Pres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com

Is News Corp. really going to yank Fox off the airwaves in response to Aereo?

Snap consensus judgement from the various corners of the TV Industrial Complex: No way. At least, not anytime soon.

People I’ve talked to who work in TVland think that News Corp. COO Chase Carey’s comments are just that — comments, not a plan.

It’s possible that over time, if broadcasters do think that Aereo or Aereo-like technology really threatens the fees they get from pay TV operators for their over-the-air programming, they’ll move more of it to cable networks. And, in fact, programmers have already started moving lots of high-profile sporting events from free TV to pay TV.

Near-term, however, people seem to think that both practical and legal restrictions — for instance, deals that Fox and CBS have with the NFL for football broadcast rights — would prevent this from happening. More important: There isn’t any reason to do so right now, since only a handful of people are actually using Aereo to get broadcast TV for free.

All that said, Wall Street seems to like the idea.

Earlier this year, Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger gamed out a scenario where all four broadcasters moved from over-the-air to pay networks, and concluded that it wouldn’t be a terrible idea, at least financially. By Juenger’s thinking, the lost “retransmission fees” and advertising dollars the broadcasters would lose from over-the-air programming would be replaced by even higher “affiliate fees” and advertising dollars they could get on cable.

And Juenger thinks that move might benefit pay TV distributors, too: “There is enough logic here to suggest it wouldn’t be completely crazy for a cable operator to make a pre-emptive offer to broadcast networks in a given market to convert to a cable model.”

In any case, for whatever reason, TV investors are cheering Carey on. Look what happened to shares at Fox owner News Corp. (which also owns this website), ABC owner Disney and CBS this afternoon after 1:30 pm ET, when Carey made his remarks at an industry conference:

The outlier here is NBC owner Comcast, whose shares also moved up after Carey’s remarks, then down again. Perhaps some investors are less comfortable with what this means for America’s biggest pay TV operator.

(Image courtesy of Pres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com)

Sources say the two companies are part of a $30 million round that gives Los Angeles-based Fullscreen a pre-money valuation of $110 million.

I don’t know if any of the money is coming from secondary sales; I’m told the deal hasn’t closed yet but is supposed to soon.

No comment from Chernin Group, led by former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, or Comcast, which is investing in the round via its Comcast Ventures arm. I haven’t heard back from Fullscreen CEO George Strompolos.

The round follows other recent Big/Old Media bets on YouTube startups, including Time Warner’s investment in Maker Studios and Bertelsmann’s investment in fashion network StyleHaul.

Like those two companies, Fullscreen generates revenue by representing a pool of semi-pro video makers on YouTube. Unlike those “multi channel networks,” though, it also has a software service it sells to content owners who want to navigate Google’s video site; customers include Disney Interactive, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and News Corp.’s Fox (News Corp. also owns this website).

Strompolos started Fullscreen a couple years ago; prior to that he had worked at Google and YouTube, where he worked with many of the YouTube content makers he represents now.

You can get a brief sense of what Fullscreen is up to in this video Strompolos made for how-to video maker Howcast; you can see the full series of his clips here.

What is interesting are the decisions the network has made about what you can watch on the apps, and when you can watch them. Because they say a lot about the state of the TV business, and the way it is and isn’t adapting to digital reality.

Stuff to pay attention to:

• CBS, which for a long time kept most of its shows off the Web, now offers almost all of them on the Web, and you can see most of those on the apps. The omissions in the mobile lineup are the shows that CBS doesn’t own. “Big Bang Theory,” for instance, comes from Time Warner’s Warner Bros. studio, so it’s not on the app.
• You can see most of CBS’ daytime and nighttime programming (soaps, “David Letterman”) on the apps the day after they air. But its primetime stuff — (“NCIS,” “The Good Wife,” etc.) won’t show up until eight days after it airs on the network.

The state of mobile, or at least the state of TV’s thinking about mobile, has a lot to do with both of those decisions.

For starters, while regular human beings recognize that stuff they look at on a tablet or a phone is the same as the stuff they see on TV or a Web browser, that’s not how biz dev and legal people think. So CBS, for instance, doesn’t have the rights to show “Big Bang Theory” on your iPad, even though it can let you watch it on its website.

And even when CBS does have mobile rights, it can’t convince advertisers to give it full credit for the eyeballs that watch its shows on phones and tablets, for technical/measurement reasons. So it’s not going to put stuff on mobile until it has wrung out the full value of its TV ad dollars.

When it comes to “Letterman” and “The Young and the Restless,” that’s the next day. But CBS and other networks are trying to convince advertisers that they should get credit for shows and ads that people watch in the seven days after an episode first airs. That’s not happening right now — currently, they get credit for shows watched live or on DVRs in the first three days after air — but CBS is hoping/assuming they’ll get what they want in the next couple years.

CBS isn’t the only network paying attention to the so-called “C7” window; you can see evidence of that in Fox’s decision to keep its shows off the Web except for “authenticated” viewers who are also paying for cable TV. (News Corp., which owns Fox, also owns this website.)

But that thinking isn’t universal, either: Right now you can watch the episode of “The Neighbors” that aired last night on ABC, on the network’s site or its iPad app, or on Hulu, for free, without any kind of sign-in/registration.

Actually, you can watch it here, too (unless you’re reading this on a tablet or mobile, because, see above). Enjoy.

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

Heads up, cord-cutters: If you want to watch March Madness next year, you’re going to have to pay up.

The last two rounds of next year’s college basketball tournament, including the championship game, are likely to be broadcast on one of Time Warner’s Turner network channels — TBS or TNT — instead of CBS, according to Sports Business Daily and the New York Times.

