A stickler for detail, Dauman noted that while the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act was a focal point of online protests, it was the Protect IP Act, the Senate version of the bill, which would have set the legislative precedent.

“I think the bill that would have emerged would have been very reasonable,” Dauman said.

“It became almost religious dogma that any legislation built around the process would have broken the Internet and created censorship around the world,” Dauman said.

Meanwhile, he argued, many technology companies supported a patent bill last year. “There should be a system where patent and copyright are both protected to make these two industries grow,” Dauman said.

Dauman — or “Philly D,” as Snooki apparently calls him — addressed a number of other topics in an onstage conversation with AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka.

Regarding the hefty payments sports networks get from cable and satellite companies, Dauman said he felt they were due for a reduction.

He said Viacom channels account for 20 percent of all viewing on subscription television, and a greater portion for young viewers. Dauman attested that, according to an unnamed distributor’s set-top box data, half of its audience never turns on sports-only channels, while half of its content costs come from sports.

“I do believe that premium content should command premium value, but there’s a fine line,” Dauman said.

We’ll hear more on that topic from ESPN’s John Skipper at the conference later today.

As for developing internal technology and acquiring tech companies, Dauman said, “We prefer to work with partners.”

“Everyone who’s developing a new form of distribution or technology stops by our office,” he said.

In light of this month’s SOPA/PIPA debate, for instance, it ought to be very interesting to compare and contrast what Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and YouTube head Salar Kamangar have to say about copyright and piracy. (Not that they were on the same page to begin with.)

But in addition to executives who help distribute media for a living, we also wanted to make sure we heard from content makers at Dive. We’ll have several, but none more famous than Neil Young.

One of the nice things about having a music icon join you onstage is that you don’t need to spend much time introducing him (though it’s easy enough to get the official and unofficial takes; and, courtesy of Kamangar’s YouTube, plenty of audiovisual reminders, which you can see at the bottom of this post).

That’s going to give us more time to have a freewheeling conversation: The man has a 40-plus-year career and is still making music and movies today, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. One digital topic I imagine we’ll certainly touch on: His long-running campaign to fix the way modern music sounds – not the songs themselves, but the way they’re recorded and distributed.

That isn’t the easiest sell, when lots of people seem content to listen to super-compressed iTunes files bleeding out of tiny, tinny, laptop speakers. But perhaps things are changing a bit: Dr. Dre and company sure have sold a lot of sort-of high-end Beats headphones in recent years.

Dive kicks off on the evening of Jan. 30, and we’ll have complete coverage here. If you want to join us in person in Laguna Niguel, Calif., grab a seat.

None of those guys have announced their plans for that, yet. But Myspace has: It says it will offer an “over the top” service in the first half of this year.

Wait. Myspace?

Right, Myspace: The once-hot, then very un-hot social network that News Corp. (which also owns this Web site) sold for a bag of chips last year. Its new owners, Specific Media, have made general murmurs about reviving the site, but other than rounding up an endorsement from Justin Timberlake, they haven’t spelled out what they’re doing.

So here’s the idea: Offer a full suite of TV programming — the same stuff you’re paying for via cable or satellite, and sell that bundled up with all sorts of cool interactive goodies. Pricing? TBD.

So that’s a plan, at least. No idea if it’s going to be a reality. Specific CEO Tim Vanderhook says he’s talking to TV programmers about the deals he’ll need to launch the service, but doesn’t have them yet and won’t go into details. And bear in mind that the Consumer Electronics Show, where Specific/Myspace is making the announcement, is ground zero for vaporware announcements.

If nothing else, though, Specific’s announcement points out how plausible the idea of a Web-based pay TV service now seems to lots of sober people. Many cable programmers are just fine with the idea, as long as: 1) the new services pay full freight, and 2) the new services don’t want to break up their bundles. That is, if you want Viacom’s Comedy Channel, you’re also going to have to get VH1. Etc.

But if you’re ok with that, and if you your money is good, the programmers are happy to take it. In their mind, this is like the ’80s and ’90s, when the satellite guys bought their way into pay TV, or more recently when AT&T and Verizon did: More outlets for them equals more money.

Here’s Specific’s press release, which is quite confusing, because it plays up music and a connection with Panasonic and “social TV” — which is usually a fancy way of saying you watch TV just like you always do, but Tweet about it. And someone will pay us for it, maybe.

But I spoke with Vanderhook earlier, and he insists that the real thrust here is a full package of TV programming, delivered over the Web, to any device with a broadband connection.

I’ll believe it when I see it. But it’s sure fun to speculate about in the meantime.

MYSPACE AND PANASONIC PARTNER TO UNVEIL NEW SOCIAL TV SERVICE

Delivers social experience through over-the-top platform across 2012 Panasonic VIERA Connect-enabled HDTVs

CES 2012 – LAS VEGAS (January 9, 2012) Myspace (www.myspace.com), a leading social entertainment destination that lets artists and fans share and discover content, today announced the launch of Myspace TV, a new service that makes the television experience social. Available on the next generation of Panasonic VIERA Connect™-enabled HDTVs, Myspace TV puts viewers in control by allowing them to discover, share and comment on the programs they’re viewing.

