The Pirate Bay Ordered To Close In The Netherlands

The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won its court case against The Pirate Bay. The Amsterdam court today ruled that the site must cease all operations in The Netherlands within 10 days, or else pay penalties of 30,000 euros ($42,300) a person, per day.

If they don’t comply all defendants will be ordered to pay 30,000 euros ($42,300) per day in penalties up to a maximum of 3 million euros ($4,231,000) total.

[via TorrentFreak]

Pirate Bay Sale on Life Support

The Pirate Bay acquisition may not happen after all. Multiple sources are reporting that the acquisition may be cancelled in one week’s time if Global Gaming X AB can’t provide investor guarantees. It doesn’t help that the major studios are suing it, either.

[via Mashable]

Pirate Bay faces new legal threat

File-sharing website The Pirate Bay faces a new volley of legal action because "they have not stopped their activities after they were sentenced to prison". The BBC reports..

... The lawsuit has been brought by Columbia Pictures, Disney Enterprises, Universal Studios and 10 other firms, many of which were due to receive damages form the April settlement.

'Mad Men' yourself avatars

Now you can be one of the Mad Men. To get an online buzz going for the popular drama series' third season, which starts Aug. 16, AMC is teaming up with Eight O'Clock Coffee for a new "Mad Men Yourself" online avatar application. It launches today at www.amctv.com.

You can create your own Sixties-styled doppelganger using art from illustrator Dyna Moe and use it on Facebook, Twitter, iPhone and your computer desktop.

[via USA Today]

Couple's wedding entrance dance becomes YouTube viral hit

Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson, the wedding couple filmed dancing down the aisle, has become a YouTube sensation.

The video has already turned the couple, from St Paul, Minnesota, into celebrities in the United States with appearances on network television. It has already been viewed 6.6m times.

[via The Telegraph]

Facebook hits one billion video views

Facebook has hit another milestone--over one billion video views last month. Since launching Facebook Video in June 2007, video views have steadily grown, and now, there are four times as many video views as actual Facebook members.

[News.com]

YouTube Now Lets You Share Insight Stats

YouTube is now letting video owners share stats from its analytics tool YouTube Insights, reports Search Engine Journal.

This includes stats on total views, number of ratings and other metrics that show how video contents are used on YouTube.

Whereas before, important stats such as video popularity, geographic audience and viewer demographics about YouTube videos are visible only to their owners through
YouTube Insight now users will be give the option to make their video stats open to the public eyes or to remain in private viewing status.

Harry Potter spreads love potion on Twitter

Warner Bros has created one of the most innovative Twitter campaigns to date, allowing fans of the film to cast spells on their followers, according to Revolution Magazine.

The campaign gives Twitter users the chance to send potions and cast spells on the people following them. The three options on offer include shrouding the follower's Twitter page in darkness, sending a flock of birds that fly across the screen and declaring affection for a follower by sending a love potion.

A website hosting the campaign has been set up to back the launch of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which debuted in UK cinemas last week.

Wonderful. Above, my spell cast on twitter.com/newteevee.

Click here to see what happens to NewTeeVee's mirror Twitter page.

And on Twitter Search to see how the "Harry Potter has been casting spells" campaign is spreading.

[via Adverblog]

Disney to charge for content online

Disney plans to offer a broad array of its content, including movies, TV shows and games, online to those willing to pay for it -- possibly at a single Web site that requires a subscription, reports The Hollywood Reporter.

Disney already is bringing in revenue online. It has joined NBC Universal and News Corp. as a content provider and equity partner in Hulu, which sells advertising. Disney also sells content on iTunes and charges a subscription fee for its Club Penguin site.

About that new Mad Men ad ...

With the third season of Mad Men just weeks away, read all about finishing touches on a local blitz called “New York’s Gone Mad” in The New Yorker via TV Tattle.

Above making-of video spotted on TV Squad.

Oldest UK television discovered

Britain's oldest working television has been uncovered in a house in London.

The 1936 Marconiphone, thought to have been made in the months that Britain's first television service began, was tracked down after a competition.

[via the BBC]

Universal Blu-ray Discs to be Tied to iPhone Apps

Universal Studios signed on to the BD-Live feature of Blu-ray with a promise to develop complementary apps for its titles which will be bundled with the movies themselves. PC Magazine reports.

On Jul 28, Universal will launch "Fast & Furious" on Blu-ray for $39.99. The disc will allow owners of an iPhone or iPod touch to directly control certain aspects of the content, Universal said Monday.

BD-Live is an enhancement to the Blu-ray technology that alloows content providers to add "live" applications and data to the fixed content of the movies.

... Future films will allow users to download content directly into their iPhone and iPod touch to take it with them on the go, and use the devices as controllers.

Read full article.

