Yahoo’s embattled CEO Scott Thompson (pictured here) is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree that he had on his bio, according to multiple sources close to the situation.

The pair will apparently say he is departing for “personal reasons.” Sources said that Thompson will be claiming to be leaving due to a serious illness that he recently discovered he had.

But the evolving crisis — which is just over a week old — centered on his botched resume and how he handled the thorny issue is the key reason for the abrupt end to his tenure as a CEO.

Thompson’s likely replacement on an interim basis will be Yahoo’s global media head Ross Levinsohn, who most recently also ran its Americas unit, including its advertising sales.

In addition to the management upheaval, Yahoo’s board is closing in on a settlement with the man who discovered Thompson’s misstep, activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point, said sources.

The situation could change, since Yahoo’s full board still has to meet this morning to officially approve the sweeping changes at the long-troubled company.

But, if it is, this development goes a long way toward fixing some of what has been ailing Yahoo recently.

And it’ll also be a stunning victory for Loeb (pictured here), since the pugnacious hedge fund investor is set to get three board seats from a slate proposed by him as part of a proxy fight aimed at Yahoo. The new Yahoo directors will be media exec Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson. Loeb’s fourth selection — former NBC head Jeff Zucker — will withdraw.

The five current Yahoo directors — who were to step down at the company’s annual meeting this summer — will leave the board effective immediately, sources said, to make way for the Third Point selections.

Finally, Yahoo’s recently added director Fred Amoroso will be named chairman of the board.

Amoroso is the director who has been conducting the investigation into the issues raised by Loeb about how the fake academic credentials got in Thompson’s public bios, as well as in Yahoo’s regulatory filings, and also the hurried circumstances around his hiring in January.

Those mysteries — read, screw-ups — might never be solved now, although Thompson made a convoluted attempt to explain it all in two awkward employee meetings at the end of last week. In those gatherings, according to numerous sources, he blamed a headhunting firm for introducing the mistake when he was being hired for a job at eBay in the mid-2000 timeframe.

That company, Heidrick and Struggles, slapped back last week with an internal memo, noting that Thompson’s claim was “verifiably not true.” Sources said that Heidrick told Yahoo’s board that it was in possession of a resume that Thompson had apparently submitted showing the inaccurate CS degree on it.

That memo, impugning Thompson’s credibility, was one of many that piled on to create an impossible situation for the Yahoo board, related to his leadership ability going forward.

Thompson had also previously issued a Yahoo statement, in which he apologized for the “distraction” caused by the problematic resume, but not for the mistake itself.

And, initially, Yahoo — under his direction — had called the borked resume an “inadvertent error.”

Such fumbling to fix the situation was among the many other issues that the board has been considering relating the ability of Thompson to remain in his job. Also of importance was the sinking morale of Yahoo employees, who had largely rejected Thompson’s excuses in the ResuMess scandal.

Internal message boards at Yahoo lit up all last week, with staffers largely rejecting his explanations. In addition, a number of top execs and engineers approached the board calling for Thompson’s firing.

While that’s not precisely what happened here, it’s close enough to describe Thompson’s departure as inevitable.

All this change comes in the wake of a massive restructuring he was in the midst of at Yahoo, after 2,000 employee layoffs.

Thompson was pushing forward a vision of adding a much more significant data and commerce element to Yahoo’s largely ad-based business.

That is likely to be less stressed under media-focused Levinsohn, who will be essentially trying out to be the permanent CEO.

Well known in the media and advertising communities, he has worked at a number of big online efforts over many years.

According to his bio at Yahoo, where he arrived in 2010:

He previously served as the President of News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, where he was responsible for the day-to-day operations, strategy and acquisitions that helped transformed the company into a leader in digital media. He also held senior management positions with AltaVista, an early pioneer and leader in search, CBS Sportsline where he oversaw all content and development for the top rated sports site, and HBO where he launched and oversaw a unit developing new programming and revenue streams. Levinsohn also was the co-founder and managing director of Fuse Capital, an investment and strategic equity management firm focused on investing in and building digital media and communications companies.

Levinsohn sits on the board of Freedom Communications and the Bogart Pediatric Cancer Research Program. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from The American University.

So far in my checking, Levinsohn’s resume is accurate.

More to come, obviously.

I have emails and texts and calls into everyone for comment, but apparently they are all out at a Mother’s Day brunch (except me).

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• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
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• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
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• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

This creates curious opportunities for fun. When Twilio was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As recounted by VentureBeat, when Lawson called, he heard automated voice messages asking him to press 1 for $5 million, 2 for $10 million and 3 for $15 million.