Initial channels on Myspace TV will be music-focused, leveraging Myspace’s unparalleled music rights and leading library of 100,000 music videos and 42 million songs. Myspace TV will expand beyond music, however, to encompass movies, news, sports and reality channels, with a growing lineup of today’s most popular broadcast and on-demand content. Audiences will not only be able to view their favorite television programs, but Myspace TV will also allow them to chat about what they’re viewing while they’re viewing it and invite friends to watch with them virtually. The platform fully integrates social and television in new ways that add a dimension to content discovery and evolve the traditional television experience. A companion app will be available on tablets and smartphones, providing instant sync capabilities for a seamless experience.

“Myspace was the first successful social network because it allowed individuals to share their interests, listen to music, express their creativity and connect around the things they love,” said Myspace CEO Tim Vanderhook. “Historically, TV has been a shared experience, as people gathered together to watch their favorite programs. Our belief was that we could enhance the TV experience by increasing viewers’ ability to connect to both content and each other. By partnering with Panasonic, we’re bringing together the content that people love and a social experience in one service: Myspace TV.”
Myspace co-owner Justin Timberlake added, “We’re ready to take television and entertainment to the next step by upgrading it to the social networking experience. Why text or email your friends to talk about your favorite programs after they’ve aired when you could be sharing the experience with real-time interactivity from anywhere across the globe? As the plot of your favorite drama unfolds, the joke of your favorite SNL character plays, or even the last second shot of your favorite team swishes the net, we’re giving you the opportunity to connect your friends to your moments as they’re actually occurring. This is the evolution of one of our greatest inventions, the television. And, we no longer have to crowd around the same one to experience it together.”

Myspace TV intends to return the diminishing social element of television by connecting viewers around content, simplifying discovery by creating fan communities empowered to comment, rate, chat and invite friends to view programming together in real-time.

Launching in the first half of 2012, Myspace TV’s over-the-top television service will be offered across the Panasonic VIERA Connect platform. VIERA Connect is Panasonic’s connected TV platform, which offers access to Internet-based video-on-demand content and applications, ranging from news and fitness, to social networking and online gaming. VIERA Connect requires no external box or PC1 and is accessed via a single button on the television remote control.

“Year after year, Panasonic’s VIERA Connect Smart VIERA TV platform has continued to expand rapidly but with a singular focus to deliver to our consumers an extremely robust and interactive connected TV experience that can be customized and enjoyed on their large-screen HDTVs,” said Joseph Taylor, Chairman & CEO, Panasonic Corporation of North America. “We are proud to partner with the new Myspace on the debut of Myspace TV on our VIERA Connect Smart TV platform. By partnering with a brand like Myspace on the VIERA Connect Smart TV platform, we’re taking connected TV to a whole new level of engaging, interactive experiences for consumers.”

Myspace is currently inviting a select audience to participate in the beta launch of its TV service through a fully integrated experience on laptop devices. To be considered for invitation, entertainment fans can submit their information at http://www.myspace.com/tv.

There are a whole lot of people who want to be in that game, and Blair Harrison is one of them. His Frequency, which launched last year, has gone through an overhaul, but its gist remains the same: It wants to let you pick and choose feeds of stuff you know you like. It wants to show you stuff your friends like, too, by incorporating cues from your social networks.

Harrison, who made his money and reputation building iFilm and selling it to Viacom during the beginning of the Web 1.0 boom, raised $3 million last year, and since then has rounded up another $1 million.

More important, his new Web site is slicker, and now features a dashboard that you can program with feeds you select, along with ones that use suggestions from Facebook, Twitter, et al. And the service now offers an iPad version, as well as one that will be featured on some Samsung TVs. Here’s what it should look like on the big screen:

Harrison’s challenges also remain the same: He needs to convince people that they should use a Web video hub, period. Facebook already does a great job of surfacing cool videos my friends think I should see (thanks for the Wilco clip, everyone), and Twitter is getting better at it.

And if I am inclined to use a Web video hub, chances are I’m already doing it via Google, at YouTube.

Google is particularly interesting for Harrison, since it’s both competition and de facto partner. YouTube is in the process of dividing itself up into niche channels that will work particularly well with Frequency’s new scheme — if you like the indie music that myISH serves up on YouTube, it should be easy to bring that feed right into Frequency.

But Google would very much like to be the program guide for Web video, too, via Google TV. That means, for instance, that some Samsung models will feature Frequency, and others will feature the one from the giant company with enormous resources. Tough fight.

Harrison isn’t asking consumers to fund his fight, either. The Web sites and apps are free, and the only ads that show up on the videos are the ones that the original distributors add in there, so right now Frequency is revenue-free.

