AllThingsD » Hulu

"Saturday Night Live" Figures It Out

Peter Kafka — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:53:20 +0000

Conan O’Brien has embraced TV’s new rules for the Web. So has his old employer.

It used to take NBC a very long time to get clips from “Saturday Night Live” on the Internet, which is the whole reason that “Lazy Sunday” became a YouTube sensation.*

Fast-forward to today, where NBC and its social media helpers distribute SNL clips in the wee hours of Sunday night, just as soon as the show wraps up. Even more advanced: Now NBC has started showing clips of bits that never made it to TV, period.

Here’s a couple of sketches that never aired on last week’s season finale. But you can see them because they made it to the dress rehearsal, which the show tapes in its entirety.

I think the stand-up satire is pretty great (loved the Bears fan and the Denis Leary guy, in particular). Media omnivore Jason Hirschhorn loved the Jay Pharoah thing.

And that’s what’s great about SNL on the Web in general — it lets everyone pick and choose their favorite bits, Chinese-menu style, and skip the many parts they don’t want to watch. Adding in stuff that was good enough to get staged but not good enough to make the 90-minute broadcast can only be a good thing. If you’re a certain kind of SNL fan, you’ll even get a kick out of dress rehearsal versions of stuff that did air.

I don’t know how long SNL has been putting up un-aired bits on the Web — looks like for all of the past season, at the very least. Perhaps NBC PR will get back to me before the holiday weekend with a more accurate date. But regardless of when they started, I hope they keep it up.

*Which you could argue is one of the reasons Google ended up buying the company for $1.6 billion. Which led to NBC and Fox creating Hulu as an anti-Google/YouTube hedge.

Airtime Raises $25M, Brings in Early Hulu Team by Acquiring Their Start-Up, Erly

Liz Gannes — Wed, 23 May 2012 04:16:57 +0000

Airtime, the soon-to-launch video start-up from the co-founders of Napster, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, and the Social + Capital Partnership, as first reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by the company. Airtime also acquired Erly, the young, KP-backed event-photo-sharing start-up created by the early Hulu product team.

Verizon Finds an Innovative Way for Customers to Bust Through Their Data Caps

Ina Fried — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:05:26 +0000

Verizon Wireless on Tuesday is launching a new Android app that aims to make it even easier for customers to find video from their mobile device.

Dubbed Viewdini, the app allows users to search for a particular title, actor or keyword across a variety of video services, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Comcast Xfinity and mSpot.

“We are just seeing a hunger for people wanting to watch video,” Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead said in an interview. Viewdini isn’t a video service in its own right, but rather a portal of content found on others’ services. Still, Mead called Viewdini one of the carrier’s key product launches for the year.

“I think this will capture the audience’s imagination,” Mead said.

The idea is that the ability to stream high-quality video is one of the things that sets LTE apart from other wireless services. Of course, one of the big challenges is that although the service is plenty fast, watching just a handful of hours of video in a month could put a customer over their data allotment.

Mead said that Verizon has plenty of systems in place to keep customers from unknowingly going over their data limit, including text alerts when customers hit 50 percent, 75 percent and 90 percent of their data limit.

“We never want customers to be surprised,” Mead said. However, he added that the company also has competitive pricing for customers who find video they want to watch and choose to go over their original data cap. “We look at it as great flexibility for customers.”

In addition to helping find videos, Viewdini will also have IMDB-style information on the movies and TV shows. Mead said that Viewdini will be limited to Verizon Wireless customers when it launches later this month.

“This is a competitive differentiator,” Mead said.

While Viewdini is Android-only at launch, the carrier said it expects eventually to add support for other operating systems.

Mead said that Verizon is working to spur strong demand for mobile services, as well as enough bandwidth to serve that demand. Mead said that the company is pleased with how its 4G LTE network is being used thus far.

“What we’re seeing is the growth that we wanted to see,” he said. “What we are seeing is customers discovering the breadth of what they can do on the Verizon network. We’re very encouraged by that.”

Only a small fraction of Verizon Wireless customers are on 4G LTE, however, with the vast majority of its customers still using 3G service.

Verizon has been actively pitching the power of what the new higher-speed network can do, through its own efforts like Viewdini, as well as through content partnerships, including its deal with the National Hockey League, in which its 4G customers get added content when using the league’s mobile app.

Next up on Mead’s to-do list is acquiring the spectrum needed to build the next generation of networks. Part of that strategy involves the company’s proposed deal to acquire a swath of spectrum from a group of cable companies — a deal opposed by T-Mobile, Sprint and an organization of rural carriers.

“We view AWS [the spectrum it is seeking to buy from the cable companies] as the spectrum where we will expand our LTE services and capacity going forward,” Mead said. “We’re still encouraged that we’ll have approval to move on later on this summer.”

"Lazy Sunday 2": "Saturday Night Live" Revives Big Media's First Viral Video

Peter Kafka — Sun, 20 May 2012 13:00:13 +0000

“Lazy Sunday” is more than six years old. You kind of have to give the “Saturday Night Live” people credit for not remaking it earlier.

But here it is: See, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell are older, healthier, and they go to Broadway shows, not movie matinees. But they’re still rapping about Rachel McAdams.

The best line, of course, is Samberg’s shout-out to Google — a reminder that he’s still waiting for a “fxxxing YouTube check” for the first “Lazy Sunday,” which NBC doesn’t allow on the video site anymore.

But Samberg’s other viral videos are all proudly displayed on a YouTube channel. And while the clip helped build YouTube into a powerhouse that sold to Google for $1.6 billion, it also helped revive SNL and build Samberg’s career. So everybody did just fine.

And here’s the original (which on NBC’s SNL page, at least, came bundled with an ad for… “Sister Act”).

