The collaboration is part of a broader trend of characters from mobile games being turned into brands that can be used by Hollywood in made-for-Web TV series.

This time it is OutFit7’s turn.

The game maker is behind such characters as Talking Tom Cat, Talking Ben the Dog and other Talking Friends, which will be used by Disney Interactive Media Group. The series will run on Disney.com, Disney’s network on YouTube, and will be accessible through the Talking Friends mobile apps.

In the apps, the animals serve as virtual pets, which respond to your touch. You can pet them, poke them or grab their tail. A popular activity is recording videos of the pet and sending messages to friends.

Before this, Disney leveraged Swampy the alligator from its “Where’s My Water?” iPhone app to make videos for YouTube. Disney and Google collaborated on that partnership and others, spending a combined $10 to $15 million for the clips. Obviously, studios are still a bit reluctant to spend even more money on turning apps into a major motion picture.

The Talking Friends franchise by Outfit7 is not talked about as much as Rovio’s Angry Birds, but it has global reach, resulting in more than 390 million downloads worldwide. It also has a big following on YouTube, making the video partnership all that more logical. For example, the Talking Friends franchise has more than 750,000 user-generated videos uploaded to YouTube that have been viewed more than 354 million times.

We’ll find out this afternoon, when the company releases its Q1 numbers. And the easiest way to tell will be by looking at one key metric: The number of U.S. streaming-video customers.

Netflix has told investors to expect something between 22.8 million and 23.6 million subscribers. And if the stock veers wildly immediately after the earnings hit the wire today, it’s likely because of that number.

If it’s high, then Netflix bulls get some vindication: Turns out that people still like paying $8 a month for all-you-can-eat movies and TV shows, streamed to any device they want, just like CEO Reed Hastings has been saying.

If it’s low, then Hastings’ doubters can argue that the loss of high-profile movies from Sony and Disney, and increased competition from the likes of Amazon and Hulu, are big problems that aren’t going away.

There will be plenty of other numbers to dig into as well, and Citi’s Mark Mahaney lays out his helpful intrepretive cheat sheet for them, below (click to enlarge). We’ll tear into those, along with Hastings’ quarterly shareholder letter, after 4 pm ET. See you then.

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

The upside to this approach is obvious: You conscript/cajole ordinary people into becoming advocates for your brand/show/widget. What could be better?

And the downsides are pretty familiar to lots of marketers, too: If you ask people to comment on your brand/show/widget, you don’t really know what they’re going to say.

So here’s a live example of the pros/cons: A viral video for “Don’t Trust the B– in Apt. 23,” a new ABC show that debuts next week. The clip stars James Van Der Beek, who some of you will remember from “Dawson’s Creek” way back in the 1990s. It showed up on my Facebook page because a couple of my Facebook pals liked it.

So far, so good. And the clip is nudge-wink funny enough, in a “could make it to SNL but won’t make the highlight reel” kinda way.

It’s the commentary that accompanies the video that might give an ABC executive pause. Or maybe not. Maybe any eyeball is a good eyeball. But read on and make your own call:

Worth noting that over on YouTube, which famously has all sorts of unpleasantness roaming free in its comments section, the conversation is PG, PC and very brief — just 8 comments, even though the clip has generated some 29,000 views. Which makes me think ABC or YouTube has been moderating what goes on over there.

Wonder when/if ABC and Facebook will try to do the same.

This morning, for example, Google’s YouTube is announcing a deal to rent movies from Viacom’s Paramount studio. The move will bring some 500 titles to Google, ranging from newish hits like the “Transformers” movies to oldies like “The Godfather” trilogy; users will also be able to rent the movies from Google’s new Google Play hub.

The announcement means that Google, which has been struggling for years to figure out Hollywood, now has rental deals with five of the six big studios: Paramount, Sony, Time Warner’s Warner Bros., Disney, and Comcast’s Universal.

The lone holdout is 20th Century Fox, which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp. All six studios rent their movies via Apple’s iTunes. It’s worth noting that Paramount is one of the few studios that has experimented with direct-to-customer sales and rentals, via its own Web site.

