RapidShare Partners With Warner Bros., Plans to Launch Movie Download Site
RapidShare.com, the controversial one-click file hoster, is working on a movie site with plans to eventually include paid downloads of major Hollywood blockbusters. The Switzerland-based company is testing the waters with a beta site dubbed RapidMovies that currently includes a few dozen trailers. Perhaps more remarkable than the test site itself is RapidShare’s first high-profile content partner: Warner Bros. supplied almost all of the trailers.
RapidShare has been enjoying a somewhat contentious relationship with the entertainment industry. The company is currently battling German music rights holders in court, and judges have so far sided with the music industry. The startup has been having more luck with video game companies and has been distributing game trailers and patches through a dedicated gaming portal called RapidGames. It’s now hoping other movie studios will eventually come around as well.
JK Wedding, Obama and Susan Boyle Rocked YouTube in 2009
YouTube’s 2009 view tallies are in, and we’ve got a winner: Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent clip clocked 120 million views, far surpassing any other video posted on the site. Second on the list of the most-watched videos is the adorably intoxicated David after Dentist, with 37 million views, while the Chris Brown career-saving JK Wedding Entrance Dance clip came in third, with 33 million views.
Also interesting is the list of fastest-rising search terms, which reads a little bit like a pop culture trip down memory lane. January was dominated by Obama’s inauguration, Michael Jackson’s death was the focus throughout much of the summer, and the rest of the year was filled with a mixture of movie premieres and minor scandals ranging from Kanye West to Tiger Woods.
Minitube Streams YouTube Videos to Your Desktop, Without Flash
As our sister site OStatic reports, Minitube is a new, open-source YouTube viewing client that gives users a way to search and watch videos without the visual distractions of the YouTube web site. Once installed, users can fire up the app and type in a keyword, and Minitube will pull up a list of relevant URLs, along with thumbnail images. Check out OStatic’s story for more info.
Multiplatform Coverage Boosts NBA Viewership, Engagement
NBA League Pass Mobile made with MobiTV
It’s still early in the season, but the National Basketball Association is having a record year in terms of web video traffic and overall TV viewership — growth the league is attributing to a mutliplatform strategy that includes broader TV distribution, more in-depth online coverage and the availability of hundreds of mobile apps.
NBA TV has seen its distribution increase to 45 million homes, and the league says fan engagement has increased dramatically over the 2009/2010 season. Fan Night voting on NBA.com, for example, in which fans get to pick the featured game on NBA TV, is up more than 239 percent for the season, with 100,000-plus votes being cast for each game.
Viewers aren’t just tuning in to the TV broadcasts of NBA games, but watching huge amounts of video on the NBA.com web site as well. The league says video views online are up some 50 percent over this time last year, with 215 million streams from around the world.
The NBA’s mobile strategy has also been highly distributed, with the league introducing more than 100 mobile apps across the iPhone app store, the Android market and BlackBerry App World. In addition to its NBA League Pass Mobile app, which costs $39.99 and enables fans to watch live video from their mobile devices, the league has issued an NBA Game Time app ($9.99) with scores and stats from across the league, and apps for each individual NBA team ($3.99 each).
Sports leagues like the NBA are increasingly turning to a multiplatform strategy as a way to reach fans wherever they happen to be, on whichever device they’re using, at any given time. Major League Baseball pioneered multiplatform distribution with its MLB.tv online video product and the release last year of its MLB.com At Bat application. And NBC’s multiplatform strategy for the 2008 Summer Olympics was incredibly successful at expanding the overall audience that watched the Games.
The Guild Sells Out! (And It’s Awesome)
- Editor rating:
This year, the web’s 10th most-watched web series in November, according to Mashable’s Visible Measures chart, has taken a bold approach to the relatively soul-sucking task of plugging the DVD edition of Seasons 1 and 2. How? By creating a series of ads for fake Guild-related merchandise, that of course is buttoned with a “subtle” plug for said DVDs.
It’s a gag that’s easy enough, but the products (most of which, the YouTube descriptions indicate, are not fit for human beings), aren’t just random knickknacks, but cleverly conceived objects that incorporate defining traits of the Guild ensemble cast, including:
- The Codex Answer Orb (Which is just as indecisive and awkward as Codex herself)
- Zaboo’s Fantastic Pheromone Spray (Which comes with bonus technology for wooing the ladies)
- The Vork Unbreakable Bank (They mean it when they say unbreakable)
- The Talking Tinkerballa Doll (Who’s just as hot and crass as Amy Okuda)
- The Clara Mommy and Me Cookie Jar (Which has treats for both kids and adults)
- Bladezz Blade (Pretty self-explanatory)
The ads were written and directed by Greg Aronowitz, who was also responsible for the crafting of the weaponry seen in the Season 3-promoting music video Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? (great, just by typing those words that song is stuck in my head again). Read more of this story
CinemaNow Taps DivX for Movie Downloads
UPDATED Sonic Solutions, best known for its movie download platform Roxio CinemaNow, is partnering with DivX Inc. to make its movie titles available in the DivX format. CinemaNow will launch a new web site dedicated to DivX downloads at divx.cinemanow.com tomorrow, with the goal of tapping into a potential market of 200 million DivX-certified devices. The partnership will also extend to download portals Sonic Solutions is operating for partners like Best Buy and Blockbuster.