CBS and Turner share coverage of the tournament, and the switch for the final games was already scheduled for 2016. No one has explained why the two companies are moving the date up by two years, but it fits a pattern we’ve seen for several years: Big-time sports events migrating from free TV to pay TV.

In 2006, Monday Night Football moved from ABC to Disney’s ESPN. If you wanted to watch much of last summer’s Olympics, you needed a pay TV subscription that gave you access to NBC Universal’s cable channels. And as SBJ’s John Ourand notes, the BCS college championships, the NBA conference finals and some baseball playoff games have all moved over to cable, as well.

The free-to-pay move serves the interests of the TV Industrial Complex in several ways: The cable networks, flush with cash from subscriber fees, can afford to pay big bucks for the rights to what is must-see TV for many people. And because it’s must-see TV for many people, it helps raise the overall value of the cable networks (Rupert Murdoch used the same strategy to turn Fox into a legitimate broadcast operation two decades ago).

And moving big-time sports to pay TV helps pay TV, period. Nielsen figures there are five million cord-cutters, or cord-nevers, and that number would presumably be much bigger if you could get sports online without paying for TV.

Which is why I’ve been waiting for Google, or Apple, or Intel, or some other TV outsider to pony up for the rights to a slate of NFL games, or some other sports franchise that millions of people have to watch, no matter where they are. Hasn’t happened yet.

(Note that if Aereo, which distributes broadcast TV over the Web without paying programmers a penny, wins its court case, then expect just about every big broadcast show — not just sports, but everything — to move from broadcast to cable networks owned by the broadcasters. Big if, though.)

Meantime, if you’re serious about college hoops and you’re serious about not paying for TV, you might still have a legal option next year.

Last year, CBS and Turner offered a $4 package that let you watch the games live on Android and iOS devices, and that option has gone away this year. This time around, you can only stream the Turner games if you’re an “authenticated” pay TV subscriber, though you can still stream the CBS games to your PC without registration.

But Turner/CBS are offering app users a free four-hour “preview” this time around. So if you’re willing to do a little planning — and if the option is still available — you could save up your preview time for the championship game, and at least watch that one for free.

That sounds like a lot of work, right? That’s what the pay TV guys are hoping you think …

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

Sources said AOL is set to hire well-known media and Internet exec Susan Lyne to be CEO of its content brands unit at the New York-based Web company, except for the Huffington Post Media Group headed by Arianna Huffington.

Lyne has most recently been chairman of the Gilt Groupe and was CEO previous to that. She will retain her board role at the online retailer, but is likely to give up her director role at AOL. She is set to be on its executive operating committee going forward.

Lyne has had a long and varied career in media and is a high-profile hire. Beside Gilt, she also ran Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and was a top television network exec at ABC.

At AOL, she will have purview over a range of properties, including TechCrunch, Engadget and StyleList.

In related news, Bloomberg reported earlier that COO Artie Minson was departing AOL, but there are no immediate plans for him to leave. But that could change, since CEO Tim Armstrong has been moving to decentralize the company and his role could shift accordingly.

An AOL spokesperson declined to comment.

Image copyright Suzanne Tucker

I make this assertion because if we look closely, we can already see what will cause the decline of Silicon Valley. In fact, the valley’s residents are consciously planting the seeds of the valley’s own demise. What’s more, I believe many of them will celebrate when the valley is no longer on top.

My cheery assessment depends on this sleight of words: Decline is relative, and the decline that Silicon Valley faces will be less like watching Hewlett-Packard slip into irrelevance and more like proudly standing to one side as the rest of the world — eventually even the less-developed world — catches up to it. Thus, the “decline” I claim the valley seeks and will eventually succumb to is a most desirable decline, indeed.

Digital disruption — a force that Silicon Valley gestated and nursed from its earliest days — is now global. Digital devices, the networks that connect them, and the software tools that prod human beings to hanker for more of all these things will soon be everywhere. The long-term effect of rising digital disruption will be to redistribute the benefits of the future across the planet even as it continues to improve the already futuristic valley that started it all. What does Silicon Valley have today that other places will eventually enjoy as well? Access to three things the valley currently has in spades:

• Knowledge. With ubiquitous sensors in every device we own or location we frequent, we will soon collect in a single day far more information than we could have stored in all the hard disks manufactured prior to 2000. But that information is meaningless if we can’t render it into knowledge, which granted the smart people of Silicon Valley an early edge that they are now giving away for free. Analytics available to even the lowest YouTube channel producer now rival the most sophisticated reports CBS, NBC and ABC had available in the 1980s. Apply even better analytical engines to the data from Fitbit pedometers, Google Glass and the myriad of sensors that will listen to the stress in our voices or identify behaviors that undermine our health, and you’ve got an unprecedented depth and breadth of knowledge available soon to anyone, anywhere.
• Tools. Knowing something is nice, but being able to act on that knowledge is even better. Digital disruption depends on the distribution of tools — most of them free or nearly free — that equip anyone who wants to use knowledge to initiate and test a new concept. Kickstarter and its peers provide this opportunity for thousands of people who want to test their ideas; Amazon can make anyone a merchant partner, an affiliate, or an author, all for no cost; and the Square card reader just helped local merchants sell $800,000 worth of goods and services around the Super Bowl on game day in New Orleans.
• Capital. It’s not that there’s money going around. But thanks to the knowledge and digital tools available to you, you need a whole lot less of it to bring your idea to fruition. I recently spoke to Charles Teague, CEO of FitNow, the company behind the wildly successful LoseIt! calorie- and weight-tracking app. A veteran of the startup business from the earliest days at Allaire, Charles described for me with a slight tone of disbelief in his own words how cheaply he can launch and manage a company today compared to even ten years ago. This is partly because the tools are cheaper — you can open your Amazon Web Services account with a credit card — but also because much of the value digital disruptors deliver today comes through software. And as a successful entrepreneur who had sold his company to Qualcomm told me last year, “It’s just software; I can do anything in software for $40,000.”

