sweden: The Modern Times Group has launched a subscription-based video-on-demand service in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Viasat OnDemand has live sports, TV and films over the Internet with content from CBS (NYSE: CBS) and Warner Bros.; (NYSE: TWX) as well as catch-up TV for free channels on the Viasat satellite service. Packages range from $6.60 to $27 per month. MTG launched the service on the same day it acquired a 50 percent stake in a Russian satellite pay-TV operator, Raduga TV, from owners Continental Media, for an undisclosed sum. (Via C21.net.)

—AOL (NYSE: AOL) UK sales: Three new roles have been added to the UK sales team. Toby Morris is the new head of premium sales; Robert Blake is now head of performance sales; and Andrew Moore is head of agency sales. These are all internal appointments; the three will report to Kate Burns, head of AOL in Europe. AOL says the moves were made to improve links with agencies and clients across its network of sites. (Via emailed release.)

—ITV: The broadcaster is looking to hire 30 new tech staff as it develops new applications and partnerships. It is recruiting in business technology consulting, marketing, online sales, TV production and post-production, and solution delivery. (Via Guardian.)

—Scottish News Consortium: Mark Wood is the new chairman of a consortium bidding for the government’s regional news pilot in Scotland. The Scottish News Consortium includes DC Thomson, Herald & Times Group, Johnston Press, and Tinopolis. Wood is a non-executive director at Future Publishing (LSE: FUTR) and had been the chief executive of ITN until March 2009. (Release)

Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis opened Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference with an extensive report about the revenue possibilities presented to hyperlocal sites. Amid an flurry of stats that aimed to show that hyperlocal sites can attract thousands of dollars in revenue with just a s small support staff, his primary point was that sites in general need to do more than just sell ads and post news items. The need to sell services, including optimizing advertisers’ web presence across search and directories sites, as well as on social media and the mobile web. In terms of content, Jarvis rejects the notion that there’s too much content on the web, which many observers has said dilutes the value of major publishers’ ad sales. He pointed the value of establishing networks that filter the huge waves of content as the best way for media companies to recapture revenue. (Jarvis has posted an outline of his presentation, here.)

Jarvis also wanted to clear one other point up, before handing the things over to a panel presentation on hyperlocal. “I’m often misquoted as saying that I’m against the concept of paid content,” he said. “I’m not against it. I’ve got a book to sell right there”—he points to his What Would Google Do?—“I just don’t think it will work.” Speaking of Google, Jarvis offered current AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong’s focus on hyperlocal blog network, Patch. Armstrong invested in Patch when he was still at Google (NSDQ: GOOG). After he became CEO of AOL, Armstrong decided to buy Patch and has said that he considers the site central to its local content strategy.

The first presented was Chris Hendricks, McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) Company’s VP of Interactive Media, who said that the newspaper publisher has been pursuing a hybrid hyperlocal content model of professional and amateur reporters. So far, the hyperlocal sites have contributed $2.5 million in revenue. The biggest site so far is the Raleigh News & Observer’s work with Triangle’s. That site did $500,000 in revenue last year. At that point, Jarvis praised him for doing God’s work. But when an audience member asked Hendricks if any of those revenues are being shared with the amateur contributors, he admitted that McClatchy wasn’t doing that yet, though they’re working on it. At that point, Jarvis said half-jokingly, “I take back what I said about God’s work.”

While McClatchy’s existing resources gives it an easy head-start when it comes to attracting users and advertisers. For others, it takes a mix of new and old media to gain any traction. Inn addition to becoming adept at SEO strategies, Mark Potts, CEO and co-founder of GrowthSpur.com advocated handing out leaflets outside the local supermarket to hosting gatherings at coffeehouses.“Marketing is the hardest part of this,” he said. “It takes a year or two to get critical mass on a local site.”

Chris Jennewein, president of U.S. Local News Network, also said that turning to the oldest media can help build a hyperlocal community. “We’ve put ads on billboards and on radio and those mediums still work pretty well.”

