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Beyoncé sued for $100m by video game developer

Game over ... Beyoncé Knowles faces lawsuit for pulling out of Starpower project. Photograph: Marc Piasecki/FilmMagic

An US video game developer is suing Beyoncé for more than $100m (£61m), claiming she "destroyed [its] business ... on a whim". Gate Five LLC alleges the singer "unscrupulously" scuppered plans for a game called Starpower: Beyoncé, forcing the company to sack 70 employees the week before Christmas.

According to a summons filed in New York on Tuesday (April), Beyoncé teamed up with Gate Five in June 2010, agreeing to license her image for a "lucrative joint venture". The company claims it invested $7m into the Starpower video game, which would have let players dance along with Beyoncé tunes such as Crazy in Love. But though Beyoncé "had already negotiated lavish compensation terms", the singer apparently changed her mind in mid-December, at a "crucial moment in the software's development". Gate Five's lawyers allege Beyoncé "made an extortionate demand for entirely new compensation terms". This drove away its financier, Beyoncé "pulled out", and the project collapsed.

It was, court papers declare, "a bad faith breach of contract so callous that, on what appeared to be a whim, she destroyed Gate Five's business and drove 70 people into unemployment". "The week of Christmas, she said that's it, I don't want to hear from you guys, go away," founder Grey Easley told New York magazine. Gate Five contends that even Beyoncé's father – at the time her manager – "renounced" her allegedly Scrooge-like behaviour.

Gate Five promises more unpleasant details are forthcoming, but "we'd much rather make a game than litigate", Easley said. Beyoncé has yet to respond to the allegations.

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NowLive Throws Its Hat In The High Quality Live Streaming Video Ring

Companies like UStream, Livestream and even Google’s YouTube are making a business out of live-streaming professional events on the web. Another player has entered the space, but is taking a more calculated approach to the live-streaming space. NowLive specializes in high quality live-streaming of red carpet premieres, concerts, celebrity chats, and more.
NowLive, which was founded by studio and tech vets from Paramount, MGM, MySpace, and MoviePhone, is setting its sights on becoming the go-to live streaming platform for major events in the entertainment and music industry. The startup’s platform goes beyond just streaming video to the web and offers social streaming chat tools within its interface, ad units, and real-time interactive quizzes and polls. The company even offers a pop-up video-like information technology for livestreaming events on the web.
While the livestreaming space is competitive, the startup has been able to sign on a collection of impressive partners. Clients include Sony Pictures, Summit Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate, Dick Clark Productions, Showtime, Starz, Discovery Channel, and Weinstein Company.
This past week, NowLive powered the official live-stream of the Scream 4 premiere. And on Friday, the company is supporting Universal to stream the premiere of Fast 5 from Brazil. The Fast 5 livestream will also show in ten theaters across the U.S.

RockMelt Mobile, The Demo Video

RockMelt, the social browser, came out with an iPhone app today. If you are familiar with RockMelt, which opened up publicly last month after much of its initial fanfare died down, it adds feeds and streams along the righthand rail. RockMelt Mobile is essentially this right-hand rail repackaged as a mobile app. Co-founder and CTO Tim Howes showed it to me recently (watch the video).

RockMelt Mobile expands that rail into all of your favorite feeds, both news and social. In one place you can read your Twitter and Facebook streams, as well as RSS feeds from your favorite sites. Web pages can be saved for later, or shared via Facebook. The app also gives you access to your bookmarks. And like Mobile Firefox, it syncs with the desktop browser. A web search bar is also thrown in.

If you are one of the couple hundred thousand or so hardcore RockMelt users, you are going to love this companion mobile app. It combines a mobile Twitter client, Facebook news feed reader, RSS reader, and Instapaper-like page saver all in one. If you are not a RockMelt user, you can still try it, but it probably won’t replace all those other mobile apps for you.

mSpot Lowers Video On Demand Pricing For Newly Released Movies

Mobile entertainment startup mSpot, which lets users stream and watch full-length movies on their mobile phones and on the web, is lowering the pricing for newly released movies today, making the startup’s movies more of a bargain than movies available on competitors like iTunes.

mSpot says that average pricing for instantly streamed new releases is typically $3.99 and now mSpot users can get many new releases for as low as $3.00 as part of their mSpot membership. In case you aren’t familiar with the service, mSpot has struck deals with Sony, Disney, Paramount, NBC/Universal, Lionsgate, Warner, Image Entertainment, and Screen Media Ventures to stream full-length movie rentals to users’ PCs and cell phones, allowing you to switch between both devices as you pick up and leave off throughout a movie.

