There has been a lot of talk overnight about YouTube (owned by Google) not being able to come to a royalty deal with the PRS in UK, thus leading to all music videos being removed from YouTube effective immediately. Here are links to the statement about the situation from YouTube and the PRS.
I don’t want to just run through what many other sites and news sources are writing about, I wanted to discuss why a solution didn’t happen and what is going to happen next to both the PRS and YouTube.
YouTube and the PRS couldn’t come to a royalty deal mainly because the PRS were asking for a lot and they were providing no real information in return. The PRS were asking for blanked royalties but weren’t able to specifically say what artists would receive the royalties and what amounts they would receive. YouTube stated the following:
“PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our license than before…we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the license they can provide so that we can identify those works…that’s like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it.”
It is kind of like the PRS just expected YouTube to meet their demands no matter what they asked. In addition, on the PRS statement for some reason they mentioned Google’s last quarter revenues for 2008 in which have completely no relevance in this case. The PRS still seem to be using old methods to try to force companies into agreements that just simply aren’t realistic in this current economic climate. Remember that Pandora is not in the UK anymore because the PRS couldn’t offer them a decent agreement and forced them to basically close up shop in this country.
This leads me to believe that there is now a potential for YouTube to launch a spinoff site as already reported with all four major labels, which will attract high levels of advertisers and also possibly sidestep old music companies like the PRS.
Boxee has just sent out an email to bloggers alerting them that as of this Friday, they will be removing Hulu from their channel lineup. This comes at the request of Hulu. Apparently Boxee has been working to try to keep Hulu in their lineup for two weeks.
From the Boxee blog post:
we love Hulu. they have built a great product and brand (including one the best Superbowl ads this year)… the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them…
two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.
Hulu has also posted on the Boxee removal:
Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes…Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites…For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you’re likely to tell us that we’re nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won’t stop innovating in support of the bigger mission.
Boxee only just release onto Mac and Ubuntu on the 8th of January and now they have lost one of their major sources of content. The Boxee service is a very simple one, they provide movies, tv shows and music all in one simple location.
UK based advertising network AdSmart, which also had its presence in India through its Delhi-based venture AdRevenue, has gone bust.
A source at AdRevenue informs Crenk that the closure of AdSmart won’t affect the business of AdRevenue, but the company will now operate under a new name, E-Spot Media Pvt Ltd.
There are obviously several sites that will now be out of pocket from this closure, such as Games2win who has already published an article about their loss.
If you have more information on the closure or have been using Adsmart please drop us a comment.
It has been reported by the Silicon Alley Insider that Yahoo is closing their RSS Advertising solution.
Not much word on why — a Yahoo spokeswoman provided this statement to SAI:
Yahoo! is closing its Ads in RSS effective February 2, 2009. The beta program, which enabled publishers to place contextually relevant ads on their own site, was available to a targeted group of small online publishers. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners such as Sponsored Search and Content Match.
Silicon Alley isnt really sure why Yahoo is making this move. However, here at Crenk we know that this is just a smaller part of the big move coming from Yahoo. I have heard from inside the company that they are going to be closing a lot of departments within their contextual advertising network. Major changes will be coming with the next three months.
There has been lots of news recently about Twitter accounts being hacked from several stars, including Britney Spears. Today there is a new star who has been hacked and he hasnt just lost his Twitter account but also his Gmail and Myspace accounts.
The hackers were responsible for spreading an online rumour – seemingly from Kanye himself – that he was plotting a move into bisexual pr0n movies. “Please I beg you, give me a break!” West wrote on his blog, which appears to be the only arm of his online empire NOT to have been hacked.
It has been reported today that Co.mments will be hitting the dead pool on the 11th of January. Well according to a post by Steve Rubel this morning the service will be shutting down and the founder Asaf Arkin announced it in a blog post the previous night.
I have never really understood these commenting services, because they dont seem to add too much to the user experience.
I was on Brian Gardner’s new project RevolutionTwo.com and previous there has been a lot of talk about this project, because he was offering free downloads but with paid support. This afternoon I went onto his new site and noticed that you can no longer download the themes for free and that they are now all paid themes. I find this a bit of a weird mood by Brian, is this because he was simply just not making any money from paid support?
I went back onto the site a couple of minutes ago and noticed that the site is now down due to a database error. Is this because it has been hacked or it Brian updating something? Anyone have any tips?