Harrison says he needs to build scale and can figure it out later, but there are some obvious sponsorship/customization routes that he can try, just like Flipboard is trying out with magazines for its Web app reader. In fact, if you said that Harrison was trying to build Flipboard for Web video, he wouldn’t stop you.

Anyway! No point in writing about Web video without showing Web video. Here are a couple of clips Frequency tells me my friends think I would like:

Now-65-year-old David Bowie, from way back in 1973, via Facebook:

And, for whatever reason, a weather balloon, via Twitter:

If you’re reading this site, you know who all of these folks are. But just for formality’s sake:

Jason Kilar is CEO of Hulu, the video joint venture co-owned by Comcast, Disney and News Corp.’s broadcast TV units. The site has been a huge hit with viewers and subscribers, who have put it on pace to generate $500 million in revenue this year. But its owners aren’t quite sure what to do with it: They put it up for sale this summer, then decided to hang on to it after all. This will be Kilar’s first major public appearance since that tumult, so we’ll have plenty of questions.

Dick Costolo is CEO of Twitter, which has moved from Web oddity to a service used by more than 100 million people a month. Twitter’s founders didn’t like the notion of turning their baby into a media company, but that’s exactly what Costolo is trying to do now; he is ramping up efforts to attract more eyeballs and sell more ads. And he’s leaning heavily on big media companies — especially TV networks and movie distributors — to make that happen.

Martha Stewart is the founder of Martha Stewart Living, the multimedia empire she built from scratch, which now includes magazines, TV shows, a Web site and multiple lines of branded goods; her newest coup is a big-dollar deal with J.C. Penney. She’ll be joined onstage by Lisa Gersh, the president and chief operating officer Stewart brought in from NBC Universal nearly a year ago. At NBC U, Gersh had overseen the acquisition of the Weather Channel, among other duties; she had previously been chief operating officer at Oxygen Media.

They’ll join a lineup that includes ESPN President John Skipper, YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey, Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull and Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff. And we may still have a surprise or two between now and the end of January.

All Things Digital’s first-ever media conference runs Jan. 30 and 31 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, an hour south of Los Angeles. See you there.

Disney CEO Bob Iger tapped Skipper to take over his company’s most important asset just a week ago. But Skipper, who had been ESPN’s content boss, has been a rising star there for years, hopping from print (!) to the Web to TV programming. We’ll have his first onstage interview in his new role.

At a time when the value of Big Media’s content is in flux, ESPN’s lock on sports — DVR-proof, pirate-resistant programming that draws mass eyeballs in a niche age — is more valuable than ever. Can Skipper keep it that way?

We’ll ask him in January, as he joins a lineup that includes: YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey, Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull and Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff.

All Things Digital’s first-ever media conference runs Jan. 30 and 31 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, an hour south of Los Angeles. See you there.

Michael Bloom joined the publisher, which owns Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men’s Journal, in May. On Friday afternoon, he sent out a memo announcing his departure. Here’s the bulk of the note:

As some of you already know, I’m moving on from Wenner Media. While it’s been a relatively short time, I’ve really enjoyed working with so many talented and creative people across Wenner’s incredible brands.

Over the past six months, a new digital leadership team has been put in place, and a lot of great work has been done to set the foundation of what will be a terrific digital future. I’m proud of what you guys have accomplished and I know that you will go on to do great things in 2012. I’ll certainly be rooting for you from the sidelines.

Unlike many of his competitors, Wenner Media owner Jann Wenner has never rushed to embrace digital publishing. For a long time, he did very little with the Web beyond handing over his flagship RollingStone.com site to RealNetworks.

That deal made him money, but it also allowed upstarts like Pitchfork to grab lots of territory and mindshare over the years. Last year, Wenner got control of the site again and moved to put most of it behind a pay wall.

Around the same time, Wenner declared himself unimpressed with the commercial upside of the iPad for magazine publishers, a position that put him at odds with the conventional wisdom. Since then, many of his peers have become much more sympathetic to his take.

Bloom, who had previously put in time at Sharecare, MTV, and AOL Time Warner, didn’t mention a new job in his note; Wenner Media hasn’t announced a replacement. I’ve asked Bloom and a Wenner rep for comment.

Hollywood and Google have been circling each other for years, as each side tries to figure out what to make of the other. Now they’re finally starting to link up in a serious way, via YouTube’s new “channels” strategy.

Which means it’s a perfect time to hear from YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar. And if you’re at D: Dive into Media in January, that’s what you’ll be able to do, as one of the world’s most important Googlers joins us onstage.

Getting Kamangar out of Mountain View and into the public eye would be a big deal under any circumstances, because — while he keeps a very low profile — he has enormous clout: He’s one of Larry Page’s most trusted lieutenants, a position he has earned by joining the company as hire No. 9 in 1999, then helping to build the AdWords product that has generated a vast majority of Google’s revenue.

