Exclusive - Xfire, which operates a social service used by 19 million gamers, has raised $4 million in fresh funding from Intel Capital and unnamed angel investors.
As a result of the capital injection, Xfire is severing the ties with Titan Gaming, the company that acquired them from Viacom a little over a year ago.
Both Xfire and Titan will henceforth operate independently from one another. → Read More
Hulu has just struck a content partnership with Viacom to return “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” to the content platform.
The deal also includes other TV Shows from Viacom’s media networks, including Comedy Central, MTV, BET, VH1, Spike TV, and TV Land to the Hulu Plus subscription service. Viacom had previously pulled the two Comedy Central shows from Hulu last March. Financial terms of the new agreement were not disclosed. → Read More
Xfire, the social network for gamers that was acquired by Viacom for $102 million back in 2006, has a new owner. The buyer is Titan Gaming, a small company that raised a mere $1 million in angel funding to date, so we’re making an educated guess here and going to assume that it was sold for a song compared to the price Viacom paid a couple of years ago.
In a message posted on the Xfire website very recently (via Kotaku), it looks like most of the development team is not sticking around: (after the jump) → Read More
How much did Google spend to fend off Viacom’s $1 billion copyright lawsuit? On today’s earnings call, CFO Patrick Pichette revealed that Google’s legal bills for the case amounted to $100 million, and that was before it went to trial.
The legal bill could have ended up being many times that amount, but last month the judge threw out the case, and Google declared victory. Viacom will reportedly try to appeal, but the summary judgement was pretty harsh. As I wrote at the time: → Read More
The long-standing, $1 billion copyright infringement case against YouTube by Viacom is now pretty much over. The judge incredibly threw out the case in a summary judgement (his final order is embedded below) and YouTube has declared victory. Viacom first filed its lawsuit in 2007. And plenty of juicy tidbits have come out over the years from unsealed documents. An appeal is pretty much certain, but the fact that Viacom could not even get to trial sets a bad precedent. → Read More
We’re still going through these recently released YouTube/Viacom litigation documents, and it’s becoming clear that we can’t take everything that’s being said by either party at face value (as if we didn’t know that already). We’ve come across a good example. In Viacom’s document Statement of Undisputed Facts, it presented the following seemingly damning passage that indicates that YouTube co-founder Steve Chen was advocating pirating movies (a quote that’s now appearing in quite a few news articles). But Viacom may be misrepresenting the evidence. Here’s their version:
In a July 29,2005 email about competing video websites, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, “steal it!”, and Chad Hurley responded: “hmm, steal the movies?”
Steve Chen replìed: “we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type. . . . viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.”
Earlier today, several previously sealed legal documents in the longstanding copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube by Viacom were made public. In conjunction with the public release of those documents, YouTube’s chief counsel Zahavah Levine wrote a blog post which reads more like a summary of a legal brief.
In it, Levine outlines YouTube’s main defense against Viacom’s allegations, including the fact that Viacom “secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there.” Levine also notes that “Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube,” suggesting that the current $1 billion lawsuit is its attempt to cash in on YouTube years after the fact. → Read More
When Hulu first launched, it was supposed to be the media industry’s answer to YouTube: a place where shows and movies from TV would find an audience online and make advertising money directly for the media companies backing it instead of sharing any of that video ad money with YouTube. All that professional quality video from NBC, Fox, and Comedy Central brought in a huge audience, helping Hulu grow into the second largest video site online with more than 1 billion video views a month.
Well, that formula is great for Hulu, but it isn’t working for one of its biggest media partners. Yesterday, Viacom decided to pull two of the top shows from Hulu: Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Viacom made the calculation that it can make more money by recentralizing distribution of its hit shows on its own sites than allowing them to be streamed on Hulu. Why should they split video ad revenues with Hulu when they can have it all themselves → Read More
Today, Viacom and Netflix announced a new agreement that will bring hit shows from various Viacom networks, like, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon to your Xbox, laptop, etc. Yes, that means you can stream all 139 episodes from the first nine seasons of South Park right now. And for the kids – there’s a slew of Nickelodeon programming available so you don’t have to tend to your own flesh and blood. → Read More
Big Media’s love affair with the Internet ebbs and flows with the markets. When they see money pouring into Web startups, they feel threatened and rush to do the same. They ramp up their digital divisions, which usually are no more than venture arms, and hope to strike it rich. When the markets are down, as they are now, their attention drifts elsewhere—exactly at the time when they can pick up innovation on the cheap.