Ross Levinsohn's Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future

Peter Kafka — Sun, 13 May 2012 23:08:16 +0000

Ross Levinsohn wants to be known as more than a deal guy. Now he gets his chance.

Assuming Yahoo gives its interim CEO real power — either by making him its actual CEO, or at least letting him behave as if he has the job — then he’ll finally have full control of a giant media company. That’s something he’s been working toward for a long time, despite his rep as a guy who enjoys buying companies more than running them.

Just like his predecessors, Levinsohn will have to untie Yahoo’s knotty Asian problem. He’ll also have to spend time repairing relationships with Facebook and figuring out what to do with a Microsoft search deal that hasn’t been a huge success.

But if Levinsohn gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength.

Bear in mind that this is still a huge business — the portal attracts some 700 million visitors a month, which helped it generate nearly $1 billion in ad sales last quarter. But that business is listing and under attack from Google, Facebook, and a swarm of nimble start-ups pulling eyeballs and dollars away.

If you want to get a sense of what Levinsohn may try to do next, it’s good to review what he did last year, when he had control of the company’s U.S. operations — and what he tried to do but couldn’t get done.

Ads: Yahoo used to have one of the Web’s best sales operations, but those days are long gone. Levisonsohn spent much of 2011 trying to fix that. Part of that involved restaffing his team, and part of it was a strategy that was supposed to cut out some of the ad tech middlemen and allow the company to increase its yield on the ads it sold. Those moves, which included a would-be alliance between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, all went into a holding pattern when Scott Thompson took over in January. Levinsohn will try restarting that again now.
M&A: Levinsohn has a reputation as a dealmaker because he’s made some pretty big deals. Most notably, he brought Myspace to News Corp. in 2005, then helped the company secure a $900 million ad deal with Google (News Corp. also owns this Web site). Last year, he tried to land another big fish, when he pushed to pursue Hulu. But Levinsohn couldn’t get buy-in from then-CEO Carol Bartz, and Hulu’s owners decided not to sell after all. I think Levinsohn would still be interested in the site under certain conditions, but he’d need more cash than he has on hand to do it. Selling off his Asian assets might make that possible. If he can’t land Hulu, I don’t see him chasing after Instagram-like companies with big price tags and no near-term revenue plans. I do see him making some plays on cheaper start-ups, as well as some technology plays, to shore up/replace the company’s very old infrastructure/platforms.

Stalking the Elusive Cord-Cutter: Pay TV Grew Last Quarter (Again)

Peter Kafka — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:20:30 +0000

Web video is awesome because it gives you so many great viewing choices, without having to pay for TV.

So why did the number of pay-TV subscribers increase in just the last three months?

They didn’t grow much — a modest 422,000 subscribers, for a very modest 0.2 percent growth rate — but they still grew.

Those numbers come from Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett, a longtime skeptic that “cord-cutting” is a real and pervasive problem for the cable guys (at least for now). It’s not the first time he’s shown evidence of barely-there growth for cable TV — last quarter, for instance, he gathered similar numbers.

But his numbers do conflict with other reports that show evidence of cord-cutting. Earlier this month, for instance, Nielsen said that pay-TV subscribers had shrunk by 1.5 million in 2011.

The easiest way to reconcile Moffett’s numbers with other reports is to note that almost all of the analyst’s data comes from the publicly traded pay-TV providers themselves — like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — in the reports they offer up to shareholders. Most of the other stuff you’re seeing comes from polls and surveys.

Here’s his data. You’ll need to click the image to enlarge it:

But what about all of you folks who tell me, over and over, that you’ve ditched cable for some kind of combo of Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, or even pirate streams? Surely I’ll hear from some of you again, just as soon as I publish this.

And I believe you folks, too. I can certainly imagine many scenarios where tech-savvy people — and even not-that-tech-savvy people — are able to satisfy their video urges without paying for a TV subscription. But my operating theory, for now, remains my vegan analogy: “They’re real, and they’re out there. They’re particularly notable in certain places like New York, the Bay Area and college towns. And they over-index at certain Web gathering places, like this one. But McDonald’s sales are still chugging along.”

Content Is No Longer King

Ben Elowitz — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:14:23 +0000

“Content is king” has been a long-lived mantra of media. And in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was true.

But over the last several years, the Internet has upheaved the aphorism.

It used to be that media was linear. And in that world, content and distribution were married. The HBO channel had HBO content. A New York Times subscription bought you New York Times content. And Vogue and Cosmopolitan each month delivered exclusive and proprietary content from … Vogue and Cosmopolitan.

Until the Internet came along. In every single one of the varied businesses the Internet has touched — from commerce to media to communications to payments — there has been one common impact: disaggregation.

Content and distribution have parted

In the case of the hundreds-of-years-old media business, the Internet has fundamentally separated content from distribution.

Today I can watch hundreds of South Park and Jon Stewart clips, all without a cable box — on my Apple TV, my Android phone, or YouTube on my desktop.

But wait, South Park and Jon Stewart? Content is king, you say. It’s now even more free to reign, unfettered by distribution channels!

No; because content is no longer enough. Content has always been a means to an end. And the end has always been audience.

Content isn’t the goal. Audience is.

When it comes to the business of media, there’s no question: advertisers don’t pay to reach content. They pay to reach an audience.

What’s the first item in every brief from every advertiser? It’s not Target Content, it’s Target Audience.

Media has been slow to adjust to this new dynamic. Companies have sunk billions into content management systems — using CMS as the cornerstone of their modernization — under the impression that they traffic in content.

But they don’t. They traffic in audience. And how much have they spent on audience development systems? Not much, if any at all.

