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In today’s Internet video news, the Microsoft Blinkx deal looks like it will shortly be put in the shade as Andrew Ross Sorkin’s NY Times DealBook Blog reports:
After marathon negotiations over the weekend, Google could announce a deal to buy YouTube.com, the popular video-sharing Web site, for about $1.6 billion as early as Monday afternoon, people involved in the talks said.
Barring a last-minute snag in the talks, the boards of both Google and YouTube were scheduled to hold separate board meetings on Monday to approve the deal, with an announcement possible after the close of regular trading. Discussions could still break down, however, or another party could present a more-attractive offer.
As for the persistent worries about YouTube and copyright violations, YouTube just made some new friends as Chris Williams reports at The Register:
YouTube moved toward full legitimacy today with a trio of deals with media giants.
Universal Music Group boss Doug Morriss had previously described YouTube as a “copyright infringer” which owed his firm tens of millions in royalties.
Now it seems he has acquiesced to the increasing distribution strength of YouTube, as have the big wigs over at Sony BMG.
The latter has properly gotten into bed with YouTube, with a carve-up of per-click advertising revenues on pages carrying its content. Universal has stopped shorter, inking a “strategic partnership” instead. YouTube will simply pay it for each music video or user-generated video that uses its music.
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Warner Music embraced YouTube in September. Three of the big four record companies are now on board, with EMI the lone dissenter, though a deal is inevitable. Smaller record labels have been posting music videos to YouTube for months.
The CBS television network signed up as well as described in the rest of the article. It’s great when a plan comes together. I’m sure that Morriss’ chest beating was mostly in pursuit of better terms since it surely did not escape his notice that Internet music videos are mostly advertising for his product.
Meanwhile, Google was covering all the bases with its own record label deals:
Google said Monday that it had signed agreements with both Sony BMG and Warner Music Group to stream each company’s catalog of music videos free from its Google Video service. The deal would also eventually allow the company’s AdSense partners to also stream the videos as well.
The Mountain View, Calif. based search company is working on technology that would allow Google Video users to incorporate Sony BMG and Warner content into their own content submitted to the service. Such capabilities would be provided for free.
The financial terms are discussed in the article, but that part about the AdSense partners is interesting. They’re the third party publishers carrying Google Web advertising and it sounds like Google is buying them a license.
For searching video on the Web, Blinkx.tv (http://www.blinkx.tv) is emerging as the way consumers on a range of Web sites and media properties find what is available.
On Monday, Blinkx will announce potentially one of its biggest deals to date, with Microsoft Corp., which has agreed to use Blinkx technology to power the video search on some parts of its MSN Internet sites and Live.com.
“We will be the single biggest video search engine on the Web,” Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx co-founder and chief technology officer, said in an interview.
Blinkx already powers video search on sites ranging from AOL to ITN, Lycos and Times Online. It also indexes video from the likes of BCC, Fox, MTV, Sky News, Reuters and YouTube and makes and makes videos on those sites searchable on Blinkx or partner sites.
To date, the company has indexed more than six million hours of audio, video, and TV programming to make it searchable.
Instead of a cut of advertising revenue, Microsoft has agreed to pay Blinkx an outright licensing fee based on how much use visitors to Microsoft Web sites make of the Blinkx search system, Chandratillake said.
No further financial details of the deal were available. Blinkx is privately held and there is more company background by following the link. The claim is that Blinkx can actually index the audio and visual content of videos and not just the surrounding text, but in a quick look at their site that wasn’t immediately observable.
Update: Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch has more:
Microsoft Live’s video search is currently powered by AOL Truveo technology (compare a search for cars on Windows Live Video to AOL’s Truveo-powered SearchVideo and you’ll see the results are the same). Microsoft said last month it was planning to develop its own video search tech.
Update 2: Uh Oh!
Although officials from the video search engine Blinkx.tv apparently did sign a deal to provide video search technology to Microsoft, a Blinkx spokesperson told BetaNews this afternoon that an official had revealed the news to Reuters prior to the details of the deal actually having been determined.
The spokesperson thus declined to speculate about exactly what it is Blinkx will be providing to Microsoft until more is learned from both Microsoft and the Blinkx officials who supposedly put pen to paper.
A later update to this article says the Blinkx index will merely be made available on Microsoft venues, but the whole thing seems to have been rushed to the table before being fully cooked.
Today’s big Google buzz was the rumor reported by Michael Arrington at Techcrunch and in the Wall Street Journal that Google was in talks to acquire the popular YouTube video sharing site for US$1.6B. The purported deal is being endlessly dissected, but the general reaction seems to be that it’s a clever way for Google to use its mountains of cash to buy the major share of the large and rapidly growing online video viewing eyeball crop that they have failed to harvest with Google Video.
