Why not try to build it?

“Tablets are interesting to me,” Calisto said in an e-mail interview. “I enjoy building things, and I love ‘The Office.’ Why not combine the three?”

So, after kicking around the idea for a bit, Calisto on Thursday launched a Kickstarter project to fund development. Calisto estimates he’ll need about $25,000 to produce a limited number of the tablets.

“I was looking into sales figures for past tablets a couple months ago and realized that a triangular tablet couldn’t sell any worse than some of those,” said Calisto. “Who knows, it could even be a hit.”

Calisto, whose day job is running online tutoring site The Teach Beach, plans to build the tablet, assuming he can raise the money, based on Android.

“Tablets are fun, intriguing and innovative, but they seem to only come in the boring rectangle form factor,” he said in his Kickstarter posting. “Think of an iPad or Kindle Fire, but triangular.”

I love both “The Office” and tablets, but I am sticking with four-sided models. I guess that makes me a square.

For those who need a refresher, here’s that clip from “The Office.”

This fall, members of the team at Firespotter Labs made a parody video pitch for a mobile app called Jotly that promised it would help people rate absolutely everything.

Then Firespotter saw at least two very similar apps — Oink and Stamped — launch for real.

(Those aren’t the only ones; this idea of giving users tools for quick and fun self-expression in order to build a more meaningful understanding of the world is also present in other apps like Amen, DailyModi and Tiny Review. All of these were recently introduced and none of them is terribly popular yet.)

So why not take the joke one step further? Today Jotly for the iPhone was released. Firespotter’s Alex Cornell explained:

“It was crazy to see these uber-granular ‘rate things’ type apps released in such a serious way, when we had imagined the same feature sets to be the stuff of social app satire. So then we figured, why not just crush it out quickly if we could.”

Cornell promised that this was just a side project by a Firespotter engineer, and that Jotly is really still a joke. The app itself seems fine enough, if a little basic and sparse.

Firespotter continues to make the Nosh app, which aggregates ratings for food dishes. Big distinction!

Meanwhile, Jotly isn’t the only tech parody with legs.

Last week I was talking with Linden Tibbets, whose neat company Ifttt helps link Web services together so users can archive and cross-post content, and set up custom notifications.

I asked Tibbets about whether he or anyone else was working on some kind of universal notifier service, one that would try to find me everywhere and then would be smart enough to retract all of the notification alerts once I’d seen one.

That kind of already exists, Tibbets pointed out. Well, at least in theory. Last year the NBC show “The Office” had a funny bit about a start-up named WUPHF that sent out simultaneous emails, faxes, text messages, voicemails, tweets, chats and pages.

The pitch is pretty much perfect (see below). So who’s going to build this?

“It’s expected to sell well among parents who always buy the wrong thing,” Meyers quipped about the $199 tablet during his Weekend Update news sketch.

It’s good, but I still prefer the Pyramid tablet from this week’s episode of “The Office.”

(The Kindle item comes in about 45 seconds into the clip, for those who can’t watch an entire two minutes of fake news.)

On NBC’s “The Office,” the fictional Dunder Mifflin team was forced to sell a triangle-shaped tablet, dubbed the Pyramid. It’s heavy and has poor battery life and, well, it’s shaped like a triangle. It has enough flaws to make the TouchPad and PlayBook seem like home runs.

Of course, unlike the products from HP and RIM (and dozens of less-than-successful Android tablets), what the Pyramid has going for it is that it was never meant to be real.

That said, its arrival should provide some comic relief for the tablet industry, at least until they remember that Apple continues to laugh its way to the bank.

Here’s a handy helper for those following the fate of the Hulu premium online video service, whose noisy efforts to sell itself have gotten a lot of attention of late:

“In preliminary talks” = “hawking itself to one of a half dozen big moneybag tech companies who will visit with Hulu’s bankers and management to see its presentation at Morgan Stanley’s office in Century City in Los Angeles.”

Last Friday, for example, that meant a look-see for Microsoft execs, to show the software giant the story of how paying top dollar for the popular Hulu would be a great investment.

This week, sources said, Yahoo will get the expected gander at the books too, among the other companies targeted by Hulu as part of a sales process in its very early stages.

Among those companies on the short list, sources said, along with Microsoft and Yahoo are: Google, Verizon, AT&T and Amazon.

None of these should come as a surprise, since they all have a big interest in the digital distribution of content business.