Hijinks like this say a lot about the culture that surrounds Twilio, but it’s not well known outside the developer community. Addressing that will be job one for Lynda Smith, its new chief marketing officer, who joined the company on April 23.

Smith is joining Twilio from Jive, the social enterprise software concern, where she was senior vice president of marketing until last fall. As CMO, she’ll be responsible for Twilio’s marketing strategy around the world.

“I think the Twilio brand is huge among developers because it gives that community a chance to play with something they haven’t had before,” Smith told me. “But it’s also getting a lot of traction within the telephony industry. … Voice and messaging are still a big part of the worlds that we live in, but they’ve been difficult to bring into new-world software applications because it’s still tied to some old-world things like hardware and protocols.” First priority, she says, is making sure that people outside the developer world know what Twilio is and what they can do with it.

Before Jive, Smith held a number executive slots at Genpact, Nuance, Genesys and Lockheed Martin. She’s a graduate of Simpson College, and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. She’s also on the faculty at Stanford University, where she lectures on global entrepreneurial marketing.

Twilio is definitely on the move: It landed $17 million in that C round late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million. It also just announced its second conference in San Francisco, in October. Time to get serious about marketing.

Of the two, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s last CEO, spent the most time on the witness stand. Called by lawyers for Google, he bolstered Google’s argument that it was free to use parts of Java as it assembled its Android mobile operating system.

Scott McNealy, called by Oracle, said it was Sun’s practice to let other companies use Java, but only with a commercial license, the primary requirement of which was that the licensee ensure that Java remain compatible.

While numerous other phones from the likes of Nokia, Research In Motion and Motorola were compatible with Java applications, those on Android weren’t. Compatibility is one of the main points over which Oracle has been arguing with Google. Oracle contends that not only did Google violate its patents and copyrights, but it then went on to build its own incompatible version of Java, fracturing one of the oldest premises of Java’s existence: Write once, run anywhere.

Schwartz said he had hoped that Google would take out a commercial license, but in the end, he said, according to a report on CNet News, Sun opted “to grit our teeth” and support it as part of the Java community. He said that he opted not to sue Google over the issue.

Oracle also presented as evidence an email from Schwartz, describing Google as having taken Java “without attribution or contribution,” and then went on: “This is why I love scroogle,” referring to a now-defunct Web-search service that served up Google-like search results anonymously. See it below.

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.

After parting company with Fox News last year, Mr. Beck took his message of outrage and self-reliance online. He launched an Internet video network called GBTV, where he is on air for two hours a day, alongside six more hours of shows, from “Liberty Treehouse,” a history and news program for children, to the reality program “Independence USA,” where a family explores life off the grid.

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And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: 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 LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

Nearly three years after Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. kicked off a drive to make cable programming available online for cable subscribers, the idea of TV Everywhere remains mired in technical holdups, slow deal-making and disputes over who will control TV customers in the future.

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Mr. Robbins, a producer and director known for Eddie Murphy movies and TV shows including “Smallville,” plans to produce 120 hours of teen programming this year, all of it destined exclusively for the Web. “We consider ourselves a network,” he says.

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On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

The change comes as YouTube beefs up its offerings to compete with broadcast and cable television, complete with original, professionally produced videos. Last month YouTube announced the creation of around 100 online video channels, featuring original programming from A-List talent such as Madonna, Jay-Z and actor Ashton Kutcher.

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Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen has raised the idea with multiple media companies as part of a broader effort to control rising programming costs. The programming wouldn’t include sports channels in its most-basic tier of service, according to the people familiar with the discussions. Sports channels are among the most expensive for cable and satellite operators to carry.

In part, offering channels over the Internet could give Dish more flexibility to exclude channels whose existing contracts with Dish mandate that they appear on the satellite company’s most-widely distributed tiers of service.

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Scott Moore, who runs the U.S. arm of Microsoft’s MSN portal, will depart the company, according to sources.

The well-known content exec is reportedly headed to another job, sources said.

Moore has worked at Microsoft twice in this career — first as publisher of its Slate online magazine. He came back to the software giant in early 2009, after a stint at Yahoo running its media operations.

At MSN, he was U.S. executive producer, responsible for leading the content and programming strategy for the service. Some of his most prominent initiatives were several innovative sites with Hollywood producers BermanBraun, as well as a rehaul of MSN in 2009.

What Microsoft does next with its portal business is a big question, of course, as it has aimed all its firepower — and gigantic piles of money — at its Bing search service. Thus, MSN, while one of the more highly trafficked sites on the Web, has often taken a back seat.

