What's Up Today: More Hybrid Devices, Distributed Video, Apple News

- Comcast is partnering with Panasonic to make a portable DVR and a TV that has a built-in set-top box (negating the term "set-top"), according to the Wall Street Journal. From Dionne Searcey's piece:

...[C]onsumers won't need to lease a separate box or a separate remote control from cable operators. By the time it's on the market later this year, it will be compatible with major cable companies' technology in most markets. Panasonic did not release pricing or other details about the TV.

The portable DVR allows consumers to take their TV recordings with them when they travel, for playback on a plane, in a car or on a TV set away from home. Including 60 hours of recording capacity, it can also play CDs and DVDs, and will be available in early 2009. While Comcast is offering the device to its customers, Panasonic says it can be used on the systems of other cable operators.

- Viacom's MTV Networks subsidiary is following a strategy of making its video available on a wide range of sites, according to Reuters. Sites include Dailymotion, GoFish, and Veoh.

- BusinessWeek looks at the negotiations between Apple and the movie studios over adding more movies, and movie rentals, to iTunes. From Ronald Grover's story:

Getting the studios to give Apple their movies for online rentals has been tricky. [Steve] Jobs wants new movies available for download "day and date" with DVD releases so that iPod users can rent them the same day the DVDs become available at Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, and other rental venues. Studios generally won't make their latest releases available for rent electronically—mostly through video-on-demand services on cable systems—until about 30 days after the DVDs hit store shelves.

Paramount's Direct-to-Net 'Jackass' Release

We can debate whether 'Jackass 2.5,' made up mostly of left-overs from 'Jackass 2,' really counts as a new, stand-alone feature film... but Paramount is claiming that it'll be the first studio feature released first online as an ad-supported streaming program. Later, it'll be available on DVD and as a paid download on iTunes and Amazon Unbox. Essentially, this is experimentation with what would've been a direct-to-DVD release, and the budget for the movie was under $2 million.

It goes up December 19th on Movielink, and on sale as a DVD and on iTunes on December 26th

From the NY Times:

...Viacom executives emphasized that this was a stand-alone venture that would pay for itself.

They described the online premiere as an experiment aimed at gauging the potential revenue streams for studio-produced, longer-form Web material that could take advantage of the consumer appetite for user-generated content.

“If this works, it could open up and really change the game about additional content that studios can create,” said Thomas Lesinski, president of Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment. Then again, Paramount executives acknowledged it might not be the fairest test of long-form films, given that the movie, like the TV show, is made up of many short segments, consumable in morsels.

From the Wall Street Journal story:

The move comes as the studios explore new media in the face of lackluster revenue in traditional outlets. Box-office sales are down about 7% for the holiday season beginning Nov. 2, according to Media by Numbers LLC. DVD sales are down for the year, dropping 1% so far in the fourth quarter, according to Nielsen VideoScan.

If Paramount can show this tactic brings in revenue, it could become a template for movies aimed at young, Internet-savvy viewers. The original "Jackass," released in 2002, took in $64 million at the domestic box office. "Jackass 2," released in 2006, took in $73 million domestically.

Prince is Pissed at YouTube ... More Original Content for MySpace ... Tron 2.0?

- Prince is suing YouTube.

"YouTube ... are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success," a statement released on his behalf said.

Good point, Prince. How well are all those much-promised content filtering tools working at YouTube? Clearly not well enough to automatically keep people from posting videos of Britney on the VMAs (which is content owned by Viacom, YouTube's primary law-suitor.)

- 'quarterlife,' a new online video series from Marshall Herkovitz and Ed Zwick ('My So-Called Life' and 'thirtysomething'), will debut November 11th on MySpace. There will be 36 eight-minute episodes, and Herkovitz is promising that they'll spend more producing it than any Web series so far. (Is that really the right objective?) The preview clip does look sorta promising, though.

Clearly, a goal of all these Web efforts is to produce something that can later be monetized in another way ... on DVDs, foreign TV, cell phones, etc.

