Content Deals
Murdoch’s Sky TV looks set to surprise industry pundits and mightily miff Virgin with a sneaky agreement with Internet television/ broadband ISP group Tiscali.
According to an article in The Times today, Tiscali have been slurping coffee and dunking biscuits with the BSkyB boys, and look set to get jiggy with a deal to let Tiscali deliver the TV channels pulled from Virgin’s service recently.
Continue reading Sky TV Looks Set To Sign Distribution Deal With Tiscali: Virgin Media Would Suffer
Another independent website gets swallowed up by a corporate giant as the well-regarded photography website dpreview.com is acquired by Amazon.com.
Beginning as a hobby site in 1998, dpreview.com has grown to be one of the biggest photographic resources on the web, providing in depth digital camera reviews backed by a thriving and passionate bulletin board community.
Continue reading DPReview.com Bought By Amazon
Joost is continuing to pick up content partners with the most recent being Warner Bros. Television (WBTV). This time Joost is getting the content on an exclusive basis.
One of the common complaints of the TV service, has been that there isn’t anything to watch on it, as was brought up in a recent BBC trial. Having seen what the content of this deal is, we’re not sure that the step towards desirable programming has moved forward.
Continue reading Warner Brothers TV: Joost Gets Exclusive Content
T-Mobile and independent music download site ARTISTdirect have pressed the flesh, slapped each others backs and distributed manly business hugs after agreeing to work together to launch a new UK music download service.
Continue reading T-Mobile UK Launches Music Download Site
Rockers Nine Inch Nails have released three tracks from their new album, “Year Zero” via the controversial BitTorrent mega-site, The Pirate Bay.
Although the band has already acquired a reputation for dishing out the freebies – new Nine Inch Nails (NiN) content has been available for free both online and on their website for some time – it’s the first time that they’ve released material directly via the torrent protocol.
Continue reading Nine Inch Nails Release Tracks Via Pirate Bay
Bebo have signed the team behind YouTube LonelyGirl.
YouTube watchers will be well aware of LonelyGirl 15 and her eventual unveiling as the product a small drama-writing team, rather than a troubled fifteen year old.
When that all came out (as it was eventually bound to), many thought LonleyGirl15, or Bree as she’s named would fade away, but the pretense of the story was kept up and ‘her’ video pieces have continued, in fact her channel remains the most subscribed channel of all time on YouTube.
Well, the 31 million member strong social networking site Bebo, have got the LonelyGirl team onboard now to create Kate Modern for them – an English LonelyGirl.
This time they’re being upfront from the start that Kate Modern isn’t real. There will be video pieces and posts made to her Bebo profile.
Mashable reported that it will all be going live in July with the episodes will be aired multiple times per week on Bebo.
The Times spoke to Miles Beckett, a San Diego medical studies drop-out who co-created Bree, to get the background, “Kate Modern is a 19-year-old university student in London. She wants to fit in with her friends and has problems with her parents — but yes, Kate is fictional and will be played by an actress.”
As The Times points out in their coverage
the innocence of LonelyGirl has been replaced by hard-nosed commerce. Joanna Shields, Bebo’s international president, said: “Kate Modern is a great proposition for advertisers and brands. Bebo users average 41 minutes per session and that can’t be ignored.”
Orange France have picked up a deal with the US studio Paramount Pictures, to distribute their content in France.
It’s not just old content that will be available, but new productions from Paramount including DreamWorks titles, which will be among the latest films available.
Orange France customers with a broadband digital television package or a High-Speed Internet package will be able to enjoy a Video-On-Demand programming schedule including the studio’s latest releases, such as Mission Impossible III, Over the Hedge and World Trade Center, among others.
There’s over 2,500 films, in French or original language versions with subtitles, available on the 24/24 Video service currently, which costs from 3 Euros to rent for 24 hours. Usual features such as unlimited viewing, pause functions and fast forward and rewind are available.
Guinness World Records TV have been in touch to let us know that they’ve just completed a deal with Joost.
We weren’t expecting to be so Joost-tastic today, but when the news arrives, you’ve got to tell it.
