Finally, a Bain Capital story that doesn't involve the term "vulture capital." This morning, Blip, a video network highlighting original web series, announced a financing round of more than $12 million. Bain Capital Ventures, Canaan Partners, and other previous investors contributed $6.5 million as well as debt from Silicon Valley Bank totaling about $6 million.

The company, formerly known as Blip.tv, filed a Form D in December of last year, signifying that they had already raised $6 million from Bain and Canaan Partners.

In the press release, Blip claimed revenue had grown 100 percent year-over-year thanks to 13 million monthly uniques in the U.S. and 30 million monthly viewers globally. The new funding, said Blip, will be used to develop tools and services for web series producers, invest in its advertising and distribution platforms, and "significantly expand" syndication relationships.

Betabeat spoke with Blip COO Steve Brookstein to talk about the competition for eyeballs, whether YouTube is a friend or foe, and if he's voting for Bain founder Mitt Romney.

According to Mr. Brookstein, the search for a new Blip CEO is progressing along. "We've seen a number of very strong candidates and hope to have a selection soon," he said. (Blip CEO and co-founder Mike Hudack took a medical leave from the company last fall. Around the same time, Blip announced the depature of co-founder Dina Kaplan, who had been handling the company's PR and marketing.)

Although Bain Capital may be making headlines of late, Mr. Brookstein said he doesn't foresee "any particular rub-off effect" on the company. He pointed out that it was Bain Capital Ventures, a division of the firm that Mitt built, that backed the company. "We think the world of Bain," said Mr. Brookstein, adding, "I think [Bain's investment] has zero impact on the sideshow going on with Gov. Romney." Mr. Brookstein declined to specify whether he would consider voting for the presidential hopeful, noting, "I don’t even discuss my voting practices with my wife."

As for Blip's destination site, which the company launched in May of last year, Mr. Brookstein said it already represents 12 percent of the company's "overall monetizable views," or videos they can run ads on. The destination site features a curated collection of 2,200 of Blip's 55,000 videos. "But we also have our player distributed on many other platforms." The site is merely one way, "we can monetize throughout our entire distribution platform," he said.

The most popular series right now are Day[9], Smosh, Red vs. Blue, and Nostaliga Critic. Blip doesn't necessarily have exclusive deals with the web series it showcases, which is why Mr. Brookstein tried to position YouTube rolling out its channel initiative and original content as a good thing.  "We work closely with YouTube, in some respects a partner, it's not really we versus they," he said. Rather, he reasoned, YouTube is shinning a spotlight on a huge market with room for them both.

So Blip has no competitors, we asked? "To some degree Hulu," he admitted, or "anyone who is looking for eyeballs."

In that arena, Blip may have an unexpected leg up, at the annual 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, Blip beat out Hulu, Dailymotion, Crackle, and Joost to win "Best Distribution Platform" from the International Academy of Web Television. In other news: web TV has its own international academy! Who knew?

All your young adults are belong to us.

With 3 percent of Twitter's servers devoted to Justin Bieber, there is no denying millenials are a power force on the internet. Alloy, the creator of books like Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, among others, has honed its formula for churning out youth bestsellers and accompanying spin-offs to perfection.

Tween and teen-oriented page turners were Alloy's bread and butter, but the company has lost its faith in books; instead turning to the web and television for eyeballs and mindshare. Alloy Digital, a division of Alloy Media + Marketing, says it reaches more than 60 70 million youngsters a month through its network of websites including the websites for the aforementioned series, new-fangled products like this confusing Facebook app, and Teen.com.

Now the company has announced the acquisition of Santa Monica-based Generate, a "full-service studio and talent management company," a pioneering web TV studio that secured its $8 million series A in 2008, according to Crunchbase. Terms of the buy were not disclosed, but the two companies say they're forming "the first of its kind, multi-platform, next generation media company."

Alloy Digital says it reaches more than 43 percent of internet users aged 12 to 34 and is a top 10 video network.

"We are now the leading next generation media company mirroring the best of both old Hollywood and the new digital era: cost-effective development and production, talent management, distribution, ad sales, social media and promotion all under one roof," Alloy, Inc. CEO Matt Diamond said in a press release.

CLARIFICATION: An Alloy rep writes in to clarify that Alloy Entertainment, the book and TV division, is not behind the deal: "This deal is Alloy Digital, not Alloy Entertainment—AE  will continue to operate independently under Alloy, Inc."