- Looks like the 'Tron' sequel is closer to starting production...and Steven Lisberger, director of the original, is serving as a producer. From Borys Kit's story:

When making the original, in order to convince the studio to take a chance on a first-time director, Lisberger shot a test reel, financed by the studio, involving the deadly Frisbee battle. In a case of historical synchronicity, sources said one of the things Kosinski will be doing is working on a sequence involving the movie's Light Cycles to work out his vision for the movie. Sources also said visual effects personnel, for many of whom "Tron" was an inspiration to enter the business, already are jockeying for pole position to work on the sequence.

The Wired blog has some cheeky commentary.

NBC and Fox take just ten months to come up with a name: Hulu

The Fox/NBC joint venture to create a video site that will rival YouTube may actually launch before everyone forgets what YouTube was.

They picked a name today -- Hulu -- only ten months after the joint venture talks began. A trial will begin in October, but you can sign up now.

I predict this will be every bit as successful as Movielink.com, the site we all download movies from.

I'll certainly remember the name Hulu, because it rhymes with Sulu, as in Lieutenant. (Unfortunately, Viacom, which owns 'Star Trek,' isn't participating in the joint venture.)

Two articles on new approaches to monetizing content

- The NY Times writes about a new ad-sharing deal that Trey Parker of Matt Stone, creators of 'South Park', have cut with Viacom. From David Halbfinger's piece:

...Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker and their bosses at Comedy Central, a unit of Viacom’s MTV Networks, are attempting to leapfrog to the vanguard of Hollywood’s transition into Web. In a joint venture that involves millions in up-front cash and a 50-50 split of ad revenues, the network and the two creative partners have agreed to create a hub to spread “South Park”-related material across the Net, mobile platforms, and video games.

The deal, signed Friday, begins with a three-year extension of the show and its creators’ contracts through a 15th season, in the year 2011, and gives Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker sizable raises, both in their salaries and in their guaranteed advances against back-end profits from DVDs, merchandising, syndication and international sales.

It also creates an entity called SouthParkStudios.com, to be housed in the show’s animation studio in Culver City, Calif., that is intended to be an incubator not only for new applications for characters the likes of Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny, but for new comedy concepts that could one day mature into TV series of their own.

All told, people involved in the deal confirm that it is worth some $75 million to Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone over the next four years.

For me, the interesting lesson here is that properties that don't figure out how to become a big presence on the Web -- easy to watch for free, or to purchase -- are in danger of lapsing into irrelevance. I hadn't realized how little 'South Park' I'd been watching online (and how much other animated stuff, like 'Red vs. Blue' or 'Homestar Runner') until I read this piece.

- The LA Times says that MySpace may soon lift its ban on commerce, allowing musicians and filmmakers, for instance, to sell CDs or DVDs from their MySpace pages. Joseph Menn writes:

By officially barring most commerce, MySpace is leaving a lot of money on the table. The company talked to Google Inc. and EBay Inc. about teaming up to organize user-to-user sales, but nothing has emerged.

Executives hint that something big is in the offing. [Co-founder Chris] DeWolfe said peer-to-peer transactions have to be "fun, safe and secure." Selling only to your friends, for instance, might be both fun and safer than bidding on EBay, MySpace employees said. One person said MySpace could be on the verge of a sweeping deal to give it tools to better monetize and monitor the commerce activities of its members.

Of course, the current "ban" on commerce is not consistently enforced -- many filmmakers already have links from their pages to Amazon.com, where their DVDs can be bought.

And musicians can use MySpace to sell downloads.

But this could make MySpace much more of a bustling content marketplace...

WSJ Profiles the YouTube Police

Phenomenal piece by Kevin Delaney in today's Wall Street Journal about the people paid to police YouTube for copyright infringement. (They work for a company called BayTSP.) They're trained to look for videos that are on the Billboard music charts, or content with the logo of a Viacom-owned network, among others. Wonder if they're trained at all in the concept of Fair Use?

