News Roundup: Hulu, MySpace, Real & Pirate Bay

Written by Frank Smith

Wednesday, October 31. 2007 at 11:50 AM EDT Post a comment

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

no ratings

• Login to Rate

This edition of the news roundup is brought to you by the coffee maker sitting on top my minibar at the Roosevelt Hotel. Here's what's happening: Hulu talks about its ad strategy, MySpace casts a bunch of unknowns for a movie, Real's CEO predicts DRM will be dropped in a year, and the Pirate Bay is developing a new P2P protocol.

Hulu talks ad strategy: The NewsCorp./NBC JV is saying it's not interested in pre-rolls, but it is experimenting with sponsor introductions while also discouraging advertisers from running the same ad throughout an episode. Hulu's also hep to overlay ads. Registered users of the site will receive ads targeted to them based on their profile information. Soon the ads will be smarter than us. [AdWeek]

MySpace casts unknowns for Faintheart: Ten people landed roles in a film by auditioning on MySpace. MySpace users picked the actors as well as a director. Faintheart is about a guy named Richard who works as a sales assistant but on weekends dresses up as a "Mighty Norse Warrior" and does battle re-enactments. I remember when the only way to get into movies was to get yer agent to set up an audition and the only thing there was to re-enact was the Civil War. [BBC]

Real CEO predicts labels to be DRM free in a year: Real CEO Rob Glaser took a moment during the company's earnings call to predict that by this time next year, if not sooner, the four major labels will offer DRM-free catalogues of their music. Universal and EMI are already experimenting with this, while Warner and Sony could be soon to follow. Real's revenue is up 55 percent in the third quarter to $145.1 million, up from $93.7 million a year ago. [Tech Tracker]

Pirate Bay develops P2P protocol to counter BitTorrent: Currently, BitTorrent Inc. closed the source of some new additions to the P2P protocol (.bittorent) that it developed. Protocols ensure that searches for a desired file can be found from a peer and downloaded. The Pirate Bay isn't happy about BitTorrent's power play, so it's developing a new protocol to be released sometime next year. But will everyone support it? [TorrentFreak]