Pirate Bay raising the surrender flag to Hollywood

The world's most notorious website for illegal music and movie downloading is going legit.

The Pirate Bay, a Sweden-based website that's one of the most popular sources for Internet piracy, has agreed to be acquired by Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish operator of Internet cafes, for $7.8 million.

Hans Pandeya, CEO of Global Gaming Factory, said he intends to cooperate with studios and record labels to turn Pirate Bay into a copyright-friendly business.

"We're a publicly listed company, so whatever we take over has to be legal," he explained. "To be legal, you have to have content providers who are paid. That's what we want."

Convincing Pirate Bay's reported 20 million users accustomed to getting content for free into paying customers will an extremely difficult task, but Pandeya said he plans to make an enticing offer.

"To compete with free file sharing, you have to beat it," he said. "What's better than zero? Well, that's paying somebody $1."

Global Gaming Factory plans to pay Pirate Bay users to let their computers be part of a worldwide peer-to-peer system that can transmit data for Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast. Theoretically, it could vastly reduce the bandwidth costs of ISPs, which are struggling to keep up with the rapidly growing amount of traffic moving through the 'Net, much of it because of illegal piracy.

Participating computer owners could use the money deposited into their account to buy and download songs, TV shows or movies.

Users are sure to be skeptical, especially since the founders of Pirate Bay not only flouted copyright laws but publicly derided them on numerous occasions. Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom were convicted in April of facilitating copyright violations and ordered to pay plaintiffs, including Fox, Warner Bros. and EMI, $3.6 million.

The men have refused to pay the fine while they appeal. They won't be joining Global Gaming Factory, which is acquiring the Pirate Bay domain name only. They recently started work on a YouTube-like video sharing site called VideoBay that is currently in an early testing phase.

Pandeya said his company plans to run the site with technology it has acquired from a Swedish software company called Peerialism for $13 million.

Several other ventures that enabled illegal file sharing and attempted to transform into legitimate downloading business, including BitTorrent and Napster, haven't had much success. However, none of them paid users for participating in a file sharing network.

The deal will be voted on by GGF's shareholders in late July or early August. If it's approved, Pandeya said Pirate Bay will immediately seek to halt illegal downloading and start working with legitimate content providers.

Update (12:12 PM): As noted on BoingBoing, one of Pirate Bay's founders said on the site's blog that the proceeds from the sale will be used for "projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the [Internet]."

-- Ben Fritz

For more on whether Pirate Bay's attempt to go legit will prove attractive to big media companies and consumers, see the story in Wednesday's Times.

Photo: Pirate Bay supporters rally in Sweden in April after four of the site's founders are convicted of copyright infringement. Credit: Fredrik Persson, AFP/Getty Images.

The high court likes their digital video recorders.

The Supreme Court cleared the way for Cablevision Systems Corp., a New York-based cable operator with more than 3 million subscribers, to deploy so-called remote storage DVRs. Unlike current DVRs, which record programs on a device in a customer's home, remote storage DVRs record them in a central location.

As of March, the penetration of DVRs in the United States was 30%, according to Nielsen. Because storing shows on a central server is so inexpensive compared with deploying devices, the ruling clears the way for Cablevision and other distrubutors to offer the service to consumers at very low or no cost.

The move is a blow to Hollywood, which had fought the technology all the way to the Supreme Court. Fox, NBC Universal, Paramount, CBS, Disney and other programmers argued that because Cablevision transmits recorded programs to consumers over its cable lines, the remote storage DVRs actually constitute a new on-demand service for which they should pay licensing fees.

Of course, what this is really about is advertising. Television executives are very worried about the ease with which consumers can skip advertisements while watching recorded programs via DVRs.

The justices declined to hear arguments from programmers, in effect validating a 2008 federal appeals court ruling in favor of New York-based cable operator Cablevision's plans to deploy its remote storage DVRs.

"We are of course disappointed by the Court's decision not to hear this case but understand that the Court can only hear a limited number of cases each year," Daniel Mandil, chief of legal affairs and intellectual property protection for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said in a statement. The MPAA has led the court case on behalf of the networks and studios. "We will continue to do what is necessary to protect the legal rights of our members with regard to their content and look forward to the continued development of the law in this area in future cases," he added.

Many DVR providers, including TiVo, have started working with the networks to develop new ways to serve advertising to consumers who are watching recorded shows.

"This is a tremendous victory and it opens up the possibility of offering a DVR experience to all of our digital cable customers," Cablevision Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge said in a statement. "At the same time, we are mindful of the potential implications for ad-skipping and the concerns this has raised in the programming community. We believe there are ways to take this victory and work with programmers to give our consumers what they want — full DVR functionality through existing digital set-top boxes — and at the same time deliver real benefits to advertisers."

— Ben Fritz

In March 2006, Nikki Finke started Deadline Hollywood Daily as an outlet for scoops that couldn't wait for her column in LA Weekly. She initially earned nothing extra for the blog.

Today she has sold the site, which she owns entirely, to Mail.com Media Group in a deal worth several million dollars.

"I have really sacrificed, but it was a conscious decision and I love doing this," Finke said of the experience.

According to a person familiar with the terms, Finke, the site’s sole owner and writer-editor, will get a low seven-figure sum to sell Deadline Hollywood Daily plus several million dollars over the life of a five-year-plus employment contract. The deal also grants her a portion of the site’s advertising revenue.

Though it took its name from Finke's column in the paper, LA Weekly had no ownership stake in Deadline Hollywood Daily. The Village Voice Media-owned publication simply sold ads and, after the site started to grow, paid Finke a stipend.

Once Deadline Hollywood Daily officially becomes part of Mail.com Media Group in a few weeks, the paper's online operation will take what LA Weekly Publisher Beth Sestanovich admitted would be a "traffic hit." While Finke will probably continue to write her column for the paper, Sestanovich said the paper will be hunting for a new entertainment blogger.

"Well probably do something more that's more mainstream pop culture," Sestanovich said. "There's probably nobody who can touch her as an insider."

For more on Mail.com Media Group owner Jay Penske and his plan to build a mini-media empire on the Web, read this article in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times.

-- Ben Fritz

In the entertainment business, it's customary practice to publicly boast that almost every new movie and TV show is a hit.

If a new report from IT consulting firm RampRate (not your usual savvy analysts of showbiz, but bear with us) is right, Silicon Valley's biggest company might be taking just the opposite approach.

RampRate's study, titled "YouTube: Google's Phantom Loss Leader," claims that the No. 1 video website is losing far less than the widely cited $470 million per year figure from an April report by Credit Suisse Equity Research. Using a different analysis of the bandwidth and other tech costs needed to operate YouTube, Ramprate estimates the site's losses this year will be a much more narrow $174.2 million.

So why isn't YouTube owner Google making a stink? We all know any movie executive wouldn't keep silent if a report claimed his or her project lost more money than it actually did (or even as much).

RampRate offers an intriguing, and plausible, theory: "Any appearance of profits leads to more draconian revenue share demands from partners and additional lawsuits from owners of unlicensed content. An apparent loss deters this behavior, making it eminently advisable for Google to let the rumors of YouTube's losses grow and compound."

Translation: If YouTube was known to be losing less money, or even close to making a profit, then the "sharks" in Hollywood might demand higher payments for their content, both legitimate and pirated, posted on the site. The longer Google can hold off sharing more revenue with content suppliers, the more money it makes on YouTube.

There's no way, of course, to reliably determine YouTube's financials since Google doesn't break out the results. And the circumstantial evidence is mixed. YouTube recently launched a "shows" section in an effort to get more television episodes and movies to compete against Hulu. The only way to increase its offerings, however, would be to pay more money, not less.

On the other hand, unless and until somebody figures out a profitable model for Web video advertising, YouTube and competitors like Hulu are left with much less revenue than their television counterparts. For now, Google might like the idea of content providers believing it's losing nearly half a billion dollars a year as it tries to help build a digital platform that could benefit studios.

As far as conspiracy theories go, it's not too far out by Hollywood standards.

Update (June 17, 5:40 PM): YouTube's losses may be shrinking fast. In a report released today, Nielsen said that YouTube is the top entertainment site on the Web and carried about 24% of all online display ads for the consumer goods category. The industry is estimated to have spent $156.2 million for online marketing in the first quarter of 2009.

— Ben Fritz

Photo: Episodes of "Alf" on YouTube. Credit: YouTube.

In the past two years, five separate online video ventures backed by big media money have gone out of business: NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's This Just In, Turner's SuperDeluxe, ABC-Disney Television's Stage 9 Digital, and the UTA-funded 60Frames.

Every flop has its own specific problems, of course. HBO and AOL never figured out how to work together smoothly on This Just In; SuperDeluxe overspent on its content and was competing, in a sense, with its parent company's Adult Swim; Stage 9 never had a natural home for its shows since it didn't work with ABC.com; 60Frames needed more funding at a time when the venture market had completely dried up.