Google is perhaps the most interesting and difficult of the group, due to both its massive YouTube unit and the even more massive interest by government regulators about its disturbing massiveness.

Amazon is the company that seems most suited as a Hulu buyer, since it already makes its business selling and distributing content. In addition, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar was a former exec — bringing a certain level of familiarity and presumably much less of the grumpy disgruntlement that he experienced with Hulu’s current media giant owners.

Microsoft seems like the longest shot and least enthusiastic, although it certainly could afford it.

As for Yahoo: Good lord, it needs something sexy to tell weary investors.

Not in the initial round, but other possible acquirers Hulu is targeting: Facebook, Netflix, Samsung and Liberty Media.

And definitely not among those kicking the tires: Disney, News Corp. and Comcast, the trio of partners who own Hulu, along with Providence Equity Partners.

The big question, of course, is whether media-focused Apple — a notorious buyer of almost nothing — would be interested in Hulu.

These blind dates with the best possible buyers will presumably give each insight into Hulu’s business and give Hulu information on what they are looking for.

Sources who have heard the pitch said Hulu is positioning itself as an inevitable competitor to cable, which seems an odd position to take, unless it can get regular access to the kind of top-drawer content that consumers want.

And that will be the most important issue for anyone buying Hulu: The time and terms of rights to the television and movie content on the site, which has been a critical part of its success.

Buyers I have interviewed said Hulu has to offer at least an 18-month license for its content and a pile of rights to hit shows to differentiate itself from competitors.

As Peter Kafka wrote, Hulu buyers would indeed get exclusive content, but with strings attached.

He also noted that the latest content licenses for Hulu’s owner/partners — Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox — have recently been completed, deals that will stay intact if Hulu is sold.

Unlike Netflix, which has had to pay top dollar for a small pile of premium content while deftly using a large archive of older content to attract subscribers, Hulu’s success has had a lot to do with more access to popular current shows offered by its media giant owners.

Those shows include TV hits such as “The Office” and “Glee.”

That access has become a point of contention with those owners, who have differed with Hulu management about what comes next for the mostly advertising-supported site, even though its slick product has been a clear hit with consumers.

Of course, some speculate that Hulu might not sell at all, just as it never went public as it had said it might do previously. In that case, it will be interesting to see what will become of Hulu once the music stops.

(And, if anyone would like to email me the Hulu presentation or notes on it, please do, so I can formulate a bid myself!)

But, until this deal churns slowly, leakily and loudly forward — let’s enjoy some apt Hulu content. As usual, the fun version of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” by the kids from “Glee” was not available on the site.

Thus, I selected frequent “Glee” guest star Gwyneth Paltrow belting out Joan Jett’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me” on the show, as a good alternate metaphor for the sales process:

That’s the scenario the Los Angeles Times floats at the bottom of its Hulu-for-sale piece today:

Hulu’s owners are pushing for the free service to require users to prove they are cable or satellite TV subscribers before they could gain next-day access to current shows, said two people privy to the discussions. Otherwise, they would be forced to wait eight days to catch up on programs they’ve missed, they said.

The industry term for this is “authentication,” and I’ve heard a similar story this month but haven’t been able to confirm that it’s true. If it is, you can go ahead and mark Hulu’s sales price way, way down.

That’s because tying Hulu to cable subscriptions is going to knock out a big chunk of the service’s viewers. Some of them will be people who don’t pay for cable and don’t have any plans to do so. And some of them will be cable TV subscribers who should be able to watch shows but can’t deal with the hassle of proving that they’re entitled.

It’s theoretically possible for Hulu and the cable guys to build a seamless, pain-free authentication process. And that will get more likely if they could do a deal with, say, Facebook (as Time Warner and Verizon have discussed). But I wouldn’t count on it any time soon.

In the meantime, authenticated Web TV services aren’t impossible to access, but they’re not easy (try signing up for the WatchESPN app and you’ll see what I mean). And Hulu is all about easy instant gratification.

Why would Hulu’s owners push to make the service less attractive? The justification I’ve heard is that most Hulu viewers are paying for TV anyway, so this really wouldn’t be a big deal.

But the real answer is that this is meant to appease cable TV providers who are paying Hulu’s owners — via “retrans” deals — for the rights to provide the shows that Hulu is giving away on the Web. And it’s also meant to protect the value of broadcast TV advertising, since the ad business still doesn’t value a Web eyeball as much as one that watches on a TV.

