YouTube will imminently launch a movie-on-demand service charging users to stream mainstream Hollywood movies off the world’s largest video sharing site, TheWrap has learned.

The new service means a full-bore challenge to Apple’s iTunes service – currently the most powerful player in paid video streaming — and a welcome new revenue stream for Hollywood as home entertainment revenues continue their steep decline.

The service may start as early as this week or next, and is expected to be announced soon by YouTube.

Major studios including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers and Universal have licensed their movies for the new service, as have numerous independent studios, including Lionsgate and the library-rich Kino Lorber, according to movie executives with knowledge of the deals in place.

YouTube has been laboring to bring all the major Hollywood studios on board before announcing it, according to one executive involved in the deal. But so far Paramount, Fox and Disney have declined to join.

YouTube, which had earlier declined to comment for the story, issued a statement after this story was published, pointing out that it has rented movies for a year, while declining to comment on the broader initiative it is about to launch with the major studios on board.

“We’ve steadily been adding more and more titles since launching movies for rent on YouTube over a year ago, and now have thousands of titles available,” a spokesperson said. “Outside of that, we don’t comment on rumor or speculation.”

But in fact the video giant has never rented mainstream movies on this scale during the traditional DVD window. The major studios, who were once leery of YouTube, now see it as a potentially lucrative platform.

“We think it will start with VOD, but broaden to include sell-through over time,” said a senior executive at one Hollywood studio that has signed the deal with YouTube. “We are pretty excited because we are happy to see new entrants come in transactionally rather than a subscription model.”

The service is the biggest studio VOD deal since all the major studios signed on to Apple’s iTunes rental service in January 2008. Fox, Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, Sony, MGM, Lionsgate and New Line were all on board for that initiative. Apple charged as low as $2.99 rental fee for that service.

It was not clear what YouTube would charge. But it means the site’s 130 million monthly users will be able to pay to watch movies as they come out into the DVD market; it is the first serious foray by the Google-owned company into mainstream movies and charging money for video.

Read more at http://www.thewrap.com

Blinkbox, the video-on-demand outfit established by former Channel 4 New Media executive Michael Cormish and Vodafone’s former head of content Adrian Letts, has been acquired by the UK retailer Tesco. It’s the latest in a series of recent deals that have seen established names enter the connected TV market through the acquisition of start-up companies.

In January, Lovefilm was acquired for £200 million by Amazon, while in the United States Wallmart purchased video site Vudu for a reported $100 million.

Tesco will purchase 80% of Blinkbox from private investors Eden Ventures and Nordic Venture Partners. Terms have not been disclosed.

Blinkbox boasts 2 million visitors per month that have access to a mix of advertising supported and paid-for content that includes 9,000 movie titles and a number of TV series.

Already available on the Mac, PC and Playstation 3, Blinkbox has plans to appear on Samsung connected TVs.

Tesco, the UK’s dominant supermarket chain, already offers its customers mp3s to download and also has packaged media DVD rental available.

Read more at http://www.broadbandtvnews.com

Sony is now emailing its 77 million worldwide users of the PlayStation Network with a warning that all their user data have been compromised by the hacker attack between April 17 – 19. This might include the user’s credit card information.

According to the email, the information that was illegally obtained by the hackers include all personal data, including name, full address, email address, date of birth, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login information.

Sony also said that credit card data could have been stolen. As a precautionary measure, people are advised to closely watch transactions on their credit card account. It is believed that a minority of users have supplied their credit card details.

Meanwhile, PSN community members are upset about the lack of communication from Sony on the matter, as well as the time it is taking for the company to restore the PSN and Qriocity services. They also complain about the lack of information about what actually happened.

Meanwhile, Sony issued an offical statement about the situation in answer to criticism: “There’s a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers’ data being compromised. We learned there was an intrusion April 19 and subsequently shut the services down. We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We then shared that information with our consumers.”

Read more at http://www.broadbandtvnews.com

It looks like HBO is stepping up its TV Everywhere initiative to make on-demand videos from its cable network available … everywhere. According to a teaser video posted on HBO’s YouTube channel, the programmer will soon launch mobile apps that will bring its HBO Go online video service to the iPad and Google Android mobile devices.

According to the YouTube video, streaming mobile apps from HBO could be available in the next few weeks. The video teases “05.02.11″ as the date that these features will launch, although HBO has yet to respond to a request for confirmation on that release date.