South Africa’s Naspers and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies (DST) are in talks to pool their Polish social networks Gadu-Gadu and Nasza-klasa.pl, according to Russian business daily Kommersant, citing “a source close to the deal”.

Naspers, which owns Gadu-Gadu outright, is reportedly doing due diligence on Forticom, the DST-owned social network operator that bought its 75 percent stake in Nasza-Klasa.pl for $92 million in 2008. We’ve got queries in with both sides - DST tells us: “We do not comment on any market speculation”

Shareholdings in Russia and eastern Europe are a piecemeal patchwork - partial stakes change hands with ease…

Naspers and DST already co-own Russia’s top portal Mail.ru, together with Tiger Global. And DST’s Forticom holds 25 percent in Russia’s top social network Odnoklassniki.ru, as well as its own social net One in its native Lithuania and Latvia. But Kommersant says this deal would include only both companies’ Polish assets.

Like Odnoklassniki.ru and Facebook, Nasza-Klasa.pl (Poland’s leading social net, with 27 million registered users) started as a classmates’ network, but Gadu-Gadu is an ICQ-like chat service, claiming seven million users. Combined, they would command a third of Polish daily interview views, according to an analyst quoted by Kommersant. The deal will mean both companies can better control advertising on the Polish sites, which command important expatriate audiences in Russia and the UK, as well as at home.

Naspers’ internet arm MIH has transformed the company from merely a South African broadcaster in to a global internet player through acquisitions in developing markets. As well as the important Mail.ru stake, it now owns a string of properties including China’s QQ instant messager and Holland’s NumBuzz social net gateway.

Digital Sky Technologies is the lynchpin in a Russian digital media investment landscape that’s fast becoming as important overseas as it is at home. It paid $200 million for 1.96 percent of Facebook last year.

Forticom itself is bullish - CEO Yasar Nasin told December’s Noah conference in London it would be “Europe’s biggest internet company” by this year. It currently has revenue in the “triple-digit million dollars” and “middle double digit million” in income, he said.

The legal guys over in Finland must be clocking up a lot of overtime these days: on top of the Apple ITC battle over patent infringements, now Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has another legal wrangle over in the U.S., this time over a class-action lawsuit around delays and discounts in its line of handsets.

The news comes as Nokia says it will be laying off 285 people as it “develops” one of its plants to boost smartphone production.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the City of Roseville Employees’ Retirement System against Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, former CFO Rick Simonson and Nokia’s head of phones Kai Oisamo, alleges that Nokia misled investors between January and September 2008.

It says that, in that period, Nokia gave misleading statements about new product launches and manufacturing problems, about losing market share and about cutting its own prices for products. All of this resulted in the Nokia’s American Depository Shares falling by eight percent, writes BBC News...

Nokia has been quick to put out its own response to the suit, which was filed on February 5: “Nokia has reviewed the allegations contained in the complaint and believes that they are without merit. Nokia intends to defend itself against the complaint vigorously.”

The City of Roseville’s retirement fund is not new to lawsuits against the companies in which it invests. Other suits have included cases against Textron (an aircraft, industrial and services conglomerate) and nuclear energy company EnergySolutions.

Separately, Nokia also announced that it would be laying off 285 employees in Finland as it redevelops one of its smartphone plants, in Salo, to improve production. The plant currently employes 2,200 people.

Related

• Apple Matches Nokia's Latest Attack By Filing A New Patent Complaint Of Its Own

Swedish film streaming site Voddler, still in beta, has picked up a further 26 million Swedish kronor (£2.25 million, $3.5 million) in funding.

This round comes from Eqvitec Partners and brings the total amount that Voddler has received up to SEK150 million (£13 million, $20.2 million), according to a spokesperson for the company.

To coincide with the announcement, Voddler is also extending its beta programme to Norway. Voddler already has 420,000 users in Sweden, and the plan is to extend that to other countries in Europe by the end of this summer.