Viacom apparently pays more than $100,000 a month to BayTSP to hunt down copyrighted clips and send take-down notices to YouTube.

From the piece:

BayTSP says it has more than five TV and movie-studio clients but for contractual reasons can't disclose names other than Viacom. The closely held company says it bills clients as much as $500,000 a month to track down illegal copies of software, music and video clips. Every month it sends out more than a million take-down notices.

Other companies have started using automated technology to identify video clips so they don't have to employ a room full of people manually scanning them as Bay TSP does. YouTube, which says it complies with copyright laws by removing clips when their owners request it, is testing technology to keep infringing videos off its site in the first place. BayTSP thinks human beings will always be needed if only to inspect automated results.

"There will always be something that falls into the gray area," says BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa, 42, who is also an active race-car driver. The company and Viacom have faced criticism for mistakenly requesting the takedown of noninfringing clips such as parodies and home videos, though BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.

By September, YouTube Says It'll Start Blocking Copyrighted Uploads

From CNET's News.com:

YouTube will launch a system in September designed to prevent pirated material from going up on the site, a Google lawyer said in court on Friday.

Google, which acquired YouTube in October, plans to generate a library of digital video fingerprints that would be used by a computer system to screen clips being uploaded to YouTube, said Philip Beck, one of the attorneys representing Google and YouTube. Beck added that the screening process would take only a few minutes to determine whether a clip is copyright material.

That's the first time Google/YouTube have mentioned a firm date. But later, Google hedged in a statement, saying that the technology was complex, and "it's difficult to forecast specific launch dates."

Even more complex is the fact that it's legal to use portions of a copyrighted work -- say, a song or movie. That concept is called "fair use." But when even the US Copyright office concedes that the distinction between copyright infringement and fair use "may be unclear and not easily defined," how will Google figure it out? I'm expecting a lot of videos will be blocked if they contain a few seconds of a song or a snippet of a TV show, once this new software swings into action.

(Here's the AP/NYTimes coverage.)

YouTube will start testing home-grown video-filtering software in July

That's according to this story broken today by the Wall Street Journal. Kevin Delaney writes:

YouTube Partner Development Director Chris Maxcy in an interview said the company was building its own video-fingerprinting technology, after concluding that existing technology from other providers wouldn't meet its needs. Video fingerprinting is based on the premise that any video content has unique attributes that allow it to be identified even from a short clip -- just as a human fingerprint identifies a person.

YouTube and other video-sharing sites hope the technology will spot television shows and films posted by consumers without the content owners' permission, so the sites can remove them or share advertising revenue. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said that fingerprinting technology is key to resolving copyright battles between media and technology companies over online video, such as Viacom Inc.'s $1 billion suit against Google filed in March. Some media executives have accused YouTube of dragging its feet in implementing such technology in order to profit from copyright infringement as long as possible, a charge the video site has denied.

Disney and Time Warner are involved with the test; YouTube CEO Chad Hurley says the company will open up the fingerprinting technology to all content owners by this fall.

Three quickies: Joost, Netflix, Sony

- The fledgling Internet TV service Joost has started to sign up independent producers, according to paidcontent.org. The biggest name on board so far, of course, is Viacom. Now, IndieFlix and Shorts International are involved -- and I presume that'll involve additional compensation for the content creators.

- Netflix just announced their first quarter earnings. Interesting tidbit: since January, they've delivered one million streams of TV shows and movies to subscribers via the Netflix site's 'Watch Now' feature.

- Wired's Gadget Lab blog reports on some problems purportedly related to new copyprotection Sony has added to DVDs. Problems have been affecting new movies like 'Casino Royale' and 'Stranger than Fiction.'

