With the release this week of Sprint’s touch-screen Instinct phone, the head-to-head with Apple’s July 11 launch of the 3G iPhone finally is joined. Sprint’s phone comes in prices $60 less than the new iPhone, and Sprint’s 3G data network is already proven and widespread. We have not used the phone yet, so we can’t speak to its attributes, but it looks close enough to an iPhone to attract those Sprint customers who don’t want to switch to AT&T. It is not clear yet whether Verizon has a direct competitor coming to market yet. Regardless, the release of the 3G iPhone at a very aggressive $199 price point is sending shivers down competitors’ spines. Early indications from consumers is that Apple and AT&T could add millions to their customer base by the time the summer is over.

Does this matter to content providers? Hell, yes! The migration of data access to the mobileplatform has begun.  Yahoo Mail already sees 14 million uniques to its mobiel site, ESPN Mobile often clocks 11 million and the Weather channel 8 million. Dig even deeper and you will see economically important pieces of the Web start to splinter off towards mobile. Nielsen reports that somewhere between 10 and 12 million users access mobile search services every month. Among youth, text messaging is replacing email as the preferred mode of contact. Searcha dn email are cash cows for this industry, and any movement away fromt he Web in some demos represent million and billions in revenues also moving. There is a direct correlation between imporved interfaces adn mobile Web access and use of the mobile Web. Magazines not only need a toe in that water. They need a real strategy for how their brands translate into mobile services.

The 3D virtual world Second Life celebrates its fifth anniversary this month, claiming it has over 10 million registered users and has logged up to 50,000 concurrent users at a time. The Eyeball is one of those 10 million registrants, and like many others he just signed up to see how boring it was before logging out forever. Linden Labs (owner of SL) have always played silly games with their numbers, and none of its stats really indicates much of anything anymore. SL is the kind of thing the Eyeball hesitates mocking if only because you never know what lame-brained geeky behavior is going to catch on ultimately. (We’re still wondering if Twitter really matters). As a marketing vehicle, SL surely is a bust. Except for virtual worlds that MTV/VH1 erected around some of its TV shows (“Virtual Hills”) virtual worlds have not proven effective places to extend brands. Cisco and IBM still believe that avatars and 3D workspaces will make great virtual meeting worlds of the future, but we remain skeptical. Except for high level gaming worlds like World of Warcraft, virtual existence shows no signs of breaking out into the mainstream any time soon. We suggest that any partnership meeting that involves prominent use of the term “avatar” end quickly.

Games magazine publisher Future US is the company behind a new downloadable multimedia magazine on the Sony Playstation3 game console, dubbed “Qore.” With the PS3 connected to the Internet, users can purchase one-issue for $2.99, which downloads to the console and plays back as a set of video files, themes and wallpapers that can be applied to the game unit interface. The ubiquitous Veronica Belmont (who seems to be the official Web video hostess of all things geeky) fronts the “magazine” as emcee. The content is not new, since it replicates much of the same material you find on a games magazine with a packed in disc. What is new is the distribution mechanism. With tens of millions of next-generation games consoles (now all with Internet connections) tied to TVs, these are the most powerful bridges between Web and living room now. They constitute a parallel TV universe, the first set top boxes with real distribution. The Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii also provide interesting places where munchable smaller content may have a place – i.e. all that Web video you are producing online. The Eyeball warns all publishers that they ignore this platform at their peril. These game console may never become Web browser replacements, but with the Wii now penetrating a new and broader demographic, as a class they now address a wide population in lean back mode.

The much-hyped CBS strategy to hyper-distribute its video far and wide will get a boost when a new video player launches in coming months. Promising new features that lets users embed CBS premium content across social networks and personal sites, the company says it fully embraces an “open approach” to redistributing content wherever the user wants to plant it. In addition to easier sharing and embedding, the new player will allow video search as well as higher quality H.264 video playback for near-HD quality. We are already starting to see CBS videos embedded at some blog and news aggregation sites. The clips carry with them ad pre-rolls that CBS hopes will monetize the effort so that someone somewhere can actually make some money off of this digital video craze.

We are on the cusp of a video tipping point online as more and more sites start redistributing branded media. Video is now as easy to cut an dpaste into an article and a blog post as an image. that means we start using video differently. Years ago, I recall the forward thinkers at Slate “revolutionizing” media reviews with actual audio clips embedded in the articles. The publisher at the time complained to me that rights issues were making a headache out of trying to make this obvious next move in the use of multimedia online. Now, finally, everyone is wising up to the benefits of letting people use and resuse your content easily so long as a sensible business model is attached to it. Don’t touch that dial. The metrics we see in the next few months about hyper-distribution and its effect on brands will be very important.