And because of its strong association with a brand, the game makers are hoping that this time the game won’t be as easy to replicate by competitors — unlike what happened with Disney’s big hit Gardens of Time.

Animal Kingdom Explorers, which will launch over the next couple of weeks, challenges players to find a number of items within a scene. Butterflies and birds, for example, are hard to decipher among the lush vines of a jungle; leopards, crocodiles and elephants are camouflaged in the deserts of Africa.

The game is Disney’s second to fall under the category of “hidden objects,” a genre that Disney arguably helped define with the launch of Gardens of Time, which Facebook named as the most popular game of 2011.

“After we launched Gardens of Time, we wanted to follow on that with something that would appeal to those who loved it and reinforce the elements that they loved the most,” said Eric Todd, the VP of product at Playdom and creative director of Animal Kingdom Explorers. “And what they said is that they really like learning.”

They also wanted a game that couldn’t be copied as easily by competitors, which frequently occurs in social gaming when a particular title or genre suddenly takes off.

For instance, the Gardens of Time game had a Victorian theme, with players traveling throughout multiple eras, learning about history as they went. After its success, many copycats followed, including Zynga’s Hidden Chronicles, which also had a Victorian look and feel. I pointed out the similarities between the two games after Zynga launched the game following its initial public offering.

But by partnering with one of Disney’s big brands, Todd is hopeful that this one will be more difficult to mimic.

He said the Disney-owned Playdom team traveled to Orlando to meet with the engineers who created the Florida theme park, so that the game would be scientifically accurate and would be familiar to anyone who had visited the park. In all likelihood, equivalent resources wouldn’t be available to other game makers.

“Hidden object games are tremendously popular among a broad and very enthusiastic audience,” Todd said. “It’s flattering to the degree in which our previous game was intimated.”

Generally, if you’ve played the Gardens of Time, or many other social games — the mechanics of this new game will be familiar; it doesn’t stray too far from the commonly used playbook.

For instance, as part of the game, players will have a space — in this case, it’s a nature reserve — where they have to decorate and add animals and other items. Users will be able to visit each other’s reserves, much like visiting another user’s farm or city.

In addition, the game uses a common game mechanic to get users to cough up a few dollars for the free-to-play game. After playing for a certain period of time, a player will run out of energy. They can either wait to play some more, or pay to buy more energy.

Another advantage in leveraging a Disney brand is being able to tap into the company’s massive entertainment marketing engine. The game will be promoted on Disney’s Web sites and within the theme park itself. Likewise, the park will be promoted from inside the game. Also, because of the close tie-in with a Disney property, the developers are using the name Disney Social Games, rather than Playdom, which Disney bought in 2010 for more than $500 million.

Playdom plans to release a dozen games this year, several of which will finally leverage Disney’s big brand names. The first game built on Disney’s intellectual property – Marvel: Avengers Alliance –   launched in January.

And, of course, there are apps for that.

Disney Publishing has just released the first in a series of new Chinese-language apps for the iPad, based on the international teaching method known as Diglot Weave. The first app, called Learn Chinese: Toy Story 3, includes multiple versions of Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” broken up into five parts that offer layers of Chinese-language instruction with sequentially increasing degrees of difficulty.

That’s right: Woody and Buzz speak Mandarin!

The app offers background music and sound effects, audio and visual translations of individual words (using Pinyin, the standard system for transcribing Chinese into Latin script) alongside one-tap pronunciation guides, and voice-recording capabilities, so users can practice and compare their pronunciations with the audio narrator.

It’s available for iPad only, though Russell Hampton, president of Disney Publishing Worldwide, says Disney plans to expand eventually to other tablets, and will offer more apps and Disney-owned titles. This one costs $4.99 in the iTunes App Store.

