The audience for broadband Internet media will grow to half a billion people within the next five years, according to Gartner. Worldwide consumer broadband penetration reached 18 percent of households in 2007, and will reach 25 percent by 2012.

Numbers like this point out that the broadband audience is rapidly growing to be larger than traditional broadcast audiences.

“Broadband penetration will increase, especially in the geographically larger markets, as current broadband providers continue to deploy their services, as newer technologies (wireless broadband, such as WiMAX) attract subscribers, and as users experience firsthand how speed enhances their Internet sessions,” said Amanda Sabia, principal research analyst at Gartner.

“Consumers in heavily penetrated markets are already addicted to broadband, thus the future in these markets is less concerned with increasing subscriber numbers, and more with addressing what new applications and/or content will be transmitted over this pipe,” Ms. Sabia said.

“Newer ventures in these markets are primarily entertainment (such as Internet video content and games), Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and home networking, which will bring these devices and services into one integrated system within the home.”

A new version of aTV Flash, a $49.95 software upgrade to enhance the functionality of your Apple TV, has been released that’s compatible with the version 2.1 of Apple TV firmware.

aTV Flash adds support for more video formats, USB external hard drives & web browsing.

Key Features:

• Play most video formats (DivX, Xvid, AVI, WMV, RMVB + more)
• Play DVD files WITHOUT converting them (includes DVD menu support)
• Surf the web with a Safari based web browser
• Easily enable external USB hard drive storage
• Enable FTP, SFTP and SSH access
• View local weather forecasts
• All original Apple TV features remain intact

aTV Flash looks like it adds great new features – but there’s no guarantee that they won’t break with Apple’s next software update.

If you’re an aTV Flash user, let me know what you think of it in the comments.

MXL has announced the MXL Studio 1 portable USB condenser microphone, designed to be a low-cost mic for music training, field recording, and professional spoken word recordings.

According to MXL, it’s “excellent for podcasting and multimedia voiceover”.

The MXL® Studio 1 does not require any special drivers and is completely “Plug & Play” for instant use with any PC or Mac computer. The Studio 1 has an integrated headphone jack which provides zero latency monitoring and clear audio playback.

The Studio 1 features a large two-micron diaphragm condenser capsule with a 40 Hz-20 kHz frequency response. The digital section features a 16-bit Delta Sigma A/D converter with available sampling rates of 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz. A red LED light behind the protective grill indicates that the microphone is active and correctly oriented toward the user.

The MXL® Studio 1 includes a hard black plastic carrying case, desktop microphone stand / adapter, 10-foot USB cable, user’s manual, and application guide to get the most from your recordings.

The expected street price is $99.95 with a MSRP of $129.95. It is shipping now.

Bad news for Microsoft: its most passionate advocate – mszunefan, aka The Zune Guy – is “done with the Zune” and has vowed to get rid of his Zune tattoos:

“I am done.  I have had the Zune since day 1 and have noticed little improvement.

I have tried my best to support them every step of the way but the recent Xbox Live announcement at E3 made me lose it.  To not include Zune Marketplace or the ability to load videos from Xbox Live to your Zune made me finally give up.

I am in the works of figuring the best way to get a new tattoo to cover the logo on my arm.”

Maybe technology tattoos aren’t such a great idea, after all…..

Not for the faint-hearted: Extreme close up of this Zune tat.

Snagfilms, a new site that offers free online distribution of documentary films, is now live, offering instant streaming of movie like Super Size Me.

The site’s embed code takes you to the Snagfilms site, instead of letting you watch the film onsite. Snagfilms needs to get this fixed to work as a true embed.

At launch, more than 250 films are available for immediate streamed playback, requiring no software downloads, sign-ups or waiting, and an additional 200 films, already under contract, will be added by mid-August.

“There has never been a time when so many high-quality socially relevant documentary films have been made, yet even though tens of thousands of documentaries are submitted to film festivals every year, only a handful find theatrical distribution. SnagFilms was created so that anyone who has a website, publishes a blog, or participates in a social network can open an online multiplex theater, giving others an opportunity to watch one or more of the films we’ll stream, to distribute these films by snagging them for their own sites, and to support the causes promoted by these films by linking to participating nonprofits. Through SnagFilms, everyone on the web can be a theater owner and a film distributor if they just donate their pixels and enable these incredible documentaries to be seen,” said SnagFilms Chairman Ted Leonsis.

Creative Technology today introduced the Creative ZEN Mozaic portable media player, a small multimedia player with built-in speaker, FM radio & built-in microphone.

