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Over the past few weeks, there have been a flurry of announcements from Microsoft, Netflix, TiVo, YouTube, Roku and others detailing how their devices can be used to play movies and other video-based content, delivered via the Internet, on the TV. Industry insiders are speculating that with these announcements the tide is finally turning, that Internet-delivered video will soon make a big impact in the consumer living room.

When looking at any new technology offering, however, market penetration rates are crucial. As we’ve seen in the past, the best technology is not what always wins — all that matters is what consumers adopt. With that in mind, here is a breakout of the numbers for these TV-connected devices and content offerings:

• Xbox 360: 10.5 million units sold in the U.S. (source: NPD)
• Netflix: 8.2 million members (source: Netflix)
• PS3: 4.9 million units sold in the U.S. (source: NPD)
• TiVo Series 3: 250,00 units sold (estimate). While TiVo won’t say how many have been sold, they did say that 750,000 Series 2 and Series 3 units are connected via broadband. Estimate assumes that two-thirds of them were Series 2.
• Apple TV: Roughly 350,000 units sold (estimate). While Apple won’t say exactly how many have been sold, published reports put the figure at less than 400,000, missing Apple’s goal of 1 million units.
• VUDU: 15,000 units sold (estimate). While VUDU won’t confirm a number, they did say that sales are in the “five figures.”
• Netflix Player by Roku: 10,000 units sold (estimate). Roku isn’t saying how many they’ve sold, but realistically speaking, how many could they have sold in just a couple weeks before they ran out?

By adding up the above numbers we’re left with 19.3 million units sold. On paper, that seems like a half-way decent number. But if we break down these numbers even further, the real number of consumers capable of getting these content offerings is much smaller — so small, in fact, that they barely register.

Take for instance the recent Microsoft and Netflix announcement. While neither side will say just how many consumers have both an Xbox Live account and a Netflix account, it’s clearly less than half of Netflix’s 8.2 million members. So if we estimate on the high side and assume that a third of Netflix’s members have an Xbox 360 console and an Xbox Live account, we come up with a mere 2.7 million consumers.

As for the PS3, Sony only launched their online video service late last week, so it’s hard to estimate any numbers. But of the 4.9 million PS3s sold in the U.S. to date, not all of them are online. Estimating that 20 percent of them are not connected via broadband, we’ll use an install number of 4 million consumers.

When it comes to TiVo, you have to estimate how many of the 750,000 broadband-connected TiVo units are Series 3. Estimating that a third of the units are Series 3 would give us 250,000 consumers. But how many consumers have more than one TiVo? I have two Series 3 TiVos in my house, so while I am counted as two units, I’m only one consumer. TiVo won’t say how many customers have more than one unit, but taking that into account, the number of real consumers that TiVo is reaching with the Series 3 is probably more like 200,000.

That leaves us with the Apple TV, the Netflix player by Roku and VUDU. Using the numbers above, I estimate they reach 375,000 consumers combined.

Adding up all of the new numbers gives us just over 7.2 million consumers, far lower than the original 19.3 million hardware units that have been sold. And this 7.2 million number is even more skewed in that it does not take into account unique consumers. How many of the 7.2 million consumers have an Xbox 360 and a TiVo or an Xbox 360 and a PS3? If you estimate that 20 percent of them have multiple devices, you’re left with 5.7 million unique users. That’s a very small number. And then you have to estimate what percentage of those consumers will adopt and use the new services, and over what period of time?

Even if you had 50 percent penetration from day one, which you won’t, that would still be less than 3 million consumers using these devices to get Internet-based video to their TVs. While it is good to see more content options coming to consumers, adding up all of the install numbers for these devices gives a stark picture of just how small the install base really is. The market is still too fragmented, with too many different devices, all limited by a lack of premium content.

In the long run, the cable operators still have the best shot at bringing Internet-based video to the TV. Set-top boxes still have the most penetration with consumers and provide them with multiple ways of getting content. Unless of course you’re like me and only have TiVo, in which case the single-stream cable cards that most cable operators use don’t allow for any of the functionality of cable TV set-top boxes.

Dan Rayburn is EVP of StreamingMedia.com and has his own blog at BusinessOfVideo.com.