Viacom states its case

Here's a compelling piece from last Saturday's Washington Post, by Michael Frick, who is Viacom's lead lawyer. He outlines the basis for the company's lawsuit against Google/YouTube, discussing Viacom's interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Frick writes:

YouTube has described itself as the place to go for video. It is far more than the kind of passive Web host or e-mail service the DMCA protects -- it is an entertainment destination. The public at large is not attracted to YouTube's storage facility or technical functionality -- people are attracted to the entertainment value of what's on the site.

And YouTube reaps financial benefits from that attraction through selling the traffic to advertisers. While an e-mail provider is paid to facilitate and manage the exchange of e-mail traffic, and competes in that fashion, YouTube lures consumers and competes by having great content -- a resoundingly substantial part of which it did not create or pay for.

And Google's response appeared in the Post five days later, as a letter to the editor. Google lawyer Michael Kwun writes:

Viacom is attempting to rewrite established copyright law through a baseless lawsuit. In February, after negotiations broke down, Viacom requested that YouTube take down more than 100,000 videos. We did so immediately, working through a weekend. Viacom later withdrew some of those requests, apparently realizing that those videos were not infringing, after all. Though Viacom seems unable to determine what constitutes infringing content, its lawyers believe that we should have the responsibility and ability to do it for them. Fortunately, the law is clear, and on our side.

Disney tech exec Kevin Mayer on iTunes, YouTube, Joost, and animation

Down in LA for the Future of Film conference today.

Kevin Mayer is the first “keynote interview” of the day, after the opening panel that I moderated. He is the EVP of corporate strategy and business development for Disney’s technology group. Some rough notes:

Some people believe that content is king; others say distribution is king. At Disney, Mayer says, the reigning philosophy is that the consumer is king. (Sounds like the right philosophy for changing times.)

Disney has three strategic pillars under CEO Bob Iger, Mayer says: creative excellence, using technology to produce better product and distribute it to consumers, and globalization.

Phil Schuman of HighView Media, who is interviewing Mayer, asks about the company’s animation activity since the Pixar acquisition. Is Walt Disney Feature Animation, the traditional core of animation activity at the company, going to focus on hand-drawn 2-D animation, while Pixar handles 3-D computer-generated work? “That isn’t the case,” Mayer says. “We’re going to assign our picture development as [John] Lasseter and [Ed] Catmull see fit. I’m sure you’ll see a different array of projects at both.”

Next up, the film studio. “In looking at our slate, we were doing too many projects,” Mayer says. “We felt like we were diffusing our creative talent over too many things.” Now, Disney is focused on making 11 to 13 features a year, spending the same amount of money as it spent in the past, but trying to make each release a little better, he continues. The hope is that “the outcome would be a notch higher in creative execution” than before.

DVDs: The growth of the DVD business has slowed, Mayer acknowledges, no longer growing at a double-digit pace. “But great product will still find a huge audience.” They don’t worry about physical media formats going away, at Disney. Blu-ray high-definition discs “will help sustain physical media. But you’ve got to have great product.”

Digital downloads at places like iTunes: Mayer says they haven’t yet been cannibalistic to DVD sales. “But if in the future, it is [cannibalistic], that’s OK. We just want people to buy our product.”

Schuman asks about Joost, the new Internet video service (still in beta-testing): Mayer says it is “a really great service. It brings a TV-like quality to the PC. I’ve been very impressed with it. They seem to be able to get higher video quality than one would envision at the bit rates they’re using.” Mayer says that if Joost gains traction in the future, and becomes an environment appropriate for Disney’s content, “we’d consider it” as a channel for Disney’s content. But “is forcing a TV-like interface on the PC going to resonate with consumers? I think that’s to be determined.”

Schuman asks whether the studios are developing their own site or jointly-run service to compete with YouTube: “I’m sworn to secrecy on that. Yes, there is one. I think.”

Next, the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit: “Someone was going to sue YouTube at some point. I don’t think we were completely taken by surprise.” But “we’d like to see these things resolved in a market-friendly way, rather than in a court of law.”