Features:

• Built-in speaker turns player into a mini boombox so that music can be shared out loud
• 1.8-inch TFT LCD color display
• Built-in FM radio with up to 32 preset stations
• Built-in microphone for voice recording
• Dimensions: 79.5mm (height) x 40mm (width) x 12.8mm (thickness)
• Bundled with the new Creative Centrale application, a one-stop media management software that organizes and tags music, photos and video, creates playlists and transcodes video to the proprietary video format
• Supports audio formats such as MP3, WMA, WMA-DRM 10 and Audible (Format 4) and JPEG format for photos
• Up to 32 hours of audio playback with a single charge of the battery.

The Zen Mozaic is priced at S$99.00 for a 2GB model (for up to 1,000 songs*) and S$129.00 for a 4GB model (for up to 2,000 songs*). Also available at a later date are 8GB and 16GB models.

Shel Israel has posted an interesting article looking at how he’s begun to rely on Twitter as his “personal search tool”:

I am coming to trust Twitter as my personal search tool…and here’s why: I can consider the recommender.

Much of the information comes from people I already know and have chatted with online. Most of the rest comes from people I can check out very quickly and draw some sort of conclusion on whether I should take their word on a restaurant, hotel or book.

Digg is an extremely popular place to discover and share. But too often, the people recommending or panning are people who have criteria different than my own. Wikipedia is, from my experience, a highly credible resource, but its entire system is designed for impartiality and often I want a partial opinion. Yelp struggles to prevent it, but it’s content can be too easily corrupted by people with vested interests.

But Twitter is like asking a neighbor. The neighbor really wants to share with you something you’ll enjoy. The neighbor is someone you’ll most likely see again and his or her reputation will have been adjusted based on their recommendations.

Israel’s views are common among people active in social media, which leads a lot of people to think that the views are true.

Yet, most people’s experiences with Twitter are nothing like Israel’s.

The Social Media Divide

Most people try out Twitter and don’t get it. They tweet what they’re doing and find that nobody is listening.

They ask a question and never get an answer. Worse, they get spammed.

There’s a reason for this. The value of social media sites is proportional to the size and quality of your network. The people that build a large network on Twitter are going to get results like Israel. Most people, though, probably won’t see the Twitter that Israel and new media gurus see.

This social media divide, between those that have large, quality social networks and those that don’t, is very real.

It’s a problem for companies like Twitter, because it creates barriers to adoption. Your initial experience with Twitter is probably going to be pretty mediocre. This means the site is unlikely to move beyond motivated first adopters.

The social media divide also represents a great opportunity. If social media sites like Twitter can find ways to reproduce the type of experience that social networking gurus have and can bring this experience to a broad audience, the sites’ value will increase exponentially.

Back in 2006, we suggested that YouTube as you know it is dead, when Google bought the site for $1.65 billion and money came into the picture in a big way.

Since then, Google’s admitted it’s got a problem trying to make money off of YouTube, and admitted that more than 97% of the videos on YouTube are deadweight.

A new report from The Diffusion Group reveals some of the math behind Google’s YouTube problem:

There is money to be made in professionally produced online video and the prices based on cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions are good. That’s the conclusion of a report from the Diffusion Group.

Professional Web programming yields very high CPMs, the report found. The CPMs for long-form online content are $40 today and will reach nearly $46 in 2013.

The lion’s share of ad dollars—$590 million today and $10 billion in 2013—will go to the professional stuff. That can be anything from ABC.com to Revision3 to video bloggers. Because that type of Web programming accounts for 96% of ad revenue flowing into online video.

In other words, 97% of YouTube’s videos are deadweight when it comes to competing for 96% of the Internet video ad dollars.

While there’s money to be made in long-tail user-generated video, Google’s going to have to move its focus to professional video, where the ad dollars are at.

Google today announced Knol – an alternative to Wikipedia that promises to pay authors.

Getting Google’s advertising onto more and more pages is key to the company’s growth. Wikipedia poses an obstacle to Google’s growth, though, because it’s ad-free and quickly becoming becoming the most popular source for information on all sorts of topics.

To fight this, Google is creating Knol – an alternative to Wikipedia that offers revenue-sharing with authors.

Here’s how Google introduces the site:

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

With Knol, Google is looking for a way to monetize user-generated articles, effectively paying you to create a Wikipedia-killer.

It’s not much of a leap to think that Google will duplicate this approach with other content, sharing revenue on news or how-to videos, for example.

Openfilm today announced the public launch of its video sharing website www.openfilm.com. The site showcases a selection of short films and animations displayed in high resolution.

If you’re creating short films, you’ll want to check the site out. In addition to offering high-quality video, the site has a revenue-sharing program.

I’ve embedded an example, the animated short film Papiroflexia, to demo the player.

“Openfilm is focused on ‘user-generated films’ – original high quality videos and animation with high production values and artistic merit, from shorts and web series to feature-length films,” explains Timothy Pastushkin, Co-Founder and CEO of Openfilm. “There is an ever-growing number of professional quality films created by independent filmmakers, whose production values are closing the quality gap between Web video and Hollywood.”