Google Play unifies books, music, movies, games

With Google Play, the technology giant wants entertainment consumers to come play in its digital sandbox.

Seeking to create a single destination for digital media and entertainment, the Mountain View, Calif., company on Tuesday said it is pulling together its disparate books, music, movie and game efforts under one umbrella dubbed Google Play.

The initiative involves Google Music, Google Books and Android Market in such a way that visitors to those sites will be redirected to a single page, on tablets and cellphones that run Google's Android operating system as well as on Web browsers.

With tabs for music, books, movies and applications, Google Play mirrors similar efforts by Apple Inc., Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp. to become an entertainment and media hub. For a full report, see the story on our Technology blog written by Jessica Guynn.

"What we’re seeing is that consumers are identifying with ecosystems, which includes devices and a broad offering of services," said Jamie Rosenberg, Google's director of digital content. "So we're creating this notion that the consumer has a single relationship with Google as the ecosystem for their content."

 

Rosenberg said unifying Google's various media initiatives also would benefit its content partners. A movie release with tie-ins to books, games and soundtracks could, for example, take advantage of Google Play's unified approach.

"It’s also a foundation for many things that we’d like to do in the future," he said. "Integrated merchandising is just one example that is enabled by this experience."

Android application developers said they welcome Google's changes, believing that the improvements in the user experience will help people find and use more of their products.

"The improved look and flow will make it easier for people to find games," said Adam Flanders, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Glu Mobile Inc., a San Francisco developer of more than 30 Android games such as Stardom and Contract Killer Zombies. "That’s great for us."

With more than 450,000 applications in Google's Android app market, triple the number from a year ago, developers are grateful for anything that can help boost their visibility.

By combining Google audience for all media, Flanders said his company can get in front of more potential customers.

"If they’ve got more eyeballs in the store looking for all kinds of content, there’s a higher probability of people finding one of our games," Flanders said.

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Top photo: Jamie Rosenberg, Google's director of digital content, at the Google Music launch event last year in Los Angeles. Credit: Los Angeles Times. Bottom screenshot of Google Play courtesy of Google.

Demand Media, after 4th-quarter loss, projects better 2012

The Internet can be a cruel mistress.

Demand Media Inc. found that out the hard way. A year ago the Web company, awash in traffic, was the darling of Wall Street, valued at $1 billion in a Jan. 26 initial public offering.

Three months later, Google Inc., which had sent millions of visitors a day to Demand’s websites, modified its search results to de-emphasize destinations deemed to have lower-quality content. The change throttled the Santa Monica company’s traffic nearly 25% between January and July.

Wall Street turned against the company, driving its stock from a lofty $24.57 in March to $5.62 by October.

On Thursday the company — whose properties include Livestrong, eHow and Cracked.com — reported a $6.4-million loss on $84.4 million in revenue in its fourth quarter, which ended Dec. 31. It had posted a $1-million profit on $73.6 million in sales a year earlier.

“The business that they took public changed fundamentally when Google changed its algorithm,” said Patrick Walravens, an analyst with JMP Securities. “The business model they had for producing content no longer works. So what’s the new model?”

Demand Media stock reels on Morgan Stanley downgrade

Demand for shares of Demand Media dropped Wednesday after a Morgan Stanley analyst downgraded the Santa Monica company's stock and expressed skepticism that the website operator could continue to grow its online audience.

Demand Media, whose stock soared 33% to $22.65 on the day of its initial public offering a year ago, shaved off 42 cents, or nearly 7% of its value, to $5.92 in late afternoon trading. Demand operates a number of websites, including LiveStrong.com and eHow, that publish hundreds of thousands of quick, pithy how-to and advice articles and videos on a broad range of topics, from dieting to planting tomatoes.  

Morgan Stanley analyst Scott Devitt, in his note on Demand Media, said the company's approach to mass producing content is under pressure as Google and other online search engines penalize sites that are deemed to have lower quality offerings.

Because Demand relies so heavily on Google in particular for its traffic, changes in the search company's algorithm have led to a precipitous drop in viewers coming to its sites, Devitt said. Demand lost nearly a quarter of its user base last year -- going from 124 million visitors in March to 94 million in December, he wrote.

