The former French water utility has the ability to hold up the deal due to its 20 percent stake in NBCU and a put option that gives it the right to sell the stake back to back to GE (GE), hang on to it or take the thing public.

There’s no reason for Vivendi to do anything but the first option, but the company is not going to come out and say so, which means that negotiations for GE to buy the stake aren’t going as fast as it or Comcast (CMCSA) would like. Vivendi itself wrote down the value of the stake by a few billion earlier this year, but that was then, and this is now. New York Post:

The deal, which many assumed would be announced today, is being held up because Vivendi is playing hardball in its negotiations with GE, said several sources close to the deal.

“They’re trying to squeeze every nickel they can out of GE,” said one of these sources. “Why wouldn’t they?”

But again, there’s no reason for this deal not to get done, and Vivendi itself made a strong case for it on Friday by announcing plans to spend some $4 billion on Brazilian telecom GVT. The proceeds of a $6 billion sale sure could come in handy for that, no?

While we’re at it: I wouldn’t read all that much into reports that Comcast plans to appoint current NBCU head Jeff Zucker to run the new business. Perhaps they really do. But even if Comcast didn’t, it would have no choice but to say it does. Remember that any deal will take a very long time to clear regulatory review and that someone has to keep running NBCU in the meantime. This stuff will get more meaningful when we’re closer to showtime.

In fact, reps from Google and the AP linked up in Manhattan on Wednesday to discuss the deal, which expires at the end of this year, people familiar with the meeting tell me. This timing makes sense since Google (GOOG) had flown in many of its top brass to New York for a series of internal meetings this week.

But that would come as a surprise to anyone who took Curley’s words, delivered after a speech in Hong Kong on Tuesday, at face value.

Here are Curley’s comments, recorded by an attendee at the Hong Kong meeting and transcribed by Zachary Seward at Nieman Journalism Lab:

Someone asked Curley if Microsoft was willing to accept the AP’s demands. “They have said very strongly that they would,” Curley responded. A bit earlier, he said of Microsoft, “They know how to have a conversation.” And what about Google? “I’m not talking about Google,” he said. “We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked with them in any serious way.”

AP spokesman Paul Colford says he has nothing to add to Curley’s comments. But I’ll try to make a case on his behalf: Maybe this is one of those “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” situations whereby Curley doesn’t consider the talks the two sides have been having to be “talks.” Alternate proposal: Maybe Curley is going for “truthiness” instead of “truth.”

I guess that’s possible. The recurring story I’ve heard from sources on both sides of the negotiations, which have been going on for months, is that they’re not moving very far.

The problem: The AP has a list of demands, which start with more money and move on from there, including assurances that its copy will receive better treatment than secondary outlets. And Google hasn’t expressed much interest in changing the existing agreement. The company is “quite happy” with the deal it has now, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters on Wednesday.

I understand why Curley would want to play up his talks with other portals, as well as the notion that he’s willing to pull his cooperative out of the world’s biggest traffic generator. Per above, I don’t think those are particularly effective tactics, but I understand them. But that’s different from creating an alternative reality altogether.

At first blush, the AP’s description of the program, found in this press release and this FAQ, sounds a lot like an attempt to implement digital rights management–a lock-and-key system–for the news. But at least in this iteration, that’s not the case. The AP is really talking about adding a layer of metadata to its copy, so it can see who’s using it, and where.

“Any time you talk about a tracking system, the thrust of [the commentary] is about enforcing copyright,” Jim Kennedy, the AP’s VP of strategic planning, told me this afternoon. “But what we hope is the outcome out of this is the ability to enable more licensed uses of  content. We want to keep the content open, we don’t want to keep it behind firewalls.”

If you want to see a benign description of the technology the AP intends to use, head to this site, developed by its U.K.-based partner Media Standards Trust. If you don’t have time for that, just imagine Wal-Mart (WMT) adding RFID chips to track its pallets as they move around the country.

Jim Kennedy tells me that the AP will have tests for the new system up and running by mid-November, and hopes to have it in place for all the copy it produces by the end of the year. And in 2010, it will make it available to the cooperative’s members, i.e., other news organizations.

You’ll hear griping about this from some corners, but all of it sounds fine to me–I don’t care how the AP tracks its product. But note that this tracking system only works when its used by someone who already has a business relationship with the AP.

Which means it doesn’t solve the two problems the AP started complaining about this spring: The  fact that bloggers and other nogoodniks are using AP copy without paying for it and the fact that Google (GOOG) isn’t paying the AP enough for the copy it does use.

On those fronts, the AP’s contract with Google expires at the end of this year, and my understanding is that renewal negotiations are moving slowly, at best. And the AP will continue to use Attributor’s tracking service to find unauthorized uses of its stuff on the Web.