But they all shared one common misstep: A desire to jump on the bandwagon led by YouTube and Saturday Night Live's "digital shorts" and a belief that big advertising dollars were just around the corner. As it turned out, there's still not much money in Web video advertising -- certainly not enough to earn a profit on videos that cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 each to produce. As Mike Salmi, former head of digital media for MTV Networks, put it: “It’s very similar to what happened in ‘99 and 2000, where everyone saw gold in the hills. The reality is that it’s much harder to make money than we thought.”

In today's Los Angeles Times, we have a story surveying these flops, explaining why they went wrong so fast, and what their failures meant not only for the big media companies that backed them, but the creators who made videos for them. Check it out here.

Our article focuses on the remarkable number of quickly abandoned Web video efforts in Hollywood over the past few years. A few remain, however.

They all have slightly different strategies and models, but most of them share one of two defining characteristics that separate them from the space's many failures: Web video serves a larger strategy and thus doesn't need to earn a profit, or it's being produced at virtually no cost.

Companies still in the web video business include:

Sony Pictures Television's Crackle: A much-evolved version of Grouper, the video sharing website Sony bought for $65 million in 2006, Crackle mixes original series with television shows and movies owned by the studio.

If Crackle was a cable network like AMC, its original series would be akin to "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad": Costly productions that aren't profitable on their own, but draw attention and help shape a public identity. The real profit is in the Sony-owned movies and TV shows that can rerun on the website at virtually no cost.

"We view Crackle like a network that has movies and TV content and then we layer originals on top of that to define the voice of the network," said Sean Carey, executive vice president of digital distribution for Sony Television.

Crackle's series include "The Jace Hall Show," a talk show about video games, "Penn Says," a series of rants by magician/comedian Penn Jilette," and "Angel of Death," a $1 million, 10-episode production from comic book writer Ed Brubaker that has been combined into a movie and will air on Spike and come out on DVD. Here's an episode of "Angel of Death":

From Crackle: Angel of Death: Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

You don't have to be an industry insider to understand that the market for professionally produced Web videos isn't exactly thriving. The list of digital video divisions and start-ups founded with Hollywood money in the last few years now resembles a row of gravestones: Disney's Stage 9, Turner's SuperDeluxe, NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's ThisJustIn and the UTA-backed 60 Frames have all gone out of business.

It's not that people aren't watching video on the Web. YouTube's and Hulu's traffic just keep going up and up and up. The problem is that there's no real business model, which means anyone spending even a few thousand dollars to produce webisodes had better not count on advertising revenue to help them turn a profit.

Despite all that, there are still plenty of true believers in the medium. Many of them gathered yesterday in New York City for the Onfronts, a rip-off of play on the television Upfronts. The event is meant to bring producers and advertisers together as an opportunity for, according to the Onfronts website, "digital content-owners to showcase a vibrant new entertainment medium and present upcoming projects to press and major advertisers dedicated to high engagement entertainment opportunities."

The keynote speech was given by Jordan Levin, former CEO of the defunct WB network who now heads the management/production company Generate, which specializes in digital content. If the Onfronts were anything like the Upfronts, you might expect Levin to be hyping his latest projects. Instead, he delivered a dire message:

 I have no doubt that premium content produced for the Internet will grow along with the adoption of online video consumption. What I do doubt is whether or not many of the independent producers and production companies either here today, or who want to be here, will be here next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. . . .

Current production and distribution margins simply cannot support the overhead required to produce premium online content at a scale suitable to advertising, without brands subsidizing that effort to a greater extent than currently exists.

Former America Online Chief Executive Jonathan Miller is expected to join News Corp. in the newly-created position overseeing digital strategy, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Miller is a well known figure in digital media, whose name was mentioned in conjunction with the top job at Yahoo. It would be the start of a major reorganization of the News Corp. digital division. It's unclear how this would affect Peter Levinsohn, who currently oversees Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.

Levinsohn is well regarded by New Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives at the company, and sources say there could potentially be another role for him inside the company.

Miller stepped down as head of AOL in 2006, and founded the investment firm Velocity Capital. Last year, he was reportedly involved in trying to secure financing to make a bid for Yahoo at $20 to $22 a share, or $28 billion to $30 billion.

Miller has established himself as a hot hand on the Internet. He made his mark in e-commerce at Barry Diller's media conglomerate, then as chairman and chief executive of AOL, from which he was ousted in November 2006. He has detractors, particularly inside Time Warner, but gets plaudits from analysts and colleagues who say he is one of the industry's foremost strategic thinkers.

Herb Scannell, CEO of Internet television start-up Next New Networks and former vice-chairman of MTV Networks, calls Miller "one of the smartest guys I have come across in the media world."

-- Dawn Chmielewski and Claudia Eller

Photo of Miller by AP

Movie rental giant Blockbuster has partnered with a Bay Area technology company to help it set up digital storefronts on an array of consumer electronics products.

The agreement with Sonic Solutions, a company that has created software to bring movie downloads and rental services to devices, provides Blockbuster with the technical know-how it needs as it seeks to extend its business to portable media players, set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs.

"What we're realizing, more and more, is our consumers are trying to watch movies in a variety of different locations," said Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president of digital entertainment. "Our job is to be ubiquitous."

The combination better positions Blockbuster to compete with its fleet-footed rival, Netflix. The movies-by-mail company has lined up a series of high-profile partnerships to bring its subscription service out of the hands of postal carriers and directly onto the TV.

In recent months, Netflix has announced deals that would allow subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet into their living rooms, using a TiVo Series 3 digital video recorder, an Xbox 360 video game console or the just-announced Internet-connected televisions from Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.

Other technology companies are also eying the TV.  Retailer Amazon.com lets customers buy videos online and download them to their TiVo boxes.  And digital media behemoth Apple Inc. delivers a similar experience, pairing its iTunes store with the AppleTV set-top box.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the Sonic partnership is another sign that Blockbuster is "really serious" about being part of the digital movie revolution. But it's also an acknowledgment of the retailer's limitations.

"It enables Blockbuster to say, 'Whatever device people want to watch video on, we'll put the Blockbuster experience on that device — without having to launch an army of developers,' " McQuivey said.

Blockbuster pursued a similar strategy in 2007, when it acquired Movielink — an online movie rental business started by five Hollywood studios — to move it quickly into digital distribution. But as consumers shied away from time-consuming paid movie downloads in favor of services that offered the immediate gratification of streaming to Internet-connected devices, Blockbuster began seeking another company with which it could partner for this type of expertise.

Sonic has existing deals to offer its own movie-rental service, CinemaNow, to consumers who buy Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers or use an LG BD300 Blu-ray player that can be connected to the Internet (a feature known as BD Live).  The company is also working with the manufacturers of portable devices with a screen and the processing power to handle movies — including Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Blockbuster will have the benefit of Sonic's many relationships with gadget-makers. CinemaNow, meanwhile, plans to re-brand its movie offerings as Blockbuster stores.

"That's the key to stimulate the market: marrying a trusted brand with a platform that takes the guess work away from the consumer," said Mark Ely, Sonic Solutions' executive vice president of strategy.

— Dawn C. Chmielewski

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

Supreme Court hits stop button on Hollywood's challenge to cheaper DVRs

The high court likes their digital video recorders.

The Supreme Court cleared the way for Cablevision Systems Corp., a New York-based cable operator with more than 3 million subscribers, to deploy so-called remote storage DVRs. Unlike current DVRs, which record programs on a device in a customer's home, remote storage DVRs record them in a central location.

As of March, the penetration of DVRs in the United States was 30%, according to Nielsen. Because storing shows on a central server is so inexpensive compared with deploying devices, the ruling clears the way for Cablevision and other distrubutors to offer the service to consumers at very low or no cost.

The move is a blow to Hollywood, which had fought the technology all the way to the Supreme Court. Fox, NBC Universal, Paramount, CBS, Disney and other programmers argued that because Cablevision transmits recorded programs to consumers over its cable lines, the remote storage DVRs actually constitute a new on-demand service for which they should pay licensing fees.

Of course, what this is really about is advertising. Television executives are very worried about the ease with which consumers can skip advertisements while watching recorded programs via DVRs.

The justices declined to hear arguments from programmers, in effect validating a 2008 federal appeals court ruling in favor of New York-based cable operator Cablevision's plans to deploy its remote storage DVRs.

"We are of course disappointed by the Court's decision not to hear this case but understand that the Court can only hear a limited number of cases each year," Daniel Mandil, chief of legal affairs and intellectual property protection for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said in a statement. The MPAA has led the court case on behalf of the networks and studios. "We will continue to do what is necessary to protect the legal rights of our members with regard to their content and look forward to the continued development of the law in this area in future cases," he added.

Many DVR providers, including TiVo, have started working with the networks to develop new ways to serve advertising to consumers who are watching recorded shows.

"This is a tremendous victory and it opens up the possibility of offering a DVR experience to all of our digital cable customers," Cablevision Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge said in a statement. "At the same time, we are mindful of the potential implications for ad-skipping and the concerns this has raised in the programming community. We believe there are ways to take this victory and work with programmers to give our consumers what they want — full DVR functionality through existing digital set-top boxes — and at the same time deliver real benefits to advertisers."