People fond of wine and cheese will argue that there’s more to valley life than just these three things. That’s certainly true, but when you have more knowledge, tools and capital, some of the other things the valley prizes become common elsewhere as well. A culture of achievement, for example. As only people who have lived in a subculture that keeps them down know, the valley is a unique place where even surfers think they can be the next startup billionaires, leading to the creation of a company like GoPro.

It’s presumptuous of me to suggest that all valley residents will be so happy to be dethroned, even if the decline is only relative to the rise of the rest of the world. Venture capitalists, lawyers and politicians will feel the relative decline the most because their services have long been offered under the presumption that the value they provide is scarce, an assumption that’s now patently false. Other valley residents will be pleased, at least if Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist at Cloudera, is any indication. As he told me in an interview for my new book, “Digital Disruption,” “I don’t subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of the world. I’d much rather create fertile soil for other innovators to plant their seeds in than just water my own tree. “

He actually talks like that. And that’s what makes him and many others like him the planters of the same seeds that will sow the relative decline of Silicon Valley by lifting everybody else up to join it. Even — perhaps especially — Detroit, home of over 250 Kickstarter projects.

James McQuivey is the author of “Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation.” He is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption.

Weirdly, though, all of you seemed to keep watching, or at least typing about it. Presumably so you could warn everyone else about how bad it was?

In any case, this is normally the point where I tell everyone who didn’t watch it that they’re both lucky and unlucky. Because Disney, which broadcast the show on ABC, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which produces the show, aren’t making it available online. Which makes no sense, because all anyone wants to do the day after the Oscars is watch clips.

But not this year! For the first time ever, you can watch the entire show via Web replay. It’s on Hulu right now, up through Wednesday. And supposedly it’s going to be available through ABC and or/the official Oscars site, though I can’t find a link on either.

Also as important, ABC and the Academy have clips of the show’s highlights/lowlights, which you can either watch on the Oscars site itself (weirdly, the video clips are labeled “blogs” there), or share with your pals. Even more progressive (or long overdue) was the fact that some of the clips went up when the show was still airing.

Here, for instance, is the “We Saw Your Boobs” number that host Seth MacFarlane opened with, which seemed to upset all of you so much that you had to keep watching for another 3.5 hours.

Content aside (was all of it like that? I really didn’t see.), this is all good, even if it should have happened years ago. Next step will be getting the clips and streams where people will actually see them: Once again, the Oscar’s day-after presence on the world’s biggest video site is a joke. The show’s official YouTube page is a graveyard of old clips you don’t care about, and searching for clips on YouTube gets you none of what you want.*

One day this will get simpler, because it ought to be a no-brainer. Still: It’s 2013, and you don’t have to break the law to watch a day-old TV show. Progress!

And in that spirit, here’s the first 17 minutes of the show — the part where everyone insisted they would stop watching but didn’t.

*The good news for YouTube is that its ContentID program, designed to automate takedowns of stuff copyright owners don’t want up there, has gotten ultra-efficient.

The post was both effective — it showed up high on Google searches, which is the reason Huffpo created it — and symbolic of Huffpo’s traffic strategy — which was either craven or clear-minded, depending on your perspective.

Now that kind of Google-baiting is old hat. Even for august newspapers with 41 Pulitzers. Here’s what the same query for today’s Oscars looks like today:

Say this for the Los Angeles Times piece — it delivers the goods, for both humans and Google’s robots. Here’s the keyword-filled top:

The 85th Academy Award nominees and winners have been chosen, the red carpet has been rolled out and the gilded Oscar statues have been polished. But what time is the show again?

The 2013 Oscars ceremony honoring the films of 2012 is set to take place Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. The pre-show broadcast will begin on ABC with red carpet arrivals at 4 p.m. PST (7 p.m. EST) and will be hosted by Lara Spencer, Jess Cagle, Kristin Chenoweth and Kelly Rowland.

The awards show will start at 5:30 p.m. PST (8:30 p.m. EST) and is scheduled to last three hours. It will be hosted by “Family Guy” and “Ted” star Seth MacFarlane and televised live in more than 225 countries.

And Google is presumably extra pleased that the story’s author, reporter/Web producer Nardine Saad, is a diligent Google+ contributor who has posted more than 30 LAT links so far this month.*

What’s that? You still find this sort of thing disheartening, even if it gives readers what they want and delivers some clicks to a newspaper that can use them? Well, you’re not alone. Here’s a gut reaction from New York Times editor Patrick LaForge:

Sad. RT @harrisj: LA Times starts the SEO battle for tomorrow bit.ly/15Fnmh4

— Patrick LaForge, NYT (@palafo) February 24, 2013

But you’re probably going to be in an ever-shrinking minority, says Raju Narisetti, who heads up The Wall Street Journal digital network (the Dow Jones digital umbrella which includes this Web site).

A (good) lasting lesson @huffingtonpost taught big newsrooms MT @harrisj: @latimes starts SEO battle for tomorrow twitter.com/harrisj/status…”

— Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) February 24, 2013

And yes, even people like yours truly try to engage Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and anyone that will increase the number of eyeballs on my stuff). AllThingsD’s publishing system, for instance, allows us to create “SEO heds” — headlines created with Google’s automatons in mind.