Dierks founded and developed Google Checkout, among other things, at the search giant. He has been there since 2004, based in New York.

The fast-growing media and news site has added a lot of content to its offerings since selling to AOL, including merging a variety of sections and overhauling others.

Here’s the official press release from HPMG, which is announcing the move today:

The AOL Huffington Post Media Group Names Google’s Tim Dierks Senior Vice President of Engineering

Noted Software Engineer Who Oversaw Multiple Teams and Founded and Developed “Google Checkout” to Oversee Group’s Expanding Engineering Team

New York, NY — September 7, 2011 – The AOL Huffington Post Media Group, a leading source of news, opinion, entertainment, community and digital information, announces today that Tim Dierks, Software Engineering Manager at Google, has been named Senior Vice President of Engineering. In this position, he will be responsible for overseeing the group’s expanding programming team. Dierks is an acclaimed software engineer who oversaw multiple engineering teams at Google and founded and developed the company’s innovative Google Checkout offering. The announcement was made by Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group; Paul Berry, Chief Technology Officer of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group; and Alexander Gounares, Chief Technology Officer of AOL.

“I’m delighted to welcome Tim to our team,” said Arianna Huffington. “In addition to having a track record of successfully leading large programming teams focused on work that’s complex, fast moving and diverse, he’s also a creative force adept at seeing his vision through to completion. Tim shares our passion for constantly improving the user experience, and I look forward to adding his ideas, insight, and knowledge to the AOL HPMG mix.”

Said Paul Berry: “We’re continuing to build a premier editorial, engineering and product group, and Tim Dierks — a rare combination of effective leader and innovative thinker –- is an incredible addition to oversee our talented and hard working team of programmers.”

Tim Dierks joined Google NYC in 2004. At the company, he has worked on internal security systems, used his “20%” time to found Google Checkout, an online payment processing service, and led engineering teams working on many different initiatives, including AdSense for Feeds, Television and Print, and FeedBurner.

In his position leading a team building internal-facing applications for the company, he managed his group’s existing software programs, oversaw the building of innovative new products, and introduced a broader set of engineering tools, including broader outsourcing and software purchasing. He also built and led a research and development team in New York that focused on TV advertising audiences, which led to the development of a “bid on and buy your audience” sales offering. Prior roles at the company included leading the newspaper ads and publisher content engineering teams.

Said Dierks: “The AOL Huffington Post Media Group offers a wide range of great content and compelling social engagement. I look forward to working with Paul Berry and the AOL Huffington Post Media Group team to continue building technology to enable and drive this terrific platform.”

Said Alexander Gounares: “Technology innovation is fundamental to AOL’s products and services, so it’s fabulous to have a noted technologist like Tim joining the team. Across the breadth of AOL technologies, we are building a world class organization of top notch talent using the latest state of the art tools. Tim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, and leadership with him, and I am looking forward to working with him.”

According to sources close to the situation, longtime Yahoo front page chief Liz Lufkin has parted ways with the company.

The departure last week appears to be related to a reorg by newish editor-in-chief Jai Singh, who used to run the editorial efforts for the Huffington Post, at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Singh appears to be setting up his own team and, thus, Lufkin was out.

Lufkin has been at Yahoo for many years, most recently as VP of front page programming. In that job, according to one bio, she supervised “editors in Sunnyvale, Santa Monica, New York and Dallas and consult[ed] to various international Yahoo! sites. Liz’s group contributed to the successful development of Yahoo’s pioneering content optimization personalization system, improving the relevancy of Front Page for users and providing new insights on audience behavior.”

Previous to Yahoo, she had been deputy managing editor at Gannett’s USATODAY.com and USA Today. She had a similar job at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle.

Lufkin’s job at Yahoo is a critical one, given how powerful the front page of the site is, with 600 million unique visitors and billions of page views.

While the portal system has been under siege in recent years, it is still a massive driver of traffic to Yahoo’s own Web properties and elsewhere on the Internet.

Yahoo declined to comment (but I am right!).

UPDATE: Yahoo said that it had hired CNET editor-in-chief Scott Ard to take Lufkin’s place. Ard, who worked for the CBS-owned tech news property for 12 years, will report directly to Jai Singh, editor-in-chief of the Yahoo Media Network.

As readers of mine know, I write a semi-ranty post now and again about the lack of women in high-level tech jobs and on the boards of its major companies.

While things are a lot better in the digital industry than, say, in meat-packing, it is still a slow slog to equality in both power and influence, even with ever more enlightened male tech leaders.