Again, this is the kind of tension between business models that has been a problem for Hulu almost from the get-go. And it has been the source of many of the disagreements between Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and his owners for some time.

And again, it’s the kind of problem that any potential Hulu buyer has to consider: The people who own Hulu are the ones who provide it with almost all of its killer content, and they’re not gung-ho about making the thing work. What happens if they don’t own the company at all?

But in the meantime, here’s a disturbing indicator: Now network TV sitcoms are parodying the notion of investing in revenue-free Internet start-ups. That’s a market top, no?

NBC really went to town on this one, by the way: There’s an entire mini-site dedicated to WUPHF.com, and it’s really well-done (it also makes more explicit reference to Facebook and “The Social Network” than the allusion in the clip above). Make sure to check out the investor section, which includes this awesome chart (PDF).

The fine print is pretty great, too. I’ve pulled it out here so you can read it:

Full-length episodes of shows like NBC’s “The Office,” CBS’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and ABC’s “Modern Family” can’t be viewed on Google TV, a service that allows people to access the Internet and search for Web videos on their television screens, as well as to search live TV listings. Logitech International S.A. and Sony Corp. began selling devices running the software this month.

Spokespeople for the three networks confirmed that they are blocking the episodes on their websites from playing on Google TV, although both ABC and NBC allow promotional clips to work using the service. ABC is owned by Walt Disney Co., CBS is part of CBS Corp., and NBC is a unit of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

If that’s the case, we could see a prospectus filed by the end of 2010, with the help of Morgan Stanley.

Except! It may not happen at all, Reuters acknowledges: An IPO “is one of several options under consideration” and “their options include attracting other media companies to contribute new programming or raising more money from existing partners.”

So maybe, maybe not.

Here’s what we do know:

• Hulu needs more money to help secure more content so it can keep competing against Netflix (NFLX), Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL), among others.
• At some point, Hulu needs to be able to offer liquidity to its early employees.
• Convincing public investors that Hulu’s three broadcast owners — Disney’s (DIS) ABC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC (soon to be Comcast’s NBC)–is theoretically possible. Because they have an obvious incentive to make it work. But all three companies continue to send signals that indicate they have mixed feelings about the JV. Which will make an IPO awfully tricky.

Big money + conflict makes for good drama, no? If they put it on the air, I’d watch.

Meanwhile, here’s a clip from “The Office,” which I haven’t been able to see this season but plan to watch on Hulu sooner than later. Not coincidentally, this kind of catch-up viewing is the service’s strong suit:

From the horse trail of our Western All Things Digital HQ, BoomTown could not resist posting this internal email from AOL exec Brad Garlinghouse, which was sent out to employees this afternoon.

Apparently, the striving New York-based Internet company is changing its email address to reflect its morale goals. Presto, it’s the peppy @teamaol.com and no longer the duller @corp.aol.com.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was this easy to change the AOL (AOL) stock price?

From: Garlinghouse, Brad

Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 4:28 PM

To: Team AOL

Subject: Team AOL!

AOLers–

As part of our mission to continue to drive a culture around teamwork–and, let’s face it–not to appear as if we’re in an episode of “The Office”–we are changing all corporate email addresses from @corp.aol.com to @teamaol.com–effective immediately. The roll-out will begin today at 9pm ET and should be completed shortly thereafter.

Here’s how it will work:

· Your emails and replies will now come from “first.last@teamaol.com”

· Emails sent to “first.last@corp.aol.com” will automatically be redirected to “first.last@teamaol.com”

· Distribution groups within Exchange will be automatically updated

· Listserv will take a bit more time to update so, for now email traffic will still flow from the original domain “first.last@corp.aol.com”

· Business cards with the new domain will be rolled out in conjunction with our new canvas collection

I realize this is a small step but I believe an important, subtle signal both internally and externally that we’re changing the way we think as a company and more importantly, our approach to the way we work together as a team.

A big thanks to Alex Gounares and team for making this happen so quickly!