And if you know how to find the one I’ve created for this post, you’ll be able to figure out what time to watch the Oscars tonight. Enjoy!

* Conventional wisdom among Google-watchers is that even if no one reads anything you post on Google+, the search engine will reward active users with Google juice in search results. So get posting!

Nope.

The to-and-fro didn’t come up a single time. Not a word during his nine-minute segment, which focused almost entirely on Musk’s SpaceX exploits. Tesla itself barely merited a mention, though Kimmel did note that the company had won a Motor Trend award.

In the past year, we’ve seen several niche social media networks blow up around images, music and ideas — Instagram, Spotify and Pinterest. But what happened in the digital video space? Many mobile video start-ups entered the scene this year, yet despite the increasing demand among consumers for Web video, none of these companies could crack the code on the most critical element of digital video: Discovery. But as content multiplies at an increasing rate, 2013 will finally be the year that the future becomes clear on the next advancement in video.

• Online video consumption hits a historic inflection point, doubling in 2013
  We are at the threshold of the second digital video revolution spurred by better and more affordable hardware and connectivity. Smartphones are in the hands of nearly one billion across the globe, and tablets, or “the second television,” are blowing up. The iPad alone has climbed the ladder of adoption three times faster than the iPhone and Gartner predicts tablet sales will hit 13 million in 2012, with this number expected to triple by 2016.

  Couple the rapidly increasing penetration of tablets and smartphones with LTE connectivity, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that consumer appetite for video will grow, transforming mobile video consumption into a daily habit. This will ignite a digital video revolution that mirrors the shift from dial-up Internet to broadband. The revolution that happened on desktop years back is about to transpire on mobile, as 2G and 3G are traded up for LTE networks on smartphones. Even with its incredible user adoption, the broadband’s impact on desktop video will pale in comparison to the more accelerated mobile video craze that’s about to kick off.

  In the last three years we’ve seen about a 140 percent increase in the amount of video content viewed online. comScore’s Video Metrix from April 2009 — when total video views hit 17 billion — sharply contrasts with 40 billion videos viewed across Web on November 2012. As consumption of video continues its march from the living room and desktop to smartphones and tablets, I predict that demand, production and consumption of video will double, and video views will hit 80 billion per month by the end of 2013.

• A newcomer will challenge YouTube for the other half of video consumption
  Declining hardware and distribution costs coupled with a steady increase in consumer demand for video has provoked a huge surge in production of pro and semi-pro video. Because of this increase in more professional-grade video, we have seen a major shift in where people are going to find digital video content.

  People are still watching just as much video — but they are now looking to different sources on the Web. In the past five months there has been a 34 percent drop in the total volume of video consumed on YouTube compared with the rest of the Web. YouTube views peaked in June 2012 at 18.3 billion, but have since declined to 12 billion on November 2012. comScore’s Video Metrix measured total Web video views in June 2012 at 32.9 billion; fast-forward to November 2012 and total video views across the Web hit 40 billion. While YouTube lost about six billion views within that five-month period, the other half of Web video shot up by 13 billion. As online video fragmentation increases in 2013, so will the need for a newcomer that aggregates YouTube and the second half of the Web’s video under one roof.

• TV networks and the top content creators will be forced into unchartered distribution and economic models
  Big media has seen the rapid shift toward Web and mobile consumption, and sites like Discovery.com, Disney, MTV and CNN continue to produce more online content. Now the real challenge becomes the fight for more audience, monetization and market share. These content creators and their advertisers won’t be satisfied with the results they get within their own silos, and will start looking for a way to expand their reach while still maintaining control over their videos.

  We have seen that relying on social networks like Facebook and Twitter for viral spread is not enough. At Twitvid, we saw major brands with over five million followers post videos to Twitter and receive only a few thousand views. Even major television networks such as CBS and ABC are struggling with this issue. ABC’s Modern Family and Glee, which previously only distributed episodes to Hulu, are now opening distribution to anyone as the effort to reach viewers continues. But no one has found a sustainable combination of large audiences and ability to drive traffic and revenue back to content creators.

  In 2013, studios and networks will be eager to experiment with new disruptive models, and expect to see a new breed of startups that can cater to their desire for both large audiences and strong control over content.

• All of this will lead to a new opportunity in video discovery that resembles something more like Spotify and less like Instagram
  Digital video is currently plagued by the lack of any real means of video discovery capable of meeting the needs of a social, mobile world. I’m confident that in 2013, someone will solve video discovery through social content aggregation — not just from YouTube, but from the exploding long-tail of semi-pro video. Many have pointed to an “Instagram for video” as the cure-all for the video space’s current state of disarray. But this is much bigger than that. Instagram focuses on user-generated content, which as Socialcam and Viddy proved this year, is not the way to win in the long term. Digital video is insanely larger than just user-generated content. The long-tail of video content is where consumer eyes draw the brands, and ultimately, revenue.

  In the same way that Spotify, Instagram and Pinterest successfully solved discovery for music, pictures and ideas, new models will emerge aiming to figure out a way to tap into this massive new world of video and somehow find a way to weave it all together.

What other predictions do you see for the world of digital video in 2013? Please submit your predictions in the comment section below.

Mo is the CEO and Founder of Telly, a social video network for discovering and sharing the best videos. You can follow him on Twitter @maladham and on Telly.

None of that is surprising, and if you’re trying to figure out what that means for Hulu, you’re asking the wrong question.

The real issue for the site is what its corporate owners — Comcast, Disney and News Corp., which also owns this website — want to do with it. We’ll get to follow that story for quite some time.