— Ben Fritz

In March 2006, Nikki Finke started Deadline Hollywood Daily as an outlet for scoops that couldn't wait for her column in LA Weekly. She initially earned nothing extra for the blog.

Today she has sold the site, which she owns entirely, to Mail.com Media Group in a deal worth several million dollars.

"I have really sacrificed, but it was a conscious decision and I love doing this," Finke said of the experience.

According to a person familiar with the terms, Finke, the site’s sole owner and writer-editor, will get a low seven-figure sum to sell Deadline Hollywood Daily plus several million dollars over the life of a five-year-plus employment contract. The deal also grants her a portion of the site’s advertising revenue.

Though it took its name from Finke's column in the paper, LA Weekly had no ownership stake in Deadline Hollywood Daily. The Village Voice Media-owned publication simply sold ads and, after the site started to grow, paid Finke a stipend.

Once Deadline Hollywood Daily officially becomes part of Mail.com Media Group in a few weeks, the paper's online operation will take what LA Weekly Publisher Beth Sestanovich admitted would be a "traffic hit." While Finke will probably continue to write her column for the paper, Sestanovich said the paper will be hunting for a new entertainment blogger.

"Well probably do something more that's more mainstream pop culture," Sestanovich said. "There's probably nobody who can touch her as an insider."

For more on Mail.com Media Group owner Jay Penske and his plan to build a mini-media empire on the Web, read this article in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times.

-- Ben Fritz

In the entertainment business, it's customary practice to publicly boast that almost every new movie and TV show is a hit.

If a new report from IT consulting firm RampRate (not your usual savvy analysts of showbiz, but bear with us) is right, Silicon Valley's biggest company might be taking just the opposite approach.

RampRate's study, titled "YouTube: Google's Phantom Loss Leader," claims that the No. 1 video website is losing far less than the widely cited $470 million per year figure from an April report by Credit Suisse Equity Research. Using a different analysis of the bandwidth and other tech costs needed to operate YouTube, Ramprate estimates the site's losses this year will be a much more narrow $174.2 million.

So why isn't YouTube owner Google making a stink? We all know any movie executive wouldn't keep silent if a report claimed his or her project lost more money than it actually did (or even as much).

RampRate offers an intriguing, and plausible, theory: "Any appearance of profits leads to more draconian revenue share demands from partners and additional lawsuits from owners of unlicensed content. An apparent loss deters this behavior, making it eminently advisable for Google to let the rumors of YouTube's losses grow and compound."

Translation: If YouTube was known to be losing less money, or even close to making a profit, then the "sharks" in Hollywood might demand higher payments for their content, both legitimate and pirated, posted on the site. The longer Google can hold off sharing more revenue with content suppliers, the more money it makes on YouTube.

There's no way, of course, to reliably determine YouTube's financials since Google doesn't break out the results. And the circumstantial evidence is mixed. YouTube recently launched a "shows" section in an effort to get more television episodes and movies to compete against Hulu. The only way to increase its offerings, however, would be to pay more money, not less.

On the other hand, unless and until somebody figures out a profitable model for Web video advertising, YouTube and competitors like Hulu are left with much less revenue than their television counterparts. For now, Google might like the idea of content providers believing it's losing nearly half a billion dollars a year as it tries to help build a digital platform that could benefit studios.

As far as conspiracy theories go, it's not too far out by Hollywood standards.

Update (June 17, 5:40 PM): YouTube's losses may be shrinking fast. In a report released today, Nielsen said that YouTube is the top entertainment site on the Web and carried about 24% of all online display ads for the consumer goods category. The industry is estimated to have spent $156.2 million for online marketing in the first quarter of 2009.

— Ben Fritz

Photo: Episodes of "Alf" on YouTube. Credit: YouTube.

In the past two years, five separate online video ventures backed by big media money have gone out of business: NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's This Just In, Turner's SuperDeluxe, ABC-Disney Television's Stage 9 Digital, and the UTA-funded 60Frames.

Every flop has its own specific problems, of course. HBO and AOL never figured out how to work together smoothly on This Just In; SuperDeluxe overspent on its content and was competing, in a sense, with its parent company's Adult Swim; Stage 9 never had a natural home for its shows since it didn't work with ABC.com; 60Frames needed more funding at a time when the venture market had completely dried up.

But they all shared one common misstep: A desire to jump on the bandwagon led by YouTube and Saturday Night Live's "digital shorts" and a belief that big advertising dollars were just around the corner. As it turned out, there's still not much money in Web video advertising -- certainly not enough to earn a profit on videos that cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 each to produce. As Mike Salmi, former head of digital media for MTV Networks, put it: “It’s very similar to what happened in ‘99 and 2000, where everyone saw gold in the hills. The reality is that it’s much harder to make money than we thought.”

In today's Los Angeles Times, we have a story surveying these flops, explaining why they went wrong so fast, and what their failures meant not only for the big media companies that backed them, but the creators who made videos for them. Check it out here.

Our article focuses on the remarkable number of quickly abandoned Web video efforts in Hollywood over the past few years. A few remain, however.

They all have slightly different strategies and models, but most of them share one of two defining characteristics that separate them from the space's many failures: Web video serves a larger strategy and thus doesn't need to earn a profit, or it's being produced at virtually no cost.

Companies still in the web video business include:

Sony Pictures Television's Crackle: A much-evolved version of Grouper, the video sharing website Sony bought for $65 million in 2006, Crackle mixes original series with television shows and movies owned by the studio.

If Crackle was a cable network like AMC, its original series would be akin to "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad": Costly productions that aren't profitable on their own, but draw attention and help shape a public identity. The real profit is in the Sony-owned movies and TV shows that can rerun on the website at virtually no cost.

"We view Crackle like a network that has movies and TV content and then we layer originals on top of that to define the voice of the network," said Sean Carey, executive vice president of digital distribution for Sony Television.

Crackle's series include "The Jace Hall Show," a talk show about video games, "Penn Says," a series of rants by magician/comedian Penn Jilette," and "Angel of Death," a $1 million, 10-episode production from comic book writer Ed Brubaker that has been combined into a movie and will air on Spike and come out on DVD. Here's an episode of "Angel of Death":

From Crackle: Angel of Death: Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

You don't have to be an industry insider to understand that the market for professionally produced Web videos isn't exactly thriving. The list of digital video divisions and start-ups founded with Hollywood money in the last few years now resembles a row of gravestones: Disney's Stage 9, Turner's SuperDeluxe, NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's ThisJustIn and the UTA-backed 60 Frames have all gone out of business.

It's not that people aren't watching video on the Web. YouTube's and Hulu's traffic just keep going up and up and up. The problem is that there's no real business model, which means anyone spending even a few thousand dollars to produce webisodes had better not count on advertising revenue to help them turn a profit.

Despite all that, there are still plenty of true believers in the medium. Many of them gathered yesterday in New York City for the Onfronts, a rip-off of play on the television Upfronts. The event is meant to bring producers and advertisers together as an opportunity for, according to the Onfronts website, "digital content-owners to showcase a vibrant new entertainment medium and present upcoming projects to press and major advertisers dedicated to high engagement entertainment opportunities."

The keynote speech was given by Jordan Levin, former CEO of the defunct WB network who now heads the management/production company Generate, which specializes in digital content. If the Onfronts were anything like the Upfronts, you might expect Levin to be hyping his latest projects. Instead, he delivered a dire message:

 I have no doubt that premium content produced for the Internet will grow along with the adoption of online video consumption. What I do doubt is whether or not many of the independent producers and production companies either here today, or who want to be here, will be here next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. . . .

Current production and distribution margins simply cannot support the overhead required to produce premium online content at a scale suitable to advertising, without brands subsidizing that effort to a greater extent than currently exists.

Former America Online Chief Executive Jonathan Miller is expected to join News Corp. in the newly-created position overseeing digital strategy, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Miller is a well known figure in digital media, whose name was mentioned in conjunction with the top job at Yahoo. It would be the start of a major reorganization of the News Corp. digital division. It's unclear how this would affect Peter Levinsohn, who currently oversees Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.

Levinsohn is well regarded by New Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives at the company, and sources say there could potentially be another role for him inside the company.

Miller stepped down as head of AOL in 2006, and founded the investment firm Velocity Capital. Last year, he was reportedly involved in trying to secure financing to make a bid for Yahoo at $20 to $22 a share, or $28 billion to $30 billion.

Miller has established himself as a hot hand on the Internet. He made his mark in e-commerce at Barry Diller's media conglomerate, then as chairman and chief executive of AOL, from which he was ousted in November 2006. He has detractors, particularly inside Time Warner, but gets plaudits from analysts and colleagues who say he is one of the industry's foremost strategic thinkers.

Herb Scannell, CEO of Internet television start-up Next New Networks and former vice-chairman of MTV Networks, calls Miller "one of the smartest guys I have come across in the media world."

-- Dawn Chmielewski and Claudia Eller

Photo of Miller by AP

Movie rental giant Blockbuster has partnered with a Bay Area technology company to help it set up digital storefronts on an array of consumer electronics products.