Mippin (formerly Refresh Mobile), whose browser-based site presents content specially designed for mobile consumption, says it has named a new CEO and reached a milestone of 500,000 users. But I question its ability to survive.

The London-based startup’s service also learns what users like and recommends stories based on their previous interests. I call it a mobile portal analogous to Yahoo, MSN, Netvibes or PageFlakes, but Judy Gibbons, the new CEO, has a different definition. She says it’s a mobile media services company, in that it optimizes PC content for consumption on a mobile device. “We believe there is only one Internet - there is not a separate mobile one,” Gibbons told me via email. “But mobile presents different challenges and opportunities and there is real user value to having all this content in one place in the same consistent format with a great fast user experience.”

Whatever you call it, Mippin needs to gain wide adoption in a crowded area to support its advertising-based revenue model. The market includes efforts by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, and according to ad network AdMob — which does business with Mippin — the number of mobile portals is steadily rising (see graph). Obviously the mobile world cannot support 500 varying portals. Even in the PC web world, portals have problems.

Despite impressive growth from its October 2007 launch, averaging 110 page views per user and advertising click-through rates of 3 percent and 15 percent for contextual ads, (way better than the .5 percent rates on other mobile sites), I’m not sure Mippin will deliver the audience advertisers need given the amount of competition fighting for consumers’ eyes. It’s a nice service, but unfortunately that doesn’t always win out.

In an interview published this morning in the Financial Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wouldn’t be looking to pick up any other Internet companies just because the Yahoo deal failed. One can only imagine how far shares of Facebook would have plummeted on that comment had the social networking site been publicly traded. Ditto for Slide and RockYou, both of whom recently raised money at lofty valuations.

“People don’t understand what they’re talking about,” Ballmer told the FT. “At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications.” And for Microsoft, according to the interview, the primary ad platform is search. That makes sense as search is a billion-dollar, proven business.

Application companies have some ad revenue, but right now they’re kind of like cable channels for the web, while an ad platform is the means to a business model that supports that cable channel. Microsoft wants to own the keys to the business model. So to prove their worth, it’s time for application developers to prove their business model.

Speech recognition company Vligno has scored a $20 million second round of funding led by Yahoo, and through a relationship with the search company, access to 600 million cell phone subscribers worldwide. As I noted earlier, Yahoo said today it will use Vlingo to power the voice recognition for its oneSearch mobile search product.

“We like the technology so much we made sure our competitors can’t use it,” explained Marco Boerries, president of Yahoo Mobile. Boerries declined to say how much Yahoo put into Vlingo, but said the company had exclusive use of the technology for mobile search.

Hooking its star to Yahoo puts Vlingo in the same league as Microsoft — which offers mobile carriers speech recognition technology derived from its TellMe acquisition — and singlespeech-focused search company Nuance Communications, which is cultivating carrier relationships as well.

Earlier this week Om wrote about Dropbox, which he liked so much that we at GigaOM are trying it out for our file-sharing and backup needs. Also this week, FolderShare, another remote file access program, launched its first version since being acquired by Microsoft two-and-half years ago. So I decided to try them out, too.

After playing around with both, I’m torn. The essential differences between the two stem from the fact that Dropbox is all about sending your data to the cloud and accessing it there, whereas FolderShare links two computers that are already online. So for remote access of your files, FolderShare is the clear winner, while Dropbox takes the cake for backup and collaborative work.

I used both programs to link my MacBook with my ancient Toshiba laptop, which runs Windows XP. I’m using Firefox as my browser, and it was nice to see that Microsoft’s FolderShare program respected that and didn’t seek to open in Explorer instead. Both took just a few minutes to install and were easy to get running. Dropbox didn’t install cleanly into the applications portion of my Mac’s hard drive, but I moved it over.

With the install over, it was time to play. I created a shared folder in Dropbox and had the option of either saving files into my Dropbox located on the desktop or going to the Dropbox web site and uploading them. This feature would be nice if I were working on some else’s computer and didn’t want to install the Dropbox client. Could you use this to upload proprietary corporate data even if it was protected from transfer to a USB drive?

To access a shared folder, you send out invites. With Dropbox currently in private beta, it’s a nice way to spread your Dropbox love to friends who might appreciate the site. Another fun things about Dropbox is that you can share your photos with non-Dropbox members via a URL, but that will show all the photos in your Dropbox photo file, so be careful who sees it.

