Why does Zach Braff need Kickstarter’s sympathy? Because the crowdfunding platform is beloved as a site that can turn independent passion projects into reality when fueled by the money and goodwill of fans and supporters.

So people get a little huffy when they see stars like Braff raise $2.5 million (with 14 days left to go) for his film “Wish I Was Here” that apparently could have been traditionally financed, if Braff had liked the terms. Or the “Veronica Mars” movie that raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter even though it was owned by Warner Bros.

Kickstarter, they say, is for the little people, not the celebrities who already have a whole industry built around them.

Braff, for his part, has gone on the defensive, saying in an interview posted on Mashable yesterday, “I’m making this movie for you and, ostensibly, with you. You’re coming along on the ride, you’re going to be a little GoPro camera on my shoulder experiencing how an independent movie is made … I owe [the fans] everything.”

But what about Kickstarter the company, which had previously gone out of its way to limit participation by hardware projects on its platform that might give people the impression that they are buying a product rather than supporting an endeavor.

Well, Kickstarter actually supports Braff, its founders said today in an open letter titled “Who is Kickstarter for?”

Kickstarter’s mission is to “help bring creative projects to life,” according to co-founders Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler. So the Zach Braff and Veronica Mars films qualify.

And second, celebrities have a halo effect for everyone else on Kickstarter. For this, they offered some numbers:

The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects.

And third, both of the celebrity projects in question were fully in the participatory, all-access spirit of Kickstarter. The Zach Braff rewards included attending premieres and Q&As that fans normally wouldn’t get access to; the Veronica Mars rewards included star Kristen Bell recording for fans outgoing voicemail messages of their choosing.

P.S. It’s not like all celebrity campaigns succeed; a would-be Kickstarter film from actress Melissa Joan Hart is currently only 2.5 percent of the way to its $2 million goal, with 16 days to go. It just recently added more interesting rewards in the style of the other two successful campaigns.

At first blush this seems like the best-case scenario for Viacom and every other Big Media player: Netflix, et al, pay a lot of money for shows the networks have already aired, and that money is almost pure profit.

And in some cases the story gets even better, as Netflix claims that for shows like AMC’s “Mad Men,” the reruns it carries boost the ratings for the show’s new episodes, as binge watchers/catch-up watchers become new fans.

But Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger is convinced that, at least for kids’ programmers, and Viacom in particular, the Netflix deals are bad ones, because they train Netflix subscribers and their kids to watch the shows on the Internet instead of on TV.

This makes intuitive sense to people like me, who have kids who watch a ton of Viacom shows — and almost never watch them on TV. Viacom has said that this isn’t the case, but today Juenger has a new note making the same argument, with new data.

Here’s what happened to ratings for kids’ programming last year, split up by homes that have Netflix and those without. Note that the only case where a network did better in a non-Netflix household was Time Warner’s Cartoon Network, which didn’t have a syndication deal with Netflix until January 2013:

The two companies announced a new pact today that will move more Time Warner shows to Netflix: Animated stuff from Turner’s Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, along with TNT’s “Dallas.”

As with every other Netflix TV deal, these are all repeats: No one is selling Netflix stuff that they’re still running on their own network.

But, at the right price, the deal is a nice addition for Netflix, particularly the Cartoon Network stuff, which bolsters a kids lineup that’s already a key part of the service.

It also helps buffer Netflix in case Viacom gets itchy and ends up taking away its Nickelodeon programming when that deal ends. And the Adult Swim stuff is great for stoners.

Bigger picture: This is the third deal Netflix has made to get its hands on Time Warner programming. In October 2011, it paid up big for stuff that used to run on the CW Network, which is jointly owned by Time Warner and CBS. Last week, it struck another deal for shows made by Warner Bros. studio, including NBC’s “Revolution.”

Biggest picture: This doesn’t mean that you’re going to get the video stuff Time Warner values the most — its movies and its HBO shows — on Netflix, now or ever.

Jeff Bewkes has made it quite clear that he’s happy to use Netflix as a syndication outlet for stuff he’s already gotten maximum value from. If Reed Hastings thinks he can make money with Bewkes’s leftovers, he is happy to sell them.

Now Walmart says it has solved that one, more or less, with software that will let most users handle the “disc to digital” process at home.

Walmart says that, starting this month, users can start storing copies of some of the movies they’ve already purchased on DVDs, using Macs and PCs and its Vudu.com movie service.

You’ll need a computer that still has an optical disc drive for this. So, if you’re working on, say, a MacBook Air, you’re going to have to dig up an older PC, or forage for an external drive.

