Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: VUDU Cuts Staff by 15%

Written by Erin Barker

Tuesday, January 27. 2009 at 11:15 AM EST Post a comment

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Just as Netflix Inc. posted a 45 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit, movie rental set-top box maker VUDU Inc. , which competes with Netflix's Roku Inc. device, laid off 15 percent of its workforce.

After the layoffs, the VUDU headcount is reduced to about 50. A company spokesperson told NewTeeVee that most of the reductions "were in temporary workers brought on for Best Buy training." Best Buy is where VUDU's set-top box is resold.

VUDU's CEO Mark Jung left the company in November 2008, following a previous 15 percent staff reduction in August.

News Corp. (NYSE: NWS)'s Fox Interactive Media also announced staff reductions today, laying off 5 percent of its workforce, or 100 people, across all groups from "MySpace to photo-sharing site Photobucket to mobile," The Wall Street Journal reports.

In other news:

What can we expect from Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)'s fourth-quarter results today after the closing bell? (Aside from a grand plan from new CEO Carol Bartz, that is.) Well, just in case you haven't been keeping score at home, Citi Investment Research's Internet analyst, Mark Mahaney, has prepared a cheat sheet, including three possible scenarios: positive, neutral, and negative. Citi itself seems to expect the positive scenario, predicting $1.4 billion in net revenue and earnings of 13 cents per share.

Hulu LLC announced it will be advertising during Superbowl XLIII this weekend, the first time an Internet video site has purchased a commercial during the event. Though, according to analysts, the 30-second Superbowl ads have gone for $3 million, it's not clear how much Hulu paid, or if it paid at all, since it's partly owned by NBC, which airs the event. The company issued a press release, saying that in the ad it will "finally... reveal the secret behind Hulu." Can't wait.

Tags: Business, Earnings, Fox, Headcount, Hulu, MySpace, Netflix, Video, Yahoo

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