There are currently more than 300 Chinese-language instructional apps for kids in the App Store; more than 200 results come up for Mandarin-language apps in the Android marketplace, though it appears that many of these are for adults and are also geared toward traditional language learning through repetition and exercises. The Diglot Weave method that Disney is going with involves teaching the language through a story that’s told partially in the learner’s native language and partially in the foreign tongue, gradually increasing the level of foreign language used throughout the narrative.

Disney has been pushing foreign-language instruction since 2009, when it launched a handful of schools across China. While Disney said at the time that its goal was authentic English-language learning, the push was also seen as a way for Disney to expand its brand reach across a nation known for tightly-controlled media.

Yahoo just got yet another poison-pen letter from activist investor Dan Loeb of Third Point, which says the company has been “dismissive” of his alternate slate of board members, including former NBC head Jeff Zucker.

It is another doozy, full of all kinds of interesting details and signals, which I will go into more detail about below, although the main message is: Perhaps it is actually time for a proxy fight.

Wrote Loeb to Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson: “The Board’s stonewalling, apparent insouciance and decision not to engage with us in a serious manner, has left us no choice but to directly approach our fellow owners with the Shareholder Slate. Accordingly, we hereby notify you that we intend to file our Preliminary Proxy Statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission within the week.”

Before the battle begins, let me just note: Who uses the great word “insouciance” anymore? Kudos, Dan! (It means indifference, Cliff Clavin.)

In an e-mailed statement, Yahoo said: “As previously stated, in order to achieve the best possible outcome for all Yahoo! shareholders, the Board’s nominating and corporate governance committee continues to review a wide range of highly qualified candidates. The committee has included Third Point’s candidates in its thorough review process and will make its recommendations to the full Board in due course.”

The Silicon Valley Internet giant also sent this turgid (look it up!) explanation of how proxy fights go down:

Yahoo! will be filing a proxy statement with the SEC in connection with the solicitation of proxies for its 2012 annual meeting of stockholders. Stockholders are strongly advised to read Yahoo!’s 2012 proxy statement (including any amendments or supplement thereto) when it becomes available because it will contain important information. Stockholders will be able to obtain copies of Yahoo!’s 2012 proxy statement, any amendments or supplements to the proxy statement, and other documents filed by Yahoo! with the SEC in connection with its 2012 annual meeting of stockholders for no charge at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov.

Yahoo!, its directors, executive officers and certain employees may be deemed participants in the solicitation of proxies from stockholders in connection with Yahoo!’s 2012 annual meeting of stockholders. Information concerning the ownership of Yahoo! securities by Yahoo!’s directors and executive officers is included in their SEC filings on Forms 3, 4 and 5, and additional information is also available in Yahoo!’s proxy statement for its 2011 annual meeting of stockholders filed with the SEC on April 29, 2011. Information regarding Yahoo!’s directors, executive officers and other persons who may, under rules of the SEC, be considered participants in the solicitation of proxies for the 2012 annual meeting of stockholders, including their respective interests by security holdings or otherwise, also will be set forth in the definitive proxy statement for Yahoo!’s 2012 annual meeting of stockholders when it is filed with the SEC.

Got that?

One interesting part of the Loeb’s much more sassy letter is a suggestion at the bottom about Yahoo’s lack of a chairman when current head Roy Bostock steps down later in the year. Loeb’s idea is to keep on Gary Wilson, former CFO of Disney and Marriott, who was also leaving, in that role for one year.

“We believe this role should be for one year only, with the explicit understanding that Mr. Wilson would recruit his replacement prior to the end of the term,” wrote Loeb, who appears to be sending a none-to-subtle smoke signal that this might have been discussed already. “We suggest this in the spirit of continuity and compromise, and believe it would be in the best interests of all shareholders. We encourage the Company and Mr. Wilson to strongly consider this idea.”

The letter is a bit of a olive branch, followed by a swift kick, presumably an attempt by Loeb to get Yahoo to start taking him more seriously.

“Scott, it is not too late for you to take decisive leadership action and avoid the costs and distraction of an expensive proxy contest fighting the Shareholder Slate (which, according to our research, will be well-received by shareholders),” Loeb noted archly, before referring to Yahoo’s current lawsuit against Facebook over patent infringement. “You appear to have enough battles to fight already.”