VW: real life interactive TV

Adverblog reports on a new Volkswagen campaign with real life interactive online television. It's part of the Pak De Polo (Get That Polo) campaign, which is currently running in the Netherlands to promote the latest Polo model.

In Pak de Polo Live the new Polo is driving around Holland for eight straight days. Along the way anyone can stop the car and make a ride. The one with the most kilometres behind the wheel gets the car.

At the campaign website, a live stream covers it all and shows who's in the car, and where they are heading. Also, visitors can make the car come their way by leaving a postal code. The result is a hectic ride through Holland, which can be watched in an entertaining, real life, interactive TV program, that lasts from 09.00 till 21.00 (local time).

The ten most shocking moments on Mad Men

[via TV Squad]

Walter Cronkite and the way it isn’t anymore

Mr. Cronkite pioneered and then mastered the role of television news anchorman with such plain-spoken grace that he was called the most trusted man in America. Bill Carter reports for The New York Times in video. A wonderful tribute.

Howard Rheingold of Smart Mobs links to a New York Times Media Decoder story today that captures how very much times have changed: from one trusted voice to crowd reporting:

Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, learned of Walter Cronkite’s death while he was at the dinner table on Friday evening, sharing a meal with his two children, ages 8 and 10.

After taking the phone call, he tried to explain to his children — who have grown up bombarded with news and information — the value of Mr. Cronkite’s once-a-day news updates.

“There probably will never be anybody who has the presence and the stature and the importance that Walter Cronkite had in this country,” Mr. McManus said in a telephone interview, recalling what he told his children.

“I tried to explain to them that most people in America expected to get both good and bad news from one man, and that was Walter Cronkite,” he said. “That will never be duplicated again,” because of the fragmentation of the media...

TV Shows Bring Their Ads Online

Cable-TV shows, including TBS's "My Boys," are coming to the Web -- along with a full complement of ads. The Wall Street Journal reports.

The shows will be part of a new Web-TV trial that begins this month, spearheaded by cable operator Comcast Corp. It involves more than a half-dozen other media companies, including CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc. The idea is to put more TV shows online, but only for paying cable subscribers.

The effort aims to address one of the biggest concerns facing producers of cable programming: how to keep viewers from canceling their subscriptions to watch free TV online.

It is also part of a broader push by media companies to put more advertisements in Web videos, seeking to capitalize on a medium where viewers can't skip ads.

Read full article.

Magic Wars app for Harry Potter Fans

A new iPhone app, Magic Wars, lets Harry Potter fans practice their magic wand skills. The latest Harry Potter movie, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," was released this week.

The game, launched three weeks ago by pocketfungames, preps players for wizard battles by having them practice motions with an iPhone while reciting an incantation. When the app boots up, wizards and witches are asked to flick their wrist to find a matching wand and are asked a series of questions to determine the house in which they will reside. There’s also an option to give yourself a wizard name and upload a photo before you begin studying spells and proposing duels with other players.

[via The Christian Science Monitor]

Post-Pirate Bay, a Federated Tracker Network Emerges

The Pirate Bay’s impending sale has been worrying BitTorrent users around the world. One reason for these worries is that the Swedish pirate platform has been the backbone of many of the web’s BitTorrent sites and communities. The New York Times /GigaOM report.

Take the Pirate Bay’s tracker servers away, and sites like Mininova would be left in a dry spell, with users unable to download pretty much anything at all.

However, two weeks after the announcement of the sale, it looks like the often-feared BitTorrent meltdown won’t happen. Not only are new trackers popping up everywhere, ready to fill the gap, but there’s also some new technology that could help interconnect these trackers to a giant, federated mesh network without any single point of failure.

Read full article.

HBO to offer True Blood, Entourage online

HBO, which has kept tight control over what content it offers online, announced today that it will stream True Blood, Hung, Entourage and other series online for free to subscribers as part of Comcast’s On Demand Online trial set to begin this summer.

HBO and Cinemax will offer 750 hours of TV and movie content to subscribers online through Comcast.net and Fancast.com at no additional cost, with additional content added over time.

[via Video Business]

Stop worrying, Hollywood – nobody is stealing your films with mobiles

Cory Doctorow has a piece in The Guardian explaining why it's awfully dumb for a theater to confiscate cellphones at a preview screening: Nobody's pirating movies with a cellphone, and real leaks come from inside the industry.

[via Gizmodo]

Related: - Crackdown In Cinemas

Teenager causes City sensation with research on media: report in full

Click on The Telegraph to read a report written by Matthew Robson, a 15-year old schoolboy, for Morgan Stanley on how he and his friends consume media.

Related to watching tv online: Disappointing, nothing on video sharing stream sites.