Schuman asks whether Mayer thinks Disney might ever distribute movies online for free, supported by advertising. Mayer says yes. “We really do want to honor the consumer…Ad-supported models are part of our arsenal, and we’ve had ad-supported movie viewing for decades, on free TV and basic cable.”

They talk a bit about the theatrical window. Mayer thinks the current 45-day theatrical window (on average) will probably shrink, but won’t go away entirely.

Someone from the audience asks what the movie business can learn from the music busienss’ experience with the Internet. Mayer says, “The consumer always wins. You should not do battle with your customers. The corollary to that is, the best defense is a good offense. We use that phrase a lot around Disney.”

Best Overview Article on Friction Between YouTube and Hollywood

It's by Ben Fritz and Michael Learmonth, in Variety. Even if you've followed the saga, you'll discover something new (like that a paid placement on YouTube's homepage costs about $80K a day.)

Here's the opening:

Hollywood veterans are used to the ground shifting quickly, but the case of YouTube is rather extreme.

Just one year ago, studios and networks were bragging that the once-scrappy video Web site was handy for branding, by helping mint hit shows or injecting movies into the youth consciousness.

"To make this kind of promotion work, you have to be able to lose control of the media," VH1 programming chief Michael Hirschorn told Variety then. "We got millions of impressions with those clips" of the network's "Flavor of Love."

The love affair abruptly ended last month, when Hirschorn's bosses at Viacom demanded that YouTube take down every one of its roughly 100,000 clips.

"We cannot continue to let them profit from our programming," CEO Philippe Dauman said, after the two companies failed to seal a content distribution and revenue sharing deal.

Every conglom has been affected in one way or another. Soon after "Ghost Rider" bowed, Sony found virtually the entire film on YouTube, chopped into segments of various lengths. The studio demanded their removal, but was unsure if another webbie would simply post them later. It's a scenario that every other studio has experienced.

The battles over the future of content online now represents arguably the most rancorous and disruptive issue to confront Hollywood in decades. Merely mention the words "viral video" to any player in Hollywood and you will get an earful. At stake, they say, are hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars being digitally picked from their pockets.

Video Spam a Growing Problem ... LA Times on Viacom's Motives ... and ShoWest News

- The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a piece headlined, 'Spam Hits Video Sites, Misleading Web Viewers.' Spammers upload videos to advertise a product, but then describe them as something else entirely -- like Paris Hilton in the buff. Sites like AOL say they've noticed an increase in the past six months. Kevin Delaney writes:

or spammers, there may soon be a clear economic incentive to post bogus videos: More video sites may start sharing ad revenue with the people who upload videos. For example, spammers could be paid each time someone viewed a video they posted or clicked on an ad accompanying their clip. YouTube executives have said they might share revenue with individuals in that way eventually.

Such an approach could encourage spammers to increase the use of false pretenses to draw users. But Revver Inc., a site that already pays people when ads accompanying their clips are clicked, says video spam submitted to it has actually dropped over the past year. It says its employees review each clip before putting it up on the site.

- The LA Times says that Viacom's suit against YouTube is all about money and control. Most interesting quote is at the very end:

Viacom CEO Philippe P. Dauman said his company went to court to enforce its copyrights and protect its valuable brands, such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. That doesn't mean Viacom won't one day strike a deal with YouTube. "Certainly, Dauman said, "we could find ways to operate in a YouTube environment that would be compatible with our brands."

- Sharon Waxman of the NY Times reports from ShoWest. She notes:

Exhibitors have ... not rushed to install digital projectors in their theaters, an expensive process whose cost they are sharing with Hollywood studios. After years of discussions with manufacturers, there are now 2,300 screens across the country with digital projectors, still a small fraction of the nation’s 37,000. The higher-quality equipment is not expected to be widely installed until 2009, when a few high-profile movies in 3D requiring digital projection (like James Cameron’s “Avatar”) are scheduled for release.

What Viacom is Hoping to Achieve with YouTube Suit

Viacom filed a lawsuit today against YouTube that accuses the site of showing clips of its content more than 1.5 billion times without permission. Sumner Redstone's company is seeking more than $1 billion in damages. Here's the Wall Street Journal story ... and here's coverage from the NY Times.