And you’ll still need to pay for the privilege of using Walmart’s cloud: $2 to convert a standard DVD or Blu-ray, or $5 if you want to convert a standard DVD into an HD copy. That may turn off some people who believe that paying extra for digital copies of stuff they own doesn’t make any sense.

Also note that while many of the big studios, including Sony, Warner Bros, Fox (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.) and Paramount are in, not all of their films are available for digital storage and playback. So in some cases this will still be a moot point.

Still, the notion of hauling your discs to a store in order to move them onto the Internet made zero sense in 2012. Nice to know that Walmart has caught up in 2013.

Walmart has made other strides, as well. It recently started letting Android users download digital copies of their movies on their devices, instead of requiring them to stream them. And it says that, next month, Apple iOS users will be able to do the same.

Walmart is pushing the service in conjunction with UltraViolet, the Hollywood + tech consortium that’s trying to push movie ownership via a system that’s supposed to let users access any film they buy, on any device. And since Disney isn’t an UltraViolet member, that means none of this applies to Disney and Pixar films, which means a key demographic that would value having multiple copies of the same movie — parents with kids — won’t get as much out of this as Walmart would like.

Still, when Walmart rolled this thing out last March, it looked DOA, and UltraViolet backers have conceded to me privately that it has underwhelmed them, too. Maybe the retailer has done enough to give this thing a second chance.

Amazon’s Prime Customers can now watch “The Closer,” the crime series that ran for seven years on TNT, and “Falling Skies,” the earthlings-versus-aliens drama that’s still running on Turner’s cable channel.

“The Closer” never got the kind of critical buzz heaped on “Mad Men,” etc., but it was very popular. And “Falling Skies” does pretty well, too.

A press release says viewers can watch “current” episodes of the latter, but that’s a bit misleading — you won’t be able to watch any new shows from the series until at least three months after the end of a new season.

So those are nice additions for Amazon. But not game-changers for the service, which doesn’t appear to be attracting many eyeballs right now — at least not compared to Netflix.

The main reason the deal is worth noting is that it’s another exclusive for Amazon and Time Warner, which has held almost all of its streaming content off of Netflix. Earlier this year, the two companies announced a deal to stream “The West Wing,” “Fringe,” and other Time Warner-owned shows on Amazon.

Meanwhile, the only Time Warner-owned content that you can see via Netflix streaming are shows that ran on the CW Network, which is co-owned by Time Warner and CBS.

But it wouldn’t be a shock to see that change sooner than later: While Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes used to go out of his way to denigrate Reed Hastings’s service, his newish position is that he’s happy to take a Netflix check — once he’s finished selling his stuff everywhere else.

Well, almost ready: “Redbox Instant by Verizon” will go into an invitation-only beta launch this month, and the official push won’t start until next year.

Still, this means the company is officially unveiling its offering. Which is exactly what we told you it would be: A service that’s supposed to offer some streaming video, a la Netflix, and some movies via DVD, a la the old Netflix and the curent RedBox. And the ability to buy and rent individual movies online, like iTunes and Amazon.

The basic offer: $8 a month for a selection of streaming movies and the ability to rent up to 4 DVDs a month from Redboxes’ kiosks, plus an online store where you can buy or rent newer movies.

If you don’t want to or can’t use the Redbox kiosks, you can go for a streaming-only option for $6. If you want to rent Blu-ray discs, that’s $9 a month.

Like Netflix and Amazon, Redbox has a deal with Epix, which means you’ll get newish movies like “Thor,” along with some big titles like “The Hunger Games,” after they’ve been available for rental and on pay TV. It also has a similar deal for older movies from Warner Bros., which hasn’t cut deals with Netflix or Amazon (yet).

But the joint venture won’t have the deeper catalog titles its competitors have built up. And it has pretty much ignored the TV titles that Netflix in particular has concentrated on in recent years.

On the other hand, it will have an online store where you can rent and buy movies, which Netflix doesn’t offer — because, says CEO Reed Hastings, everyone else does. Though this store will be different from those run by other online retailers like Amazon and iTunes: For whatever reason, the company hasn’t signed on all of the studios, so there will be notable gaps from the likes of Disney and Sony. (Update: Redbox Instant says it does have a deal with Sony, after all.)

So basically: Costs about the same as Netflix, without some of the stuff people like about Netflix, with other stuff Netflix doesn’t have.