Teenagers are also watching less television because of services such as BBC iPlayer, which allows them to watch shows when they want. Whilst watching TV, adverts come on quite regularly (18 minutes of every hour) and teenagers do not want to watch these, so they switch to another channel, or do something else whilst the adverts run.

Related to movies: Doubtful. Teenagers don't download movies?

Some teenagers choose to download the films off the internet, but this is not favourable as the films are usually bad quality,have to be watched on a small computer screen and there is a chance that they will be malicious files and install a virus.

French "3 strikes" law returns, now with judicial oversight!

The French Senate has approved an updated version of the "three strikes" online copyright infringement bill aimed at taking repeat offenders offline. The approval comes exactly one month after the country's Constitutional Council ripped apart the previous version of the Création et Internet law. The nouveau version of the bill attempts to get around the constitutional limitations by moving the final decision to cut off users' Internet accounts to the courts.

[via arstechnica. Image from Geek.com]

Previously

-- France govt goes into spin mode to salvage three-strikes law

-- France ignores EU and passes antipiracy law

-- Once Again, France Will Vote on Piracy

-- EU undermines Sarkozy's plan to to Fight Illegal Downloads

-- French reject Internet Piracy Law

-- Sarkozy move to punish illegal downloaders sparks liberties row

-- Assembly approves Sarkozy plan for French television

-- European Parliament says "no" to disconnecting P2P users

-- Illegal downloaders 'face UK ban'

-- French plan e-mail warnings for illegal downloads

President Barack Obama speech at slave site

President Obama makes remarks after touring Cape Coast Castle, in Ghana.

[via The Huffington Post]

YouTube hits: Daning Evian Babies and Singer's airline tune

Two videos on YouTube which are making a splash: One is a huge PR success for Evian and the other a PR nightmare for United Airlines.

Evian’s Dancing Babies. Read WSJ write up.

After breaking his guitar, an angry United Airlines passenger/musician gets even by writing a song and posting it on YouTube where it's a hit. A PR nightmare for the airline who plans on mending their ways. According to the BBC, "United Airlines said the musician's song would be used for internal customer service training."

20% of online video fans watch less TV

A fifth of online video aficionados watch less TV as a direct result of online video, seemingly confirming the fears of TV networks that their traditional audience is moving online, reports arstechnica.

A new report from Frank N. Magid Associates and Metacafe claims that online video offerings are now becoming as or more entertaining than shows on the boob tube, and the types of clips people watch online span many different genres.

The most popular online videos were not professionally produced content, according to the study. Instead, the largest chunk of survey respondents (43 percent of a nationally representative group of 2,000 people between the ages of 12 and 64) said that they regularly watched videos shot by other Joe Schmoes.

... Full-length TV shows were only watched by 25 percent of respondents on a regular basis, and full-length movies by only 15 percent.

Statue of Liberty replica decapitated on YouTube

A disturbing YouTube video dated July Fourth showing a gloved hand sawing off the head of the statue of Liberty with slogans "We don't want your freedom" and "Death to America" flashing on the screen, was anonymously e-mailed to the Daily News and Ryan earlier this week. CNN reports.

Michael Jackson Funeral Live Streams, By the Numbers

Michael Jackson’s memorial held today at the Staples Center in Los Angeles turned out to be one of the biggest online events ever, according to various sources, reports GigaOM.

Akamai says that it was the second-largest day in terms of total traffic on its network. Akamai delivered more than 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams in both the Flash and Windows Media formats.

There were 3,924,370 visitors per minute as of 1 pm EST and an average of more than 3.3 million visitors per minute overall.

More stats on GigaOM. Via The New York Times.

How can YouTube survive?

It's wildly popular - and thought to be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now questions are being asked about the future of YouTube. Rhodri Marsden investigates a mystery of digital-age 'freeconomics' for London's Independent.

... YouTube's lack of profitability other than as part of a colossal global multinational may signal the end of a dream that has somehow managed to extend past the bursting of the dotcom bubble back in 2001, and the options for new online ventures seem to be as follows: either produce something that people are willing to pay for, or come up with an idea for a free service that's so ingenious that a benevolent multinational is willing to take it off your hands. But remember: that trick of making a home video of yourself in front of a few elephants has already been done.

[via Mediabistro]

Where to Watch the Michael Jackson Memorial Service

Check out where to watch the Michael Jackson Memorial Service on NewTeeVee.

One option, go to CNN.om Live .

3 offers free Sky TV on the Sony Ericsson W995

3 is offering its customers a saving of £5 a month when they purchase the Sony Ericsson W995. With exclusive access to Sky Mobile TV, customers of 3 will have access to live sports coverage as well as Sky Sports 1, 2, 3, Xtra and Sky Sports News. For the non sports fan, there will also be instant access to Sky Sports News.

[via Mobile Choice]