YouTube, top talent agency near deal
YouTube and Hollywood’s the William Morris Agency are about to sign a deal in which WMA’s clients would appear in online videos.
The Web video talks were first reported in today’s New York Times. Reps for both parties refused to comment, the Times said.
WMA apparently will take an ownership stake in the videos produced for or by YouTube.
YouTube, owned by Google, has been taking tentative steps toward adding professional video to its sea of amateur footage. It has started running authorized online TV episodes from CBS and Showtime, and recently retooled its site for the widescreen video ratio that filmmakers favor.
It also has added an enhanced video quality option described as HD. Its Screening Room recently featured the premiere of a Wayne Wang movie.
Streaming vids boost Netflix profits
Saying “it’s very clear that streaming is energizing our growth,” Netflix chieftain Reed Hastings announced strong earnings, revenues and subscriber increases for the fourth quarter, sending its stock on a two-day tear. Profits were up 45%.
Hastings credited Netflix’s movie-streaming service Watch Instantly with the flashy numbers, which handily beat the Street. For the online video industry, this is a big deal.
The news that online video service already is impacting the mail-rental giant’s bottom line is startling and exciting. No doubt the story is being closely tracked in the Hollywood studios and at the networks.
Netflix has been aggressively promoting its streaming videos and lining up hardware partners, especially in recent months. Hastings said 2008′s “substantial” investment in online video content will be surpassed in 2009.
There was no indication he would be adding current hit movies to Watch Instantly, however.
(Read the Netflix earnings report.)
To use Watch Instantly you have to be a Netflix DVD rental subscriber, which was likely a factor in the company’s report that it brought in more subscribers at a lower acquisition cost. (Cablers can only dream … ) Total subscribers are about to surpass 10 million.
Hastings said he saw evidence that Watch Instantly users were renting fewer DVDs. “Time will tell whether this substitution effect is an attribute of early adopters or a mainstream behavior.” He said Netflix was in talks with “nearly every (consumer electronics) manufacturer” regarding Blu-rays and online television.
Netflix stock shot up 15% on Tuesday’s news, and added another 4% Wednesday amid a strong market rally.
“We plan to spend as much money as we can with the studios, licensing as much content as we can — we are already one of the studios’ largest Internet revenue sources,” Hastings said. “Our spending is limited only by what content is available at reasonable costs.”
Netflix has been busily cutting carriage deals for its streaming video service, now standard on some Blu-ray players from LG and Samsung. LG plans “broadband TVs” with Netflix inside. The recently redesigned Xbox 360 Marketplace offers Watch Instantly, and lone wolves can buy a black box, from Roku, that picks up only that signal. TiVo started carrying the Netflix online video stream late last year.
Meanwhile, over at set-top box maker Vudu, 15% of workers were laid off. That leaves about 50 staffers. A spokesman said most of those shown the door were temp workers.
Disclosure: I’m a Netflix stockholder, feeling better about things now. The company’s affiliate ads run on this blog.
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Boxee thinks outside cable TV
The New York Times today profiles Boxee, a company whose software allows users to cherry-pick video content from various online outlets and watch on a regular or high-def TV monitor.
The New York company “is treading over the carefully negotiated business arrangements of much larger companies and garnering accolades from tech-heads for doing what the big guys have failed to do,” the Times said.
The Boxee software is free, and works on Macs and the Apple TV box. A PC version is in “private alpha,” the company web site says (how’s that for a switch, Mac fans).
Boxee had one of the hottest booths at this month’s CES, the Times reported. Boxee’s blog said the company was approached at the consumer electronics show by “several device makers” interested in embedding the software in existing or future products.
One cable executive said the service was intriguing, but its business prospects were not so hot:
“There is a lot about Boxee that doesn’t work, like the business model, which is really nonexistent right now,” the unidentified cable exec said.
He probably should be hoping things stay that way. One of the biggest complaints, among the many about cable TV service, is its bundling of networks and stations, which effectively forces consumers to pay for channels they never watch.