I don't think Viacom actually believes they're gonna win; YouTube, as an online service, is likely protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as I wrote in Variety just after Google's acquisition of YouTube last year. But this lawsuit is a lick of fire from a giant flamethrower, intended to do one of two things: force YouTube to get better at keeping copyrighted content off its site once the owner demands that it be removed (usually, after content is pulled from YouTube, other users quickly re-post it), or encourage YouTube to offer better revenue-sharing deals to media companies.

But the relationship between Viacom and YouTube may have already deteriorated to the point where that second thing isn't going to happen.

(In other legal news, here Mark Cuban explains why he recently sent subpoenas to Google to get the names of users who were uploading copies of movies he owns the rights to.)

The MPAA's Annual Report, Video on the Xbox, and More

- In advance of next week's ShoWest gathering in Vegas, the Motion Picture Association of America has released its annual report on movie industry economics. (A PDF of the press release is here.) From the NY Times coverage:

The average production cost of a film made by [an MPAA] member company rose about 3.4 percent to $65.8 million in 2006, according to the report, while the marketing cost fell slightly, to an average of $34.5 million. (Association executives noted that the production cost figure does not include money contributed by outside investors who frequently underwrite the expense of Hollywood films.) The domestic box office rose about 5.5 percent last year to $9.49 billion, while theatrical admissions rose 3.3 percent to 1.45 billion, and the worldwide box office rose about 11 percent to $25.8 billion.

Variety offers a thorough analysis of the numbers. Some interesting elements from that:

> Spending on online marketing is growing
> So is the number of movies released each year (607 in 2006, an all-time high)
> There's a correlation between people who have a lot of technology in their homes (game consoles, DVD players, high-def TV) and people who see a lot of movies. (Seems to me this could be purely related to household net worth, rather than home theaters generating a desire to see movies in theaters.)

- Microsoft is clearly trying to promote the Xbox's video offerings, if this piece from Sunday's NY Times is any indication. Dave Itzkoff writes:

In late November Microsoft began expanding the library on its Xbox Live network, a broadband service available by subscription to Xbox 360 owners. In addition to the video-game trailers and playable demonstrations that the network has traditionally offered, you can now find an eclectically selected collection of films and television shows offered for downloading to a console’s hard drive: for a few dollars you can view “Mission: Impossible III” or “Chinatown” or the episode of “Chappelle’s Show” with the blind white supremacist, on your television, just as if you were watching a DVD or a video-on-demand channel.

...This month XBox Live will offer a new view of the corpulent form of Eric Cartman when it becomes the first outlet ever to offer an episode of “South Park” in high definition.

While Microsoft acknowledges that most consumers are buying Xbox 360s primarily, if not solely, to play video games, the company also sees an opportunity to use film and television content to draw an audience that doesn’t fit the stereotypical gamer profile.

“The original Xbox was probably the domain of that testosterone-fueled male in the household, and while we love him to death, we also want his little brother and sister and mom and dad and their friends to be able to enjoy it,” said Peter Moore, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business division.

- Viacom's CEO disses YouTube at an investment conference in New York, and says a deal with the video service Joost will give the company more control over its content, according to the LA Times.

Viacom's Deal with Joost: What It Means

Viacom is supplying Joost, an Internet video start-up, with "hundreds of hours of programming from Viacom's MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures movies studio and BET Networks," according to Reuters. It'll be available to viewers for free -- though likely supported by advertising.

Why is Viacom partnering with Joost, a video service still in beta, with nowhere near the audience of a YouTube? Joost, which needs a few high-profile content partnerships, was undoubtedly eager to offer sweet, sweet terms to Viacom. "In similar deals in the past, Viacom has received two-thirds of the advertising revenue and other compensation," the Wall Street Journal notes.