Kamangar has been formally running YouTube for the past year, but in reality he had been overseeing the world’s largest video site for some time. Kamangar is also in charge of Google’s broader video plans, including Google TV, which is now making a second stab at inserting itself into the world’s living rooms.

So there’s going to be plenty to talk about when Kamangar joins a lineup of media heavyweights Jan. 30 and 31 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, an hour south of Los Angeles. Previously announced speakers include Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey, Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull, and VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff.

We’ll announce more in the weeks to come. If you want to make sure you get a seat, you should sign up now.

For our first-ever media conference, we’re trying to cast a wide net, so you’ll hear from movers and shakers from a range of companies. The common theme: All of them are making and distributing content during a time of unprecedented technological change. How do they adapt?

So far, we’ve announced that Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, New York editor David Remnick, Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. and News Corp. chief operating officer Chase Carey will be joining us on Jan. 30 and 31 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Nigel, just south of Los Angeles.

Let’s add three more to that list:

Bob Pittman helped build MTV, then AOL. And after spending several years as a full-time investor in everything from Zynga to a high-end tequila, he’s running a media company once again — this time overseeing radio and billboard giant Clear Channel. Why would you want to run a radio company when everyone’s consumed with the likes of iTunes, Pandora and Spotify? Because it’s still a growth industry, Pittman argues. And the fact that it’s the industry that gave him his start, at age 15, makes the story even more interesting.

Thomas Tull is a relative newcomer to Hollywood, but he’s moving fast. After founding Legendary Pictures in 2004, he’s produced a string of hits, including “The Hangover,” “The Dark Knight” and “300.” And if you accuse him of making dude-centric movies that appeal to “fanboys,” he won’t flinch — they’re the ones who still come out to the theaters, if you know how to get them there. Last spring, his track record helped him secure an investment from Silicon Valley heavyweight Accel Partners, which gives you a hint about where Tull thinks all of this is going.

Joint ventures formed by big media companies are a tricky proposition, but Rio Caraeff seems to be making his work. Vevo, the “Hulu for music videos,” is co-owned by Universal Music Group and Sony Music, and helped in large part by Google’s YouTube. And as of last month it was the second-biggest video site on the Web — a title that used to be held by Hulu.

Just like our flagship D: All Things Digital conference, D: Dive into Media will give you rare access to deep, smart talks with the people who matter. And we’ll be announcing more of them in the weeks to come. For now: You can find registration information here.

Viacom and Google, who have been tangling over copyright violations at YouTube since 2007, will be at it again today at a federal courthouse in New York. The two sides will start oral arguments for Viacom’s appeal of the case, which Google won decisively in a 2010 ruling.

In the past, both sides have tried digging up evidence to discredit each others’ arguments, and while both came up with plenty of embarrassing stuff, they couldn’t find a smoking gun.

So now we’re back to the basic question of the case: How much protection does the Digital Millennium Copyright Act offer YouTube, or any other site that lets users upload and distribute content they don’t own?

That question has come up to the courts in at least three different suits in recent years: Viacom versus Google, Universal Music Group versus Veoh, and EMI versus MP3Tunes. And in all three cases, federal judges have offered up the same response: The DMCA gives Web sites enormous latitude. As long as the site serves a legitimate function, it can’t be held responsible if users upload stuff they don’t own. If copyright owners find something that shouldn’t be there, and they ask the site to take the offending piece down, the site has to comply. But that’s about it.

So far, that’s very encouraging news for all manner of digerati. And in theory, it’s quite threatening to media companies and other people who create, finance and distribute intellectual property for a living.

But things might not be quite so dire for the media guys. While you can read the recent court rulings as an invitation for a free-for-all, it looks a little different in the real world.

YouTube, for instance, has spent a lot of time and money creating systems to filter content on its site, which hoovers up more than 24 hours of stuff every minute. And it works hand in hand with most big media companies to help them keep stuff they don’t want off the site — and to help them distribute other stuff they do want there.

Included in that list of companies playing very nicely with YouTube — Viacom’s sister company, CBS. And once this suit finally gets settled — which could still take years — my hunch is Viacom will want to work closely with the world’s biggest video site, too.

[Image credit: Sweetheart/Shutterstock]

The biggest broadcast and cable-television channels are racing to launch tablet apps linked to their broadcasts and used simultaneously with the TV shows. The hope is that viewers will tune in live and interact.

The offerings include apps from NBCUniversal’s Bravo and News Corp.’s Fox that present material such as photos, quotes, polls or background about particular scenes as a show plays. Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. have apps that display updates about shows from Twitter or Facebook in real time.

USA Network’s TV comedy-mystery series “Psych” has an app that asks users to enter keywords that flash during the show’s graphics to unlock content like behind-the-scenes footage and games.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

At their height, music-related games generated an estimated $1.7 billion in revenues in 2008. Families all over America were rocking out in their living rooms with plastic guitars and drum sets to everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith.

But less than three years later, the leaders in the space were canceling new products and slashing production.