Now that distribution of content to audience is no longer linear, distribution decisions are suddenly more complicated. And, at the same time, they are immensely more important — and more dynamic — to create the impact media companies are looking for: drawing an audience! Social distribution can outperform search, if you use it wisely. Day-parting your postings can boost post performance by 100 percent or more. Packaging can triple the effectiveness of content in reaching an audience.

And yet, few in media have even begun to optimize these decisions.

Who’s your Chief Audience Officer?

Distribution decisions are just as important as content decisions in building and serving an audience, and yet they are being largely ignored. Everyone has an Editor-In-Chief or a Chief Creative Officer. But how many have a Distributor-In-Chief? Or a Chief Audience Officer? A Head of Digital Programming?

The myopic focus on content over distribution is widespread, and it’s a bad business decision. It ignores a critical access of leverage, and one of competitive advantage.

The smartest media companies will do three things to take control of their digital opportunity:

Put someone in charge of audience development.
Give them latitude to think about the interplay between distribution and content, so that they can marry the two. Like a head of programming for a cable network, they should be tasked to realize the full potential of your digital channels. They should support the delivery of your content, and they should also provide back pressure to your content creators. Don’t merge it into your editorial jobs — that’s too precarious. Make it its own discipline.
Adopt an audience development strategy.
There are three basic components you have to master: insights (know your audience segments, and what each one will like); channel selection (identify the highest value distribution outlets for your brand, whether it’s search, social, YouTube, Hulu, or your own channels); and optimization (use data to create a feedback loop and tune your content, packaging, and timing to what works for your audience).
Systematize it.
You have sunk millions into content management systems. But how much have you spent on your most monetizable asset, your audience? You should be as systematic in audience development as you are in content creation, if not more so. Whether it’s with established processes or dedicated algorithms, make audience development a competitive advantage. Get so good at it that you truly know how to maximize every piece of content you create — and multiply your ROI. Use technology for what it does best: Systematize your advantages over your competitors.

With the rise of new distribution platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Hulu, there’s no question that the next generation of digital media is as much about distribution as it is about content. Media companies that orient their organizations to prize audience development above all (with distribution as a key component) will catch the upside of these tectonic shifts. And they will be the ones that survive and thrive in the digital age. After all, audience is the ruler of media companies’ fortunes.

This article by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is an exclusive selection from his Media Success newsletter for digital media leaders. Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

Cable Fee Fight Takes Another Turn as Dish Networks Uses iTunes, Netflix and Amazon as Weapons

Peter Kafka — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:07:00 +0000

The basic contours of the TV programmer versus pay-TV provider fight are fundamental and unchanging: The programmer tries to get more money for his stuff, the pay-TV provider says that’s too much, and the two sides chest-bump for a while.

Eventually they settle, and you, the pay-TV customer, ends up paying more.

And that’s what’s happening in the latest dustup between Dish Networks, the satellite TV service, and AMC Networks, the programmers now best known as the guys who bring you “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad.”

The slight twist here: For argument’s sake, at least, Dish is saying that because AMC is selling digital versions of those shows to other outlets, its hit shows are worth less to Dish subscribers. “It’s actually devalued,” says Dish chairman Charlie Ergen.

The fact that networks are selling or giving away their stuff online has been a minor but growing issue in carriage fights for a while now. But this is the biggest stink that a cable/pay TV provider has made about it, at least in public.*

Dish first brought this up via a press statement last week, but Ergen went on about it at length today during the Dish earnings call.

It’s worth reading. I’ve cleaned up his comments just a bit for clarity (note that AMC Networks includes multiple channels, including AMC, IFC and Sundance):

We have very, very specific viewer measurement. Much more granular than somebody like Nielsen might have. So we’re able to watch our customer base and — we realize we skew a bit more rural — between [AMC Networks] programming, they have very, very low viewership, outside of a few obviously popular [shows] on AMC.

But those particular channels are also available to our customers on a variety of other sources, like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on.

One of the things that programmers have done is that they’ve devalued their programming content by making it available in many multiple outlets. So, when someone asks for price increases …

We just look at it. Our customers are not really saying “We want to pay more money,” they’re saying, “We want more flexibility in our programming, and we don’t want to pay more.”

And when you look at that from a timing perspective, that’s just a contract that we can change. And we believe that the product is actually devalued. Not that there’s not some good programs, but that they’ve been devalued, because you can get it in multiple ways. And customers are asking for more flexibility, or have more flexibility to get the programming. So it’s not quite the same as something that was exclusive.

So we look at it and say, “This is a good opportunity to make a good business judgment call.” And obviously there’s a price where an [AMC Networks] product makes sense. We just don’t think that’s where we are today.

First things first: Obviously it makes the most sense to dump all of this into the “posturing” bucket, and treat it accordingly. The easy money here is to bet that, yet again, Dish and AMC will strike a deal, which Ergen, at the end of his remarks, explicitly says is on the table.

That said, a couple of points:

Most of the big TV programmers seem to agree with Ergen’s point when it comes to free repeats of recent shows. Which is why they have been taking stuff that they’ve been giving away via outlets like Hulu, and either pulling them off the Web entirely, or requiring that customers “authenticate” — prove that they’re paying for cable or satellite TV — in order to see them without delay. Note that Dish was the first pay-TV service to participate in the Fox authentication plan last summer. (Fox is owned by News Corp., as is this Web site.)
TV programmers don’t seem to think that iTunes’ and Amazon’s a la carte sales of shows that aired the night before are devaluing their product. Because they’re still selling them, and by all accounts there doesn’t seem to be a ton of volume for those episodes. If there was, advertisers would squawk long before pay-TV providers would.
The really touchy subject here is what happens to prior-season episodes of AMC hits like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. Netflix has been arguing that these episodes are big draws for its customers, and that this is good for networks like AMC, because people discover the old shows on Netflix and then watch the new ones as they air. There is some evidence for this, too.
But there is also evidence that Netflix repeats hurt some cable programming — like kids’ shows — too. And that leads to speculation that Viacom and Disney will pull back their shows from the service or raise prices when their contracts expire — even though Netflix is already paying big dollars for them. Netflix will have its hands on “Mad Men” and other AMC shows for at least a couple of years more. But it will be interesting to see what Dish’s complaint means for the renegotiations.