Best,
Brad

To help AOLers get in the mood, here’s a video of some clips from “The Office,” although we feel that “Wonder Pets” might be a better reference point:

Kara came out swinging this week over Meg Whitman’s insistence that the Skype acquisition by eBay should be put in her “win” column. Whitman, former CEO of eBay (EBAY), is running for governor of California, and Kara had her spin detector set to maximum. Speaking of dystopia, Kara covered the release of Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.” Auletta posits that Google (GOOG) is more Spock than Kirk and lacks important emotional intelligence. He made similar accusations about another subject of his recent works: Microsoft (MSFT). Insert sarcastic gasp here. Kara rounded out the week with a flight aboard the airship “Broadband,” aka Virgin America. It seems as though Facebook is everywhere these days, and on this day in particular, Facebook was just a few rows behind her in the person of a PR guy from the company. The moral is that maybe the greatest thing about that speedy in-flight Internet is farming out the awkward seatmate talk to your email inbox. Kara did get an invitation to Facebook’s Washington, D.C., offices out of the deal.

Digital Daily opened the week with an invasion of droids. No, John wasn’t stuck in front of an Xbox playing Terminator; he was covering the release of the first 100,000 units of Motorola’s (MOT) newest iPhone competitor. John also covered Apple’s (AAPL) opening of a “significant store” in New York this week, which may shed light on the company’s future retail strategy. John sees potential for the newest store to serve as jai-alai palace, should the whole iPhone thing not work out. And just in case Kara’s story about Google’s lack of feeling wasn’t frightening enough, John brought us a look into the search giant’s designs on the software space occupied by Microsoft Office. While Google claims to have no plans for domination of office productivity, it sure seems like it would like to paint the whole cloud Chrome.

Peter gave us the cold hard facts about the projected costs of the coming AOL spinoff, as he began the week in somber tone. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AOL estimates losses will run to nearly $200 million and end employment for up to 1,000 people. Nothing gets Peter up from that kind of low quite like a good session with “The Office,” and this week’s episode was just too good to pass up. The team at Dunder Mifflin did a little Wall Street Journal paywall pole-vault right on screen. Commentary on recent “Murdochian” events or not, Peter thinks it’s just good TV. MediaMemo covered the pending AOL spinoff from the other end this week and addressed the biggest problem in the room head on: AOL is going to enter a space it hasn’t filled since the days when the sound of “you’ve got mail” meant you were high tech. Google runs the yard now, which will make it harder for AOL’s old dog to play with the comparatively young pups.

Most people think bigger is better, but in the strange world of tech columnists, small reigns supreme. Walt’s Personal Technology column this week covered three new laptops with some very sleek features to please the holiday consumer. New offerings from Toshiba, HP (HPQ) and Lenovo came under the Mossberg microscope, and all were pronounced impressive, if a bit pricy. Walt’s semifavorite is the Lenovo, but his preference for the slim, light design admittedly came at the heavy expense of limited battery life. The trip to Mossberg’s Mailbox this week yielded answers on pressing questions from potential Motorola Droid owners, a person hoping to make the move from a Palm (PALM) PDA to an iPhone, and from an older computer user thinking about making the switch to Apple’s new bigger-screened iMac. Over at The Mossberg Solution, Katie reviewed the new BlackBerry Bold from Research in Motion (RIM), which seemed to have 10 percent more features and a similar reduction in size. The newest model wasn’t quite as Bold as its predecessors, Katie found. Many features originally reserved for this higher-end model have been passed down to the rest of the product range. Her advice: have a look at the Tour or Curve 8900 before going Bold.

Tune in next week to get the 30,000-foot view on the wide world of tech from the road-ready AllThingsD team. Let’s hope we can get Wi-Fi on that flight too.

Or at least that’s the way I read it. My guess is that Jim is using the “leaky wall” strategy to access the rest of the Journal piece rather than using a paid subscription. But the writers seem to have made that deliberately oblique. Or perhaps they think their audience has zero interest in the minutiae of media economics.

And for the record: In addition to Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, News Corp. (NWS) owns this Web site.

Is Hulu putting up a pay wall around its Web TV site? Nope.

Does Hulu want to charge people to watch Web TV? Yes.

Confused? Don’t be.

It’s pretty straightforward: Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC Universal and Disney’s (DIS) ABC, doesn’t plan on charging people to watch the stuff it’s currently airing on the site–a mix of first-run shows from broadcast TV, a limited number of cable TV shows and a smattering of movies. But Hulu is trying to figure out how to create some kind of premium offering where you’ll pay for stuff that isn’t on the site right now.

That’s what Hulu’s backers have been saying for months, so it’s a little puzzling that News Corp. COO Chase Carey’s comments got folks worked up yesterday. Meanwhile, multiple sources familiar with Hulu’s plans tell me that…Hulu doesn’t actually have a plan yet, but it is trying to piece one together.