In other words, if you prefer the “Fatal Attraction” movie metaphor rather than from “Dirty Dancing,” Loeb is not going to be ignored!

Oh, read it all for yourself — here’s the full letter:

Third Point Letter 3.14.12

Let’s assume that some of you are interested in taking your old DVDs to Walmart, and paying up to $5 a disc so you can access the movies on them from Vudu, Walmart’s cloud-based service. Fair enough — different strokes and all of that.

But we’re going to have to shrink the size of this theoretical group a bit. Because Walmart’s new “disc to digital service” won’t work for:

• People who want to watch Disney or Pixar movies. Disney is working on its own cloud service, and isn’t joining the five other major studios on this one.
• People who want to download the movies to iPhones and iPads. Users of iOS can stream Vudu movies to their devices, but can’t keep them on their machines.
• People who want to stream or download their movies on Android phones or tablets. I’m sure there’s a good biz-dev reason that Vudu doesn’t support Google’s OS, because I can’t think of a technical one.

You can download and stream movies to Windows or Mac PCs. Walmart says Vudu will work on “more than 300” devices, but I only count 211 on the service’s Web site, and most of those are Internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players.

I guess there are some people who would rather go to Walmart and upload their movies instead of ripping them directly from their DVDs to their PCs, even though it’s very easy. Maybe they are very, very interested in obeying the law, because — weirdly — it’s technically illegal to copy a movie you own, even for personal use.

But I can’t figure out who’s going to use disc-to-digital to watch movies on their TVs, since it’s very likely they already have a machine that plays discs sitting right next to their TVs. (Based on the promotional video Walmart has rolled out, it can’t either. As you can see at the bottom of this post, it’s playing up disc-to-digital’s mobile advantages.)

I’m also pretty skeptical that anyone who doesn’t have kids will have much interest in making digital copies of movies they already own. The reason that Hollywood is working on schemes like this to promote movie ownership is that most people have figured out they’d rather rent. Not because they’re constrained by device compatibility, but because they only want to watch a movie once or twice.

Kids’ movies are the big exception here. I think lots of people would jump through lots of hoops to get copies of kids’ movies on as many devices as possible. But the absence of all those Disney movies, and all those Pixar movies, sure looks like a problem for that pitch.

But I don’t want to end the evening on a negative note! So take a look at Walmart’s video. It’s pleasant enough. And perhaps at some point, Walmart figures out how to rope Disney in, add more devices to its lineup, and actually deliver on the promise sketched out below:

But Google’s Web video giant is also very happy to run good old-fashioned TV shows, if it can get its hands on them.

Here’s a reminder: Nearly 70 videos from Disney’s Disney Channel, many of them full-length episodes, are all free.

The videos have gone up in the last few days, but neither Google or Disney has said much about them. They’re there because of a programming deal the two companies cut last fall.

Coverage of that pact focused on the fact that Disney was going to create original short videos for YouTube, and would also allow YouTube to post a selection of user-generated stuff that incorporated Disney characters, etc.

But the deal also allows YouTube to run full-length shows. They’re even fully embeddable, as you can see below, if you’ve got 22 minutes to catch up on Zack and Cody’s suite life.

I’m not an expert on this flavor of kids’ programming, but I gather these are relatively old clips. But I do know that kids don’t really care about the vintage of their Web videos — they’re generally happy to watch whatever they watch, over and over again.

That’s why kids’ videos are so important to Netflix, and why they’re potentially very important for Google. That long-running, never-ending copyright lawsuit means that YouTube can’t get its hands on all the kids’ stuff that Viacom controls, but the Mouse House has plenty of its own. The fact that Disney distributes its stuff quite widely on the Web doesn’t diminish its value to YouTube boss Salar Kamangar.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has distributed full TV episodes, or even full movies, owned by Big Media, for free. (See more here and here). But it is a good reminder that it is very happy to show more of them, as soon Hollywood is ready to play along.