There are so many streaming video startups in the market today, so what’s Voddler’s USP? Voddler says it has more than 30 patents covering its delivery technology, which is built on a P2P distribution system to speed up delivery. “But it’s very safe for the movie companies,” says the spokesperson. “We can take back the segments of content stored with our users at any time.”

Voddler currently distributes films from 15 studios, including Disney (NYSE: DIS), Paramount, Miramax, Columbia, Dreamworks, Touchstone, MGM and Sony…

Lots of initial interest for the service from both users and the industry, then, but still the main challenge for Voddler will be monetising its content. The company says it is mulling over a subscription model, but is still “uncertain” how that will work, or when it would get put in place.

Currently between 90 and 95 percent of the content is free to view, with those films running with two to four minutes of preroll ads. The other movies are offered on a per-day rental model costing between SEK19 and SEK37 (£1.64-3.20) to rent. Most of the content is in English with a choice of languages for subtitles, and whichever films that “are delivered in HD are sent out by us that way too,” says the spokesperson.

This round of funding follows on from another round last year. In October 2009, Voddler filed SEC documents that stated it had raised $2.2 million (£1.4 million) from backers that included Deseven Capital AB. Then in November 2009, it was reported that it picked up £3 million from unknown, possibly private, backers.

Hadar Cars, a partner at Eqvitec, is joining the board of Voddler.

Related

• Movies On Demand Site Voddler Gets £3 Million Funding, But Who's Paying?
• Swedish VOD Provider Voddler Raises $2.2 Million; Inks Deals With Disney, Paramount

London media investment firm Galleon Holdings is buying a 19 percent stake in its U.S. partner firm, Atlanta-based multimedia entertainment producer Dragonfruit Studios, in a deal worth over $1 million.

The deal sees Galleon pay $500,000 (which Dragonfruit will use as working capital) and give over Galleon shares worth the same amount. But Galleon will also hand back its existing 19 percent stake in a Dragonfruit subsidiary, Dragonfruit Entertainment. That makes this essentially a financing deal for Dragonfruit, it looks like.

Dragonfruit was founded by Michael Koziol and Melissa Honabach in 1999 and sold to Canada’s Nurun five years later. It produces content including teen web travel documentary Wayfinder.tv, reality show Super Fashion Stars and Super Star Soccer, an international reality show aiming to recruit a teenager for Chelsea soccer club. It also already has a license to localise Sokator-442, a Chinese soccer management game, on behalf of Galleon. These last three are all Galleon properties.

Galleon CEO Stephen Green, in the release: “This branded entertainment revenue is critical for launching Galleons multiplatform entertainment properties in the US. We are also seeing benefits in China where the same brands are also interested in investing in some of our entertainment properties.”

Conservative Lord Ralph Lucas is using the Digital Economy Bill to wade in to the debate over whether aggregators can freely link to online newspaper material.

He has tabled an amendment guaranteeting “Protection of the right to link to publicly available information on the internet”, which states: “The creation, aggregation, copying and publication of any link to publicly available information contained on websites on the internet shall not constitute an infringement of copyright.”

It seems designed to get off the hook news monitoring aggregators like Meltwater and NewsNow, who oppose a new license the Newspaper Licensing Agency is requiring from any aggregators which copy online articles in order to provide commercial clients with links to stories.

NewsNow is complying with the license by opting not to include NLA members’ material in its commercial service but has been blocked from crawling whole News International sites and Mirror.co.uk and is publicly campaigning for its Right2Link. But Meltwater is playing hardball and has taken the NLA to the UK Copyright Tribunal for a ruling.

Lord Lucas’ amendment would write in to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 that: “Links incorporating or accompanied by minimal reproduction of contents in the form of insubstantial extracts shall not constitute an infringement of copyright.” Though the likes of NewsNow may choose to use this as a defence, in fact it would justify use of excerpts at the point of publication, and not copying of full text during story processing (NewsNow’s quandary is the latter).