In the meantime, we can take a minute and give Kilar credit for building and maintaining an influential, important and valuable site many people pronounced dead as soon as it was born.

As Kilar himself notes, Hulu’s unofficial launch name was ClownCo, because any sensible person knew that there was no way Big Media companies could form a worthwhile joint venture, and zero chance they’d be able to create a decent video site. That’s the kind of thing that you left to the smart tech guys at places like Myspace, Veoh and Metacafe.

Surprise! Those guys are gone, and Kilar and his team ended up building a really great website, and then kept it up and running for 5 years, while generating real money by the end of his run. Meanwhile, the site’s value doubled, to $2 billion.

Kilar’s detractors — and he had many, both at the big media companies that owned Hulu and outside of them — argued that anyone who was given access to programming from ABC, Fox and NBC could turn that into a real business, and that he gave himself too much credit for doing so.

But even today, Hulu stands apart from the rest of the pack when it comes to design and experience, and that was most definitely the case back in the old days. If you can’t remember what NBC’s video offerings looked like in 2007, you’re lucky.

And while Kilar also gets knocked about for not playing well with some of his corporate owners, the fact that he kept the thing together this long shows that he was able to accomplish a very difficult juggling act.

Hulu in 2013 isn’t nearly as exciting as Hulu was in 2007, but you can’t blame Kilar for that. The site’s original corporate boosters are long gone, and in their place are people who aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about its chances, and can’t decide what they want to do with it regardless. You can’t blame Kilar for looking around, cashing out his stake and moving on.

I talked with Kilar about a lot of this stuff a year ago, at our first D: Dive into Media Conference (more on next month’s edition here), and you can see our entire conversation below.

Note that my first question to him was about his long-expected departure; not surprisingly, he didn’t really want to answer that then. So I asked him again, near the end of the interview. His response: “I’m not the kind of guy that dabbles in a lot of things; I tend to go deep. And I’m a big believer in the long term. … It’s highly amusing to read all the stuff that gets written, but all I’d ask … is judge me on my history.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130104/let-jason-kilar-take-a-bow/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121226/hulus-employee-owners-are-just-employees-again-which-means-some-may-be-ex-employees-soon/ http://allthingsd.com/20121226/hulus-employee-owners-are-just-employees-again-which-means-some-may-be-ex-employees-soon/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:00:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=280581

Hulu’s employees used to be owners, too. But those days are over, so they’re going to have to be happy with a paycheck and some bonuses.

That’s the upshot of a new long-term incentive plan I’m told the video site is prepping. It’s meant to replace the equity stakes Hulu’s employees cashed out earlier this fall. And it should be going into effect soon.

The move is small but symbolic: Hulu used to be a start-up, and the people who worked there had the potential for a big payout if things went really, really well. But investor Providence Equity Partners sold its stake in the site in October, and that let Hulu employees sell too. The company’s value doubled, to $2 billion, in five years, so many of them did do well. But not sit-on-a-beach-and-count-your-money well.

Now, it’s purely a Big Media asset — Hulu is co-owned by Comcast, Disney and News Corp. (which also owns this Web site) — and the employees who stick around will be Big Media employees.

So who’s going to stick around? As always, there is plenty of chatter about CEO Jason Kilar’s next move, but that chatter has been going on for years, and he’s still there.

That said, if someone does present Kilar with a great opportunity — say, the chance to run a start-up that’s already up and running, but that has the potential to get really, really, big — he can now head out without reservation. He has taken the company much further than many expected and has also gotten his team paid.

Some of Kilar’s senior team could head out the door regardless. Both Andy Forssell, who heads up Hulu’s content efforts, and Jean-Paul Colaco, who runs ad sales, are frequently mentioned by people outside the company as candidates for new jobs.

Meanwhile, people who have talked to other Hulu employees say some of them either have new gigs lined up or have begun looking for them. After the cash-out in October, Hulu paid out additional bonuses to get some senior managers and key employees to stick around through the end of 2012. But now those payouts are done as well, so it won’t be surprising if you see an exodus in the new year.

Hulu’s corporate owners seem resigned to that notion, and seem confident that they can hire replacements if necessary. As The Wall Street Journal noted last week, the really big issue for the company is that its corporate owners don’t agree about what they want to do with the site going forward. If News Corp. and Disney can’t figure that out, it doesn’t matter who’s still there to run it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121226/hulus-employee-owners-are-just-employees-again-which-means-some-may-be-ex-employees-soon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121217/hulus-year-end-report-were-pretty-darn-big-and-were-not-saying-anything-else/ http://allthingsd.com/20121217/hulus-year-end-report-were-pretty-darn-big-and-were-not-saying-anything-else/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:00:31 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=278518 Hulu has put out its 2012 numbers and, boy, are they good for a company that everyone said would never work: Almost $700 million in revenue, and “more than” three million paying customers for its Hulu Plus subscription service.

And as far as everything else: Nada.

In the past, Jason Kilar has used these state of the company reports to make big declarations about The Future Of TV, or at least the near-term future of Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp., Disney and Comcast (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

Today, there’s none of that. Just the numbers, sir.

And maybe, if you’re into tea-leaf-reading, an oblique reference from Kilar: “So much has changed” since the company’s conception in 2007, he notes.

Which might be, among other things, a reference to big changes behind the scenes with Hulu’s corporate owners, who haven’t had a consistent approach to the site in five years. And/or its employees, who have had a “liquidity event” worth roughly $200 million this fall.

Or maybe it was just some he words he typed up and put on a blog. (I know the feeling!)