Yes. But not that many people.

Social TV tracker Bluefin Labs counted 3.44 million “social comments” about last night’s Oscar awards. That metric, which primarily tracks Twitter usage but also includes some data from Facebook and other services, is certainly big. But it’s much smaller than two other big live-TV events this month. Bluefin counted some 12 million comments for the Super Bowl, and 13 million for the Grammys.

And the comment volume for those two events showed much more year-over-year growth than the Oscars, too. Bluefin says Oscar Tweets were up more than 250 percent this year, compared to a crazy 2,300 percent bump for the Grammys and 580 percent for the Super Bowl.

That might seem a little odd to someone like, um, me, whose Sunday evening Twitter feed seemed to be clogged exclusively with people live-tweeting the same broadcast. (Which, really — love you guys, but I could do without.)

So this ends up being a very healthy reminder that different people use Twitter for different things. Hard to remember that sometimes, because the medium so closely mimics a traditional broadcast system, with its one-to-many structure (even if CEO Dick Costolo insists it’s not a media company). But on Twitter, there are a whole lot more broadcasters out there, and not all of them go freaking nuts about the Oscars, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

(Photo courtesy of Academy Award official site)

Many of those folks work at Trendrr, one of several start-ups trying to make a go of the “social TV” boom. A dozen of the company’s 20 employees will spend the day monitoring the broadcast, as well as the red carpet run-up to the show and the post-event recaps.

But Trendrr did its heaviest lifting last week, when it had to figure out exactly how it was going to track Twitter’s Oscar conversation. (Like its peers, Trendrr also keeps tabs on Facebook and other social outfits, but Twitter provides it with the most complete data stream.)

Some of you will go out of your way to help Trendrr and its competitors, like Bluefin and Socialguide, by explicitly labeling your Oscar tweets via hashtags like “#oscars.”

But many of you may simply type something about “The Descendants” at some point during ABC’s broadcast. And some of you may leave out the space between the two words, or the “The” altogether. How to account for all of that?

A combination of art and science, says Trendrr CEO Mark Ghuneim. His team spent the week going through the list of award categories and nominees that will be televised, as well as any presenters expected to be on stage, etc.

That yielded around 200 search terms that his computers will use to search the Twitter stream. And each search term will contain multiple queries — not just “The Artist,” for instance, but “TheArtist.” (You can see some of the list, pictured left.)

Some of the other stuff is trickier to account for, and Trendrr will need to make some decisions about some of the tweets on the fly. If it sees a spike in tweets about “Drive,” for instance, it will need to figure out if people are talking about tooling around in a Toyota, or a sound-editing award.

All of which make for interesting data points after the event, some of which I’ll happy to write up here. (Spoiler alert: Just like the Super Bowl and the Grammys, the Oscars will generate a big year-over-year increase in Twitter activity.)

The long-term question is what kind of value all of this data will provide for programmers and advertisers.

Even if it turns out that Twitter (and Facebook, and every other social service) is directing more eyeballs toward TV — a narrative that pleases both the old- and new-media folks — how is it helpful to know that “George Clooney” was a popular term on Twitter last night?

“This is a swarm event,” Ghuneim says. “And when you have a swarm event, that’s when the action is most actionable.”

That sounds smart, though I’m a little skeptical that the ad world is anything close to nimble enough to do a lot with the data right now. Still, lots of marketing folks seem interested in this stuff in the present tense — if you visit Interpublic Group’s Media Lab, for instance, you’ll see Trendrr data displayed prominently. And always better to have more data than less, right?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish my preshow Melissa McCarthy appreciation exercises.

*If I had to bet, I’d go along with the conventional wisdom that gives “The Artist” an armful of statues. And if you haven’t seen it, I’d say this: It’s fun! You should go! But if you don’t see it in a theater, and end up watching at home, you’re going to be underwhelmed. Can’t watch this one with a remote or an iPhone in your hand.

Google has asked federal regulators for permission to sell pay TV in Kansas City, where it has been working on a broadband/fiber buildout, and the WSJ thinks it could launch in a couple months.

