I Think I Just Blue Myself: 4th Season of Arrested Development Comes to Netflix May 26
What are you doing on May 26th? If you answered “binge watching all 15 new episodes of Arrested Development,” then you answered correctly. Read More
Web TV
True Life: I Binge-Watched Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’
Remember when catching up on a TV show required numerous trips to Blockbuster in a single weekend? Us neither. For years we’ve been mainlining our television shows entire seasons at a time, thanks to the glories of video streaming. How else would anyone have made it through the dismal nadir of season three of “Lost”? What do you think got Americans addicted to “Downton Abbey”?
So when I sat down to watch the first episode of “House of Cards” on Saturday, as a way of killing laundry time, I didn’t expect I’d stretch the show out over the next 13 weeks, like I was watching “Dallas” circa 1982. But I also wasn’t planning to find myself awake at 2 a.m. last night, polishing off the last episode and frantically googling “house of cards season 2 please oh please tell me it’s coming soon.” Read More
Dave Tisch, Alexis Ohanian and Other NYC Tech Favs Cameo in Hulu Dramedy Leap Year
When the Techstars reality show on Bloomberg TV gets too intense (What will happen to To Vie For!?!), award-winning producer Wilson Cleveland has a solution for you. His web series Leap Year, presented by Hiscox Insurance, chronicles the personal and professional lives of several employees at a startup called C3D, which is “like Skype with holograms.” The show follows the ups (but mostly downs) of building a startup, with a wry comedic voice and plenty of inside jokes for the tech set. In fact, the show garnered so many Startupland fans that a couple of New York’s better-known tech glitterati make appearances in this season.
Today, Mr. Cleveland and the Leap Year team released an episode featuring none other than Techstars cofounder Dave Tisch, Shelby.TV cofounder Reece Pacheco, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and Change the Ratio cofounder Rachel Sklar. Quite the star-studded cast. Read More
Blip Networks Hires New CEO Four Months After Cofounders Left
Q: How long does it take to find a new CEO after you raise $12 million? A: Not that long, it turns out. Go figure. Brooklyn-basedNew York-based Blip, which recently dropped the .tv and added a Networks, may not be a startup anymore. It’s more than six years old, its founders have already flown the nest, and it just hired a grownup CEO after a four-month search.
Kelly Day, EVP and general manager of digital media and commerce at Discovery Communications, will “take responsibility for the Company’s next phase of growth for its industry-leading advertising and distribution platforms,” according to a press release that comes about a month after Blip announced the fresh millions. Read More
Boxee Joins the TMI Party With Frictionless Sharing From Facebook
If you don’t have to make a conscious decision to share something, shouldn’t it be called something else? The effort to share something is what separates it from daily life and lets your network know its worth their time. Otherwise its just sort of exhibitionist spam.
In any case, Boxee is joining the party, adding its name along Spotify and The Washington Post as part of Facebook’s new “frictionless sharing” initiative. Watch an episode of The Colbert Report and without even the click of a button this info is shared with your Facebook network. Read More
Blip TV Raises $6 M., Still Searching for New CEO
The folks at Form D landed the SEC form for what appears to be a new round of funding at Blip Networks, the corporate name of blip.tv. So far the company has sold $6 million in shares on what would be its Series D, with the option to sell another $5 million still on the table. Read More
Fox Starts Pulling Shows From the Web, Other Networks Expected Follow
Hulu users who don’t pay for the site’s premium version won’t be enjoying any content from Fox the morning after. Starting today, all Fox shows will be kept off the web for eight days, unless users subscribe to Hulu Plus or prove they pay for Dish Network. Peter Kafka reports that Disney’s ABC will be the next major network to put this kind of delay in place. Read More
Fox Won’t Wait Till Hulu Sells Before Kneecapping the Platform
Poor Hulu. Born to a conglomerate of traditional TV networks that finally admitted they needed to do something about this whole, “web video” world, the company was always caught in a kind of Cronos paradox: the parents might kill their own child rather than let it grow up to threaten their power.
Recently the networks decided they would be better off selling Hulu to somebody else, making it easier down the road to reap lucrative fees for licensing the content they currently put on Hulu for free. But now it seems Fox has decided it can’t even wait for that sale to go down before basically cutting Hulu off at the knees.
The News Corp. network has announced that starting August 15th it will no longer put shows on Hulu the day after they air. Read More
Youtube’s Cosmic Panda Update Follows Blip.tv’s Lead
Youtube just rolled out a new look for the site they are calling Cosmic Panda. Between that and bidding Pi in the recent Nortel auction, Google is really letting their geek flag fly.
The most interesting change in Cosmic Panda is that it puts a lot more emphasis on showing users related content from a single channel and bringing together episodes from ongoing series. Read More
Hulu Could Be Google’s Trojan Horse to Get Inside the TV Biz
We’ve know for a little while that Hulu had some suitors, with Microsoft and Yahoo named among the early aspirants.
Today news broke that Google is also interested, and web TV insiders say Hulu would be a great fit for the search giant.
“It’s funny because that was my first guess,” said one source. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Google emerges in the next few years as the biggest competitor to Time Warner and Comcast.” Read More
