All Things Digital

Ashton Kutcher’s practiced finesse and stage presence were completely out of place at the TechCrunch50 conference earlier this week, but his appearance was the talk of the show. Kutcher wasn’t in San Francisco to run a casting call for “Beauty and the Geek,” but to launch a Web video show focused on something about which he knows a fair amount: celebrity gossip. Celebrity spokespeople are a fact of life at this point, but celebrity tech founders? Like so many things, it’s a phenomenon that gets frothy every time there’s a bubble.

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Three online video start-up CEOs stepped down last week. The departures were for different reasons, but when you hear about them in the span of a few hours, as I did on Friday, they glom together. Herb Scannell of Next New Networks said his company would be better served by someone more Web-oriented; Mollie Spilman deferred to her co-founder to lead Tidal TV; and Bill Joll of On2 didn’t give a reason, though it’s worth noting that his company recently had to restate earnings due to “falsified” sales accounts.

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Bear with me for a minute, because I’m about to tell a long and self-involved tale. Ultimately I think it might say something interesting about platforms for television consumption, but of course that’ll be up to you to decide.

Before last fall, I barely had a television in my house and had only ever really watched TV shows over the last five years on DVD or iTunes. But then I started watching “Dancing With the Stars” through ABC.com’s downloadable player (the one that’s powered by Move Networks). I had personal connections to a few of the “celebrity” contestants–like our favorite web video hater Mark Cuban–and also wanted to use some of the software I was writing about. But let’s just say I went above and beyond just research.

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Wow, just when we question those EQAL guys’ reasoning for doing something dumb by pulling a hit series, they show they have something much more interesting up their sleeves. Wednesday at CBS’ upfront, a major partnership between the network and the just-funded start-up was announced.

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Seesmic is a video start-up I’ve shied away from writing about too often, because I’m not sure I really get it. But I figure if so many smart people think there’s something good going on here, I should keep an eye on what the company is doing. So last week we had founder and CEO Loïc Le Meur on the “GigaOM Show,” where I and co-host Joyce Kim got to ask him what’s the big idea.

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Now that professional writers are done protesting the Web, will they flock to it? In this quick video interview, Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America West, tells us which parts of the new WGA contract the Guild is happy about, what new Web ventures are coming down the pike (and whether they’ll stick around) and makes a case for the continuing value of writers.

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Troubled video site Revver was bought by Brad Greenspan’s LiveUniverse last night for a price “many multiples more” than the $500,000 to $1.5 million reported recently, according to a source close to the deal. Our source would not disclose the selling price, but said “I wouldn’t say anyone got rich, but everybody was happy.” Revver had raised $12.7 million from Comcast, Turner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Richards and William Randolph Hearst III. The Revver team will continue working under the new ownership.

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Yahoo is close to acquiring enterprise video start-up Maven Networks for between $160 million and $170 million, according to sources familiar with the deal. Maven provides video hosting and distribution services for Gannett, Hearst, Fox News, Sony BMG, the Financial Times, Univision, TV Guide and others.

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Will it be a MacBook Touch or an Apple TV Pro? And what’s all this about the Air? [Today] is the big Stevenote day at Macworld in San Francisco, and I’ll be there with an EVDO card and last year’s Mac laptop burning my thighs.

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Out of work and newly wise to the state of content being distributed online, a group of professional writers is looking to start their own production and distribution company. Aaron Mendelsohn, writer of the Disney film “Air Bud” and an active Writers Guild of America member, is captaining the efforts, and says he has gotten a group of “A-list” film and TV writers on the team. He’s also partnering with online community experts from Silicon Valley and raising “north of $30 million” in venture capital, with the idea of launching a company called Virtual Artists later this year.

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How was the first Republican CNN-YouTube debate? So exciting I fell asleep! I missed the last six questions and had to catch them in YouTube’s helpful playlist from the night. There’s also live-blogging coverage from the New York Times, ABC News and Mahalo.

There were no melting-snowman questions to trivialize Mitt Romney’s participation, but there was some goofiness, like this homemade candidate roundup ditty. As for content, CNN’s efforts to make sure the questions weren’t too left-leaning–a.k.a. “weed[ing] out the obvious sort of Democratic gotcha grenades”–meant that things like health care and climate change weren’t even mentioned.

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