It would be awesome if Google could use this as an opportunity to break up the cable bundle, and let people buy individual channels instead of big expensive blocks of programming they mostly ignore.

But that’s very unlikely to happen, because the cable programmers love the bundle, and don’t have any incentive to break it up (see: Viacom’s Philippe Dauman and ESPN’s John Skipper last month at Dive Into Media). If Google wants cable TV programming, it’s going to have to play by cable TV’s rules.

So what can Google offer that will make someone switch from Time Warner Cable, which dominates the pay TV business in Kansas City?

Very high-speed Internet access, for starters. And perhaps Larry Page will figure it’s worth his while to offer the service at an extremely low margin, because the whole project is a very expensive test, anyway.

Beyond that, here are some guesses/predictions from Bernstein Research analysts Carlos Kirjner and Craig Moffett, who have a pretty good handle on this stuff. They’re the ones who predicted on Tuesday that Google would file for cable licenses “very soon.” This prognostication comes from that same note:

DVR in the Cloud: “We would expect Google to store (and make available to consumers) the content across all or most TV channels it will provide, making available to users not just the live stream but also past content going back several days or weeks, if not longer. With the addition of good search and discovery and user interface capabilities, this would make DVRs obsolete.”

TV Where You Want It: “We would expect Google to offer access to something like ‘Cloud TV,’ described above, including the live TV stream, across multiple devices, such as computers, tablets and handsets.”

A Programming Guide That Doesn’t Suck: “It is not very hard to imagine a much better user interface than the one currently provided by the MSOs and satellite TV providers,” presumably along the lines of what they’ve been showing off with the revamped Google TV.

Again, the big caveat here is that none of this happens unless the cable programmers play along. And while none of the stuff described above seems truly mind-blowing, some of it — like live mobile streaming — will stil require programmers to give Google capabilities they haven’t given to heavyweights like Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

And even though the cable programmers often tangle with the cable providers, they’re at least comfortable with them in general. Google, though, still scares the bejesus out of lots of traditional media companies, so I’m not sure how many of them will play along.

One pretty good bet: Google’s foray into cable TV won’t include anything from Viacom, since the cable giant is still suing Google in the YouTube copyright case. So no Snooki for Kansas City.

[Shutterstock/Dwight Smith]

In the meantime, they’re offering this teaser clip, along with a story-behind-the-story (warning — comes with annoying auto-play video):

But! If you’re going to see Linsanity up close and personal, may as well get as close as possible. Zuckerberg’s seat normally goes for $1,200, according to CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell.

Mark Zuckerberg, who is at the Knicks game, is sitting in $1,200 seats. He can spend that every min for 10K days & still have $

— darren rovell (@darrenrovell) February 19, 2012

Provided you’re willing to get your head around a couple of ideas:

• If you want to buy old shows that now have limited value to the cable programmer, it’s happy to part with them for the right price. Ask Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, among others.
• And if you want the new stuff that cable subscribers get, Viacom will sell you those, too. As long you’re willing to pay for the entire bundle of Viacom’s channels, just like cable subscribers do.

From Dauman’s perspective, Viacom — and by extension, most of the big cable programmers — are in pretty good shape right now. Even though people like me like to write about cord-cutting, he says he’s not seeing any real evidence of it. Meanwhile, new digital players are giving him what amounts to found money — checks for shows he wasn’t really selling, anyway.

Exceptions? Sure. Disney’s ESPN charges a whole lot for its programs, and Dauman (and other cable guys who don’t sell sports) think that’s a problem.

Then there’s the whole SOPA/PIPA thing, which Dauman says was well-intentioned and misunderstood. And it will stay that way for a while — he says there’s no chance that the entertainment guys get new legislation through in 2012.