Is that compelling enough to take market share away from Hastings? We’ll have to wait some time to see, but it’s worth noting that Amazon and Hulu, which have been at this for a while, have yet to make a real dent.

In the meantime, the most interesting thing about Redbox Instant is what it could be, one day, if Verzion wants to push it. The service isn’t confined to Verizon’s fiber or wireless footprint, which means it could truly make it a national video service, if it wants to commit the resources. So far this looks more like a toe in the water than anything else.

Nintendo’s President of North America, Reggie Fils-Aime, made the announcement this morning onstage in New York City.

There will be two configurations available. The regular set, in white, will cost $299.99, and will include the Wii console and the Wii U GamePad. It will have 8 GB of memory. The deluxe package, in black, costs $349.99 and will ship with 32 GB of capacity, a GamePad charging cradle and the game NintendoLand.

Nintendo also announced it will be offering a new video feature called Nintendo TVii at no additional cost. TVii will allow consumers to search for content across multiple subscription services, including Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Video, and stream content to the TV.

Fils-Aime confirmed that Nintendo will release the games NintendoLand and Super Mario U at the Nov. 18 launch, along with 50 other titles from partners including Electronic Arts, THQ, Disney, Warner Bros., Ubisoft, Activision and many others.

The Wii U was first unveiled more than a year ago at E3, where Nintendo surprised the industry with the first tablet-size controller for a videogame console. The hardware also represents a nice upgrade from the current generation, because it supports HD graphics and hardcore game play. It will be connected online to offer new social experiences, including video chat.

Nintendo’s new system will be the only new console launching this holiday season. Microsoft and Sony have not announced plans for launching new Xbox or PlayStation hardware.

The Wii U will launch nearly a month later in Japan on Dec. 8.

So, here comes another option: M-Go, a cloud/locker app/service backed by DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor, that will be part digital storefront, part digital “discovery” service.

M-Go won’t launch until later this fall, but today the company is announcing that it has distribution deals with most of Hollywood’s biggest studios: Sony, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox (Fox is owned by News Corp, as is this Web site).

The pitch: Consumers will be able to use M-Go to purchase movies (and eventually TV shows, and perhaps, one day, music) and watch them wherever they’d like — on connected TVs, PCs and mobile phones.

M-Go will have dedicated apps for some TVs and PCs, like Intel Ultrabooks; for other platforms, like Apple’s iOS, the movies will be available on a Web browser. M-Go will also link consumers to other digital storefronts, like Apple’s iTunes, though movies purchased there won’t work on M-Go.

Nothing wrong with that, in concept. The question is whether consumers aren’t buying movies because they’re worried that they won’t work on multiple devices, or because they’ve concluded that they really don’t need to own most movies.

Studios are hoping it’s the former, which is why they’ve already backed UltraViolet, a consortium of tech and media companies that’s trying to solve the same problem. M-Go will be compatible with UltraViolet titles, so that’s good.

Less good is the fact that Disney, which isn’t part of the UltraViolet coalition, isn’t a part of M-Go, either. And Disney/Pixar’s kids’ movies are the kind of movies consumers are most likely to decide they need to own — which may be why Disney is approaching the cloud/locker question with its own Keystone technology.

But Warner Bros. is trying to do both. And the newest version of Flixster, the recommendation service it bought last year, is pretty interesting.

This one is Web-based, and combines lots of elements you’ve seen in different places on the Internet. Like input from your Facebook friends, a design that owes a lot to Pinterest, and ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, the movie-geek site that Warner Bros. also owns.

Unlike Flixster Collections, a year-old movie “discovery” app Warner Bros. is mothballing, this one doesn’t want to tie up with your Netflix and Hulu accounts. But it is interested in promoting UltraViolet, the cloud/locker system that many of the studios are promoting, which is supposed to give you access to whatever movie you buy on whatever device you want.

After a long run-up, UltraViolet devices and titles finally hit the market last fall, and so far even its most ardent defenders have a hard time arguing that it has much traction. That may never happen, since it’s supported by a coalition that doesn’t include Apple or Disney.

But Amazon has signed on to UltraViolet, at least in theory. And Warner Bros. in particular has been vocal about promoting the system, which it thinks will convince consumers to keep buying copies of movies instead of renting them.

In any case, Flixster.com does a nice job of not shoving UltraViolet in anyone’s face — it simply flags the fact that the service exists on its homepage. And if you click on a movie that’s now available as an UltraViolet purchase, Flixster lists it as a viewing/purchasing/rental option alongside Apple, Amazon, Netflix and others.

