6/4/2009

Soon, you’ll have to pay for Hulu

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo

Don’t get too attached to all that free, high-quality video on Hulu. It just might disappear behind a pay wall before too long.

Speaking last night at an Internet Week event sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter, Jonathan Miller, News Corp.’s newly-installed chief digital officer, said he envisions a future where at least some of the TV shows and movies on Hulu, the premium video site co-owned by News Corp. (NWS), NBC Universal and Disney (DIS), are available only to subscribers.

Miller, whose last job was running AOL (parent of Daily Finance), prefaced his remark by noting that he won’t attend his first Hulu board meeting until Monday, so the scenario he foresees is merely his own speculation. But, he continued, “in my opinion the answer could be yes. I don’t see why over time that shouldn’t happen. I don’t think it’s on the agenda for Monday [but] it seems to me that over time that could be a logical thing.”

Digg’s new ads put advertisers on the front page

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo

Digg unveiled a new ad platform on Wednesday that will give companies an ad medium that looks and feels like user-submitted stories that have been promoted to Digg’s front page. Users will be able to Digg up ads they like and “bury” ones they don’t using the same voting mechanism used on regular site links.

Partners for the initial roll-out of ads include Electronic Arts and Intel, the latter of which has provided sponsorship on Digg’s labs pages as well as advertising on other parts of the site.

Two things make advertised Digg stories different than naturally submitted story links. One is the lack of an upcoming section for ads. For regular stories, the upcoming section consists of user-submitted links, which are sent to a holding pen. Users then vote them up to the front page. The other is a way for users to completely remove ads that don’t do well, which can’t be done in this case. Instead of completely removing low-ranked ads from the front page by burying them, they’re simply seen less by users.

What isn’t clear with this move is whether Digg learned its lesson from the DiggBar debacle. By changing the way users interacted with links from the site, it made a good portion of its heaviest users, along with the publishers it was linking to, quite angry. In this case, the line between advertising and user-submitted content may looks and feel a little too close for some.

McAfee’s new family shield

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo

On the heels of Symantec’s OnlineFamily.Norton released earlier this year, security stalwart McAfee jumps into the family protection game with a new home-oriented protection program. Called McAfee Family Protection, the program offers many familiar tools to parents in the hopes of fostering conversation while protecting children from harm.

McAfee Family Protection offers blocking, monitoring, and parental notifications for most computer-based activities. The program allows for up to 10 users on three different machines, utilizing several layers of algorithms to monitor behavior. Parents can outright block or merely monitor Web sites, social-networking behavior, and instant messaging including Facebook IM and multi-protocol chat clients, according to Javed Hasan, vice president of McAfee Product Management.

In addition to blanket blocks for subject matter and specific Web site blocks, parents can customize rules so that they can block all of YouTube, or just YouTube videos that have specific tags. Web sites protected by secure protocol, https, can also be blocked. They can also set up roadblocks that prevent specific applications from opening, such as peer-to-peer clients or media players, and parents can receive brief SMS notifications alongside more detailed e-mail reports.

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