Demand scrambled to boost its appeal to search engines by focusing more in "premium" content in October, but Devitt concluded, "We find little early evidence of success." 

The Morgan Stanley downgrade came on the heels of news that three of the company's six co-founders had resigned Jan. 30. They include Larry Fitzgibbon, who had spearheaded Demand's efforts to grow its overseas audience; Joe Perez, executive vice president of product; and Steve Kydd, who headed the company's video unit.

A Demand Media spokeswoman declined to comment on the departures and the downgrade, citing an inability to speak publicly during a quiet period preceding its fourth quarter earnings announcement, set for Feb. 16.

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Photo: From left, co-founder and mergers and acquisitions chief Shawn Colo, president and CFO Charles Hilliard, and co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt. Credit: Stefano Paltera / Los Angeles Times

 

 

YouTube starts action sport channels with Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater

Dominant online video site YouTube has launched a new lineup of sports channels featuring some of the biggest names in action sports — including pro skateboarder Tony Hawk, snowboarder Shaun White and surfer Kelly Slater.

The four channels seek to tap into the rising popularity of action sports — especially among teens and twentysomethings — by offering clips, commentary and live events on YouTube. The original content represents another step in the site's efforts to augment its user-created videos with more professionally programmed offerings.  

YouTube's sports outlets will include the Red Bull Channel, which will feature a new 13-episode series chronicling the daily lives of some of the world's best-known action sports athletes, including urban mountain biker Danny MacAskill, skateboarding pro Ryan Sheckler and big wave surfer Jamie O'Brien. 

Another channel, Network A, will offer highlights and interviews with well-known athletes such as skateboarding pros Sheckler and Paul Rodriguez, White and Slater. 

Alli Sports will feature tips from favorite athletes discussing how they pull off their signature moves. It will also seek to identify rising stars and offer news and highlights.

Hawk will lend his backing to Ride, a 24-hour channel devoted to the skateboarding lifestyle. One show, "Tony Hawk's Dissent," will offer subscribers behind-the-scenes access to celebrities. "One in a Million" will give amateurs the chance to compete for sponsorship.

"Bringing these new channels from some of the world's leading producers will be a welcome addition to our already broad base of action sports fans on YouTube," said Claude Ruibal, global head of sports for YouTube.

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X Games legend Shaun White wows the crowd during warm-ups for Skateboard Vert Elimination during the X Games last July. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times.

SOPA blackout shows little hope of peace with Hollywood

Little more than an hour into the first "Internet strike," major websites like Wikipedia and Craigslist remained dark to protest controversial anti-piracy legislation and more promised to follow in the morning.

Many sites such as the social news aggregator Reddit and Mozilla.org, home page of the maker of the Firefox browser, planned to launch a 12-hour strike starting at 8 a.m. Eastern time. Most websites experience their heaviest traffic during the day when consumers are at work.

Hundreds of smaller sites planned to join the protest as well, according to SOPAStrike.com, demonstrating the widespread opposition in the tech community to bills that opponents claim amount to censorship.

But none carry the weight of Wikipedia and Craigslist, which began their strike at midnight, or of Google, which blacked out the logo on its home page in protest.

The overwhelming majority of initial reaction on Twitter appeared to be against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and its companion PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Some users put "Stop SOPA" and "Stop PIPA" stripes over their Twitter photos. In one protest much linked to on Twitter, the racy website Suicide GIrls used "STop SOPA" stripes to cover up an otherwise naked woman.

It appeared casual Web surfers would have a very hard time finding any pro-SOPA and PIPA perspective online. Most sites that were blacked out contained links to pages with dire warnings, such as: "There are powerful forces trying to censor the Internet" (Reddit); "Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet" (Wikipedia); and "the U.S. Senate is considering legislation that would certainly kill us forever" (BoingBoing).

Only Google offered a fig leaf to the much-maligned entertainment industry that supports the bills. The SOPA/PIPA information page linked on the search engine home page starts off by stating, "Members of Congress are trying to do the right thing by going after pirates and counterfeiters," before adding, "but SOPA and PIPA are the wrong way to do it."

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YouTube's Robert Kyncl charts Internet video's meteoric rise

YouTube executive Robert Kyncl took the consumer electronics industry on a trip through a time machine -- just five years ago -- when subscription service Netflix didn't stream movies online, Internet television service Hulu didn't exist and YouTube was still in its infancy.