The agreement with Sonic Solutions, a company that has created software to bring movie downloads and rental services to devices, provides Blockbuster with the technical know-how it needs as it seeks to extend its business to portable media players, set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs.

"What we're realizing, more and more, is our consumers are trying to watch movies in a variety of different locations," said Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president of digital entertainment. "Our job is to be ubiquitous."

The combination better positions Blockbuster to compete with its fleet-footed rival, Netflix. The movies-by-mail company has lined up a series of high-profile partnerships to bring its subscription service out of the hands of postal carriers and directly onto the TV.

In recent months, Netflix has announced deals that would allow subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet into their living rooms, using a TiVo Series 3 digital video recorder, an Xbox 360 video game console or the just-announced Internet-connected televisions from Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.

Other technology companies are also eying the TV.  Retailer Amazon.com lets customers buy videos online and download them to their TiVo boxes.  And digital media behemoth Apple Inc. delivers a similar experience, pairing its iTunes store with the AppleTV set-top box.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the Sonic partnership is another sign that Blockbuster is "really serious" about being part of the digital movie revolution. But it's also an acknowledgment of the retailer's limitations.

"It enables Blockbuster to say, 'Whatever device people want to watch video on, we'll put the Blockbuster experience on that device — without having to launch an army of developers,' " McQuivey said.

Blockbuster pursued a similar strategy in 2007, when it acquired Movielink — an online movie rental business started by five Hollywood studios — to move it quickly into digital distribution. But as consumers shied away from time-consuming paid movie downloads in favor of services that offered the immediate gratification of streaming to Internet-connected devices, Blockbuster began seeking another company with which it could partner for this type of expertise.

Sonic has existing deals to offer its own movie-rental service, CinemaNow, to consumers who buy Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers or use an LG BD300 Blu-ray player that can be connected to the Internet (a feature known as BD Live).  The company is also working with the manufacturers of portable devices with a screen and the processing power to handle movies — including Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Blockbuster will have the benefit of Sonic's many relationships with gadget-makers. CinemaNow, meanwhile, plans to re-brand its movie offerings as Blockbuster stores.

"That's the key to stimulate the market: marrying a trusted brand with a platform that takes the guess work away from the consumer," said Mark Ely, Sonic Solutions' executive vice president of strategy.

— Dawn C. Chmielewski

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

Deadline Hollywood Daily sold for several million dollars; LA Weekly to hire new showbiz blogger

In March 2006, Nikki Finke started Deadline Hollywood Daily as an outlet for scoops that couldn't wait for her column in LA Weekly. She initially earned nothing extra for the blog.

Today she has sold the site, which she owns entirely, to Mail.com Media Group in a deal worth several million dollars.

"I have really sacrificed, but it was a conscious decision and I love doing this," Finke said of the experience.

According to a person familiar with the terms, Finke, the site’s sole owner and writer-editor, will get a low seven-figure sum to sell Deadline Hollywood Daily plus several million dollars over the life of a five-year-plus employment contract. The deal also grants her a portion of the site’s advertising revenue.

Though it took its name from Finke's column in the paper, LA Weekly had no ownership stake in Deadline Hollywood Daily. The Village Voice Media-owned publication simply sold ads and, after the site started to grow, paid Finke a stipend.

Once Deadline Hollywood Daily officially becomes part of Mail.com Media Group in a few weeks, the paper's online operation will take what LA Weekly Publisher Beth Sestanovich admitted would be a "traffic hit." While Finke will probably continue to write her column for the paper, Sestanovich said the paper will be hunting for a new entertainment blogger.

"Well probably do something more that's more mainstream pop culture," Sestanovich said. "There's probably nobody who can touch her as an insider."

For more on Mail.com Media Group owner Jay Penske and his plan to build a mini-media empire on the Web, read this article in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times.

-- Ben Fritz

In the entertainment business, it's customary practice to publicly boast that almost every new movie and TV show is a hit.

If a new report from IT consulting firm RampRate (not your usual savvy analysts of showbiz, but bear with us) is right, Silicon Valley's biggest company might be taking just the opposite approach.

RampRate's study, titled "YouTube: Google's Phantom Loss Leader," claims that the No. 1 video website is losing far less than the widely cited $470 million per year figure from an April report by Credit Suisse Equity Research. Using a different analysis of the bandwidth and other tech costs needed to operate YouTube, Ramprate estimates the site's losses this year will be a much more narrow $174.2 million.

So why isn't YouTube owner Google making a stink? We all know any movie executive wouldn't keep silent if a report claimed his or her project lost more money than it actually did (or even as much).

RampRate offers an intriguing, and plausible, theory: "Any appearance of profits leads to more draconian revenue share demands from partners and additional lawsuits from owners of unlicensed content. An apparent loss deters this behavior, making it eminently advisable for Google to let the rumors of YouTube's losses grow and compound."

Translation: If YouTube was known to be losing less money, or even close to making a profit, then the "sharks" in Hollywood might demand higher payments for their content, both legitimate and pirated, posted on the site. The longer Google can hold off sharing more revenue with content suppliers, the more money it makes on YouTube.

There's no way, of course, to reliably determine YouTube's financials since Google doesn't break out the results. And the circumstantial evidence is mixed. YouTube recently launched a "shows" section in an effort to get more television episodes and movies to compete against Hulu. The only way to increase its offerings, however, would be to pay more money, not less.

On the other hand, unless and until somebody figures out a profitable model for Web video advertising, YouTube and competitors like Hulu are left with much less revenue than their television counterparts. For now, Google might like the idea of content providers believing it's losing nearly half a billion dollars a year as it tries to help build a digital platform that could benefit studios.

As far as conspiracy theories go, it's not too far out by Hollywood standards.

Update (June 17, 5:40 PM): YouTube's losses may be shrinking fast. In a report released today, Nielsen said that YouTube is the top entertainment site on the Web and carried about 24% of all online display ads for the consumer goods category. The industry is estimated to have spent $156.2 million for online marketing in the first quarter of 2009.

— Ben Fritz

Photo: Episodes of "Alf" on YouTube. Credit: YouTube.

In the past two years, five separate online video ventures backed by big media money have gone out of business: NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's This Just In, Turner's SuperDeluxe, ABC-Disney Television's Stage 9 Digital, and the UTA-funded 60Frames.

Every flop has its own specific problems, of course. HBO and AOL never figured out how to work together smoothly on This Just In; SuperDeluxe overspent on its content and was competing, in a sense, with its parent company's Adult Swim; Stage 9 never had a natural home for its shows since it didn't work with ABC.com; 60Frames needed more funding at a time when the venture market had completely dried up.

But they all shared one common misstep: A desire to jump on the bandwagon led by YouTube and Saturday Night Live's "digital shorts" and a belief that big advertising dollars were just around the corner. As it turned out, there's still not much money in Web video advertising -- certainly not enough to earn a profit on videos that cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 each to produce. As Mike Salmi, former head of digital media for MTV Networks, put it: “It’s very similar to what happened in ‘99 and 2000, where everyone saw gold in the hills. The reality is that it’s much harder to make money than we thought.”

In today's Los Angeles Times, we have a story surveying these flops, explaining why they went wrong so fast, and what their failures meant not only for the big media companies that backed them, but the creators who made videos for them. Check it out here.

Our article focuses on the remarkable number of quickly abandoned Web video efforts in Hollywood over the past few years. A few remain, however.

They all have slightly different strategies and models, but most of them share one of two defining characteristics that separate them from the space's many failures: Web video serves a larger strategy and thus doesn't need to earn a profit, or it's being produced at virtually no cost.

Companies still in the web video business include:

Sony Pictures Television's Crackle: A much-evolved version of Grouper, the video sharing website Sony bought for $65 million in 2006, Crackle mixes original series with television shows and movies owned by the studio.

If Crackle was a cable network like AMC, its original series would be akin to "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad": Costly productions that aren't profitable on their own, but draw attention and help shape a public identity. The real profit is in the Sony-owned movies and TV shows that can rerun on the website at virtually no cost.

"We view Crackle like a network that has movies and TV content and then we layer originals on top of that to define the voice of the network," said Sean Carey, executive vice president of digital distribution for Sony Television.

Crackle's series include "The Jace Hall Show," a talk show about video games, "Penn Says," a series of rants by magician/comedian Penn Jilette," and "Angel of Death," a $1 million, 10-episode production from comic book writer Ed Brubaker that has been combined into a movie and will air on Spike and come out on DVD. Here's an episode of "Angel of Death":

From Crackle: Angel of Death: Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

You don't have to be an industry insider to understand that the market for professionally produced Web videos isn't exactly thriving. The list of digital video divisions and start-ups founded with Hollywood money in the last few years now resembles a row of gravestones: Disney's Stage 9, Turner's SuperDeluxe, NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's ThisJustIn and the UTA-backed 60 Frames have all gone out of business.

It's not that people aren't watching video on the Web. YouTube's and Hulu's traffic just keep going up and up and up. The problem is that there's no real business model, which means anyone spending even a few thousand dollars to produce webisodes had better not count on advertising revenue to help them turn a profit.