In late 2010, slowing sales of Rock Band led Viacom to sell maker Harmonix and close the MTV Games publishing division, and a few months later, Activision Blizzard canceled Guitar Hero.

The book, called “Music Games Rock: Rhythm Gaming’s Greatest Hits of All Time,” is by Scott Steinberg and is available via download for a number of e-readers at www.MusicGamesRock.com. It is free on the Web, or costs $2.99 for the Kindle.

Steinberg is the CEO of TechSavvy Global, a technology and video game consulting firm, and previously wrote the book “Get Rich Playing Games.”

So is this a good time to be in media? Or a terrifying one? Both? Yes!

AllThingsD covers the media business and the way it responds to technology, every day. But in January we’re going to go really deep into this stuff, at our first D: Dive Into Media event, where we’ll focus on the people who create, finance and distribute what we listen to, read and watch. (Facebook is on to something!)

We’ll gather the most powerful, interesting and innovative leaders from a wide range of media and entertainment companies, and sit down with them for one-on-one interviews.

And just like our flagship D: All Things Digital event, we’ll also be able to give you peeks at the future, by focusing on new voices and new technology you’ll be hearing from in the months and years to come. You won’t see panel discussions with middling players here: Just deep, smart talks with the people who matter.

We’ll be announcing our speakers throughout the fall, but here’s a starter list to give you a sense of what we’ve got planned:

Philippe Dauman is CEO of Viacom, which runs one of the world’s dominant cable networks. We’ll talk to him about what that means in a universe where cord-cutting could become a reality — if it’s not already. We’ll also pick his brain about the future of his Paramount studio, and Hollywood in general.

New Yorker editor David Remnick runs one of the world’s best, most storied magazines. Coincidentally or not, it also happens to be a rarity in the iPad world — a successful magazine app. We’ll talk to the Pulitzer Prize winner about the challenge of making long, immersive content in a fast-twitch world.

Edgar Bronfman Jr. ran Warner Music Group from 2004 until earlier this summer; he’s now the company’s chairman at a pivotal time in its history. Since his resume also includes a stint running what’s now called NBCUniversal, he’ll also be able to give us an interesting perspective on the evolution of the TV and movie business.

News Corp. COO Chase Carey can talk to us about his company’s take on the movie business, the TV business, the cable business, the newspaper business and the Internet. News Corp. also owns this Web site, but that won’t prevent us from having a frank discussion about the company’s challenges and opportunities.

D: Dive Into Media will be held at the stunning Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, a little more than an hour south of Los Angeles. On behalf of Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and the rest of the AllThingsD staff, I’d like to invite you to join us Jan. 30 and 31.

But I find that it’s easier than ever to be fully informed about What Was On The Teevee Last Night without ever turning on the set. Twitter, in particular, is good/bad about this — even if I have no interest in, say, last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, my feed makes sure I’ve got all the relevant info.

In case your Twitterfeed doesn’t look like mine, there were two big take-aways:

A) Beyonce looks pregnant and is encouraging everyone to believe that this is the case.

B) Adele, the only person in the world who is selling lots of recorded music these days, gave the night’s best performance.

Obligatory digital media business notes:

• The part where Twitter gives me the ability to learn about stuff that happened 12 hours ago is a little different from Twitter’s current pitch to TV programmers and advertisers. Dick Costolo and company like to argue that Twitter makes live TV more essential. The two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive — it’s possible that Twitter actually does boost live TV ratings at the same time it makes catch-up easier — but since there’s a lot less money in the catch-up business than in the live TV business (see: Hulu) you won’t hear much about that.
• Easy to forget, but true — MTV parent Viacom is still suing Google and YouTube. Which means that the clip I provided above should be hard to find, at the very least. But this one popped up as the second result under “Adele” on YouTube this morning.

What does that mean for the rest of us? In a nutshell: It’s yet another victory for Web sites and services that let users upload and access music, movies and other files under the protection of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

And it gives Google and Amazon additional cover for the cloud locker services they launched earlier this year, without approval from the big music labels.

In practical terms, though, I’m not sure that the decision does anything beyond maintaining the status quo. Had it gone the other way, it’s possible that it would have threatened lots of popular Web sites and services. But since it doesn’t: Carry on!

The most important news is that a third federal court has ruled on behalf of Web services whose users might use it to upload and/or access files that violate copyright rules.

In this case, it’s MP3Tunes fending off EMI Music. But it’s the same basic story as the Veoh/Universal Music and YouTube/Viacom cases: A judge has ruled that the DMCA doesn’t require Web services to figure out which files that users upload have the right to be there.

Assuming all of those rulings stand up (Viacom is appealing the YouTube decision, and this one will likely go back into the court system, too), this will give Web sites enormous flexibility. The rulings don’t give users unlimited access to stuff they don’t own, though, and they do require sites to pull down files if copyright owners complain.