The times, and the way viewers consume entertainment, are a changin', as Kyncl underscored in his Thursday keynote address at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that charted the rapid rise of the Internet as a distribution platform. 

Netflix, which got its start in 1998 mailing DVDs to subscribers in its trademark red envelopes, streamed 2 billion videos in the fourth quarter of 2011. Hulu now boasts 30 million monthly users. And YouTube attracts about 800 million viewers a month.

"The speed with which we're running is incredible," said Kyncl, YouTube's global head of content partnerships. He predicted that Internet video would soon account for 90% of the traffic on the Internet.

Kyncl said YouTube is a platform where someone like Michelle Phan could follow her own passion -- and not her mother's desire that she become a doctor -- to create instructional makeup and beauty videos. Her YouTube channel now attracts twice as many regular viewers as a program on cable's Style network, he said. And that audience led to a sponsorship from a mainstream advertiser, Lancome. 

"It's a wonderful, magical story that wouldn't have been possible five years ago," Kyncl said. "But it's possible today."

Kyncl portrayed Internet video as the next major step in the evolution of media, once dominated by three broadcast networks that together commanded 100% of television viewership in the U.S. The emergence of cable and satellite distributors made possible the fragmentation of the audience around niche programming.

By 2020, Kyncl predicted, about 75% of channels will be transmitted by the Internet. The global reach of sites like YouTube will allow for even more specialized channels to draw together sizable audiences of passionate enthusiasts, he said.

Machinima, a YouTube channel for video game fans, now attracts more than 1 billion views every month from about 116 million people around the world, said Chief Executive Allen DeBevoise, who participated in a panel discussion after Kyncl's presentation.  

YouTube's initiative to bring established TV producers and stars to its platform has attracted such entertainment notables as  "CSI" creator Anthony Zuiker, actor Rainn Wilson, best known for portraying Dwight Schrute in NBC's "The Office," and Felicia Day, creator of the Internet series "The Guild."

"I'm here because of what I've learned from the user-generated content ... on YouTube that has inspired me," Zuiker said.

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Photo: Robert Kyncl, YouTube's head of global content, in the company's Santa Monica offices. Credit: Christina House / For The Times

MPAA's Dodd says Hollywood is pro-Internet but anti-piracy

Motion Picture Assn. of America chief Christopher J. Dodd sought to counter criticism that Hollywood is trying to censor the Internet via pending legislation to crack down on online piracy, telling a liberal Washington think tank Tuesday that the industry's fate is tied to technology.

"Hollywood is pro-Internet," the former Democratic senator from Connecticut told the Center for American Progress. "So I want to make it clear right at the outset that our fight against content theft is not a fight against technology. It is a fight against criminals."

His comments came as the House Judiciary Committee is poised to approve legislation Thursday  aimed at shutting down foreign websites that offer pirated movies, music, medicine and other products. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved similar legislation in May.

Hollywood strongly backs the legislation, which would grant new authority to the Justice Department to block so-called rogue sites. The legislation also would give movie studios, music companies and other copyright holders the ability to seek court injunctions against Internet companies they believe are aiding in copyright theft.

But major Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, EBay and Facebook, are fighting to water down the legislation because they fear it opens the door to censorship on the Internet. They argue that the piracy bills are too heavy-handed and would even threaten the technological stability of the Internet through new mechanisms to block access to piracy sites.

Speaking in Washington on Monday, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the content industry has "over-reached" in the legislation and filtering technologies that companies would have to develop could be used by some countries to curb free speech.

Dodd has taken heat for recent comments that Internet censorship by China showed that blocking rogue sites was possible.

"When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn't do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites," he told Variety.

But Dodd said Tuesday that the industry opposes censorship of free speech by repressive governments and that any comparison of the legislation to such efforts was "absolutely reprehensible."

"We stand with those who strongly oppose foreign governments that would unilaterally block websites, and thus deny the free flow of information and speech," he said.

But Dodd said that a free and open Internet also must contain strong copyright protection.

"There is a difference between believing that the Internet should be free and open, and believing that just because something's on the Internet, it should be free," he said.