And if the AP ever does try to shove its copy behind a firewall, then a tracking system would come in handy. But we’re not there yet.

Both messages are a result of long and tortured negotiations with record labels that have finally come to a close with a deal Pandora says it can live with, though it’s different than the one founder Tim Westergren said the site had nailed down in November. The flip side is that the service will now require users who listen to the service for 40 hours a month to pay 99 cents if they want to hear any more tunes that month.

And the big picture is that Pandora, which has been warning of its doom if it was required to pay steeper royalty rates, can switch gears and brag about its growth. Westergren tells me the service is motoring at a great clip–he says it is on track to generate $40 million in revenue this year, almost all of it from advertising, up from $19 million in 2008–and it can now accelerate.

“I think that this is going to have a really huge impact,” he says. “We’ve been talking about going out of business for the last two years, and that’s not good for growth.”

The new arrangement might also convince investors to cut the service a big check. Earlier this year, multiple sources told me Pandora was looking to raise a very big round, perhaps in the $40 million range, and was talking to private equity shops about a deal. Westergren wouldn’t talk to me about fund raising, but it’s fair to assume that his company looks more attractive now than it did in January.

As for the deal itself, I’ll spare you the details, but in essence it’s a straightforward rate cut. The deal requires a lower per-song fee than Pandora and other Webcasters were supposed to pay under the terms the Copyright Royalty Board signed off on in 2007. It’s retroactive to 2006 and calls for an increase every year up through 2015.

The new deal means Pandora will be spending more than 25% of its revenue on royalties, but it will still be paying less than it would have under the old rules. Under the original terms, for instance, Pandora was supposed to shell out 14 hundredths of a penny ($.0014) per song streamed, per listener. Now it won’t pay that rate until 2015. Meanwhile tiny sites with less than $1.25 million in annual revenue will have a different structure.

The downside is that the deal will require Pandora to tax its heaviest users since it is still paying a per-song fee. “There’s a very small percent of listeners who are using it a ton, and that’s great, except when you’re paying per song,” Westergren says. He estimates the 99-cent fee will apply to a a “single digit” percentage of its 11.5 million monthly users.

One exception: The Globe’s unionized editorial employees, who have yet to come to terms with the paper’s owner. The Times makes ominous sounds about what might happen–“evaluating our alternatives”–but nothing specific.

Last night, the Times said it was ready to file a so-called WARN Act announcing that it would shutter the Globe in 60 days unless it got the concessions it was looking for. At the outset of negotiations with the unions, the New York Times Co. (NYT) said it needed $20 million worth of cuts to keep the paper afloat; it claims the Globe, which it purchased for $1.1 billion in 1993, is on track to lost $85 million this year.

Here’s the release:

We are very pleased to have reached agreements with six of the seven unions that were involved in recent negotiations. This includes agreements with the drivers, mailers, pressmen, the electricians, machinists, and technical services group. As a result of these agreements, which are subject to ratification by union members, we expect to achieve both the workplace flexibility and the financial savings that we sought from these unions. We are not, therefore, making a filing today under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. We appreciate the productive and cooperative approach demonstrated by the leadership of these unions throughout these difficult negotiations.

We are disappointed, however, that we have not yet been able to reach an agreement with the Guild. Because of that, we are evaluating our alternatives under both the Guild contract and applicable law to achieve as quickly as possible the workplace flexibility and remaining cost savings we need to help put The Globe on a sound financial footing.

That’s what finally allowed Disney (DIS) to join up with GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox in Hulu, the fast-growing Web video site.

The deal, which was finally announced yesterday, has its roots in a November 2007 meeting between Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and Disney’s executive team where Kilar demoed a private beta of the service on Disney CEO Bob Iger’s computer. But the two sides didn’t really start talking in earnest until mid-December of last year.

Since then, people who were involved in the negotiations tell me, the discussions were a long slog, complicated by the fact that there were essentially five parties in the talks. But at no point did the deal ever look to be in jeopardy, I’m told–even though everyone from Google (GOOG) to Comcast (CMCSA) was trying to convince Iger not to go forward.

In the end, Disney essentially agreed to the same terms that NBC and Fox first used when put the site together two years ago. The main components:

• A two-year guarantee of exclusive third-party access to ABC’s online TV inventory, as well as a smattering of Disney cable shows.
• Marketing money, to be spent buying market-rate air time promoting Hulu on Disney TV properties. NBC and Fox handed over $50 million each, doled out over two years, when they formed Hulu; I’m told Disney has committed to a similar amount.
• A cash investment in Hulu itself. I’m told that NBC and Fox kicked in a total of about $30 million to get Hulu off the ground, prior to getting Providence Equity Partners to pony up $100 million for a 10 percent stake. Given that NBC and Fox took on substantial risk when they contributed their stakes, it’s likely that Disney ended up paying a larger sum.