Frankly, because I don’t collaborate with anyone using offline files like Word or Excel, and work from the same laptop all the time, I’m not sure how useful I find Dropbox. FolderShare, on the other hand, is appealing to me in the way it lets me access the random files I have stored on my personal laptop, such as contact data from Outlook and notes taken on my personal PC. I can also use it to grab photos and music fairly easily, although I do wish I could see thumbnails for my images in the display. That would require too much information to be stored on the Microsoft servers, though.

Another caveat is that for FolderShare to work, both computers have to be online. So hibernating computers need to be awakened from their slumber. Bottom line, you could use FolderShare for easy access to your files on various computers and Dropbox for backup and collaborative work. As a word of caution, both services were running pretty slowly while I was playing around with them.

Years ago, Stephen Dukker helped to disrupt the personal computing industry when the company he founded, eMachines, started selling PCs for $400 each, effectively broadening the number of consumers who were able to buy computers. And now he’s trying to do it again, as CEO of Redwood City, Calif.-based virtualization startup NComputing, which just raised $28 million in a second round of funding.

NComputing makes terminals bundled with a keyboard, mouse and monitor that can be hooked up to a PC (given the processing power available in today’s computers compared with what’s needed for most applications, multiple terminal kits can be connected to a single PC.) After selling some 600,000 kits primarily to educational users over the past year-and-a-half, NComputing will take the $28 million it just raised (at a more than $100 million valuation) and use to target the enterprise market.

I spoke with Dukker about the importance of opening up new markets for PCs, and how that can be done using software. We also talked about NComputing’s push into the enterprise market, even as it continues to find success in education and the developing world. Currently the company sells 80 percent of its terminals to educational buyers, with 50 percent of its sales occurring in the U.S.

Q: Why would someone want to get into the PC industry today?

A: At eMachines we proved there is no low-cost PC that allows their suppliers to be profitable. Since the industry has not been able to bring prices down further, we have not been able to open up new markets. So all a PC maker can do to gain market share is to sell at low margins and steal share from other people.

Q: So why did you come back to the PC world?

A: After eMachines, I thought I was through with PCs, and then I got a call from my No. 2 guy at eMachines who was in Germany working with these guys who said they could lower the cost of PC ownership with software. I told him if you can do this, you can potentially change the world. The cost of the PC basically goes away. The chip costs $2 to produce, but the software is hard to do. It’s exactly what companies like VMware, Citrix and Microsoft are doing with desktop virtualization.

Q: What made the software so compelling?

A: With the PC what we have is a classic situation of the exhaustion of an architecture. PCs are becoming supercomputers and the applications are not keeping up. Unless you are doing some super science or are a hard-core gamer, you don’t need the processing power. With our software and hardware you can run a couple of terminals on one computer for about $70 per kit. It costs us about $11 to make the kit. This allows us to charge the customer less and make more at the same time, which is the hallmark of a disruptive technology.

Q: Why go after emerging markets first?

A: We gain credibility. By engaging enterprise customers later we will have more than 1 million people using our machines around the world. I want to further emphasize that this technology was not designed for emerging markets and education. It was originally designed to be a Citrix killer — the most efficient and cost-effective server-based computing solution for the enterprise. The reason we’re seeing the huge response in the education and emerging market is because their needs are immediate, whereas we know the enterprise markets are fairly slow.

Q: Where will you take this next?

A: We accepted the money to pick up the pace on the enterprise side without losing focus on our current markets. We are in trials in many large enterprise environments, and will make a meaningful impact on the Citrix and VMwares of the world in the back half of this year. We are also going to introduce a new product for broadband providers where you could have our chip inside a set-top box. It will be a desktop that’s being served to you for a couple bucks a month over your television by a broadband provider.

Microsoft (MSFT) has invested $240 million in Facebook at a valuation of $15 billion and gets the rights to sell third-party ads on the Facebook network. That’s about 2 percent stake. Not as crazy as the $900 million that MySpace (NWS) pried out of Google (GOOG), but still pretty steep. I thought the deal was for $500 million, so I am guessing there is another shoe to drop here. (Looks like Microsoft is going to be to Facebook what Yahoo was for Google…transition strategy!)