Rolling out streaming availability on devices like the iPad is just an extension of HBO’s ongoing TV Everywhere strategy, which will enable pay TV subscribers that pay for its premium cable network to get additional access to on-demand videos online. The HBO Go service officially launched last February with 600 hours worth of on-demand content. HBO recently upped the ante by making every episode of every scripted series available through the service, boosting the number of available titles to 1,400. Now HBO is taking those video assets mobile. According to the video narrator:

“Imagine a place where you can enjoy all your favorite HBO series, movies and more, right at the tip of your finger. Introducing HBO Go, the new streaming service that gives you instant and unlimited access to the best HBO has to offer. Get every episode of every season of your favorite HBO shows, plus hit movies and much more — all free to HBO subscribers and all streaming on your iPad, laptop or smartphone wherever you are. HBO Go — it’s HBO, anywhere.”

It’s clear that the iPad will be the big selling point for many HBO subscribers, but it appears that the HBO Go will also be available on Android mobile devices as well. While the YouTube video doesn’t say that HBO Go will work on any particular smartphone or mobile OS, it previews the app running on what looks to be a Motorola Droid X, according to GigaOM mobile guru Kevin Tofel.

This isn’t the only way HBO subscribers can view the on-demand service on mobile devices like the iPad. Pay TV operators like Comcast have already made HBO Go titles available through their own mobile applications. But creating a streaming HBO Go app will allow the programmer to reach a larger group of users across a number of distributors. It will also enable HBO to keep its brand front and center and maintain a relationship with consumers, who generally pay cable, satellite and IPTV providers for the service.

Read more at http://gigaom.com

UK telco BT is banking on the YouView project to turn its BT Vision hybrid IPTV/digital terrestrial service into a major Pay TV force alongside BSkyB and Virgin Media. Currently BT Vision, with just over 500,000 subscribers, lies a distant third in the UK pay market compared with 3.8 million for Virgin Media and 10.1 million for BSkyB. The hybrid nature of the service and the inability of the BT infrastructure at this stage to deliver on-demand HD services, along with mixed fortunes securing attractive content deals, have held back BT Vision’s progress against its two strong competitors.

But now BT is aligning its television service with YouView, which launches next year. BT Vision will be one of the options on YouView after its launch, accessed through a portal alongside the BBC iPlayer catch-up TV service and others, but will still initially be available only as a walled garden IPTV service, like today.

The difference will be that subscribers will access the service via the YouView set-top box and portal, with the option of other YouView services including paid ones if they sign up. Consumers will still have to subscribe to BT’s broadband service to obtain access to BT Vision, with BT aiming to compete against YouView rivals, and indeed other IPTV or over-the-top (OTT) providers, through Quality of Service (QoS).

“We will align QoS through a good broadband offering with our BT Vision portfolio on YouView,” Steve White, BT’s Head of Information Systems and Technology for IPTV, told Videonet. “We hope customers will get a better experience using our broadband service than other peoples’.”

YouView then, is really a sales and marketing platform for BT designed to give BT Vision exposure at a time when its network infrastructure is coming of age for delivery of a full broadcast HD line-up. Many YouView users, except those subscribing to TalkTalk, will be BT broadband subscribers anyway and so will present rather a captive audience, as White hints.

“Because we are in the joint YouView venture, that helps, and we then have advantages other ISPs do not have. We have our own CDN (Content Delivery Network), we are upgrading our [core] network and rolling out multicast, so we have a pretty good start at delivering better quality video.”

BT Vision transmits linear TV over DTT using a Freeview decoder, with on-demand content including movies delivered by progressive download over the broadband connection. At the current average bit rate of around 4 Mbps, the progressive download requires 10 minutes of buffering to ensure smooth playout at SD quality.

Read more at http://www.v-net.tv

IPTV WORLD FORUM – LONDON. Hulu remains very interested in expanding outside the US to markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America. However, its biggest challenge to doing so, according to senior VP international Johannes Larcher, is access to content rather than technology.

Speaking a keynote session entitled Connected TV: Challenging business models for the TV environment?, Larcher outlined in some details how far Hulu has come since its launch in 2007.

Starting with only two content partners and 10 ad clients, it now has 30 million users, 860 million content streams and 1.1 billion ad streams. Its content partners and ad clients now number over 250 and 400 respectively, while its revenues of $260 million (€182.9 million), of which 95% were derived from advertising and the remainder from subscriptions, in 2010 are projected to reach over $450 million this year.

