This just in from a cooperative of cable TV companies. "Thank you for registering with Vutopia. Vutopia is the mobile lover's ultimate destination. It's hundreds of great movies on demand to watch on TV and online anytime you want. It's Hollywood favorites, indie titles and documentaries... This is Vutopia, your movie happy place." Actually, this is your cable company scared as hell of the inroads Netflix is making on your TV screen.

After spending a few hours last night playing with the video-centric apps that launched in the Chrome Web Store yesterday, a few things float to the top of my mind. Foremost, the app model is trying to replace the Web site model. In developing this app store, Google is trying to advance its case that the browser really can be an operating system. If that is the case, then content providers can get the latitude to break free from the aesthetic and even technical constraints of the standard Web page and develop more discrete styles of delivery.

It looks as if the prospect of people relying on the Web for their TV content is hitting a real sore spot with traditional media. While some metrics companies like Convergence Consulting Group have projected that hundreds of thousands of customer have already left their cable subscriptions behind, we are seeing metrics ammo being packed and fired back like snowballs in warm weather. It is hard to tell whether they are melting or hitting their mark. Yesterday, ESPN treated the cord cutters as a negligible nuisance that it seemed to swat away like a mosquito. The Disney-owned sportscasting goliath says …

Apparently Hulu is getting into the original Web programming business. Peter Kafka at All Things D reports this morning that the TV replay site put out a casting call for a show host on a daily 5-minute review of pop culture and media. Because, what, there aren't enough of those around?

Videoholics who have been paying attention in class will recall the Boston College study from last year that found fast forwarding through ads on DVRs was not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, research showed that the act of hitting the FF button focused user attention on the center of the screen. How else can you make sure that you don't over shoot the commercial and eat into precious programming time? It turns out that we're not really skipping commercials so much as compressing them. People can process the images even when they get only one out of the 24 …

myYearbook is one of those little companies that could, and even when it does, too few people notice. For several years now this social network and people discovery engine has been turning a profit on subscription services and virtual goods. It has 25 million members. Unlike Facebook, which is more about a circle of existing friends communicating and sharing, myYearbook was about finding new people and engaging in online socializing experiences lime virtual games and participating in social applications, contests. This week the company unveils a video component to its social gaming that blends live video chat with online games …

One of the unique aspects of modern video gaming in the panoply of media is the way that anticipation and monitoring of a game's release became a critical part of the gaming experience. An entire games media business grew up around previews. In the economy of gaming, the prolonged pre-release stage (six and nine months out from actual release) is integral to the marketing system and the economy of gaming. In what other medium -- film, TV, music, books -- do we actually get such enormous, relentless coverage of a property that far out and then so little after the …