The deal is really nothing particularly unusual — an Internet video streaming service adding old shows to its lineup. Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), Hulu and many other streaming services do this all the time. About a month ago Amazon said it would let viewers help it choose the first of its original productions to add to the Prime service.

That was mildly interesting, but just a page from Netflix’s book. Somehow or other, the video streaming companies are going to have to shake loose new programming from the established media firms like Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS), CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) and others. Original programming like Netflix’s “House of Cards” proved to be a huge success, according to the company, and that is what drove Amazon to jump into the fray.

Of course all of these have to compete with Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube, which is far and away the leading provider of video content. That is because most of YouTube’s videos are made by amateurs and the videos are free. If — and it is a big “if” — YouTube can get viewers to pay for the various channels it has begun to offer, Google could end up putting a huge dent in revenues and profits at Netflix, Amazon Prime and others.

On a GAAP basis, the company posted first-quarter EPS of $1.20, compared with EPS of $1.07 in the same period a year ago. Adjusted earnings do not include a pretax charge of $166 million related to the devaluation of Venezuela’s currency.

DirecTV added 21,000 U.S. subscribers in the first quarter, and average revenue per customer rose 4.4% to $96.05. In the company’s Latin American division, the net subscriber count grew by 538,000, which was slightly lower than the growth in the same period a year ago. Average revenue per customer fell 10.5% to$54.23, primarily due to currency effects. The company said that stripping out currency effects average revenue per user rose 1.5%.

The company’s CEO said:

Our industry leading revenue growth of 8% continues to be driven by the strength of our premier brands and popularity of our differentiated product and service offerings across the Americas, as well as our ability to profitably grow [average revenue per user] in a challenging U.S. operating environment.

Perhaps the company’s best move in the quarter was something it did not do. DirecTV declined to pay the asking price of around $9 billion for the Brazilian unit of Vivendi. Shares jumped to a new 52-week high shortly after that decision was announced and have continued to rise since.

Shares are up 4.1% this morning at $60.37, which would mark a new 52-week high if it holds. The current 52-week range is $42.87 to $58.45. Thomson Reuters had a consensus analyst price target of around $60.20 before today’s report.

Ergen said, “We’re not going to lose because we’ve got a better offer on the table.” Dish’s offer for Sprint is $7.10 in cash per share, along with a 32% ownership stake for Sprint shareholders in the combined company, tops Softbank’s cash offer of $6.38 a share and a 30% stake in Sprint.

Softbank has said that it will not improve its offer, but that was then. Ergen appears to expect a sweetened offer for Sprint from Softbank, and indicated yesterday that Dish would have to seek a private equity partner if Softbank put in a bid of $7.50 or $8.00 a share.

Ergen also made it very clear about what is important to Dish: the spectrum owned by Clearwire Corp. (NASDAQ: CLWR), a company controlled by Sprint and for which the wireless carrier already has offered to buy the rest of the company. Dish has tried before to acquire spectrum from Clearwire, only to be rebuffed. Now the gloves are off.

Ergen’s strategy — if he can acquire Sprint/Clearwire — is to leverage Dish’s satellite network with a terrestrial wireless network that would allow subscribers to get mobile wireless service as part of a single package. Verizon Wireless — still a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) and Vodafone Group PLC (NASDAQ: VOD) — and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) both seek the same thing, but neither has the content licenses that Dish already has in place with the media companies.

That is a huge part of Ergen’s play here. Dish would be transformed virtually overnight into the only U.S. provider of a single, all-inclusive wireless-pay TV package that would allow customers seamless access to media content both inside and outside their homes.

Suddenly, Dish is a threat to what is essentially a duopoly at the top of the wireless industry in the United States. The FCC would be hard-pressed to deny a merger that promises to increase competition for consumers.

It is still early days, but the fight for Sprint/Clearwire has all the earmarks of being a good one for Sprint shareholders. Shares are trading now at $7.12, slightly above Dish’s cash offer of $7.10. If Softbank makes a higher bid, shares will shoot up on the expectation that Dish will top the offer.

Ergen has as much as said that Dish Network’s future depends on its acquisition of Sprint/Clearwire. Certainly Dish’s growth prospects are dim without a transformative deal like this, and there are no other deals out there like this one. For Dish, it is grow or die.

On a GAAP basis, Comcast’s EPS totaled $0.51, excluding one-time $0.03 per share gain on the sale of wireless spectrum licenses.

Comcast did not offer any guidance information, but the consensus estimates call for second-quarter EPS of $0.62 on revenue of $15.99 billion. The current full-year estimate calls for EPS of $2.38 on revenue of $68.04 billion.

The company’s CEO noted:

Cable’s results highlight revenue growth in every product, led by Video and High-Speed Internet, and overall customer growth, as we continue to effectively balance financial and customer performance. NBCUniversal’s businesses also generated strong first quarter performance, led by Film and Cable Networks.

Total revenue from NBCUniversal was down 2.4% year-over-year to $5.34 billion. Most of the decline was due to an 18.5% drop in the broadcast television segment. Revenue at the company’s theme parks rose 12.2% year-over-year.

Comcast lost 60,000 cable subscribers in the quarter, but added 433,000 high-speed Internet subscribers. Both numbers are slightly worse than subscriber turnover in the same period a year ago.

Average monthly revenue per video customer rose 8.1% to $155.05 in the quarter. Comcast claims nearly 22 million video customers, down from 22.3 million in the same period a year ago, and nearly 20 million high-speed Internet customers, up from 18.6 million a year ago.

Comcast’s shares are up 1.7% in premarket trading, at $42.01, in a 52-week range of $28.09 to $42.61. The consensus target price for the shares was around $46.75 before today’s report.