There are some pretty obvious ways to go here. Hulu could sell movies or TV shows on a pay-per-view basis, or it could sell subscriptions to shows it doesn’t offer now or to a deeper offering of shows it already has. You could call it “Hulu Plus” (no charge for that one, guys).

If you’re a fan of Fox’s “Family Guy,” for instance, Hulu is only of limited help: The site only has the most recent five episodes. So how much would you pay to watch the rest of them?

If you don’t have an answer for that, don’t worry–Team Hulu doesn’t know, either. Nor can they tell you if airing free shows on Hulu has cut into other revenue streams like broadcast TV advertising or DVD sales, even though “we’ve done a thousand regression analyses on this,” says an industry executive involved in the site.

Do bear in mind that this was a problem Hulu’s backers didn’t really envision when they were dreaming up the site; at the time, they were most concerned with building a video site that would allow them to barter with Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL).

Now they own one of the biggest video sites on the Web, one they say is performing ahead of plan. And Hulu is selling enough advertising that it’s coming close to reaching break-even, according to executives I spoke to this week.

But at the very least, adding a pay component to Hulu helps mollify those who fear the site is cannibalizing their existing businesses. Or who simply want another revenue stream. And a pay element dovetails with Hulu’s interest in joining up with the “authentication” movement pushed by cable guys like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner (TWX).

Meanwhile, here’s the use case for Hulu that its backers originally envisioned–“catch up viewing.” I was on a plane when last night’s episode of the “The Office” aired, but I can watch the whole thing–with ads I can’t skip–on my laptop today. And so can you:

What is it? A TV (and movie) portal that looks more or less like every other TV (and movie) portal on the Web: Hulu, TV.com, Sling.com, Fancast, etc.

The only reason for AT&T (T) to launch its own portal now would be as a placeholder until it launches its own “TV Everywhere” play, where subscribers to its  “U-Verse” TV service would get Web access to cable shows. That’s the same strategy that Comcast (CMCSA), Time Warner Cable (TWC), Verizon (VZ) and everyone else in the pay TV business is trying.

But while AT&T will likely be doing the same, this site isn’t for that. At least, not according to the note AT&T sent to NewTeeVee, which makes it sound like the company is creating…another free Web TV portal:

We have started a soft launch of a new site called AT&T Entertainment. This site will feature free online content available to any consumer. We’re finalizing a few final elements, and we’ll share more details on our official launch soon.

Allrighty, then. As AT&T says, it’s a soft launch, so maybe when it’s ready for primetime, things will make more sense. But for now it’s a head-scratcher.

One thing that distinguishes AT&T’s site from, say, Hulu: Hulu lets you embed clips from the site on your blog, while AT&T’s site, which relies on Hulu for much of its content, doesn’t. So here’s an awesome, upsetting clip you can see on AT&T’s site, but can only embed by heading to Hulu. Makes sense, right?

Is a deal between Disney and Hulu, which has been in the works for many months, finally ready for primetime? Yes, say multiple people familiar with the matter who tell me an announcement should be coming in the next few days.

The arrangement will add Disney (DIS) programming–primarily television shows from ABC like “Lost,” although it will also include some of the company’s movies–to the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox. In return for giving Hulu exclusive access to some of its content, but not for some high-profile programming like ESPN, Disney will get an equity stake in the joint venture and seats on the company’s board.

It’s a big deal for Disney, which until now has been focused on driving Web traffic to its own properties. And it’s a big deal for Hulu, which has now locked up three of the four broadcast networks.

Does all of this sound familiar? It should. It’s pretty much where things stood nearly a month ago when I was told a deal was going to be struck “any day.”

So what was the hold-up?

Just the tedium of i-dotting and t-crossing, I’m told. In this case, it comes in the form of haggling over programming decisions: Which shows and movies will appear on Hulu, how quickly they appear after their offline debut, how long they will stay on the site, etc.

A week ago, an executive involved in the negotiations told me the deal was “down to the short strokes.” By the end of last week, the four companies involved were massaging language for press releases, I’m told.

The long gestation period has led some observers to wonder if other players with a stake in online video–like Comcast (CMCSA), Google (GOOG) or CBS (CBS)–had been able to convince Disney’s Bob Iger not to go forward with the pact.