—Legalise format shifting (#285): Separately, Lucas is also proposing to amend the act such that: “Where a person acquires the right to use a copyright work in electronic form for his personal use, he also acquires the right to copy that work into other electronic formats for his personal use.” Intellectual Property Office minister Lord Triesmann recommended legalising format-shifting back in 2008, though many content owners want paying for such copying; for example; through a levy on copying devices that exists in many European states though not the UK.

—Equity-for-rights extension (#290): Another Lucas amendment would seem to give cash from services like Spotify to musicians whose labels have taken equity: “Where a copyright owner of a work in electronic form sells or licenses all or part of that copyright in exchange for equity or any other interest in another company or business, the original artist or any person who would have been entitled to share in the cash proceeds from the sale or licensing of the copyright, shall equally be entitled to share in any security or business for which the copyright interest is exchanged or licensed.”

—Unlimited search exemption (#292): Lucas is trying to reintroduce his earlier proposal that: “Every provider of a publicly accessible website shall be presumed to give a standing and non-exclusive license to providers of search engine services to make a copy of some or all of the content of that website, for the purpose only of providing said search engine services.” That would exempt Google (NSDQ: GOOG) from any publishers’ claims it’s copying their stories without permission.

—More defined game rules (#246): Three lords and a baroness are proposing specific language (the filthiest I’ve ever seen in a government bill) to bring more video games under classification by the Video Recordings Act. This would include games depicting “racist, homophobic or other discriminatory language”, “graphic torture” and “anus, breasts or buttocks”.

—Tighter VOD porn rules (#251b): Baroness Howe proves her acquaintance with online pornography by proposing an amendment that would compel “online on-demand programme services” to introduce age verification for any material “which might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of persons under the age of 18”. She uses a litany of specific acts that would be covered. The regs would apply not just to out-and-out porn sites but to any broadcasters’ sites whose shows include the same acts.

—List for copyrighted material (#284):  Lucas is trying again on his amendment that would mean “Ofcom shall maintain on the web a registry of other websites where copyright material may be located” - a proposal many will consider ridiculously onerous on a regulator that may be downsized in the coming year.

The amendments will be either accepted, rejected or withdrawn in a Lords committee hearing on Tuesday Monday.

An example of how some straight tech investment is making the shift into green technology: AMEE, which has built an engine to calculate greenhouse gas emissions, has raised $5.5 million from investors that include Amadeus Capital Partners and existing investors O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures.

AMEE says in a release that it will use the funds to extend its geographical reach and enrich its platform. AMEE, a UK/US startup, will not comment on how much funding it has had to date…

AMEE’s technology is sold directly to enterprises and other organizations to calculate their emissions, or those companies that create online services for consumers and businesses to calculate their carbon footprints. AMEE’s software claims to be unique in that it integrates the multiple standards and regulations that are on the market today for calculating emissions. It also offers a search engine to be able to read up on the latest research and regulations in different markets.

Interestingly, the management behind AMEE has quite a bit of new-media pedigree. The CEO, Gavin Starks, was “employee number five” at Richard Branson’s Virgin Net, now part of Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED). There he was responsible for designing and building various Virgin web properties, including Virgin Net and Virgin Radio. He was also an early player in streaming media, in 1999 founding Tornado Productions, which was in 2003 sold to Servecast (now part of Level 3). After that he took a role as MD at CI, which was the first company to deliver digital products to iTunes and delivered just under a quarter of digital products to Amazon.com’s download store.

Meanwhile, Salman Malik, VP of product, co-founded Firefly Network, a personalization and recommendation engine eventually sold to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Board members at AMEE include Toby Coppel and Albert Wenger, ex-Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) executives.

With this newest round of funding, Pat Burtis, an investment manager at Amadeus Capital Partners, will join the AMEE board of directors.

