YouTube to launch movie rental service

Three of the six major film studios – Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers and Universal – have reportedly agreed licensing terms with YouTube. Photograph: Jay Maidment/SMPSP

YouTube is launching a movie rental service in a partnership with Hollywood film giants including Sony and Warner Bros, to rival Netflix and Apple's iTunes.

The video website will expand into streaming big-name, full-length blockbusters in May, according to reports. With the premium movie-on-demand service, film lovers will be able to stream new releases for as little as $2 (£1.20), though prices will differ for each movie.

Three of the six major film studios – Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros and Universal – have reportedly agreed licensing terms with the Google-owned video giant. Paramount, Fox and Disney have not yet committed to the plan, it is understood. The service is expected to be limited to the US for the foreseeable future.

A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment.

Google has strengthened its relationship with Hollywood and programme makers in recent months in an attempt to keep up with competitors, including the market-leading Netflix and iTunes.

In the US, Netflix dominates the nascent online movie streaming market. With 23.6 million subscribers, the US-only site now commands as many eyeballs as Comcast, the largest cable operator in the US. Apple's iTunes, meanwhile, offers a formidable roster of new releases to download and to rent online.

Despite a low-key foray into independent movie-streaming – announced at the Sundance film festival in January 2010 – YouTube has yet to offer any big-name titles. The site's global reach, attracting more than 100 million users around the world, is understood to have complicated negotiations with film studios, which usually sign licensing agreements on a country-by-country basis. The deal has been further complicated by existing partnerships between Hollywood studios and streaming services including Netflix.

YouTube has signed up a number of high-profile media executives, including former Netflix boss Robert Kyncl, in recent months as the site tries to move away from its user-generated video image. Two Paramount executives, Alex Carloss and Malik Ducard, have also joined YouTube recently, along with Universal Sports chief Claude Ruibal.

Kyncl, now YouTube's vice-president of TV and film entertainment, hinted at the movies-on-demand plan at a conference earlier this month. "Imagine if you had a video store on YouTube, where you could rent or buy the movie without being sent elsewhere," he said. "Obviously, there are things coming, but we can't talk about them yet."

YouTube, which was bought for $1.6bn (£970m) by Google in 2006, generated about $544m in revenue last year and is thought to have recently become profitable.

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White Label App Platform Appia Launches Pay-Per-Download Service For Developers

With Apple clamping down on incentivized downloads, white-label mobile app platform Appia (formerly PocketGear) has launched a new performance based advertising network for app developers to increase app downloads and only pay for results.

In case you aren’t familiar, Appia powers a white-label content and commerce platform for everyone and anyone who needs a mobile app store. The company now powers mobile app storefronts for more than 40 partners, including four of the world’s top five handset manufacturers (Samsung, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless). The bonus of using Appia’s white-label offering is that it enables its partners to deliver apps to more than 3,200 different mobile device makes and models. Via its partnerships, Appia currently powers more than 500,000 downloads a day from a catalog of 140,000 apps with projections to double by mid-2011.

Appia’s ad network allows developers to access a pay-per-download service that allows developers to promote their apps by targeting ads by country and platform (Android, iOS, Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Palm). Developers only pay for actual downloads of their apps.

Developers will now be able to target consumers across Appia’s distribution network, which delivered 22 million downloads in March. The network now reaches more than 200 million mobile subscribers in over 200 countries. Appia’s performance based advertising network is directly integrated into the Appia Developer Program. Once an application has been uploaded to the the Appia developer portal, the developer simply sets the bid price they want to pay per download, chooses the geographies they want to target, and select a payment method. Appia’s online reporting shows campaign activity broken down by platform, device and geography; giving developers insight into where their campaign is driving app downloads.

Prior to today’s launch, Appia’s performance based advertising service has been in private beta since February but has already delivered high value sponsored downloads to trial partners including Flirtomatic and Blue Lion.

While Appia’s app platform doesn’t have the same scale as the Apple App Store, it certainly is an outlet for developers to advertise and profit. And the company’s reach is steadily increasing. Appia recently announced partnerships with Opera Software, to power the Opera Mobile Store for more than 100 million users, as well as with Telcel, Mexico’s largest operator, to power the Ideas Appstore for Telcel’s 64 million subscribers. Incentivized downloads have become a big business, and it should be interesting if developers expand to Appia’s platform to capitalize on this.

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Page Sharing Service Bo.lt Lets You Copy, Edit And Share Almost Any Webpage

With $5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, webpage sharing service Bo.lt launches today after about a year in private beta. Like a “Bit.ly on steroids,” the service lets you paste any URL into its copy engine or bookmarklet, creating a duplicate of the page on its servers.

Once copied, Bo.lt lets you quickly edit the page itself. You can change the text, edit and delete images and text and change links — either through the Bo.lt visual editor or its HTML editor. You can then share the page on Twitter or Facebook through its customizable URL and let other people edit or make changes which are tracked.