At least as important as Disney’s contribution, though, is NBC and Fox’s decision to re-up their exclusivity arrangements for another two years. Some executives at NBC and Fox I’ve talked to have downplayed this part of the deal, arguing that their companies would have kept working with Hulu even without renewing their exclusives, which were expiring.

But the reality is that if NBC and Fox had not renewed, it would have been a signal that the networks were no longer committed to their joint venture, a question that’s been whispered more and more often in recent months. There are also some practical effects when it comes to dealing with the cable guys (see below).

The deal still needs regulatory approval, and you may hear the likes of Google and Comcast murmuring loudly that a partnership between three of the four broadcast networks violates antitrust statues. But assuming it does go through, here are some of the ripple effects:

CBS: The broadcaster is on a lonely road, which is not where entertainment companies like to find themselves. It may well be that the Web strategy CBS has been pursuing–don’t put too much of your stuff online, but syndicate the stuff you do put out there as widely as possible–is the right way to go. But if CBS CEO Les Moonves ever changes his mind, he will have a hard time climbing aboard the good ship Hulu.

For the record, Kilar is enthusiastic about bringing on CBS: “We’d love to see CBS jump into Hulu,” he says. We’d love to see Time Warner (TWX) jump in to Hulu, too.”

But executives at his partner networks–the same guys who forced him to cut off Web upstart Boxee, remember–says that the door is shut for CBS, at least in terms of the equity deal ABC just got.

If CBS (CBS) does want to make a deal with a big Web distributor, it may well end up doing something with Google’s YouTube, which already distributes snippets of CBS shows on its site. You won’t hear CBS bragging about this out loud, but I’m told partnership has worked out very well for the network to date.

The cable guys: Note that there’s very little of Disney’s premium cable stuff on Hulu–just a smattering of SoapNet and a few shows from the Disney Channel, but nothing your kids care about. And there’s zilch from ESPN.

That’s because Iger doesn’t want to freak out cable operators that pay Disney billions a year for cable programming. So that stuff will stay offline. (Meanwhile, it may get increasingly hard to find some of the NBC/Fox cable programming on Hulu, for the same reason. Good luck watching the most recent episode of FX’s “Rescue Me,” for instance).

But the Disney move, along with NBC and Fox’s commitment to re-up their exclusivity arrangement, just complicated efforts by the likes of Comcast and Time Warner to push an “authentication” arrangement. That’s where cable subscribers–but only cable subscribers–get access to a wealth of TV on the Web.

Without the exclusivity clause, the cable guys could demand that the networks hand over their best stuff directly to them for their online efforts. Now, at least for the next two years, they’ll have work through Hulu, on Hulu’s terms.

It may be that the cable guys are so far away from making their authentication plans a reality–I’m told Comcast’s test will launch this summer with just a few thousand subscribers and will add something like 50,000 subscribers a month after that–that this might not mean much. It’s possible that by the time the cable guys are ready to really talk shop with their programmers, the two-year deals will be long expired.

Bonus: We get to see new Hulu ads, starring actors from ABC shows. I’m hoping for one featuring Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley on “Lost.” For now, here’s the newest one in the current campaign, featuring Dennis Leary from “Rescue Me.”

Who actually made the move to drop the label’s content from the world’s biggest video site is a matter of dispute, though. Both sides are taking credit for the decision.

Here’s Warner Music (WMG)’s statement:

We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists’ content to the site. Until then, we simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”

But a person familiar with the situation tells me that the two companies were close to an agreement until recently, when Warner changed its terms. In response, Google (GOOG) made the move to yank the label’s content.

Google’s blog post about the matter is more oblique. But note that it doesn’t say it is taking the music down at Warner’s request:

Sometimes, if we can’t reach acceptable business terms, we must part ways with successful partners. For example, you may notice videos that contain music owned by Warner Music Group being blocked from the site.”

As I explained yesterday, music videos are some of the most popular content on YouTube. But the videos are also money losers for the video site because it has to pay the labels each time someone views a clip, regardless of whether it’s generating any revenue. YouTube’s contracts with all of the the big labels–in addition to Warner, it has pacts with Sony (SNE), Universal Music Group and EMI–are set to expire in the near future, so there are multiple games of chicken to watch here.

Meanwhile, taking down an entire music company’s catalog can take quite a while, which means that if you head to YouTube right now, you can still find plenty of Warner stuff  there–like the Madonna channel, which has golden oldies like this one: