Is this a big deal? Sharon Waxman, who broke the news tonight, thinks so, arguing that it positions Netflix as a bona-fide competitor with the likes of Time Warner’s HBO (TWX) for online movie rights. Waxman’s rival Nikki Finke pooh-poohs the pact.

Feels weird to type this, but I’m with Finke on this one. But not for the reason she states–that Relativity makes lots of stinkers. Unless I’m missing something, the bigger problem is that Relativity doesn’t have the licensing and distribution rights to many of the biggest movies it puts out. Those go to Sony, Warner Bros, Universal, etc.

Still, Waxman is on to something here–Netflix does want to gather streaming rights to as many movies as it can, as it transitions from a DVD rental service to one that rents out bits.

That doesn’t mean it’s likely to challenge HBO et al. for the biggest and most expensive catalogs out there. And Netflix is still going to have make subscriber-unfriendly deals like the one it made with Warner Bros. if it wants access to their stuff. But it will be able to pick up a few titles here and there. And over time, those can add up.

Is this a big deal? Sharon Waxman, who broke the news tonight, thinks so, arguing that it positions Netflix as a bona-fide competitor with the likes of Time Warner’s HBO (TWX) for online movie rights. Waxman’s rival Nikki Finke pooh-poohs the pact.

Feels weird to type this, but I’m with Finke on this one. But not for the reason she states–that Relativity makes lots of stinkers. Unless I’m missing something, the bigger problem is that Relativity doesn’t have the licensing and distribution rights to many of the biggest movies it puts out. Those go to Sony, Warner Bros, Universal, etc.

Still, Waxman is on to something here–Netflix does want to gather streaming rights to as many movies as it can, as it transitions from a DVD rental service to one that rents out bits.

That doesn’t mean it’s likely to challenge HBO et al. for the biggest and most expensive catalogs out there. And Netflix is still going to have make subscriber-unfriendly deals like the one it made with Warner Bros. if it wants access to their stuff. But it will be able to pick up a few titles here and there. And over time, those can add up.

Among those paying attention: Mail.com owner Jay Penske, who has just purchased Geller’s three-and-a-half year-old site, which averages around a million visitors per month.

Geller will be added to Penske’s growing stable of Web site operators, which includes high-profile gets like Hollywood power blogger Nikki Finke and celebrity editrix Bonnie Fuller.

Geller wouldn’t tell me what the terms were, but said the deal for his company — he’s the sole owner, and employs three writers — is worth “multiple millions”. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we heard similar numbers batted around when Penske bought Finke’s one-woman site last summer.

I assume the terms include an upfront payment, equity in Penske’s company and payouts triggered by traffic and/or revenue goals, so there’s likely a good deal of wiggle room in the deal.

In any case, it’s a nice bit of validation for a 23-year-old who never made it to college. Geller dropped out of Greenwich High School in Greenwich, Conn., presumably because he was too busy contributing posts to tech kingpin Engadget. He started his own site in October 2006.

Geller says he’s kept his name off of his posts, and off his site because it seemed like a good idea, “for marketing reasons.”

He will still keep his name off the site, but will be making a few changes under Penske’s ownership. Geller is changing the url to an easier-to-find bgr.com, for instance. And Penske will be bringing his own people to replace Federated Media, which has been handing sales for the site.

The content should remain the same, though: Plenty of stat-heavy posts about everything from Apple’s (AAPL)’s new iPhone (duh) to Research in Motion’s (RIMM) annual BlackBerry convention.

A treat for those of you who love reading about Hollywood’s inner workings: About 7,800 words in this week’s New Yorker dedicated to power blogger Nikki Finke and those who fear her and/or read her. Which pretty much includes everyone in Hollywood.

It’s a classic New Yorker profile, which means it’s thorough and a great read, though there’s not much in the way of news there. Writer Tad Friend mentions Jay Penske’s purchase of Finke’s services in passing, and there’s no update of Penske’s and Finke’s plans to expand the site.

For the record, in late June, Finke said she’d have a New York correspondent hired within three months; four weeks ago, Penske told me said correspondent was going to be signed within two weeks.

What’s the status now? “Not ready to comment right now,” Finke says via email. I’ve also asked Penske for an update.

Back to the story. There’s a lot of inside baseball about the symbiosis between the studios and the people who write about them, and some smart reporting about the tradecraft of reporting and how it has been altered by the rise of blogging.

I also detected at least a whiff of allusion to Janet Malcolm’s famous description of journalism, published in the New Yorker two decades ago:

Finke’s code is the Hollywood code. She is for hard work, big box-office, stars who remain loyal to their agents and publicists, and the little guy–until, that is, the big guy chats her up. Then she’s for that big guy until some other big guy calls to stick it to the first big guy. And this, too, is the Hollywood code: relationships are paramount but provisional. One executive observes that people who heed Finke’s call to snark about their competitors shouldn’t get too comfortable: “The idea is, The lion won’t eat me if I throw it another Christian. It works for a day, but you’re going back to the Colosseum soon.”

The bond between journalists and their sources is always complex–you’re friends with benefits, without being friends–but its contingent nature is particularly apparent in Hollywood. Finke’s sources can hear in her voice when she sounds low or unwell, and will ask if she needs anything. She’s grateful for the solicitude, but determined to maintain the barrier between her and those she calls “these people.” “A veterinarian treats animals–he’s not an animal,” she says.

What does Finke think? Glad you asked. She has an entire post dedicated to it, of course.

The gist:

As I expected, it’s an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I’m relieved that The New Yorker didn’t lay a glove on me. I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick [the magazine's Pulitzer Prize-winning editor in chief] , whom I enjoyed bitchslapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process.

No comment from Friend or the New Yorker’s PR staff, which sent me a copy of the article this afternoon.

Memo to all Cyborg Geeks:

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology….We can make him better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”

Wait, that’s “The Six Million Dollar Man” motto!

But it might as well apply to the entertainment outfit that owns the “Terminator” movie franchise.

Today, according to blogger Nikke Finke of Deadline Hollywood, the Halcyon Holding Group, after recently filing for Chapter 11 protection, has hired FTI Capital Advisors “to evaluate strategic alternatives for the company.”

In other words: Selling off Skynet!

Halcyon, which made the most recent “Terminator Salvation” film and “owns the first-look rights to the works of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick,” has been fighting with a hedge fund that gave it money to buy the famous series that takes a very bleak view of the future.

Almost as bleak as that of Halcyon if it doesn’t come up with a plan to bring me my annual dose of cybernetic organisms, which is–of course!–living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

It better be back.

Here’s the original trailer for the very first “Terminator” movie, which pretty much rocks:

Finke moved Deadline Hollywood Daily, her one-woman operation, from LA Weekly to Penske’s burgeoning Web empire in June. At the time, she promised to hire a “senior” journalist, based in New York City, within three months.

Now Penske tells me that the new hire, whom he describes as a “well-known figure from established media,” has been locked up, is finishing paperwork, and will be on board within two weeks. Finke also promises to have hires in “London, Paris, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Sydney” within the next year.

Not that long ago, it would have been inconceivable to see a big-name media macher go to work for a one-woman blog owned by a white-label email services provider. But now that Web publishing has lost most (but not all) of its reputation as a backwater for second-raters, wannabes and has-beens, and now that traditional publishing is on life support, it’s a whole lot more believable.

So. Who’s making the leap and jumping into the digital pool with the rest of us? (It’s great fun! You’ll love it! Unless you hate it!) A few of us have been guessing at names for a bit, but there’s no reason to keep our parlor game to ourselves.

Feel free to speculate in comments below, though you’ll have to use your real name if you do. If you’re feeling shy, you can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com. And if you want to be completely anonymous, which is understandable but less useful to me (I won’t have any way of reaching you for follow-up) you can use the blind tip box here.

The Nikki Finke auction is over, and the winner is…Mail.com. Jay Penske’s Mail.com Media Corporation, which owns the Mail.com email service and a small portfolio of Web sites, has acquired the blogger, whose Deadline Hollywood Daily is a must-read for Hollywood.

No details on pricing yet.* But, the fate of Finke’s site, which was managed by the LA Weekly, has been the subject of lots of speculation in recent months, including spirited back-and-forths between Finke and competitors like Variety and Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap.

Reading that stuff has been nearly as entertaining as Finke’s column. She provides blow-by-blow Tinseltown coverage–she seemed to post nearly hourly during the 2007-2008 writer’s strike–and relishes her scoops. One of her most recent: Allegations that GE’s (GE) NBC Universal was trying to “stifle” the Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the entertainment conglomerate and its parent company.

Finke says she’ll keep full editorial and design control as she begins working for Penske, the son of auto magnate Roger Penske. He’s making an interesting move: Mail.com is a white-label email provider that raised $35 million last year, but he’s been expanding into the content business. Earlier this year, he relaunched Movieline with staff from Gawker Media’s Defamer site.

But Finke’s site will remain separate from the rest of Penske’s portfolio. She says she’ll expand her one-woman show by hiring a “senior” journalist based in New York City within the next three months.

That will be a tricky expansion to navigate: Recent history shows that blogs produced by dedicated/obsessive proprietors often stumble when they expand, in part because dedicated/obsessive proprietors may not be the best managers and in part because it’s tough to find people who want, or are able, to work for dedicated/obsessive proprietors.

And from my perch, this seems like a lousy time to sell an ad-supported news site. Not so, says Finke. Or at least, not her site.

“I was not anxious to sell. I was not looking to sell,” she says. “This was sort of a process where various people kind of wore me down….I’m very pleased with what happened. What wound up happening was nothing like the offers I was getting a year ago.”

UPDATE: You can now pick a number, depending on which news source you like, but they range from “low seven figures” to $15 million. It would be awesome if any of them are true–I need a bigger apartment, among other things, and it’d be great to know that you can get rich blogging–but the only one I think is remotely plausible is the lowest one, from Rafat Ali at PaidContent.

Gabe Snyder at Gawker does a nice job of running through the estimates and explaining why they don’t make sense.

The only thing I’d add is that all of the numbers being floated today are almost certain to include earnout clauses, meaning the deal is potentially worth up to X amount–if Finke’s site hits certain performance goals. Which is a lot different than saying she’s actually made X amount in the deal.

Another way of putting it, from a source who buys and sells media assets for a living: “Presumably it’s one of these billion dollar earnout deals. I’ll pay you a billion dollars–one dollar (more or less) upfront, and the rest as a percentage of revenues (or profits if I ever find someone else to sell this to). But in the meantime you can tell your friends that you were paid a billion.”

UPDATE2: Now the WSJ estimates the deal at $10 million — but says that number includes equity from Mail.com, along with a $1 million upfront payment.

Every year we lie to you and every year you come back for more. You don’t need an upfront. You need therapy. We completely lie to you, and then you pass those lies onto your clients.

Predictably, this generated lots of gasping in cyberspace, but it shouldn’t have. The networks always bring comedians onstage during upfronts to poke fun at themselves and their competitors.

That’s because they need to. The upfronts, where the TV broadcasters show off next year’s shows to advertisers, are a week-long hard-sell. Without some “hey, we’re in on the joke” levity, these things would collapse of their own weight.

And as far as “the occasional gasp”? I was at the 2004 upfront where GE’s (GE) NBC rolled out its animated show based on Siegfried & Roy–a year after Roy had been attacked by one of his own tigers–and attempted to assure advertisers that this was OK by rolling an interview with the mangled entertainer. Now that generated some gasping.

Anyway, no need to trust either me or Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke, who patiently walks through all of this as well. Here, via the miracle of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, is Kimmel’s routine in its entirety. Enjoy it now, in case the Disney-owned (DIS) network sends a take-down notice. Warning: Contains a couple curse words that people in the advertising business have heard before.

But the layoffs that Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke predicted would get announced today have not materialized.

Gawker did get its hand on a memo from Bob Bakish, who is president of Viacom’s MTV International unit, in which he tells everyone that the group has stopped hiring and has “instituted significant restrictions on discretionary items such as on travel, entertainment, consulting, third party services and the like.”

This comes a day after Viacom told all of its workers it would be nixing holiday parties but was giving everyone two extra vacation days off instead, which is a great idea.

Finke was correct in thinking that this would be an excellent day to shovel bad news out the door, though. Hard to imagine that anyone is paying attention to anything that doesn’t have the word “election” in it. But for the record, here’s Bakish’s memo:

From: Alexander, Linda-LA
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 2:29 PM
To: All at MTVNI O&O
Cc: [A bunch of people]

Subject: On behalf of Bob Bakish – IMPORTANT

Team:
We are living in a time of unprecedented economic challenges. It is clear that the global economic slow down is real and will take us into next year. With that in mind, we need to dramatically reduce our spending for the balance of the year and for 2009.

Senior managers across the regions and strategic services have been given this message and are in the process of identifying savings opportunities. As you know, we have suspended all hiring (including staff, temps and freelancers) and instituted significant restrictions on discretionary items such as on travel, entertainment, consulting, third party services and the like.

I know these actions are not pleasant and delivering this message is not easy. However, it is the right thing to do. We, like others around us in media and the general business community, have no choice but to respond quickly to this difficult environment. It is only with this type of response that we can ensure our Brands will continue to prosper and provide our global consumers the innovative content they want and our partners the unique value they expect.

In addition, as many of you read in Philippe Dauman and Tom Dooley’s e-mail, our company will be forgoing all divisional, regional and corporate holiday parties and instead giving all employees, including everyone internationally two additional vacation days to be used during your respective holiday season as coordinated with your respective supervisor. We feel in times like these, giving our employees the extra time to spend with family and loved ones is much appreciated.

Again, I know this is not easy but we are not alone and we will make it through. Thanks as always for focusing on driving us forward–even in this period where going forward means spending less.

Bob”