Many years ago, for example, I posted a piece, titled “The Men and (No) Women Facebook of Facebook Management” There were none in the high echelons of the social networking start-up at the time.

More recently, I wrote a piece — “The Men and No Women of Web 2.0 Boards (BoomTown’s Talking to You: Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare)” — about how all the often touchy-feely men entrepreneurs of the hottest Web 2.0 companies had a glaring problem.

While most of them have women as a majority of their customers, they could not seem to find even one qualified woman for any of their boards.

This makes it a struggle even in programming our D: All Things Digital conferences. We have featured almost every significant female tech exec we could — from eBay’s Meg Whitman to Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina to Yahoo’s Sue Decker and, later, Carol Bartz to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to this year’s amazing DARPA head Dr. Regina Dugan.

But it is still definitely not enough and a failing we think about improving all the time.

I could go on — and I am going to go on even more this fall in the pages of Glamour magazine, which has asked me to write an essay on where all the women in tech are and what is their status today and in the future.

I will also be part of what I hope will be a provocative panel, moderated by Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive, in New York City on October 11.

The panel, said Glamour, “will ask where all the women are and why don’t we see more of them — and tell why the next Mark Zuckerberg should be a ‘Marcia.’”

I am not so sanguine that that will occur anytime soon, but it will be good to talk about this important issue. Diversity is at the heart of true innovation and more of it is needed for tech to thrive in the coming years.

I will also be helping select the panelists for the Glamour event and would welcome any suggestions, especially some ideas that are not typical.

Until then, here’s the impressive Dugan at D9 last week, as well as a video of the movie trailer for 1995′s “Hackers,” in which Angelina Jolie plays a hard-charging techie who is her mostly dude colleagues’ equal.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110610/an-unlikely-pair-me-and-glamour-magazine-tackle-women-in-tech-conundrum-this-fall/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110408/youtube-opens-streaming-floodgates/ http://allthingsd.com/20110408/youtube-opens-streaming-floodgates/#comments Fri, 08 Apr 2011 17:20:28 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=38734 YouTube’s move into live streaming took a big step forward today with the initial rollout of YouTube Live, which will integrate the tools for producing and discovering live feeds into the site’s core system for the first time. Google’s video site is also opening its streaming platform to approved YouTube partners and hopes thousands of them will climb aboard. The amount of live programming now warrants its own viewing guide page.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110408/youtube-opens-streaming-floodgates/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110406/google-to-revamp-youtube-with-channels/ http://allthingsd.com/20110406/google-to-revamp-youtube-with-channels/#comments Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:16:19 +0000 Jessica E. Vascellaro and Amir Efrati http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=38625 Google Inc.’s YouTube video website is working on a major site overhaul to organize its content around “channels” as it positions itself for the rise of Internet-connected televisions that allow people to watch online video in their living rooms, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company is planning changes to the homepage that would highlight sets of channels around topics such as arts and sports. YouTube is looking to introduce 20 or so “premium channels” that would feature five to 10 hours of professionally-produced original programming a week, one of these people said. Additional channels would be assembled from content already on the site.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110406/google-to-revamp-youtube-with-channels/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110316/exclusive-yahoo-news-head-moves-to-disney-com-which-will-get-big-redo/ http://allthingsd.com/20110316/exclusive-yahoo-news-head-moves-to-disney-com-which-will-get-big-redo/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:27:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41686

Yesterday, BoomTown reported that Mark Walker, the head of the powerful Yahoo News site, was leaving the Internet giant for another company.

That company, sources said, will be Disney, where Walker will be leading a major overhaul of its flagship Disney.com site.

The property, which has largely been a promotional and aggregation play for Disney’s many family-oriented offerings–such as its popular Disney Channel cable television shows–still sees 20 million unique visitors monthly.

Walker will report to Jimmy Pitaro, the former Yahoo media head who is now co-president of Disney’s online division with John Pleasants. Walker worked directly for Pitaro at Yahoo.

Walker’s job, said sources, will be to find a new direction for Disney.com, including adding original programming to the site, as well as more personalization for its users.

It’s a big task for Walker, since Disney’s various Web efforts have a long and often rocky history, from its disastrous purchase of Infoseek in 1998 and efforts to create the Go.com portal to its savvy acquisition of several innovative kid-focused sites such as Club Penguin in recent years.

Still, like many traditional media giants, Disney has never achieved the kind of digital success its spectacular brand has promised. The hiring of Pitaro and Pleasants by CEO Bob Iger was a sign that the company was going to make some big changes again.