Oatmeal really nailed this one

Netflix sent the blogosphere into a tizzy earlier this week when it announced it was dividing itself in two: Netflix the streaming video business, and Qwikster, the disastrously named DVD by mail step child. A lot of articles were written trying to parse the news, but the general sentiment was confusion.

The truth is that the TV business is on the brink of a seismic shift, akin to what has already happened in music with the iTunes store and Spotify. But the entrenched interests, both the networks and the cable companies, are doing everything they can to make sure they keep control during this change.

So you get a situation like Netflix and Qwickster, which as Evolver.fm Elliot Van Buskirk explains, is all about the licensing silly:

Anyone who uses Netflix should understand the fundamental difference between Netflix the DVD service and Netflix the streaming service: The DVD section has a better selection, with newer releases. The reason for this: Movie studios have a striated approach to licensing. They sell the same movies over and over in different ways, at different prices, to theaters, DVD rental companies, on-demand cable, pay TV, basic cable, online streaming services, airlines, basic cable, and free TV.

The people who own movie copyrights already treat Netflix’s DVD and streaming businesses separately, and have done so for years. We weren’t in the room when these deals were struck, but given Netflix’s surprising decision, it seems clear that the movie studios were using one as a bargaining chip against the other. Basically: “We’ll give you X on DVD if you accept not having Y on a stream until Z date.”

From Netflix’s point of view, the decision to split its streaming and DVD-shipping businesses into separate companies, with no ties to each other appears to be about allowing them to negotiate rights and release windows independently. No longer will the movie studios be able to use leverage in one area against the other, and this is especially important in light of current and future competition against Netflix’s streaming business from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others.

Betabeat has reported on a similar internal conflict between Hulu and its parent companies, who seemed intent on kneecapping Hulu just as it was in the midst of acquisition talks. Again the issue was that the company was in effect competing against itself. The parent companies want Hulu to succeed, but not so badly that they are willing to sacrifice the juicy revenue that comes from re-trans rights paid by the cable companies.

Things are poised to become even more complex as TV Anywhere, the alternative to Hulu, has announced plans to join forces with Google TV, which up till now had trouble securing partnerships with traditional television companies. Expect things to get worse before they get better, with a lot of fragmentation and ridiculous authentication needed in order to watch TV over the web. A world in which a single, Spotify like platform allows for one payment to access almost all mainstream content, seems increasingly far away.

Image via We Are NY Tech

Techstars NY graduate Shelby.tv has been pretty quiet since raising $1.5 million in July. But today the young start-up, which aims to provide an immersive experience for watching, sharing and discovering web video, announced that content from the typically isolated Hulu will be available on Shelby.tv. Videos from IAC's College Humor also came online today, along with Tumblr integration.

Shelby is working in a crowded space. It has direct competitors like VHX, which is building essentially the same experience. Functionality for social video sharing is also built into Boxee, which has the advantage of a hardware component that makes it a snap to stream videos to your big screen. And of course giants like YouTube are experimenting with leanback views and social sharing.

CEO Reece Pacheco became friendly with Fred Wilson after commenting on the latter's blog over the course of a few years. Mr. Wilson has been a vocal supporter of Shelby, certainly a strong advocate. Scoring the right to Hulu and College Humor shows, Shelby has the chops to negotiate with the big corporate parents who control these smaller, more open web platforms. Boxee has yet to achieve a deal with Hulu.

As The Next Web's Courtney Boyd Meyers reports, Shelby plans to monetize by offering branded channels instead of traditional ads. "By filtering, Shelby’s branded content will be smart; meaning, Reece will receive Old Spice ads and Shark Week promos, while I’ll be watching branded content from vegetarian cooking shows and Thai tourism boards."

But the future of Hulu is very much in flux. Fox has already put its content on an eight-day delay, and many expect ABC and CBS to follow suit in the near future. The old guard media is planning to squeeze every last penny out of their content while they still retain some modicum of control, which means the rights to premium digital music and video will only be getting more expensive in the next few years. For innovative start-ups like Shelby, this is the great challenge, and opportunity.

Hmmm...where can I find me shows?

A week after Fox made users wait to watch new shows on Hulu for free, tech site TorrentFreak says they've seen a drastic rise in the volume of illegal downloads of Fox shows.

TorrentFreak reported that over the first five days of Fox's service change, Hell's Kitchen saw an over 100 percent rise in illegal downloads compared with three previous episodes, and that MasterChef saw a rise of over 189 percent for the same comparison.