“M&A is gone,” the digital media chief at one of the largest media companies tells me. Other than a few targeted acquisitions to fill out business or technology holes, “you look foolish making any purchases,” he says, “especially if prices are still going down.”
And those prices are way down. Consider, for example, that CBS’s entire market capitalization is now only $2.5 billion, which is not much more than the $2.1 billion its digital division CBS Interactive paid in cash over the past two years for Cnet ($1.8 billion) and Last.fm ($280 million). (It also made a number of other smaller acquisitions and investments). As of December 31, 2008, CBS only had $419 million in cash on its balance sheet. → Read More
Time Warner subscribers almost, almost lost some of the best cable networks if a deal hadn’t been struck by the time the NYV ball dropped. Thankfully, Viacom and Time Warner came together in the name of the subscribers (and money) and penned an agreement in principle that will keep Dora and Stewart on the air. → Read More
MTV Networks has acquired the remaining portion of Social Project that it did not already own. Terms were not disclosed. Previously, MTV Networks was a minority investor in Social Project, which is behind the Flux social-networking platform powering many of its sites, including MTV.com, TheDailyShow.com, and ColbertNation.com. Social Project, which competes with Ning and KickApps, had previously raised $47.5 million, mostly from MTV’s parent company Viacom.
Social Project started life as Tagworld, before partnering with Viacom to add social media features to its sites. Last November, Flux was launched as a joint venture to let people create their own niche social networks and tap into Viacom’s vast library of video content. Since then, Flux has added about 2 million members, bringing the total to 7.6 million across about 1,000 different sites. The biggest one is MTV.com, with 600,000 registered members. Of those, 250,000 signed up on one day alone, the day of the MTV Video Music Awards on September 7. (You have to be registered to leave a rating or comment.). And, according to MTV Networks, engagement levels across all of MTV.com (as measured by time spent on the site and pageviews) are up 20 percent, and up 140 percent among Flux members. → Read More
It is not enough to be a destination site anymore. Everyone now wants to become an ad network. MTV Networks on Monday announced that it has expanded its vertical ad network strategy by building ad networks around the service’s core properties.
Each vertical ad network will be called a “Tribe.” Much like In contrast to what LinkedIn is trying to do with its new ad network (reselling access to its audience no matter where they may roam on the Web), MTV.com is basically reselling access to its advertisers audience. It is striking deals with other sites that share a similar audience (i.e., speak to the same Tribe) and offering its existing advertisers inventory on those hand-selected sites. → Read More
Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Comcast has bought newsletter service DailyCandy for an unconfirmed $125 million. The site caters to women interested in fashion, food, travel and other cosmopolitan topics. Comcast apparently beat out Viacom with its willingness to pay $5 million more than Viacom’s offer of $120 million. Bob Pittman of Pilot Group Ventures, the holding company of DailyCandy, says the service was expected to hit $25 million in revenue this year with an EBITDA of over $10 million. DailyCandy is understood to have been on the block for years, with speculation from just last month that it would sell for $75 million. CrunchBase Information Dailycandy Comcast Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The Google-Viacom showdown over the handover of YouTube user data appears to be over. The two sides agreed to changes in a previous ruling that would have required Google to hand over user id’s, IP addresses and a list of all viewed YouTube videos to Viacom in connection with their ongoing copyright infringement litigation. After an online uprising against the order, Viacom tried to assert that they never requested personally identifiable information (they did), and later promised not to use the information to sue individuals. The value of that promise was questioned by us and many others. The new order, filed this evening, states that Google will substitue user id’s and IP addresses for anonymous but unique identifiers. The full order is below, but the key language is: When producing data from the Logging Database pursuant to the Order, Defendants shall substitute values while preserving uniqueness for entries in the following fields: User ID, IP Address and Visitor ID. The parties shall agree as promptly as feasible on a specific protocol to govern this substitution whereby each unique value contained in these fields shall be assigned a correlative unique substituted value, and preexisting interdependencies shall be retained in the version of the data produced. Defendants shall promptly (no later than 7 business days after execution of this Stipulation) provide a proposed protocol for this substitution. Defendants agree to reasonably consult with Plaintiffs’ consultant if necessary to reach agreement on the protocol. Without IP addresses and user names it will be significantly more difficult for Viacom to determine which individuals may have viewed any particular video. I for one have no further objections to this data being handed over from a privacy standpoint, although I still urge Viacom to stop the endless litigation and consider more innovative business models around their content. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/wrapper.ashx?doc_id=949507&swf_url=http%3A//content1.docstoc.com.s3.amazonaws.com/google_youtube_viacom.pdf.swf&enableFullScreen=1google viacom youtube agreement – Get more Legal Forms → Read More
