Monthly Archives: November 2010

Disney, Walmart lay some ‘Toy Story’ Vudu on UltraViolet

November 2, 2010
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Starting today, anyone who buys Disney Pixar’s “Toy Story 3″ special edition 3-disc set at Walmart will automatically get access to a digital copy of the movie via Vudu, the Walmart-owned streaming service, at no extra charge. With Vudu’s announcement last week that its streaming app will now be available on PCs and Macs via Boxee’s free media center, Walmart customers will be able to watch “Toy Story 3″ from anywhere with a broadband connection.

If the scheme sounds familiar to supporters of UltraViolet, the industry consortium formerly known as DECE, it’s because the Disney-Walmart “Toy Story” offer is strikingly similar to one of the hypothetical use cases UltraViolet president and Sony Pictures exec Mitch Singer likes to serve up to illustrate the promise of UltraViolet’s buy-once-play-anywhere vision: buy a Blu-ray Disc at Best Buy, get a rights token in your cloud-based UltraViolet “locker” conferring permission to stream the movie to any UltraViolet-compliant device you’ve registered to your UltraViolet “domain.” Read more »

Could cable operators find an ally in Google TV?

November 1, 2010
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Over-The-Top Video Forget those business-school clichés about win-win deals. When it comes to cable operators and networks these days, it’s a zero-sum game. Just ask Cablevision.

On Friday, after a two-week blackout by Fox in the New York and Philadelphia markets over a retransmission-consent dispute, Cablevision agreed to the network’s demands for a steep price increase along with carriage of two new low-rated Fox cable channels, restoring the signals to Cablevision subscribers in time to catch the final few games of the World Series for which Fox held the rights.

Rather than the usual bromides about looking forward to continuing its partnership with Fox to bring subscribers the best that TV has to offer, blah, blah, Cablevision issued a statement basically calling Fox a bunch of greedy momzers: Read more »