Warner Bros. also doesn’t seem to be shoving its own titles in front of anyone, either, which is an incredibly obvious mistake to avoid, but still nice to see. You can see for yourself right now:

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Patricia Marroquin)

So, no news there, really. What would have been more interesting is if one of HBO’s digital competitors — say, Netflix — or someone who was contemplating becoming a competitor — say, Google or Apple — had been bidding for the rights. But I’m told that didn’t happen here.

The deal does have one interesting wrinkle for digital-media watchers. Fox (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.) and HBO officials say the deal includes a “softening” of the “electronic sell-through” window.

In real-world terms: Previous HBO contracts meant that Fox — or other studios — couldn’t sell or rent their movies electronically while HBO was running them for the first time. Now, Fox will have the ability sell its stuff — but not rent it — on iTunes, Amazon, etc., at the same time the titles show up on HBO. (HBO and Fox had already agreed to a deal that solved a different windowing problem for Apple’s iCloud locker.)

I’m told the new terms will also apply to movies covered by the existing pact. So, while you currently can’t get “X Men: First Class” from iTunes, because it’s in its first HBO run, you should be able to get it soon.

Does that really matter? Hard to say: To date, the market for digital sales and rentals has been pretty meager compared to the old DVD business. But if that market does end up getting bigger, it’s a new revenue stream for the Fox guys. And presumably for other studios as well — an HBO executive says the company is in talks with its corporate cousins at Warner Bros.

It’s also another encouraging sign that media owners and distributors are closing up some of those weird rights gaps that make zero sense to consumers.

It’s now standard issue for Amazon and Netflix to announce new additions to their subscription video catalogs, but this one has a slight twist. Amazon will have “West Wing” and “Fringe” exclusively — but that exclusive only lasts “for the summer.”

What happens after that? It’s not clear: Amazon will continue to have access to the show, but other digital video subscription services could also offer it, if they’re willing to pay up. So Amazon’s exclusive could effectively last beyond the summer, or it could end in a couple of months.

It’s a small deal any way you cut it. But in the big picture, it points out that the value of “exclusive” content is still a fluid notion for digital distributors like Amazon, Netflix and Hulu.

All three of them are going to offer many of the same shows, because content owners like to sell their stuff as many times as they can. So you can see “Battlestar Galactica” on both Hulu and Netflix, for instance. And you can see “Dora the Explorer” on both Netflix and Amazon.

But all three distributors also want stuff that distinguishes their catalogs from those of their competitors. Not necessarily because they think consumers will pick one service or another, but because they want to give consumers a reason to add their service to their entertainment offerings.

How they do that is more art than science.

On the one hand, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has been willing to make very expensive bets to get his hands on upcoming originals like “House of Cards” and new episodes of “Arrested Development”, both slated to run next year. But apparently Hastings’ team wasn’t willing to outbid Amazon for access to “West Wing”.

Meanwhile Hulu, whose main selling point is its co-exclusive access to broadcast TV shows, has made a point of producing small-scale original programming, like its “Day in the Life” documentary series. And next year, it will be the first U.S. distribution outlet for new episodes of “In the Thick of It,” a BBC comedy (from the same team that brought HBO its “Veep” series).

To date, video sellers tell me, Amazon has not been an aggressive buyers when content comes on the market — Jeff Bezos’ team has had a reputation for being fairly indiscriminate about what it acquires, and not particularly interested in outbidding competitors. But in this case, Amazon was willing to pay for something no one else would have — at least for six weeks.

That said, if you’re willing to watch the show in two-minute clips, it’s quite easy to get the West Wing online without going through Amazon — YouTube has a very large selection, of varying quality:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This morning, for example, Google’s YouTube is announcing a deal to rent movies from Viacom’s Paramount studio. The move will bring some 500 titles to Google, ranging from newish hits like the “Transformers” movies to oldies like “The Godfather” trilogy; users will also be able to rent the movies from Google’s new Google Play hub.

The announcement means that Google, which has been struggling for years to figure out Hollywood, now has rental deals with five of the six big studios: Paramount, Sony, Time Warner’s Warner Bros., Disney, and Comcast’s Universal.

The lone holdout is 20th Century Fox, which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp. All six studios rent their movies via Apple’s iTunes. It’s worth noting that Paramount is one of the few studios that has experimented with direct-to-customer sales and rentals, via its own Web site.

Totally evil.

Also, totally untrue.

So says Netflix PR rep Steve Swasey. “Completely bogus,” he says.

