Slowly but surely, YouTube has been able to bump up the number of “premium” content creators willing to hand over some of their stuff to the world’s biggest video site. Here’s yet another one: Funny or Die, the comedy site backed by Will Ferrell, Sequoia and HBO, among others.
Wouldn’t you like to bump elbows with media moguls and hear from the likes of Eric Schmidt, Biz Stone and James Murdoch? Me too! Alas, Quadrangle’s Foursquare conference is closed to the public and the press. But at least I can tell you whom you won’t be hearing from.
Not sure what Barnes & Noble has to say about the “Nook” that it didn’t discuss yesterday, when it unveiled its new e-reader. But the bookseller’s press conference this morning, scheduled for 9:30 EDT, gives us an opportunity to try a little crowd-sourcing experiment: Send me any questions you have and I’ll try to ask the company on your behalf.
It’s e-reader preview week, apparently. Last night, Plastic Logic formally named its would-be Kindle killer; tomorrow, Barnes & Noble is supposed to show off its own branded device. This morning’s entrant: Spring Design, which says it has produced a reader that boasts two screens and an operating system that runs on Google’s Android. What it doesn’t have: Big-pocketed partners to boast about.
Vevo, the music industry’s version of Hulu, now has its own version of Providence Equity, the outside investor that took a flyer on the Web TV and movie joint venture: Abu Dhabi Media Company has purchased a stake in the company from owners Universal Music and Sony. No financials released, though I’m told the deal values the JV at $300 million.
Plastic Logic, which has been talking up its coming e-reader for some time now but hasn’t actually started selling it, has a little more to say: It will have more to say about its coming e-reader in a few months.
Oh, and its coming device has a name–the Que.
Want to get Michael Jackson’s new single? You will be able to get it on iTunes this month, contrary to earlier reports. But there’s a catch: You’re going to have to buy some of the late singer’s other songs, too.
After Michael Jackson died, fans flooded iTunes to snap up his music. And contrary to an earlier report, “This Is It,” the singer’s final work, will also be sold by Apple this month.
YouTube sneaked up on big media, then scared the hell out of them, then tried to do business with them, more or less unsuccessfully.
Now, three years after Google plunked down $1.6 billion for the video site, it seems to have figured out an approach that works for at least some big players: Hand over a chunk of the site to content creators, who get to control it, sell ads on it, program it with their stuff and share some of the ad dollars. Newest example, reportedly: Britain’s Channel 4.
Last month, Warner Music Group won the right to sell ads on its YouTube videos. Next step: Getting someone to sell ads on its YouTube videos, since the music label doesn’t have its own sales team. The plan: Hand those duties over to someone who’s already doing it for Veoh and other video outfits.
Amazon won’t even tell us how many Kindles it has actually sold, so projecting how many it’s going to move in the future makes for particularly tough fortune-telling. But that doesn’t stop anyone from trying: Forrester thinks Jeff Bezos and company will move 600,000 newly discounted units this holiday season and sell 1.8 million by the end of 2009.
Had to see this one coming: Amazon is chopping the price on its plain-vanilla Kindle e-book reader and is introducing a new version that will allow users to download books when they’re outside the U.S. Your move, Sony–and every other would-be Kindle competitor.
Warner Music and YouTube, co-owners of the one of the Web’s nastiest spats, are about to patch things up. How’d they do it? By cutting a deal that looks a lot like the one YouTube has already made with Universal Music Group.
Vevo, the music industry’s attempt to create a Hulu-like hub for its videos, is going to attract a lot of eyeballs when it launches later this year. Here’s the guy who’s supposed to attract advertisers: David Kohl, a former Nokia executive who starts work today as the site’s sales boss.
Is Time Inc. building a Kindle Killer? Nope.
A report suggests that Time Inc. wants to get into the hardware business and produce its own e-reader.
That’s something other publishers, like Hearst and News Corp., are actually doing or have at least mulled. But multiple sources familiar with the Time Warner unit’s thinking say that’s not the case here.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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