Dauman laid all of this out during his interview with me — preceded by a spirited, R-rated introduction by Viacom employee Snooki — at Dive Into Media last month. You can watch the entire video here:

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120214/viacoms-philippe-dauman-has-a-bundle-will-travel-the-full-dive-into-media-interview/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-cord-cutting-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-cord-cutting-business/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 03:51:11 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=174217 When last we heard from Bamboom, it was an interesting and also sort of confusing service that promised to let you watch TV — but only some TV — on your iPad or any other Web-connected device.

Now Bamboom is called Aereo, and it is backed by Barry Diller and/or his IAC Web holding company. But the concept appears to be the same: The service will let users stream broadcast TV stations to their Internet-connected devices, wherever they are.

We’ll know more Tuesday, when the service hosts a press event at Diller’s IAC headquarters in Manhattan. Press materials promoting the event describe Diller as a “minority investor” in Aereo, but don’t say whether he’s backing the company personally, or if he has put IAC’s money into the service. I asked IAC for clarification, but they referred me back to Aereo.

Financing aside, a more fundamental question about Aereo would be: Who is the market for this thing?

Aereo uses a Rube Goldberg-like system involving huge arrays of teeny-tiny broadcast TV antennas to give each user their own personal live TV stream. That’s a system created to take advantage of the legal umbrella that Cablevision’s remote DVR has earned — and one that Google and Amazon used to create their music locker services without approval from the big labels last year, too.

That’s clever, but it won’t do anything to help someone who wants to watch Monday Night Football on their iPad. Because Monday Night Football airs on Disney’s ESPN cable channel.

I assume that Aereo CEO Chaitanya Kanojia will explain tomorrow that a large percentage of TV viewing is confined to the broadcast networks like ABC, Fox, CBS and NBC, and I’m sure he’s right. But that explanation won’t satisfy someone who thought they could use the service to watch CNN or Bravo or Lifetime or whatever, and then finds out it won’t work.

So, yes, you could describe Aereo as “cord-cutting” technology — which is the way the service’s PR folks are describing it in their invitations — because it will help you watch TV without a cable subscription.

But it won’t help you watch shows you used to watch on cable, which I think is what most people expect from a service with that description. A better description would be: “A service that’s interesting but limited by itself, but if coupled with other things — say, an ‘over the top’ Web video subscription service — could get more interesting.”

More later. For now, here’s the old Bamboom explainer video, which isn’t as slick as the new Aereo video, and which touts an integration with Netflix that the new video doesn’t mention. But it is embeddable:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-cord-cutting-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120208/hulu-ceo-jason-kilar-is-still-standing-the-full-dive-into-media-interview-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120208/hulu-ceo-jason-kilar-is-still-standing-the-full-dive-into-media-interview-video/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:40:02 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=172445 Hulu isn’t supposed to be a success. And Jason Kilar isn’t supposed to have a job.

But the Hulu CEO is still running his site, a full year after angering his owners/bosses with a “Jerry Maguire” manifesto. And Hulu itself generated more than $400 million in revenue last year — just a few years after all the smart money was sure that the “ClownCo” would never work.

So what was Kilar thinking when he published that memo, anyway? And more important, what’s next for him and his site? We got to ask him directly at D: Dive Into Media last week — his first onstage interview in a very long time.

You can watch the full interview here, but you’re also going to want to watch Hulu carefully in the next few months. That’s because its strategic owners — Comcast, Disney and News Corp., which also owns this site — still don’t seem to have figured out what they want to do with the joint venture. And financial backer Providence Equity has a chance to get its money out this spring, which could directly impact Kilar’s plans, too.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120208/hulu-ceo-jason-kilar-is-still-standing-the-full-dive-into-media-interview-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120207/disney-profit-rises-12-percent/ http://allthingsd.com/20120207/disney-profit-rises-12-percent/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:30:06 +0000 William Launder and Drew FitzGerald http://allthingsd.com/?p=172313 Walt Disney Co.’s fiscal first-quarter profit rose 12 percent, helped by revised contracts with broadcast affiliates and increased customer spending and attendance at its theme parks.

The company’s revenue missed analysts’ expectations amid a decline in film revenue and essentially flat advertising revenue at ESPN.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

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