And I’ll take his word over the tale that has spread over the Web the last few days — that whoever owns the streaming rights to the 1992 Whitney Houston/Kevin Costner film had yanked them away from Netflix after Houston’s death, so it could make more money selling discs.

The reason that story didn’t make any sense to me isn’t because Hollywood studios are paragons of virtue, but because digital licensing deals are usually rigid, and start and stop on certain dates. If they allowed rights holders to yank their stuff on a whim, then we’d see it all the time, right?

And sure enough, it turns out Netflix hasn’t had the streaming rights to “The Bodyguard” — which belong to Time Warner’s Warner Bros. — since the end of last year. “We didn’t renew it,” Swasey says.* Netflix still rents the DVDs, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Ah. But what about that Netflix rep who supposedly told talk show host and publisher Dan McDermott that a “production company” was pulling “all the streaming titles we have of Whitney Houston,” so it can make a “very large amount of money”?

This one is harder for Swasey to say is categorically false, since he didn’t hear the exchange himself. But he says it’s “highly doubtful” that a rep told any caller anything beyond the fact that the movie wasn’t available. Because support reps are trained to offer very little information beyond that, Swasey says.

So, perhaps a rep did think way outside the box here, but I tend to believe Swasey’s story here, too. Always more fun to imagine big companies behaving outrageously, but if that happened every time we imagined it did, it wouldn’t be outrageous.

*Perhaps there’s a good story about Warner Bros. titles leaving Netflix in general, since the studio and its parent company have had a … strained relationship with the movie service.

The two companies put out a press release without a whole lot of detail (below) but are holding a press conference shortly where we may be able to tease some more out of them. (Update: Well, that was a waste of 10 minutes. Verizon is also promising to make executives available for interviews this morning, but my expectations are now very, very, very low. Subterranean.)

Right now, all they’re really saying is that they’ll have video content, delivered over the Web and via mobile devices, and that consumers will be able to stream some of it and download some of it.

Roping Redbox into the JV — Verizon will own 65 percent of the company, and the movie rental service will have the remainder — makes sense, because it will give the unnamed service a digital-plus-physical option. Just like Netflix and Dish Network’s Blockbuster already have.

But while the big media companies are very happy to license some of their content to Verizon or any other player that wants to pay for digital rights, they are much less comfortable with Coinstar’s Redbox, and have tangled with that service in court.

Right now, for instance, Redbox has announced that it won’t work with Warner Bros.’ new 56-day “window” for new movies on DVD, and will buy discs from third-party sources instead of getting them directly from the studio. So it will be interesting to see how Warner Bros. and parent company Time Warner treat the new venture, and whether that dynamic plays out with other content guys.

VERIZON AND COINSTAR’S REDBOX FORM JOINT VENTURE TO CREATE NEW CONSUMER CHOICE FOR VIDEO ENTERTAINMENT
Joint Venture Will Offer the Best of Both Worlds – Physical and Digital – to All Consumers Nationwide

NEW YORK – Verizon and Coinstar, Inc. today announced the formation of a joint venture that will create a new choice for quality- and value-conscious consumers seeking a simple and affordable way to access the video entertainment they crave. The venture’s services will offer all of the convenience, simplicity and value of Redbox® new release DVD and Blu-ray Disc® rentals combined with a new content-rich video on-demand streaming and download service from Verizon.

The joint venture plans to introduce the product portfolio in the second half of 2012. It will offer subscription services and more in an easy-to-use, flexible and affordable service that will allow all consumers across the U.S. to enjoy the new and popular entertainment they want, whenever they choose, using the media and devices they prefer. Additional brand and product information will be revealed in the coming months.

“When you consider the core elements the parties bring to this venture – our powerful brands; our national rental kiosk footprint; our anytime, anywhere network presence; and our mutual commitment to customer-focused innovation – it’s clear that Verizon and Redbox are a powerful entertainment team,” said Bob Mudge, president of Verizon consumer and mass business markets.

“Consumers rely on Redbox for the latest new release movies at a great value, and our joint venture with Verizon will enable us to bring them even more value by offering expanded content offerings and greater flexibility for how and when they enjoy entertainment,” said Paul Davis, chief executive officer of Coinstar, Inc. “This alliance is the result of a deliberate and strategic process to identify a partner who shares our commitment to delivering innovative solutions to consumers. We look forward to rolling out the shared benefits this venture will bring to consumers, retailers, and shareholders.”