*There is also a wrinkle involving a lawsuit between Dish and a former AMC subsidiary, but that’s par for the course, too. All of these guys sue all of these guys, all the time. No recession, ever, for TV attorneys.

Amazon Gets Into the Sitcom Business

Peter Kafka — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:30:33 +0000

Amazon has been stocking up its Web-video offering with lots of old TV shows. Now it’s going to start making some of its own.

The company is pulling back the covers (a bit) on its plans to produce kids’ shows and sitcoms via its “Amazon Studios” unit, which has already been dipping a toe into the movie business. Word of the new push leaked out earlier this year, via hiring notices — such a useful way to track a secretive company! — and now Amazon is ’fessing up.

A bit. Amazon Studios head Roy Price won’t discuss his budget, or the number of shows he intends to make, or a timeline for getting them on the Web. But he is willing to sketch out a couple of notions:

Like the movie effort, Amazon is soliciting scripts for new productions via the Web, and will pay out modest fees — $10,000 for an option, $55,000 if a show gets produced, plus possible royalties — for stuff it likes.
The big difference between his TV effort and his movie effort is that Amazon intends (with some exceptions) to actually make the shows, and distribute them via its own “Amazon Instant Video” offering. (For the movie effort, Amazon is feeding scripts it likes to Warner Bros., which will decide what to do with them.)
Price says the shows he does make should look and feel like “real” TV shows, with commensurate production budgets.

Lots of wiggle room in all of this. So the big news is that Amazon is formally declaring that it’s in the original video business — just like Google, Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo and lots of other tech guys.

Not surprisingly, Price doesn’t want to talk about Amazon’s place in that newly formed constellation. But he does point out that this isn’t the first time the company has started making its own media. Amazon has already launched its own book-publishing business, and has started poaching “real” authors for that effort, and that has traditional book publishers terrified.

Hard to see Hollywood freaking out about this right now — particularly when they’re making a ton of money selling Amazon their old shows. But if this ever takes off, that could change.

Providence Gets Out of Hulu. What About Jason Kilar?

Peter Kafka — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:17:44 +0000

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Five years after investing in Hulu, Providence Equity is getting its return and going home. The private equity group is striking a deal with the rest of Hulu’s owners — Comcast, Disney and News Corp. — that will let it cash out its 10 percent stake.

People familiar with the negotiations tell me that Providence and its fellow investors are pegging Hulu’s value at $2 billion, as Bloomberg reported earlier today. I don’t know if that means Providence will take $200 million, or if it structured a deal that gave it some sort of preferred return over and above its equity stake. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

In any case, the real question to answer now is what this means for Jason Kilar and his management team. Kilar and his employees also have a chunk of equity in the company, but haven’t been able to get their hands on it because there hasn’t been a “liquidity event.”

So now that there has been one, will Kilar take his payout and leave? There have been a lot of folks, myself included, who assumed he was leaving for a long time — especially during 2011, when he angered his media company owners with a “Jerry Maguire” memo questioning the basic business practices of the TV business, and when Hulu briefly went on the sale block.

But come 2012, Kilar was still there. And starting with his appearance at our D: Dive Into Media conference in January, he’s been loudly extolling Hulu’s virtues and its track record, in a variety of public appearances.

When I talked to Kilar a few months ago, I tried to get him to tell me if he was sticking around. Here’s what he said then: “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.”

Which doesn’t really answer the question at all. I’ve asked him and his reps for a more concrete answer today. Not surprisingly, they’re staying quiet.

Here’s that interview again. The part where I confess to being wrong about his exit date is right at the beginning. The part where he won’t talk about his exit date is at the end.

[ See post to watch video ]

Netflix Says It's Back to Boom Times. Wall Street Isn't Convinced.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:01:44 +0000

Netflix says 2012 is going to be great. Wall Street remembers 2011.

And that’s the explanation for last night’s stock swoon, which followed a solid-to-good Q1 earnings report from the video company.

Specifically, Wall Street doesn’t believe Reed Hastings’s prediction that his company will add seven million customers to its U.S. streaming-video service this year. For a couple reasons:

That’s the same growth rate that Netflix had back in 2010. But back then, Netflix was growing from a much smaller base. At least as important: Back then, it had the subscription streaming-video business more or less to itself. Now it is facing competition from Hulu, Amazon and Comcast, with more — like a Redbox/Verizon service — on the way.
Hastings says Netflix can pull this off, even though next quarter’s growth will be much slower than Wall Street was expecting. Netflix has a complicated explanation for this, involving “seasonality” and the size of the company’s subscriber base. Short version: Trust us, it will all work out in the end.

These are the kind of arguments that Hastings used to win, because Netflix was one of tech and media’s most amazing growth stories, and Hastings had the aura of a man who could see around corners.

But 2011 changed all that. Now, if Hastings tells Wall Street that he can see the future, he’s going to get plenty of pushback. Yesterday’s conference call was dominated by questions about his 2012 growth predictions. The first one set the tone: “Why are you so confident?”

That one will take about eight months to explain. Let’s see if investors are that patient.

The One Number Netflix Investors Care About Today

Peter Kafka — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:30:48 +0000

Netflix had a crummy 2011. How did the first three months of 2012 go?

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.