BoomTown will query Iger about all this at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference this summer, where he’ll be interviewed onstage.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110316/exclusive-yahoo-news-head-moves-to-disney-com-which-will-get-big-redo/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110308/video-chief-twit-leo-laporte-talks-about-podcasting-expansion-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20110308/video-chief-twit-leo-laporte-talks-about-podcasting-expansion-and-more/#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:47:50 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41380

Right before the Oscars, BoomTown motored up to Petaluma, Calif., a lovely town in Northern California, to be in studio on Leo Laporte’s “This Week in Tech” online show.

(That is him waving from in front of TWiT Global HQ, wearing mouse ears with TWiT logo, his outfit for a party later–click to make image larger.)

TWiT is just one of the more than two dozen online video shows put out by the energetic Laporte via the TWiT Netcast Network, whose expansion has been heartening to see given the programming–though decidedly geeky–is really top-notch.

That’s because, while the shoot-the-breeze about tech tone is there, the smooth-talking and erudite Laporte keeps the conversation lively and, thankfully, civil.

TWiT is all supported by advertising and listener donations, which seems to be going well for Laporte, a longtime Silicon Valley player.

So much so, that he’s moving the operation from the charming but makeshift TWiT Cottage to a bigger facility down the street with tricked-up studios.

Here is Laporte talking about this and more in a video interview with me from his fave spot behind the microphone:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110308/video-chief-twit-leo-laporte-talks-about-podcasting-expansion-and-more/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-says-company-needs-to-unify-its-experience-across-devices/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-says-company-needs-to-unify-its-experience-across-devices/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:28:40 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=4098 Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said on Monday that although the service is available on nearly every phone, the company has a long way to go to make the product consistent across devices.

“The experience has to be the same,” Costolo said during an afternoon keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “I shouldn’t have to think how to use Twitter.”

About 40 percent of tweets come from a mobile device, while half of all active users are active on more than one device, he said.

Until not that long ago, Twitter built only the product for the Web and let third parties handle phones and other devices. In recent months, though, it has scooped up various app makers and now offers official apps for the major smartphones. However, given that those official apps stem from different acquisitions, they often work in different ways.

Costolo said the company also wants to make sure that one doesn’t have to sign up and follow lots of people to get something out of the service.

“We want Twitter to be instantly useful,” he said.

With Twitter for Windows Phone 7, the company introduced the notion, already present on the Web, that one shouldn’t have to be an active user to have Twitter on their phone.

His talk is still ongoing and I’ll update things as it continues.

5:32 pm: Costolo said the company will begin offering crowdsourced translations of the service into Russian, Turkish and Indonesian and, later this year, will have its own translation to Portuguese.

5:33 pm: Some stats from Super Bowl, this year.

4,000 tweets per second at the end of the game and 3,000 tweets per second during the game. That was 27 tweets per second in 2008.

The overall record is New Year’s Eve in Japan (the country has a single time zone) and the prior sporting event record was from last year’s World Cup.

5:34 pm: Twitter is actually bringing things back to live TV and away from the DVR.

“That’s not just happening with live sporting events,” Costolo said. He cites game shows in the U.K.

5:36 pm: “Glee,” for example, has 30 times the number of tweets about it when the show is on.

Takeaway: the long-talked about second screen of interactive TV is here and it is Twitter.

5:38 pm: About Twitter as a business: The short answer is we are already making money, Costolo said. The really good thing, he said, is that businesses can use the service in the same way as others–building community around shared interest.

5:41 pm: A viral campaign of note. Al-Jazeera highlighting its coverage of the events in the Middle East and North Africa with the hashtag #demandaljazeera to get its programming on U.S. cable systems.

5:44 pm: Costolo, on the role of Twitter and Facebook in recent events there:

“I think that takes away from what these people have accomplished,” he said. “We are probably a very small piece of the puzzle.”

5:47 pm: On to Q&A. Battery is running low, but hoping to make it through the question period.

First question came in over Twitter and asks what is the company’s biggest fear.

“Twitter’s biggest fear is lack of execution,” Costolo said, saying he tries to convince workers not to focus on competitors. “If we execute on what we are trying to do we will be successful.”

5:48 pm: A couple of questions on local trends and translations. Costolo said that crowdsourcing offers a way to do more translations quickly, while the trends piece requires more work on Twitter’s part, some of which should be done this year.

5:53 pm: What is the biggest mistake Twitter has made?

Costolo said company’s founders would say they shot themselves in the foot, head and everywhere else not hiring or scaling fast enough.

“I think we are out of the woods on that one,” Costolo said.