Some of his choice lines which I live tweeted from his lunch talk:
—It is so much easier to be a journalist these days; piece of cake
—Disappointed that newspapers are cutting investigative journalism. They don’t do journalism at all these days.
—Quoting someone: news is what someone wants to suppress; rest is all advertising.
—Don’t blame the web for lazy journalism
—The heterogeneity in journalism has disappeared; it us all homogeneous now with journalism schools and other institutions.
—Rupert is doing brilliantly with WSJ. I find it a very stimulating paper. The previous management was inept.
—It is no use printing the truth once. You just have to persist.

P.S.: They gave away signed copies of his new book, My Paper Chase, at the conference. Digging into it now, and digging reading it…

Fair play to Haymarket - it’s set us a great example of the adage that readers will pay for quality specialist content...

The publisher’s Autosport.com says Monday-to-Wednesday buys this week for its £32.50-a-year premium subscription quadrupled from the same time last year - because it was reporting from Formula One testing sessions in Valencia.

Live commentary and high-res photos of Michael Schumacher’s return to the sport proved big drivers, says the site, which pulled 482,320 uniques over the three days - 40,000 more than Autosport.com clocked in a month the last time it filed an ABCe return in 2000. But it wasn’t just editorial - subscribers also get the laptimes and other stats they love in a premium-only database.

Autosport.com’s premium play, Autosport Plus, is simple and distinct - as well as premium indicators throughout the site, a red “Autosport Plus” box on the homepage clearly signifies which content is behind the wall; and, frankly, to motorsport fans (who can be as geeky as they can well-off), it seems well worth paying the mere £3.75 a month or £32.50 a year.

And Autosport needs this new stream - monthly print sales fell from 61,025 to 34,442 between 2000 and 2008, losing about 4,000 readers each year (ABC (NYSE: DIS) figs).

The upcoming F1 season is being eagerly anticipated, with a range of new drivers and teams, including YouTube-backed US F1. Publisher Haymarket recently retired Media Week and Revolution in print, and has since been playing musical chairs at exec level.

Forecast: you’re going to see a lot more of this in the next few weeks - publishers announcing iPad apps, before the they’ve even had a chance to touch the sacred tablet.

Bournemouth tech and entertainment magazine publisher Imagine Publishing says it’s released “iPhone and iPad editions” for all 20 of its titles.

Technically, that’s true - though iPad won’t be on shelves until March, iPhone apps will run on the tablet, albeit at their original resolution, which won’t take advantage of iPad’s larger screen.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has only just released its latest software developers’ kit, which will let publishers write apps with list and content views on iPad’s single, bigger display, rather than across multiple iPhone page flicks. But, so hard is it becoming for some content owners to get discovered amongst the 140,000 existing iPhone apps, there may be a brief window of high visibility in being one of the first native iPad app publishers.

Imagine’s model - charging for the magazine app, which includes the current issue at no further cost, but charging extra within the app for back-issues or a subscription. The apps are built by PixelMags, which actually lets users flick a finger to turn a real-looking page…

If the larger iPad, as well as existing iPhone, supports this feature (and not just iPad’s split-screen list integration) the gadget could soon deliver us those e-magazine wet dreams the concept videos promise.

“

Hat tip: Journalism.co.uk.

Related

• That Was Quick: Already, A Fund For iPad App Developers | paidContent:UK
• Bonnier Takes A Stab At Re-Inventing The Mag | paidContent:UK
• Time Inc. Tries To Get Ahead Of The Color E-Reader Curve; Looking At Interim Options; Video Demo | paidContent:UK

—Dailymotion: David Ripert has been promoted to the role of director, global content partnerships for Dailymotion, to be based in New York. He had been the online video site’s senior manager for content and partnerships in Paris. (Via Cynopsis)

—Samsung: Will Lever is the new European brand director for Samsung Electronics Europe. He comes from a marketing role at Best Buy, and has also held senior marketing roles at Carphone Warehouse, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) UK and O2. (Via mad.co.uk.)