In this case, Judge William Pauley ruled that MP3Tunes, which operates a “locker” music service similar to the ones Google and Amazon launched earlier this year, was liable for some copyright infringement, because it didn’t remove specific songs EMI had flagged. And he said MP3Tunes founder Michael Robertson was also liable, because he knowingly uploaded songs he didn’t own.

That means Robertson and his company could still end up paying significant penalties, even though they won most of their case.

Pauley’s ruling also briefly blessed the construction of the locker service itself. In short, he said that users have a right to upload their own songs to the cloud and play them back, even if the service they used to do it doesn’t have an arrangement with the music labels.

That’s good news for Google and Amazon, because they don’t have deals with labels for their services. But it didn’t seems like they were going to need them, anyway.

Though music executives huffed and puffed after the lockers launched, they haven’t taken legal action against the companies. They also haven’t pursued mSpot, a small start-up that offers something similar.

I’ve seen some reports that suggest that Pauley’s ruling gives Google and Amazon the ability to do a “scan and match” service, where users don’t have to laboriously upload their songs to a locker — instead, the service would simply look at what’s on their hard drive, and give them access to a copy stored on the site.

That’s what Apple’s new iTunes Match service does (among other things). And Apple hammered out a deal with the labels to make that happen.

But as far as I can tell, the only additional leeway that Pauley gives to Google and Amazon is the ability to save storage space on their own servers, by using “deduplication” technology — a “standard data compression algorithm that eliminates redundant digital data.”

That’s not nothing — it’s always nice to save storage space — but it won’t fundamentally change what they’re offering to consumers, who will still have to spend a long time moving their stuff into the cloud.

Big picture: If the idea of storing all of your music on a remote server — so that you can listen to it whenever you want, wherever you want — is appealing, this ruling is good news. It’s also good news if you like watching videos on YouTube, listening to songs on Tumblr, or using lots and lots of other Web sites that depend on stuff users upload. But since you can do all of that already, you’re not going to notice a change.

CEO Philippe Dauman said that a “substantial bump” in licensing revenue generated last quarter by the company’s TV shows came from “new and renewed digital distribution agreements” — i.e., deals with services like Netflix and Hulu.

The size of the bump may not be that big: BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield did some quick math and figured that new digital dollars added up to $70 million this quarter. That’s a tiny fraction of the overall $2.4 billion Viacom’s cable networks generated in the same time period.

But digital dollars are exceptionally profitable — Dauman said the margin on those deals was upward of 75 percent. And Dauman and his lieutenants took great pains to stress that they’d be signing up new digital pacts, both in and outside the U.S.

Unlike CBS CEO Les Moonves, who listed Apple, Microsoft and Google, among others, as potential buyers, Dauman was a little more circumspect when it came to new prospects — the only one he cited by name was LoveFilm, the “Netflix of Europe” that Amazon owns.

But he also suggested that some of the digital deals would come from cable and satellite companies who are already paying him to show stuff like “The Daily Show” and “Jersey Shore” on analog TV, but would want more digital rights. Both the Dish Network and DirecTV are obvious candidates there.

Again, this is the best-case digital scenario for the TV guys — the one where the Internet doesn’t eat into their business, but supplies it with new streams of easy money. It’s hard to believe it will stay that simple — a lot of this depends on customers deciding that it’s easier to pay for content than grabbing it for free off the Web – but right now it’s a pretty good place to be.

The studio’s big summer movie is out Friday, but you can see it tomorrow by heading to this site, which you can get to via the “#Super8Secret” hashtag, which Viacom’s movie unit has purchased as today’s “Promoted Trend” on Twitter.

Pretty straightforward stuff, but worth noting because:

• It’s another example of Hollywood embracing Twitter. Many studios have started using the service to promote an opening weekend. That’s a very nice sector of the ad business to play in, and it generates a lot of money for the TV networks on Thursday nights; it’s also lucrative for the very biggest Web portals. Getting a piece of it is a promising sign for Twitter.
• It’s also part of a year-long marketing pact that Paramount has signed with Twitter, one of several the service has signed with advertisers. One of the big raps about Twitter’s early ad efforts are that it doesn’t have enough inventory/opportunities to command big ad buys, but signing on buyers for a year takes care of some of those problems, for now.

By the way, I got to see the movie at a preview screening last night, attended by reporters and PR people. It’s good!

Yes, say the investors in Frequency.com. They’ve put together a $3 million Series A round for the site, which promises to deliver “your customized stream of web video from all over the internet, all in one place.”

Frequency is run by Blair Harrison, best known as the guy who built iFilm.com and sold it to Viacom in 2005 (you can still find iFilm’s bones if you poke around Spike TV’s site).

Harrison says funding for the round comes from his pocketbook, as well from Limelight Networks co-founder Mike Gordon, who’s now working as chief strategy officer for Frequency. Other angels include some early Limelight investors.