Next question is on what Twitter is doing in response to its pivotal role in Arabic-speaking countries right now. Costolo noted that Twitter doesn’t yet support right-to-left languages.

On being blocked, Costolo said Twitter is only a 350-person company and doesn’t have the resources of some larger companies. “We try to just leverage our own platform to plead for help,” he said.

5:58 pm: Costolo is asked if there is a need for Twitter-branded smartphones.

“No,” Costolo said. “I believe there is a need for Twitter in the existing platforms.”

Earlier in his keynote, Costolo said he wants deep integration so that when a user takes a picture they don’t have to open a separate app to tweet out that picture.

6:03 pm: As for rumors that Google might be willing to pay $10 billion for the company.

“I don’t know where these things come from,” Costolo said. “It’s just a rumor.”

6:03 pm: End of keynote. (just as my battery was on its last sliver of red, too!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-says-company-needs-to-unify-its-experience-across-devices/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/web-video-doubter-mark-cuban-invests-in-web-video-studio-revision3/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/web-video-doubter-mark-cuban-invests-in-web-video-studio-revision3/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:01:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28945 Mark Cuban, Web video skeptic? Meet Mark Cuban, Web video investor.

The voluble entrepreneur and investor, who made his fortune off Web video during the first Internet boom, is dabbling in it again: He has put money into Revision3, the Web video studio/network best known as the home of Diggnation.

The investment was part of a small round of funding Revision3 raised last year, which it hasn’t disclosed until now.

That wouldn’t be that noteworthy, except that Cuban, again and again, has argued that ever-rising expectations for Web video were overblown, and that the technology wouldn’t displace TV. Which happens to be where Cuban is betting heavily, via his HDNet network.

A very brief summary of his argument:  Internet infrastructure can’t support TV-scale viewing; Web advertising can’t support TV-scale programming; people like TV.

And some representative blog posts where he make his case: The Great Internet Video Lie; Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid?;  The Future of TV Is…TV.

And here’s a representative counter-argument: Cable TV Is Screwd. It was written two years ago, by Cuban’s new partner, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback.

So what gives? Is Cuban finally backing down? Not at all, the billionaire says. He’s merely investing in a potential source of content for his TV network.

The dollars he’s putting into Revision3 will give him what amounts to a first look on the video site’s programming, and the chance to turn some of it into TV shows.

“I think Jim can make some money from this. I don’t throw money away,” Cuban says via email. “But this investment really confirms my position on web video. While Revision3 will make some money on the web, the real money is [in] TV. And I wanted HDNet to have the option to be that outlet.”

Louderback, for his part, seems fine with a less than total endorsement of his industry–he’s the one highlighting Cuban’s investment. “I like to think that we’re doing some pretty innovative stuff, and [the investment] gives him a broader visibility into that space”, he says.

And since Revision3 won’t say how much money Cuban invested in the company, or the total size of the round–Louderback will only say that it was “relatively immaterial” for his company–it’s impossible to gauge what any of this really means from the outside.

In related can’t-really-judge-what-this-means news: Revision3 says its revenue, which it won’t disclose, grew 80 percent last year, and that the company turned a profit in Q4 of 2010. Louderback defines profitable in this instance as “EBIDTA-profitable,” and says his company should be “solidly in the black” by the middle of this year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/web-video-doubter-mark-cuban-invests-in-web-video-studio-revision3/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/hows-your-html5-app-skills-in-demand/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/hows-your-html5-app-skills-in-demand/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:30:56 +0000 Joe Light http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35715 Times are good for Web- and mobile-application developers.
The number of online listings containing the keywords “HTML5,” “Mobile app,” and “Android,” have skyrocketed over the past year, making them the fastest growing keywords in jobs posted online, according to data tracked by jobs search engine Indeed.com.

The number of job listings requesting HTML5, the latest version of the language used to display Web pages, increased 13-fold between the first and fourth quarters of last year, according to Indeed. “Twitter” and “jQuery,” which is used in JavaScript programming, rounded out the top five fastest growing keywords.

Customers of Dice.com, a job board for tech professionals, expect cloud computing–which enables users to access programs and data stored online–and mobile-application development to be two of the quickest growing in-demand skill sets this year, said Tom Silver, senior vice president of North America for Dice Holdings Inc.

“Virtually all companies are figuring out how to make use of mobile apps and don’t know how to do it as well as they need to,” he said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/hows-your-html5-app-skills-in-demand/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110117/game-written-by-a-14-year-old-passes-angry-birds-as-top-free-iphone-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110117/game-written-by-a-14-year-old-passes-angry-birds-as-top-free-iphone-app/#comments Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:36:54 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=2502 While Angry Birds is still the top paid iPhone game, a game written by an eighth-grader has spent the last few days atop Apple’s free charts.

