YouTube is staging its own live halftime show, putting it in competition with Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz. It's the Game Day cherry on the top of YouTube's annual Super Bowl AdBlitz channel.

Amazon Instant Video, which trots out series pilots and then invites viewers to give an opinion of them, has begun showing a new batch of seven new programs, including "The New Yorker Presents" a pilot that tries to give a flavor of the magazine--fiction, fact, poetry, arts, cartoon; and "The Man in the High Castle," a drama based on the Philip K. Dick novel from 1962 that imagined the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II.

It finally hit me that television may have become the worst, least interesting and most inefficient way to get news, or even see the news.

Deborah Aho Williamson, eMarketer's principal analyst, says the growing video biz on Facebook, Snaptchat, Twitter and Instagram will not overwhelm YouTube. It will just make the whole video advertising business grow.

Although millions of Americans have seen neither "House of Cards" on Netflix or "Transparent" on Amazon, the success and buzz are awesome indicators of how rapidly the content business is shifting to digital. But the popularity of those pay services also says something about what viewers think about "commercial" television itself.

Pew says 71% of Internet users use Facebook, the same percentage as last year. That still makes it the biggest elephant in the zoo, by far, but Pew shows heavy upticks for Pinterest and Instagram, two visually-oriented social sites. Separately, trying to increase its video presence, Facebook also says it acquired Quickfire, to help speed its video plays.

Netflix chief content office Ted Sarandos told TV critics the other day that ratings are irrelevant to the pay service, because it counts subscribers, not viewers, That's true now, but as online competition grows, producers may want better answers than that.

Wix. com, a Web site development service for small, small businesses, is taking a big $4.5 million bet on the Super Bowl, betting that its time is now, and using former stars like Brett Favre and Terrell Owens to make its case. They are among five celeb NFL athletes Wix has enticed to start their own businesses, using the no-brainer Wix platform.

Ooyala's takeaway is: "Broadcast's advertising-driven machine is splintering with consumer OTT shifts" and consumers and advertisers are rapidly moving away from what we once understood as "television."

At the CES show, the online pay service and some manufacturers announced Netflix will begin giving its stamp of approval - "Netflix recommended TV" - on certain new smart TVs. Those include sets made by LG, Vizio, Sharp and new smart sets made that include Roku units built in.