Web video search and discovery sites are a dime a dozen. But there seems to be demand for them, too: Clicker, for instance, recently sold to CBS for something in the $100 million range, and I’ve heard the site was getting interest from the likes of Microsoft and Google.

Harrison’s pitch is that his service will find you stuff based on interests you tell it about, as well as pulling in all the video your friends are posting on Facebook and Twitter. Eventually, he says, the service will have enough data about you to start suggesting videos you didn’t know you wanted to see.

Frequency is a Web-only proposition now, but Harrison is using some of the money to build apps for Apple’s iOS platform. And by the end of the year he hopes to have his service integrated into at least one smart TV platform.

Harrison says the site is already attracting close to 2 million monthly uniques, just 5 months after its formal launch in January.

I’ve played around with Frequency a bit, and I do like the notion of a dedicated spot for the videos my social network pals like to post. I’m not sure why Twitter, Facebook etc can’t do this themselves. But then again there’s lots of stuff those services could do but haven’t, so far.

Here’s a clip that’s made its way around the Web and into my Twitterstream, where Frequency found it: A 1983 Colecovision ad for “George Plimpton’s Video Falconry” (Psst. It’s fake.)

As I wrote in April, YouTube is adding movies from big studios including Time Warner’s Warner Bros., Sony and Comcast’s Universal to existing service, which has previously had a limited selection of titles from small studios.

For now, the YouTube movie store appears to be a work in progress: Google says it will rent newish movies like Inception, The King’s Speech, Little Fockers from the store, but so far I can’t find any of them. Same goes for new old titles like Caddyshack, which are also MIA.

Once YouTube gets this thing ready for prime time, though, it’s going to look very similar to what consumers can already get from competitors like Apple and Amazon: The ability to rent a movie that they can watch anytime over a 30-day period, except that once they start watching it they’ll have 24 hours before it evaporates. Pricing should be comparable to YouTube’s peers — $3.99 for new movies $2.99 for older ones.

Beyond that, the only wrinkles of note here:

• As I reported last month, the movies will be streamed, not downloaded. So presumably you’ll need a live Web connection to watch them, unlike Apple’s videos, which reside on your device for the duration of the rental.
• It’s unclear whether consumers will have to sign up for Google Checkout or some other Google-specific e-commerce platform to rent the movies; a FAQ sent out by Google only mentions that “the service accepts all major credit cards.”. Not linking the service to a Google account may make things slightly easier for consumers, since it’s an extra step they won’t have to take. On the other hand, you’d think Google would be very interested in establishing a credit card relationship with their customers, like Amazon, Apple and Netflix do.

By all accounts, this is an intermediate, incremental step for Google, which has had movie rentals for a year but hasn’t had much to show for it. Now it has the backing of some big studios, but is missing others, including News Corp.’s Fox (News Corp. also owns this Web site), Viacom’s Paramount and Disney.

Even if YouTube does bring on more partners — Paramount seems like a particularly long shot, given the ongoing Viacom/YouTube lawsuit, but the rest could show up one day — that will just bring Google up to par with other online a la carte movie rental outlets, which haven’t gained much traction yet.

Nothing wrong with that, but that doesn’t seem to be the end game for either Google or the studios. Google seems interested in building up YouTube, period. And if making video rentals available as part of the huge swell of content that lives on the site helps, then great.

The movies will also work on Google TV, which can use any help it can get. So that’s good, too.

At least part of Hollywood, meanwhile, seems to believe it can keep its DVD business alive by launching a locker/cloud system that would give disc owners the right to watch their movies whenever they want, on different devices . They’re also gung ho about anything that isn’t a Netflix all-you-can-eat subscription plans.

I’m doubtful that can work. Because beyond kids’ movies, which get watched hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times (I know the name of every character in Cars – try me!) most consumers don’t want to watch a movie multiple times. It’s not like a music collection, which does make quite a bit of sense in the cloud.

But the studios seem to like this idea, and at least some of them are convinced Google can help them do it — or, at least, provide leverage with other potential cloud partners, like Apple or Facebook. Watch for more developments in this vein.

And while you’re waiting, you can try renting a movie from YouTube.

He’s full of good will, too! No surprise: The Netflix CEO has always tried to present his company as an ally to Hollywood and the TV guys. So everything should be cool from here on out, right?

The reality is that the studios and TV networks aren’t quite sure what to do about Netflix: They’re happy to take Hastings’s checks, but they’re worried he’s using the money to disrupt their businesses.

So let’s hear Hastings make his case in his own words, via an interview I conducted with him on Tuesday. That’s a day before Bewkes made his latest comments about Netflix and other Web video services. But I don’t think Bewkes said anything that would have changed Hastings’s answers.

I used my time to focus primarily on Hastings’s approach to the TV business, but we touched on some other topics as well, including his take on competition from Amazon and Hulu.

Alas, right after I finished up with Hastings, I realized I had forgotten to ask him about Apple’s new subscription rules and what impact they would have on his Web service. I tried following up, but it was too late: Hastings, via a PR rep, declined to comment.