The page editor tool itself is extremely intuitive to use, and is pretty fun if you’re creatively messing around with web pages and pretty useful if you’re trying to complete actual work like A/B testing site code changes or codelessly trying out different headlines, images and fonts on a content page.

Bo.lt serves up realtime analytics on each page, showing you the amount of traffic from Twitter, Facebook and Google as well as providing more webmaster-friendly data like differences in page load time. The service also lets you see all user Bo.lting activity in a Community feed, and lets you explore other users’ activity visually when you click on their profile page.

As with any content aggregation service, there’s always the looming specter of copyright issues, but co-founder Matthew Roche tells me that the tool is content provider friendly in that Bo.lt still serves up a given page’s ads and analytics systems. “It’s way of preserving the form ad and visibility of the content while increasing the reach,” he says. As a tool enabling sharable webpage changes like this has never existed before, it remains to be seen exactly how content owners will react to their content being altered and shared in this way.

Bo.lt plans on monetizing through premium accounts that give users the ability to create Bo.lt pages under their own domain names as well as other power user features like suppression of the automatic share to the Community feed. Right now partners like Houseplans.com, Second Porch and Smart Destinations are all using Bo.lt to target web pages to customers.

While the simple page-editing aspect of this is pretty awesome, co-founders Matthew and Jamie Roche have a grander vision, “We are building a true page sharing network, you should be able to share webpages the way you share stuff on YouTube and Flickr.”

The service begins rolling out to early signups at 8am PST today, and a hundred interested TechCrunch readers can get priority access here.

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Another Group Photo Sharing Service? Yeah But ZangZing Actually Works

The digerati ponder Color and its tens of millions of dollars in financing. It will become the next Cuil, or it will turn Facebook into a buggy whip, or both, depending on who you talk too. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the actual user experience is horrific (luckily the product seems happily disconnected to the company’s hype).
Meanwhile, I still want to make on the fly photo albums during events. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and there aren’t many options out there. Flickr has some limited group sharing but it’s too onerous for one time events, and works better for long term groups (butterfly lovers or whatever). MG managed to use Color for a weekend trip to Mexico that ended dramatically if not surprisingly with a bout of Montezuma’s revenge. Few others will bother until the app has gone through a few more versions.
Anyway, new startup ZangZing will fit this need nicely. It’s a beautiful photo repository that focuses on sharing and presentation. If you’re at an event, say a wedding, and you want to start a group album, just upload a picture from the wedding via email and then invite your friends. They can reply with their own photos, which are added to the album. And they can add new friends by email invite as well, unless someone’s changed the privacy setting to make an album private or even password protected. There’s no need for anyone to create a new account, simply by responding to the email with photos they’ve begun the process, and can finish the rest later, if they like. It’s one of the ways Posterous grew so fast, by making account creation so simple that you’re done before you even know you’ve begun.
ZangZing hasn’t launched yet, but it will soon and I’ve been testing the service. Pictures are beautifully displayed, with very little distracting text and certainly no advertisements. Scrolling through photos is a very Flash-like experience but, wonderfully, the site is entirely Flash-free. The wonders of HTML. And they’ve integrated a very nice desktop downloader into the browser experience. No more broken Flash uploaders to deal with, either.
And ZangZing says they want to be your long term repository for photos. It will be a freemium service where you will eventually pay a fee for increased storage. But if you discontinue paying they won’t hold your photos hostage, like Flickr so callously does. “We’ll always give users access to their photos,” says cofounder Joseph Ansanelli (a promise we’ll hold him to). he says for long term users they may just send them a DVD on request with their photos to save the days and days of downloading required for huge numbers of photos. I imagine they’d charge a few dollars for that, but it would be worth it. Flickr should do the same.
Anyway, this is just a teaser for now, the company doesn’t want any screenshots out there yet. The team, by the way, has some serious chops. They’ve self-funded so far with $1.5 million.
Serious photographers will probably always have their favorite sites to show off their photos. But the social/sharing/group photo crowd space is still wide open, other than Facebook. I think there’s room for a service like ZangZing to capture our imagination, particularly if they integrate with Facebook and eliminate the need for another social graph.


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Spotify Takes Axe To Free Music Service – Can It Still Claim To Slash Music Piracy?

It turns out there really is no such things as a free lunch. Spotify is slashing in half the amount of free listening available to long term users of its service, with listening hours slashed in half from 20 to 10 hours from 1 May. New users will be moved over to this new restricted model in the next six months.

The details of the new service is this: The existing free advertising supported services will still exist as they are today. “Spotify Free” needs an invitation to work but is unlimited. “Spotify Open” – where anyone can just register without an invite – becomes limited to 20 hrs a month, no invite needed.

Brand new Spotify users still get to use the free service as it is today (either Spotify Free or Spotify Open) for the first 6 months, then the capping begins. But users who registered an account before 1 Nov who will see the changes from 1 May.

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