Despite all that, there are still plenty of true believers in the medium. Many of them gathered yesterday in New York City for the Onfronts, a rip-off of play on the television Upfronts. The event is meant to bring producers and advertisers together as an opportunity for, according to the Onfronts website, "digital content-owners to showcase a vibrant new entertainment medium and present upcoming projects to press and major advertisers dedicated to high engagement entertainment opportunities."

The keynote speech was given by Jordan Levin, former CEO of the defunct WB network who now heads the management/production company Generate, which specializes in digital content. If the Onfronts were anything like the Upfronts, you might expect Levin to be hyping his latest projects. Instead, he delivered a dire message:

 I have no doubt that premium content produced for the Internet will grow along with the adoption of online video consumption. What I do doubt is whether or not many of the independent producers and production companies either here today, or who want to be here, will be here next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. . . .

Current production and distribution margins simply cannot support the overhead required to produce premium online content at a scale suitable to advertising, without brands subsidizing that effort to a greater extent than currently exists.

Former America Online Chief Executive Jonathan Miller is expected to join News Corp. in the newly-created position overseeing digital strategy, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Miller is a well known figure in digital media, whose name was mentioned in conjunction with the top job at Yahoo. It would be the start of a major reorganization of the News Corp. digital division. It's unclear how this would affect Peter Levinsohn, who currently oversees Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.

Levinsohn is well regarded by New Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives at the company, and sources say there could potentially be another role for him inside the company.

Miller stepped down as head of AOL in 2006, and founded the investment firm Velocity Capital. Last year, he was reportedly involved in trying to secure financing to make a bid for Yahoo at $20 to $22 a share, or $28 billion to $30 billion.

Miller has established himself as a hot hand on the Internet. He made his mark in e-commerce at Barry Diller's media conglomerate, then as chairman and chief executive of AOL, from which he was ousted in November 2006. He has detractors, particularly inside Time Warner, but gets plaudits from analysts and colleagues who say he is one of the industry's foremost strategic thinkers.

Herb Scannell, CEO of Internet television start-up Next New Networks and former vice-chairman of MTV Networks, calls Miller "one of the smartest guys I have come across in the media world."

-- Dawn Chmielewski and Claudia Eller

Photo of Miller by AP

Movie rental giant Blockbuster has partnered with a Bay Area technology company to help it set up digital storefronts on an array of consumer electronics products.

The agreement with Sonic Solutions, a company that has created software to bring movie downloads and rental services to devices, provides Blockbuster with the technical know-how it needs as it seeks to extend its business to portable media players, set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs.

"What we're realizing, more and more, is our consumers are trying to watch movies in a variety of different locations," said Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president of digital entertainment. "Our job is to be ubiquitous."

The combination better positions Blockbuster to compete with its fleet-footed rival, Netflix. The movies-by-mail company has lined up a series of high-profile partnerships to bring its subscription service out of the hands of postal carriers and directly onto the TV.

In recent months, Netflix has announced deals that would allow subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet into their living rooms, using a TiVo Series 3 digital video recorder, an Xbox 360 video game console or the just-announced Internet-connected televisions from Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.

Other technology companies are also eying the TV.  Retailer Amazon.com lets customers buy videos online and download them to their TiVo boxes.  And digital media behemoth Apple Inc. delivers a similar experience, pairing its iTunes store with the AppleTV set-top box.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the Sonic partnership is another sign that Blockbuster is "really serious" about being part of the digital movie revolution. But it's also an acknowledgment of the retailer's limitations.

"It enables Blockbuster to say, 'Whatever device people want to watch video on, we'll put the Blockbuster experience on that device — without having to launch an army of developers,' " McQuivey said.

Blockbuster pursued a similar strategy in 2007, when it acquired Movielink — an online movie rental business started by five Hollywood studios — to move it quickly into digital distribution. But as consumers shied away from time-consuming paid movie downloads in favor of services that offered the immediate gratification of streaming to Internet-connected devices, Blockbuster began seeking another company with which it could partner for this type of expertise.

Sonic has existing deals to offer its own movie-rental service, CinemaNow, to consumers who buy Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers or use an LG BD300 Blu-ray player that can be connected to the Internet (a feature known as BD Live).  The company is also working with the manufacturers of portable devices with a screen and the processing power to handle movies — including Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Blockbuster will have the benefit of Sonic's many relationships with gadget-makers. CinemaNow, meanwhile, plans to re-brand its movie offerings as Blockbuster stores.

"That's the key to stimulate the market: marrying a trusted brand with a platform that takes the guess work away from the consumer," said Mark Ely, Sonic Solutions' executive vice president of strategy.

— Dawn C. Chmielewski

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

Report: YouTube losing less money than thought, happy Hollywood doesn't know it

In the entertainment business, it's customary practice to publicly boast that almost every new movie and TV show is a hit.

If a new report from IT consulting firm RampRate (not your usual savvy analysts of showbiz, but bear with us) is right, Silicon Valley's biggest company might be taking just the opposite approach.

RampRate's study, titled "YouTube: Google's Phantom Loss Leader," claims that the No. 1 video website is losing far less than the widely cited $470 million per year figure from an April report by Credit Suisse Equity Research. Using a different analysis of the bandwidth and other tech costs needed to operate YouTube, Ramprate estimates the site's losses this year will be a much more narrow $174.2 million.

So why isn't YouTube owner Google making a stink? We all know any movie executive wouldn't keep silent if a report claimed his or her project lost more money than it actually did (or even as much).

RampRate offers an intriguing, and plausible, theory: "Any appearance of profits leads to more draconian revenue share demands from partners and additional lawsuits from owners of unlicensed content. An apparent loss deters this behavior, making it eminently advisable for Google to let the rumors of YouTube's losses grow and compound."

Translation: If YouTube was known to be losing less money, or even close to making a profit, then the "sharks" in Hollywood might demand higher payments for their content, both legitimate and pirated, posted on the site. The longer Google can hold off sharing more revenue with content suppliers, the more money it makes on YouTube.

There's no way, of course, to reliably determine YouTube's financials since Google doesn't break out the results. And the circumstantial evidence is mixed. YouTube recently launched a "shows" section in an effort to get more television episodes and movies to compete against Hulu. The only way to increase its offerings, however, would be to pay more money, not less.

On the other hand, unless and until somebody figures out a profitable model for Web video advertising, YouTube and competitors like Hulu are left with much less revenue than their television counterparts. For now, Google might like the idea of content providers believing it's losing nearly half a billion dollars a year as it tries to help build a digital platform that could benefit studios.

As far as conspiracy theories go, it's not too far out by Hollywood standards.

Update (June 17, 5:40 PM): YouTube's losses may be shrinking fast. In a report released today, Nielsen said that YouTube is the top entertainment site on the Web and carried about 24% of all online display ads for the consumer goods category. The industry is estimated to have spent $156.2 million for online marketing in the first quarter of 2009.

— Ben Fritz

Photo: Episodes of "Alf" on YouTube. Credit: YouTube.

In the past two years, five separate online video ventures backed by big media money have gone out of business: NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's This Just In, Turner's SuperDeluxe, ABC-Disney Television's Stage 9 Digital, and the UTA-funded 60Frames.

Every flop has its own specific problems, of course. HBO and AOL never figured out how to work together smoothly on This Just In; SuperDeluxe overspent on its content and was competing, in a sense, with its parent company's Adult Swim; Stage 9 never had a natural home for its shows since it didn't work with ABC.com; 60Frames needed more funding at a time when the venture market had completely dried up.

But they all shared one common misstep: A desire to jump on the bandwagon led by YouTube and Saturday Night Live's "digital shorts" and a belief that big advertising dollars were just around the corner. As it turned out, there's still not much money in Web video advertising -- certainly not enough to earn a profit on videos that cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 each to produce. As Mike Salmi, former head of digital media for MTV Networks, put it: “It’s very similar to what happened in ‘99 and 2000, where everyone saw gold in the hills. The reality is that it’s much harder to make money than we thought.”

In today's Los Angeles Times, we have a story surveying these flops, explaining why they went wrong so fast, and what their failures meant not only for the big media companies that backed them, but the creators who made videos for them. Check it out here.

Our article focuses on the remarkable number of quickly abandoned Web video efforts in Hollywood over the past few years. A few remain, however.

They all have slightly different strategies and models, but most of them share one of two defining characteristics that separate them from the space's many failures: Web video serves a larger strategy and thus doesn't need to earn a profit, or it's being produced at virtually no cost.

Companies still in the web video business include:

Sony Pictures Television's Crackle: A much-evolved version of Grouper, the video sharing website Sony bought for $65 million in 2006, Crackle mixes original series with television shows and movies owned by the studio.

If Crackle was a cable network like AMC, its original series would be akin to "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad": Costly productions that aren't profitable on their own, but draw attention and help shape a public identity. The real profit is in the Sony-owned movies and TV shows that can rerun on the website at virtually no cost.

"We view Crackle like a network that has movies and TV content and then we layer originals on top of that to define the voice of the network," said Sean Carey, executive vice president of digital distribution for Sony Television.