Here’s an edited and condensed transcript from our talk:

Peter Kafka: There’s been a lot of rumbling from Hollywood about slowing down your growth by delaying or cutting off your access to content, and Time Warner has been the most vocal about this. What happens if they follow through?

Reed Hastings: We license only a small part of our streaming content from Warners today, and we hope to be able to license more as we go. We’ll see what their perspective is on it. But we’re doing great, even though we haven’t licensed essentially any Time Warner streaming content.

But beyond streaming, they could make it much harder for you to distribute their DVDs, too. You have a distribution agreement with them now, but it will expire this year.

Discs I think we should set to the side, because we’re mostly focused on streaming. And on streaming we only license a few shows from them today. It’s a very tiny amount.

And [because they're] not licensing to us, they’re missing out on a lot of revenue, and we’re putting that revenue into their competitors. We spend a lot of money with News Corp. We spend a lot of money with Viacom. That’s a choice that they’re making.

Do you think Jeff Bewkes is more concerned about your impact on his Warner Bros., or his HBO pay channel?

I’m not sure. You’d have to ask Jeff that.

I ask because in the ongoing cord-cutting/cord-shaving/cord-nevers debate, there seems to be a growing consensus that services like Netflix are most competitive with premium TV like HBO.

We compete with HBO like baseball and football compete. We sell to the same person, we deliver some of the same emotion, but it’s not direct competition. People subscribe to both. And the people who love us often subscribe to HBO.

They don’t have any of the same content we have, and we don’t have any of the content they have. So it’s a pretty indirect competition for time and money.

How many Netflix subscribers also have HBO?

The last time we checked was a couple years ago. It was about a third.

Again, there really isn’t a direct competition. We’re creating this new market where consumers get to choose what they want, and it’s on demand, and it’s a very different experience.

In your last shareholders letter, you specifically referred to competition from Amazon and Hulu Plus. Do you think those are your two biggest threats?

What we said is that they’ve entered the market in the last year, and that we’ve continued to prosper and grow.

You’ve been focusing more energy on acquiring TV programs. And while you keep saying you’re not interested in providing TV shows the day after they air, like Hulu does, many people think that’s what you’ll do sooner or later. How do you look at TV programming?

TV content on DVD was about 20 percent of our viewing. And on streaming it’s about half. The difference between “Terminator” 1, 2 and 3, and episode 1, 2 and 3 of a TV show is not that large. We’ve always been consistent that movies and TV shows are what we do, and we haven’t changed.

We’re not focused on same day [TV shows], because what we really want to do is spend that money on prior. You can buy two or three prior season shows for the price of a same day show. You can get same day on cable, satellite, pretty easily.

What about when you have more money? Would you get into same day then? Or do you always want to be an archival business?

I wouldn’t call it archival. [Comcast CEO] Brian Roberts’s phrase was “rerun TV.” And there’s a lot of great reruns, because you might not catch everything when it’s new and fresh. At least for the next five years, we’re really focused on that rerun model on television, and the pay [TV window] model on movies. And we have our global expansion, which we’re putting a lot of money and time into.

But you are paying for the first run of “House of Cards,” and possibly other shows. That seems like you’re edging closer to premium content.

We like premium content. We just did a big deal licensing “Glee,”and a big deal licensing “Mad Men.” And “House of Cards” is similar except that it’s premiering on Netflix.

So it’s a little bolder and a little riskier than other shows, but we’re not really in the original content business. We didn’t create that content, we didn’t find the script, we didn’t put the cast together, we didn’t talk Kevin Spacey into it. And it’s a small part of what we do, as a test.

If it works, will you build out a staff to find more of this stuff, or develop it?

If there’s a market of buyers, then those shows tend to get developed. We’ll take it year by year and see what happens.

We tried an experiment a couple of years ago with Red Envelope entertainment, where we bought films out of Sundance and similar festivals. And it was very fun, but we lost $10 million, and then we stopped. So we’ll see what we find.

So you don’t see yourself producing originals in the way that HBO does?

Very unlikely, especially given my background. What we’d prefer to be is the buyer of prior season, or expired season, like an “In Treatment.” Or have all the episodes of “Dexter.” We think if we focus on prior season, we can help build audience for current season.

Speaking of expired season, I’ve heard some networks talk about extending the life of shows they were going to cancel if you’re going to pay them to keep going. Does that make sense?

Yes. For example, “Friday Night Lights” wasn’t going to get continued two seasons ago on NBC, and DirecTV did a deal to extend that show. So we can see ourselves doing something like that–extending a season of something that was doing well on Netflix.

Ms. McGrath, who began her MTV career 30 years ago as a copywriter in its promotions department, and has been CEO since 2004, will step down immediately. The company will not name a successor.

People close to Viacom and Ms. McGrath, 58 years old, say that she chose to resign and wasn’t forced out. As recently as last week, she had not decided whether to leave, one of those people said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site