This venture between Verizon and Redbox will create the kind of national multi-platform product that customers are demanding from video entertainment service providers. It will leverage Verizon’s industry-wide relationships with entertainment content providers, its advanced cloud computing technologies and state-of-the-art IP network infrastructure to distribute video on-demand content to its customers.

“The joint venture will combine the accessibility and value of Redbox with Verizon’s vision for a borderless lifestyle – where consumers easily accomplish what they want or need to do, on their terms, through the power of the network,” said Mudge. “Together, we are erasing old technology boundaries, freeing people to spontaneously enjoy the entertainment they want, whenever they choose, using the devices and media they prefer, at home or away.”

By offering instantly available online and mobile content with immediate access to physical media through rental kiosks, Verizon and Redbox will be uniquely positioned to deliver the best of both worlds – digital and physical – to consumers across the country.
The joint venture is a limited liability company with Verizon holding a 65 percent ownership share and Redbox holding a 35 percent ownership share at the outset.

Which means we’re in for an interesting game of chicken between Time Warner’s movie studio and the two rental services. And the result will be meaningful for Netflix, too.

Here’s where things stand: Warner Bros wants to double the “window” that keeps new DVDs away from rental services from 28 days to 56 days, a strategy that’s supposed to encourage would-be renters to buy DVDs instead. Netflix intends on going along with the plan and will be able to buy discs directly from the studio at wholesale rates.

Warner plans on announcing the new terms next week at the Consumer Electronics Show. But though I reported yesterday that Dish Network’s Blockbuster and Coinstar’s Redbox had signed on, the two companies — directly and indirectly —  say that’s not the case. Earlier today a Coinstar rep told me the company won’t agree to a longer window, and a person familiar with Blockbuster’s thinking now says the same thing.

If neither side backs down, then Blockbuster and Redbox would have a marketing advantage over Netflix, since the companies could boast about getting new movies before their rival.

But that assumes they can get their hands on the movies. That will be costly, and perhaps quite difficult.

In the past, Redbox has bought movies directly from retailers (Netflix also used to do the same thing in the service’s early days. But chains like Wal-Mart and Target have instituted buying caps on their discs  that are supposed to thwart that strategy. (Thanks, Janko Roettgers.)

Grab your popcorn!

And if you didn’t understand that one, he offered another metaphor: A “200-pound chimp.”

In the following months, Bewkes cut back on his rhetoric, which may or may not have had anything to do with a lucrative deal to sell reruns of “Gossip Girl” to Netflix. But now that deal has been inked, Netflix stock has been crushed and lots of smart people think the video service may be on a permanent spiral.

So here’s Bewkes again, damning his new partners with very faint praise, this time in the Financial Times instead of the New York Times: Netflix and similar services (read: Hulu and Amazon, for now) can’t get the best stuff anymore, he says, and are stuck showing “archival content that nobody would want in Blockbuster.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Bewkes adds. “It can do certain things and not other things. It can fly, it’s not a submarine. Don’t turn a hamburger into a cow.”

And that is how a pro mixes metaphors and backhanded compliments.

Again, remember that the real purpose of this stuff isn’t to hurt Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s feelings — Hastings can probably take it — but to make Time Warner shareholders feel better about the company’s cable holdings. Because Time Warner’s cable channels — like TBS and TNT, and its HBO premium channel — are absolutely competing with Netflix for viewer time and dollars, no matter how much either company tries to insist otherwise.

Does this sort of semi-smack-talk entertain you? (It’s okay to admit it. Me, too.) Then you’ll want to check back on Tuesday: Both Bewkes and Hastings are scheduled to present that day at the annual UBS Media/Telecom conference. I’ll be there to record the slings and arrows, and I’ll report back.

In all, physical sales of both hardware and software totaled $1.08 billion, up from $1.07 billion year over year, according to NPD Group’s monthly U.S. game industry report.

The biggest console performer was the Xbox for the ninth month in a row. It sold 393,000 units, up 21 percent compared to October 2010 — resulting in a 44 percent industry share.

David Dennis, Group Product Manager of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, told AllThingsD that sales were driven by blockbuster games that started to launch in September and grew in October.

During the month, six of the top 10 console games were available on the Xbox, including Battlefield 3, Batman, NBA 2K12, Rage, and exclusives including Forza Motorsport 4 and Gears of War 3.

The other hardware platform that performed surprisingly well was Nintendo’s portable 3DS, which clearly has benefited from a steep price drop. After a poor reception in July, Nintendo slashed the price of the 3DS to $169.99 from $249.99.

The 3DS was the second-best-selling hardware platform, and when combined with the older DS model sales, Nintendo sold 25 percent more compared to last October.