The service works on over 50 different handset devices – including the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, Android, Windows Mobile and others. Now, users can stream individual new release movies for $3.99 each (or old movies for as low as $1.99) or join a monthly Movie Club: $4.99/month for up to 4 movies, $7.99 for 8 movies, or $15.99 for 16 movies. With the mSpot Movies Club, the startup says users can save money on streaming rentals by purchasing pre-paid credits for a select number of rentals every month, based on their plan.

mSpot says that new releases on mSpot Movies are often available the day DVDs go on sale, which means that people can watch these movies 28 days before subscription services like Netflix offer the same DVD.

The startup is playing in a competitive space both in terms of its movie (iTunes and Netflix) and music streaming services. With the launch of Amazon’s digital music locker, mSpot has been left with another competitor, and is taking measures to mitigate this competition. For example, mSpot just lowered the prices of storage for its music service. I have a feeling that lowering the prices of newly released movies is another way the startup is hoping to fend off the competition.

AOL Jumps To No. 2 Spot In comScore Online Video Rankings

Online video views continue to rise. ComScore has released data from its Video Metrix service, showing that 174 million Internet users in the United States watched online video content in March for an average of 14.8 hours per viewer. That’s up from 170 million users in February. In total, the U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.7 billion viewing sessions during March (compared to 5 billion in February).
Google Sites (a.k.a. YouTube) was the top online video content property in March with 143.2 million unique viewers. AOL jumped from the seventh spot in February to the second spot in March with 57 million viewers. Yahoo Sites followed with 56.4 million viewers. Microsoft Sites came in fourth with 53.1 million viewers, while VEVO ranked fifth with 52.6 million viewers. Facebook came in sixth with 48.8 million viewers. Google Sites had the highest number of viewing sessions as it neared the 2 billion mark, and highest time spent per viewer at 276 minutes, or 4.6 hours.
So why did AOL jump five spots in the past month? There are a few possible reasons for this, but the main one is because comScore is counting video viewership differently than before. ComScore says that as the data analysis company switches over to UD, (unified digital measurement); AOL’s online video views have been boosted.
And of course, AOL has also recently become more bullish on video content and is ramping up video production on its properties. AOL bought video syndication network 5min last Fall for this reason. And in January 2010, AOL acquired StudioNow for $36.5 million to integrate a solid video creation platform into its content business. And AOL acquired the Huffington Post in February and closed the deal in early March. Videos from the Huffington Post are also contributing (and we are doing our small part with TCTV).
In terms of video ad views, Americans viewed 4.3 billion video ads in March, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at more than 1.2 billion. Tremor Media Video Network followed (and highest among video ad networks) with 804.3 million ad views, followed by Adap.tv (553 million) and BrightRoll Video Network (398 million).
Time spent watching videos ads neared 1.9 billion minutes during the month, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 520 million minutes. Video ads reached 43 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 33 times during the month. Hulu also delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 47 over the course of the month.

Disclosure: We are owned by AOL.

View the original article here

NuCaptcha’s Advertising Network For Video Captchas Goes Self-Serve

NuCaptcha, a startup that develops video captcha technology, unveiled its ad formats last year. Today, the startup is releasing a self-serve advertising server that will enable both advertisers and publishers to sell their own captcha ads directly.

Captchas are security questions you find on Web sites that require you to decipher and type words or numbers and detects whether the user is a human or a spambot. Most Captchas you see are transcription, text-based Captchas. NuCaptcha is trying to disrupt the space by adding video to the mix. NuCaptcha’s ad format allows brands to place advertisements behind the actual Captcha text. NuCaptcha’s video animation technology aims to be easier to read and more secure, with animation that makes the captcha far easier for humans to solve.