Earlier this month, Sinclair agreed to acquire Fisher Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: FSCI) for approximately $373 million in cash. Including this acquisition, Sinclair broadcast empire will reach more than a third of all U.S. television households.

Today’s offering includes a 30-day option from some selling stockholders for an additional 2.1 million shares. Net proceeds from the offering will be used to fund pending and future potential acquisitions and for general corporate purposes.

The number of shares in the offering equals about 17% of Sinclair’s total number of shares outstanding.

Shares of Sinclair have jumped more than 16% in the two weeks since the announcement of the Fisher acquisition and more than 35% in the past 30 days. The stock has more than doubled since the beginning of the year.

Shares are down about 1.8% this morning, at $27.00 in a 52-week range of $7.82 to $28.53.

Unlike streaming video competitor Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), Amazon seeks input from viewers of the pilot programs and will use that input to help it decide which programs to produce in full. Netflix produced 13 episodes of its “House of Cards” series without seeking viewer feedback.

Amazon’s plan could help it avoid making a costly mistake, but soliciting viewer feedback in any significant way slows down the production process. Netflix, however, takes a bigger financial gamble by producing an entire series at one time.

The free pilot programs and the viewer survey is primarily a marketing tool for Amazon. The company is hoping that viewers will be so pleased with what they see that they will sign up for the company’s Prime service.

One threat to Amazon’s free-pilot scheme has been pointed out at The Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD blog. The pilots have been released without the polish and production values that viewers have come to expect from TV programming. Average viewers are not used to looking at rough cuts and partially finished animation. That could lead those who fill out the surveys to rate the shows more poorly than they might if the pilots were more polished. Time will tell.

Amazon’s shares are up about 0.8% this morning, at $261.42 in a 52-week range of $185.51 to $284.72.

Netflix shares are up 2.9% at $168.58 in a 52-week range of $52.81 to $197.62.

Bloomberg cites unnamed sources who say that the deals would allow Twitter to stream the videos and split the advertising revenues with the media companies. One or more of the partnerships could be active by mid-May one source told Bloomberg.

Twitter introduced its Vine video-sharing app in January, which allows users to post and share short (six second) videos on its site. Vine was an instant hit, but it did not drive any added revenue to the company.

According to research cited by Bloomberg, a third of active Twitter users share a post about something they have seen on TV. Giving its users some additional incentive to view video clips and spend more time on the site and view more ads are all pluses for Twitter. For the media companies, greater exposure for their programming could drum up more advertising dollars, something that they need to fight back against the inroads that online streaming have made into their traditional distribution mechanisms of broadcast and pay TV.

In addition to the threat from Aereo, broadcasters and cable channels are raging at Dish Network Corp. (NASDAQ: DISH) and its Hopper DVR that allows subscribers to record a program and then replay it without advertising.

That may be a lose-lose situation though, because there are still more than 11 million households in the U.S. that still receive broadcast signals. Going cable-only would force these households either to pay for a subscription to Fox or find some other channel to watch. The other broadcast networks, CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS), ABC, owned by The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS), and NBC, owned by Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ: CMCSA) face the same threat and may end up as cable-only channels as well.

News Corp.’s COO told Bloomberg:

We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content. This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal. We will move to a subscription model if that’s our only recourse.

CBS has already threatened to pull its programming from Dish’s satellite system in response to the Hopper ad-skipping device. So far, Dish hasn’t blinked, but if CBS gets serious, Dish may have to back down or its 14 million subscribers will lose NFL football and other popular programming.

Aereo doesn’t face the same threat. The broadcasters will surely appeal the court decisions against them, all the way to the Supreme Court. If they lose there, then the switch to a cable-only network may be their only choice.

One thing remains certain: there are serious changes in the making with some serious money at stake.

In a July ruling, a district court judge denied the broadcasters request for an injunction to stop Aereo from offering its service. Today’s ruling denied the broadcasters’ appeal of that ruling.

Aereo, currently only available in New York City, makes an miniature antenna that captures over-the-air broadcast TV signals and then sells subscriptions to those signals via streaming over an Internet connection. In the original ruling, the judge stated that the Aereo device is virtually the same as a DVR, a device that was declared legal several years ago because its retransmission of programming is made to a single subscriber and is not a performance aimed at the general public. As such, the device does not violate copyright law.

There is too much at stake here for this to be the last word, but the situation does not look good for the broadcasters.

Among the heaviest users of video are consumers in Brazil, China, Russia, and South Korea, with 43%, 39%, 36%, and 44% of consumers, respectively, reporting that they use their devices to watch video. That’s all the so-called BRIC countries except India, where feature phones still outnumber smartphones by a wide margin. In the U.S., 28% of mobile phone owners watch video on their phones.

In the U.S. and China more than 70% of video watchers use the mobile web, while 72% of U.S. video consumers use an app. That’s far more than anywhere else in the world and is likely attributable to the availability of faster 3G and 4G networks. Watching video through apps is growing as well in China (55%) and the U.K. (59%), while 57% of Indians download clips for later viewing.

More than 40% of U.S. users watch a least one video a day, while nearly half of Brazilian and Chinese view at least one video a day. Some 37% of Chinese phone owners watch more than one video a day, while a third of Brazilians watch two or more. In the U.S., only 9% of phone owners watch more than one video a day.

There are a couple of developments to watch for going forward. One is whether or not companies that host videos can turn these viewing habits into revenue. The leading global video site is Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube, where virtually all video viewing is currently free.

The second is whether or not mobile viewing eventually displaces traditional TV viewing habits. So far, according to Nielsen, mobile video supplements traditional viewing habits and does not supplant them. That could change as companies like Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), and other web-based video providers add original programming to their arsenal.

The Nielsen report is available here.