Earlier this month Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, ordered Google to hand over YouTube user log data to Viacom to help Viacom determine damages in their ongoing billion dollar litigation with Google. We and others cried out in protest, since the data being delivered included username, IP address and identifiers of all videos viewed on YouTube. And the entity it was being delivered to has a penchant for litigating over copyright infringement (some of their many lawsuits are mentioned in the original post). The fear is that if data is turned over to Viacom, any YouTube user who has watched a copyrighted video would be subject to a lawsuit. Viacom’s first line of defense when the negative press hit was obfuscation. They said “Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any YouTube user. The personally identifiable information that YouTube collects from its users will be stripped from the data before it is transferred to Viacom.” Sounds good, right? The LA Times mentioned it in their article on the issue and quoted Viacom. A number of other publications then followed, saying that Viacom wasn’t going to collect all the data they were entitled to under the order. But not really. Everyone involved in the lawsuit (except the users, who weren’t asked) agreed that a YouTube login ID isn’t personally identifiable. The original Stanton order summarized: “Defendants do not refute that the “login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube” which without more “cannot identify specific individuals”.” So Viacom didn’t abandon any of their data rights, but they sure went out of their way to suggest they did. And anyone who watched the 2006 AOL search debacle will know that users were absolutely identified based on nothing more than a list of the search terms they entered. Does anyone really believe that a motivated plaintiff couldn’t identify individuals based on a user selected ID (mine is “TechCrunch”), IP address and a list of all watched videos? Now Viacom is talking again, and saying that they won’t use the information to go after individuals. Here’s the problem – I don’t know if Viacom will live up to their promise, or not. The fact that Google is unwilling to hand over employee data → Read More
The recent court order directing Google to hand over data to Viacom about every YouTube video ever watched strikes many people as an absurd overreach of the law into the privacy of anyone who has ever used YouTube (i.e., almost everyone on the Internet). Google should definitely keep fighting the ruling if it can. But if it can’t, perhaps it should comply with it in a creative way. The data in question are data logs containing the records of every video watched on YouTube, by whom, and at what times. The court is also ordering that Google hand over all videos that have ever been taken down for any reason. The logs alone take up 12 terabytes. Google should print them out and deliver them on paper. It would literally fill up the Library of Congress. That is roughly the equivalent of all the printed books in the Library of Congress (by one estimate, others put it at 20 terabytes—either way, it’s a lot of paper). The court order never states what form, the data must be delivered in. (Photo via, appropriately enough, the Library of Congress And hat tip to reader Paul Christiansen for the original suggestion). → Read More
The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle. Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued the opinion and order, which is here (PDF). That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.” Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code as it could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment.” I can understand why Judge Stanton, who graduated from law school in 1955, may be completely and utterly clueless when it comes to online video services. But perhaps one of his bright young clerks or interns could have told him that (1) handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube, and (2) YouTube’s source code is about as valuable as the hard drive it would be delivered on, since the core Flash technology is owned by Adobe and there are countless YouTube clones out there, most of which offer higher quality video. YouTube’s core value is in it’s network effect – the library of content along with its massive user base. The privacy fallout of this ruling is spectacular. The EFF has already chimed in, noting that the order is highly likely to be in violation of federal law. Judge Stanton doesn’t seem to care much about that law, for now. And he clearly doesn’t understand that far more data is being transferred than is necessary to comply with Viacom’s core stated concern, which is to understand the popularity of copyright infringing v. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for far more data than that, and there’s only one use for that data: → Read More
Viacom’s Hollywood studios, which include Paramount and Lionsgate, are gonna give that Internet thing another go. Since its contract with Showtime ended, Viacom wants to explore new ways to distribute pay TV (Showtime, HBO, etc.), and is looking to create a new online service to do just that. Said Viacom’s chief executive, “We want it to be available for consumers any way they want it.” Pretty sure consumers want “it” DRM-free and for a reasonable price, so we’ll see how that goes. Or maybe they’ll go the Hulu route, which I’ve actually heard my tech illiterate friends mention. I was truly shocked. Don’t expect other studios to join in on the fun, however, as their pay TV contracts aren’t up for some time yet. → Read More