In all, it sold 1.65 million units, Nintendo said, to put it on track to surpass the first-year total of the Nintendo DS, which sold 2.37 million in its first 12 months on market.

Nintendo’s home console system, the Wii, didn’t do as well. It sold 250,000 units.

Disney has re-upped a two-year-old deal with Netflix to stream older shows that aired on ABC, ABC Family and the Disney Channel. And it announced what is essentially the same deal with Amazon, which will make the shows available via its Amazon Prime streaming service.

The Amazon deal also includes animated shows featuring Marvel characters, and it’s possible that the two deals have minor differences. The Netflix release, for instance, says that some shows that are still on the air — like “Grey’s Anatomy” — will be available 30 days after the last episode of each season runs on TV. There’s no reference to window length with Amazon.

But for the average Web video viewer, this stuff is going to mean the same thing: Both Amazon and Netflix are going to have a bunch of old ABC shows. A few of them will be programs that are still running on TV, but they’ll be from previous seasons, not this year’s reruns. And everything else will be even older.

That’s now the standard for most Big TV Web-video licensing deals. The networks and studios are quite happy to sell their shows to digital distributors, as long as they’re a bit musty.

It’s basically found money, and it will drop straight to Disney’s bottom line, just like equivalent deals at Comcast’s NBC, News Corp.’s Fox, etc. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

And the networks are finding ways to sell the same stuff multiple times, like today’s pacts, or deals announced earlier this month to show CW Network shows on Netflix and Hulu, which (could) bring more than a $1 billion in new revenue to owners CBS and Time Warner.

The deals also show that Amazon continues to cut into the lead Netflix has built up in its Web video catalog. Netflix is moving toward an exclusivity strategy, where it pays a premium for stuff you’re not going to be find anywhere else on the Web. But it can’t fill its 20,000-title catalog with exclusives alone. And in this deal, at least, it doesn’t appear to have carved out any exclusives at all.

When word first got out that most of Hollywood and the tech industry was working on a “Giant Media DRM Cloud Coalition Featuring Everyone Except Apple and Disney” (and Amazon ), the safe bet was to assume the thing would never see the light of day.

But here it is. Today you can buy “Horrible Bosses,” the first UltraViolet-blessed movie, on DVD or Blu-ray, and it will come with a code that will let you stream and/or download the film on other devices, like iPads, Android phones and laptops.

At least in theory. Time Warner’s Warner Bros. showed me some slides yesterday that spelled out how it’s supposed to work — digital access to the movie is tethered to the Flixster app/site the studio bought in May, using Facebook as a login (Mark Zuckerberg = Big Media’s new buddy). But I can’t vouch for it in any way, because I have no idea if it really works.

The idea, though, makes perfect sense: Of course a DVD purchase should entitle you to watch the same movie on multiple machines.

And if Warner Bros. doesn’t charge a premium for UltraViolet movies — which they don’t appear to be doing with “Horrible Bosses” — then it makes a whole lot more sense.

No one is going to get too excited about the prospect of watching “Horrible Bosses” on your laptop and your TV. But Warner Bros., which has been banging the drum hard on this cloud/locker idea, will be rolling out big movies for UltraViolet later this year, including the newest “Harry Potter” and the “Hangover” sequel. Sony will chip in some movies soon, too.

And later on, the UltraViolet folks promise that they’ll have more movies, and more compatible devices, too, like connected TVs and game players like Xbox 360, etc.

A couple of things to think about as this stuff rolls out:

• The UltraViolet people say they can make this work without buy-in from Apple and Amazon, both of whom are launching their own not-that-compatible cloud media services. I’m not so sure about that. For now, UltraViolet is leaning on Flixster, which is already well-distributed on both iOS and Android — which means this should work on Amazon’s Kindle Fire, too. But there will be plenty of places for Apple or Amazon to flex their muscles and make it more difficult for UltraViolet down the line. On the other hand, the studios pushing UltraViolet have stuff that both Apple and Amazon want — digital rights for their movies and TV shows — so there could also be some horse trading.
• All of this only matters if people still want to own movies. The movie guys are quite clear about their motivation for UltraViolet — they think it will sustain a huge revenue stream by encouraging DVD sales. But the technology that makes UltraViolet’s locker work (in theory) also means there’s no reason to own a film at all — if you can pull down whatever you want from the cloud, wherever you are, who cares whether you “own” it or not? This concept used to be hard for people to grasp, but not anymore — which is why Netflix, despite its months of missteps, still has some 24 million subscribers.