Fox instituted the delay to mollify the cable companies, who pay them the lions share of their revenue in re-trans rights. A week of exclusivity makes these incumbents feel better about the pretty penny they are shelling out for content.

For consumers of course, waiting over a week for a new episode (or making personal schedule changes to catch it in primetime) is far from an ideal or realistic expectation, especially for audiences members who have grown accustomed to on-demand viewing.

TorrentFreak also pointed out that Hulu.com and other legal online content venues had decreased illegal download traffic, proving that a lot of viewers want to watch legally if they can, even sitting through multiple ads online.

Now customers who used to watch their favorite shows on Hulu.com the day after they aired have three options: they can wait eight days for the show to appear for free as usual, they can pay for the content, or they can pirate it online. And after having their content provided for free for years, the majority of the slighted viewer base probably isn't going to line Fox's coffers to have it back.

NBC and the other wait-and-see networks are likely watching very closely as Fox tests the waters of the pay wall. But the real question, as bids come in today from the giants of the tech world who are interested in leveraging Hulu for their burgeoning web TV empires, is whether this will take even more of the sheen off an already-battered brand.

It's about time

If you're a big time VC or founder with a sweet exit, you probably get your floss on with an iPad in every room of the house. To get the full MTV Cribs Tech Edition, it's crucial to have a fantastic stream of videos running at all time or ready to go with a single swipe.

We've had the Boxee in our living room for a while and love the ability to stream Netflix (all six seasons of the Larry Sanders show) and easily pull up videos we bookmarked from the web. Now we can double down on our home entertainment with Boxee's new iPad app. 

The Boxee app lets you stream any videos you have on your local network straight to your iPad and the experimental airplay synch lets you stream any videos on your iPad to you Boxee connected TV. It's one step closer to the universal screen and definitely means Boxee will have a lot more utility, both at home and on the go.

Ok, enough advertorial, we just happen to think this shit is cool. Boxee, get your act together and do a damn deal with Hulu already, their app sucks. Maybe just a monster debt round so you can buy them outright?

First, they came for the DVDs...

Blogger Miken Flacy signed in as a Hulu employee, with full access to their personal data and, more embaraasingly, their taste in day time television.

Overall this is not a major deal. But with Hulu currently in the process of being shopped around to bidders like Microsoft and Google, even a small mishap is being taken very seriously.

Hulu VP of Platform Technology Richard Tom responded immediately with a blog post assuring users that this wasn't caused by any hacking, just good old fashioned incompetence. Tom highlighted that no one accessed Hulu systems or “highly sensitive user information such as passwords or credit card numbers.”

You could head down and catch this gem at the Tribeca Film Festival. But through May 17th, the fest's marvelous shorts will be screening five at a time in the Youtube Screening Room.

American Express is the corporate sponsor on this, and the credit card giant is also backing a promotion that lets people submit their films online for a chance to screen at next year's festival.

This is part of a bigger push by Youtube to become a destination for professional quality films. Yesterday The Wrap broke the news that Youtube would be partnering with Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal for a streaming, on demand service. While that service is still a ways off, users can get their indy kicks for free right away.

Wilkinson and Pugh

For a long time, web video platforms didn't treat viewing the same way as traditional TV. Each clip was an autonomous unit. Maybe users got a few recommendations after they finished watching a video, but there was no sense of a continuous curated stream of entertainment like there is while watching network TV.

VHX, which launched today, is looking to use your social network to program your web video watching. Users open the service up to their contacts on Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, then get a dashboard of videos pulled from the friends they are following.

These videos are being plucked from all over the web using a simple dashboard widget, making the overall experience akin to Tumblr;  grab, share and follow.

The venture is the creation of Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson. Mr. Pugh was a senior app developer at Vimeo and then ran web development for Boxee. Mr. Wilkinson was co-creator of Know Your Meme, taught the 'internet famous' class at Parsons and shared an Emmy with Mr. Pugh for Star Wars Uncut.

"We're really stoked to take the curation features to the next level with mixtape-esque playlists," said Mr. Wilkinson. "That way I can finally make an entire show of kids jumping off sheds."

The big boys in web video are exploring the curated playlist turf as well. Youtube is looking to compete with big TV networks by pouring $100 million into a series of channels of professionally produced programming. It was why Google acquired local video start-up Next New Networks. On a local level, TechStars start-up Shelby.TV similarly creates a web channel of videos shared in users' social networks.

"We're much more flexible, work faster, and care more about the "small-time" curators out there," Mr. Wilkinson said. "The people YouTube are going to ignore."