Online publishers can replace website Captchas with the video-based advertisements and earn revenue. Brand advertisers can upload their video ads into NuCaptcha’s system to. It is essentially becoming an ad network for video captchas.

NuCaptcha had over a dozen advertisers who are using the platform and the startup is optimistic that more advertisers will sign up now that the service is self-serve. The startup says that it has seen high engagement rates with ads, so there is a benefit to brands using the format. Since June 2010, NuCaptcha has served millions of video-based Captchas.

Peliculas Online

Google Video Prepares To Enter The Deadpool For Good

Looks like Google Tags wasn’t the only product on the chopping block today — now Google Video, the mostly-forgotten service that was once YouTube’s rival, is getting the axe too.

Google just sent out an email to users who have previously uploaded content to the service informing them that on April 29 2011, the site will no longer host any more videos. Users are being encouraged to download and reupload their files to YouTube. The news was first reported yesterday by CenterNetworks.

Google actually stopped allowing uploads to Google Video back in May 2009, but existing videos have played fine until now. The news will likely frustrate some people, as Google’s help page assured users that while uploads were being disabled, their content “would remain hosted by Google Video”.

The writing has been on the wall for a long time now. Google Video launched back in 2005 — you originally had to upload footage using a desktop client instead of a web form — and was selling premium content as early as January 2006. But rival site YouTube came out of nowhere to become a viral phenomenon, which prompted Google to acquire it in October 2006.

We’re adding Google Video to the deadpool, though the service still lives on (if only in logo) as Google’s search engine for video at video.google.com.

Here’s the letter that’s being sent out:

Dear Google Video User,

Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.

On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)

We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven’t done so already. YouTube offers many video hosting options including the ability to share your videos privately or in an unlisted manner. To learn more go here.

Here’s how to download your videos:

Go to the Video Status page.
To download a video to your computer, click the Download Video link located on the right side of each of your videos in the Actions column.

Once a video has been downloaded, “Already Downloaded” will appear next to the Download Video link.

If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all.

Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011.

Thank you for being a Google Video user.

Sincerely,

The Google Video Team

VodPod Founders Launch Showyou, A Flipboard-Like Social Video App For iOS

Online video startup Vodpod is launching a new app today, Showyou, which is essentially a Flipboard for videos. Launched as a free iOS app for the iPad, iPhone and iPad touch; Showyou allows you to access all the videos your friends and contacts share on social neyworks.

Once you sign into the app with your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts, Showyou will displau videos from your friends on Facebook, people you follow on Twitter and Tumblr, and from channels you subscribe to on YouTube and Vodpod on one screen, called the Showyou Grid. Videos are presented in a grid-like format, allowing you to easily view all of the content that is shared by your friends.

You can also follow people on Showyou, comment on videos, and share videos to your social networks and within the app. The feed itself will only contain Tweets, Facebook updates and other messages that include videos. To start, Showyou will include and allow viewing of videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and TED (you also won’t be able to access licensed content like TV shows from the app). In the coming weeks and months, the startup says that users will be able to share and view videos from many publishers so long as they’re HTML5 and iOS compatible.

Mark Hall, CEO of Remixnation (the company behind Vodpod and Showyou), tells us that the app is trying to add a social layer to video viewing. YouTube and other video sites lack this element and it can be difficult to filter your Facebook and Twitter streams to focus purely on viewing video. Hall also believes that users want to access this content on a mobile device, like an iPad, and does not plan on extending the application to the web. As for making money, Showyou plans to display cost-per-view, click-to-play ads within the app and may experiment with a subscription service.

Hall adds that the company used much of Vodpod’s core, underlying technology to build Showyou. Launched in late 2006, Vodpod has over 1 million registered users who have collected videos from over 20,000 different video sites.

ShowYou’s interface is sleek, especially on an iPad, but I’m curious if consumers will want a dedicated app for social video. I like apps like Flipboard because it aggregates content from all of my news feeds and social networks in one place.