Bubble Ball, a physics simulator, was coded by Robert Nay, a 14-year-old from Spanish Fork, Utah. The game challenges players to use objects and gravity to guide a ball to its destination.

Nay spent the better part of a couple of months writing the game, which debuted in the App Store late last year and is also available for Android devices. In recent days, though, it has been rivaling Angry Birds Lite atop the list of most downloaded free games.

“I was pretty surprised by how well it was doing,” Nay told Mobilized. Nay said he plans to add more levels to the free game and then eventually add still more games as an in-app purchase. He also has some other ideas for games he’d like to write down the road.

Although it’s his first game, Nay has been into computers for some time, including Web programming and helping others with their computers. When he’s not at the computer (or school) he also likes reading, especially science fiction, and playing the piano and trumpet.

Some months back, a friend suggested that if Nay liked his iPod touch so much, perhaps he should try his hand at programming for it. At first he tried the standard Objective-C programming tools, but found the learning curve a little steep. He tried another tool called GameSalad, but didn’t like the results. In the end, he settled on the Corona tools from Ansca Mobile. Corona was easy to use, he said, and also let him write once and publish for both Apple and Android devices.

Bubble Ball showed up in the app store on Dec. 29 and had a million downloads in the first two weeks. Last Thursday, it topped the App Store free chart and had more than 400,000 downloads on that day alone.

Robert’s mom, Kari Nay, drew some of the levels of the game, though Robert did all the coding. Kari Nay also handles the business tasks, such as submitting the apps to the App Store and Android marketplaces.

“I do the grown-up stuff for him,” she said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110117/game-written-by-a-14-year-old-passes-angry-birds-as-top-free-iphone-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110112/in-yet-another-content-hook-up-aol-ups-deal-with-endemol/ http://allthingsd.com/20110112/in-yet-another-content-hook-up-aol-ups-deal-with-endemol/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:10:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39480 AOL’s strategy to partner with third-party content creators for original programming–especially premium video content–keeps ticking, with another partnership, this time with Endemol USA.

The New York-based Internet company said it would “co-develop and co-produce new Web programming initially aimed at AOL’s growing women’s audience” with Endemol.

Endemol makes television shows, such as “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” “Big Brother,” “Wipeout” and “Jerseylicious,” as well as Web series “Married On My Space 1 & 2″ and “Coupon Mom.”

AOL is working on several other content partnerships, said sources, to add to its previous ones.

AOL said the first two “built-if-sold”–meaning some big advertiser has to pony up–will be:

“Re-Dressed by America”: An interactive Web series where online users make over subjects facing a life-changing event (high school reunions, first dates, etc.) by voting on their hairstyles, fashion, accessories and more. The series will be featured on Stylelist.com and MyDaily.com.

“Mamá’s Recipe”: U.S. families compete for the best family recipes and share their secrets with the AOL audience. The series will be featured on KitchenDaily and AOL Latino.

Not exactly “The Sopranos,” but there you have it.

Here’s the full press release from AOL:

AOL INC. AND ENDEMOL USA ANNOUNCE WEB PROGRAMMING PRODUCTION PARTNERSHIP

Agreement Further Expands AOL’s Original Video Offerings

New York, NY–January 12. 2011– AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) and Endemol USA today announced a production agreement to co-develop and co-produce new Web programming initially aimed at AOL’s growing women’s audience, as well as at the broader AOL audience. The partnership will focus on creating premium, unscripted digital video content that will enhance the user experience by taking advantage of the real time, interactive and community nature of the Web.

“Endemol is a premiere producer of unscripted programming and their expertise in creating unique, interactive, popular shows, combined with AOL’s growing video audience will take digital production to the next level,” said David Eun, President of AOL Media & Studios. “Endemol is the latest in a string of partnerships that serve both the AOL consumers and our advertising partners.”

“We are thrilled to partner with such a successful and global leading company like AOL,” said David Goldberg, Chairman of Endemol North America. “This deal continues our growth as a leader in interactive digital entertainment, and we look forward to creating many genre-defining series with AOL.”

The first two built-if-sold series to be produced under the new agreement are:

“Re-Dressed By America”: An interactive web series where online users make over subjects facing a life-changing event (high school reunions, first dates, etc.) by voting on their hairstyles, fashion, accessories and more. The series will be featured on Stylelist.com and MyDaily.com.