Today Facebook also launched an application for BlackBerry, and got RIM and T-Mobile USA on stage with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz to announce it today. Facebook already has an iPhone app that early adopters everywhere love to brag about. Moskowitz also announced the Facebook platform was expanding to all web-enabled phones, with apps appearing on mobile Facebook profiles and getting access to SMS to communicate with users.

Press call live blogging below the fold:

• The call was supposed to start at 2 pm, its already 2.04. Bad muzak playing!
• Mark Zuckerberg , if you want to play Steve Jobs, learn to be punctual like Steve.
• Maybe they are getting their stories right, and haven’t figured out how to put the obscene finger gesture to Google in polite/politically correct language.
• 2.10 pm, and still terrible music and no sign of anyone.
• 2.12 pm: It’s on. Vivek Verma and Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft, are on the call. Brandee Barker (spokesperson) and Owen Van Natta, vice president of operations and chief revenue officer at Facebook. are on the call.
• Mark is beyond all these PR things He got peeps it seems who are handling this!
• There is an error in the press release, and will be reissued.
• Owen is speaking. He is saying stuff which could be spoken by any executive on any conference call.
• Kevin - major win for Microsoft in advertising and strong signal from our biggest partner. Facebook is a strategic win for us. We are very pleased with the depth and the scope of this deal. Seems like Facebook is going to work on newer ads for social environment.
• Kevin says the equity stake is a strong statement of confidence in this partnership. Blah blah! 200 million users is in realm of possibility and combine that with monetization opportunity.
• Kevin - there are certain elements we won’t disclose about this deal. We have strong alignment around technology. Lot more we will do together.
• Owen says: lot of folks wanted to partner with us over advertising, and relationship has been great for us. We are now expanding our relationship beyond U.S. borders.
• Owen says: no restriction on 3rd party developers. I think they can tap into Microsoft ad center and other technologies.
• (Arrington asks) Any other investors in this round? Not announcing any other investors in this round for now. Just Microsoft.
• Kevin says - we are expanding our advertising relationship internationally and that is what we are announcing right now.
• In response to Josh Quittner’s question about who else were they talking to, Owen says not commenting on who were others they were talking to.
• Owen says lot of rumors about financing but this is the best set of terms we came up with this deal.
• Not talking about Facebook IPO.
• Is this deal just for banner ads? Will it be expanding to Internet Search deal and will it be separate deal? We are not announcing anything related to Web Search. This is only about advertising.
• Question Mine: Kevin Johnson (what we are seeing so far) we continue to see monetization which continues to improve. We will drive hire. Continues to improve… both parties are not disclosing the metrics. Part two - in terms of what we are using the capital for, our innovation and growth we are seeing today. Expanding our employee base. 700 employees in 2008 (wow). International growth and there is a lot of technical infrastructure we can build around the. Allow people to experience better Facebook. (I will expand on this point later)
• Building your own (FB) salesforce? Microsoft is an exclusive advertising platform partner. The two companies work together today and going forward - there are different needs advertisers have. Socialization of the Internet needs innovation.
• Does Microsoft have access to Facebook user data? User trust is core to what we focus on and we both are going to provide highly relevant advertising and focus on that. We don’t want to violate user trust…There are certain parts of the partnership we are not announcing. I think they are dodging a very relevant question.

Hitwise just sent me over some data that helps put the deal in perspective. According to the Internet monitoring firm, for the week ended 10/20/07:

*Facebook.com was the 9th most visited web site in the U.S., with .96 percent of all Internet visits.

*U.S traffic to Facebook.com has risen 102 percent year-over-year when compared with the week ended 10/21/06.

*Among a custom category of leading social networking web sites, Facebook.com received 15 percent of U.S. visits, putting it at No. 2 behind MySpace.com, which received 76 percent. Windows Live Spaces received 0.4 percent.

*Facebook.com received 9.9 percent of its U.S. traffic from search engines. Of that traffic, MSN Search and Live Search combined for .46 percent to Facebook.com. Google sent 6.82 percent of U.S. traffic while Yahoo! Search sent 1.34 percent of traffic.

*U.S. visits for Facebook.com among users ages 35 and over have increased 19 percent when compared with the week ended 10/21/06.