Other possible suitors for YouTube (and other less successful video startups) are rumored too, including Microsoft:
Microsoft –The software company, trails Internet competitors like Yahoo!, Google and AOL in most areas, and it’s moving slow with user-generated video. Its first offering, Soapbox, launched in invitation-only form on Sept. 18. Its professional video site, MSN Video, has little more than 5% of the video market. Yet Microsoft’s MSN Spaces blogging platform is the most widely used around the globe, according to ComScore, so the company likely wants to get as many of its 100 million users of that product onto Soapbox. If that doesn’t pan out soon, expect Microsoft to belatedly consider other options.
The downside to a deal is that YouTube seems to be a massive copyright lawsuit just waiting to happen and opinions vary as to whether a Google acquisition would help or hurt in that regard, but Google certainly does have the experience and the money for lawyers as they demonstrated today:
Google Inc. recently disclosed that it wants to use details about its rivals’ book searching features in order to defend its own methods against copyright infringement allegations from authors and book publishers.
Google has requested the details from Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc., plus major book publishers Random House, Holtzbrinck Publishers and HarperCollins, according to recent court filings.
The requests are part of Google’s response to a class action suit filed against it by several major book publishers and The Authors Guild, which collectively alleges Google didn’t get the proper OKs before making their work available to anyone with an Internet connection.
There are more details by following the link and here, but Google is asking for everything but the kitchen sink. Should be quite a party in the courtroom.
If the above seems like a hefty load, it’s only Friday’s news. Earlier in the week Google also:
This latter crop isn’t particularly Microsoft related, but illustrative of what Microsoft is going to have to compete with if they are serious about their “Live” endeavors. On the other hand, maybe Google is finally slowing down:
In another sign of Google Inc.’s growth from start-up to corporate behemoth, the company’s top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better.
Microsoft to buy eBay? This one has been around for a while, but yesterday traders looking for any light at the end of the eBay tunnel drove up shares over 5% based on this and other wishful thinking.
Why the PlayStation 3 Will Bankrupt Sony. Interesting assessment of the financial hurdles Sony will face in subsidizing the pricey PlayStation 3, although the suggestion that Sony may sell their videogame division to Microsoft seems a bit farfetched.
These corporate takeover rumors are a little remote, but here’s one closer to home – Microsoft May Use Incentives to Tempt Users to ‘Soapbox’. Rewarding frequent users at social networking sites seems to be the latest Web 2.0 thing. I guess it helps to break the ice.
Uh-Oh – Microsoft antivirus software gets the jump on Windows zero days:
Microsoft Corp’s antivirus software knows about in-the-wild zero-day attacks against Windows products before the company has officially acknowledged they exist.
…
It’s an interesting predicament for Microsoft, which will often find itself in the position of wearing both the “vendor” and sometimes the “discoverer” hats when trying to play by the responsible disclosure rulebook.Commercial vulnerability researchers have generally agreed not to release full information about security holes until a patch is available, on the basis that the information would also be useful to would-be attackers.
One time that agreement breaks down is when the attackers already know about the vulnerability and are actively exploiting it. In this case, discoverers will often release more information, to help users protect themselves while waiting for a patch.
In this case, it appears that Microsoft knew about the zero-day attacks, but had not yet disclosed that fact.
Then there is this Neelie Kroes bait – Symantec accuses Microsoft of withholding Vista security APIs:
Symantec has partnerships with equipment manufacturers Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Sony and Toshiba, among others. The antivirus vendor is worried that Microsoft will hand over the APIs so late that Symantec won’t be able to make its antivirus software compatible with Vista in time.
“Microsoft will provide information about two days before the October shipment date, and say “We’ve given you the APIs”. Now we’re good, but we’re not good enough [to integrate Norton with Defender] in that time,” said a Symantec spokesperson.
Speaking of Neelie Kroes, she apparently spotted another reporter:
The European Commission’s Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes told a Dutch newspaper this week that she was pressured by the United States government to go easy on Microsoft. In the article, she criticized government officials for interfering in an EU matter.
Representatives have confirmed that Kroes was annoyed by the U.S. government’s attempts to intervene, although she wouldn’t say it herself. “In my work, I cannot have a preference,” she told the Financieele Dagblad. “I have, however, a personal opinion, but that is for Saturday night.”
Stunned by the thought of Neelie Kroes as a party animal, I’ll only observe that this is old news and wonder why she thinks anyone would mistake her for an impartial arbiter after all her grandstanding for the press. Maybe the EU could get her predecessor Mario Monti back and return a little professionalism to the office of Competition Commissioner?
And while we’re talking about software that won’t work on Vista, Mary Jo Foley points to an unofficial application compatibility list for Vista. It’s not bad at all, but not comprehensive at this point either.
As for Vista itself, Robert McLaws wonders What’s the deal with all these analysts? His objection is to all the various analyst theories that Vista won’t be ready in November in the USA at least.
Finally, Ed Bott spanks Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage program again in Microsoft admits WGA failures “coming up more commonly now:”
Scrolling through the posts on Microsoft’s official WGA Validation Problems forum is like reading accident reports from a multiple-car pileup on Interstate 5. Many of the victims are completely innocent and have no idea what hit them, and cleaning up the mess can be a nightmare.
Maybe they can get a new product key by posting frequently on MSN Soapbox?