Why You Can't See SNL's Great "Game of Thrones" Sketch on NBC.com

Peter Kafka — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:35:26 +0000

The great thing about Saturday Night Live and the Internet is that you don’t have to watch Saturday Night Live anymore. Because of the Internet.

Do whatever you want on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, you can see all of the show online, legally, for free. Your cyber-pals will have already told you which clips you should seek out, and NBC has gotten so good at this that it now hires a “social media marketing” firm to seed the Internet with embeddable highlights.

Easy. Except when it’s not. Periodically, NBC ends up in a position where it can’t use the Internet to distribute its TV show, because someone complained about a copyright issue after the show aired.

And that’s apparently what happened this weekend to this excellent “Game of Thrones” parody, which you can see on Gawker but not NBC or Hulu. (The clip stays up on Gawker, apparently, because either no one complained or because Gawker hasn’t listened to their complaints; I’ve asked Nick Denton and company for clarification.)

So who griped? Not us, say HBO’s reps, and that makes sense, since the clip is first and foremost a great ad for the pay channel.

“Rights issue,” says NBC, without elaborating. So the best guess here is that someone who owns the rights to the “Game of Thrones” soundtrack complained.

That soundtrack comes from LA-based Varèse Sarabande, which specializes in film scores and soundtracks, and is distributed by Universal Music Group. I’ve asked Universal to confirm that the label complained, so we’ll see. But it’s a pretty good bet, because music rights are almost always the cause of this kind of thing.

That’s because music is particularly difficult to clear, even by byzantine digital media rights standards. Each song is composed of two elements, the recording and the underlying composition, and each one of those elements can have multiple owners and … ugh.

Amazing anything gets cleared, ever. And for a show that gets built on the fly, like SNL does, every week, even more amazing.

So nothing to do here, I guess, but shrug. Things are a lot better than they were way back in 2005, when NBC was befuddled by “Lazy Sunday” and YouTube. And at least Saturday Night Live’s writing staff can still point us to the Gawker clip, which has racked up some 300,000 views in the last couple days.

Reed Hastings Goes After Comcast, Again, on Facebook. Again.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:03:37 +0000

Two weeks after Reed Hastings called out Comcast, using his personal Facebook account to vent at the cable company, the Netflix CEO is at it again.

Today’s blast is similar to last month’s in both form and content.

Hastings is once again accusing Comcast of violating “Net neutrality” principles by favoring its own Web video service over those from Netflix, HBO and Hulu, when it comes to data usage. (Last month Hastings also complained that he couldn’t watch HBO GO on his Xbox, but that’s been resolved.)

Here’s the text (you can also see a screenshot, below):

Comcast no longer following net neutrality principles.
Comcast should apply caps equally, or not at all.
I spent the weekend enjoying four good internet video apps on my Xbox: Netflix, HBO GO, Xfinity, and Hulu.
When I watch video on my Xbox from three of these four apps, it counts against my Comcast internet cap. When I watch through Comcast’s Xfinity app, however, it does not count against my Comcast internet cap.
For example, if I watch last night’s SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn’t use up my cap at all.
The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment.
In what way is this neutral?

Reminder: Hastings has all sorts of ways to complain/lobby Comcast and/or regulators (see, for instance, the new Netflix PAC). I continue to find it fascinating that he’s taken to posting on Facebook for this stuff. (Another reminder: Hastings is a Facebook board member).

Last month, I asked Hastings and Netflix PR if they wanted to expand on his comments, but never heard back. I’ll let you know if that changes.

Notes From ArabNet

Chris Schroeder — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:39:54 +0000

The following dispatch was written on March 29, day one of the third annual ArabNet Digital Summit.

If debates rage about the meaning of the past year in the Middle East, one would not sense much doubt among over 1,000 young regional entrepreneurs and early stage investors gathered here in Beirut. Their message is clear: There is no turning back, and the demographically young, wired, connected new generation in this region plan to take business opportunities into their own hands.

ArabNet Digital Summit is the brainchild of Yale MBA and Lebanese entrepreneur Omar Christidis. His vision has remained throughout to create a hub of shared ideas, experiences and connections among the nascent but rapidly growing start-up communities throughout the Middle East. Innovators from 22 countries are networking, competing in start-up competitions and participating in sessions familiar to any entrepreneur in the United States — e-commerce, big data, mobile, the cloud and social networks — but with sensitivity to local and regional opportunities as yet untapped.

Saad Khan, one of the few American VCs here, is a young veteran of Silicon Valley — having been a part of one of the world’s first incubators at Garage.com (which launched Pandora) and now at CMEA Ventures (where he sits on Blekko’s board). He has travelled extensively throughout the region over the last two years, and he believes that something pivotal is happening in the Middle East. “This is not about looking for ways to transport Silicon Valley here,” he notes, “MENA is a different market. Building connections with tech smart people in the Valley is great — shared, reciprocal learning both ways can be more powerful. Mobile is on fire in this region, everyone has a cellphone and smartphone penetration is deploying rapidly as pricing has dropped. Look for mobile innovation here to come from MENA, even leap-frogging the US.” He adds that some of best innovations in the cloud computing and ad analytics (like Cloudera, Revenue Science, AdMob and Bre.ad) are coming from Arabs and Arab Americans connected to the States and globally.

Moderator Alex Tohme, entrepreneur and Digital Strategist for Ogilvy One in Dubai, argues that while she prefers to run a company with the team under one roof, technology facilitates connections among skills around the region. “My ideal start-up would have tech engineers from Jordan, creatives from Egypt and have Lebanese sell it,” Alex Tohme notes. “ArabNet is great, as we’ve all connected regularly online over the last year and can meet here in real life. Talent is in many places, and many ‘hubs’ will spring up and connect with each other.”

