viacom

Court allows Viacom to invade privacy of Youtube viewers

July 3, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Due to the litigation case between Viacom and Google, a federal court has ordered Google to produce:

all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website

Time to boycott any Viacom products? Read more details on how this erroneously ignores the protection of the US Video Privacy Protection Act on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website. For the record, actions like this are a far bigger problem than Twitter failing to scale!

Unsettling and unsubstantiated Last.fm rumour

March 2, 2007 By Dan Thornton

Viacom execs are looking to buy last.fm for $450 million, in an unsubstantiated rumour story published on dealbreaker.com

As commented on before, Last.fm had recently signed a deal for content from Warner, so was, perhaps, preparing for something like this?

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this story, as although I don’t often use the last.fm player, I do enjoy seeing my MP3s listed up there, as well as using the pandora/last.fm mash-up, here.

Time to embace new media outlets?

February 21, 2007 By Dan Thornton

First Warner’s decided to sign up with Last.fm, and now Viacom has signed a content licensing deal with Joost.

Meanwhile the UK Government has rejected a ban on Digital Rights Management (DRM), but has acknowledged that DRM might infringe consumer rights.

And James Blacks’ internet TV experiment, www.ansathat.com is entering a new phase, with the findings that a $34 website could result in £30k ad revenue after just 50 days of existence. It also found a solid Google rating, and was approached by two organisations, including BT.
Meanwhile, the famed Ask A Ninja site is looking at $300,000 in a year, if it maintains its’ audience.

My favourite example, being male, has to be French Maid TV, which creates one-off sponsored episodes for around $50k, and also creates revenue by hosting clips on Revver

If you’ve got any kind of capture devices, whether it’s a webcam, or HDTV digital video camera, then if you’ve got any ideas for shows, it’s boom time. The question is how soon the bubble will burst for many of these shows, and how they will manage in the future. Will there be a number of net-only content channels spawned by ninjas and french maids, will they always be engaged in a popularity contest on Youtube and Revver, or will the big existing TV players look to be the arbiters of taste and popularity?

More convergence for online entertainment

February 13, 2007 By Dan Thornton

It seems like there’s a new story about media converging every day at the moment. Actually, it seems more like 20 per day. And most are offering something of interest.

StumbleUpon Video on the Ninteno Wii (Techcrunch): A good move for StumbleUpon to get word of mouth and entice all the owners of the new Nintendo console. And it’s a more efficient way of getting content that MS licensing individual companies and videos for their Live service.
Myspace is offering video filtering. Viacom is looking for a Youtube work around (NewTeeVee): Both these stories in the NewTeeVee round up suggest that the mighty Gootube still hasn’t won over content providers, or scared away rivals enough to be totally secure.
Last.fm secure music from Warner.(Downloadsquad). One music company has hitched a trailer to the social music network. How long before the others finally join up, particularly as the conversations about Digital Rights Management are generally allowing that the pirates had it right all along?