Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Matt Stone and Trey Parker have signed a deal to make the first 9 seasons of South Park available for Netflix‘s Watch Instantly service, per the New York Times. Matt and Trey apparently met with Hulu and Joost but decided to go with Netflix instead because the deal included upfront cash rather than guarantees or advances on a share of future ad revenue. The two writer/producers, whose SouthParkStudios site has generated some 300 million views since launching last April, have a unique agreement with Comedy Central that gives them half of all non-TV revenue generated from the show. (Cynopsis 3/3)

Facebook investor Peter Thiel went public for the first time in Business Week affirming that acquisition talks between Facebook and Twitter did indeed occur last year but that they broke down over how to value the fast-growing social networking site. The deal, pegged in the $500 million range, would have been made using Facebook stock, the valuation of which has been a moving target. (Microsoft valued Facebook at $15 billion when it invested in the company in 2007 but secondary stock market sales of employee stock have pegged its value in the $2-$4 billion range.) (Cynopsis 3/3)

The Yahoo-owned Flickr is now letting users of the free online photo-sharing service upload video snippets in a budding challenge to Google‘s YouTube. “We are continuing to evolve the video experience to make it more compelling,” says Flickr head Kakul Srivastava. (Iwantmedia 3/3, http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090302/tc_afp/lifestyleusinternetfilmcompanyyahoo 3/2)

Eminem’s former publisher FBT Productions is suing Universal Music for more than $1.3 million for revenues from royalties and music downloads on iTunes. FBT makes a novel argument: it characterizes iTunes MP3 sales as part of its “licensing” agreement (which the artist splits 50/50 with the label) rather than its “distribution” agreement with Universal, which yields only 20 cents on the dollar. The case could open the door to other musicians looking to claim a larger slice of the iTunes pie. (Cynopsis 3/3

EQAL’s partnership with CBS is about to yield more forward-looking fruit. CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker is joining EQAL, the company behind lonelygirl15 and KateModern, to create a new multiplatform “Digi-novel” series designed to take advantage of the web’s interactive capabilities. Dark Chronicles will be the first in a series of novels to be published by Dutton on Sept. 8 and will also exist as a social website being developed by EQAL. Readers who buy the book will find codes at the end of every 5 chapters proving access to videos, audio files, photos and personal blog entries from Mr. Zuiker and an unnamed co-author. (Cynopsis 3/3)

Microsoft is testing a new version of its online search service internally under the name of Kumo. The service is not yet available outside the company, but may eventually be part of Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with search leaders Google and Yahoo. (Iwantmedia 3/3, http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090302/a-sneak-peek-look-at-microsofts-new-kumo 3/2)

Strange…looks like Google but with another kooky name.

Adult entertainment is not only seeing its DVD sales plummet as more consumers go online, it is also having its own version of a Napster moment. So-called “tube sites” — named for their emulation of YouTube — are eating away at the $13 billion industry. (Iwantmedia 3/3, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/02/DDFB160F55.DTL 3/2)

Video sharing site Dailymotion struck a distribution deal with Hulu to supply Dailymotion with more than 40,000 videos from its extensive library including full-length episodes from major studios. The content, displayed through Dailymotion’s interactive video player, will be presented in a curated fashion in channels including Funny, Film & TV, Music and Sports & Extreme. (Cynopsis 3/3)

As TechCrunch reported back in December, Oodle is taking over Facebook classifieds. The new service launches Wednesday and will be rolled out to Facebook users over the next sixty days. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/03/oodle-on-facebook-is-live 3/3)

Time Warner has inked a nonexclusive agreement with Adobe Systems to develop new DRM and Flash offerings for the Web portals of three of the media company’s top assets: Turner Broadcasting System, HBO and Warner Bros. Entertainment. The alliance will first play out at HBO.com, which, according to the announcement of the deal, soon will be relaunched to make “extensive use of the Adobe Flash platform.” CNET (3/2)

The White House is denying reports that its official Web site stopped putting YouTube videos on its pages after privacy advocates raised concerns. A spokesman insists it is now hosting President Obama’s video address on WhiteHouse.gov as a test of its own capabilities. (Iwantmedia 3/3, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/white-house-denies-it-is-shunning-youtube 3/2)

Universal search and video search engine optimization firm EveryZing launched MediaCloud, describing it as the internet’s first cloud-based computing service for generating and managing all types of metadata. MediaCloud enables companies to post live or archived video, audio, or text content feeds and receive a rich set of metadata back they can use to tag their content including transcripts, time-stamped tags and geo-targeted and tagged thumbnails. (Cynopsis 3/3)