Many of the more successful start-ups at ArabNet are regionalizing/arabizing ideas that have worked elsewhere in English. In fact, some of the leading competitors at the start-up demo competition would be familiar to the western world. Cinemoz announced significant business development partnerships with the best in Arabic TV and movie content, creating a Hulu for the region. ReserveOut is a fast-growing reservation-booking and backend for restaurants and spas similar to OpenTable. Arab Rooms allows business travelers in Saudi and beyond to find cheap, clean and convenient rooms somewhere between a Hotels.com and an AirBnB.

Habib Haddad is a Lebanese entrepreneur who created the first Arabic translation search engine, Yamli, and has created wamda.com in Beirut as the cornerstone of an entrepreneurial ecosystem of breaking information, education, research and angel investing in the region. He believes that such “copycats” are a great thing. “The Middle East and Arabic market is huge, has perfect demographics and has hunger for services for them on their terms and in their language. As success breeds success, more innovation will follow.”

Panelists and participants concur universally that the mere act of creating content and services in Arabic offers significant opportunity. Surveys have shown that over three quarters of Internet users in the region would prefer content in the Arab language, yet a tiny fraction of content online is currently in Arabic. Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer for Wikimedia Foundation, noted in his talk here that on Wikipedia there are over 22 million individual articles in 280 languages. Only 100,000 are in Arabic. Denmark alone has over 200,000.

Rob Kniaz, General Partner of Hoxton Ventures out of London, who specializes in early investments in emerging markets, told me that Arabizing the web not only creates services to large markets who wish to have them in their own languages, but also opens up new, now-dormant business opportunities. “Local, Arabic advertisers have nowhere to go, so aggregate dollars are small and ad CPMs can be a few cents. Think of the pent-up demand over time as this is addressed by more Arabic content,” he notes.

Demo Competition winner May Habib founded Quordoba first as a B2B platform for businesses to outsource translation needs online, creating a network of over 400 vetted translators, many with industry expertise, to turn around documents in a matter of hours. But rapid demand is now also coming from English consumer media companies looking to reach Arabic audiences — and not only book publishers, but authors themselves, want them to both translate and distribute their books digitally and offline in the Middle East.

There is plenty of grumbling about infrastructure issues at this gathering — each country with its own challenges of logistics, delivery and regulation. But there is a special place of frustration among attendees over mobile broadband quality and cost. During a panel with executives from some of the region’s telecom giants, many participants drilled into the quality of services, the scaleability of capabilities as more smart phones come on board, and the access charges that are high by any global standards. The Twitter feed of #ArabNetME retweeted themes like, “Only Skype matters” while the executives also described their hopes for expansions into 4G and beyond.

But many entrepreneurs find opportunity in infrastructure weakness. Rasha Khouri, Lebanese Palestinian founder of diaboutique.com and dia-style.com — the largest growing fashion and e-commerce website that allows global access to some of the most innovative and hard to find fashion brands — noted: “I’m very impressed with the number of start-ups here trying to solve issues we face infrastructurally. More efficient online banking, mobile charging, billing, teaching advanced computer skills. Some of these aren’t necessarily ‘innovation’ as in ‘new technology’ — but critical for innovation to flourish.”

Jordanian entrepreneur and competition finalist Fouad Jeryes could not agree more. He co-founded Codely as the first fully online education platform for schools to teach specific programming and tech skills to high-school age kids, offering supplemental but often unique educational opportunities. “We surveyed kids and asked them what computing skills were all about and most said ‘Facebook,’ or ‘a way to play games’ or ‘secretarial skills.’ Our programs not only teach skills but create awareness of whole new worlds they really never have understood existed for them. We are lighting a fire in kids minds to make this understanding real. I believe we will help create the next generation of entrepreneurs in the Middle East, and eventually completely globally.”

Regional venture capital — from the Arab world and Turkey — is hovering closely over the ArabNet attendees. Egyptian VCs Sawari Ventures and Amman incubator Oasis 500, some of the most active regional investors with nearly 50 investments last year, split their time equally here with portfolio companies and looking for new investments. Middle East Ventures announced five new investments from the stage, including two follow-ons in music, job discovery, gaming and mobile payments. Noted Oasis 500′s Salwa Katkhuda, “I came with good expectations to be about the same as last year. But so much more is going on now in the region in terms of start-ups funded, a few success stories, more VC funds and so on.”

Will western investors be far behind? Saad Khan notes with conviction: “The answer to what will happen in five years is in the hands of the people in this room, period. And wins tend to beget wins.” He likes what he saw at ArabNet.

Christopher M. Schroeder @cmschroed is a U.S. Internet entrepreneur and angel investor. His most recent company, the social and content online health platform healthcentral.com, was acquired in December 2011. He has been active in following entrepreneurship in emerging markets, especially in the Middle East, and has written for AllThingsD on these experiences.

Want to Skip a Pre-Roll Ad on Your Free Video? Pay Up.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:07:26 +0000

If you’re the kind of person who complains about “pre-roll” video ads, now you can put your money where your mouth is. Pay up, and you won’t have to see them.

That’s the pitch for SkipIt, a new service from video ad company SpotXchange. The idea: Users set up an account, and when they play videos on sites that use the service, they can pay 10 cents a pop to skip over the ads.

Meanwhile, SpotXchange tells Web publishers it will pay them more than they would have received from the video advertisers if the pre-roll had played. And it says it will end up increasing the value of the rest of the publishers’ video ads, since users will only see the stuff they really like.

All of that sound unwieldy and unlikely to you? I think so, too.

Hard to imagine consumers pulling out their credit cards in order to skip a pre-roll. And while SpotXchange imagines that there will be lots of ways for users to earn SkipIt credits without actually spending their own money — another advertiser could give out freebies for watching one of their ads, etc. — simply registering for an ad-skipping service seems like an awful lot of work. After all, you could just look away.