Initially 35 hours will be made available comprising of their UK show, Ultimate Guinness World Records. It’s available to Joost viewers globally.
They haven’t hung around either in getting the content out. Checking the latest incarnation of Joost, we see that the content is up there already.
Additional content will be added on a monthly basis, with Guinness World Record (GWR) making the point that they’ll be “controlling its programming line-up on the platform.”
They’ve got 400 hours of it, so there’s plenty more to come.
Both sides are in back-slapping mode with Rob Molloy, Director of Television at Guinness World Records keen to keep the door open to deliver their content to other platforms by saying “We are thrilled to be partnering with a company as exciting as Joost, once again this shows how easily Guinness World Records content can be adapted to fit into so many areas of new media and for such varied audiences.”
Yvette Alberdingkthijm, EVP of content strategy and acquisition Joost took the pun-ing route of “We are delighted to have Guinness World Records on board and look forward to offering our viewers record breaking content.”
It’s interesting to realise that GWR TV is part of the HIT Entertainment who own the hugely popular children’s content Bob the Builder, Barney and Thomas the Tank Engine.
We wonder if this GWR deal is a tester for HIT, opening the doors for a much bigger deal to be coming out.
After years of throwing squadrons of lawyers at each other, the big Apples – Apple Inc and Apple Corps – kissed and made up a few months ago and now it looks like they can’t stop the love.
Yesterday, record company giants EMI Group PLC announced that it planned to unveil “an exciting new digital offering” with Steve Jobs and the gang at Apple, leading pundits to conclude that The Beatles’ music catalogue is finally about to be made available through Apple’s iTunes online music store.
Spinning the expectation-o-meter right up to eleven, EMI revealed that their chief executive, Eric Nicoli, and Apple head honcho Jobs will be holding a news conference today, which will be supplemented by a “special live performance.”
The Beatles have famously refused to sign up to iTunes and other online music services for years, and many expect the download charts to be instantly filled up with the Fab Four’s songs as soon as their catalogue becomes available.
Of course, the fact that the story broke on April Fool’s Day has led some to think it might be a bit of a jolly wind-up wheeze, so I guess we’ll have to wait to see if the scheduled 1pm conference happens or not.
Mind you, if it is an April Fool’s it’s a pretty crummy one compared to Google’s TiSP Toilet wireless network one.
Another day, another content deal as the UK National broadcaster, the BBC, sign a deal with YouTube/Google to make a selection of their content available on YouTube on an non-exclusive basis.
Two deals have been done, one with the BBC, the other BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC. Financial terms of the deal aren’t being discussed at all.
There will be three YouTube ‘channels’ under the deal. Two of them are live already, BBC and BBCWorldwide, with BBCWorld to follow ‘shortly.’
BBC is very much in the YouTube model, full of rough camcorder diary pieces, and behind the scenes shots giving an ‘insight’ into the workings of the BBC. Currently there are 31 pieces going back one month.
BBCWorldwide is labelled as “The best of British TV” and currently has 78 video pieces on it and contains a ton on Top Gear, Attenborough and a smattering of comedy shows like The Mighty Boosh and Catherine Tate. Will also “include a limited amount of advertising.”
BBCWorld isn’t up and running yet, but when it is, will only be available to YouTube viewers outside the UK. It will be advertising-funded.
Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, likes the project, “The partnership provides both a creative outlet for a range of short-form content from BBC programme makers and the opportunity to learn about new forms of audience behaviour.
What’s it like?
Surprisingly for the BBC the quality of the video isn’t what it could be. Quite a change from the days when quality was everything.
Interestingly, fans of BBC content are barred from showing their fav ditties on any other sites as “Embedding disabled by request.” If the BBC has requested this, or YouTube isn’t clear. It’s more likely given they’ve paid the BBC for their content, and we imagine that they damn well want viewers visiting their site to see the videos.
This is great for the BBC as they get to distribute their content widely (fitting their remit) while not having to spend any money on distribution of the content, in fact receiving payment for the privilege.