Here are the two big challenges facing this partnership:

1. How much will Viacom promote its content on Joost? I suspect that Viacom execs will be more eager to throw Viacom's promotional weight behind Viacom's own properties, like ComedyCentral.com or VH1.com. Why make a start-up more successful -- unless Joost is offering equity to Viacom (which doesn't seem to be the case.)

2. Using Joost requires a special software download. So if I recommend a particular piece of Viacom content to you, you've first got to download the Joost viewing application. How much of a drag is that? With YouTube and other Web-based video services, what bumps up video viewership is e-mailing links, and "embedding" screencaps into blogs. Watching is simple. To me, putting content on Joost seems like having The Police play their reunion tour in series of a suburban garages -- who's gonna see it, and how much potential revenue are you missing?

(Of course, the caveat here is that with Skype, the previous piece of software produced by Joost's founders, is now used by more than 100 million people -- and it required a download. But Skype made it free to do something that had previously been very expensive: make long distance phone calls. There's already quite a lot of free video content on the Net.)

Joost's official launch is scheduled for June 30th.

Media Biggies Still Scheming Over YouTube ... Remembering Peter Ellenshaw ... Bob's Basement

- Richard Siklos has a piece in today's NY Times about the continuing discussions among the CEOs of NBC Universal, Viacom, and News Corp. about whether they ought to create a competitor to YouTube (or perhaps ally with Yahoo.) The opening:

JEFF ZUCKER, the newly minted chief executive of NBC Universal, ventured to the Times Square headquarters of Viacom two Wednesdays ago with Peter A. Chernin, president of the News Corporation. It was not a social call as much as a social-networking call, to see Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive. After all, Viacom had rather publicly ordered YouTube, the Internet’s most popular video-sharing site, to remove thousands of clips of MTV material.

A few weeks earlier, Viacom had also bowed out of a partnership with NBC and the News Corporation to set up their own alternative to YouTube, which was recently acquired by the search juggernaut Google. Not to be dissuaded, their idea is that a Web start-up featuring the broadcasters’ most Web-friendly fare (comedy clips and even whole episodes of their popular shows) could gather a crowd on its own and also be a powerful consortium for licensing content to other destinations around the Web — including, of course, “GoogTube.”

According to people briefed on the visit, Mr. Zucker and Mr. Chernin ran through a presentation on why they thought Viacom ought to rejoin their group. So far, Viacom has not rejoined the venture, and the project’s fate remains unclear. (No love is lost between Viacom and the News Corporation, since the latter snatched MySpace.com from under Viacom’s nose.)

- Peter Ellenshaw, a great matte painter who worked with Walt Disney on movies like 'Treasure Island' and '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,' has died at age 93. He shared in the Oscar for visual effects awarded to 'Mary Poppins,' in 1965. Here is the AP obituary. The Wall Street Journal has a longer remembrance. Stephen Miller writes:

A master of a now-dying art called matte painting, he helped usher Walt Disney Corp. into live-action films by painting miniature scenery that was combined through technical wizardry with frames depicting actors. He reached his apogee with "Mary Poppins," which won the Oscar for special visual effects in 1965. Mr. Ellenshaw, who died Feb. 12 at age 93, was nominated three other times and worked on 30 Disney films.

"He helped define the Disney look," says Roy E. Disney, nephew of the founder and a former vice chairman. "He created a kind of faux-realism which you believed in. It didn't look like something pasted onto the frame. ...Walt loved him."

Mr. Ellenshaw's handiwork can be viewed in films from "Treasure Island" (1950) -- his first for Disney -- "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1954) and "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" (1971). He also left his mark on several Disney television programs, including "Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier," where actor Fess Parker as Crockett -- on his way to Washington to serve a spell in Congress -- journeyed down a dirt road that was an Ellenshaw painting.

Also a nice piece about Ellenshaw's work on Jim Hill Media, a Disney fan site.

- Fun piece in the NY Times about Bob's Basement, a collection of famous Hollywood props.