In any case, this is likely going to be theoretical for lots of Web surfers. SkipIt is launching today on just a handful of sites, none of which are owned by big publishers. But SpotXchange says it has a deal in place with magazine publisher Meredith, so you should start seeing it on sites like Better Recipes soon.

And SpotXchange CEO Michael Shehan, who concedes that this is a work in progress, insists that there has to be an audience for some version of what he’s offering. “There’s a segment of people who will do a lot of work to not watch ads,” he says.

At the very least, SkipIt seems like another acknowledgment that most pre-rolls are clumsy and unpopular. YouTube and Hulu already let users skip lots of their pre-rolls with a single, free click, which they say increases the value of the ads you choose to watch. And last month we told you about Solve Media’s answer to the problem, which involves typing in a brand message in order to skip the ad.

Here’s a video from SkipIt that explains the service. You’ll note that there’s no ad before the ad:

[Shutterstock/Tom Sebourn]

Miramax CEO Mike Lang Out

Peter Kafka — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:25:01 +0000

Miramax CEO Mike Lang is leaving the movie studio, after a 14-month stint. A Miramax press release says Lang is resigning, and that the company doesn’t have a successor lined up. Lang took over the film company after private equity investors had purchased it from Disney, and helped it hammer out a series of distribution deals, particularly with digital outlets like Netflix and Hulu. (An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Miramax and Amazon had signed a deal.)

Please Don't Tell Me What You're Watching on Netflix

Peter Kafka — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:00:11 +0000

Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” system means you end up telling your friends about everything you’re doing, whether they want to know or not. Netflix wants to tie this into its streaming service, but can’t, because of a U.S. privacy law.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is also a Facebook board member, is backing a bill that would change the law. Right now, it’s tied up in the Senate.

But if it passes, don’t expect Netflix subscribers to thank him. They have absolutely no desire to learn what their Facebook pals are watching.

That’s the no-doubt-about-it conclusion from a new survey commissioned by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney: He finds that seven out of 10 Netflix subs are “not at all interested” in “seeing what [their] FB friends have watched on Netflix.”

Here’s what that looks like in a bar chart:

As Mahaney notes, it’s possible that the folks he surveyed just don’t know how cool it will be to learn that their pals are watching “Mad Men” or “Dora the Explorer” or whatever. And that if it becomes possible, they’ll change their mind.

But it’s worth noting that Hulu has synced up with Facebook (I’ve never really understood why it’s not constrained by the same law, but whatever). And so far I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Facebook pal tell me what they’re watching there.

There are a bunch of ways to explain that nonscientific observation away. But my gut is that people are actually sort of private about a lot of their video viewing, and don’t want to automatically share it with the Web.

It’s not like Spotify, where even though you may not be proud that you were listening to .38 Special, you don’t really care if anyone knows.

Yes, lots of people will tell you — on Facebook or Twitter, or maybe even one of those TV check-in services — about a specific show they’re watching.* But that’s a lot different from a deluge, which is what Facebook seems to want.

And Netflix users, at least, want no part of it.

*I just finished season 4 of “Breaking Bad” this weekend. So great. I literally yelped in delight at the end of the last five or six episodes.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

Solve Media Lets You Skip Web Video Ads. One String Attached …

Peter Kafka — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:00:53 +0000

You want to watch Web videos. But you don’t want to pay for them. You don’t want to watch any ads, either.

Solve Media has an idea. The ad tech company will let you skip the “pre-roll” commercials before Web clips. But only after you’ve typed a branding message into a text box.

So, rather than watch an ad for Toyota’s RAV4 before you watch a video on AOL’s Huffington Post, you can now type in “no time to waste” and go right to the video. You can see it in action here, and there’s also an explainer video at the bottom of this post.

This may sound familiar. Solve Media employed the same mechanism — “type a branding phrase, and we’ll give you access to something” — a couple years ago, when it used it in place of captchas, the random text strings some sites use for security reasons.

Like that one, this gambit has conceptual logic working for it, especially for marketers — getting someone to type your brand’s name or campaign slogan, in return for something they value, seems like a good thing.

This one seems harder to sell to Web video watchers, though. The work/reward ratio seems off.

Yes, pre-rolls can be annoying, especially when the ad is long and the clip is short. But I’ve generally gotten pretty good at tuning out whenever they pop up. Asking me to lean forward and type in order to skip them — particularly when YouTube and Hulu often let me skip them with a single click — seems like a lot of work, when I could just zone out instead.

But maybe I’m particularly zen when it comes to ads. I don’t really mind most of them, anyway. Particularly when they help pay my bills.

Some of you seem more agitated by this sort of thing, so you tell me: Are you willing to type a marketing message in order to avoid watching a marketing message?

Solving the Pre-Roll Blues from Solve Media on Vimeo.

[Shutterstock/iQoncept]

Hey Ladies! Guess Who Loves Web Video?

Peter Kafka — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:59:15 +0000

From the “sort-of-surprising-but-really-shouldn’t-be” file: Women like watching video on the Web — even more than men do. At least when it comes to Netflix and Hulu.

So says Nielsen, using data it collected last fall. It says 57 percent of Netflix.com visitors are women, and that 59 percent of Hulu’s visitors are women.

And those numbers actually understate the gender gap a bit, because women watch more once they get to the sites, too. Nielsen says that women account for 64 percent of total viewing time on the two sites.

A good reminder that while there’s (still) a big gender imbalance when it comes to tech companies’ executive ranks, board composition, etc., it’s a different story when it comes to tech consumers. Another good reminder: Pinterest.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Dmitrijs Dmitrijevs)

Comcast's Netflix Killer Isn't One Yet. But It Could Be.