Back to the numbers: Hulu will do $695 million in revenue this year. That’s up 65 percent from the $420 million it did last year, when revenue was up 60 percent. And that three-million-plus number for Hulu Plus is two times last year’s tally (Hulu competitor Netflix has around 27 million paid subscribers worldwide).

In the past, Hulu has said that it expects subscription dollars to make up more than half of its total revenue. It doesn’t spell that out here, but I believe it’s still the case.

So that’s all good and bow-worthy for the Hulu team. The questions about how it works with its content/partner owners, and who at Hulu will be around to work with them, we can tackle some other time.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121217/hulus-year-end-report-were-pretty-darn-big-and-were-not-saying-anything-else/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121207/valley-nerds-cook-for-good-in-the-start-up-chef-e-book/ http://allthingsd.com/20121207/valley-nerds-cook-for-good-in-the-start-up-chef-e-book/#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2012 15:00:26 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=276021 Mention of the words “techie” and “food” likely brings to mind the typical engineer fare — racks of Popchips, Snickers bars and chilled Mountain Dew, staples all too common to the Silicon Valley start-up pantry.

But some nerds eat better than others.

At least, that’s the case for those contributing to “The Start-Up Chef,” a new recipe book touting dishes from more than 70 Valley-dwelling contributors who can cook everything from eggs sous vide to steak au poivre (as well a host of other non-French dishes).

It’s the pet project of Hunter Walk and Maya Baratz, two techies who wanted to both celebrate the fact that the start-up diet isn’t all Funyuns and Twizzlers, while trying to do a bit of good at the same time. Published as both an e-book and a PDF on self-publishing platform Leanpub, proceeds from the book sales go to charities aiming to end hunger.

It’s a break from the typical Valley refrain, where dreams of wealth, upward mobility and lavish parties often trump the do-gooder ideas and concerns of social welfare.

“We want to evolve the norms of our industry,” Walk, a product head at YouTube who has worked on other philanthropic efforts at Google, told me. “Not only in building amazing products, but in helping the world in general.”

As new generations of technologists continue to come into money and prominence early on, Walk says it’s all the more important to try and find ways to participate in charitable giving at every point in their careers.

And as Baratz points out, the book offers a taste (ha!) of the lives of founders, venture capitalists and tech writers that we wouldn’t otherwise be privy to.

“Not only can these people cook well, but many of these are passed-down family recipes,” said Baratz, a product exec at ABC News. “They’ve brought a lot of personal aspects to the project.”

Natch, you’ll find a sausage soup recipe on page 138, one that comes straight from the kitchen of “Mom Crowley,” mother of Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley.

The book is available online beginning Friday, and will be updated with further recipes and pictures through the Leanpub platform in the coming months.

Bon appetit, geeks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121207/valley-nerds-cook-for-good-in-the-start-up-chef-e-book/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121105/set-phasers-to-hulu-cbs-cuts-another-web-video-deal/ http://allthingsd.com/20121105/set-phasers-to-hulu-cbs-cuts-another-web-video-deal/#comments Mon, 05 Nov 2012 19:20:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=266718 Hulu started out as a way to watch lots of TV shows from NBC and Fox, and later added ABC. Now it has shows from CBS, too, which means it has deals with all four broadcast networks.

So that’s a big deal, right?

Nope, not really.

Shorter version: This is a deal for “library” shows from CBS. Which is another way of saying “old” shows from CBS, like “CSI: Miami” and “really old” shows, like “Star Trek.”

And almost all of them will be on the Hulu Plus subscription service, not the free Hulu.com.

And CBS is getting paid a license fee for this stuff, but isn’t taking an equity stake in the joint venture along with the other broadcasters.

Plus, CBS has already been working with Hulu, via a deal for CW shows like “Gossip Girl.”

Even shorter version: Remember the deal CBS cut with Netflix in 2011? This is basically the same thing.

One new tweak to this deal: The free Hulu site will get a smattering of stuff, all designed to drive eyeballs elsewhere. CBS will rotate through a handful of its old shows on the site as a promotion for Hulu Plus. It will also provide clips from “day-of” episodes of “Entertainment Tonight,” its syndicated infotainment program.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121105/set-phasers-to-hulu-cbs-cuts-another-web-video-deal/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121102/jimmy-kimmel-on-the-ipad-mini-were-apple-and-youre-suckers/ http://allthingsd.com/20121102/jimmy-kimmel-on-the-ipad-mini-were-apple-and-youre-suckers/#comments Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:30:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=266308 Jimmy Kimmel and his writers are doing some very nice work with Apple the last couple months. The intro here has a bit more bite than you normally get from network TV: “Anyone standing in line for an iPad mini in New York or New Jersey this week should be punched in the throat.”

Kimmel, by the way, has doing his shows from Brooklyn this week. Bad timing when it comes to dragging guests across the East River. But he’s been able to do it, for the most part.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121102/jimmy-kimmel-on-the-ipad-mini-were-apple-and-youre-suckers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121031/marissa-mayer-makes-a-media-deal/ http://allthingsd.com/20121031/marissa-mayer-makes-a-media-deal/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:59:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=265562 The Marissa Mayer messaging is that Yahoo’s new CEO is about product, not media. But that doesn’t mean she’s shutting down everything her predecessor Ross Levinsohn was working on.

Example: Yahoo has struck a deal with Wenner Media, which lets the Us Weekly and Rolling Stone publisher get its stuff on Yahoo’s site and vice versa.