Crackle's series include "The Jace Hall Show," a talk show about video games, "Penn Says," a series of rants by magician/comedian Penn Jilette," and "Angel of Death," a $1 million, 10-episode production from comic book writer Ed Brubaker that has been combined into a movie and will air on Spike and come out on DVD. Here's an episode of "Angel of Death":

From Crackle: Angel of Death: Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

You don't have to be an industry insider to understand that the market for professionally produced Web videos isn't exactly thriving. The list of digital video divisions and start-ups founded with Hollywood money in the last few years now resembles a row of gravestones: Disney's Stage 9, Turner's SuperDeluxe, NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's ThisJustIn and the UTA-backed 60 Frames have all gone out of business.

It's not that people aren't watching video on the Web. YouTube's and Hulu's traffic just keep going up and up and up. The problem is that there's no real business model, which means anyone spending even a few thousand dollars to produce webisodes had better not count on advertising revenue to help them turn a profit.

Despite all that, there are still plenty of true believers in the medium. Many of them gathered yesterday in New York City for the Onfronts, a rip-off of play on the television Upfronts. The event is meant to bring producers and advertisers together as an opportunity for, according to the Onfronts website, "digital content-owners to showcase a vibrant new entertainment medium and present upcoming projects to press and major advertisers dedicated to high engagement entertainment opportunities."

The keynote speech was given by Jordan Levin, former CEO of the defunct WB network who now heads the management/production company Generate, which specializes in digital content. If the Onfronts were anything like the Upfronts, you might expect Levin to be hyping his latest projects. Instead, he delivered a dire message:

 I have no doubt that premium content produced for the Internet will grow along with the adoption of online video consumption. What I do doubt is whether or not many of the independent producers and production companies either here today, or who want to be here, will be here next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. . . .

Current production and distribution margins simply cannot support the overhead required to produce premium online content at a scale suitable to advertising, without brands subsidizing that effort to a greater extent than currently exists.

Former America Online Chief Executive Jonathan Miller is expected to join News Corp. in the newly-created position overseeing digital strategy, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Miller is a well known figure in digital media, whose name was mentioned in conjunction with the top job at Yahoo. It would be the start of a major reorganization of the News Corp. digital division. It's unclear how this would affect Peter Levinsohn, who currently oversees Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.

Levinsohn is well regarded by New Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives at the company, and sources say there could potentially be another role for him inside the company.

Miller stepped down as head of AOL in 2006, and founded the investment firm Velocity Capital. Last year, he was reportedly involved in trying to secure financing to make a bid for Yahoo at $20 to $22 a share, or $28 billion to $30 billion.

Miller has established himself as a hot hand on the Internet. He made his mark in e-commerce at Barry Diller's media conglomerate, then as chairman and chief executive of AOL, from which he was ousted in November 2006. He has detractors, particularly inside Time Warner, but gets plaudits from analysts and colleagues who say he is one of the industry's foremost strategic thinkers.

Herb Scannell, CEO of Internet television start-up Next New Networks and former vice-chairman of MTV Networks, calls Miller "one of the smartest guys I have come across in the media world."

-- Dawn Chmielewski and Claudia Eller

Photo of Miller by AP

Movie rental giant Blockbuster has partnered with a Bay Area technology company to help it set up digital storefronts on an array of consumer electronics products.

The agreement with Sonic Solutions, a company that has created software to bring movie downloads and rental services to devices, provides Blockbuster with the technical know-how it needs as it seeks to extend its business to portable media players, set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs.

"What we're realizing, more and more, is our consumers are trying to watch movies in a variety of different locations," said Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president of digital entertainment. "Our job is to be ubiquitous."

The combination better positions Blockbuster to compete with its fleet-footed rival, Netflix. The movies-by-mail company has lined up a series of high-profile partnerships to bring its subscription service out of the hands of postal carriers and directly onto the TV.

In recent months, Netflix has announced deals that would allow subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet into their living rooms, using a TiVo Series 3 digital video recorder, an Xbox 360 video game console or the just-announced Internet-connected televisions from Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.

Other technology companies are also eying the TV.  Retailer Amazon.com lets customers buy videos online and download them to their TiVo boxes.  And digital media behemoth Apple Inc. delivers a similar experience, pairing its iTunes store with the AppleTV set-top box.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the Sonic partnership is another sign that Blockbuster is "really serious" about being part of the digital movie revolution. But it's also an acknowledgment of the retailer's limitations.

"It enables Blockbuster to say, 'Whatever device people want to watch video on, we'll put the Blockbuster experience on that device — without having to launch an army of developers,' " McQuivey said.

Blockbuster pursued a similar strategy in 2007, when it acquired Movielink — an online movie rental business started by five Hollywood studios — to move it quickly into digital distribution. But as consumers shied away from time-consuming paid movie downloads in favor of services that offered the immediate gratification of streaming to Internet-connected devices, Blockbuster began seeking another company with which it could partner for this type of expertise.

Sonic has existing deals to offer its own movie-rental service, CinemaNow, to consumers who buy Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers or use an LG BD300 Blu-ray player that can be connected to the Internet (a feature known as BD Live).  The company is also working with the manufacturers of portable devices with a screen and the processing power to handle movies — including Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Blockbuster will have the benefit of Sonic's many relationships with gadget-makers. CinemaNow, meanwhile, plans to re-brand its movie offerings as Blockbuster stores.

"That's the key to stimulate the market: marrying a trusted brand with a platform that takes the guess work away from the consumer," said Mark Ely, Sonic Solutions' executive vice president of strategy.

— Dawn C. Chmielewski

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

After many Hollywood-backed flops, who's left in Web video?

In the past two years, five separate online video ventures backed by big media money have gone out of business: NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's This Just In, Turner's SuperDeluxe, ABC-Disney Television's Stage 9 Digital, and the UTA-funded 60Frames.

Every flop has its own specific problems, of course. HBO and AOL never figured out how to work together smoothly on This Just In; SuperDeluxe overspent on its content and was competing, in a sense, with its parent company's Adult Swim; Stage 9 never had a natural home for its shows since it didn't work with ABC.com; 60Frames needed more funding at a time when the venture market had completely dried up.

But they all shared one common misstep: A desire to jump on the bandwagon led by YouTube and Saturday Night Live's "digital shorts" and a belief that big advertising dollars were just around the corner. As it turned out, there's still not much money in Web video advertising -- certainly not enough to earn a profit on videos that cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 each to produce. As Mike Salmi, former head of digital media for MTV Networks, put it: “It’s very similar to what happened in ‘99 and 2000, where everyone saw gold in the hills. The reality is that it’s much harder to make money than we thought.”

In today's Los Angeles Times, we have a story surveying these flops, explaining why they went wrong so fast, and what their failures meant not only for the big media companies that backed them, but the creators who made videos for them. Check it out here.

Our article focuses on the remarkable number of quickly abandoned Web video efforts in Hollywood over the past few years. A few remain, however.

They all have slightly different strategies and models, but most of them share one of two defining characteristics that separate them from the space's many failures: Web video serves a larger strategy and thus doesn't need to earn a profit, or it's being produced at virtually no cost.

Companies still in the web video business include:

Sony Pictures Television's Crackle: A much-evolved version of Grouper, the video sharing website Sony bought for $65 million in 2006, Crackle mixes original series with television shows and movies owned by the studio.

If Crackle was a cable network like AMC, its original series would be akin to "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad": Costly productions that aren't profitable on their own, but draw attention and help shape a public identity. The real profit is in the Sony-owned movies and TV shows that can rerun on the website at virtually no cost.

"We view Crackle like a network that has movies and TV content and then we layer originals on top of that to define the voice of the network," said Sean Carey, executive vice president of digital distribution for Sony Television.

Crackle's series include "The Jace Hall Show," a talk show about video games, "Penn Says," a series of rants by magician/comedian Penn Jilette," and "Angel of Death," a $1 million, 10-episode production from comic book writer Ed Brubaker that has been combined into a movie and will air on Spike and come out on DVD. Here's an episode of "Angel of Death":

From Crackle: Angel of Death: Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

You don't have to be an industry insider to understand that the market for professionally produced Web videos isn't exactly thriving. The list of digital video divisions and start-ups founded with Hollywood money in the last few years now resembles a row of gravestones: Disney's Stage 9, Turner's SuperDeluxe, NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's ThisJustIn and the UTA-backed 60 Frames have all gone out of business.

It's not that people aren't watching video on the Web. YouTube's and Hulu's traffic just keep going up and up and up. The problem is that there's no real business model, which means anyone spending even a few thousand dollars to produce webisodes had better not count on advertising revenue to help them turn a profit.

Despite all that, there are still plenty of true believers in the medium. Many of them gathered yesterday in New York City for the Onfronts, a rip-off of play on the television Upfronts. The event is meant to bring producers and advertisers together as an opportunity for, according to the Onfronts website, "digital content-owners to showcase a vibrant new entertainment medium and present upcoming projects to press and major advertisers dedicated to high engagement entertainment opportunities."

