Viral Video: First Trailer for “The Hobbit” Movie

Still suffering withdrawal from an annual holiday-season Hobbit habit? Hope is but a year away.
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Netflix Shatters Pay TV Window With FilmDistrict Deal

Intent on remaking the cable landscape, Netflix this morning inked another distribution deal, this one with FilmDistrict. Under its terms, first-run films that typically would have been licensed to cable channels for broadcast during the so-called “pay TV window” will now instead go to Netflix for streaming.

Coming Soon from Google: Pay-Per-Tube

It’s taken the better part of a year, but Google’s discussions with major movie studios about a YouTube pay-per-view movie service are coming to fruition. The Financial Times claims that by year’s end we could see YouTube transform from an online destination for user-generated content into a full-fledged, international on-demand movie service.

YouTube’s Trip to the Movies Nets Enough for Popcorn, and Another Visit

YouTube has finished its first attempt to charge customers to watch Web video. The good news: Some people paid up. And from YouTube’s perspective, that’s all that matters. Good thing, since the video site’s Sundance experiment netted less than $11,000.

In Search Of… Images Worth 1,000 Results

Google and Microsoft are offering visual searches where a picture is worth many Web results.
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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: We’ll Be Shipping DVDs Until 2030

The digital video revolution may be hastening the DVD toward its end, but there’s quite a bit of life left in the old format yet. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said as much today when he remarked that the company’s DVD-by-mail business will likely continue until 2030. During a wide-ranging on-stage interview with All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka, Hastings discussed the deal Netflix cut with Warner Bros. earlier this week that will delay rentals of the studio’s films until 28 days after their DVD release and Comcast’s proposal to acquire a controlling stake in NBC Universal, a move that could impact Netflix’s Watch Instantly streaming service.
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Apple Finally Gets Around to Updating Apple TV

It has been about two years since Apple last released a major firmware update for its Apple TV platform, so the release of Apple TV 3.0 today will come as welcome news to those who own the device. 3.0 is largely as rumored: Adding support for both iTunes LP and iTunes Extras.
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Cinema Buffs Capture Hard-to-Find Films

Jaman.com gives users the chance to download independent and international movies from the Web directly to their computers, but the system can be frustrating and the interface is cluttered.
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