The pact is roughly similar to deals Levinsohn’s team made with the likes of ABC News: Yahoo will get some real estate on Wenner Media’s sites, and the Wenner folks will get dedicated space on Yahoo Music and Yahoo’s OMG entertainment portal. Here’s what the Us Weekly integration looks like on OMG:

Wenner will be able to sell its Yahoo pages to advertisers and will share the revenue with Yahoo, says David Kang, who started running digital for Wenner this year. (Kang replaced Michael Bloom, who left after a six-month stint.)

That means Wenner can offer a lot more reach than it could before. Yahoo Music and OMG boast some 46 million unique users, and Us Weekly and Rolling Stone have a combined audience of 10 million.

The two companies will also work together creating new properties that should appear on both sites. Both ventures will be video-centric: For Yahoo Music, a series of in-studio, behind-the-scenes footage of musicians that Rolling Stone will procure; OMG will get a new batch of red carpet videos via Us Weekly.

For Yahoo, the deal is worth noting because it’s the culmination of a deal that started while Levinsohn was still running the place. It was shepherded by Mickie Rosen, a Levinsohn lieutenant who has stayed on in the new regime.

Kang says he figures it was particularly attractive to Mayer because “we have every reason to believe she’s a huge Us Weekly fan.”

But if Mayer’s interests extend beyond gossip and music, you may see some more of these deals down the line. One likely candidate would be a tie-up with Comcast’s NBC Sports unit, which has reportedly been in the works for some time.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121031/marissa-mayer-makes-a-media-deal/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121012/providence-equity-sells-hulu-stake/ http://allthingsd.com/20121012/providence-equity-sells-hulu-stake/#comments Sat, 13 Oct 2012 01:30:29 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=259706 Providence Equity Partners has closed a deal to sell its stake in Hulu, according to a source familiar with the transaction. The sale, first reported by TechCrunch, has been in the works since April, and also triggers a “liquidity event” for the Web video site’s employee shareholders, including CEO Jason Kilar. Hulu’s others owners are Comcast, Disney, and News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121012/providence-equity-sells-hulu-stake/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121009/hulu-keeps-jon-stewart-and-stephen-colbert-for-two-more-years-adds-spongebob/ http://allthingsd.com/20121009/hulu-keeps-jon-stewart-and-stephen-colbert-for-two-more-years-adds-spongebob/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:27:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=258325 Hulu may have big changes ahead of it, but for now the company is proceeding along the same path: Today it announced it has broadened a deal with Viacom, by adding some of the cable giant’s Nickelodeon shows to its Hulu Plus subscription service.

Just as important, the deal extends Hulu’s previous Viacom pact for another two years. That means Hulu and Hulu Plus viewers can keep using the video service to watch Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s nightly shows, two of Hulu’s biggest draws.

The new deal will give Hulu Plus access to some of Nickelodeon’s live-action and animated kids’ shows, like “iCarly,” “Big Time Rush,” and “SpongeBob Squarepants.”

But it doesn’t include sister channel Nick Jr.’s shows, which are targeted at younger kids. That means no “Dora the Explorer” or “Fresh Beat Band.” Some of those titles are licensed to Hulu competitors Amazon and Netflix.

Viacom’s kids’ shows have been a subject of scrutiny over the last year, as their ratings have slipped. Some analysts argue that Viacom and Disney have been sacrificing TV eyeballs by putting those shows online.

The big picture for Hulu is that it still has the ability to pay for premium programming that doesn’t come from its three broadcast TV owners — NBC, Disney and Fox* — and that it’s willing to do so. The Viacom stuff is unlikely to come cheap — in 2011, when Viacom and Hulu announced the first deal, I pegged the price at $40 million to $50 million.

Meanwhile, we’re into October, and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is still running the company. That means my most recent predictions about his departure — the most recent one was that he would be out in September — was wrong. Just like all the others I’ve made.

Plans for Hulu’s network owners to buy out co-investor Providence Equity Partners’ stake, in the works since last spring, have yet to close, which means Kilar and his co-workers haven’t received big checks from the “liquidity event,” either. Once they do, things could change, but I’ll refrain from crystal ball gazing this time around.

*Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121009/hulu-keeps-jon-stewart-and-stephen-colbert-for-two-more-years-adds-spongebob/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121001/disney-unveils-new-home-page-with-entertainment-focus/ http://allthingsd.com/20121001/disney-unveils-new-home-page-with-entertainment-focus/#comments Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:06:35 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=255649

The Walt Disney Company will finally be unveiling a newly refurbished Disney.com site — aimed at delivering a robust entertainment experience — which the digital division of the company has been working on for a year.

In an interview Friday, Disney Interactive co-President James Pitaro said that the new site has been built from the “ground up,” keeping in mind delivery to multiple devices, especially increasingly popular tablets and smartphones.

Making such a dramatic shift to what he called the “digital gateway to Disney” is not without risk, he said.

“The new Disney.com is a much cleaner and more elegant site and a significant change from the legacy site, and any time you make material changes to a Web experience that has a large audience, you have potential to unsettle some users,” said Pitaro, who came to Disney from Yahoo in late 2010. “That said, we take a lot of pride in the new entertainment experience we’ve created and are confident that the multi-platform site will both further engage our current Guests and bring in new ones.”

The rollout began with a video beta site appearing in May.

Pitaro said the load time on the site had been drastically improved, along with the new minimalist design, which “puts Guests first.”

(“Guests” is how Disney refers to its customers, wherever they are.)

Instead of positioning the site as the marketing vehicle it has been in the past, Pitaro said the new Web and mobile destination is much more of the entertainment experience throughout.

That has meant getting fresh content from a wide range of Disney units, from its high-profile theme parks to its television channel to its movie studio. Content from its ABC and ESPN divisions are not part of the site, but both Marvel and Pixar are included.