The keynote speech was given by Jordan Levin, former CEO of the defunct WB network who now heads the management/production company Generate, which specializes in digital content. If the Onfronts were anything like the Upfronts, you might expect Levin to be hyping his latest projects. Instead, he delivered a dire message:

 I have no doubt that premium content produced for the Internet will grow along with the adoption of online video consumption. What I do doubt is whether or not many of the independent producers and production companies either here today, or who want to be here, will be here next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. . . .

Current production and distribution margins simply cannot support the overhead required to produce premium online content at a scale suitable to advertising, without brands subsidizing that effort to a greater extent than currently exists.

Former America Online Chief Executive Jonathan Miller is expected to join News Corp. in the newly-created position overseeing digital strategy, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Miller is a well known figure in digital media, whose name was mentioned in conjunction with the top job at Yahoo. It would be the start of a major reorganization of the News Corp. digital division. It's unclear how this would affect Peter Levinsohn, who currently oversees Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.

Levinsohn is well regarded by New Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives at the company, and sources say there could potentially be another role for him inside the company.

Miller stepped down as head of AOL in 2006, and founded the investment firm Velocity Capital. Last year, he was reportedly involved in trying to secure financing to make a bid for Yahoo at $20 to $22 a share, or $28 billion to $30 billion.

Miller has established himself as a hot hand on the Internet. He made his mark in e-commerce at Barry Diller's media conglomerate, then as chairman and chief executive of AOL, from which he was ousted in November 2006. He has detractors, particularly inside Time Warner, but gets plaudits from analysts and colleagues who say he is one of the industry's foremost strategic thinkers.

Herb Scannell, CEO of Internet television start-up Next New Networks and former vice-chairman of MTV Networks, calls Miller "one of the smartest guys I have come across in the media world."

-- Dawn Chmielewski and Claudia Eller

Photo of Miller by AP

Movie rental giant Blockbuster has partnered with a Bay Area technology company to help it set up digital storefronts on an array of consumer electronics products.

The agreement with Sonic Solutions, a company that has created software to bring movie downloads and rental services to devices, provides Blockbuster with the technical know-how it needs as it seeks to extend its business to portable media players, set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs.

"What we're realizing, more and more, is our consumers are trying to watch movies in a variety of different locations," said Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president of digital entertainment. "Our job is to be ubiquitous."

The combination better positions Blockbuster to compete with its fleet-footed rival, Netflix. The movies-by-mail company has lined up a series of high-profile partnerships to bring its subscription service out of the hands of postal carriers and directly onto the TV.

In recent months, Netflix has announced deals that would allow subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet into their living rooms, using a TiVo Series 3 digital video recorder, an Xbox 360 video game console or the just-announced Internet-connected televisions from Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.

Other technology companies are also eying the TV.  Retailer Amazon.com lets customers buy videos online and download them to their TiVo boxes.  And digital media behemoth Apple Inc. delivers a similar experience, pairing its iTunes store with the AppleTV set-top box.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the Sonic partnership is another sign that Blockbuster is "really serious" about being part of the digital movie revolution. But it's also an acknowledgment of the retailer's limitations.

"It enables Blockbuster to say, 'Whatever device people want to watch video on, we'll put the Blockbuster experience on that device — without having to launch an army of developers,' " McQuivey said.

Blockbuster pursued a similar strategy in 2007, when it acquired Movielink — an online movie rental business started by five Hollywood studios — to move it quickly into digital distribution. But as consumers shied away from time-consuming paid movie downloads in favor of services that offered the immediate gratification of streaming to Internet-connected devices, Blockbuster began seeking another company with which it could partner for this type of expertise.

Sonic has existing deals to offer its own movie-rental service, CinemaNow, to consumers who buy Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers or use an LG BD300 Blu-ray player that can be connected to the Internet (a feature known as BD Live).  The company is also working with the manufacturers of portable devices with a screen and the processing power to handle movies — including Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Blockbuster will have the benefit of Sonic's many relationships with gadget-makers. CinemaNow, meanwhile, plans to re-brand its movie offerings as Blockbuster stores.

"That's the key to stimulate the market: marrying a trusted brand with a platform that takes the guess work away from the consumer," said Mark Ely, Sonic Solutions' executive vice president of strategy.

— Dawn C. Chmielewski

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

Online video advertising model ... broken already

You don't have to be an industry insider to understand that the market for professionally produced Web videos isn't exactly thriving. The list of digital video divisions and start-ups founded with Hollywood money in the last few years now resembles a row of gravestones: Disney's Stage 9, Turner's SuperDeluxe, NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's ThisJustIn and the UTA-backed 60 Frames have all gone out of business.

It's not that people aren't watching video on the Web. YouTube's and Hulu's traffic just keep going up and up and up. The problem is that there's no real business model, which means anyone spending even a few thousand dollars to produce webisodes had better not count on advertising revenue to help them turn a profit.

Despite all that, there are still plenty of true believers in the medium. Many of them gathered yesterday in New York City for the Onfronts, a rip-off of play on the television Upfronts. The event is meant to bring producers and advertisers together as an opportunity for, according to the Onfronts website, "digital content-owners to showcase a vibrant new entertainment medium and present upcoming projects to press and major advertisers dedicated to high engagement entertainment opportunities."

The keynote speech was given by Jordan Levin, former CEO of the defunct WB network who now heads the management/production company Generate, which specializes in digital content. If the Onfronts were anything like the Upfronts, you might expect Levin to be hyping his latest projects. Instead, he delivered a dire message:

 I have no doubt that premium content produced for the Internet will grow along with the adoption of online video consumption. What I do doubt is whether or not many of the independent producers and production companies either here today, or who want to be here, will be here next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. . . .

Current production and distribution margins simply cannot support the overhead required to produce premium online content at a scale suitable to advertising, without brands subsidizing that effort to a greater extent than currently exists.

Former America Online Chief Executive Jonathan Miller is expected to join News Corp. in the newly-created position overseeing digital strategy, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Miller is a well known figure in digital media, whose name was mentioned in conjunction with the top job at Yahoo. It would be the start of a major reorganization of the News Corp. digital division. It's unclear how this would affect Peter Levinsohn, who currently oversees Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.

Levinsohn is well regarded by New Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives at the company, and sources say there could potentially be another role for him inside the company.

Miller stepped down as head of AOL in 2006, and founded the investment firm Velocity Capital. Last year, he was reportedly involved in trying to secure financing to make a bid for Yahoo at $20 to $22 a share, or $28 billion to $30 billion.

Miller has established himself as a hot hand on the Internet. He made his mark in e-commerce at Barry Diller's media conglomerate, then as chairman and chief executive of AOL, from which he was ousted in November 2006. He has detractors, particularly inside Time Warner, but gets plaudits from analysts and colleagues who say he is one of the industry's foremost strategic thinkers.

Herb Scannell, CEO of Internet television start-up Next New Networks and former vice-chairman of MTV Networks, calls Miller "one of the smartest guys I have come across in the media world."

-- Dawn Chmielewski and Claudia Eller

Photo of Miller by AP

Movie rental giant Blockbuster has partnered with a Bay Area technology company to help it set up digital storefronts on an array of consumer electronics products.

The agreement with Sonic Solutions, a company that has created software to bring movie downloads and rental services to devices, provides Blockbuster with the technical know-how it needs as it seeks to extend its business to portable media players, set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs.

"What we're realizing, more and more, is our consumers are trying to watch movies in a variety of different locations," said Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president of digital entertainment. "Our job is to be ubiquitous."

The combination better positions Blockbuster to compete with its fleet-footed rival, Netflix. The movies-by-mail company has lined up a series of high-profile partnerships to bring its subscription service out of the hands of postal carriers and directly onto the TV.

In recent months, Netflix has announced deals that would allow subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet into their living rooms, using a TiVo Series 3 digital video recorder, an Xbox 360 video game console or the just-announced Internet-connected televisions from Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.

Other technology companies are also eying the TV.  Retailer Amazon.com lets customers buy videos online and download them to their TiVo boxes.  And digital media behemoth Apple Inc. delivers a similar experience, pairing its iTunes store with the AppleTV set-top box.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the Sonic partnership is another sign that Blockbuster is "really serious" about being part of the digital movie revolution. But it's also an acknowledgment of the retailer's limitations.

"It enables Blockbuster to say, 'Whatever device people want to watch video on, we'll put the Blockbuster experience on that device — without having to launch an army of developers,' " McQuivey said.

Blockbuster pursued a similar strategy in 2007, when it acquired Movielink — an online movie rental business started by five Hollywood studios — to move it quickly into digital distribution. But as consumers shied away from time-consuming paid movie downloads in favor of services that offered the immediate gratification of streaming to Internet-connected devices, Blockbuster began seeking another company with which it could partner for this type of expertise.

Sonic has existing deals to offer its own movie-rental service, CinemaNow, to consumers who buy Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers or use an LG BD300 Blu-ray player that can be connected to the Internet (a feature known as BD Live).  The company is also working with the manufacturers of portable devices with a screen and the processing power to handle movies — including Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Blockbuster will have the benefit of Sonic's many relationships with gadget-makers. CinemaNow, meanwhile, plans to re-brand its movie offerings as Blockbuster stores.

