How many tweets does it take to create a sit-com? CBS (CBS) is about to find out.

The network has picked up a comedy developed by Justin Halpern, the creator of the breakout Twitter account S—mydadsays, and his writing partner Patrick Schumacker.

S—mydadsays is an ongoing feed of Mr. Halpern’s father’s remarks, in all their brief, funny, often unprintable glory (for an example of all three, check out today’s).

The account has more than 700,000 followers (it follows only one Twitterer, LeVar Burton) and sparked interest from book publishers and producers after it gained notoriety.

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Music-download service 7digital faces plenty of skepticism since its U.S. launch two weeks ago.

According to Ben Drury, its co-founder and chief executive, many of the questions–how do you compete with iTunes, how do you stand out amid a sea of music services–are valid ones.

“We didn’t want to just launch a ‘me-too’ store,” he said in an interview in New York, where he’s attending the CMJ Music Marathon and meeting with media companies old and new, including CBS (CBS), eBay (EBAY), Pandora and AOL, to discuss potential partnerships.

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YouTube, CBS (CBS), NBC, ABC are going to have an awful lot in common in the not too distant future.

Which company uses its traffic to drive eyeballs to programming on which it sells advertising? They all do.

The biggest difference between YouTube and the broadcast networks is that one actually produces content or pays a licensing fee for the content before they sell advertising around it.

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To hawk its fall season, CBS (CBS) has teamed with PepsiCo (PEP) and Entertainment Weekly to create a video ad that will run in the magazine.

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The U.S. Supreme Court today cleared the way for Cablevision (CVC) to offer a network DVR service, allowing consumers to record copies of television programming “in the cloud,” rather than on set-top boxes.

Without comment, the court refused to review a Court of Appeals ruling that rejected claims by film studios and television networks that the network DVR approach would infringe copyrights.

Cablevision first announced plans for the service in 2006, but it has been tied up in litigation–until now. Among the companies opposed to the concept were Time Warner (TWX), CBS (CBS) and Disney (DIS).

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For months, Microsoft (MSFT) has jabbed at Apple (AAPL) with an, at times, baffling advertising campaign for Windows PCs. Now Microsoft may finally land a solid blow against its rival.

In a new chapter to its ad campaign that will begin airing during the NCAA basketball playoffs on CBS (CBS) Thursday evening, Microsoft will begin hammering on a theme that could resonate in these times of economic hardship: how much less expensive Windows PCs are than Macs. For the commercials, Microsoft’s advertising agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, recruited prospective computer shoppers in the Los Angeles area through Craigslist and other sites, with a tantalizing offer to give them between $700 and $2,000 to purchase a new PC.

According to Brad Brooks, corporate vice president for Windows consumer product marketing at Microsoft, the agency told recruits it was a market research firm and didn’t mention it was working with Microsoft. The recruits were told they could keep whatever money they didn’t spend on a PC so they had incentives to look for good values.

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When NBC Universal and News Corp. created Hulu, they gave the video portal a valuable but short-term asset: exclusive rights to distribute NBC and Fox shows outside of the media giants’ own websites.

From that base of content, Hulu.com has become the fourth-biggest online video distributor by unique visitors in January, behind YouTube, Yahoo and MySpace, according to the latest from Nielsen VideoCensus. In total video streams, it’s No. 3, with 232 million, behind YouTube (5.8 billion) and Yahoo (277 million).

But the exclusive part of that NBC-News Corp. deal lasts only two years, and Hulu knows all too well that the scarcity that helped it establish an audience (and brand) is going away soon. Hulu has never said exactly when the deal expires, but it’s likely within a year after the first anniversary of Hulu’s public launch, in March.

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On TV, content is king. But on the Web, community may reign supreme. Throughout television history, the way to lure most viewers was to air the best shows. It doesn’t necessarily work that way on the Web, where many shows can be seen on multiple sites.

Take the recent announcement by CBS (CBS) that it would begin airing shows like Showtime’s “Dexter” and Sony Pictures Television’s (SNE) “Bewitched” on TV.com, CBS’s online site for full-length video. But none of the more than 1,000 new programs are exclusive to TV.com. And the episodes of “Bewitched,” the classic sitcom featuring the nose-wrinkling witch Samantha, are already on rival Hulu, the joint site of NBC Universal and News Corp. (NWS). “Every major studio right now is following a nonexclusive strategy” online, says Arash Amel, senior analyst with London-based media researcher Screen Digest. “The question for these sites is beginning to be, ‘how do you differentiate yourself beyond the content you have?’”

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Mel Brooks said the hardest thing to do was to make a person sitting alone in a room laugh out loud. Laughter is social, and that’s important to consider as watching online video on your laptop or handheld device with headphones can be a pretty isolating experience. CBS is looking to transform this experience with its new Social Viewing Rooms that let users separated by geography watch and interact with TV shows together online. But can it truly be social?

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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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Free streaming music turns people on to new music and encourages them to buy, says social-networking site Last.fm. In the music industry, this will not come as a huge revelation.

Last.fm, acquired by CBS last May, announced Wednesday that since the company launched its on-demand streaming service two months ago, CD and download sales through its partnership with Amazon.com have more than doubled.

So what does that mean?

Music discovery continues to be one of digital music’s greatest vulnerabilities. Nobody has come up with a sure or simple way to help people wade through the millions of tracks available on the Web.

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“Jericho,” CBS’s excellent postapocalyptic drama set in rural Kansas has been canceled. Again. “Jericho” drew a large following among the tech demo. Besides the obvious sci-fi draw, Jericho explored themes of government intervention and self-sufficiency, which are passionate topics among the more tinfoil-hat Libertarians of the Web. But shows that please Netizens aren’t moneymakers.

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Back a year ago, I wrote a three-part series on the future of the media business. It began as an attempt to think out loud about a topic with which I had become obsessed, and it ended up becoming a manifesto of sorts about conversational media and marketing.

As you may recall, I started that last set of posts with the observation that major media companies–Time Warner, News Corp., CBS–had all fired or parted ways with the longtime managers of their digital assets, opting instead for insiders or traditional media folks with whom they were more comfortable.

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Yahoo is buying Maven Networks, a company that helps outfits like CBS and Sony put their video online. Its press release is full of all sorts of ways this will help Yahoo: It gets video technology. Yahoo will be able to use its sales force to sell video ads on partner sites. And it will be able to syndicate its content to other sites and bring other video content onto Yahoo.

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