—Unanimis: The Orange-owned ad agency is expanding its mobile sales team. It has appointed Alex Rahaman as director of mobile and added four more executives to the group. Rahaman was previously the company’s operations and finance director. (via NMA.)

A company that has built—and is already publicizing—a BBC iPlayer app for the iPhone may get stalled at the gates by the BBC, we have learned.

If it goes live, the Rewat.ch app, from Manchester-based developers Camiloo, would be the first iPlayer app for iPhones on the market, according to the BBC. But the BBC may have none of it: “Camiloo is not a licensed distributor of BBC content online or on mobile. The BBC routinely looks for unauthorised usage of our brand across all platforms and when we encounter it we work to resolve the issue,” a spokesperson told paidContent:UK. She would not comment further on whether this means it would bar the app. Rewat.ch would sell for £1.19 but would otherwise be free to use.

Rewat.ch, which is in Apple’s approval stage as Camiloo waits for the BBC to give the go-ahead, points to wider questions on BBC content syndication. Mark Newby, Camiloo’s MD, tells us that it is using publicly accessed RSS feeds of iPlayer content, taken from the BBC’s mobile site, and therefore is not doing anything illicit in its app. But last year, IP Vision got banned from putting its own implementation of the iPlayer into its set-top boxes for its Fetch TV IPTV service.The BBC “provided reasonable arguments as to why implementing a self-build iPlayer for IP Vision could have jeopardised both value for money and the BBC’s brand,” the BBC Trust concluded at the time.

Yet there are already apps in the iTunes store that are sourcing BBC content, but are not official BBC apps. This would argue for Re.wind making its way to the store, too.

The BBC has developed a number of mobile-friendly websites for its services, and it provides an iPlayer widget for selected Nokia devices. And there are niche sites on the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) store for certain products such as its Good Food magazine and site, and Lonely Planet travel guides. These are produced by the BBC’s commercial division, BBC Worldwide. But it has not launched any Apple apps for the bulk of its content.

It’s not quite clear why BBC hasn’t done more on iPhones: some believe that the BBC’s delay on apps is down to Apple’s own T&C’s; others believe it is because of the BBC’s own license terms. The BBC will not comment on the speculation but tells us this: “We are always keen to make our content available to as many people on as many platforms as possible. We are in continuous discussions with a number of manufacturers with the hope of making our services available via their platforms in the future.”

Newby says that Rewat.ch offers a better experience over the iPlayer site that users can access via iPhones. The app works on a combination of 3G and WiFi, and caches content on the phone for when a person is offline. The BBC’s web version of the iPlayer requires 3G bandwidth to run its service, but this can prove to be a bandwidth hog—3UK says iPlayer can use up to 1600kbps (compared to YouTube at 300kbps) on the network. Newby says that, in fact, some mobile operators restrict usage of iPlayer as a result.

The plan would be to enhance Rewat.ch with content from the online edition of iPlayer eventually. The PC site contains more video and audio than the mobile edition, including more local affiliate coverage as well as subtitles for the hearing impaired. Newby says that this would allow Re.wind to be used on the larger iPad format as well.

Related

• IP Vision Won't Get To Build Its Own iPlayer
• BBC Hovers On iPhone Apps Due To Apple Terms

The new London freesheet The London Weekly distributed its first copy today - in the wake of much skepticism over whether it really existed at all.

The new weekly is swimming against a pretty strong tide in the freesheet market. The Evening Standard may be read by 1.37 million readers on a circulation of 600,000, but 2009 otherwise saw 35 free dailies close down on the back of reduced ad spend.

Looks like The London Weekly print launch is not tied in with a refresh of content online. The most recent news in the online edition currently dates from February 3.

A London journalist, Jennifer Whitehead, was first to the post on Twitter with her picture of the masthead. The newspaper is getting distributed in central London locations alongside other freesheets.

Related

• Free Newspapers Crumple And Fold As Ads Go Cold
• London Weekly Launch: A Mystery Wrapped In An Enigma