Pay $3.99 and you can watch Optimus Prime and his pals romp through Chicago on your PC as many times as you’d like, for up to 48 hours. If you’re running a Windows machine, you can pay $4.99 for an HD stream (you’ll need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight installed for both versions, so no iPad/iPhone option).

Advertising Age describes this as an end run around Netflix, but since Reed Hastings’s video service never streams movies during their initial VOD/DVD window, a more apt analogy would be Amazon and Apple, which do.

Studios like Time Warner’s Warner Bros. have also experimented with renting movies directly via Facebook, but those are generally older catalog films, not fresh stuff.

You can see why Paramount would be interested in trying this out — if it works, the studio keeps all of the rental fee, and it establishes a direct billing and marketing relationship with its customers — but it’s also easy to see the hurdles.

Unlike Apple, Amazon and Facebook, etc., Paramount will have a difficult time finding its fans. And once it does, it will require them to pull out a credit card to complete the transaction — a PayPal, Facebook Credits or iTunes account won’t help you here.

Paramount is careful to describe this as a “toe-dip” experiment. Nothing wrong with that. Hard to see where this leads, though.

But one of the most important elements of today’s news will take place outside of Facebook’s walls. A crucial part of the new strategy involves letting people sign up for someone else’s site, or service, with a single click, using their Facebook ID.

In other words, lots of big players are going to start sharing their locks and keys with Facebook.

The trade-off is straightforward: You give up (some) control of your own territory, with all the attendant risks that come with that, and in return you get a lot more people showing up at your door.

The media companies that are working with Facebook today are familiar with this dynamic — it’s quite similar to the one they face when they work with Apple and its App Store.

And my guess is they’re now more willing to engage so deeply with Facebook precisely because they’re already deep with Apple. This helps them gain a bit of leverage back.

Hollywood, for instance, doesn’t want Tim Cook to control digital access to their stuff in the way that Steve Jobs locked in the music industry. So it’s likely to let Facebook become an authentication system for various locker/cloud strategies the studios roll out, most notably their Ultraviolet program coming out this year. The cable industry has talked about the same thing.

I don’t think you’re going to see this kind of really deep integration announced today, though. Instead, you’ll see the groundwork for it.

Warner Bros’ Flixster, for instance, will be a launch partner, and that service’s new features allow users to share their collections of movies they watched and would like to watch with their friends. And once you’re signed up for that, it’s easy to imagine registering collections of movies that you actually own with Flixster, too. And once you’ve done that, you could access them from a locker/cloud service, all using your Facebook ID and password.

That’s a (potentially) very big deal. Keep your eyes open.

[Image via Shutterstock/Péter Gudella]

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I’ve given the service — which uses the Flixster brand that Warner Bros acquired earlier this year but which the studio built on its own over the last 12 months — a quick spin. Given that it just went into public beta yesterday, there’s no way to really assess how it’s going to work. Particularly since it’s supposed to be a social experience, and if no one you know is using it, it can’t be that social.

That said, you can at least get a sense of what Warner Bros. is trying to do here, and it’s a lot: They want Flixster to serve as your starting point whenever you’re thinking about renting, buying or watching a movie, or even when you’re thinking about thinking about it.

The free service ties into users’ Amazon, Apple iTunes, Hulu and Netflix accounts — as well as your hard drive, if you let it. And it lets you and your friends see what you’ve already watched, via “collections” that get displayed as movie posters (it doesn’t seem to have hang-ups about the “Bork law” that Netflix says prevents a Facebook integration the rental service wants to launch in the U.S.). It can also direct you back to those services when you want to watch something else.

And if you’d like to see a movie that’s actually in theaters, it can help there, too, via links to movie reviews, trailers and online ticketing services. You can also imagine how this will tie in to “Ultraviolet,” the cloud/locker system for video that Warner and a big coalition of movie studios and tech companies (except for Apple and Amazon) are pushing.

Sound like a lot of … stuff? It is! And the scope of the service’s offerings, plus the fact that it requires a standalone download (for Mac and PCs only for now, though mobile apps will be coming), may be a lot for casual video fans to take in. Especially since Facebook and Twitter already do a pretty good job of letting you and your friends gab about movies — without the privacy worries of letting a service look into your Netflix queue or root around in your hard drive.

And again, since the service is really supposed to shine once you can start sharing your likes and dislikes with friends, getting enough folks to sign on might be a challenge. Still, there’s nothing wrong with trying something big and ambitious.