"That's the key to stimulate the market: marrying a trusted brand with a platform that takes the guess work away from the consumer," said Mark Ely, Sonic Solutions' executive vice president of strategy.

— Dawn C. Chmielewski

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

Former AOL chief to join News Corp.

Former America Online Chief Executive Jonathan Miller is expected to join News Corp. in the newly-created position overseeing digital strategy, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Miller is a well known figure in digital media, whose name was mentioned in conjunction with the top job at Yahoo. It would be the start of a major reorganization of the News Corp. digital division. It's unclear how this would affect Peter Levinsohn, who currently oversees Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.

Levinsohn is well regarded by New Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives at the company, and sources say there could potentially be another role for him inside the company.

Miller stepped down as head of AOL in 2006, and founded the investment firm Velocity Capital. Last year, he was reportedly involved in trying to secure financing to make a bid for Yahoo at $20 to $22 a share, or $28 billion to $30 billion.

Miller has established himself as a hot hand on the Internet. He made his mark in e-commerce at Barry Diller's media conglomerate, then as chairman and chief executive of AOL, from which he was ousted in November 2006. He has detractors, particularly inside Time Warner, but gets plaudits from analysts and colleagues who say he is one of the industry's foremost strategic thinkers.

Herb Scannell, CEO of Internet television start-up Next New Networks and former vice-chairman of MTV Networks, calls Miller "one of the smartest guys I have come across in the media world."

-- Dawn Chmielewski and Claudia Eller

Photo of Miller by AP

Movie rental giant Blockbuster has partnered with a Bay Area technology company to help it set up digital storefronts on an array of consumer electronics products.

The agreement with Sonic Solutions, a company that has created software to bring movie downloads and rental services to devices, provides Blockbuster with the technical know-how it needs as it seeks to extend its business to portable media players, set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs.

"What we're realizing, more and more, is our consumers are trying to watch movies in a variety of different locations," said Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president of digital entertainment. "Our job is to be ubiquitous."

The combination better positions Blockbuster to compete with its fleet-footed rival, Netflix. The movies-by-mail company has lined up a series of high-profile partnerships to bring its subscription service out of the hands of postal carriers and directly onto the TV.

In recent months, Netflix has announced deals that would allow subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet into their living rooms, using a TiVo Series 3 digital video recorder, an Xbox 360 video game console or the just-announced Internet-connected televisions from Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.

Other technology companies are also eying the TV.  Retailer Amazon.com lets customers buy videos online and download them to their TiVo boxes.  And digital media behemoth Apple Inc. delivers a similar experience, pairing its iTunes store with the AppleTV set-top box.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the Sonic partnership is another sign that Blockbuster is "really serious" about being part of the digital movie revolution. But it's also an acknowledgment of the retailer's limitations.

"It enables Blockbuster to say, 'Whatever device people want to watch video on, we'll put the Blockbuster experience on that device — without having to launch an army of developers,' " McQuivey said.

Blockbuster pursued a similar strategy in 2007, when it acquired Movielink — an online movie rental business started by five Hollywood studios — to move it quickly into digital distribution. But as consumers shied away from time-consuming paid movie downloads in favor of services that offered the immediate gratification of streaming to Internet-connected devices, Blockbuster began seeking another company with which it could partner for this type of expertise.

Sonic has existing deals to offer its own movie-rental service, CinemaNow, to consumers who buy Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers or use an LG BD300 Blu-ray player that can be connected to the Internet (a feature known as BD Live).  The company is also working with the manufacturers of portable devices with a screen and the processing power to handle movies — including Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Blockbuster will have the benefit of Sonic's many relationships with gadget-makers. CinemaNow, meanwhile, plans to re-brand its movie offerings as Blockbuster stores.

"That's the key to stimulate the market: marrying a trusted brand with a platform that takes the guess work away from the consumer," said Mark Ely, Sonic Solutions' executive vice president of strategy.

— Dawn C. Chmielewski

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

Blockbuster partners with Sonic, chases Netflix

Movie rental giant Blockbuster has partnered with a Bay Area technology company to help it set up digital storefronts on an array of consumer electronics products.

The agreement with Sonic Solutions, a company that has created software to bring movie downloads and rental services to devices, provides Blockbuster with the technical know-how it needs as it seeks to extend its business to portable media players, set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs.

"What we're realizing, more and more, is our consumers are trying to watch movies in a variety of different locations," said Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president of digital entertainment. "Our job is to be ubiquitous."

The combination better positions Blockbuster to compete with its fleet-footed rival, Netflix. The movies-by-mail company has lined up a series of high-profile partnerships to bring its subscription service out of the hands of postal carriers and directly onto the TV.

In recent months, Netflix has announced deals that would allow subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet into their living rooms, using a TiVo Series 3 digital video recorder, an Xbox 360 video game console or the just-announced Internet-connected televisions from Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.

Other technology companies are also eying the TV.  Retailer Amazon.com lets customers buy videos online and download them to their TiVo boxes.  And digital media behemoth Apple Inc. delivers a similar experience, pairing its iTunes store with the AppleTV set-top box.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the Sonic partnership is another sign that Blockbuster is "really serious" about being part of the digital movie revolution. But it's also an acknowledgment of the retailer's limitations.

"It enables Blockbuster to say, 'Whatever device people want to watch video on, we'll put the Blockbuster experience on that device — without having to launch an army of developers,' " McQuivey said.

Blockbuster pursued a similar strategy in 2007, when it acquired Movielink — an online movie rental business started by five Hollywood studios — to move it quickly into digital distribution. But as consumers shied away from time-consuming paid movie downloads in favor of services that offered the immediate gratification of streaming to Internet-connected devices, Blockbuster began seeking another company with which it could partner for this type of expertise.

Sonic has existing deals to offer its own movie-rental service, CinemaNow, to consumers who buy Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers or use an LG BD300 Blu-ray player that can be connected to the Internet (a feature known as BD Live).  The company is also working with the manufacturers of portable devices with a screen and the processing power to handle movies — including Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

Blockbuster will have the benefit of Sonic's many relationships with gadget-makers. CinemaNow, meanwhile, plans to re-brand its movie offerings as Blockbuster stores.

"That's the key to stimulate the market: marrying a trusted brand with a platform that takes the guess work away from the consumer," said Mark Ely, Sonic Solutions' executive vice president of strategy.

— Dawn C. Chmielewski

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

TV.com. playing catch-up, strikes deals for "Dexter," "I Dream of Jeannie"

Can TV.com be suffering from a case of Hulu envy?

CBS Interactive reached a series of deals to bring clips and full episodes of television shows such as "Dexter," "The Tudors" "The Surreal Life" and classics such as "I Dream of Jeannie" to TV.com as it attempts to broaden the appeal of its online community of television fans.

CBS scooped up TV.com as part of its $1.8-billion acquisition of CNet Networks in May. The site -- with a brand name that all but screams that it's the place to watch TV shows online -- has nonetheless lost ground to Hulu, the online television and movie portal venture by News Corp. and NBC Universal that emerged from an extended beta test last March.

The most recent online audience estimates from ComScore Media Metrix show Hulu surpassed the earlier TV-on-the-Internet media darling, Joost, and is putting pressure on TV.com, which has seen its unique visitors drop by a third.

TV.com has found itself playing catch-up.

The deals announced today with MGM, PBS, CBS-owned premium cable channel Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Endemol, producer of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"  and "Deal or No Deal," add more than 1,000 show episodes to TV.com's video library, which already includes episodes and clips from CBS and Hulu.

Anthony Soohoo, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive Entertainment and Lifestyle, said broadening the selection of shows fit with the desire to make TV.com the place where "television lives online."  Fans will not only come to watch the shows they're passionate about, but the video also provides a leaping-off point for discussion....

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images

Josh Brolin finds his voice

Josh Brolin, the actor who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's biopic "W.," has taken on a new executive role -- honorary chairman of a film competition sponsored by Netflix Inc. and Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition will award one aspiring filmmaker $350,000 in cash and production help to make and distribute the winner's movie. 

Film Independent will evaluate the submissions, due Feb. 9, and select 10 semifinalists, who will be asked to submit two- to three-minute video shorts. These videos will be posted on the competition website for the public to screen and vote on through July 5. The five videos receiving the most votes will be designated as the competition finalists.

A panel of judges, including Brolin, will review the finalists' videos and pick a winner, who will receive a $150,000 production grant from Netflix and four weeks of access to a camera package donated by Panavision, Kodak Film and Deluxe Entertainment Services. 

Brolin extolled the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen, and Gus Van Sant, who got their start working on small-budget, independent films. That why he decided to volunteer his time to the competition, he said, to "give hope to aspiring filmmakers."

"What these guys are doing is giving somebody an opportunity to make a film," Brolin said.

More information about the competition, its eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria and an entry application can be found here.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Actor Josh Brolin speaks at the announcement of the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition at the W Hotel in Westwood.

Credit: Charley Gallay / Getty Images