The promotional elements will include in-show integrations for both "Top Chef 3 Miami" andTelemundo’s morning show "Cada Dia", a webisode cooking show hosted by "Top Chef" season two contestant Carlos Fernandez. The show will be produced in English and Spanish for BravoTV.com and Yahoo Telemundo Web sites.

Jason Klarman, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Digital, Bravo, said,  "Partnering with Telemundo is the perfect way to leverage the Latin influence of this season and drive viewership with the Hispanic audience."

"This alliance represents the perfect marriage between Bravo’s quality product and bilingual viewership and Telemundo’s bilingual talent," said Don Browne, President, Telemundo.

 "This partnership will strengthen Bravo’s presence among U.S. Hispanics and will increase Telemundo’s audience and awareness in the general market."

"TelevisionWithoutPity is an online brand destination for the impassioned and opinionated television viewer, which mirrors the exact attributes of Bravo’s core audience," said Zalaznick. "This will broaden the scope of our sites to create a community where smart people with something to say about their favorite shows, past and present, can get together under the umbrella of Bravo’s pop sensibility."

TelevisionWithoutPity summarizes over 40 TV shows into weekly "recaps" featuring witty commentary on what took place on each show. Later this month "Brothers & Sisters," "Men in Trees," "Drive" and "The Wire" will be added to the existing recaps.

The site has a good selection of program recaps and a sizeable variety of forums covering areas such as news shows, game shows and reality shows. The recaps are reminiscent of the cable program The Soup that does a weekly review of the happenings in pop culture.

TelevisionWithoutPity has one million unique monthly visitors who spend an average of 12.9 minutes on the site during a visit and receive about 30 million page views a month, according to comScore Mediametrix.

Founders of the site Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting originally met in a chat room and bonded over their love hate-relationship with bad TV. The two collaborated to create DawsonsWrap.com in the fall of 1998, a site focused on Dawson’s Creek. Because of a good response from that site the two created MightyBigTV.com in 1999, which changed its name to TelevisionWithoutPity.com in 2002.

"We only did this to make our ongoing project of stalking Tim Gunn a bit easier," joked Bunting and Ariano. "Actually, it’s long been our dream to turn Television Without Pity into the fullest, richest, raddest, all-round best TV site on the internet, and with Bravo’s commitment and creativity behind us, we’re thrilled to start making that happen."

When the Bravo TV show “Top Chef” debuts its new series on April 12th, an online store will also launch on the site.

To purchase items online, Bravo will offer, among its payment options, PayPal Mobile, which launched in late March.

“We saw record viewer response from all of our other interactive text messaging initiatives, from the voting during Project Runway’s finale, to getting text messaged from Top Chef characters during the show. We strongly believe this new feature will be equally embraced by our savvy audience.” Lauren Zalaznick, Bravo’s President, said in a statement.

During the show, Bravo will prompt viewers on-screen when items are available for purchase with PayPal Mobile’s text-to-buy feature. The price of all items will include tax and shipping to ensure viewers will have a one-stop and simplified process for this new feature.

Bravo also said it will promote the PayPal Mobile text to buy service via on-air spots during “Top Chef” and on BravoTV.com.

Once an order has been placed with PayPal Mobile, the user will receive a callback to confirm the legitimacy of the order. Then the order goes through processing and ships to the purchaser.

That means while watching an aspiring contestant get dismissed from the competition, viewers can order a copy of the stylish kitchen towel he or she cried into after receiving the bad news. One can only imagine what other reality shows could do with PayPal Mobile.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

It’s been talked about for a while – that someone would snap up iVillage (here’s the whole iVillage history from PaidContent). And, NBC seems to be an interesting choice to go after iVillage, but also makes sense to fit into its television networks (Bravo and USA), to work within the network to promote and crosspromote within the iVillage network, which includes blogs and the old skool (which still works wonders) message boards.

While I am not in the demographic, the community does not have the feel of other communities recently snapped up, like MySpace, About.com and others. But, 14MM users (stat from Robert Ricci) is no small network to mock.

It’s an interesting position for PR people – there are message boards to tread lightly in, the articles themselves on the site, the potential for cross-pitching with TV shows (when we find out how the site will be integrated) and blogs to pitch and send product out to.

Now, if NBCU buys ClubMom, they’ll have that market locked up tight…

Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

There’s somethin’ happenin’ here
And what it is ain’t exactly clear…

Buffalo Springfield recorded ‘For What It’s Worth’ about 40 years ago. In 2001, Apple filed for a trademark on the term “iPod” and partially described it as “Portable and handheld digital electronic devices for recording, organizing, transmitting, manipulating, and reviewing text, data, and audio files;”.

Engadget points out that Apple has submitted a revised description back in June, with something new in Goods and Services: “handheld digital electronic devices for recording, organizing, transmitting, manipulating, and reviewing text, data, audio, image, and video files;”

(The USPTO site doesn’t offer a permalink to trademark searches. Go to the site, click on Search under Trademarks, search on “iPod”, and look at serial numbers 78653661 and 78089144.)

So what are a couple of extra words worth? Possibly a new iPod before the holidays, capable of supporting video, available for convenient download from the iTunes Music Store. Or perhaps Media Store instead?

Video for the small screen can work. Nintendo was stuffing Johnny Bravo into cartridges for the GameBoy Advance well before Sony dropped the PSP on the crowd, along with its UMD-format movies (available separately, see store for details.)

Apple’s engineers definitely have the smarts to make it work. And Steve Jobs has a new friend in Disney top-man Robert Iger, who certainly could have the studio people scrape together some content to help spur interest.

Like other tech companies, Apple has to get something new to market at intervals to maintain its revenue stream. Sales of the iPod have begun to flatten; Apple pays at least 70 cents of every single it sells on iTunes to a music label, probably more to the major players, and that’s out of 99 cents.

Apple recently sold its 500 millionth song. That’s $495 million at 99 cents each; knock off 70 cents per, and the figure comes down to $145 million leftover for the tea kitty in Cupertino. Another digital media revenue stream would certainly help, especially if Apple can get better terms.

That path may be lit with the glow of a million video iPods under Christmas trees in 2005.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.