Boxee admits its technology is not exactly user friendly at this point: “Boxee is not optimized for the Apple TV hardware, Netflix doesn’t work on it, etc.” (Although the user profile asks for Netflix account info.)
An Apple computer or one running on Linux does have to be connected to the TV unless an Apple TV device is attached. Boxee also can be used just on, say, a Mac computer.
A Boxee poll of its web site visitors found the Joost online video application was the one they most wanted to see incorporated into the software.
The web site includes a social media set-up that has links to your presence on the usual suspects. Your first “friend” will Boxee’s creator and CEO, Avner Ronen, 33, pictured.
Hulu takes the fall for ‘Sunny’ blackout
“We screwed up royally,” Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has told site users in a major exhibition of transparency.
The trouble started when the upscale video site suddenly pulled nearly three seasons of the FX channel hit “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
Kilar wrote on the blog, “We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ‘Sunny’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have.”
The series was yanked at the request of the content owner, FX Networks. Noting that the matter was out of Hulu’s hands, Kilar praised the cable network for agreeing to temporarily return the episodes, in response to a flood of complaints. That’s two more weeks to keep up with Kaitlin Olson (pictured) and company.
The affair remains a bit curious, however, since FX is owned by News Corp., a co-founder of Hulu along with NBC Universal. (At one point the cabler was known as “FX: Fox Gone Cable.”) So a News Corp. company removed its content from a News Corp. site, and then not surprisingly agreed to mitigate the damage. But the series is coming down irrespective of what’s going on behind the scenes.
One explanation could be the launch last summer of the FX web site, which carries 45 episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” The site is underwhelming and the “Sunny” video seems not to work at times — as is almost never the case at Hulu. That’s one way to compete when you can’t.
But other FX shows such as “Nip/Tuck” and “Sons of Anarchy” remain on Hulu, where presumably a lot of folks who are among the millions who don’t get FX go to see them.
Back to Kilar and the mea culpa: The CEO vowed to provide Hulu users with “the decency of a reasonable warning before the content is taken down.” The Hulu blog entry was titled: “Customer Trust Is Hard Won, Easily Lost.” Props to him.
Hulu would do well to point to off-site presentations of content it has to remove. That’s the same spirit of the web that brings us that buzz term “transparency.” Hard to imagine a content provider would have a problem with links, assuming the venue is legit. And, of course, anyone can clink anywhere on non-firewalled sites.
FX, meanwhile, should do something about its watery web site before eliminating content on a much-better streaming video outlet.
Of course, many people will simply head over to the BitTorrent side of the street, without apology.
LG flows Netflix stream into HDTVs
No black box required:
LG continues to cut innovative deals with movie and TV content distributors, this time routing Netflix’s streaming video service through new LCD and plasma HDTV models to be introduced at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.
The “Broadband HDTVs” are expected in market this spring. Streaming video will come straight into the HDTVs. Local broadband issues would be expected to affect quality as with any outboard Internet video device.
Netflix and LG already have partnered on a set-top box and the network BD300 Blu-ray player. LG said five of its upcoming Blu-ray players and home theater set-ups would include Netflix’s streaming service, called Watch Instantly.
“LG Electronics was first to embrace Netflix as a streaming partner a year ago, and was first in 2008 to introduce a Blu-ray disc player that streams movies from Netflix,” said the mail-rental giant’s chieftain Reed Hastings. “So it’s fitting that LG is the first to introduce Netflix instant streaming directly to the TV with these next-generation HDTVs.”
For Netflix, the move continues its evolution away from the famous red mailer envelopes containing rental DVD discs. Hastings, credited as an early visionary of e-commerce, has long said broadband delivery would be the future for his company. (For this reason, I remain a cautiously optimistic shareholder in Netflix.)
LG has been aggressively trying to set its consumer electronics products apart from the big-box crowd with content-driven deals. A week ago, the Korean manufacturer announced online video deals for its Blu-ray players with online PPV provider CinemaNow and user-generated video homebase YouTube.