“Everyone’s been trying to tell Iger how stupid this deal is,” a TV executive tells me. The nuance of the critiques differs depending on who’s making them, but all of them make the same point: Throwing in with Hulu will strengthen the joint venture, which also includes investor Providence Equity Partners, but it won’t provide Disney with significant upside.

But the complaints seem to have fallen on deaf ears. While Google was able to get a deal with Disney to run excerpts of some of its programming on YouTube–a consolation prize, basically–it’s been unable to cobble together a deal for long-form programming.

Earlier this month, YouTube unveiled a new Hulu-like section for movies and television shows. But its inventory of TV shows and movies remains paltry and it doesn’t have any of the first-run shows that the TV networks highlight on their own sites (and on Hulu).

One thing to watch for going forward, regardless of when the Disney/ABC deal gets done, is how much access to those first-run shows Hulu users get.

Hulu is a hit with viewers but its network backers are still wary of training viewers to expect to watch their favorite shows on the Web whenever they want to watch them.

Which is why many of Hulu’s first-run TV shows have particularly short shelf lives. You can only see about half of this season’s run of NBC’s “The Office,” for instance. And if you want to watch new episodes of “Rescue Me,” which airs on News Corp.’s FX, you’ve got to be patient, then act fast. New episodes don’t show up on Hulu until eight days after they premiere on the cable channel, but they don’t last there for more than a couple of weeks.

In TV parlance, this now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t programming is called “windowing,” and casual Hulu users tend not to notice or complain about it. A small dust-up in January about “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” a disappearing FX sitcom, is the exception that proves the rule.

But what happens if NBC, Fox and ABC shows start taking longer to get to the Hulu site and leave sooner? We may find out. An executive at one of the joint venture’s network backers tells me to expect more restrictive windowing in the future as the TV guys try to get a handle on the Web.

Which means that just as the Disney deal pumps more content into Hulu, it may end up becoming harder to find.

When I first met Avner Ronen in January, the Boxee CEO was beaming. His Web video company was one of the breakout hits at the Consumer Electronics Show.

But when I had lunch with Ronen yesterday, he was much more subdued. Going head-to-head against the TV establishment can take the wind out of you.

In the span of two months, Boxee has gone from obscure start-up to an irritant or worse for the TV business.

That’s because Boxee, which makes it easy to sort and play video you grab from the Web, symbolizes a real threat for the established players: That one day, many consumers will consume most of their TV via video they find on the Web. And then they’ll cut TV networks and cable operators out of the picture.

That’s a long way from happening, but just the notion of it seemed to be enough for GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, which apparently forced their Hulu joint venture to stop working with Boxee last month.

Now Hulu and Boxee are in a cat-and-mouse game, whereby Boxee’s engineers try to find ways to get Hulu’s stuff onto their browsers and the Hulu guys try to stop them. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

Ronen isn’t optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon. He also says the past few months have taught him how little he knew about the media business prior to starting Boxee in 2007. Had he known how entrenched and complicated the relationships between broadcasters, programmers, cable networks and cable operators are, he says, he might never have tried to get the company going.

But Ronen still figures he’ll thrive in the long run. He notes that some big media companies that aren’t NBC and Fox–Netflix (NFLX) and Disney’s (DIS) ABC, for instance–have been happy to work with Boxee, or at least not to complain about the service.

I’ll let him explain why, and lay out Boxee’s future plans (which included a beta launch this summer and Boxee-enabled devices next year) in this video interview.

And if, like me, you’re going to be in Austin for South By Southwest on Saturday, you can ask him yourself, at a panel discussion where he’ll share the stage with College Humor’s Ricky Van Veen and B.J. Novak of “The Office.”

But this time, Morgan has abandoned the Web for TV.

And Morgan’s Simulmedia, which just announced a $4 million funding round led by Union Square Ventures and Avalon Ventures, isn’t even going after the TV of the future.

Instead, it’s chasing an odd niche that exists today: television commercials for television shows–e.g., the ads NBC runs during “The Office” to try to get you to watch “30 Rock.”

Morgan says this is a $10 billion business, and argues that most of the money spent on it is wasted. He says his company can solve that with software that swaps

out different spots depending on factors like geography, timing, and even weather. Weather? Well, in advance of last Sunday’s snowstorm in New York, he says, his clients-to-be could have run ads letting parents know about all the kids’ programming available on their cable system.