Peter Kafka — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:39:25 +0000

Comcast’s new Netflix killer can’t be a Netflix killer, because most of the people in the U.S. can’t use it. Streampix, the Web video service it is launching this week, will only be available to Comcast’s 22 million cable TV subscribers.

But if Comcast wants to, it can change that overnight, as The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Schechner reported yesterday. The cable giant’s new content deals allow it to sell its stuff nationally, to anyone with an Internet connection, if it wants to.

Comcast insists publicly that it has no interest in doing that. Privately, its executives say the same thing. They say they can’t figure out how to market and support a $5-a-month digital subscription service to noncustomers and still make money.

What if they added more content and sold it for $8 a month, like Netflix does? “That still wouldn’t work for us,” one of them told me yesterday. “We can’t figure out how it works for Netflix, either.”

So if things don’t change, then Streampix will work primarily as an anti-churn tool for Comcast — a carrot they’ll dangle to keep current subscribers happy. And it may also keep a few of them from signing up for Netflix, or renewing the subscription they already have.

Which means it will join the growing number of Netflix killers that aren’t really Netflix killers, because they don’t have the same breadth of content, or are only available to a certain number of customers.

Over the last couple of years, Amazon, Hulu and Dish/Blockbuster have all launched Web video subscription services that offer Netflix-like services. But, so far, none of them have really gone head to head with Reed Hastings.

Later this year, though, Verizon and Redbox will begin selling their own Web video service, and the companies have been very clear that that one won’t be limited to Verizon customers.

And it will definitely feel like a competitive service. There’s a good chance, for instance, that movies from the Viacom-backed Epix pay-TV channel, which currently run on Netflix, will appear on the Verizon service, too.

So that’s one full-fledged (potential) Netflix killer launching this year. And another one that might turn into one, with a flip of the switch. That ought to keep the Netflix executives, and investors, occupied for a bit.

It's Not TV, It's Amazon

John Paczkowski — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:25:04 +0000

Hulu has “Paul the Male Matchmaker,” Netflix has “Lilyhammer” and “House of Cards.” And what does Amazon have in the way of original video programming? Nothing much yet. But that may soon change.

New job listings on Amazon’s careers site show the company looking to recruit at least two creative executives for the “People’s Production Company,” its movie and series production arm. Specifically, it’s seeking executives to quarterback its children’s and comedy programming efforts. Each job’s top duty: To “help develop half-hour comedies for online and traditional distribution.”

And traditional distribution. Interesting.

So maybe Amazon’s big digital push into the traditional television business is broader than just streaming video.

Or, on the other hand, maybe it’s just a toe-touch that doesn’t mean much until it means something — like “Amazon Studios,” a screenplay submission factory the company created in 2010 that has yet to result in very much.

Hiring a few executives, or even greenlighting a couple of original shows or series, isn’t much of a commitment for Netflix or Hulu. And it means even less for Amazon, which generated nearly $4 billion in operating profit last quarter.

But those same resources mean that if Amazon ever does get serious about the content business, it can get very, very serious.

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar Is Still Standing: The Full Dive Into Media Interview (Video)

Peter Kafka — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:40:02 +0000

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.

[ See post to watch video ]

Viral Video: Hulu's Original "Paul, the Male Matchmaker" Set to Debut

Kara Swisher — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:57:06 +0000

Here’s the trailer for Hulu’s latest original content offering about a very unusual matchmaker.

That’s irksome “Paul, the Male Matchmaker,” a 10-episode spoof series from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Studio 2.0, which will debut on the premium video service on Feb. 13.

Get it? The day before Valentine’s Day.

It’s got the same tone as Lisa Kudrow’s successful (and now on cable television’s Showtime) “Web Therapy,” with lots of well-known guest stars.

I kind of like it from the teaser here, but we’ll see:

News Corp.'s Chase Carey Says Phone Hacking Doesn't Indicate a Culture Problem

Liz Gannes — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:55:25 +0000

“It certainly has been a difficult year,” said News Corp. COO Chase Carey, referring to the public discovery that U.K. publications owned by News Corp. had hacked into cellphones in order to advance their stories. Now that the dust is beginning to settle, he added, “Our priority is to make things right.”

Was phone hacking indicative of a larger culture problem at News Corp.? asked Walt Mossberg, who interviewed Carey on stage at D: Dive Into Media this afternoon.

“No,” Carey replied. “While all this noise exists, one of our challenges is to manage our businesses, and we’re quite proud of them.”

(This might be a good time to mention that Carey is our boss, since AllThingsD.com is owned by News Corp.)

Mossberg eventually moved onto SOPA and PIPA, the recently withdrawn anti-piracy bills. Wouldn’t it have been better for Hollywood to work together with Silicon Valley to hash out a solution that worked for both of them? he asked.

Carey doesn’t think so. “We’re the ones who are having our product pirated, so we appropriately tried to get it dealt with,” he said.

So was SOPA a bad bill?

Carey wouldn’t go that far, though he declined to comment on the specifics of the bill. “Without having read it, it probably could have been a bit better focused,” he said.

The next big topic was online television distribution and cutting the cord — two of the leading themes of today’s conference.

For the short term, News Corp.’s best option is what’s called “TV everywhere,” where watchers log in to view online programs based on their paid television accounts. Carey admitted this authentication hasn’t been executed all that well.

Over time, Carey said, News Corp. expects to increasingly address viewers who want content on their own terms. But it wants to figure out how to make money.

On a more specific note, what about Hulu, the premium video streaming site that News Corp. owns in part and tried to sell last year?

“I’m not sure where Hulu goes,” Carey said. “But it’s something a lot of people would cut off their arms for, to have that sort of leadership in the digital arena.”