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Photo: MPAA chief Christopher J. Dodd. Credit: Associated Press

YouTube acquires RightsFlow

Google Inc.'s YouTube online video division has acquired RightsFlow, a New York company that handles certain U.S. licensing rights for more than 30 million songs. 

Terms of the deal, announced Friday, were not disclosed. 

Established in 2007, RightsFlow manages royalty payments for songwriters, as well as music labels and publishers. YouTube has been attempting to play nice with music and video copyright holders who have been complaining about the amount of unlicensed, pirated content uploaded by users of the site. Viacom Inc., for example, is pursuing an appeal of its copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and its parent, Google.

Since the Viacom lawsuit, filed in March 2007, YouTube has buttoned up as many licenses as it could with music copyright holders to cover songs heard on the site, either as background music to a video or in a cover performance.

But the area of music copyrights is vastly complex, with multiple rights holders often involved in a single song. That's where RightsFlow comes in, said David King, product manager for San Bruno, Calif.-based YouTube.

"By combining RightsFlow's expertise and technology with YouTube's platform, we hope to more rapidly and efficiently license music on YouTube," King said in a blog post.

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Rumble game start-up scores $15 million in funding

Rumble, a newly formed online gaming company with a roster of industry veterans, has shaken $15 million in funding from two of Silicon Valley's bigger money trees -- Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

What Google and Khosla seem to be betting on is not Rumble's games; the company hasn't published any. Instead, they're putting their money on Rumble's business strategy and its high-wattage management team.

First, the strategy: Rumble aims to become a publisher for the next generation of online games -- titles that are easy to jump into, have high-quality graphics and are free to play, but supported by sales of virtual goods or enhanced game features. Although the Redwood City, Calif., company will develop some of its own titles, its primary goal is to help independent publishers bring their games to market.

That's been a good recipe for Chillingo and Ngmoco, two companies that publish mobile games and were sold a year ago for generous sums. Ngmoco, known for the games Godfinger and We Rule, went to Japanese social networking company DeNA for $400 million in October 2010. That same month, Chillingo, which publishes Angry Birds and Cut the Rope, was snapped up by Electronic Arts Inc. for just under $20 million.

Second, the management team: Greg Richardson, Rumble's chief executive, was head of BioWare/Pandemic, a game development studio that was sold to EA for $860 million in 2007. John Yoo, Rumble's design director, worked on a long list of online games, including CityVille, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and Star Trek Online. Rumble's general manager of games, Mark Spenner, hails from EA, where he was vice president of social games. And Rumble co-founder David O'Connor was EA's chief technology officer.

The proof in Rumble's pudding will presumably reveal itself next year, when it plans to release its first title, an online game targeted at men 18 to 35. Richardson declined to reveal further details of the game.

"In the entertainment industry, quality is the only business plan that matters in the long run," Richardson said. "That embodies who we are."

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Photo: Greg Richardson is chief executive and co-founder of Rumble. Credit: Rumble.

 

Google’s new online music store to offer Universal Music songs

Google Inc. has inked a deal with Universal Music Group to be able to sell downloads from the world's largest record company's song catalog, said executives familiar with the agreement.

Universal also granted Google a license to include its music in the technology company's cloud locker service, which lets users play their personal music collection from any Web browser. The two companies had been widely expected to reach a deal, but did not sign a contract until Wednesday morning, just hours before Google's press event to debut its music store.

The agreement is a coup for the Silicon Valley search giant, which has labored for more than a year to persuade major music labels to get on board with its ambitious plan to offer a full digital music service for mobile devices that use Google's Android operating system.

Google is set to announce a key component of that service on Wednesday — a download store akin to Apple Inc.'s iTunes or Amazon.com's MP3 store.

With Universal in the bag, Google's store would launch with roughly 80% of the music that's available for sale today. It earlier reached licensing deals with EMI, Sony and Merlin Network, a global consortium of more than 18,000 independent record labels and artists. 

Missing from the pack, however, is Warner Music Group, whose catalog represents about 20% of the market. An agreement with Warner is not expected to be reached in time for Google's unveiling of its music store, which is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles amid an eclectic guest list of street artists and musicians.

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Photo: Maroon 5, a Los Angeles-based band under contract with Universal Music, is among the artists scheduled to perform when Google unveils its music store. Credit: David Factor.