This sounds similar to lots of other efforts to make TV advertising more Web-like by serving up different ads to different viewers based on who they are and what they watch. Basically, a variant of the behavioral targeting technology that made Tacoda worth $275 million to Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, which bought the Morgan’s company in 2007.

But Morgan, who spent less than five months at AOL as an EVP before bolting, says his start-up is chasing a different market, using different techniques. He explains why in this interview:


[ See post to watch video ]
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090306/a-web-ad-guys-third-act-better-tv-ads-for-tv-shows/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090112/boxee-webtv-that-makes-sense-is-that-good-or-bad-for-big-cable/ http://allthingsd.com/20090112/boxee-webtv-that-makes-sense-is-that-good-or-bad-for-big-cable/#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:19:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=3053 This year’s Consumer Electronic Show, like every year’s CES, was peppered with big talk about merging your PC and your TV, led by a new widget initiative from Yahoo (YHOO). And my reaction was the same one I have every year: Why?

No need to go on about my lack of interest in this forced marriage, which the consumer electronics business has been trying to make work for more than a decade (see the 1993 Time cover to the right). Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has done it for me. If you’re pressed for time, the title will do: “I don’t want my Web TV.”

Here’s what I do want: The ability to use my TV to watch all the great video the Web makes available–actual TV shows and movies like “The Office” on Hulu, “Lost” on ABC.com, “No Country For Old Men” on Netflix’s (NFLX) on-demand service. Which is where Boxee comes in.

The New York-based start-up makes elegant software that cobbles together offerings from all of those services, plus many more–with whatever media you have stored on your hard drive–and serves it up to you on your big screen, with a minimum of fuss. Right now it’s a niche product–it only works on PCs running Linux, or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac mini and AppleTV boxes–but that should change soon.

It’s slick stuff, and when you get a chance to watch it in action, it’s the first time that all those anecdotal stories about people dropping their cable TV subscriptions and just watching Internet video finally make sense: Why pay for cable stations you don’t want when you can watch just about everything you do want, on demand, for free?

This is also why I’m not sure how long the big cable companies will allow Boxee to operate unfettered. As the recent dispute between Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Viacom (VIA) illustrates, the cable operators are increasingly dismayed about paying the cable networks big fees for their content, only to find them giving it away online. And with Boxee providing customers with a real opportunity to drop cable TV in favor of a broadband connection, I worry that it’s a matter of time before they find some way to throttle the company.

Technically, the cable guys (and the telcos, who are also in the TV business) aren’t supposed to be able to do anything about Boxee. They’re just supposed to act as a dumb pipe serving up high-speed Internet access and keep their mouths shut. In the real world, I don’t think that’s going to fly. See: The many bandwidth caps the cable guys are starting to experiment with, which are aimed at heavy Web video users.

Boxee founder Avner Ronen disagrees, of course. He thinks the cable guys will want to work with his company (he plans to make money by licensing his software to gadget makers and extracting fees from content providers like Netflix, but that’s all down the line). And maybe he’s right: When I dropped by his CES booth on Friday, he was being swarmed by emissaries from CableLabs, the cable guys’ tech consortium. They were the third group of cable execs to visit the company that day.

I’ll let Ronen make his case in the video below; and I’ve also included a brief demo video from the company. But that clip doesn’t really do Boxee justice. Ask one of the 100,000 super-early adopters who are using the software themselves. Or any of the nervous cable guys who saw it last week.


[ See post to watch video ]


quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090112/boxee-webtv-that-makes-sense-is-that-good-or-bad-for-big-cable/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071108/writers-strike-videos-on-youtube-of-course/ http://allthingsd.com/20071108/writers-strike-videos-on-youtube-of-course/#comments Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:03:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071108/writers-strike-videos-on-youtube-of-course/ Since they’re fighting with the studios over being paid for content that is moving to the Internet, why shouldn’t the Writers Guild of America put up some choice user-generated content on the Web?

United Hollywood is a nifty Web site chronicling the strike in a blog and video, and it also has a page on YouTube.

After all, why shouldn’t people whose work is often ripped off on the site use it for their own benefit too?

Here’s a video of the writers of “The Office,” who are as goofy as you might expect, but who make cogent arguments about why they should share in the Internet wealth:

And how much do we love the chant, “How greedy can you get, they won’t even share the Net,” with “Grey’s Anatomy” cast member Sandra Oh carrying a picket sign? As much as we like donuts, that’s how much!

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