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Friday, November 03, 2006
Cellphone video storms the blogs, and other news
It's all cellphone video this morning, all the time. - YouTube boss Chad Hurley said Wednesday that the company would soon enable video sharing on phones: "[I]t's going to be a huge market," Hurley told a crowd at an ad industry conference Wednesday.
- Meanwhile, blogs are buzzing about start-up MobiTV's $30 million venture capital round, which closes (for the second time) its Series C financing with over $100 million in the bank. The latest investors, Adobe and Hearst Corporation, are what's known in Valley speak as "strategic investors." In other words, they bring more to the table than cash, usually a lot of red tape.... In any event, the pundits wonder what a small company like MobiTV is going to do with all that cash. (Valleywag headline: "MobiTV swims in a giant vat of money.") But Michael Arrington says that the cellphone application is a red herring. Arrington argues that what's really going on is a backdoor drive for Internet TV. Pointing out that MobiTV has a "little known product that allows users to watch TV on a computer without a tuner," Arrington says "I think the real win isn't to distribute TV over mobile devices...But giving people TV over the Internet generally...that's a killer product."
- And it's no doubt his ability to weave together small facts with provocative comments like that that earned Mr. Arrington a profile in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Calling TechCrunch a "must read," the virtuous journos at the Journal go on to probe whether Arrington's is overly focused on money and somewhat loose in managing his conflicts of interest. Well, any time you can get your competitors to write about you, if begrudgingly, you've won. Score one for Arrington.
- And in a final note on Internet video: Rafat Ali at paidContent.org writes that "Google is in frantic talks with big media companies to halt any legal threats coming YouTube's way..." Ali has rounded up reports from the Financial Times, Agence France Presse, and the WSJ, painting a grim picture of YouTube's copyright hangover.
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