Twitter is nearing an agreement with Viacom to host TV clips and sell advertising on the site, reports Bloomberg. It is also reportedly discussing a content partnership with Comcast’s NBCUniversal, and one or more of the deals could be reached by mid-May. → Read More
Good news, Godfather fans — Google has just recently announced on their official YouTube blog that they’ve inked a licensing deal with Viacom-owned Paramount to bring some 500 new titles to YouTube and the Google Play store over the coming weeks.
Google first started toying with the notion of movie rentals via YouTube in early 2010, and their rental catalog has since swelled to nearly… → Read More
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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
When it comes to market share gains in advertising dollars, Google outstripped every other media company in 2007, whether you look at the Web, TV, print, or radio. Earlier this morning, Henry Blodget compared the advertising revenues of 17 major media businesses (including News Corp, Time Warner Cable, Viacom, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL,, the New York Times, and CBS Radio). He left out Disney… → Read More
[photopress:rock_band_street_date.jpg,full,center] It’s no secret and no surprise that Rock Band is selling quite well. The game is one of the most fun multiplayers around and is on both major gaming platforms and will hit the Wii soon. The talk of the Web today, though, is the $208.7 million payout Viacom has ready for Harmonix, the Rock Band developer. This is a performance-based earnout… → Read More
In another move to strengthen the anti-YouTube coalition, Viacom is syndicating its videos (from Comedy Central, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and Atom Films, among other properties) to a whole new slew of video-sharing Websites. The new recipients of Viacom’s video love are Dailymotion, Veoh (which already has Hulu and CBS videos), imeem, GoFish, and MeeVee. They join AOL, Bebo, Joost, MSN… → Read More
HD DVD’s booth at CES was a sad, sad sight to see. You could tell by the demeanor of everyone working the booth. They knew. Blu-ray’s booth was less than 20 yards away and they were rocking out and people were milling around trying to watch demos, take pictures with Captain Jack Sparrow and the Spartans from 300. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in HD DVD’s camp, but how are… → Read More
As we noted earlier, the FTC has indeed cleared Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick. Notably, the FTC required no conditions for clearing the transaction, which is a big win for Google. It won’t have to sell off any businesses or change any of its current business practices. Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond gives a rundown of the reasoning behind the… → Read More
In yet another move to strengthen the anti-Google coalition, Viacom announced a complicated deal with Microsoft that combined Web advertising, TV advertising, video licensing, and an online gaming partnership. Back in April, Viacom signed another deal with Yahoo for search advertising across its sites, which is still in place. The media company’s Web strategy seems motivated by its hate for… → Read More
Viacom sues YouTube for 1 billion, writers get 75 cents a word. Viacom estimates downloadable content is worth $500 million and writers get bad coffee. There’s the bottom line. Hopefully this strike destroys the media conglomerates and a new, communal writing system takes root and flourishes in the wasteland of dead media, but it won’t. We’ll just have to wait longer for Lost to… → Read More
It didn’t take long for all the media companies to respond to Google’s launch earlier this week of its copyright fingerprinting system on YouTube. Today, they announced a set of limp-wristed “guidelines” that both technology and media companies should abide by in order to protect copyrighted content going forward. Companies who signed on to the guidelines include Viacom… → Read More
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