“Mamá’s Recipe”: US families compete for the best family recipes and share their secrets with the AOL audience. The series will be featured on KitchenDaily (http://www.kitchendaily.com) and AOL Latino (http://latino.aol.com/).

AOL will promote each Web series throughout the AOL Network focusing on the sites and destinations relevant for each series’ demographic. Every series produced through this partnership will feature enhanced online programming, such as user voting, supplemental video clips and supporting blog content to create deeper user experiences, and opportunities for sponsors to integrate their messaging in creative and highly-engaging ways.

Endemol USA, one of the world’s leading producers of entertainment programming, will leverage its experience producing hit shows such as Emmy-award winning “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” “Big Brother,” “Wipeout” and “Jerseylicious,” as well as the hit Web series “Married On My Space 1 & 2″ and “Coupon Mom” to create captivating Web series with AOL.

“You’ve Got…” the video series that debuted with the new AOL.com launch, generated nearly 8 million views in its first month, and featured a diverse guest list including Kelly Ripa, Barack Obama, Matt Damon and the Marines in Afghanistan. For comparison, that puts “You’ve Got…” on-pace with a top 10 Web series. Overall, video views on the new AOL.com rose more than 3X in its first month.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110112/in-yet-another-content-hook-up-aol-ups-deal-with-endemol/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101122/goodbye-free-tv-on-your-ipad-for-now/ http://allthingsd.com/20101122/goodbye-free-tv-on-your-ipad-for-now/#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2010 02:05:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26237 The only surprise here is that it took this long: A federal court has put the kibosh on a Web site that served up programming from broadcast TV networks for free, without their permission.

A federal judge in New York has issued a temporary restraining order against FilmOn.com, which has riled up the U.S. TV industry for a couple of months. The four broadcast networks–News Corp.’s Fox, GE’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and CBS–had asked for the order on Nov. 9.

FilmOn argues that the U.S. copyright act allows it to redistribute broadcast programming; Ivi Inc., a Seattle-based company that offers a similar service, makes the same argument.

FilmOn offers a free service that’s supposed to work on conventional PCs, as well as on mobile devices like Apple’s iPad. As of Monday evening it wasn’t clear whether FilmOn had actually taken down the streams, or if the service was simply misfiring, as it has been prone to do.

UPDATE: Here’s FilmOn’s response, issued Tuesday morning:

FILMON.COM, INC. ISSUES RESPONSE REGARDING NEW YORK SOUTHERN DISTRICT COURT’S RULING ON CBS BROADCASTING, INC., ET AL v. FILMON.COM, INC., TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER

Los Angeles, CA – November 23, 2010 –FilmOn.com Inc. CEO and Chairman, Alki David today issued the following statement regarding the ruling made by the New York Southern District Court, which issued a temporary restraining order, in effect pending the court’s decision on if it will issue a preliminary injunction.

“We respect the Court’s decision in this matter and have temporarily ceased retransmission of free network television on FilmOn. In the few weeks FilmOn provided free access to basic television on consumers’ mobile devices, it received more than 30 million individual users. We also garnered dozens of positive reviews about our free service’s quality and ease of use. We have, in essence, shown full proof of concept of the FilmOn delivery system–proving that millions of viewers will watch our superior television service online, all with commercials, adding millions of extra impressions that enhance network’s value to its viewers and advertisers.”

“FilmOn has succeeded in securing partnerships with several independent broadcast channels to be able to keep a compelling live offering online in the near future. Coupled with our own library of content and that of our partners, FilmOn will remain open for business. “

We do expect to bring the major networks back to our lineup in the near future, all in a legitimate and collaborative business model. We have already begun very positive discussions with TV networks affiliates and other content owners to provide our delivery service and measurement analytics to stream their live content online.

Scott Zarin, Zarin & Associates P.C., legal counsel for FilmOn added:

“In addressing FilmOn’s argument that it is exempt from copyright infringement liability as a cable system, the court indicated that it was not convinced–on the facts currently known to it–which this is the case. Although the court issued a Temporary Restraining Order, it is providing FilmOn with an opportunity to elaborate upon its ‘cable system’ argument more thoroughly in a hearing on the Networks’ request for a preliminary injunction.

“FilmOn will be drafting papers in opposition to the Networks’ motion for a preliminary injunction in the coming weeks, with which it expects to submit to the court the opinion of an expert on FilmOn’s technology in order to demonstrate that FilmOn is indeed a cable system. If FilmOn successfully opposes the Networks’ motion for a preliminary injunction, the court’s Temporary Restraining Order–which by law can only remain in effect for a short duration–will be dissolved.”

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