Hulu Plus, the premium service launched by the company in November 2010 is meanwhile expected to have 1 million paid subscribers by the end of this year.

Larcher said that on launch Hulu was aware of the problems it might face in expanding beyond the US, adding that it would only be introduced in other markets if the product is right.

He also said that Hulu is currently exploring several international opportunities.

Source: www.broadbandtvnews.com

Content owners from Hollywood studios to niche programme producers are now taking OTT (over-the-top) seriously and ramping up charges and security requirements accordingly. This was one of the talking points on day one of the IP&TV World Forum in London, amid demonstrations of broadcast quality delivery over the Internet.

It was only two years ago when some major content owners were almost giving their content away to OTT service providers, because they did not believe consumers would pay much, if anything, for poor and variable quality pictures. By the same token, many content producers, excepting the top movie studios, were not too concerned about security because any content stolen from the Internet would not be good enough to be worth pirating.

But all that is changing as access bit rates increase, and streaming techniques protect the video to a greater extent against variations in bandwidth, enabling more consistent delivery. Real-time transrating allows the rate at which video is delivered to adjust automatically to the capabilities of the receiving device as well as to the bandwidth available, so that video quality can go up as well as down, taking full advantage of the bandwidth available at a given time rather than being determined by the lowest available over a whole session.

A major development on this front will be availability of HTTP Live Streaming, according to Doug Wills, VP of Marketing and Business Development at middleware vendor Minerva Networks. “This will add the ability to do live TV streaming to any device,” said Wills, speaking at a seminar, ‘Revenue Opportunities for Multi Screen Video’, hosted by revenue protection specialist Verimatrix at the IP&TV World Forum. This, said Wills, will enable OTT service providers to squeeze traditional Pay TV operators. “It will, we think, fundamentally alter subscription TV.”

But streaming does not, on its own, overcome the limitations of low bandwidth, even if it does help mitigate the impact of its variation. The bigger breakthrough will come with much higher bit rate services, and it is this prospect that is causing content providers to change their attitude to OTT, according to Steve Oetegenn, Verimatrix’s Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, speaking at the same seminar. Content owners are now charging more for OTT rights and demanding greater security in anticipation of higher bit rate delivery, he said.

“What’s worrying the content owners is not what is possible today but what will be in future, in five years time when everyone has 100Mbps to the home,” said Oetegenn. OTT providers are already spending more on content, he added, referring to the $100 million US OTT provider Netflix spent recently to acquire rights for the Americanised version of the old UK TV series House of Cards. “Netflix will want to protect that content so they can recoup that $100 million.”

read more at http://v-net.tv

Sky, Film4 and Lovefilm are included on a list on content partners interested in working with delayed hybrid project YouView.

The full list comprises Blinkbox, Blinkx, BSkyB, Film4oD, Golant Media Ventures, Guardian News & Media, IndieMoviesOnline, Lovefilm, Pushbutton, Radioplayer, Stream UK, STV, Travel Channel, Tvinci, UTV and woomi.

BSkyB’s interest in the project had already been registered, but in a list which could be said as containing the usual suspects, there are also a few surprises. Although as a shareholder in the project commercial channel ITV is not present on the list it will presumably make a contribution. STV, the commercial television provider in Scotland, and its Northern Ireland equivalent UTV are on the list.

However, a spokesman for BSkyB said the satcaster’s involvement in YouView was by no means certain: “We already distribute Sky content across a wide range of platforms. “It makes sense for us to continue to explore new ways of reaching customers, but it’s too early to say at this stage whether we’ll offer a service over YouView.”

Of multichannel services the independent Travel Channel is the only such provider outside of BSkyB.

Alcatel-Lucent, Blinkx, Capablue, Deluxe, easeltv, IMD, ioko, Kaltura, Nativ, Ooyala, Red Bee Media, Technicolor, TripleSEE and Twofour form the technology and service providers’ advisory group.

“We’re delighted with the response we’ve had from the creative industries,” said Richard Halton, CEO, YouView. “We want all types of content providers to be able to deliver their content via YouView so viewers get the best possible choice.

“The diversity and expertise of the organisations that are informing our development will ensure that YouView is able to support a potentially unlimited range of content in the future.”

All content providers – including those that form its advisory group – will be invited by YouView to confirm their formal intention to making content available via the platform later this year.

Source:  www.broadbandtvnews.com