The deal is definitely good news for DivX, a company that has been struggling to keep up with the growing importance of Adobe’s Flash. DivX laid off 10 percent of its staff a year ago, and its revenue has since been declining. DivX has been trying to turn its fate around with a number of licensing deals as well as the acquisition of Anysource Media, but it’s too early to tell whether these efforts will pay off.
Vid-Biz: YouTube, NBC Universal, Project Canvas
Is YouTube Looking at a Subscription Model?; Google vice president of content partnerships David Eun said some full-length shows would not be available to YouTube under its current advertising model (Reuters), and Sky reportedly backed out of talks to put its shows on the video site because it would not allow Google to broadcast its content for free. (Telegraph)
NBC Universal to Take Major Loss on Winter Olympics; GE CEO Jeff Immelt said that NBC will lose an estimated $200 million on the February Olympics. (MediaPost)
Channel 4 and Talk Talk join Project Canvas; six partners will now seek expressions of interest from other companies to become partners in the joint venture. (ProjectCanvas.info)
‘Mood-Based’ Video Discovery Service Jinni Raises $1.6 Million; the service makes recommendations based on semantic cues in the words users search for, as well as the choices they select over time. (paidContent)
Telco TV Subscribers Expected to Double by 2011; according to ABI Research, there will be more than 730 million global pay TV subscribers by the end of 2011. (IPTV Watch)
Movie Gallery Hires Financial Adviser; the movie-rental chain is using a 30-day grace period to renegotiate with lenders and landlords after not filing financial reports required by the lenders. (Video Business)
FBI Makes Arrest in Wolverine Upload Case; if convicted, Gilberto Sanchez could face up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine or twice the gross gain or gross loss attributable to the offense. (CNET)
ZillionTV Adds MLB; the ZillionTV Service will have archived games of the week, classic games, and FastCast video recaps, all offered as ad-supported programs. (emailed release)
Amazon CDN Grows Up, Adds Flash Streaming
When Amazon introduced its CloudFront CDN last year, one of the biggest knocks against the service was that it wasn’t primed for the delivery of video. That changed today, with the addition of video streaming capabilities in the form of Adobe’s Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5.
While previously Amazon customers could theoretically use CloudFront to deliver video via progressive download, the addition of FMS 3.5 will enable streaming through Adobe’s proprietary RTMP streaming protocol. The ability to stream comes at no additional cost; customers can use the functionality at the same rates that Amazon had been charging for HTTP delivery, which start at 17 cents a GB and go as low as 5 cents a GB.
Berlusconi Hit by Statue, Seen by 6M
Ah, December — apparently the season for throwing things at elected leaders. A year after President Bush ducked a shoe tossed at him by an Iraqi journalist, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was assaulted by a small souvenir model of the Milan Cathedral (which looks like it’d really hurt).
Visible Measures has charted the spread of more than 900 clips of the incident since Sunday night, which taken together have topped 6 million views.
In the same period of time last year, Bush’s quick reflexes had gone viral to the tune of 10 million-plus views, but the reason for that is fairly evident. While Bush ducking was documented by one well-placed camera, the attack on Berlusconi was caught by a number of different ones, albeit not very clearly; the AP’s mashup of footage is mostly shouting crowds and shots of the aftermath. Just goes to show that you can point a dozen cameras at one spot and still not get the money shot.
Comcast Xfinity Day 1: What’s the Buzz?
Source: Zatz Not Funny!
A Twitter search currently pulls up mostly news of Xfinity’s launch and commentary on the name change (my favorite tweet so far, from @ceciliakang: “Terrestrial loophole, Xfinity, Net Neutrality. Sometimes my world feels like a bad Star Trek episode.”)
Dan Rayburn of Streaming Media wasn’t impressed with his testing of the system, citing 10-second buffer times, high amounts of pixelation and poor frame rates.
Peter Kafka at All Things D was able to watch the last episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and thought that “it looked pretty good (as long you don’t fast-forward).”
But the much-missed Chris Albrecht also checked it out, and he had some choice words to describe his experience.
None of us are on Comcast, but we’re currently working on a way to get you a full review soon. So in the meantime, how about you, dear readers? Have you had a chance to play with the service? Love it or hate it, please let us know in the comments!
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