The new site does not mean Disney’s online efforts will be less available outside the site. The company has a large-scale relationship with Google’s YouTube, for example, as well as being partial owner of the Hulu premium video site.

“We still need to take Disney where our Guests are,” said Pitaro.

Disney’s efforts online in the past have been decidedly mixed — from its doomed Go.com portal in Web 1.0 to its highly successful Club Penguin acquisition many years later.

Thus, said Pitaro, what is now appearing today on Disney.com — a new front page, movie and music pages — is still a work in process, with more changes coming.

Here are some screenshots of the new look:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121001/disney-unveils-new-home-page-with-entertainment-focus/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120929/is-a-tablet-the-only-tv-you-need/ http://allthingsd.com/20120929/is-a-tablet-the-only-tv-you-need/#comments Sat, 29 Sep 2012 17:45:22 +0000 By Kevin Sintumuang http://allthingsd.com/?p=255479 It started out of laziness: Put on sweatpants, plop on couch, search for remote. It’s not on the coffee table—but, hey, here’s an iPad! I check some emails, detour to Facebook and Twitter, click a link to a video of a baby chewing the bars of his crib. Why am I here again? Oh right: the TV. Where’s that remote? I should really look under this cushion. Or maybe press the TV’s “On” button? Nah. That would require walking 10. Whole. Feet. (Yes, I realize the irony of not wanting to move in sweatpants.) So it’s back to the easiest pipeline to entertainment at the moment: this tablet.

I bounce from video app to video app. A season of “Sherlock” here, some “The X-Files” there, and at some point while watching “Battle Royale” (totally better than “The Hunger Games,” by the way) I look at a clock. I’ve just spent hours staring at a 10-inch screen when there was a 40-inch one directly in front of me.

While planting your face in front of a tiny screen is perfectly acceptable on trans-Atlantic flights, it can be a little odd at home. But if you give yourself over to the tablet, it’s actually a pretty awesome experience. I’m not claiming an iPad beats the big screen, but I will say this: Watching shows and movies on a tablet feels closer to what television viewing should be like in the 21st century than what 21st-century TVs actually deliver.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120929/is-a-tablet-the-only-tv-you-need/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120925/from-youtube-to-tv/ http://allthingsd.com/20120925/from-youtube-to-tv/#comments Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:09:20 +0000 Amir Efrati http://allthingsd.com/?p=253866 An online-video series funded by Google Inc.’s YouTube video site is being turned into a syndicated TV show to run on ABC stations, a sign of how made-for-Web content is finding new legs in the offline world.

Everyday Health Inc., which launched the healthy-cooking series “Recipe Rehab” in April on its YouTube “channel,” said it is making longer, 30-minute episodes of the show, which will appear on nearly all stations affiliated with Walt Disney Co.’s ABC. The show, which is co-produced by Trium Entertainment LLC, will be broadcast on weekends in mid-morning starting Oct. 6.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120925/from-youtube-to-tv/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120918/hulus-shark-tank-problem/ http://allthingsd.com/20120918/hulus-shark-tank-problem/#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:00:02 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=251382 I think “Shark Tank” is one of the best hours on TV right now. Want to see for yourself? Tune in on Friday nights to ABC, where the reality show/start-up competition is in its fourth season. Mark Cuban makes a particularly excellent hero/villain.

Don’t want to watch TV on Friday nights? Don’t have a DVR? No problem.

A day after the show airs, you can see it on:
Hulu
ABC.com
ABC’s iPad and iPhone app
And, if you get pay TV, your pay-TV service’s video on demand system.

One place you can’t see it:
Hulu Plus. The $8-a-month subscription service offers only some of the show’s episodes from previous seasons.

To beat that into the ground: If you want to watch “Shark Tank” someplace other than ABC, you have several legal options. Hulu Plus, the service that’s supposed to give its customers more TV programming than the free version it hatched out of two years ago, isn’t one of them.

Why not? Good question. An ABC rep says the company doesn’t have the rights to distribute the show on subscription video services. It says it’s up to Sony, which produces the show, to cut a deal with Hulu. But a Sony rep says ABC does have those rights. (Update: ABC now says the show is unavailable because of  a “business-related decision.”)

The net result is the same: Hulu Plus customers who want to watch the show on the service have to find another way, because of murky licensing issues.

It’s hard to get whipped up about this. As noted above, there are plenty of other ways to watch “Shark Tank.”*

The only people who are out of luck are the ones who wanted to watch the show on an Android phone or tablet (ABC doesn’t make an app for that OS), or for people who don’t have cable and want to watch the show on a device like a connected TV or an Apple TV.

I tried to watch the show via Apple TV on Saturday night. When that didn’t work, I ended up watching via Time Warner Cable. No big deal.**

And the good news is that these weird, inexplicable-to-regular-humans licensing gaps seem to happen less often than they used to, because Hulu (owned by Disney, News Corp., and Comcast***) and its programming partners have gotten better at ironing this stuff out. But they still happen. Another example: Hulu Plus customers can’t watch “The Simpsons” on their phones or TVs. Meanwhile, these rights gaps aren’t limited to Hulu.

The digital media utopia will be when media makers no longer care where or when we watch their stuff, because our eyeballs will be just as valuable on any platform. And we’re getting there! But it’s going to take awhile. If the media guys are lucky, we’ll be patient.

* And it really is quite good. If you’re reading this site, decent odds you’ll like it. It’s VC approved!

** Yup. I’ll own it — I spend my Saturday nights at home, watching reality shows.

*** News Corp. also owns this Web site.

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